What had been a whim in Fabrizio’s case, now became a matter of piqued vanity. (Young as he was, his anxieties had already driven him to indulge in whims.) His vanity led him to the theatre; the little girl acted very well and amused him. When the play was over he was in love for quite an hour. The count, receiving news that Fabrizio was in real danger, returned to Parma. Giletti, who had served as a dragoon in the fine “Napoleon” regiment, was seriously talking of murdering Fabrizio, and was making arrangements for his subsequent flight into the Romagna. If my reader be very young, he will be scandalized by my admiration for this fine trait of virtue. Yet it involved no small effort of heroism on the count’s part to leave Bologna. For too often, indeed, in the mornings, his complexion looked sorely jaded, and Fabrizio’s was so fresh and pleasant to look at! Who could have reproached him with Fabrizio’s death if it had occurred in his absence, and on account of so foolish a business? But to his rare nature, the thought of a generous action, which he might have done, and which he had not performed, would have been an eternal remorse; and, further, he could not endure the idea of seeing the duchess sad, and by his fault.
When he arrived, he found her taciturn and gloomy. This is what had happened. Her little maid Cecchina, tormented by remorse and gauging the importance of her own fault by the large sum she had been paid for committing it, had fallen sick. One night the duchess, who had a real regard for her, went up to her room. The young girl could not resist this mark of kindness. She burst into tears, begged her mistress to take back the money still remaining to her out of what she had received, and at last gathered courage to tell her the story of the count’s questions and her own replies. The duchess ran across to the lamp and put it out. Then she told Cecchina that she would forgive her, but only on condition that she never said a word about the strange scene to anybody on earth. “The poor count,” she added carelessly, “is afraid of looking ridiculous—all men are alike.”
The duchess hurried down to her own apartments. She had hardly shut herself into her own room before she burst into tears. The idea of love passages with Fabrizio, at whose birth she had been present, was horrible to her, and yet what other meaning could her conduct bear?
Such had been the first cause of the black depression in which the count found her plunged. When he arrived, she had fits of impatience with him, and almost with Fabrizio; she would have liked never to have seen either of them again. She was vexed by Fabrizio’s behaviour with little Marietta, which seemed to her ridiculous. For the count—who, like a true lover, could keep nothing from his mistress—had told her the whole story. She could not grow accustomed to this disaster; there was a flaw in her idol. At last, in a moment of confidence, she asked the count’s advice. It was an exquisite instant for him, and a worthy reward for the upright impulse which had brought him back to Parma.
“What can be more simple?” said the count, with a smile. “These young fellows fall in love with every woman they see, and the next morning they have forgotten all about her. Ought he not to go to Belgirate to see the Marchesa del Dongo? Very well, then. Let him start. While he is away I shall request the comedy company to remove itself and its talents elsewhere, and will pay its travelling expenses. But we shall soon see him in love again with the first pretty woman chance may throw across his path. That is the natural order of things, and I would not have it otherwise. If it is necessary, let the marchesa write to him.”
This suggestion, emitted with an air of the most complete indifference, was a ray of light to the duchess; she was afraid of Giletti.
That evening the count mentioned, as though by chance, that one of his couriers was about to pass through Milan on his way to Vienna.
Three days later Fabrizio received a letter from his mother.
He departed, very much annoyed because Giletti’s jealousy had hitherto prevented him from taking advantage of the friendly feelings of which Marietta had assured him through her mamaccia, an old woman who performed the functions of her mother.
Fabrizio met his mother and one of his sisters at Belgirate, a large Piedmontese village on the right bank of the Lago Maggiore. The left bank is in Milanese territory, and consequently belongs to Austria.