“These letters will be finished more quickly,” said he to Fabrizio, “if your Excellency would take the trouble of dictating them to me.” As soon as the letters were finished, Fabrizio wrote an A and a B on the bottom line, and on a little scrap of paper which he afterward crumpled up, he wrote in French, “Croyez A et B.” The messenger was to hide this scrap of paper in his clothes.
When the boat was within hailing distance, Ludovico shouted to the boatmen, using names which were not their own. They did not reply, but approached the bank about a thousand yards lower down, looking about on every side, lest any custom-house officer should have caught sight of them.
“I am at your orders,” said Ludovico to Fabrizio. “Would you wish me to take the letters to Parma myself? Would you like me to go with you to Ferrara?”
“To come with me to Ferrara is a service which I did not venture to ask of you. I shall have to land and try to get into the town without showing my passport. I don’t mind telling you that I have the greatest repugnance to the idea of travelling under Giletti’s name, and nobody that I can think of, except yourself, can procure me another passport.”
“Why did you not speak of that at Casal-Maggiore? I know a spy there who would have sold us an excellent passport, and not dear either, for forty or fifty francs.”
One of the two boatmen, who had been born on the right bank of the Po, and consequently needed no passport to get him to Parma, undertook to deliver the letters. Ludovico, who knew how to handle an oar, pledged himself to manage the boat with the other man’s assistance.
“Lower down the river,” he said, “we shall meet several armed police-boats, and I know how to keep out of their way.” A dozen times they had to hide themselves in the midst of low islets covered with willows; three times they landed, to let the empty boat pass in front of the police boats. Ludovico took advantage of these long spells of idleness to recite several of his sonnets to Fabrizio. They were good enough as regarded feeling, but this was weakened by the form of expression, and none of them were worth writing down. The curious thing was that the ex-coachman’s passions and conception were lively and picturesque, but the moment he began to write he grew cold and commonplace. “The very opposite,” said Fabrizio to himself, “of what we see in the world. There everything is gracefully expressed, but the heart has nothing to do with it.” He discovered that the greatest pleasure he could do to his faithful servant was to correct the spelling of his sonnets.
“When I lend my manuscript to anybody I get laughed at,” said Ludovico. “But if your Excellency would condescend to dictate the spelling of the words to me, letter by letter, envious people would have to hold their tongues. Spelling is not genius.”
It was not till the evening of the second day that Fabrizio was able to land, in perfect safety, in an alder copse a league from Ponte-Lago-Oscuro. All the day long he lay hid in a hemp field, and Ludovico went on to Ferrara, where he hired a little lodging in the house of a needy Jew, who at once realized that there was money to be earned if he would hold his tongue. In the evening, as the darkness was falling, Fabrizio rode into Ferrara on a pony. He was in urgent need of care. The heat on the river had made him ill; the knife thrust in his thigh and the sword thrust Giletti had given him in the shoulder, at the beginning of their fight, had both become inflamed, and made him feverish.