MARIE-HENRI BEYLE

[DE STENDHAL]

THE CHARTERHOUSE
OF PARMA

Translated from the French by

C. K. SCOTT MONCRIEFF

VOLUME ONE

BONI & LIVERIGHT

NEW YORK MCMXXV

The Works of Stendhal

I

THE CHARTERHOUSE
OF PARMA

VOLUME ONE

CONTENTS

[A STUDY OF M. BEYLE by
Honoré De Balzac]
[BEYLE'S REPLY TO BALZAC]
[TO THE READER]
[CHAPTER ONE]
[CHAPTER TWO]
[CHAPTER THREE]
[CHAPTER FOUR]
[CHAPTER FIVE]
[CHAPTER SIX]
[CHAPTER SEVEN]
[CHAPTER EIGHT]
[CHAPTER NINE]
[CHAPTER TEN]
[CHAPTER ELEVEN]
[CHAPTER TWELVE]
[CHAPTER THIRTEEN]

TRANSLATOR'S DEDICATION

TO MADAME C—— R——

In whom alone survives the spirit of the Sanseverina, to resist tyranny, to unmask intrigue, to encourage ambition, this story of her countrywoman is, in the language of her adopted country, dedicated by

C. K. S. M.

Pisa, December, 1924.

[A STUDY OF M. BEYLE
By Honoré De Balzac]

In our day, literature quite evidently presents three aspects; and, so far from being a symptom of decadence, this triplicity, to use an expression coined by M. Cousin in his dislike of the word trinity, seems to me a natural enough effect of the abundance of literary talent: it is a tribute to the nineteenth century, which does not offer one sole and invariable form, like the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which were more or less obedient to the tyranny of a man or of a system.

These three forms, aspects or systems, by whichever name you choose to call them, exist in nature and correspond to general sympathies which were bound to declare themselves at a time when literature has seen, through the spread of knowledge, the number of its appreciators increase and the practice of reading advance with unparalleled progress.

In all generations and among all peoples there are minds that are elegiac, meditative, contemplative, minds that attach themselves more especially to the great imagery, the vast spectacles of nature, and transpose these into themselves. Hence a whole school to which I should give the name: the Literature of Imagery, to which belong lyrical writing, the epic and everything that springs from that way of looking at things.

There are, on the other hand, other active souls who like rapidity, movement, conciseness, sudden shocks, action, drama, who avoid discussion, who have little fondness for meditation, and take pleasure in results. From these, another whole system from which springs what I should call, in contrast to the former system, the Literature of Ideas.

Finally, certain complete beings, certain bifrontal intelligences embrace everything, choose both lyricism and action, drama and ode, in the belief that perfection requires a view of things as a whole. This school, which may be called Literary Eclecticism, demands a representation of the world as it is: imagery and ideas, the idea in the image or the image in the idea, movement and meditation. Walter Scott has entirely satisfied these eclectic natures.

Which party predominates, I do not know. I should not like anyone to infer from this natural distinction forced consequences. Thus, I do not mean to say that such and such a poet of the school of imagery is devoid of ideas, or that some other poet of the school of ideas cannot invent fine images. These three formulas apply only to the general impression left by the poets' work, to the mould into which the writer casts his thought, to the natural tendency of his mind. Every image corresponds to an idea, or, more precisely, to a sentiment which is a collection of ideas, and the idea does not always end in an image. The idea demands an effort in its development which does not come readily to every mind. Also the image is essentially popular, it is readily understood. Suppose that M. Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris were to appear simultaneously with Manon Lescaut, Notre-Dame would seize hold of the masses far more promptly than Manon, and would seem to have outrivalled it in the eyes of those who kneel before the Vox populi.

And yet, whatever be the kind from which a work proceeds, it will dwell in the human memory only by obeying the laws of the ideal and those of form. In literature, imagery and idea correspond nearly enough to what in painting we call design and colour. Rubens and Raphael are two great painters; but he would be strangely mistaken who thought that Raphael was not a colourist; and those who would refuse to Rubens the title of draughtsman may go and kneel before the painting with which the illustrious Fleming has adorned the Church of the Jesuits at Genoa, as an act of homage to design.

M. Beyle, better known by the pseudonym Stendhal, is, in my opinion, one of the most eminent masters of the Literature of Ideas, a school to which belong MM. Alfred de Musset, Mérimée, Léon Gozlan, Béranger, Delavigne, Gustave Planche, Madame de Girardin, Alphonse Karr and Charles Nodier. Henry Monnier belongs to it by the truth of his proverbs, which are often lacking in a root-idea, but which are nevertheless full of that naturalness and that accurate observation which are characteristic of the school.

This school, to which we already owe much fine work, recommends itself by its abundance of facts, by the sobriety of its imagery, by conciseness, by clarity, by the petite phrase of Voltaire, by a way of relating a story which the eighteenth century possessed, and, above all, by a sense of comedy. M. Beyle and M. Mérimée, despite their profound seriousness, have something ironical and sly in the manner in which they state their facts. With them the comedy is kept in reserve. It is the spark in the flint.

M. Victor Hugo's is undoubtedly the most eminent talent in the Literature of Imagery. M. Lamartine belongs to this school, which M. de Chateaubriand held over the baptismal font, and the philosophy of which was created by M. Ballanche. Obermann is another. MM. Auguste Barbier, Théophile Gautier, Sainte-Beuve are others, as are a number of feeble imitators. In some of the authors whom I have just named, the sentiment prevails sometimes over the image, as in M. de Sénancour and M. Sainte-Beuve. By his poetry rather than by his prose, M. de Vigny is seen to belong to this great school. All these poets have little sense of comedy, they know nothing of dialogue, with the exception of M. Gautier, who has a keen sense of it. M. Hugo's dialogue is too much his own speech, he does not transform himself sufficiently, he puts himself into his character, instead of becoming that character. But this school has, like the other, produced some fine work. It is remarkable for the poetic fulness of its language, for the wealth of its imagery, for the closeness of its union with nature; the other school is human, and this one divine in the sense that it tends to raise itself by feeling towards the very heart of creation. It prefers nature to man. The French language is indebted to it for a strong dose of poetry which was necessary, for it has developed the poetic feeling long resisted by the positivism—pardon the word—of our language, and the dryness stamped on it by the writers of the eighteenth century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre were the instigators of this revolution, which I regard as fortunate.

The secret of the struggle between the Classics and the Romantics lies entirely in this quite natural disparity of minds. For two centuries past, the Literature of Ideas has held exclusive sway, and so the heirs of the eighteenth century naturally mistook the only system of literature that they knew for the whole of literature. Let us not blame them, these defenders of the classic! The Literature of Ideas, full of facts, closely knit, is part of the genius of France. The Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard, Candide, the Dialogue de Sylla et d'Eucrate, the Considérations sur les causes de la Grandeur et de la Décadence des Romains, the Provinciales, Manon Lescaut, Gil Blas, are more in the French spirit than the works of the Literature of Imagery. But we owe to this latter the poetry of which the two previous centuries had not even a suspicion, if we set aside La Fontaine, André Chénier and Racine. The Literature of Imagery is in its cradle, and already includes a number of men whose genius is incontestable; but, when I see how many the other school includes, I believe it to be at the height rather than in the decline of its dominance over our beautiful tongue. The struggle ended, one may say that the Romantics have not invented new methods, that in the theatre, for instance, those who complain of want of action have made ample use of the tirade and the soliloquy, and that we have not, so far, either heard the keen and compact dialogue of Beaumarchais, nor seen again the comedy of Molière, which will always be based upon reason and ideas. Comedy is the enemy of meditation and imagery. M. Hugo has gained enormously in this contest. But men of wide reading remember the war waged on M. de Chateaubriand, during the Empire; it was fully as savage, and ended sooner because M. de Chateaubriand stood alone, without the stipante caterva of M. Hugo, without the antagonism of the press, without the support furnished to the Romantics by the men of genius of England and Germany, better known and better appreciated.

As for the third school, which partakes of each of the other two, it has less chance than they of exciting the masses, who have little taste for the mezzo termine, for composite things, and see in eclecticism an arrangement that runs counter to their passions in so far as it calms them. France likes to find war in everything. In time of peace, she is still fighting. Nevertheless, Walter Scott, Madame de Staël, Cooper, George Sand seem to me to have distinct genius. As for myself, I take my stand under the banner of literary eclecticism for the following reason: I do not believe the portrayal of modern society to be possible by the severe method of the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The introduction of the dramatic element, of the image, the picture, of description, of dialogue, seems to me indispensable in modern literature. Let us confess frankly that Gil Blas is wearisome as form: in the piling up of events and ideas there is something sterile. The idea, personified in a character, shews a finer intelligence. Plato cast his psychological ethics in the form of dialogue.

La Chartreuse de Parme is of our period and, up to the present, to my mind, is the masterpiece of the Literature of Ideas, while M. Beyle has made concessions in it to the two other schools, which are admissible by fair minds and satisfactory to both camps.

If I have so long delayed, in spite of its importance, in speaking of this book, you must understand that it was difficult for me to acquire a sort of impartiality. Even now I am not certain that I can retain it, so extraordinary, after a third, leisurely and thoughtful reading, do I find this work.

I can imagine all the mockery which my admiration for it will provoke. There will be an outcry, of course, at my infatuation, when I am simply still filled with enthusiasm after the point at which enthusiasm should have died. Men of imagination, it will be said, conceive as promptly as they forget their affection for certain works of which the common herd arrogantly and ironically protest that they can understand nothing. Simple-minded, or even intelligent persons who with their proud gaze sweep the surface of things, will say that I amuse myself with paradox, that I have, like M. Sainte-Beuve, my chers inconnus. I am incapable of compromise with the truth, that is all.

M. Beyle has written a book in which sublimity glows from chapter after chapter. He has produced, at an age when men rarely find monumental subjects and after having written a score of extremely intelligent volumes, a work which can be appreciated only by minds and men that are truly superior. In short, he has written The Prince up to date, the novel that Machiavelli would write if he were living banished from Italy in the nineteenth century.

And so the chief obstacle to the renown which M. Beyle deserves lies in the fact that La Chartreuse de Parme can find readers fitted to enjoy it only among diplomats, ministers, observers, the leaders of society, the most distinguished artists; in a word, among the twelve or fifteen hundred persons who are at the head of things in Europe. Do not be surprised, therefore, if, in the ten months since this surprising work was published, there has not been a single journalist who has either read, or understood, or studied it, who has announced, analysed and praised it, who has even alluded to it. I, who, I think, have some understanding of the matter, I have read it for the third time in the last few days: I have found the book finer even than before, and have felt in my heart the kind of happiness that comes from the opportunity of doing a good action.

Is it not doing a good action to try to do justice to a man of immense talent, who will appear to have genius only in the eyes of a few privileged beings and whom the transcendency of his ideas deprives of that immediate but fleeting popularity which the courtiers of the public seek and which great souls despise? If the mediocre knew that they had a chance of raising themselves to the level of the sublime by understanding them, La Chartreuse de Parme would have as many readers as Clarissa Harlowe had on its first appearance.

There are in admiration that is made legitimate by conscience ineffable delights. Therefore all that I am going to say here I address to the pure and noble hearts which, in spite of certain pessimistic declamations, exist in every country, like undiscovered pleiads, among the families of minds devoted to the worship of art. Has not humanity, from generation to generation, has it not here below its constellations of souls, its heaven, its angels, to use the favourite expression of the great Swedish prophet, Swedenborg, a chosen people for whom true artists work and whose judgments make them ready to accept privation, the insolence of upstarts and the indifference of governments?

You will pardon me, I hope, what malevolent persons will call longueurs. In the first place, I am firmly convinced, the analysis of so curious and so interesting a work as this will give more pleasure to the most fastidious reader than he would derive from the unpublished novel whose place it fills. Besides, any other critic would require at least three articles of the length of this, if he sought to give an adequate explanation of this novel, which often contains a whole book in a single page, and which cannot be explained save by a man to whom the North of Italy is fairly familiar. Finally, let me assure you that, with the help of M. Beyle, I am going to try to make myself instructive enough to be read with pleasure to the end.

A sister of the Marchese del Dongo, named Gina, the abbreviation of Angelina, whose early character, as a young girl, would have a certain similarity, could an Italian woman ever resemble a Frenchwoman, to the character of Madame de Lignolle in Faublas, marries at Milan, against the will of her brother, who wishes to marry her to an old man, noble, rich and Milanese, a certain Conte Pietranera, poor and without a penny.

The Conte and Contessa support the French party, and are the ornament of the Court of Prince Eugène. We are in the days of the Kingdom of Italy, when the story begins.

The Marchese del Dongo, a Milanese attached to Austria and her spy, spends fourteen years waiting for the fall of the Emperor Napoleon. Moreover, this Marchese, the brother of Gina Pietranera, does not live at Milan: he occupies his castle of Grianta, on the Lake of Como: he there brings up his elder son in the love of Austria and on sound principles; but he has a younger son, named Fabrizio, to whom Signora Pietranera is passionately devoted: Fabrizio is a cadet of the family; like her, he will be left without a penny in the world. Who is not familiar with the fondness of noble hearts for the disinherited? Also, she wishes to make something of him. Then, fortunately, Fabrizio is a charming boy; she obtains leave to put him to school at Milan, where, playing truant, she makes him see something of the viceregal court.

Napoleon falls for the first time. While he is on the Island of Elba, in the course of the reaction at Milan, which the Austrians have reoccupied, an insult offered to the Armies of Italy in the presence of Pietranera, who takes it up, is the cause of his death: he is killed in a duel.

A lover of the Contessa refuses to avenge her husband, Gina humiliates him by one of those acts of vengeance, magnificent south of the Alps, which would be thought stupid in Paris. This is her revenge:

Although she despises, in petto, this lover who has been adoring her at a distance and without reward for the last six years, she pays certain attentions to the wretch, and, when he is in a paroxysm of suspense, writes to him:

"Will you act for once like a man of spirit? Please to imagine that you have never known me. I am, with a touch of contempt, your servant,

GINA PIETRANERA."

Then, to increase still further the desperation of this rich man, with his income of two hundred thousand lire, she ginginates (ginginare is a Milanese verb meaning everything that passes at a distance between a pair of lovers before they have spoken; the verb has its noun: one is a gingino. It is the first stage in love). Well, she ginginates for a moment with a fool whom she soon abandons; then she retires, with a pension of fifteen hundred francs, to a third floor apartment where all Milan of the day comes to see her and admires her.

Her brother, the Marchese, invites her to return to the ancestral castle on the Lake of Como. She goes there, to see once more and to protect her charming nephew, Fabrizio, to comfort her sister-in-law and to plan her own future amid the sublime scenery of the Lake of Como, her native soil and the native soil of this nephew whom she has made her son: she has no children. Fabrizio, who loves Napoleon, learns of his landing from the Gulf of Juan and wishes to go to serve the sovereign of his uncle Pietranera. His mother, who, the wife of a rich Marchese with an income of five hundred thousand lire, has not a penny to call her own, his aunt Gina, who has nothing, give him their diamonds: Fabrizio is in their eyes a hero.

The inspired volunteer crosses Switzerland, arrives in Paris, takes part in the battle of Waterloo, then returns to Italy, where, for having dabbled in the conspiracy of 1815 against the peace of Europe, he is disowned by his father and the Austrian government place him on their index. For him, to return to Milan would be to enter the Spielberg. From this point Fabrizio, in trouble, persecuted for his heroism, this sublime boy becomes everything in the world to Gina.

The Contessa returns to Milan, she obtains a promise from Bubna and from the men of character whom Austria at this period has put in authority there, not to persecute Fabrizio, whom, following the advice of an extremely shrewd Canon, she keeps in concealment at Novara. Meanwhile, with all these things happening, no money. But Gina is of a sublime beauty, she is the type of that Lombard beauty (bellezza folgorante) which can be realised only at Milan and in the Scala when you see assembled there the thousand beautiful women of Lombardy. The events of this troubled life have developed in her the most magnificent Italian character: she has intellect, shrewdness, the Italian grace, the most charming conversation, an astonishing command of herself; in short, the Contessa is at one and the same time Madame de Montespan, Catherine de' Medici, Catherine II, too, if you like: the most audacious political genius and the most consummate feminine genius, hidden beneath a marvellous beauty. Having watched over her nephew, despite the hatred of the elder brother who is jealous of him, despite the hatred and indifference of the father, having snatched him from these perils, having been one of the queens of the court of the Viceroy Eugène, and then nothing; all these crises have enriched her natural forces, exercised her faculties and awakened the instincts numbed in the depths of her being by her early prosperity, by a marriage the joys of which have been rare, owing to the continual absence of Napoleon's devoted servant. Everyone sees or can divine in her the thousand treasures of passion, the resources and the refulgence of the most perfect feminine heart.

The old Canon, whom she has seduced, sends Fabrizio to Novara, a small town in Piedmont, under the tutelage of a parish priest. This priest puts a step to the inquiries of the police by his description of Fabrizio: "a younger son who feels wronged because he is not the eldest." When Gina, who had dreamed of Fabrizio's becoming aide-de-camp to Napoleon, sees Napoleon banished to St. Helena, she realises that Fabrizio, his name inscribed in the black book of the Milanese police, is lost to her for ever.

During the uncertainties which prevailed throughout Europe at the time of the battle of Waterloo, Gina has made the acquaintance of Conte Mosca della Rovere, the Minister of the famous Prince of Parma, Ranuccio-Ernesto IV.

Let us pause at this point.

Certainly, after having read the book, it is impossible not to recognise, in Conte Mosca, the most remarkable portrait that anyone could ever make of Prince Metternich, but of a Metternich transported from the great Chancellory of the Austrian Empire to the modest State of Parma. The State of Parma and Ernesto IV seem to me similarly to be the Duke of Modena and his Duchy. M. Beyle says of Ernesto IV that he is one of the richest Princes in Europe: the wealth of the Duke of Modena is famous. In seeking to avoid personalities the author has expended more ingenuity than Walter Scott required to construct the plot of Kenilworth. Indeed, these two similarities are vague enough, outwardly, to be denied, and so real inwardly that the well-informed reader cannot be mistaken. M. Beyle has so exalted the sublime character of the Prime Minister of the State of Parma that it is doubtful whether Prince Metternich be so great a man as Mosca, although the heart of that celebrated statesman does offer, to those who know his life well, one or two examples of passions of a compass at least equal to that of Mosca's. It is not slandering the Austrian Minister to believe him capable of all the secret greatnesses of Mosca. As for what Mosca is throughout the book, as for the conduct of the man whom Gina regards as the greatest diplomat in Italy, it took genius to create the incidents, the events and the innumerable and recurring plots in the midst of which this immense character unfolds. All that M. de Metternich has done during his long career is not more extraordinary than what you see done by Mosca. When one comes to think that the author has invented it all, ravelled all the plot and then unravelled it, as things do ravel and unravel themselves at a court, the most daring mind, a mind to which the conception of ideas is a familiar process, is left dazed, stupefied before so huge a task. As for myself, I suspect some literary Aladdin's-lamp. To have dared to put on the stage a man of the genius and force of M. de Choiseul, Potemkin, M. de Metternich, to create him, to justify the creation by the actions of the creature himself, to make him move in an environment which is appropriate to him and in which his faculties have full play, is the work not of a man but of a fairy, a wizard. Bear in mind that the most skilfully complicated plots of Walter Scott do not arrive at the admirable simplicity which prevails in the recital of these events, so numerous, so thickly foliaged, to borrow the famous expression of Diderot.

Here is the portrait of Mosca. We are in 1816, remember.

"He might have been forty or forty-five: he had strongly marked features, with no trace of self-importance, and a simple and light-hearted manner which told in his favour; he would have looked very well indeed, if a whim on the part of his Prince had not obliged him to wear powder on his hair as a proof of his soundness in politics."

And so the powder which M. de Metternich wears, and which softens a face already so gentle, is justified in Mosca by the will of his master. In spite of the prodigious efforts of M. Beyle, who, on page after page, naturalises in this State marvellous inventions to deceive his reader and blunt the point of his allusions, the mind is at Modena and will on no account consent to remain at Parma. Whoever has seen, known, met M. de Metternich, thinks that he hears him speaking through the mouth of Mosca, lends Mosca his voice and clothes him in his manners. Although, in the book, Ernesto IV dies, and the Duke of Modena is still living, one is often reminded of that Prince so notorious for his severities, which the Liberals of Milan called cruelties. Such are the expressions used by the author in speaking of the Prince of Parma.

In these two portraits, begun with a satirical intention, there is, however, nothing that can wound, nothing that reeks of vengeance. Although M. Beyle has no cause to thank M. de Metternich, who refused him his exequatur for the Trieste Consulate, and although the Duke of Modena has never been able to look with pleasure on the author of Rome, Naples et Florence, of the Promenades en Rome, and of certain other works, these two figures are portrayed with great taste and the utmost propriety.

This is what, no doubt, occurred during the actual work of these two creations. Carried away by the enthusiasm necessary to him who handles clay and scalpel, the brush and colours, the pen and the treasures of man's moral nature, M. Beyle, who had started out to depict a little court in Italy and a diplomat, ended with the type PRINCE and the type PRIME MINISTER. The resemblance, began with the fantasy of a satirical mind, ceased where the genius of the arts appeared to the artist.

This convention of masks once admitted, the reader, keenly interested, accepts the admirable Italian scene which the author paints, the town and all the buildings necessary to his story, which, in many places, has the magical quality of an Oriental tale.

This long parenthesis was indispensable. Let us continue.

Mosca is smitten with love, but with a love immense, eternal, boundless, for Gina, absolutely like M. de Metternich and his Leykam. He lets her, at the risk of compromising himself, have the latest diplomatic news before anyone else. The presence at Milan of this Minister of the State of Parma is perfectly accounted for later on.

To give you an idea of this famous Italian love, I must relate to you a distinctly curious incident. On their departure, in 1799, the Austrians saw as they left Milan, on the Bastion, a certain Contessa B——nini who was driving with a Canon, both heedless of revolutions and war: they were in love. The Bastion is a magnificent avenue which starts from the Eastern Gate (Porta Renza) and corresponds to the Champs-Elysées in Paris, with this slight difference that on the left extends the Duomo, "that mountain of gold transmuted into marble," as Francis II, who had a gift of expression, called it; and on the right the snowy fringe, the sublime chasms of the Alps. On their return in 1814 the first thing the Austrians saw was the Contessa and the Canon, sitting in the same carriage and saying, perhaps, the same things, at the same point on the Bastion. I have seen, in that city, a young man who became ill if he went more than a certain number of streets away from the house of his mistress. When a woman gives an Italian sensations, he never leaves her.

"In spite of his frivolous air and his polished manners. Mosca," says M. Beyle, "was not blessed with a soul of the French type; he could not forget the things that annoyed him. When there was a thorn in his pillow, he would blunt it by repeated stabbings of his throbbing limbs." This superior man guesses the superior mind of the Contessa, he falls in love with her to the point of behaving like a schoolboy.

"After all," the Minister said to himself, "old age is only being incapable of indulging in these delicious timidities."

The Contessa one evening remarks the fine, benevolent gaze of Mosca. (The gaze with which M. de Metternich would deceive the Deity.)

"At Parma," she says to him, "if you were to look like that, you would give them the hope that they might escape hanging."

In the end the diplomat, having realised how essential this woman is to his happiness, and after three months of inward struggle, arrives with three different plans, devised to secure his happiness, and makes her agree to the wisest of them.

In Mosca's eyes, Fabrizio is a child: the excessive interest which the Contessa takes in her nephew seems to him one of those elective maternities which, until love comes to reign there, beguile the hearts of noble-hearted women.

Mosca, unfortunately, is married. Accordingly he brings to Milan the Duca Sanseverina-Taxis. Let me, in this analysis, introduce a few quotations which will give you examples of the vivid, free, sometimes faulty style of M. Beyle, and will enable me to make myself be read with pleasure.

The Duca is a handsome little old man of sixty-eight, dapple-grey, very polished, very neat, immensely rich, but not quite as noble as he ought to have been. Apart from this, the Duca is by no means an absolute idiot, says the Conte: "he gets his clothes and wigs from Paris. He is not the sort of man who would do anything deliberately mean, he seriously believes that honour consists in having a Grand Cordon, and he is ashamed of his riches. He wants an Embassy. Marry him, he will give you a hundred thousand scudi, a magnificent jointure, his palazzo and the most superb existence in Parma. On these conditions, I make the Prince appoint him Ambassador, he will have his Grand Cordon, and he will start the day after his marriage; you become Duchessa Sanseverina, and we live happily. Everything is settled with the Duca, who will be made the happiest man in the world by our arrangement: he will never shew his face again in Parma. If this life does not appeal to you, I have four hundred thousand francs, I hand in my resignation and we go and live at Naples."

"Do you know that what you and your Duca are proposing is highly immoral?" says the Contessa.

"No more immoral than what is done at every court," the Minister answers. "Absolute Power has this advantage, that it justifies everything. Every year we shall be afraid of a 1798, and everything that can reduce that fear will be supremely moral. You shall hear the speeches I make on the subject at my receptions. The Prince has consented, and you will have a brother in the Duca, who has not dared to hope for such a marriage, which saves his face; he thinks himself ruined because he lent twenty-five napoleons to the great Ferrante Palla, a Republican, a poet and something of a genius, whom we have sentenced to death, fortunately in his absence."

Gina accepts. We next see her Duchessa Sanseverina-Taxis, astonishing the court of Parma by her affability, by the noble serenity of her mind. Her house is the most attractive in the town, she reigns there, she is the glory of this little court.

The portrait of Ernesto IV, his reception of the Duchessa, her introduction to each member in turn of the Reigning House, all these details are marvels of wit, depth, succinctness. Never have the hearts of Princes, Ministers, courtiers and women been so depicted. The reader will find it hard to lay the book down.

When the Duchessa's nephew fled from Austrian persecution and was on his way from the Lake of Como to Novara under the protection of his confessor and the parish priest, he met Fabio Conti, General of the Armies of the State of Parma, one of the most curious figures of this court and of the book, a general who thinks of nothing but whether His Highness's soldiers ought to have seven buttons on their uniform or nine; but this comic general possesses an entrancing daughter, Clelia Conti. Fabrizio and Clelia, both trying to escape from the police, have exchanged a few words. Clelia is the most beautiful creature in Parma. As soon as the Prince sees the effect produced in his court by the Sanseverina, he thinks of counter-balancing that beauty by bringing Clelia to light. A great difficulty! Girls are not received at court: he therefore has her created a Canoness.

The Prince has of course a mistress. One of his weaknesses is to ape Louis XIV. So, to be in the picture, he has provided himself with a La Vallière, one Contessa Balbi, who dips her fingers into every money-bag, and is not forgotten when any government contract is made. Ernesto IV would be in despair if the Balbi were not slightly grasping: the scandalous fortune of his mistress is a sign of royal power. He is lucky, the Contessa is a miser!

"She received me," the Duchessa tells Mosca, "as though she expected me to give her a buona mancia (a tip)."

But, to the great grief of Ernesto IV, the Contessa, who has no brains, cannot be compared for a moment to the Duchessa; this humiliates him, a first source of irritation. His mistress is thirty, and a model of Italian leggiadria.

She had still the finest eyes in the world and the most graceful little hands;[1] but her skin was netted with countless fine little wrinkles which made her look like a young grandmother. As she was obliged to smile at everything the Prince said, and sought to make him think, by this ironical smile, that she understood him, Conte Mosca used to say that these suppressed yawns had in course of time produced her wrinkles.

The Duchessa parries the first blow aimed at her by His Highness by making a friend of Clelia, who, fortunately, is an innocent creature. From motives of policy, the Prince allows to exist at Parma a sort of Party, called Liberal (God knows what sort of Liberals!). A Liberal is a man who has the great men of Italy, Dante, Machiavelli, Petrarch, Leo X painted welcoming Monti on a ceiling. This passes as an epigram against the power which has no longer any great men. This Liberal Party has as its chief a Marchesa Raversi, an ugly and mischievous woman, as irritating as an Opposition. Fabio Conti, the General, belongs to this Party. The Prince, who hangs agitators, has his reasons for allowing a Liberal Party.

Ernesto IV rejoices in a Laubardemont, his Fiscal General or Chief Justice, named Rassi. This Rassi, full of natural intelligence, is one of the most horribly comic or comically horrible personages that can be imagined: he laughs and has people hanged, he makes a game of his justice. He is necessary, indispensable to the Prince. Rassi is a blend of Fouché, Fouquier-Tinville, Merlin, Triboulet and Scapin. You call the Prince a tyrant: he says that this is conspiracy and he hangs you. He has already hanged two Liberals. Since this execution, notorious throughout Italy, the Prince, who is brave when on the field of battle and has led armies, the Prince, though a man of spirit, lives in fear. This Rassi becomes something terrible, he attains to gigantic proportions while still remaining grotesque: he embodies all the justice of this little State.

And now for the inevitable effects at court of the Duchessa's triumphs. The Conte and the Duchessa, that pair of eagles caged in this tiny capital, soon begin to offend the Prince. In the first place the Duchessa is sincerely attached to the Conte, the Conte is more in love every day, and this happiness irritates a bored Prince. Mosca's talents are indispensable to the Cabinet of Parma. Ranuccio-Ernesto and his Minister are attached to one another like the Siamese twins. Indeed, they have between them contrived the impossible plan ("impossible" is a rhetorical precaution on M. Beyle's part) of making a single State of Northern Italy. Beneath his mask of absolutism, the Prince is intriguing to become the Sovereign of this Constitutional Kingdom. He is dying of envy to ape Louis XVIII, to give a Charter and Two Chamber government to Northern Italy. He regards himself as a great politician, he has his ambition: he redeems in his own eyes his subordinate position by this plan with which Mosca is fully acquainted; he has control of his treasury! The more need he has of Mosca and the more he recognises his Minister's talent, the more reasons there are in the depths of this princely heart for an unconfessed jealousy. Life at court is boring, at the palazzo Sanseverina it is amusing. What means remain to him of demonstrating his power to himself? The chance of tormenting his Minister. And he torments him cruelly! The Prince tries first of all, in a friendly way, to secure the Duchessa as his mistress, she refuses; there are blows to self-esteem the elements of which may easily be guessed from this brief analysis. Presently, the Prince reaches the stage of wishing to attack his Minister through the Duchessa, and he then seeks out ways of making her suffer.

All this part of the novel is of a remarkable literary solidity. This painting has the magnitude of a canvas fifty feet by thirty, and at the same time the manner, the execution is Dutch in its minuteness. We come to the drama, and to a drama the most complete, the most gripping, the strangest, the truest, the most profoundly explored in the human heart that has ever been invented, but one that has existed, undoubtedly, at many periods, and will reappear at courts where it will be enacted again, as Louis XIII and Richelieu, as Francis II and Prince Metternich, as Louis XV, the du Barry and M. de Choiseul have enacted it in the past.

The prospect which, in this new setting, has most attracted the Duchessa is that of the possibility of making a career for her hero, for this child of her heart, for Fabrizio her nephew. Fabrizio will owe his fortune to the genius of Mosca. The love which she has conceived for the child she continues to feel for the youth. I may tell you now, beforehand, that this love is to become later on, at first without Gina's knowledge, then consciously, a passion that will reach the sublime. Nevertheless she will always be the wife of the great diplomat, to whom she will never have committed any other act of infidelity than that of the passionate impulses of her heart towards this young idol; she will not deceive this man of genius, she will always make him happy and proud; she will make him aware of her least emotions, he will endure the most horrible rages of jealousy, and will never have any grounds for complaint. The Duchessa will be frank, artless, sublime, resigned, moving as a play of Shakespeare, beautiful as poetry, and the most severe reader will have no fault to find. I doubt if any poet has ever solved such a problem with as much felicity as has M. Beyle in this bold work. The Duchessa is one of those magnificent statues which make us at once admire the art that created them and inveigh against Nature which is so sparing of such models. Gina, when you have read the book, will remain before your eyes like a sublime statue: it will be neither the Venus de Milo, nor the Venus de' Medici; it will be Diana with the voluptuousness of Venus, with the suavity of Raphael's Virgins, and the movement of Italian passion. Above all, there is nothing French in the Duchessa. Yes, the Frenchman who has modelled, chiselled, wrought this marble, has left nothing on it of his native soil. Corinne, you must realise, is a miserable sketch compared with this living, ravishing creature. You will find her great, intellectual, passionate, always true to life, and yet the author has carefully concealed her sensual aspect. There is not in the work a single word that can make one think of the pleasures of love or can inspire them. Although the Duchessa, Mosca, Fabrizio, the Prince and his son, Clelia, although the book and its characters are, in their different ways, passion with all its furies; although it is Italy as it is, with its shrewdness, its dissimulation, its cunning, its coolness, its tenacity, its higher policy in every connexion. La Chartreuse de Parme is more chaste than the most puritanical of the novels of Walter Scott. To make a noble, majestic, almost irreproachable character of a duchess who makes a Mosca happy, and keeps nothing from him, is not that a masterpiece of fiction? The Phèdre of Racine, that sublime creation of the French stage, which Jansenism did not venture to condemn, is not so beautiful, nor so complete, nor so animated.

Well, at the moment when everything is smiling on the Duchessa, when she is amusing herself with this court life where a sudden storm is always to be feared, when she is most tenderly attached to the Conte, who, literally, is mad with happiness; when he has the patent and receives the honours of Prime Minister which come very near to those paid to the Sovereign himself, she says to him one day:

"And Fabrizio?"

The Conte then offers to obtain for her, from Austria, a pardon for this dear nephew.

"But, if he is somewhat superior to the young men who ride their English thoroughbreds about the streets of Milan, what a life, at eighteen, to be doing nothing with no prospect of ever having anything to do! If," says Mosca, "heaven had endowed him with a real passion, were it only for angling, I should respect it; but what is he to do at Milan, even after he has obtained his pardon?"

"I should like him to be an officer," says the Duchessa.

"Would you advise a Sovereign," says Mosca, "to entrust a post which, at a given date, may be of some importance, to a young man who has shown enthusiasm, who, from Como, has gone to join Napoleon at Waterloo? A del Dongo cannot be a merchant, nor a barrister, nor a doctor. You will cry out in protest, but you will come in the end to agree with me. If Fabrizio wishes it, he can quickly become Archbishop of Parma, one of the highest dignities in Italy, and from that Cardinal. We have had at Parma three del Dongo Archbishops, the Cardinal who wrote a book in sixteen-something, Fabrizio in 1700 and Ascanio in 1750. Only, shall I remain Minister long enough? That is the sole objection."

After two months spent in discussion, the Duchessa, defeated on every point by the Conte's observations, and rendered desperate by the precarious position of a younger son of a Milanese family, utters one day this profound Italian saying to her friend:

"Prove to me again that every other career is impossible for Fabrizio."

The Conte proves it.

The Duchessa, susceptible to the thought of fame, sees no other way of salvation, here below, for her dear Fabrizio, than the Church and its high dignities, for the future of Italy lies in Rome, and nowhere else. To anyone who has studied Italy carefully, it is clear that the unity of government in that country, that its nationality will never be re-established save by the hand of a Sixtus V. The Pope alone has the power to stir and to reconstitute Italy. And so we see with what pains the Austrian court has watched, for the last thirty years, the elections of Popes, what aged imbeciles she has allowed to don the Triple Crown. "Perish Catholicism sooner than my domination!" seems to be her guiding motto. Miserly Austria would spend a million to prevent the election of a Pope with French ideas. And then, if some fine Italian genius employed sufficient dissimulation to put on the white cassock, he might die like Ganganelli. There perhaps is to be found the secret of the refusals of the Court of Rome, which has not chosen to accept the invigorating potion, the elixir offered to it by men of fine ecclesiastical genius from France: Borgia would not have failed to make them take their seat among his devoted Cardinals. The author of the Bull In coena Domini would have understood the great Gallican idea, Catholic Democracy, he would have adapted it to the circumstances. M. de Lamennais, that fallen angel, would not then, in his Breton obstinacy, have abandoned the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church.

So the Duchessa adopts this plan of the Conte. In this great woman there is, as in great politicians, a moment of uncertainty, of hesitation before a plan; but she never goes back upon her resolutions. The Duchessa is always right in wishing what she has wished. Her persistency, that strong quality of her imperious character, imparts an element of terror to all the scenes of this fertile drama.

Nothing could be more clever than the initiation of Fabrizio into his future destiny. The lovers display to Fabrizio the chances of his life. Fabrizio, a boy of astonishing intelligence, grasps everything at once and has a vision of the tiara. The Conte does not pretend to make a priest of him of the sort one sees everywhere in Italy. Fabrizio is a great gentleman, he can remain perfectly ignorant if it seems good to him, and will none the less become Archbishop. Fabrizio refuses to lead the life of the caffè, he has a horror of poverty, and realises that he cannot be a soldier. When he speaks of going and becoming an American citizen (we are in 1817), he has explained to him the dulness of life in America, without smartness, without music, without love affairs, without war, the cult of the god Dollar, and the respect due to artisans, to the masses who by their votes decide everything. Fabrizio has a horror of mobocracy.

At the voice of the great diplomat, who shows him life as it really is, the young man's illusions take flight. He had not understood what is incomprehensible to young people, the "Surtout pas de zèle!" of M. de Talleyrand.

"Remember," Mosca says to him, "that a proclamation, a caprice of the heart flings the enthusiast into the bosom of the party opposed to his own future sympathies."

What a phrase![2]

The instructions given by the Minister to the neophyte who is to return to Parma only as a Monsignore, in violet stockings, and whom he sends to Naples to complete his studies with letters of recommendation to the Archbishop there, one of his clever friends; these instructions, given in the Duchessa's drawing-room, during a game of cards, are admirable. A single quotation will show you the fineness of the perceptions, the science of life which the author gives to this great character.

"Believe or not, as you choose, what they teach you, but never raise any objection. Imagine that they are teaching you the rules of the game of whist; would you raise any objection to the rules of whist? And once you knew and had adopted those rules, would you not wish to win? Do not fall into the vulgar habit of speaking with horror of Voltaire, Diderot, Raynal and all those harebrained Frenchmen who have brought us that foolish government by Two Chambers. Speak of them with a calm irony, they are people who have long since been refuted. You will be forgiven a little amorous intrigue, if it is done in the proper way, but they would take note of your objections: age stifles intrigue but encourages doubt. Believe everything, do not yield to the temptation to shine; be morose: discerning eyes will see your cleverness in yours and it will be time enough to be witty when you are an Archbishop!"

The astonishing and fine superiority of Mosca is never lacking, either in action or in speech; it makes this book one as profound, from page to page, as the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld. And observe that their passion leads the Conte and Duchessa to make mistakes, they are obliged to bring their talent into play to atone for them. To another man who had consulted him, the Conte would have explained the misfortunes that would await him at Parma after the death of Ernesto IV. But his passion has made him completely blind to his own interests. Talent alone can make you discover this poignant touch of comedy for yourself. Great politicians are nothing more, after all, than equilibrists who, if they do not take care, see their finest edifice come crashing to the ground. Richelieu was only saved from his peril, on the Day of the Dupes, by the broth of the Queen Mother, who refused to go to Saint-Germain without having taken the lait de poule which preserved her complexion. The Duchessa and Mosca live by a perpetual expenditure of all their faculties; and so the reader who follows the spectacle of their life is kept in a trance, through chapter after chapter, so well are the difficulties of this existence set before him, so cleverly are they explained. Finally, let us note well, these crises, these terrible scenes are woven into the substance of the book: the flowers are not stitched on, they are of the same substance as the rest.

"We must keep our love secret," the Duchessa says sadly to her lover, on the day on which she has guessed that his struggle with the Prince has begun.

When, to outact his acting, she lets Ernesto IV gather that she is only moderately in love with the Conte, she gives him a day of happiness; but the Prince is shrewd, he sees sooner or later that he has been tricked. And his disappointment adds violence to the storm brought about by her ill-wishers.

This great work could not have been conceived or executed save by a man of fifty, in the full vigour of his age and in the maturity of all his talents. One sees perfection in every detail. The character of the Prince is drawn by the hand of a master, and is, as I have told you, The Prince. One conceives him admirably, as a man and as sovereign. This man might be at the head of the Russian Empire, he would be capable of ruling it, he would be great; but the man would remain what he is, liable to vanity, to jealousy, to passion. In the seventeenth-century, at Versailles, he would be Louis XIV and would avenge himself on the Duchessa, as did Louis XIV on Fouquet. Criticism can find no fault in the greatest or in the smallest character; they are all what they ought to be. There is life and especially the life of courts, not drawn in caricature, as Hoffmann has tried to draw it, but seriously and ironically. Finally, this book explains to you admirably all that Louis XIII's camarilla made Richelieu suffer. This work applied to vast interests like those of the cabinet of Louis XIV, of Pitt's cabinet, of Napoleon's cabinet or of the Russian cabinet, would have been impossible owing to the prolixities and explanations which so many veiled interests would have required; whereas you get a comprehensive view of the State of Parma; and Parma enables you to understand, mutato nomine, the intrigues of the most exalted court. Things were like this tinder the Borgia Pope, at the court of Tiberius, at the court of Philip II: they must be like this also at the court of Peking!

Let us enter into the terrible Italian drama which has been slowly and logically preparing itself in a charming manner. I spare you the details of the court and its original figures; the Princess who thinks it her duty to be unhappy, because the Prince has his Pompadour; the Heir Apparent who is kept caged; the Princess Isotta, the Chamberlain, the Minister of the Interior, the Governor of the Citadel, Fabio Conti. One cannot afford to take the least thing lightly. If, like the Duchessa, Fabrizio and Mosca, you accept the court of Parma, you play your game of whist and your interests are at stake. When the Prime Minister thinks that he has fallen from power, he says quite seriously:

"When our guests have gone, we can decide on a way of barricading ourselves for the night; the best plan would be to set off while they're dancing for your place at Sacca, by the Po, from where in twenty minutes one can get into Austria."

Indeed the Duchessa, the Minister, every Parmesan subject is liable to end his days in the citadel.

When the Prince confesses his desires to the Duchessa and she in reply asks him:

"How should we ever lode Mosca in the face again, that man of genius and heart?"

"I have thought of that," says the Prince: "we should never look him in the face again! The citadel waits."

The Sanseverina does not fail to repeat this saying to Mosca, who puts his affairs in order.

Four years elapse.

The Minister, who has not allowed Fabrizio to come to Parma during these four years, permits him to reappear there when the Pope has created him Monsignore, a kind of dignity which entitles him to wear violet stockings. Fabrizio has nobly answered the expectations of his political master. At Naples he has had mistresses, he has had the passion for archeology, he has sold his horses to make excavations, he has behaved well, he has aroused no jealousy, he may become Pope. What delights him most about his return to Parma is the thought of being delivered from the attentions of the charming Duchessa d'A——. His governor, who has made him an educated man, receives a Cross and a pension. Fabrizio's first appearance at Parma, his arrival, his various presentations at court, form the highest comedy of manners, character and intrigue that one can read anywhere. At more than one point, the better class of reader will lay down this book on his table to say to himself:

"Heavens! How good this is, how exquisitely arranged, how deep!"

He will meditate upon words like the following, for instance, upon which Princes ought to meditate well for their own good: People with brains who are born on the throne or at the foot of it soon lose all fineness of touch; they proscribe, in their immediate circle, freedom of conversation which seems to them coarseness, they refuse to look at anything but masks and pretend to judge the beauty of complexions; the amusing part of it is that they imagine their touch to be of the finest.

Here begin the Duchessa's ingenuous passion for Fabrizio, and Mosca's torments. Fabrizio is a diamond that has lost nothing by being polished. Gina, who had sent him to Naples a devil-may-care young rough-rider, whose horsewhip seemed to be an inherent part of his person, sees him now with a noble and confident bearing before strangers, and in private the same fire of youth.

"This nephew," Mosca tells his mistress, "is made to adorn all the exalted posts." But the great diplomat, attentive at first to Fabrizio, turns to look at the Duchessa and notices a curious look in her eyes. "I am in my fifties," he reflects.

The Duchessa is so happy that she does not give the Conte a thought. This profound effect, made on Mosca by a single glance, is irremediable.

When Ranuccio-Ernesto IV guesses that the aunt loves the nephew a little more warmly than the laws of consanguinity permit, which at Parma is incest, he is at the pinnacle of happiness. He writes his Minister an anonymous letter on the subject. When he is sure that Mosca has read it, he sends for him, without giving him time to call first on the Duchessa, and keeps him on the rack throughout a conversation full of princely friendliness and hypocrisy. Certainly the pangs of love causing a fine heart to bleed always make an effective scene; but this heart is Italian, this is the heart of a man of genius, and I know nothing that grips me so as the chapter on Mosca's jealousy.

Fabrizio does not love his aunt; he adores her as an aunt, she inspires no longing in him as a woman; nevertheless, in their Conversations, a gesture, a word may make youth break out, the least thing may then make his aunt leave Parma, because riches, honours are nothing to her who, once already, before the eyes of all Milan, has managed to live on a third floor, with an income of fifteen hundred francs. The future Archbishop sees an abyss open before him. The Prince is as happy as a king, while waiting for a catastrophe to destroy the private happiness of his dear Minister. Mosca, the great Mosca, weeps like a child. The prudence of this dear Fabrizio, who understands Mosca and understands his aunt, prevents any disaster. The Monsignore makes himself fall in love with a little Marietta, an actress of the lowest grade, a columbine who has her harlequin, a certain Giletti, formerly one of Napoleon's dragoons, and a fencing master, a man horrible in mind and body, who devours Marietta, beats her, steals her blue shawls and all her earnings.

Mosca breathes again. The Prince is uneasy, his prey is escaping, he could hold the Sanseverina by her nephew, and now the nephew turns out a profound politician! In spite of Marietta, the Duchessa's passion is so artless, her familiarities are so dangerous, that Fabrizio, to restore tranquillity, proposes to the Conte, who also is an antiquarian and is engaged on excavations, to go down to the country and superintend the work. The Minister adores Fabrizio. The company which includes Marietta, her mammaccia—a figure drawn in four pages with an astounding truth and depth of character—and Giletti, the whole motley crew, leave Parma. This trio, Giletti, the mammaccia and Marietta come along the road while Fabrizio is shooting. There follows an encounter between the dragoon, who seeks, in an access of Italian vanity, to kill the black-frock, and Fabrizio, who is amazed at seeing Marietta on the road. This accidental duel becomes serious when Fabrizio sees that Giletti, who has only one eye, is trying to disfigure him: he kills him. Giletti was plainly the aggressor, the workmen engaged on the excavations saw everything, Fabrizio realises all the capital that the Raversi faction and the Liberals will make out of this ridiculous adventure against himself, the Ministers, his aunt; he takes flight, he crosses the Po. Thanks to the clever assistance of Lodovico, an old servant of the Sanseverina household, a fellow who writes sonnets, he finds shelter and reaches Bologna, where he sees Marietta again. Lodovico becomes fanatically attached to Fabrizio. This retired coachman is one of the most complete of the figures of the second magnitude. Fabrizio's flight, the scenery by the Po, the descriptions of famous places through which the young prelate passes, his adventures during his exile from Parma, his correspondence with the Archbishop, another character admirably drawn, the smallest details are of a literary execution that bears the hall-mark of genius. And all is so Italian as to make one take the coach and fly to Italy, there to seek this drama and this poetry. The reader becomes Fabrizio.

During this absence, Fabrizio goes to revisit his native scenes, the Lake of Como and the paternal castle, despite the dangers of his position with regard to Austria, at that time very strict. We are in 1821, a time when a passport was not to be treated lightly. The prelate recognised as Fabrizio del Dongo may be sent to the Spielberg. In this part of the book the author completes the portrait of a fine head, that of a Priore Blanès, a simple village curate, who adores Fabrizio and cultivates the study of judicial astrology. This portrait is done so seriously, there shines from it so great a faith in the occult sciences, that the satire of which those sciences—to which we shall return and which do not rest, as has been supposed, upon false foundations—might naturally be the object dies away on the lips of the incredulous. I do not know what the author's opinion may be, but he justifies that of the Priore Blanès. Priore Blanès is a character who is true in Italy. The truth of him can be felt, just as one can tell whether one of Titian's heads is the portrait of a Venetian gentleman or a fancy.

The Prince orders the preparation of the case against Fabrizio, and in this task the genius of Rassi is revealed. The Fiscal General sends the witnesses for the defence out of the country, purchases evidence for the prosecution, and, as he impudently informs the Prince, produces out of this foolish affair—the death inflicted on a Giletti by a del Dongo, in self-defence, by a del Dongo who had received the first blow!—a sentence of detention for twenty years in the fortress. The Prince would have liked a death sentence, in order to exercise clemency and so humiliate the Sanseverina.

"But," says Rassi, "I have done better than that, I have broken his neck, his career is barred to him for ever. The Vatican can do nothing more for a murderer."

So the Prince holds the Sanseverina in his clutches at last! Ah! It is then that the Duchessa becomes superb, that the court of Parma is agitated, that the lights go up on the drama, which assumes gigantic proportions. One of the finest scenes in modern fiction is, certainly, that in which the Sanseverina comes to pay her farewell to the Sovereign and presents him with an ultimatum. The scene of Elizabeth, Amy and Leicester in Kenilworth is no greater, more dramatic nor more terrible. The tiger is braved in his den: the serpent is caught, in vain does he writhe his coils and beg for pity, the woman crushes him. Gina desires, dictates, obtains from the Prince a rescript annulling the proceedings. She does not seek a pardon, the Prince will state that the proceedings are unjust and shall have no consequences in the future, which is an absurd thing to expect of an absolute Sovereign. This absurdity she demands, she obtains it. Mosca is magnificent in this scene where the lovers are alternately saved, lost, in peril for a gesture, a word, a glance!

In every walk of life, artists have an invincible self-respect, a sense of their art, a professional conscience which is ineradicable from the man. One does not corrupt, one never succeeds in buying this conscience. The actor who wishes most harm to his theatre or to an author will never play a part badly. The chemist, called in to look for arsenic in a body, will find it if there is any there. The writer, the painter, are always faithful to their genius, even at the foot of the scaffold. This does not exist in woman. The universe is the stepping-stone of her passion. And so woman is greater and finer than man in this respect. Woman is passion; man is action. If this were not so, man would not adore woman. And so it is in the social circle of the court, which gives the greatest flight to her passion, that woman sheds her most brilliant radiance. Her finest stage is the world of Absolute Power. That is why there are no longer any women in France. Now Conte Mosca suppresses, from a trace of ministerial self-respect, in the Prince's rescript, the words on which the Duchessa depends. The Prince imagines that his Minister considers him before the Sanseverina, and casts a glance at him which the reader intercepts. Mosca, like a true statesman, will not countersign a stupid thing, that is all: the Prince is mistaken. In the intoxication of her triumph, rejoicing that she has saved Fabrizio, the Duchessa, who trusts in Mosca, does not peruse the rescript. She was thought to be ruined, she had made all preparations for her departure in the face of Parma, she returns from the court having effected a revolution. Mosca was thought to be in disgrace. Fabrizio's sentence was taken as an insult by the Prince to the Duchessa and Minister. Not at all, the Raversi is banished. The Prince laughs, he is holding his vengeance in reserve: this woman who has humiliated him, he is going to make die of grief.

The Marchesa Raversi, instead of composing Ovidian Tristia, like everyone who is banished from a court where he or she handled the reins of power, sets to work. She guesses what has happened in the Prince's cabinet, she extracts his secrets from Rassi, who allows her to do so; he is aware of the Prince's intentions. The Marchesa has some letters written by the Duchessa, she sends her lover to the galleys at Genoa to get a letter forged from the Duchessa to Fabrizio, telling him of her triumph, and appointing a meeting at her country house. Sacca, close to the Po, a delicious spot where the Duchessa always spends the summer. Poor Fabrizio hastens there, he is caught, they put handcuffs on him, he is shut up in the citadel, and while they are shutting him up, he recognises the daughter of the governor, Fabio Conti, the lovely and sublime Clelia, for whom he is to feel that eternal love that gives no respite.

Fabrizio del Dongo, her nephew, he whom she adores, in the most honourable fashion, in the citadel! . . . Imagine the Duchessa's feelings! She learns of Mosca's mistake. She will not see Mosca again. There is only Fabrizio now in the world! Once inside that terrible fortress, he may die there, die there by poison!

This is the Prince's system: a fortnight of terror, a fortnight of hope. And he will handle this fiery steed, this proud soul, this Sanseverina whose triumphs and happiness, though necessary to the brilliance of his court, were insulting to his inner man. Played on in this way, the Sanseverina will become thin, old and ugly: he will knead her like dough.

This terrible duel in which the Duchessa has inflicted the first wound, piercing her adversary to the heart but without killing him, in which she will receive for the next year a fresh wound daily, is the most powerful thing that the genius of the modern novel has invented.

Let us turn now to Fabrizio in prison, and so come to my analysis of that chapter, which is one of the diamonds on this crown.

The episode of the robbers in Lewis's Monk, his Anaconda, which is his best book, the interest of the last volumes by Mrs. Radcliffe, the thrilling vicissitudes in the Red Indian romances of Cooper, all the extraordinary things I know in the narratives of travels and prisoners, none of these can compare with the confinement of Fabrizio in the fortress of Parma, three hundred and something feet above the ground. This terrifying abode is a Vaucluse: he makes love there to Clelia, he is happy there, he displays the ingenuity of prisoners, and he prefers his prison to the most enchanting spot that the world has to offer. The Bay of Naples is beautiful only through the eyes of Lamartine's Elvire; but, in the eyes of a Clelia, in the trills of her voice, there are whole universes. The author depicts, as he knows how to depict, by little incidents which have the eloquence of Shakespearean action, the progress of the love between these two fair creatures, amid the dangers of an imminent death by poison. This part of the book will be read with halting breath, straining throat, avid eyes by all those readers who have imagination, or simply hearts. Everything in it is perfect, rapid, real, without any improbability or strain. There you find passion in all its glory, its rendings, its hopes, its melancholies, its returns, its abatements, its inspirations, the only ones that equal those of genius. Nothing has been forgotten. You will read there an encyclopædia of all the resources of the prisoner; his marvellous languages for which he makes use of nature, the means by which he gives life to a song and meaning to a sound. Read in prison, this book is capable of killing a prisoner, or of making him tunnel through his walls.

While Fabrizio is inspiring love and feeling it, during the most engrossing scenes of the drama inside the prison, there is, you must understand, a fight to the death going on outside the fortress. The Prince, the governor, Rassi, attempt to poison him. Fabrizio's death is determined upon at a moment when the Prince's vanity is mortally wounded. The charming Clelia, the most delicious figure you could see in a dream, then reveals the extent of her love by helping Fabrizio to escape, although his rescuers have nearly killed her father, the General.

At this crisis in the book, we understand all the incidents that have gone before. Without those adventures in which we have seen the people, in which we have watched them acting, nothing would be intelligible, everything would seem false and impossible.

Let us return to the Duchessa. The courtiers, the Raversi party triumph in the griefs of this noble woman. Her calm is killing the Prince, and no one can explain it to him. Mosca himself does not understand it. Here, we see that Mosca, great as he is, is inferior to this woman who, at this moment, seems to you to be the genius of Italy. Profound is her dissimulation, bold are her plans. As for her revenge, it will be complete. The Prince has been too greatly offended, she sees him implacable: between them, the duel is to the death; but the Duchessa's vengeance would be impotent, imperfect, if she allowed Ranuccio-Ernesto IV to take Fabrizio from her by poison. Fabrizio must be set at liberty. This attempt seems literally impossible to every reader, so carefully has tyranny taken its precautions, so deeply has it involved the governor, Fabio Conti, whose honour is at stake if he does not guard his prisoners.

There is in this man something of Hudson Lowe, but of a Hudson Lowe magnified to the tenth degree; he is Italian, and wishes to avenge the Raversi for the disgrace that the Duchessa has brought on her. Gina fears nothing. This is why:

"The lover thinks more often of penetrating to his mistress's chamber than the husband of guarding his wife; the prisoner thinks more often of escaping than the gaoler of shutting his door; therefore, in spite of the obstacles in their way, the lover and the prisoner must succeed in the end."

She will help him! Oh, what a fine painting of this Italian in despair, who cannot flee from this abhorrent court! "Come," she says to herself, "forward, unhappy woman" (we weep as we read this great feminine utterance), "do your duty, pretend to forget Fabrizio!" "Forget him!" the word saves her: she has not been able to shed a tear until this word. Then the Duchessa conspires, she conspires with the Prime Minister, whom she has ostensibly banished in disgrace, but who would set Parma on fire and deluge it with blood for her, who would kill everyone, the Prince even. This true lover realises that he is in the wrong, he is the most wretched of men. Alas! What a feeble excuse! He did not believe his master to be so false, so cowardly, so cruel. And so he admits that his mistress is entitled to be implacable. He finds it natural that Fabrizio should be, at this moment, everything in the world to her, he has that weakness of great men for their mistresses which leads them to understand even the infidelity which may mean their death. The enamoured veteran is sublime! He says but one word to himself, in the scene when Gina has made him come to her for their rupture. A single night has ravaged the Duchessa.

"Great God!" exclaims Mosca to himself, "she looks all her forty years to-day!"

What a book is this in which one finds these cries of passion, these profound diplomatic sayings, and on every page. Note this as well: you will not meet in this book those extra flourishes, so aptly named tartines. No, the characters act, reflect, feel, and always the drama sweeps on. Never does the poet, a dramatist in his ideas, stoop in his path to pick the smallest flower, everything has the rapidity of a dithyramb.

Let us proceed! The Duchessa is ravishing in her admissions to Mosca, and sublime in her despair. Finding her so changed, he supposes her to be ill, and wishes to send for Razori, the leading doctor in Parma and in Italy.

"Is that the counsel of a traitor or of a friend?" she asks. "You wish to convey to a stranger the measure of my despair!"

"I am lost," thinks the Conte, "she no longer includes me even among the common men of honour."

"Bear in mind," the Duchessa tells him with the most imperious air, "that I am not distressed by the capture of Fabrizio, that I have not the least shadow of a desire to go away, that I am full of respect for the Prince. As for yourself: I intend to have the entire control of my own behaviour, I wish to part from you as an old and good friend. Consider that I have reached sixty, the young woman is dead. With Fabrizio in prison, I am incapable of love. Finally, I should be the unhappiest woman in the world were I to compromise your future. If you see me making a show of having a young lover, do not let yourself be distressed by that. I can swear to you, by Fabrizio's future happiness, that I have never been guilty of the slightest infidelity towards you, and that in five whole years . . . that is a long time!" she says, trying to smile. "I swear to you that I have never either planned or wished such a thing. Now you understand that, leave me."

The Conte goes, he spends two days and two nights in thought.

"Great heavens!" he at length exclaims, "the Duchessa never said a word to me about an escape; can she have been wanting in sincerity for once in her life, and is the motive of her quarrel only a desire that I should betray the Prince? No sooner said than done."

Did I not tell you that this book was a masterpiece, and can you not see it for yourself, merely from this rough analysis?

The Minister, after this discovery, treads the ground as if he were a boy of fifteen, takes a new lease of life. He is going to seduce Rassi from the Prince, and make him his own creature.

"Rassi," he says to himself, "is paid by his master to carry out the sentences that disgrace us throughout Europe, but he will not refuse to let himself be paid by me to betray his master's secrets. He has a mistress and a confessor. The mistress is of so low an order that the market woman would know the whole story by to-morrow morning."

He goes to say his prayers at the cathedral and to find the Archbishop.

"What sort of man is Dugnani, the Vicar of San Paolo?" he asks him.

"A small mind with great ambition, few scruples and extreme poverty; for we too have our vices!" says the Archbishop, raising his eyes to heaven.

The Minister cannot help laughing at the analytical depth reached by true piety combined with honesty. He sends for the priest and says to him only:

"You direct the conscience of my friend the Fiscal General; are you sure he has nothing to tell me?"

The Conte is prepared to stake everything: there is only one thing that he wishes to know, the moment at which Fabrizio will be in danger of death, and he does not propose to interfere with the Duchessa's plans. His interview with Rassi is a capital scene. This is how the Conte begins, adopting the tone of the most lofty impertinence:

"What, sir, you carry off from Bologna a conspirator who is under my protection; more than that, you propose to cut off his head, and you say nothing to me about it. Do you know the name of my successor? Is it General Conti or yourself?"

The Minister and Fiscal agree upon a plan which allows them to retain their respective positions. I must leave to you the pleasure of reading the admirable details of this continuous web in which the author drives a hundred characters abreast without being more embarrassed than a skilful coachman is by the reins of a ten-horse coach. Everything is in its place, there is not the slightest confusion. You see everything, the town and the court. The drama is amazing in its skill, its execution, its clearness. The air plays over the picture, not a character is superfluous. Lodovico, who on many occasions has proved that he is an honest Figaro, is the Duchessa's right arm. He plays a fine part, he will be well rewarded.

The time has now come to speak to you of one of the subordinate characters who is shown in colossal proportions, and to whom frequent reference is made in the book, namely Ferrante Palla, a Liberal doctor under sentence of death who is wandering through Italy, where he performs his task of propaganda.

Ferrante Palla is a great poet, like Silvio Pellico, but he is what Pellico is not, a Radical Republican. Let us not concern ourselves with the faith of this man. He has faith, he is the Saint Paul of the Republic, a martyr of Young Italy, he is a sublime work of art like the Saint Bartholomew at Milan, like Foyatier's Spartacus, like Marius pondering over the ruins of Carthage. Everything that he does, everything that he says is sublime. He has the conviction, the grandeur, the passion of the believer. However high you may place, in execution, in conception, in reality, the Prince, the Minister, the Duchessa, Ferrante Palla, this superb statue, set in a corner of the picture, commands your gaze, compels your admiration. In spite of your opinions, constitutional, monarchical or religious, he subjugates you. Greater than his own misfortunes, preaching Italy from the hollow shelter of his caves, without bread for his mistress and their five children; committing highway robbery to maintain them, and keeping a note of the sums stolen and the persons robbed so as to restore to them this forced loan to the Republic when he shall have the power to do so; stealing moreover in order to print his pamphlets entitled: The necessity for a budget in Italy! Ferrante Palla is the type of a family of minds to be found in Italy, sincere but misguided, full of talent but ignorant of the fatal results of their doctrine. Send them with plenty of gold to France and to the United States, as Ministers of Absolute Princes! Instead of persecuting them, let them acquire enlightenment, these true men, full of great and exquisite qualities. They will say like Alfieri in 1793: "Little men, at work, reconcile me to the great."

I praise with all the more enthusiasm this creation of Ferrante Palla, having caressed the same figure myself. If I have the trifling advantage over M. Beyle of priority, I am inferior to him in execution. I have perceived this inward drama, so great, so powerful, of the stern and conscientious Republican in love with a Duchess who holds to Absolute Power. My Michel Chrestien, in love with the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, could not stand out with the relief of Ferrante Palla, a lover after the style of Petrarch of the Duchessa Sanseverina. Italy and its customs, Italy and its scenery, the perils, the starvation of Ferrante Palla are far more attractive than the meagre details of Parisian civilisation. Although Michel Chrestien dies at Saint-Merry and Ferrante Palla escapes to the United States after his crimes, Italian passion is far superior to French passion, and the events of this episode add to their Apennine savour an interest with which it is useless to compete. In a period when everything is levelled more easily under the uniform of the National Guard and the Bourgeois law than under the steel triangle of the Republic, literature is essentially lacking, in France, in those great obstacles between lovers which used to be the source of fresh beauties, of new situations, and which made subjects dramatic. And so it was difficult for the serious paradox of the passion of a Radical for a great lady to escape trained pens.

In no book, unless it be Old Mortality, is there to be found a figure of an energy comparable to that which M. Beyle has given to Ferrante Palla, whose name exercises a sort of compulsion over the imagination. Between Balfour of Burley and Ferrante Palla, I have no hesitation, I choose Ferrante Palla; the design is the same; but Walter Scott, great colourist as he may be, has not the thrilling, warm colour, as of Titian, which M. Beyle has spread over his character. Ferrante Palla is a whole poem in himself, a poem superior to Lord Byron's Corsair. "Ah! That is how people love!" is what all M. Beyle's feminine readers will say to themselves on reading this sublime and most reprehensible episode.

Ferrante Palla has the most impenetrable of retreats in the neighbourhood of Sacca. He has often seen the Duchessa, he has fallen passionately in love with her. The Duchessa has met him, has been moved. Ferrante Palla has told her everything, as though in the presence of God. He knows that the Duchessa loves Mosca, his own love therefore is hopeless. There is something touching in the Italian grace with which the Duchessa lets him give himself the pleasure of kissing the white hands of a woman with blue blood. He has not clasped a white hand for seven years, and this poet adores beautiful white hands. His mistress, whom he no longer loves, does the heavy work, makes clothes for the children, and he cannot desert a woman who will not leave him, notwithstanding the most appalling poverty. These obligations of an honest man become apparent. The Duchessa has compassion for everything, like a true Madonna. She has offered him his pardon! Ah, but Ferrante Palla has, like Carl Sand, his own little sentences to enforce; he has his preaching, his journeyings to rekindle the zeal of Young Italy.

"All those scoundrels, who do so much harm to the people, would live for long years," he says, "and whose fault would that be? What would my father say when I meet him in heaven!"

She then proposes to provide for the needs of the woman and her children, and give him an undiscoverable hiding-place in the palazzo Sanseverina.

The palazzo Sanseverina includes an immense reservoir, built in the middle ages with a view to prolonged sieges, and capable of supplying the town with water for a year. Part of the palazzo is built over this immense structure. The dapple-grey Duca spent the night after their marriage in telling his wife the secret of the reservoir and of its hiding-place. An enormous stone which moves on a pivot will let all the water escape and flood the streets of Parma. In one of the thick walls of the reservoir there is a chamber without light and without much air, which no one would ever suspect; you would have to pull down the reservoir to find it.

Ferrante Palla accepts the hiding-place for evil days, and refuses the Duchessa's money; he has made a vow never to have more than a hundred francs on him. At the moment when she offers him her sequins, he has money; but he lets himself go so far as to accept one sequin.

"I take this sequin, because I love you," he says; "but I am on the wrong side of my hundred by five francs, and, if they were to hang me this minute, I should feel remorse."

"He does really love," the Duchessa says to herself.

Is not that the simplicity of Italy, taken from life? Molière, writing a novel to describe this people, the only one except the Arabs that has preserved its reverence for vows, could do nothing finer.

Ferrante Palla becomes the Duchessa's other arm in her conspiracy, and is a terrible weapon, his energy makes one shudder! Here is the scene that occurs one evening in the palazzo Sanseverina. The lion of the people has emerged from his retreat. He enters for the first time rooms ablaze with regal splendour. He finds there his mistress, his idol, the idol whom he has set above Young Italy, above the Republic and the welfare of humanity; he sees her distressed, tears in her eyes! The Prince has snatched from her him whom she loves best in the world, he has basely deceived her, and this tyrant holds the sword of Damocles over the beloved head.

"What is happening here," says this sublime Republican Don Quixote, "is an injustice of which the Tribune of the People ought to take note. On the other hand, as a private citizen, I can give the Signora Duchessa Sanseverina nothing but my life, and I lay it at her feet. The creature you see at your feet is not a puppet of the court, he is a man.—She has wept in my presence," he says to himself, "she is less unhappy."

"Think of the risk you are running," says the Duchessa.

"The Tribune will answer you: 'What is life when the voice of duty speaks?' The man will say to you: 'Here is a body of iron and a heart that fears nothing in the world but your displeasure.'"

"If you speak to me of your feelings," says the Duchessa, "I shall not see you again."

Ferrante Palla departs sadly.

Am I mistaken? Are they not as fine as Corneille, these dialogues? And, remember, such passages abound, they are all, after their kind, at the same high level. Struck by the beauty of this character, the Duchessa prepares a written document providing for the future of Ferrante's mistress and his five children, without saying anything to him, for she is afraid that he may let himself be killed on learning that his dependents have had this provision made for them.

Finally, on the day when the whole of Parma is discussing the probable death of Fabrizio, the Tribune braves every danger. He enters the palazzo at night, he arrives disguised as a Capuchin in the Duchessa's presence; he finds her drowned in tears and voiceless: she greets him with her hand and points to a chair. Palla prostrates himself, prays to God, so divine does her beauty seem to him, and breaks off his prayer to say:

"Once again he offers his life."

"Think of what you are saying!" cries the Duchessa with that haggard eye which shews more clearly than sobs that anger is mastering affection.

"He offers his life to place all obstacle in the way of Fabrizio's fate or to avenge it."

"If I were to accept!" she says, gazing at him.

She sees the joy of martyrdom flash in Palla's eye. She rises, goes to look for the deed of gift prepared a month back, for Ferrante's mistress and children.

"Read this!"

He reads it and falls on his knees, he sobs, he almost dies of joy.

"Give me back the paper," says the Duchessa.

She burns it over a candle.

"My name," she tells him, "must not appear. If you are taken and executed, if you are weak, I may be also, and Fabrizio would be in danger. I wish you to sacrifice yourself."

"I will perform the task faithfully, punctually and prudently."

"If I am discovered and convicted," the Duchessa goes on proudly, "I do not wish to be accused of having corrupted you. Do not put him to death until I give the signal. That signal will be the flooding of the streets of Parma, of which you are bound to hear."

Ferrante, delighted by the Duchessa's tone of authority, takes his leave. When he has gone, the Duchessa calls him back.

"Ferrante, sublime man!"

He returns.

"And your children?"

"Bah! You will provide for them."

"Look, here are my diamonds."

And she gives him a little olive-wood box.

"They are worth fifty thousand francs."

"Oh! Signora!" says Ferrante with a start of horror, "I may perhaps not see you again. Take them, it is my wish."

Ferrante leaves her. The door closes behind him, the Duchessa again calls him back. He sees her standing there, he comes back uneasily. The great Sanseverina throws herself into his arms. Ferrante is on the point of fainting. She allows him to kiss her, frees herself from his embrace when he threatens to become disrespectful, and shews him the door.

She remains standing for some time and says to herself.

"That is the one man who has understood me; Fabrizio would be like that if he could only know me."

I cannot lay too much stress on the merit of this scene. M. Beyle is not in the least a preacher. He does not urge you on to regicide, he gives you a fact, states it as it occurred. No one, not even a Republican, feels the desire to kill a tyrant on reading it. It is the play of private passions, that is all. It is a question of a duel which requires extraordinary, but equally matched arms. The Duchessa makes use of Palla to poison the Prince as the Prince makes use of one of Fabrizio's enemies to poison Fabrizio. One can avenge oneself on a king, Coriolanus avenged himself well on his country, Beaumarchais and Mirabeau avenged themselves well on their period which despised them. This is not moral, but the author has told you of it, and washes his hands of it as Tacitus washes his of the crimes of Tiberius. "I am inclined to believe," he says, "that the immoral delight in taking revenge which one finds in Italy springs from the strength of imagination of that race; other races do not forgive, they forget." Thus the moralist explains this energetic people among whom we find so many inventors, who have the richest, the finest imagination, with its accompanying drawbacks. This reflexion is more profound than it appears at a first reading, it explains the rhetorical stupidities which weigh down the Italians, the only race that is comparable to the French, a race superior to the Russians or the English, whose genius has the feminine fibre, that delicacy, that majesty which make it in many respects superior to all other races. From this point the Duchessa regains her advantage over the Prince. Hitherto, she was weak and tricked in this great duel; Mosca, prompted by his courtier's spirit, had been acting as second to the Prince. Now that her revenge is assured, Gina feels her strength. Each step that her thoughts take gives her happiness, she can play her part. The Tribune's courage heightens hers. Lodovico is electrified by her. These three conspirators, on whom Mosca shuts his eyes, while leaving his police free to act against them if they notice anything, arrive at the most extraordinary result.

The Minister has been the dupe of his mistress, he fully believed himself to be in disgrace, as he deserved. If he had not been thoroughly taken in, he could never have played the part of a forlorn lover, for happiness admits of no concealment. That fire of the heart has its smoke. But, after the fascination of Ferrante by the Duchessa, her joy enlightens the Minister, he at last guesses her purpose, without knowing how far she has gone.

Fabrizio's escape borders on the miraculous. It has required so much physical strength and such an exercise of intelligence, that the dear boy is on the point of death: the scent of his aunt's clothing and handkerchief revives him. This slight detail, which is not forgotten among a thousand other incidents, will delight those who are in love: it is placed, as might be placed in a finale a melody which recalls the sweetest elements of the life of love. All precautions have been carefully taken, there is no indiscretion: Conte Mosca, who is present in person at the expedition with more than two dozen spies, does not receive a single report of it as Minister.

"Now I'm committing high treason," he says to himself, blind with joy.

Everyone has understood his orders without a word said, and escapes in his own way. The business finished, each head has to think of and for itself. Lodovico is the courier, he crosses the Po. Ah! When Fabrizio is out of the reach of his crowned assassin, the Duchessa, who until then had been crouching like a jaguar, coiled like a serpent hidden in the undergrowth, flat as one of Cooper's Indians in the mud, supple as a slave and feline as a deceitful woman, rises to her full height: the panther shews her claws, the serpent is going to sting, the Indian to utter his yell of triumph, she leaps for joy, she is mad. Lodovico, who knows nothing of Ferrante Palla, who says of him in the common phrase: "He is a poor man persecuted because of Napoleon!" Lodovico is afraid that his mistress is going out of her mind. She gives him the small property of Ricciarda. He trembles on receiving this regal gift. What has he done to deserve it? "Conspire, and for Monsignore, why that is a pleasure."

It is then, the author tells us, that the Duchessa allows herself to commit an act not only horrible in the eyes of morality, but fatal to the tranquillity of her life. We suppose, of course, that in this hour of bliss, she will forgive the Prince. No.

"If you wish to acquire the property, you must do two things," she tells Lodovico, "and without exposing yourself. You must go back at once across the Po, illuminate my house at Sacca in such a way as to make people think it is on fire. I have prepared everything for this festivity, in case we succeeded. There are lamps and oil in the cellars. Here is a line to my agent. Let the whole population of Sacca drink themselves drunk, empty all my barrels and all my bottles. By the Madonna! If I find one full bottle, one barrel with two fingers of wine left in it, you lose Ricciarda! When that is done, return to Parma and let the water out of the reservoir. Wine for my dear people at Sacca, water for the town of Parma!"

This makes one shudder. It is the Italian spirit, which M. Hugo has perfectly reproduced when he makes Lucrezia Borgia say: "You have given me a ball at Venice, I offer you in return a supper at Ferrara." The two speeches are equivalent. Lodovico sees in this nothing more than a magnificent insolence and an exquisite joke. He repeats: "Wine for the people of Sacca, water for the people of Parma!" Lodovico returns after having carried out the Duchessa's orders, establishes her at Belgirate, and takes Fabrizio, who has still the Austrian police to fear, to Locarno, in Switzerland.

Fabrizio's escape, the illumination of Sacca throw the State of Parma into utter confusion. Little attention is paid to the flooding of the town. A similar event occurred at the time of the French invasion. A horrible punishment awaits the Duchessa. She sees Fabrizio dying of love for Clelia, resentful of being First Grand Vicar to the Archbishop and so unable to marry his beloved.

In the arms of his aunt and on Lake Maggiore, he dreams of his dear prison. What then are the sufferings of this woman who has ordered a crime, who has so to speak brought down the moon from the sky by taking this beloved boy out of prison, and who sees him so artless and simple, thinking of other things, refusing to perceive anything, and not allowing himself to succumb to what he had so wisely fled from in the company of his Gina, his mother, his sister, his aunt, his friend who longed to be something more than a friend to him, all this torture is unspeakable; but, in the book, it is felt, it is seen. We are pained by Fabrizio's desertion of the Sanseverina, although we are conscious that the gratification of her love would be criminal. Fabrizio is not even grateful. The ex-prisoner, like a Minister in retirement who dreams of coalitions which will restore him to power, thinks only of his prison; he sends for pictures of Parma, that city abhorrent to his aunt; he puts one of the fortress in his bedroom. Finally, he writes a letter of apology to General Conti for having escaped, so as to be able to say to Clelia that he finds no happiness in liberty without her, and you can imagine what effect this letter (it is taken as a masterpiece of ecclesiastical irony) produces on the General: he swears that he will be avenged. The Duchessa, terrified and brought back to a sense of self-preservation by the futility of her revenge, takes a boatman from each of the villages on Lake Maggiore; she makes them row her out to the middle of the lake; then she tells them that a search may be made for Fabrizio, who served under Napoleon at Waterloo, and bids them keep a sharp watch; she makes herself loved, and obeyed; she pays well, and so has a spy in every village; she gives each of them permission to enter her room at any hour, even at night when she is asleep. One evening, at Locarno, during a party, she hears of the death of the Prince of Parma. She looks at Fabrizio.

"I have done this for him; I would have done things a thousand times worse," she says to herself, "and look at him there, silent, indifferent, dreaming about another!"

At this thought she faints. This fainting-fit may be her ruin. The company gathers round her, Fabrizio thinks of Clelia: she sees him, she shudders, she finds herself surrounded by all these curious people, an archpriest, the local authorities, and so forth. She recovers the calm of a great lady, and says:

"He was a great Prince, who was vilely slandered; it is an immense loss for us.—Ah!" she says to herself, when she is alone, "it is now that I have to pay for the transports of happiness and childish joy that I felt in my palazzo at Parma when I welcomed Fabrizio there on his return from Naples. If I had said a word, all would have been over, I should have left Mosca. Once he was with me, Clelia would never have meant anything to Fabrizio. Clelia wins, she is twenty. I am almost twice her age. I must die! A woman of forty is no longer anything save for the men who have loved her in her youth!"

It is for this reflexion, profound in its shrewdness, suggested by grief and almost entirely true, that I quote this passage. The Duchessa's soliloquy is interrupted by a noise outside, at midnight.

"Good," she says, "they are coming to arrest me; so much the better, it will occupy my mind, fighting them for my head."

It is nothing of the sort. Conte Mosca has sent her their most faithful courier to inform her, before the rest of Europe, of recent events at Parma, and of the details of the death of Ranuccio-Ernesto IV: there has been a revolution, the Tribune Ferrante Palla has been on the verge of triumph, he has spent the fifty thousand francs, the price of the diamonds, on the cause of his dear Republic instead of giving them to his children; the rising has been suppressed by Mosca, who served under Napoleon in Spain, and who has displayed the courage of a soldier and the coolness of a statesman; he has saved Rassi, which he will bitterly repent; finally, he gives details of the accession to the throne of Ranuccio-Ernesto V, a young prince who is enamoured of Signora Sanseverina. The Duchessa is free to return. The Princess Dowager, who adores her for reasons which the reader knows and has gathered from the intrigues of the court at the time when the Duchessa reigned there, writes her a charming letter, creates her Duchessa in her own right, and Grand Mistress. It would not, however, be prudent for Fabrizio to return at present, the sentence must be quashed by a retrial of the case.

The Duchessa conceals Fabrizio at Sacca, and returns to Parma triumphant. Thus the subject revives of its own accord without effort, without monotony. There is not the slightest resemblance between the early favour enjoyed by the innocent Sanseverina, under Ranuccio-Ernesto IV, and the favour enjoyed by the Duchessa who has had him poisoned, under Ranuccio-Ernesto V. The young twenty-year-old Prince is madly in love with her, the peril incurred by the criminal is balanced by the boundless power enjoyed by the Dowager's Grand Mistress. This Louis XIII on a small scale finds his Richelieu in Mosca. The great Minister, during the riots, carried away by a lingering trace of zeal, of enthusiasm, has called him a boy. The word has remained in the Prince's heart, it has hurt him. Mosca is useful to him; but the Prince, who is only twenty years old in politics, is fifty in self-esteem. Rassi is working in secret, he searches among the people and through all Italy, and learns that Ferrante Palla, who is as poor as Job, has sold nine or ten diamonds at Genoa. During the underground burrowings of the Fiscal General joy reigns at court. The Prince, a shy young man like all shy young men, attacks the woman of forty, grows frenzied in his pursuit of her; it is true that Gina, more beautiful than ever, does not look more than thirty, she is happy, she is making Mosca thoroughly happy, Fabrizio is saved, he is to be tried again, acquitted, and will be, when his sentence is quashed. Coadjutor to the Archbishop, who is seventy-eight years old, with the right of eventual succession.

Clelia alone causes the Duchessa any misgivings. As for the Prince, she is amused by him. They act plays at court (those commedie dell' arte in which each character invents the dialogue as he goes on, the outline of the plot being posted up in the wings—a sort of glorified charade). The Prince takes the lovers' parts, and Gina is always the leading lady. Literally, the Grand Mistress is dancing upon a volcano. This part of the work is charming. In the very middle of one of these plays, this is what happens. Rassi has said to the Prince: "Does Your Highness choose to pay a hundred thousand francs to find out the exact manner of His august father's death?" He has had the hundred thousand francs, because the Prince is a boy. Rassi has tried to corrupt the Duchessa's head maid, this maid has told Mosca everything. Mosca has told her to let herself be corrupted. Rassi requires one thing only, to have the Duchessa's diamonds examined by two jewellers. Mosca posts counter-spies and learns that one of these inquisitive jewellers is Rassi's brother. Mosca appears, between the acts of the play, to warn the Duchessa, whom he finds in the highest spirits.

"I have very little time," she says to Mosca, "but let us go into the guard-room."

There she says with a laugh to her friend the Minister:

"You always scold me when I tell you unnecessary secrets; very well, it was I who called Ernesto V to the throne; it was a case of avenging Fabrizio, whom I loved far more than I love him to-day, though always quite innocently. You will scarcely believe in my innocence, but that does not matter, since you love me in spite of my crimes! Very well, there is one crime in my life: Ferrante Palla had my diamonds. I did worse, I let myself be kissed by him so that he should poison the man who wished to poison our Fabrizio. Where is the harm?"

"And you tell me this in the guard-room?" says the Conte, slightly taken aback!

This last expression is charming.

"It is because I am in a hurry," she says, "Rassi is on the track: but I have never spoken of insurrection, I abhor Jacobins. Think it over, and give me your advice after the play."

"I will give it you now," replies Mosca without hesitation. "You will buttonhole the Prince behind the scenes, make him lose his head, but without doing anything dishonourable, you understand."

The Duchessa is called to go on the stage, and returns behind the scenes.

Ferrante Palla's farewell to his idol is one of the finest things in this book, where there are so many fine things; but we come now to the capital scene, to the scene which crowns the work, to the burning of the papers in the case drawn up by Rassi, which the Grand Mistress obtains from Ranuccio-Ernesto V and the Princess Dowager, a terrible scene, in which she is now lost, now saved, at the whim of the mother and son who feel themselves overpowered by the force of character of this sort of Princesse des Ursins. This scene occupies only eight pages, but it is without parallel in the art of literature. There is nothing analogous to which it can be compared, it is unique. I say nothing of it, it is sufficient to draw attention to it. The Duchessa triumphs, she destroys the proofs and even carries away one of the documents for Mosca, who takes note of the names of some of the witnesses and cries: "It was high time, they were getting warm!" Rassi is in despair: the Prince has given orders for a retrial of Fabrizio's case. Fabrizio, instead of making himself a prisoner, as Mosca wishes, in the town prison, which is under the Prime Minister's orders, returns at once to his beloved citadel, where the General, who thought that his honour had been tarnished by the escape, rigorously confines him with the intention of getting rid of him. Mosca would have answered for him, with his life, in the town prison; but in the citadel Fabrizio is helpless.

This news comes as a bolt from the blue to the Duchessa: she remains speechless and unhearing. Fabrizio's love for Clelia bringing him back to the place where death lies in wait for him and where the girl will give him a moment's happiness for which he must pay with his life—the thought of this crushes her, and Fabrizio's imminent danger is the last straw.

This danger exists already, it is not created to fit the scene, it is the result of the passions aroused by Fabrizio during his former imprisonment, by his escape, by the fury of Rassi who has been forced to sign the order for a fresh trial. And so, even in the most minute details, the author loyally obeys the laws of the poetry of the novel. This exact observation of the rules, whether it come from the calculation, meditation, and natural deduction of a well chosen, well developed and fruitful subject, or from the instinct peculiar to talent, produces this powerful and permanent interest which we find in great, in fine works of art.

Mosca, in despair, makes the Duchessa understand the impossibility of getting a young Prince to believe that a prisoner can be poisoned in his State, and offers to get rid of Rassi.

"But," he tells her, "you know how squeamish I am about that sort of thing. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I still think of those two spies whom I had shot in Spain."

"Rassi owes his life, then," replies the Duchessa, "to the fact that I care more for you than for Fabrizio; I do not wish to poison the evenings of the old age which we shall have to spend together."

The Duchessa hastens to the fortress, and is there convinced of Fabrizio's peril; she goes to the Prince. The Prince is a boy who, as the Minister has foreseen, does not understand the danger that can threaten an innocent person in his State Prison. He declines to dishonour himself, to pass judgment on his own justice. Finally, in view of the imminence of the peril (the poison has been given), the Duchessa wrests from him the order to set Fabrizio at liberty in exchange for a promise to yield to this young Prince's desires. This scene has an originality of its own after that of the burning of the papers. At that time, Gina's only thought was for herself, now it is for Fabrizio. Fabrizio once acquitted and appointed Coadjutor to the Archbishop with the right of eventual succession, which is tantamount to being made Archbishop, the Duchessa finds a way to elude the consequences of her promise by one of those dilemmas which women who are not in love can always find with a maddening coolness. She is to the end the woman of great character whose career started as you have read. There follows a change in the Ministry. Mosca leaves Parma with his wife, for the Duchessa and he, both widowed, have now married. But nothing goes well, and at the end of a year the Prince recalls Conte and Contessa Mosca. Fabrizio is Archbishop and in high favour.

There follows the love of Clelia and Archbishop Fabrizio, which ends in the death of Clelia, in that of a beloved child, and in the resignation and withdrawal of the Archbishop, who dies, doubtless after a long expiation, in the Charterhouse of Parma.

I explain this ending to you in a few words, since, in spite of beautiful details, it is sketched rather than finished. If the author had had to develop the romance of the end like that of the beginning, it would have been difficult to know where to stop. Is there not a whole drama in the love of a celibate priest? So there is a whole drama in the love of the Coadjutor and Clelia. Book upon book!

Had M. Beyle some woman in his mind when he drew his Sanseverina? I fancy so. For this statue, as for the Prince and the Prime Minister, there must necessarily have been some model. Is she at Milan? Is she at Rome, at Naples, at Florence? I cannot say. Although I am quite convinced that there do exist women like the Sanseverina, though in very small numbers, and that I know some myself, I believe also that the author has perhaps enlarged the model and has completely idealised her. In spite of this labour, which removes all similarity, one may find in the Princesse B—— certain traits of the Sanseverina. Is she not Milanese? Has she not passed through good and adverse fortune? Is she not shrewd and witty?

You know now the framework of this immense edifice, and I have taken you round it. My hasty analysis, bold, believe me, for it requires boldness to undertake to give you an idea of a novel constructed out of incidents as closely compressed as are those of La Chartreuse de Parme; my analysis, dry as it may be, has outlined the masses for you, and you can judge whether my praise is exaggerated. But it is difficult to enumerate to you in detail the fine and delicate sculptures that enrich this solid structure, to stop before the statuettes, the paintings, the landscapes, the bas-reliefs which decorate it. This is what happened to me. At the first reading, which took me quite by surprise, I found faults in the book. On my reading it again, the longueurs vanished, I saw the necessity for the detail which, at first, had seemed ta me too long or too diffuse. To give you a good account of it, I ran through the book once more. Captivated then by the execution, I spent more time than I had intended in the contemplation of this fine book, and everything struck me as most harmonious, connected naturally or by artifice but concordantly.

Here, however, are the errors which I pick out, not so much from the point of view of art as in view of the sacrifices which every author must learn to make to the majority.

If I found confusion on first reading the bode, my impression will be that of the public, and therefore evidently this book is lacking in method. M. Beyle has indeed disposed the events as they happened, or as they ought to have happened; but he has committed, in his arrangement of the facts, a mistake which many authors commit, by taking a subject true in nature which is not true in art. When he sees a landscape, a great painter takes care not to copy it slavishly, he has to give us not so much its letter as its spirit. So, in his simple, artless and unstudied manner of telling his story, M. Beyle has run the risk of appearing confused. Merit which requires to be studied is in danger of remaining unperceived. And so I could wish, in the interest of the book, that the author had begun with his magnificent sketch of the battle of Waterloo, that he had reduced everything which precedes it to some account given by Fabrizio or about Fabrizio while he is lying in the village in Flanders where he arrives wounded. Certainly, the work would gain in lightness. The del Dongo father and son, the details about Milan, all these things are not part of the book: the drama is at Parma, the principal characters are the Prince and his son. Mosca, Rassi, the Duchessa, Ferrante Palla, Lodovico, Clelia, her father, the Raversi, Giletti, Marietta. Skilled advisers or friends endowed with simple common sense might have procured the development of certain portions which the author has not supposed to be as interesting as they are, and would have called for the excision of several details, superfluous in spite of their fineness. For instance, the work would lose nothing if the Priore Blanès were to disappear entirely.

I will go farther, and will make no compromise, in favour of this fine work, over the true principles of art. The law which governs everything is that of unity in composition; whether you place this unity in the central idea or in the plan of the book, without it there can be only confusion. So, in spite of its title, the work is ended when Conte and Contessa Mosca return to Parma and Fabrizio is Archbishop. The great comedy of the court is finished. It is so well finished, and the author has so clearly felt this, that it is in this place that he sets his Moral, as our forerunners used to do at the end of their fables.

"One can conclude with this moral," he says: "the man who comes to a court risks his happiness, if he is happy; and in any case makes his future depend upon the intrigues of a chambermaid.

"On the other hand, in America, in the Republic, one has to waste one's whole time paying serious court to the shopkeepers in the street and becoming as stupid as themselves; and there, there is no Opera."

If, beneath the Roman purple and with a mitre on his head, Fabrizio loves Clelia, become Marchesa Crescenzi, and if you were telling us about it, you would then wish to make the life of this young man the subject of your book. But if you wished to describe the whole of Fabrizio's life, you ought, being a man of such sagacity, to call your book Fabrizio, or the Italian in the Nineteenth Century. In launching himself upon such a career, Fabrizio ought not to have found himself outshone by figures so typical, so poetical as are those of the two Princes, the Sanseverina, Mosca, Ferrante Palla. Fabrizio ought to have represented the young Italian of to-day. In making this young man the principal figure of the drama, the author was under an obligation to give him a large mind, to endow him with a feeling which would make him superior to the men of genius who surround him, and which he lacks. Feeling, in short, is equivalent to talent. To feel is the rival of to understand as to act is the opposite of to think. The friend of a man of genius can raise himself to his level by affection, by understanding. In matters of the heart, an inferior man may prevail over the greatest artist. There lies the justification of those women who fall in love with imbeciles. So, in a drama, one of the most ingenious resources of the artist is (in the case in which we suppose M. Beyle to be) to make a hero superior by his feeling when he cannot by genius compete with the people among whom he is placed. In this respect, Fabrizio's part requires recasting. The genius of Catholicism ought to urge him with its divine hand towards the Charterhouse of Parma, and that genius ought from time to time to overwhelm him with the tidings of heavenly grace. But then the Priore Blanès could not perform this part, for it is impossible to cultivate judicial astrology and to be a saint according to the Church. The book ought therefore to be either shorter or longer.

Possibly the slowness of the beginning, possibly that ending which begins a new book and in which the subject is abruptly strangled, will damage its success, possibly they have already damaged it. M. Beyle has moreover allowed himself certain repetitions, perceptible only to those who know his earlier books; but such readers themselves are necessarily connoisseurs, and so fastidious. M. Beyle, keeping in mind that great principle: "Unlucky in love, as in the arts, who says too much!" ought not to repeat himself, he, always concise and leaving much to be guessed. In spite of his sphinx-like habit, he is less enigmatic here than in his other works, and his true friends will congratulate him on this.

The portraits are brief. A few words are enough for M. Beyle, who paints his characters both by action and by dialogue; he does not weary one with descriptions, he hastens to the drama and arrives at it by a word, by a thought. His landscapes, traced with a somewhat dry touch which, however, is suited to the country, are lightly done. He takes his stand by a tree, on the spot where he happens to be; he shews you the lines of the Alps which on all sides enclose the scene of action, and the landscape is complete. The book is particularly valuable to travellers who have strolled by the Lake of Como, over the Brianza, who have passed under the outermost bastions of the Alps and crossed the plains of Lombardy. The spirit of those scenes is finely revealed, their beauty is well felt. One can see them.

The weak part of this book is the style, in so far as the arrangement of the words goes, for the thought, which is eminently French, sustains the sentences. The mistakes that M. Beyle makes are purely grammatical; he is careless, incorrect, after the manner of seventeenth-century writers. The quotations I have made shew what sort of faults he lets himself commit. In one place, a discord of tenses between verbs, sometimes the absence of a verb; here, again, sequences of c'est, of ce que, of que, which weary the reader, and have the effect on his mind of a journey in a badly hung carriage over a French road. These quite glaring faults indicate a scamping of work. But, if the French language is a varnish spread over thought, we ought to be as indulgent towards those in whom it covers fine paintings as we are severe to those who shew nothing but the varnish. If, in M. Beyle, this varnish is a little yellow in places and inclined to scale off in others, he does at least let us see a sequence of thoughts which are derived from one another according to the laws of logic. His long sentence is ill constructed, his short sentence lacks polish. He writes more or less in the style of Diderot, who was not a writer; but the conception is great and strong; the thought is original, and often well rendered. This system is not one to be imitated. It would be too dangerous to allow authors to imagine themselves to be profound thinkers.

M. Beyle is saved by the deep feeling that animates his thought. All those to whom Italy is dear, who have studied or understood her, will read La Chartreuse de Parme with delight. The spirit, the genius, the customs, the soul of that beautiful country live in this long drama that is always engaging, in this vast fresco so well painted, so strongly coloured, which moves the heart profoundly and satisfies the most difficult, the most exacting mind. The Sanseverina is the Italian woman, a figure as happily portrayed as Carlo Dolci's famous head of Poetry, Allori's Judith, or Guercino's Sibyl in the Manfredini gallery. In Mosca he paints the man of genius in politics at grips with love. It is indeed love without speech (the speeches are the weak point in Clarisse), active love, always true to its own type, love stronger than the call of duty, love, such as women dream of, such as gives an additional interest to the least things in life. Fabrizio is quite the young Italian of to-day at grips with the distinctly clumsy despotism which suppresses the imagination of that fine country; but, as I have said above, the dominant thought or the feeling which urges him to lay aside his dignities and to end his life in a Charterhouse needs development. This book is admirably expressive of love as it is felt in the South. Obviously, the North does not love in this way. All these characters have a heat, a fever of the blood, a vivacity of hand, a rapidity of mind which is not to be found in the English nor in the Germans nor in the Russians, who arrive at the same results only by processes of revery, by the reasonings of a smitten heart, by the slow rising of their sap. M. Beyle has in this respect given this book the profound meaning, the feeling which guarantees the survival of a literary conception. But unfortunately it is almost a secret doctrine, which requires laborious study. La Chartreuse de Parme is placed at such a height, it requires in the reader so perfect a knowledge of the court, the place, the people that I am by no means astonished at the absolute silence with which such a book has been greeted. That is the lot that awaits all books in which there is nothing vulgar. The secret ballot in which vote one by one and slowly the superior minds who make the name of such works, is not counted until long afterwards. Besides, M. Beyle is not a courtier, he has the most profound horror of the press. From largeness of character or from the sensitiveness of his self-esteem, as soon as his book appears, he takes flight, leaves Paris, travels two hundred and fifty leagues in order not to hear it spoken of. He demands no articles, he does not haunt the footsteps of the reviewers. He has behaved thus after the publication of each of his books. I admire this pride of character or this sensitiveness of self-esteem. Excuses there may be for mendicity, there can be none for that quest for praise and articles on which modern authors go begging. It is the mendicity, the pauperism of the mind. There are no great works of art that have fallen into oblivion. The lies, the complacencies of the pen cannot give life to a worthless book.

After the courage to criticise comes the courage to praise. Certainly it is time someone did justice to M. Beyle's merit. Our age owes him much: was it not he who first revealed to us Rossini, the finest genius in music? He has pleaded constantly for that glory which France had not the intelligence to make her own. Let us in turn plead for the writer who knows Italy best, who avenges her for the calumnies of her conquerors, who has so well explained her spirit and her genius.

I had met M. Beyle twice in society, in twelve years, before the day when I took the liberty of congratulating him on La Chartreuse de Parme on meeting him in the Boulevard des Italiens. On each occasion, his conversation has fully maintained the opinion I had formed of him from his works. He tells stories with the spirit and grace which M. Charles Nodier and M. de Latouche possess in a high degree. Indeed he recalls the latter gentleman by the irresistible charm of his speech, although his physique—for he is extremely stout—seems at first sight to preclude refinement, elegance of manners; but he instantly disproves this suspicion, like Dr. Koreff, the friend of Hoffmann. He has a fine forehead, a keen and piercing eye, a sardonic mouth; in short, he has altogether the physiognomy of his talent. He retains in conversation that enigmatic turn, that eccentricity which leads him never to sign the already illustrious name of Beyle, to call himself one day Cotonnet, another Frédéric. He is, I am told, the nephew of the famous and industrious Daru, one of the strong arms of Napoleon. M. Beyle was naturally in the Emperor's service; 1815 tore him, necessarily, from his career, he passed from Berlin to Milan, and it is to the contrast between the life of the North and that of the South, which impressed him, that we are indebted for this writer. M. Beyle is one of the superior men of our time. It is difficult to explain how this observer of the first order, this profound diplomat who, whether in his writings or in his speech, has furnished so many proofs of the loftiness of his ideas and the extent of his practical knowledge should find himself nothing more than Consul at Civita-vecchia. No one could be better qualified to represent France at Rome. M. Mérimée knew M. Beyle early and takes after him; but the master is more elegant and has more ease. M. Beyle's works are many in number and are remarkable for fineness of observation and for the abundance of their ideas. Almost all of them deal with Italy. He was the first to give us exact information about the terrible case of the Cenci; but he has not sufficiently explained the causes of the execution, which was independent of the trial, and due to factional clamour, to the demands of avarice. His book De l'amour is superior to M. de Sénancour's, he shews affinity to the great doctrines of Cabanis and the School of Paris; but he fails by the lack of method which, as I have already said, spoils La Chartreuse de Parme. He has ventured, in this treatise, upon the word crystallisation to explain the phenomenon of the birth of this sentiment, a word which has been taken as a joke, but will survive on account of its profound accuracy. M. Beyle has been writing since 1817. He began with a certain show of Liberalism; but I doubt whether this great calculator can have let himself be taken in by the stupidities of Dual Chamber government. La Chartreuse de Parme has an underlying bias which is certainly not against Monarchy. He finds fault with what he admires, he is a Frenchman.

M. de Chateaubriand said, in a preface to the eleventh edition of Atala, that his book in no way resembled the previous editions, so thoroughly had he revised it. M. le Comte de Maistre admits having rewritten Le Lépreux de la vallée d'Aoste seventeen times. I hope that M. Beyle also will set to work going over, polishing La Chartreuse de Parme, and will stamp it with the imprint of perfection, the emblem of irreproachable beauty which MM. de Chateaubriand and de Maistre have given to their precious books.

[1]So Balzac, reading les petites mains les plus gracieuses. Stendhal's words are les petites mines, and he makes the lady a Marchesa. Balzac's quotations are not, as a rule, textually accurate, but his analysis of the story is admirable.

C. K. S. M.

[2]What a phrase, indeed. But it is the Duchessa, not Mosca, who gives this advice to Fabrizio, at Piacenza, and it is the party "opposite to the one he has served all his life" that he is to be flung into.

C. K. S. M.

This article opened the third and concluding number of Balzac's Revue Parisienne, dated September 25, 1840. Each of the earlier numbers had opened with a story, viz.; Z. Marcas and Les Fantaisies de Claudine (Un Prince de la Bohème) afterwards embodied in the Comédie Humaine. This Etude sur M. Beyle will be found in Œuvres complètes de H. de Balzac—XXIII—Œuvres diverses—septième partie—Essais historiques et politiques—Paris, Michel Lévy Frères, Editeurs, &c., 873, pages 687 to 738. It is also reprinted in Lévy's 1853 edition of La Chartreuse de Parme.

[BEYLE'S REPLY TO BALZAC]

On receiving the Revue Parisienne, Beyle at once wrote to Balzac the letter a translation of which follows. This letter he seems to have entrusted to his friend Romain Colomb, afterwards his literary executor, in whose hands it still remained six months later. As published by Colomb, the letter includes the text actually addressed to Balzac and the draft here appended to it, and it so figures in Stendhal: Œuvres Posthumes: Correspondance Inédite précédée d'une Introduction par Prosper Mérimée de l'Académie Française: Vol. II, pp. 293-299 (Calmann-Lévy). The correct text was established by M. Paul Arbelet in the Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, Oct.-Dec., 1917, pp. 548 sqq. La véritable lettre de Stendhal, and reprinted by MM. G. Grès & Cie. in their edition of La Chartreuse de Parme (1922).

Civita-vecchia, 30th October, 1840.

Last night, Sir, I received a great surprise. No one, I think, has ever been so well treated in a Review, and by the best judge of the subject. You have taken pity on an orphan left wandering in the street. I have made a fitting response to this kindness, I read the review last night, and this morning I have cut down to four or five pages the fifty-four opening pages[3] of the work which you have introduced to the world.

The confection of literature would have disgusted me with all pleasure in writing; I have dismissed all rejoicings over the printed page, to a time twenty or thirty years hence. Some literary rag-picker may make the discovery of the works whose merit you so strangely exaggerate.

Your illusion goes a long way, Phèdre, for instance. I may admit to you that I was shocked, I who am quite well-disposed towards the author.

Since you have taken the trouble to read this novel three times, I shall have a number of questions to ask you at our next meeting on the boulevard.

1. Am I allowed to call Fabrizio our hero? It was a question of not repeating the name Fabrizio too often.

2. Ought I to suppress the episode of Fausta, which has turned out unduly long? Fabrizio seizes the opportunity that is offered him to shew to the Duchessa that he is not susceptible to love.

3. The fifty-four opening pages seem to me a graceful introduction. I did indeed feel some misgivings when correcting the proofs, but I thought of those boring first half-volumes of Walter Scott, and of the endless preamble to the divine Princesse de Clèves.

I abhor an involved style, and I must admit to you that many pages of the Chartreuse were printed from my original dictation. As children say: I shall not return to it again. I think, however, that since the destruction of the court, in 1792, the part played by form becomes more exiguous daily. Were M. Villemain, whom I cite as the most distinguished of our Academicians, to translate the Chartreuse into French, he would require three volumes to express what I have given in two. The majority of scoundrels being emphatic and eloquent, people will take a dislike to the declamatory tone. At seventeen I came near to fighting a duel over the "indeterminate crest of the forests" of M. de Chateaubriand, who numbered many admirers in the 6th Dragoons. I have never read La Chaumière indienne, I cannot abide M. de Maistre.

My Homer is the Memoirs of Marshal Gouvion Saint-Cyr. Montesquieu and Fénelon's Dialogues strike me as well written. Except for Madame de Mortsauf and her companions, I have read nothing of what has been printed in the last thirty years. I read Ariosto, whose stories I love. The Duchessa is copied from Correggio. I see the future history of French literature in the history of painting. We have reached the stage of the pupils of Pietro da Cortona, who worked rapidly and strained all his expressions, like Madame Cottin who makes the hewn stones of the Borromean Islands walk. After this novel, I have no . . .[4] While composing the Chartreuse, to acquire the tone, I used to read every morning two or three pages of the Code Civil.

Permit a coarse expression: I do not wish to b—— the heart of the reader. This, poor reader lets ambitious phrases pass, such as "the wind that uproots the waves," but they come back to him after the moment of emotion. I wish on the other hand that, if the reader thinks of Conte Mosca, he shall find nothing to cut down.

4. I am going to introduce, in the foyer of the Opera, Bassi and Riscara, sent to Paris as spies after Waterloo by Ranuccio-Ernesto IV. Fabrizio returning from Amiens will be struck by their Italian appearance and clipped Milanese, which these watchers imagine to be understood by no one. Everyone tells me that I must announce my characters. I shall greatly reduce the good Priore Blanès. I thought that the story needed characters who do nothing, and only touch the heart of the reader and dispel the air of romance.

You are going to think me a monster of pride. What, your inward sense will say, this creature, not content with what I have done for him, a thing without parallel in this century, still wishes to be praised for his style!

I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing. I wish to speak of what is occurring in the heart of Mosca, of the Duchessa, of Clelia. It is a country into which hardly penetrates the gaze of the newly rich, such as the Latinist Master of the Mint, M. le Comte Roy, M. Laffitte, etc., etc., etc., the gaze of the grocer, the worthy paterfamilias, etc., etc.

If, to the obscurity of the matter, I add the obscurities of style of M. Villemain, of Madame Sand, etc. (supposing me to have the rare privilege of being able to write like those choregi of good style), if I add to the difficulty of the subject the obscurities of this vaunted style, no one in the world will understand the struggle between the Duchessa and Ernesto IV. The style of M. de Chateaubriand and M. de Villemain seems to me to say: 1. a number of pleasant little things, but things not worth saying (like the style of Ausonius, Claudian, etc.); 2. a number of little insincerities, pleasant to listen to. These great Academicians would have seen the public go mad over their writings, had they been given to the world in 1780; their chance of greatness depended upon the old régime.

In proportion as the semi-intelligent become more numerous, the part played by form decreases. If the Chartreuse were translated into French by Madame Sand, she would make it a success, but, in order to express what there is in my two volumes, she would need three or four. Weigh this excuse.

The semi-intelligent puts above everything else the verse of Racine, for he can understand what is meant by an unfinished line; but every day his verse becomes a less important factor in Racine's merit. The public, as it grows more numerous, less sheeplike, requires a greater quantity of little actual facts, as to a passion, a situation in real life, etc. How often do we find Voltaire, Racine, etc., all of them in fact except Corneille, obliged to cap their lines for the sake of the rhyme; well, these capping lines occupy the place that should properly be filled by little actual facts.

In fifty years' time M. Bignan, and the Bignans who write in prose will have so wearied their public with productions that are elegant and devoid of any other merit, that the semi-intelligent will be in great difficulties; their vanity requiring them always to speak of literature and to make a pretence of thought, what will become of them when they can no longer attach themselves to form? They will end by making their god of Voltaire. Wit lasts no more than two centuries; in 1978, Voltaire will be Voiture; but Le Père Goriot will still be Le Père Goriot. Perhaps the semi-intelligent will be so distressed at no longer having their beloved rules to admire that it is highly possible that they will grow disgusted with literature and take to religion. All political rascals having a declamatory and eloquent tone, people will have grown sick of this in 1880. Then perhaps they will read the Chartreuse.

[The following passage occurs among the Beyle manuscripts at Grenoble, and was added to the printed text of the letter by Colomb. It appears rather to be alternative to some of the preceding paragraphs.]

The part played by form becomes more exiguous daily. Take Hume; imagine a History of France from 1780 to 1840, written with Hume's sound sense; it would be read, even if it were written in patois; it[5] is written like the Code Civil. I am going to correct the style of the Chartreuse, since it hurts you, but I shall find it most difficult. I do not admire the style now in fashion, I have no patience with it. I see Claudians, Senecas, Ausoniuses. I have been told for the last year that one ought now and then to relax the reader's attention by describing scenery, dresses. These things have bored me so in other writers! I shall try.

As for immediate success, of which I should never have thought but for the Revue Parisienne, it is quite fifteen years since I said to myself: I should become a candidate for the Academy if I won the hand of Mademoiselle Bertin, who would have my praises sung three times weekly. When society is no longer tainted with common upstarts, valuing above everything else nobility, just because they are ignoble, it will no longer be on its knees before the press of the aristocracy. Before 1793 good company was the true judge of books, now it is haunted by the fear of another 1793, it is frightened, it is no longer a judge. Look at the catalogue which a little bookseller near Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin (Rue du Bac, about No. 110) supplies to the nobility, his neighbours. It is the argument that has most convinced me of the impossibility of pleasing these timid creatures, stupefied by idleness.

I have not in the least copied M. de Metternich, whom I have not seen since 1810, at Saint-Cloud, when he wore a bracelet of the hair of Caroline Murat, who was such a beauty then. I feel no regret for all that is destined not to happen. I am a fatalist, and hide from it. I imagine that I shall perhaps have a little success about 1860 or '80. Then there will be very little said of M. de Metternich, and even less of the petty Prince. Who was Prime Minister of England in the time of Malherbe? If I have not the misfortune to hit upon a Cromwell, I am sure of a nonentity.

Death makes us change places with these people. They can do anything with our bodies during their lives, but, at the moment of death, oblivion enwraps them for ever. Who will speak of M. de Villèle, of M. de Martignac, in a hundred years' time? M. de Talleyrand himself will be preserved only by his Memoirs, if he has left good ones, while Le Roman comique is to-day what Le Père Goriot will be in 1980. It is Scarron who makes known the name of the Rothschild of his day, M. de Montauron, who was also, to the extent of fifty louis, the protector of Corneille.

You have well felt, Sir, with the tact of a man who has acted, that the Chartreuse could not deal with a great State, such as France, Spain, Vienna, on account of the administrative detail. I was left with the petty Princes of Germany and Italy.

But the Germans are so much on their knees before a riband, they are such fools! I spent several years among them, and have forgotten their language, out of contempt for them. You can easily see that my characters could not be Germans. If you follow this idea, you will find that I have been led by the hand to an extinct dynasty, to a Farnese, the least obscure of these extinct personages, on account of the Generals, his grandsires.

I take a character well-known to myself, I leave him the habits he has contracted in the art of going out every morning in pursuit of pleasure, then I give him more intelligence. I have never seen Signora di Belgiojoso. Rassi was a German; I have talked to him hundreds of times. I picked up the Prince while staying at Saint-Cloud in 1810 and 1811.

Ouf! I hope that you will have read this treatise three times. You say, Sir, that you do not know English: you have in Paris the bourgeois style of Walter Scott in the heavy prose of M. Delécluze, editor of the Débats, and author of a Mademoiselle de Liron which has something in it. Walter Scott's prose is inelegant and above all pretentious. One sees a dwarf who is determined not to lose an inch of his stature.

This astounding article, such as no writer has ever received from another, I have read, I now make bold to confess to you, with shouts of laughter, whenever I came to an encomium that was at all strong, and I met them at every turn. I could see the expression on the faces of my friends as they read it.

For instance the Minister d'Argout, being then Auditor to the Council of State, was my equal and, moreover, what is known as a friend; 1830 comes, he is a Minister, his clerks, whom I do not know, think that there are at least thirty artists. . . .

[3]i.e., Chapters I and II.

C. K. S. M.

[4]This sentence is left unfinished at the foot of a page, the next page beginning with "While composing," etc.

[5]This seems to refer to the Chartreuse.

C. K. S. M.

The Works of Stendhal

I

THE CHARTERHOUSE
OF PARMA

VOLUME ONE

[TO THE READER]

It was in the winter of 1830 and three hundred leagues from Paris that this tale was written; thus it contains no allusion to the events of 1839.

Many years before 1830, at the time when our Armies were overrunning Europe, chance put me in possession of a billeting order on the house of a Canon: this was at Padua, a charming town in Italy; my stay being prolonged, we became friends.

Passing through Padua again towards the end of 1830, I hastened to the house of the good Canon: he himself was dead, that I knew, but I wished to see once again the room in which we had passed so many pleasant evenings, evenings on which I had often looked back since. I found there the Canon's nephew and his wife who welcomed me like an old friend. Several people came in, and we did not break up until a very late hour; the nephew sent out to the Caffè Pedrocchi for an excellent zabaione. What more than anything kept us up was the story of the Duchessa Sanseverina, to which someone made an allusion, and which the nephew was good enough to relate from beginning to end, in my honour.

"In the place to which I am going," I told my friends, "I am not likely to find evenings like this, and, to while away the long hours of darkness, I shall make a novel out of your story."

"In that case," said the nephew, "let me give you my uncle's journal, which, under the heading Parma, mentions several of the intrigues of that court, in the days when the Duchessa's word was law there; but, have a care! this story is anything but moral, and now that you pride yourselves in France on your gospel purity, it may win you the reputation of an assassin."

I publish this tale without any alteration from the manuscript of 1830, a course which may have two drawbacks:

The first for the reader: the characters being Italians will perhaps interest him less, hearts in that country differing considerably from hearts in France: the Italians are sincere, honest folk and, not taking offence, say what is in their minds; it is only when the mood seizes them that they shew any vanity; which then becomes passion, and goes by the name of puntiglio. Lastly, poverty is not, with them, a subject for ridicule.

The second drawback concerns the author.

I confess that I have been so bold as to leave my characters with their natural asperities; but, on the other hand—this I proclaim aloud—I heap the most moral censure upon many of their actions. To what purpose should I give them the exalted morality and other graces of French characters, who love money above all things, and sin scarcely ever from motives of hatred or love? The Italians in this tale are almost the opposite. Besides, it seems to me that, whenever one takes a stride of two hundred leagues from South to North, the change of scene that occurs is tantamount to a fresh tale. The Canon's charming niece had known and indeed had been greatly devoted to the Duchessa Sanseverina, and begs me to alter nothing in her adventures, which are reprehensible.

23rd January, 1839.

THE CHARTERHOUSE
OF PARMA

[CHAPTER ONE]

On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of that young army which had shortly before crossed the Bridge of Lodi and taught the world that after all these centuries Cæsar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of gallantry and genius of which Italy was a witness in the space of a few months aroused a slumbering people; only a week before the arrival of the French, the Milanese still regarded them as a mere rabble of brigands, accustomed invariably to flee before the troops of His Imperial and Royal Majesty; so much at least was reported to them three times weekly by a little news-sheet no bigger than one's hand, and printed on soiled paper.

In the Middle Ages the Republicans of Lombardy had given proof of a valour equal to that of the French, and deserved to see their city rased to the ground by the German Emperors. Since they had become loyal subjects, their great occupation was the printing of sonnets upon handkerchiefs of rose-coloured taffeta whenever the marriage occurred of a young lady belonging to some rich or noble family. Two or three years after that great event in her life, the young lady in question used to engage a devoted admirer: sometimes the name of the cicisbeo chosen by the husband's family occupied an honourable place in the marriage contract. It was a far cry from these effeminate ways to the profound emotions aroused by the unexpected arrival of the French army. Presently there sprang up a new and passionate way of life. A whole people discovered, on the 15th of May, 1796, that everything which until then it had respected was supremely ridiculous, if not actually hateful. The departure of the last Austrian regiment marked the collapse of the old ideas: to risk one's life became the fashion. People saw that in order to be really happy after centuries of cloying sensations, it was necessary to love one's country with a real love and to seek out heroic actions. They had been plunged in the darkest night by the continuation of the jealous despotism of Charles V and Philip II; they overturned these monarchs' statues and immediately found themselves flooded with daylight. For the last half-century, as the Encyclopædia and Voltaire gained ground in France, the monks had been dinning into the ears of the good people of Milan that to learn to read, or for that matter to learn anything at all was a great waste of labour, and that by paying one's exact tithe to one's parish priest and faithfully reporting to him all one's little misdeeds, one was practically certain of having a good place in Paradise. To complete the debilitation of this people once so formidable and so rational, Austria had sold them, on easy terms, the privilege of not having to furnish any recruits to her army.

MILAN IN 1796

In 1796, the Milanese army was composed of four and twenty rapscallions dressed in scarlet, who guarded the town with the assistance of four magnificent regiments of Hungarian Grenadiers. Freedom of morals was extreme, but passion very rare; otherwise, apart from the inconvenience of having to repeat everything to one's parish priest, on pain of ruin even in this world, the good people of Milan were still subjected to certain little monarchical interferences which could not fail to be vexatious. For instance, the Archduke, who resided at Milan and governed in the name of the Emperor, his cousin, had had the lucrative idea of trading in corn. In consequence, an order prohibiting the peasants from selling their grain until His Highness had filled his granaries.

In May, 1796, three days after the entry of the French, a young painter in miniature, slightly mad, named Gros, afterwards famous, who had come with the army, overhearing in the great Caffè dei Servi (which was then in fashion) an account of the exploits of the Archduke, who moreover was extremely stout, picked up the list of ices which was printed on a sheet of coarse yellow paper. On the back of this he drew the fat Archduke; a French soldier was stabbing him with his bayonet in the stomach, and instead of blood there gushed out an incredible quantity of corn. What we call a lampoon or caricature was unknown in this land of crafty despotism. The drawing, left by Gros on the table of the Caffè dei Servi, seemed a miracle fallen from heaven; it was engraved and printed during the night, and next day twenty thousand copies of it were sold.

The same day, there were posted up notices of a forced loan of six millions, levied to supply the needs of the French army which, having just won six battles and conquered a score of provinces, wanted nothing now but shoes, breeches, jackets and caps.

The mass of prosperity and pleasure which burst into Lombardy in the wake of these French ragamuffins was so great that only the priests and a few nobles were conscious of the burden of this levy of six millions, shortly to be followed by a number of others. These French soldiers laughed and sang all day long; they were all under twenty-five years of age, and their Commander in Chief, who had reached twenty-seven, was reckoned the oldest man in his army. This gaiety, this youthfulness, this irresponsibility furnished a jocular reply to the furious preachings of the monks, who, for six months, had been announcing from the pulpit that the French were monsters, obliged, upon pain of death, to burn down everything and to cut off everyone's head. With this object, each of their regiments marched with a guillotine at its head.

In the country districts one saw at the cottage doors the French soldier engaged in dandling the housewife's baby in his arms, and almost every evening some drummer, scraping a fiddle, would improvise a ball. Our country dances proving a great deal too skilful and complicated for the soldiers, who for that matter barely knew them themselves, to be able to teach them to the women of the country, it was the latter who shewed the young Frenchmen the Monferrina, Salterello and other Italian dances.

The officers had been lodged, as far as possible, with the wealthy inhabitants; they had every need of comfort. A certain lieutenant, for instance, named Robert, received a billeting order on the palazzo of the Marchesa del Dongo. This officer, a young conscript not over-burdened with scruples, possessed as his whole worldly wealth, when he entered this palazzo, a scudo of six francs which he had received at Piacenza. After the crossing of the Bridge of Lodi he had taken from a fine Austrian officer, killed by a ball, a magnificent pair of nankeen pantaloons, quite new, and never did any garment come more opportunely. His officer's epaulettes were of wool, and the cloth of his tunic was stitched to the lining of the sleeves so that its scraps might hold together; but there was something even more distressing; the soles of his shoes were made out of pieces of soldiers' caps, likewise picked up on the field of battle, somewhere beyond the Bridge of Lodi. These makeshift soles were tied on over his shoes with pieces of string which were plainly visible, so that when the majordomo appeared at the door of Lieutenant Robert's room bringing him an invitation to dine with the Signora Marchesa, the officer was thrown into the utmost confusion. He and his orderly spent the two hours that divided him from this fatal dinner in trying to patch up the tunic a little and in dyeing black, with ink, those wretched strings round his shoes. At last the dread moment arrived. "Never in my life did I feel more ill at ease," Lieutenant Robert told me; "the ladies expected that I would terrify them, and I was trembling far more than they were. I looked down at my shoes and did not know how to walk gracefully. The Marchesa del Dongo," he went on, "was then in the full bloom of her beauty: you have seen her for yourself, with those lovely eyes of an angelic sweetness, and the dusky gold of her hair which made such a perfect frame for the oval of that charming face. I had in my room a Herodias by Leonardo da Vinci, which might have been her portrait. Mercifully, I was so overcome by her supernatural beauty that I forgot all about my clothes. For the last two years I had been seeing nothing that was not ugly and wretched, in the mountains behind Genoa: I ventured to say a few words to her to express my delight.

"But I had too much sense to waste any time upon compliments. As I was turning my phrases I saw, in a dining-room built entirely of marble, a dozen flunkeys and footmen dressed in what seemed to me then the height of magnificence. Just imagine, the rascals had not only good shoes on their feet, but silver buckles as well. I could see them all, out of the corner of my eye, staring stupidly at my coat and perhaps at my shoes also, which cut me to the heart. I could have frightened all these fellows with a word; but how was I to put them in their place without running the risk of offending the ladies? For the Marchesa, to fortify her own courage a little, as she has told me a hundred times since, had sent to fetch from the convent where she was still at school Gina del Dongo, her husband's sister, who was afterwards that charming Contessa Pietranera: no one, in prosperity, surpassed her in gaiety and sweetness of temper, just as no one surpassed her in courage and serenity of soul when fortune turned against her.

"Gina, who at that time might have been thirteen but looked more like eighteen, a lively, downright girl, as you know, was in such fear of bursting out laughing at the sight of my costume that she dared not eat; the Marchesa, on the other hand, loaded me with constrained civilities; she could see quite well the movements of impatience in my eyes. In a word, I cut a sorry figure, I chewed the bread of scorn, a thing which is said to be impossible for a Frenchman. At length, a heaven-sent idea shone in my mind: I set to work to tell the ladies of my poverty and of what we had suffered for the last two years in the mountains behind Genoa where we were kept by idiotic old Generals. There, I told them, we were paid in assignats which were not legal tender in the country, and given three ounces of bread daily. I had not been speaking for two minutes before there were tears in the good Marchesa's eyes, and Gina had grown serious.

"'What, Lieutenant,' she broke in, 'three ounces of bread!'

"'Yes, Signorina; but to make up for that the issue ran short three days in the week, and as the peasants on whom we were billeted were even worse off than ourselves, we used to hand on some of our bread to them.'

"On leaving the table, I offered the Marchesa my arm as far as the door of the drawing-room, then hurried back and gave the servant who had waited upon me at dinner that solitary scudo of six francs upon the spending of which I had built so many castles in the air.

"A week later," Robert went on, "when it was satisfactorily established that the French were not guillotining anyone, the Marchese del Dongo returned from his castle of Grianta on the Lake of Como, to which he had gallantly retired on the approach of the army, abandoning to the fortunes of war his young and beautiful wife and his sister. The hatred that this Marchese felt for us was equal to his fear, that is to say immeasurable: his fat face, pale and pious, was an amusing spectacle when he was being polite to me. On the day after his return to Milan, I received three ells of cloth and two hundred francs out of the levy of six millions; I renewed my wardrobe, and became cavalier to the ladies, for the season of balls was beginning."

Lieutenant Robert's story was more or less that of all the French troops; instead of laughing at the wretched plight of these poor soldiers, people were sorry for them and came to love them.

This period of unlooked-for happiness and wild excitement lasted but two short years; the frenzy had been so excessive and so general that it would be impossible for me to give any idea of it, were it not for this historical and profound reflexion: these people had been living in a state of boredom for the last hundred years.

The thirst for pleasure natural in southern countries had prevailed in former times at the court of the Visconti and Sforza, those famous Dukes of Milan. But from the year 1524, when the Spaniards conquered the Milanese, and conquered them as taciturn, suspicious, arrogant masters, always in dread of revolt, gaiety had fled. The subject race, adopting the manners of their masters, thought more of avenging the least insult by a dagger-blow than of enjoying the fleeting hour.

This frenzied joy, this gaiety, this thirst for pleasure, this tendency to forget every sad or even reasonable feeling were carried to such a pitch, between the 15th of May, 1796, when the French entered Milan, and April, 1799, when they were driven out again after the battle of Cassano, that instances have been cited of old millionaire merchants, old money-lenders, old scriveners who, during this interval, quite forgot to pull long faces and to amass money.

At the most it would have been possible to point to a few families belonging to the higher ranks of the nobility, who had retired to their palaces in the country, as though in a sullen revolt against the prevailing high spirits and the expansion of every heart. It is true that these noble and wealthy families had been given a distressing prominence in the allocation of the forced loans exacted for the French army.

The Marchese del Dongo, irritated by the spectacle of so much gaiety, had been one of the first to return to his magnificent castle of Grianta, on the farther side of Como, whither his ladies took with them Lieutenant Robert. This castle, standing in a position which is perhaps unique in the world, on a plateau one hundred and fifty feet above that sublime lake, a great part of which it commands, had been originally a fortress. The del Dongo family had constructed it in the fifteenth century, as was everywhere attested by marble tablets charged with their arms; one could still see the drawbridges and deep moats, though the latter, it must be admitted, had been drained of their water; but with its walls eighty feet in height and six in thickness, this castle was safe from assault, and it was for this reason that it was dear to the timorous Marchese. Surrounded by some twenty-five or thirty retainers whom he supposed to be devoted to his person, presumably because he never opened his mouth except to curse them, he was less tormented by fear than at Milan.

This fear was not altogether groundless: he was in most active correspondence with a spy posted by Austria on the Swiss frontier three leagues from Grianta, to contrive the escape of the prisoners taken on the field of battle; conduct which might have been viewed in a serious light by the French Generals.

The Marchese had left his young wife at Milan; she looked after the affairs of the family there, and was responsible for providing the sums levied on the casa del Dongo (as they say in Italy); she sought to have these reduced, which obliged her to visit those of the nobility who had accepted public office, and even some highly influential persons who were not of noble birth. A great event now occurred in this family. The Marchese had arranged the marriage of his young sister Gina with a personage of great wealth and the very highest birth; but he powdered his hair; in virtue of which, Gina received him with shouts of laughter, and presently took the rash step of marrying the Conte Pietranera. He was, it is true, a very fine gentleman, of the most personable appearance, but ruined for generations past in estate, and to complete the disgrace of the match, a fervent supporter of the new ideas. Pietranera was a sub-lieutenant in the Italian Legion; this was the last straw for the Marchese.

After these two years of folly and happiness, the Directory in Paris, giving itself the airs of a sovereign firmly enthroned, began to shew a mortal hatred of everything that was not commonplace. The incompetent Generals whom it imposed on the Army of Italy lost a succession of battles in those same plains of Verona, which had witnessed two years before the prodigies of Arcole and Lonato. The Austrians again drew near to Milan; Lieutenant Robert, who had been promoted to the command of a battalion and had been wounded at the battle of Cassano, came to lodge for the last time in the house of his friend the Marchesa del Dongo. Their parting was a sad one; Robert set forth with Conte Pietranera who followed the French in their retirement on Novi. The young Contessa, to whom her brother refused to pay her marriage portion, followed the army, riding in a cart.

Then began that period of reaction and a return to the old ideas, which the Milanese call i tredici mesi (the thirteen months), because as it turned out their destiny willed that this return to stupidity should endure for thirteen months only, until Marengo. Everyone who was old, bigoted, morose, reappeared at the head of affairs, and resumed the leadership of society; presently the people who had remained faithful to the sound doctrines published a report in the villages that Napoleon had been hanged by the Mamelukes in Egypt, as he so richly deserved.

Among these men who had retired to sulk on their estates and came back now athirst for vengeance, the Marchese del Dongo distinguished himself by his rabidity; the extravagance of his sentiments carried him naturally to the head of his party. These gentlemen, quite worthy people when they were not in a state of panic, but who were always trembling, succeeded in getting round the Austrian General: a good enough man at heart, he let himself be persuaded that severity was the best policy, and ordered the arrest of one hundred and fifty patriots: quite the best men to be found in Italy at the time.

They were speedily deported to the Bocche di Cattaro, and, flung into subterranean caves, the moisture, and above all the want of bread did prompt justice to each and all of these rascals.

The Marchese del Dongo had an exalted position, and, as he combined with a host of other fine qualities a sordid avarice, he would boast publicly that he never sent a scudo to his sister, the Contessa Pietranera: still madly in love, she refused to leave her husband, and was starving by his side in France. The good Marchesa was in despair; finally she managed to abstract a few small diamonds from her jewel case, which her husband took from her every evening to stow away under his bed, in an iron coffer: the Marchesa had brought him a dowry of 800,000 francs, and received 80 francs monthly for her personal expenses. During the thirteen months in which the French were absent from Milan, this most timid of women found various pretexts and never went out of mourning.

We must confess that, following the example of many grave authors, we have begun the history of our hero a year before his birth. This essential personage is none other than Fabrizio Valserra, Marchesino del Dongo, as the style is at Milan.[6] He had taken the trouble to be born just when the French were driven out, and found himself, by the accident of birth, the second son of that Marchese del Dongo who was so great a gentleman, and with whose fat, pasty face, false smile and unbounded hatred for the new ideas the reader is already acquainted. The whole of the family fortune was already settled upon the elder son, Ascanio del Dongo, the worthy image of his father. He was eight years old and Fabrizio two when all of a sudden that General Bonaparte, whom everyone of good family understood to have been hanged long ago, came down from the Mont Saint-Bernard. He entered Milan: that moment is still unique in history; imagine a whole populace madly in love. A few days later, Napoleon won the battle of Marengo. The rest needs no telling. The frenzy of the Milanese reached its climax; but this time it was mingled with ideas of vengeance: these good people had been taught to hate. Presently they saw arrive in their midst all that remained of the patriots deported to the Bocche di Cattaro; their return was celebrated with a national festa. Their pale faces, their great startled eyes, their shrunken limbs were in strange contrast to the joy that broke out on every side. Their arrival was the signal for departure for the families most deeply compromised. The Marchese del Dongo was one of the first to flee to his castle of Grianta. The heads of the great families were filled with hatred and fear; but their wives, their daughters, remembered the joys of the former French occupation, and thought with regret of Milan and those gay balls, which, immediately after Marengo, were organised afresh at the casa Tanzi. A few days after the victory, the French General responsible for maintaining order in Lombardy discovered that all the farmers on the noblemen's estates, all the old wives in the villages, so far from still thinking of this astonishing victory at Marengo, which had altered the destinies of Italy and recaptured thirteen fortified positions in a single day, had their minds occupied only by a prophecy of San Giovita, the principal Patron Saint of Brescia. According to this inspired utterance, the prosperity of France and of Napoleon was to cease just thirteen weeks after Marengo. What does to some extent excuse the Marchese del Dongo and all the nobles sulking on their estates is that literally and without any affectation they believed in the prophecy. Not one of these gentlemen had read as many as four volumes in his life; quite openly they were making their preparations to return to Milan at the end of the thirteen weeks; but time, as it went on, recorded fresh successes for the cause of France. Returning to Paris, Napoleon, by wise decrees, saved the country from revolution at home as he had saved it from its foreign enemies at Marengo. Then the Lombard nobles, in the safe shelter of their castles, discovered that at first they had misinterpreted the prophecy of the holy patron of Brescia; it was a question not of thirteen weeks, but of thirteen months. The thirteen months went by, and the prosperity of France seemed to increase daily.

We pass lightly over ten years of progress and happiness, from 1800 to 1810. Fabrizio spent the first part of this decade at the castle of Grianta, giving and receiving an abundance of fisticuffs among the little contadini of the village, and learning nothing, not even how to read. Later on, he was sent to the Jesuit College at Milan. The Marchese, his father, insisted on his being shewn the Latin tongue, not on any account in the works of those ancient writers who are always talking about Republics, but in a magnificent volume adorned with more than a hundred engravings, a masterpiece of seventeenth-century art; this was the Lathi genealogy of the Valserra, Marchesi del Dongo, published in 1650 by Fabrizio del Dongo, Archbishop of Parma. The fortunes of the Valserra being pre-eminently military, the engravings represented any number of battles, and everywhere one saw some hero of the name dealing mighty blows with his sword. This book greatly delighted the young Fabrizio. His mother, who adored him, obtained permission, from time to time, to pay him a visit at Milan; but as her husband never offered her any money for these journeys, it was her sister-in-law, the charming Contessa Pietranera, who lent her what she required. After the return of the French, the Contessa had become one of the most brilliant ladies at the court of Prince Eugène, the Viceroy of Italy.

When Fabrizio had made his First Communion, she obtained leave from the Marchese, still in voluntary exile, to invite him out, now and again, from his college. She found him unusual, thoughtful, very serious, but a nice-looking boy and not at all out of place in the drawing-room of a lady of fashion; otherwise, as ignorant as one could wish, and barely able to write. The Contessa, who carried her impulsive character into everything, promised her protection to the head of the establishment provided that her nephew Fabrizio made astounding progress and carried off a number of prizes at the end of the year. So that he should be in a position to deserve them, she used to send for him every Saturday evening, and often did not restore him to his masters until the following Wednesday or Thursday. The Jesuits, although tenderly cherished by the Prince Viceroy, were expelled from Italy by the laws of the Kingdom, and the Superior of the College, an able man, was conscious of all that might be made out of his relations with a woman all-powerful at court. He never thought of complaining of the absences of Fabrizio, who, more ignorant than ever, at the end of the year was awarded five first prizes. This being so, the Contessa, escorted by her husband, now the General commanding one of the Divisions of the Guard, and by five or six of the most important personages at the viceregal court, came to attend the prize-giving at the Jesuit College. The Superior was complimented by his chiefs.

The Contessa took her nephew with her to all those brilliant festivities which marked the too brief reign of the sociable Prince Eugène. She had on her own authority created him an officer of hussars, and Fabrizio, now twelve years old, wore that uniform. One day the Contessa, enchanted by his handsome figure, besought the Prince to give him a post as page, a request which implied that the del Dongo family was coming round. Next day she had need of all her credit to secure the Viceroy's kind consent not to remember this request, which lacked only the consent of the prospective page's father, and this consent would have been emphatically refused. After this act of folly, which made the sullen Marchese shudder, he found an excuse to recall young Fabrizio to Grianta. The Contessa had a supreme contempt for her brother, she regarded him as a melancholy fool, and one who would be troublesome if ever it lay in his power. But she was madly fond of Fabrizio, and, after ten years of silence, wrote to the Marchese reclaiming her nephew; her letter was left unanswered.

On his return to this formidable palace, built by the most bellicose of his ancestors, Fabrizio knew nothing in the world except how to drill and how to sit on a horse. Conte Pietranera, as fond of the boy as was his wife, used often to put him on a horse and take him with him on parade.

On reaching the castle of Grianta, Fabrizio, his eyes still red with the tears that he had shed on leaving his aunt's fine rooms, found only the passionate caresses of his mother and sisters. The Marchese was closeted in his study with his elder son, the Marchesino Ascanio; there they composed letters in cipher which had the honour to be forwarded to Vienna; father and son appeared in public only at meal-times. The Marchese used ostentatiously to repeat that he was teaching his natural successor to keep, by double entry, the accounts of the produce of each of his estates. As a matter of fact, the Marchese was too jealous of his own power ever to speak of these matters to a son, the necessary inheritor of all these entailed properties. He employed him to cipher despatches of fifteen or twenty pages which two or three times weekly he had conveyed into Switzerland, where they were put on the road for Vienna. The Marchese claimed to inform his rightful Sovereign of the internal condition of the Kingdom of Italy, of which he himself knew nothing, and his letters were invariably most successful, for the following reason. The Marchese would have a count taken on the high road, by some trusted agent, of the number of men in a certain French or Italian regiment that was changing its station, and in reporting the fact to the court of Vienna would take care to reduce by at least a quarter the number of the troops on the march. These letters, in other respects absurd, had the merit of contradicting others of greater accuracy, and gave pleasure. And so, a short time before Fabrizio's arrival at the castle, the Marchese had received the star of a famous order: it was the fifth to adorn his Chamberlain's coat. As a matter of fact, he suffered from the chagrin of not daring to sport this garment outside his study; but he never allowed himself to dictate a despatch without first putting on the gold-laced coat, studded with all his orders. He would have felt himself to be wanting in respect had he acted otherwise.

The Marchesa was amazed by her son's graces. But she had kept up the habit of writing two or three times every year to General Comte d'A——, which was the title now borne by Lieutenant Robert. The Marchesa had a horror of lying to the people to whom she was attached; she examined her son and was appalled by his ignorance.

"If he appears to me to have learned little," she said to herself, "to me who know nothing, Robert, who is so clever, would find that his education had been entirely neglected; and in these days one must have merit." Another peculiarity, which astonished her almost as much, was that Fabrizio had taken seriously all the religious teaching that had been instilled into him by the Jesuits. Although very pious herself, the fanaticism of this child made her shudder; "If the Marchese has the sense to discover this way of influencing him, he will take my son's affection from me." She wept copiously, and her passion for Fabrizio was thereby increased.

Life in this castle, peopled by thirty or forty servants, was extremely dull; accordingly Fabrizio spent all his days in pursuit of game or exploring the lake in a boat. Soon he was on intimate terms with the coachmen and grooms; these were all hot supporters of the French, and laughed openly at the pious valets, attached to the person of the Marchese or to that of his elder son. The great theme for wit at the expense of these solemn personages was that, in imitation of their masters, they powdered their heads.

[6]By the local custom, borrowed from Germany, this title is given to every son of a Marchese; Contino to the son of a Conte, Contessina to the daughter of a Conte, etc.

[CHAPTER TWO]

. . . Alors que Vesper vient embrunir nos
yeux,
Tout épris d'avenir, je contemple les cieux,
En qui Dieu nous escrit, par notes non obscures.
Les sorts et les destins de toutes créatures.
Car lui, du fond des deux regardant un
humain.
Parfois mû de pitié, lui montre le chemin;
Par les astres du ciel qui sont ses caractères,
Les choses nous prédit et bonnes et contraires;
Mais les hommes chargés de terre et de trépas,
Méprisent tel écrit, et ne le lisent pas.

RONSARD.

The Marchese professed a vigorous hatred of enlightenment: "It is ideas," he used to say, "that have ruined Italy"; he did not know quite how to reconcile this holy horror of instruction with his desire to see his son Fabrizio perfect the education so brilliantly begun with the Jesuits. In order to incur the least possible risk, he charged the good Priore Blanès, parish priest of Grianta, with the task of continuing Fabrizio's Latin studies. For this it was necessary that the priest should himself know that language; whereas it was to him an object of scorn; his knowledge in the matter being confined to the recitation, by heart, of the prayers in his missal, the meaning of which he could interpret more or less to his flock. But this priest was nevertheless highly respected and indeed feared throughout the district; he had always said that it was by no means in thirteen weeks, nor even in thirteen months that they would see the fulfilment of the famous prophecy of San Giovita, the patron saint of Brescia. He added, when he was speaking to friends whom he could trust, that this number thirteen was to be interpreted in a fashion which would astonish many people, if it were permitted to say all that one knew (1813).

PRIORE BLANÈS

The fact was that the Priore Blanès, a man whose honesty and virtue were primitive, and a man of parts as well, spent all his nights up in his belfry; he was mad on astrology. After using up all his days in calculating the conjunctions and positions of the stars, he would devote the greater part of his nights to following their course in the sky. Such was his poverty, he had no other instrument than a long telescope with pasteboard tubes. One may imagine the contempt that was felt for the study of languages by a man who spent his time discovering the precise dates of the fall of empires and the revolutions that change the face of the world. "What more do I know about a horse," he asked Fabrizio, "when I am told that in Latin it is called equus?"

The contadini looked upon Priore Blanès with awe as a great magician: for his part, by dint of the fear that his nightly stations in the belfry inspired, he restrained them from stealing. His clerical brethren in the surrounding parishes, intensely jealous of his influence, detested him; the Marchese del Dongo merely despised him, because he reasoned too much for a man of such humble station. Fabrizio adored him: to gratify him he sometimes spent whole evenings in doing enormous sums of addition or multiplication. Then he would go up to the belfry: this was a great favour and one that Priore Blanès had never granted to anyone; but he liked the boy for his simplicity. "If you do not turn out a hypocrite," he would say to him, "you will perhaps be a man."

Two or three times in a year, Fabrizio, intrepid and passionate in his pleasures, came within an inch of drowning himself in the lake. He was the leader of all the great expeditions made by the young contadini of Grianta and Cadenabbia. These boys had procured a number of little keys, and on very dark nights would try to open the padlocks of the chains that fastened the boats to some big stone or to a tree growing by the water's edge. It should be explained that on the Lake of Como the fishermen in the pursuit of their calling put out night-lines at a great distance from the shore. The upper end of the line is attached to a plank kept afloat by a cork keel, and a supple hazel twig, fastened to this plank, supports a little bell which rings whenever a fish, caught on the line, gives a tug to the float.

The great object of these nocturnal expeditions, of which Fabrizio was commander in chief, was to go out and visit the night-lines before the fishermen had heard the warning note of the little bells. They used to choose stormy weather, and for these hazardous exploits would embark in the early morning, an hour before dawn. As they climbed into the boat, these boys imagined themselves to be plunging into the greatest dangers; this was the finer aspect of their behaviour; and, following the example of their fathers, would devoutly repeat a Hail, Mary. Now it frequently happened that at the moment of starting, and immediately after the Hail, Mary, Fabrizio was struck by a foreboding. This was the fruit which he had gathered from the astronomical studies of his friend Priore Blanès, in whose predictions he had no faith whatsoever. According to his youthful imagination, this foreboding announced to him infallibly the success or failure of the expedition; and, as he had a stronger will than any of his companions, in course of time the whole band had so formed the habit of having forebodings that if, at the moment of embarking, one of them caught sight of a priest on the shore, or if someone saw a crow fly past on his left, they would hasten to replace the padlock on the chain of the boat, and each would go off to his bed. Thus Priore Blanès had not imparted his somewhat difficult science to Fabrizio; but, unconsciously, had infected him with an unbounded confidence in the signs by which the future can be foretold.

MILAN

The Marchese felt that any accident to his ciphered correspondence might put him at the mercy of his sister; and so every year, at the feast of Sant'Angela, which was Contessa Pietranera's name-day, Fabrizio was given leave to go and spend a week at Milan. He lived through the year looking hopefully forward or sadly back to this week. On this great occasion, to carry out this politic mission, the Marchese handed over to his son four scudi, and, in accordance with his custom, gave nothing to his wife, who took the boy. But one of the cooks, six lackeys and a coachman with a pair of horses, started for Como the day before, and every day at Milan the Marchesa found a carriage at her disposal and a dinner of twelve covers.

The sullen sort of life that was led by the Marchese del Dongo was certainly by no means entertaining, but it had this advantage that it permanently enriched the families who were kind enough to sacrifice themselves to it. The Marchese, who had an income of more than two hundred thousand lire, did not spend a quarter of that sum; he was living on hope. Throughout the thirteen years from 1800 to 1813, he constantly and firmly believed that Napoleon would be overthrown within six months. One may judge of his rapture when, at the beginning of 1813, he learned of the disasters of the Beresima! The taking of Paris and the fall of Napoleon almost made him lose his head; he then allowed himself to make the most outrageous remarks to his wife and sister. Finally, after fourteen years of waiting, he had that unspeakable joy of seeing the Austrian troops re-enter Milan. In obedience to orders issued from Vienna, the Austrian General received the Marchese del Dongo with a consideration akin to respect; they hastened to offer him one of the highest posts in the government; and he accepted it as the payment of a debt. His elder son obtained a lieutenancy in one of the smartest regiments of the Monarchy, but the younger repeatedly declined to accept a cadetship which was offered him. This triumph, in which the Marchese exulted with a rare insolence, lasted but a few months, and was followed by a humiliating reverse. Never had he had any talent for business, and fourteen years spent in the country among his footmen, his lawyer and his doctor, added to the crustiness of old age which had overtaken him, had left him totally incapable of conducting business in any form. Now it is not possible, in an Austrian country, to keep an important place without having the kind of talent that is required by the slow and complicated, but highly reasonable administration of that venerable Monarchy. The blunders made by the Marchese del Dongo scandalised the staff of his office, and even obstructed the course of public business. His ultra-monarchist utterances irritated the populace which the authorities sought to lull into a heedless slumber. One fine day he learned that His Majesty had been graciously pleased to accept the resignation which he had submitted of his post in the administration, and at the same time conferred on him the place of Second Grand Majordomo Major of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom. The Marchese was furious at the atrocious injustice of which he had been made a victim; he printed an open letter to a friend, he who so inveighed against the liberty of the press. Finally, he wrote to the Emperor that his Ministers were playing him false, and were no better than Jacobins. These things accomplished, he went sadly back to his castle of Grianta. He had one consolation. After the fall of Napoleon, certain powerful personages at Milan planned an assault in the streets on Conte Prina, a former Minister of the King of Italy, and a man of the highest merit. Conte Pietranera risked his own life to save that of the Minister, who was killed by blows from umbrellas after five hours of agony. A priest, the Marchese del Dongo's confessor, could have saved Prina by opening the wicket of the church of San Giovanni, in front of which the unfortunate Minister was dragged, and indeed left for a moment in the gutter, in the middle of the street; but he refused with derision to open his wicket, and, six months afterwards, the Marchese was happily able to secure for him a fine advancement.

PRINA

He execrated Conte Pietranera, his brother-in-law, who, not having an income of 50 louis, had the audacity to be quite content, made a point of showing himself loyal to what he had loved all his life, and had the insolence to preach that spirit of justice without regard for persons, which the Marchese called an infamous piece of Jacobinism. The Conte had refused to take service in Austria; this refusal was remembered against him, and, a few months after the death of Prina, the same persons who had hired the assassins contrived that General Pietranera should be flung into prison. Whereupon the Contessa, his wife, procured a passport and sent for post-horses to go to Vienna to tell the Emperor the truth. Prina's assassins took fright, and one of them, a cousin of Signora Pietranera, came to her at midnight, an hour before she was to start for Vienna, with the order for her husband's release. Next day, the Austrian General sent for Conte Pietranera, received him with every possible mark of distinction, and assured him that his pension as a retired officer would be issued to him without delay and on the most liberal scale. The gallant General Bubna, a man of sound judgment and warm heart, seemed quite ashamed of the assassination of Prina and the Conte's imprisonment.

After this brief storm, allayed by the Contessa's firmness of character, the couple lived, for better or worse, on the retired pay for which, thanks to General Bubna's recommendation, they were not long kept waiting.

Fortunately, it so happened that, for the last five or six years, the Contessa had been on the most friendly terms with a very rich young man, who was also an intimate friend of the Conte, and never failed to place at their disposal the finest team of English horses to be seen in Milan at the time, his box in the theatre alla Scala and his villa in the country. But the Conte had a sense of his own valour, he was full of generous impulses, he was easily carried away, and at such times allowed himself to make imprudent speeches. One day when he was out shooting with some young men, one of them, who had served under other flags than his, began to belittle the courage of the soldiers of the Cisalpine Republic. The Conte struck him, a fight at once followed, and the Conte, who was without support, among all these young men, was killed. This species of duel gave rise to a great deal of talk, and the persons who had been engaged in it took the precaution of going for a tour in Switzerland.

That absurd form of courage which is called resignation, the courage of a fool who allows himself to be hanged without a word of protest, was not at all in keeping with the Contessa's character. Furious at the death of her husband, she would have liked Limercati, the rich young man, her intimate friend, to be seized also by the desire to travel in Switzerland, and there to shoot or otherwise assault the murderer of Conte Pietranera.

MILAN

Limercati thought this plan the last word in absurdity, and the Contessa discovered that in herself contempt for him had killed her affection. She multiplied her attentions to Limercati; she sought to rekindle his love, and then to leave him stranded and so make him desperate. To render this plan of vengeance intelligible to French readers, I should explain that at Milan, in a land widely remote from our own, people are still made desperate by love. The Contessa, who, in her widow's weeds, easily eclipsed any of her rivals, flirted with all the young men of rank and fashion, and one of these, Conte N——, who, from the first, had said that he felt Limercati's good qualities to be rather heavy, rather starched for so spirited a woman, fell madly in love with her. She wrote to Limercati:

"Will you for once act like a man of spirit? Please to consider that you have never known me.

"I am, with a trace of contempt perhaps, your most humble servant,

"GINA PIETRANERA."

After reading this missive, Limercati set off for one of his country seats, his love rose to a climax, he became quite mad and spoke of blowing out his brains, an unheard-of thing in countries where hell is believed in. Within twenty-four hours of his arrival in the country, he had written to the Contessa offering her his hand and his rent-roll of 200,000 francs. She sent him back his letter, with its seal unbroken, by Conte N——'s groom. Whereupon Limercati spent three years on his estates, returning every other month to Milan, but without ever having the courage to remain there, and boring all his friends with his passionate love for the Contessa and his detailed accounts of the favours she had formerly bestowed on him. At first, he used to add that with Conte N—— she was ruining herself, and that such a connexion was degrading to her.

The fact of the matter was that the Contessa had no sort of love for Conte N——, and she told him as much when she had made quite sure of Limercati's despair. The Conte, who was no novice, besought her upon no account to divulge the sad truth which she had confided to him. "If you will be so extremely indulgent," he added, "as to continue to receive me with all the outward distinctions accorded to a reigning lover, I may perhaps be able to find a suitable position."

After this heroic declaration the Contessa declined to avail herself any longer either of Conte N——'s horses or of his box. But for the last fifteen years she had been accustomed to the most fashionable style of living; she had now to solve that difficult, or rather impossible problem: how to live in Milan on a pension of 1,500 francs. She left her palazzo, took a pair of rooms on a fifth floor, dismissed all her servants, including even her own maid whose place she filled with a poor old woman to do the housework. This sacrifice was as a matter of fact less heroic and less painful than it appears to us; at Milan poverty is not a thing to laugh at, and therefore does not present itself to trembling souls as the worst of evils. After some months of this noble poverty, besieged by incessant letters from Limercati, and indeed from Conte N—— who also wished to marry her, it came to pass that the Marchese del Dongo, miserly as a rule to the last degree, bethought himself that his enemies might find a cause for triumph in his sister's plight. What! A del Dongo reduced to living upon the pension which the court of Vienna, of which he had so many grounds for complaint, grants to the widows of its Generals!

He wrote to inform her that an apartment and an allowance worthy of his sister awaited her at the castle of Grianta. The Contessa's volatile mind embraced with enthusiasm the idea of this new mode of life; it was twenty years since she had lived in that venerable castle that rose majestically from among its old chestnuts planted in the days of the Sforza. "There," she told herself, "I shall find repose, and, at my age, is not that in itself happiness?" (Having reached one-and-thirty, she imagined that the time had come for her to retire.) "On that sublime lake by which I was born, there awaits me at last a happy and peaceful existence."

THE LAKE

I cannot say whether she was mistaken, but one thing certain is that this passionate soul, which had just refused so lightly the offer of two vast fortunes, brought happiness to the castle of Grianta. Her two nieces were wild with joy. "You have renewed the dear days of my youth," the Marchesa told her, as she took her in her arms; "before you came, I was a hundred." The Contessa set out to revisit, with Fabrizio, all those enchanting spots in the neighbourhood of Grianta, which travellers have made so famous: the Villa Melzi on the other shore of the lake, opposite the castle, and commanding a fine view of it; higher up, the sacred wood of the Sfrondata, and the bold promontory which divides the two arms of the lake, that of Como, so voluptuous, and the other which runs towards Lecco, grimly severe: sublime and charming views which the most famous site in the world, the Bay of Naples, may equal, but does not surpass. It was with ecstasy that the Contessa recaptured the memories of her earliest childhood and compared them with her present sensations. "The Lake of Como," she said to herself, "is not surrounded, like the Lake of Geneva, by wide tracts of land enclosed and cultivated according to the most approved methods, which suggest money and speculation. Here, on every side, I see hills of irregular height covered with clumps of trees that have grown there at random, which the hand of man has never yet spoiled and forced to yield a return. Standing among these admirably shaped hills which run down to the lake at such curious angles, I can preserve all the illusions of Tasso's and Ariosto's descriptions. All is noble and tender, everything speaks of love, nothing recalls the ugliness of civilisation. The villages halfway up their sides are hidden in tall trees, and above the tree-tops rises the charming architecture of their picturesque belfries. If some little field fifty yards across comes here and there to interrupt the clumps of chestnuts and wild cherries, the satisfied eye sees growing on it plants more vigorous and happier than elsewhere. Beyond these hills, the crests of which offer one hermitages in all of which one would like to dwell, the astonished eye perceives the peaks of the Alps, always covered in snow, and their stern austerity recalls to one so much of the sorrows of life as is necessary to enhance one's immediate pleasure. The imagination is touched by the distant sound of the bell of some little village hidden among the trees: these sounds borne across the waters which soften their tone, assume a tinge of gentle melancholy and resignation, and seem to be saying to man: 'Life is fleeting: do not therefore show yourself so obdurate towards the happiness that is offered you, make haste to enjoy it.'" The language of these enchanting spots, which have not their like in the world, restored to the Contessa the heart of a girl of sixteen. She could not conceive how she could have spent all these years without revisiting the lake. "Is it then to the threshold of old age," she asked herself, "that our happiness takes flight?" She bought a boat which Fabrizio, the Marchesa and she decorated with their own hands, having no money to spend on anything, in the midst of this most luxurious establishment; since his disgrace the Marchese del Dongo had doubled his aristocratic state. For example, in order to reclaim ten yards of land from the lake, near the famous plane avenue, in the direction of Cadenabbia, he had an embankment built the estimate for which ran to 80,000 francs. At the end of this embankment there rose, from the plans of the famous Marchese Cagnola, a chapel built entirely of huge blocks of granite, and in this chapel Marchesi, the sculptor then in fashion at Milan, built him a tomb on which a number of bas-reliefs were intended to represent the gallant deeds of his ancestors.

Fabrizio's elder brother, the Marchesino Ascanio, sought to join the ladies in their excursions; but his aunt flung water over his powdered hair, and found some fresh dart every day with which to puncture his solemnity. At length he delivered from the sight of his fat, pasty face the merry troop who did not venture to laugh in his presence. They supposed him to be the spy of the Marchese his father, and care had to be taken in handling that stern despot, always in a furious temper since his enforced retirement.

Ascanio swore to be avenged on Fabrizio.

There was a storm in which they were all in danger; although they were infinitely short of money, they paid the two boatmen generously not to say anything to the Marchese, who already was showing great ill humour at their taking his two daughters with them. They encountered a second storm; the storms on this lake are terrible and unexpected: gusts of wind sweep out suddenly from the two mountain gorges which run down into it on opposite sides and join battle on the water. The Contessa wished to land in the midst of the hurricane and pealing thunder; she insisted that, if she were to climb to a rock that stood up by itself in the middle of the lake and was the size of a small room, she would enjoy a curious spectacle; she would see herself assailed on all sides by raging waves; but in jumping out of the boat she fell into the water. Fabrizio dived in after her to save her, and both were carried away for some distance. No doubt it is not a pleasant thing to feel oneself drowning; but the spirit of boredom, taken by surprise, was banished from the feudal castle. The Contessa conceived a passionate enthusiasm for the primitive nature of the Priore Blanès and for his astrology. The little money that remained to her after the purchase of the boat had been spent on buying a spy-glass, and almost every evening, with her nieces and Fabrizio, she would take her stand on the platform of one of the gothic towers of the castle. Fabrizio was the learned one of the party, and they spent many hours there very pleasantly, out of reach of the spies.

It must be admitted that there were days on which the Contessa did not utter a word to anyone; she would be seen strolling under the tall chestnuts lost in sombre meditations; she was too clever a woman not to feel at times the tedium of having no one with whom to exchange ideas. But next day she would be laughing as before: it was the lamentations of her sister-in-law, the Marchesa, that produced these sombre impressions on a mind naturally so active.

"Are we to spend all the youth that is left to us in this gloomy castle?" the Marchesa used to exclaim.

Before the Contessa came, she had not had the courage even to feel these regrets.

Such was their life during the winter of 1814 and 1815. On two occasions, in spite of her poverty, the Contessa went to spend a few days at Milan; she was anxious to see a sublime ballet by Vigano, given at the Scala, and the Marchese raised no objections to his wife's accompanying her sister-in-law. They went to draw the arrears of the little pension, and it was the penniless widow of the Cisalpine General who lent a few sequins to the millionaire Marchesa del Dongo. These parties were delightful; they invited old friends to dinner, and consoled themselves by laughing at everything, just like children. This Italian gaiety, full of surprise and brio, made them forget the atmosphere of sombre gloom which the stern faces of the Marchese and his elder son spread around them at Grianta. Fabrizio, though barely sixteen, represented the head of the house admirably.

DEPARTURE

On the 7th of March, 1815, the ladies had been back for two days after a charming little excursion to Milan; they were strolling under the fine avenue of plane trees, then recently extended to the very edge of the lake. A boat appeared, coming from the direction of Como, and made strange signals. One of the Marchese's agents leaped out upon the bank: Napoleon had just landed from the Gulf of Juan. Europe was kind enough to be surprised at this event, which did not at all surprise the Marchese del Dongo; he wrote his Sovereign a letter full of the most cordial effusion; he offered him his talents and several millions of money, and informed him once again that his Ministers were Jacobins and in league with the ringleaders in Paris.

On the 8th of March, at six o'clock in the morning, the Marchese, wearing all his orders, was making his elder son dictate to him the draft of a third political despatch; he was solemnly occupied in transcribing this in his fine and careful hand, upon paper that bore the Sovereign's effigy as a watermark. At the same moment, Fabrizio was knocking at Contessa Pietranera's door.

"I am off," he informed her, "I am going to join the Emperor who is also King of Italy; he was such a good friend to your husband! I shall travel through Switzerland. Last night, at Menaggio, my friend Vasi, the dealer in barometers, gave me his passport; now you must give me a few napoleons, for I have only a couple on me; but if necessary I shall go on foot."

The Contessa wept with joy and grief. "Great Heavens! What can have put that idea into your head?" she cried, seizing Fabrizio's hands in her own.

She rose and went to fetch from the linen-cupboard, where it was carefully hidden, a little purse embroidered with pearls; it was all that she possessed in the world.

"Take it," she said to Fabrizio; "but, in heaven's name, do not let yourself be killed. What will your poor mother and I have left, if you are taken from us? As for Napoleon's succeeding, that, my poor boy, is impossible; our gentlemen will certainly manage to destroy him. Did you not hear, a week ago, at Milan the story of the twenty-three plots to assassinate him, all so carefully planned, from which it was only by a miracle that he escaped? And at that time he was all-powerful. And you have seen that it is not the will to destroy him that is lacking in our enemies; France ceased to count after he left it."

It was in a tone of the keenest emotion that the Contessa spoke to Fabrizio of the fate in store for Napoleon. "In allowing you to go to join him, I am sacrificing to him the dearest thing I have in the world," she said. Fabrizio's eyes grew moist, he shed tears as he embraced the Contessa, but his determination to be off was never for a moment shaken. He explained with effusion to this beloved friend all the reasons that had led to his decision, reasons which we take the liberty of finding highly attractive.

"Yesterday evening, it wanted seven minutes to six, we were strolling, you remember, by the shore of the lake along the plane avenue, below the Casa Sommariva, and we were facing the south. It was there that I first noticed, in the distance, the boat that was coming from Como, bearing such great tidings. As I looked at this boat without thinking of the Emperor, and only envying the lot of those who are free to travel, suddenly I felt myself seized by a profound emotion. The boat touched ground, the agent said something in a low tone to my father, who changed colour, and took us aside to announce the terrible news. I turned towards the lake with no other object but to hide the tears of joy that were flooding my eyes. Suddenly, at an immense height in the sky and on my right hand side, I saw an eagle, the bird of Napoleon; he flew majestically past making for Switzerland, and consequently for Paris. 'And I too,' I said to myself at that moment, 'will fly across Switzerland with the speed of an eagle, and will go to offer that great man a very little thing, but the only thing, after all, that I have to offer him, the support of my feeble arm. He wished to give us a country, and he loved my uncle.' At that instant, while I was gazing at the eagle, in some strange way my tears ceased to flow; and the proof that this idea came from above is that at the same moment, without any discussion, I made up my mind to go, and saw how the journey might be made. In the twinkling of an eye all the sorrows that, as you know, are poisoning my life, especially on Sundays, seemed to be swept away by a breath from heaven. I saw that mighty figure of Italy raise herself from the mire in which the Germans keep her plunged;[7] she stretched out her mangled arms still half loaded with chains towards her King and Liberator. 'And I,' I said to myself, 'a son as yet unknown to fame of that unhappy Mother, I shall go forth to die or to conquer with that man marked out by destiny, who sought to cleanse us from the scorn that is heaped upon us by even the most enslaved and the vilest among the inhabitants of Europe.'

"You know," he added in a low tone drawing nearer to the Contessa, and fastening upon her a pair of eyes from which fire darted, "you know that young chestnut which my mother, in the winter in which I was born, planted with her own hands beside the big spring in our forest, two leagues from here; before doing anything else I wanted to visit it. 'The spring is not far advanced,' I said to myself, 'very well, if my tree is in leaf, that shall be a sign for me. I also must emerge from the state of torpor in which I am languishing in this cold and dreary castle.' Do you not feel that these old blackened walls, the symbols now as they were once the instruments of despotism, are a perfect image of the dreariness of winter? They are to me what winter is to my tree.

"Would you believe it, Gina? Yesterday evening at half past seven I came to my chestnut; it had leaves, pretty little leaves that were quite big already! I kissed them, carefully so as not to hurt them. I turned the soil reverently round the dear tree. At once filled with a fresh enthusiasm, I crossed the mountain; I came to Menaggio: I needed a passport to enter Switzerland. The time had flown, it was already one o'clock in the morning when I found myself at Vasi's door. I thought that I should have to knock for a long time to arouse him, but he was sitting up with three of his friends. At the first word I uttered: 'You are going to join Napoleon' he cried; and he fell on my neck. The others too embraced me with rapture. 'Why am I married?' I heard one of them say."

Signora Pietranera had grown pensive. She felt that she must offer a few objections. If Fabrizio had had the slightest experience of life, he would have seen quite well that the Contessa herself did not believe in the sound reasons which she hastened to urge on him. But, failing experience, he had resolution; he did not condescend even to hear what those reasons were. The Contessa presently came down to making him promise that at least he would inform his mother of his intention.

"She will tell my sisters, and those women will betray me without knowing it!" cried Fabrizio with a sort of heroic grandeur.

"You should speak more respectfully," said the Contessa, smiling through her tears, "of the sex that will make your fortune; for you will never appeal to men, you have too much fire for prosaic souls."

The Marchesa dissolved in tears on learning her son's strange plan; she could not feel its heroism, and did everything in her power to keep him at home. When she was convinced that nothing in the world, except the walls of a prison, could prevent him from starting, she handed over to him the little money that she possessed; then she remembered that she had also, the day before, received nine or ten small diamonds, worth perhaps ten thousand francs, which the Marchese had entrusted to her to take to Milan to be set. Fabrizio's sisters came into their mother's room while the Contessa was sewing these diamonds into our hero's travelling coat; he handed the poor women back their humble napoleons. His sisters were so enthusiastic over his plan, they kissed him with so clamorous a joy that he took in his hand the diamonds that had still to be concealed and was for starting off there and then.

"You will betray me without knowing it," he said to his sisters. "Since I have all this money, there is no need to take clothes; one can get them anywhere." He embraced these dear ones and set off at once without even going back to his own room. He walked so fast, afraid of being followed by men on horseback, that before night he had entered Lugano. He was now, thank heaven, in a Swiss town, and had no longer any fear of being waylaid on the lonely road by constables in his father's pay. From this haven, he wrote him a fine letter, a boyish weakness which gave strength and substance to the Marchese's anger. Fabrizio took the post, crossed the Saint-Gothard; his progress was rapid, and he entered France by Pontarlier. The Emperor was in Paris. There Fabrizio's troubles began; he had started out with the firm intention of speaking to the Emperor: it had never occurred to him that this might be a difficult matter. At Milan, ten times daily he used to see Prince Eugène, and could have spoken to him had he wished. In Paris, every morning he went to the courtyard of the Tuileries to watch the reviews held by Napoleon; but never was he able to come near the Emperor. Our hero imagined all the French to be profoundly disturbed, as he himself was, by the extreme peril in which their country lay. At table in the hotel in which he was staying, he made no mystery about his plans; he found several young men with charming manners, even more enthusiastic than himself, who, in a very few days, did not fail to rob him of all the money that he possessed. Fortunately, out of pure modesty, he had said nothing of the diamonds given him by his mother. On the morning when, after an orgy overnight, he found that he had been decidedly robbed, he bought a fine pair of horses, engaged as servant an old soldier, one of the dealer's grooms, and, filled with contempt for the young men of Paris with their fine speeches, set out to join the army. He knew nothing except that it was concentrated near Maubeuge. No sooner had he reached the frontier than he felt that it would be absurd for him to stay in a house, toasting himself before a good fire, when there were soldiers in bivouac outside. In spite of the remonstrances of his servant, who was not lacking in common sense, he rashly made his way to the bivouacs on the extreme frontier, on the road into Belgium. No sooner had he reached the first battalion that was resting by the side of the road than the soldiers began to stare at the sight of this young civilian in whose appearance there was nothing that suggested uniform. Night was falling, a cold wind blew. Fabrizio went up to a fire and offered to pay for hospitality. The soldiers looked at one another amazed more than anything at the idea of payment, and willingly made room for him by the fire. His servant constructed a shelter for him. But, an hour later, the adjudant of the regiment happening to pass near the bivouac, the soldiers went to report to him the arrival of this stranger speaking bad French. The adjudant questioned Fabrizio, who spoke to him of his enthusiasm for the Emperor in an accent which aroused grave suspicion; whereupon this under-officer requested our hero to go with him to the Colonel, whose headquarters were in a neighbouring farm. Fabrizio's servant came up with the two horses. The sight of them seemed to make so forcible an impression upon the adjudant that immediately he changed his mind and began to interrogate the servant also. The latter, an old soldier, guessing his questioner's plan of campaign from the first, spoke of the powerful protection which his master enjoyed, adding that certainly they would not bone his fine horses. At once a soldier called by the adjudant put his hand on the servant's collar; another soldier took charge of the horses, and, with an air of severity, the adjudant ordered Fabrizio to follow him and not to answer back.

THE BIVOUAC

After making him cover a good league on foot, in the darkness rendered apparently more intense by the fires of the bivouacs which lighted the horizon on every side, the adjutant handed Fabrizio over to an officer of gendarmerie who, with a grave air, asked for his papers. Fabrizio showed his passport, which described him as a dealer in barometers travelling with his wares.

"What fools they are!" cried the officer; "this really is too much."

He put a number of questions to our hero who spoke of the Emperor and of Liberty in terms of the keenest enthusiasm; whereupon the officer of gendarmerie went off in peals of laughter.

"Gad! You're no good at telling a tale!" he cried. "It is a bit too much of a good thing their daring to send us young mugs like you!" And despite all the protestations of Fabrizio, who was dying to explain that he was not really a dealer in barometers, the officer sent him to the prison of B——, a small town in the neighbourhood where our hero arrived at about three o'clock in the morning, beside himself with rage and half dead with exhaustion.

Fabrizio, astonished at first, then furious, understanding absolutely nothing of what was happening to him, spent thirty-three long days in this wretched prison; he wrote letter after letter to the town commandant, and it was the gaoler's wife, a handsome Fleming of six-and-thirty, who undertook to deliver them. But as she had no wish to see so nice-looking a boy shot, and as moreover he paid well, she put all these letters without fail in the fire. Late in the evening, she would deign to come in and listen to the prisoner's complaints; she had told her husband that the young greenhorn had money, after which the prudent gaoler allowed her a free hand. She availed herself of this licence and received several gold napoleons in return, for the adjudant had taken only the horses, and the officer of gendarmerie had confiscated nothing at all. One afternoon in the month of June, Fabrizio heard a violent cannonade at some distance. So they were fighting at last! His heart leaped with impatience. He heard also a great deal of noise in the town; as a matter of fact a big movement of troops was being effected; three divisions were passing through B——. When, about eleven o'clock, the gaoler's wife came in to share his griefs, Fabrizio was even more friendly than usual; then, seizing hold of her hands:

"Get me out of here, I swear on my honour to return to prison as soon as they have stopped fighting."

"Stuff and nonsense! Have you the quibus?" He seemed worried; he did not understand the word quibus. The gaoler's wife, noticing his dismay, decided that he must be in low water, and instead of talking in gold napoleons as she had intended talked now only in francs.

WAR

"Listen," she said to him, "if you can put down a hundred francs, I will place a double napoleon on each eye of the corporal who comes to change the guard during the night. He won't be able to see you breaking out of prison, and if his regiment is to march to-morrow he will accept."

The bargain was soon struck. The gaoler's wife even consented to hide Fabrizio in her own room, from which he could more easily make his escape in the morning.

Next day, before dawn, the woman who was quite moved said to Fabrizio:

"My dear boy, you are still far too young for that dirty trade; take my advice, don't go back to it."

"What!" stammered Fabrizio, "is it a crime then to wish to defend one's country?"

"Enough said. Always remember that I saved your life; your case was clear, you would have been shot. But don't say a word to anyone, or you will lose my husband and me our job; and whatever you do, don't go about repeating that silly tale about being a gentleman from Milan disguised as a dealer in barometers, it's too stupid. Listen to me now, I'm going to give you the uniform of a hussar who died the other day in the prison; open your mouth as little as you possibly can; but if a serjeant or an officer asks you questions so that you have to answer, say that you've been lying ill in the house of a peasant who took you in out of charity when you were shivering with fever in a ditch by the roadside. If that does not satisfy them, you can add that you are going back to your regiment. They may perhaps arrest you because of your accent; then say that you were born in Piedmont, that you're a conscript who was left in France last year, and all that sort of thing."

For the first time, after thirty-three days of blind fury, Fabrizio grasped the clue to all that had happened. They took him for a spy. He argued with the gaoler's wife, who, that morning, was most affectionate; and finally, while armed with a needle she was taking in the hussar's uniform to fit him, he told his whole story in so many words to the astonished woman. For an instant she believed him; he had so innocent an air, and looked so nice dressed as a hussar.

"Since you have such a desire to fight," she said to him at length half convinced, "what you ought to have done as soon as you reached Paris was to enlist in a regiment. If you had paid for a serjeant's drink, the whole thing would have been settled." The gaoler's wife added much good advice for the future, and finally, at the first streak of dawn, let Fabrizio out of the house, after making him swear a hundred times over that he would never mention her name, whatever happened. As soon as Fabrizio had left the little town, marching boldly with the hussar's sabre under his arm, he was seized by a scruple. "Here I am," he said to himself, "with the clothes and the marching orders of a hussar who died in prison, where he was sent, they say, for stealing a cow and some silver plate! I have, so to speak, inherited his identity . . . and without wishing it or expecting it in any way! Beware of prison! The omen is clear, I shall have much to suffer from prisons!"

Not an hour had passed since Fabrizio's parting from his benefactress when the rain began to fall with such violence that the new hussar was barely able to get along, hampered by a pair of heavy boots which had not been made for him. Meeting a peasant mounted upon a sorry horse, he bought the animal, explaining by signs what he wanted; the gaoler's wife had recommended him to speak as little as possible, in view of his accent.

That day the army, which had just won the battle of Ligny, was marching straight on Brussels. It was the eve of the battle of Waterloo. Towards midday, the rain still continuing to fall in torrents, Fabrizio heard the sound of the guns; this joy made him completely oblivious of the fearful moments of despair in which so unjust an imprisonment had plunged him. He rode on until late at night, and, as he was beginning to have a little common sense, went to seek shelter in a peasant's house a long way from the road. This peasant wept and pretended that everything had been taken from him; Fabrizio gave him a crown, and he found some barley. "My horse is no beauty," Fabrizio said to himself, "but that makes no difference, he may easily take the fancy of some adjudant," and he went to lie down in the stable by its side. An hour before dawn Fabrizio was on the road, and, by copious endearments, succeeded in making his horse trot. About five o'clock, he heard the cannonade: it was the preliminaries of Waterloo.

[7]The speaker is carried away by passion; he is rendering in prose some lines of the famous Monti.

[CHAPTER THREE]

Fabrizio soon came upon some vivandières, and the extreme gratitude that he felt for the gaoler's wife of B—— impelled him to address them; he asked one of them where he would find the 4th Hussar Regiment, to which he belonged.

"You would do just as well not to be in such a hurry, young soldier," said the cantinière, touched by Fabrizio's pallor and glowing eyes. "Your wrist is not strong enough yet for the sabre-thrusts they'll be giving to-day. If you had a musket, I don't say, maybe you could let off your round as well as any of them."

This advice displeased Fabrizio; but however much he urged on his horse, he could go no faster than the cantinière in her cart. Every now and then the sound of the guns seemed to come nearer and prevented them from hearing each other speak, for Fabrizio was so beside himself with enthusiasm and delight that he had renewed the conversation. Every word uttered by the cantinière intensified his happiness by making him understand it. With the exception of his real name and his escape from prison, he ended by confiding everything to this woman who seemed such a good soul. She was greatly surprised and understood nothing at all of what this handsome young soldier was telling her.

"I see what it is," she exclaimed at length with an air of triumph. "You're a young gentleman who has fallen in love with the wife of some captain in the 4th Hussars. Your mistress will have made you a present of the uniform you're wearing, and you're going after her. As sure as God's in heaven, you've never been a soldier; but, like the brave boy you are, seeing your regiment's under fire, you want to be there too, and not let them think you a chicken."

WAR

Fabrizio agreed with everything; it was his only way of procuring good advice. "I know nothing of the ways of these French people," he said to himself, "and if I am not guided by someone I shall find myself being put in prison again, and they'll steal my horse."

"First of all, my boy," said the cantinière, who was becoming more and more of a friend to him, "confess that you're not one-and-twenty: at the very most you might be seventeen."

This was the truth, and Fabrizio admitted as much with good grace.

"Then, you aren't even a conscript; it's simply because of Madame's pretty face that you're going to get your bones broken. Plague it, she can't be particular. If you've still got some of the yellow-boys she sent you, you must first of all buy yourself another horse; look how your screw pricks up his ears when the guns sound at all near; that's a peasant's horse, and will be the death of you as soon as you reach the line. That white smoke you see over there above the hedge, that's the infantry firing, my boy. So prepare for a fine fright when you hear the bullets whistling over you. You'll do as well to eat a bit while there's still time."

Fabrizio followed this advice and, presenting a napoleon to the vivandière, asked her to accept payment.

"It makes one weep to see him!" cried the woman; "the poor child doesn't even know how to spend his money! It would be no more than you deserve if I pocketed your napoleon and put Cocotte into a trot; damned if your screw could catch me up. What would you do, stupid, if you saw me go off? Bear in mind, when the brute growls, never to show your gold. Here," she went on, "here's 18 francs, 50 centimes, and your breakfast costs you 30 sous. Now, we shall soon have some horses for sale. If the beast is a small one, you'll give ten francs, and, in any case, never more than twenty, not if it was the horse of the Four Sons of Aymon."

The meal finished, the vivandière, who was still haranguing, was interrupted by a woman who had come across the fields and passed them on the road.

"Hallo there, hi!" this woman shouted. "Hallo, Margot! Your 6th Light are over there on the right."

"I must leave you, my boy," said the vivandière to our hero; "but really and truly I pity you; I've taken quite a fancy to you, upon my word I have. You don't know a thing about anything, you're going to get a wipe in the eye, as sure as God's in heaven! Come along to the 6th Light with me."

"I quite understand that I know nothing," Fabrizio told her, "but I want to fight, and I'm determined to go over there towards that white smoke."

"Look how your horse is twitching his ears! As soon as he gets over there, even if he's no strength left, he'll take the bit in his teeth and start galloping, and heaven only knows where he'll land you. Will you listen to me now? As soon as you get to the troops, pick up a musket and a cartridge-pouch, get down among the men and copy what you see them do, exactly the same: But, good heavens, I'll bet you don't even know how to open a cartridge."

Fabrizio, stung to the quick, admitted nevertheless to his new friend that she had guessed aright.

"Poor boy! He'll be killed straight away; sure as God! It won't take long. You've got to come with me, absolutely," went on the cantinière in a tone of authority.

"But I want to fight."

"You shall fight too; why, the 6th Light are famous fighters, and there's fighting enough to-day for everyone."

"But shall we come soon to the regiment?"

"In a quarter of an hour at the most."

"With this honest woman's recommendation," Fabrizio told himself, "my ignorance of everything won't make them take me for a spy, and I shall have a chance of fighting." At this moment the noise of the guns redoubled, each explosion coming straight on top of the last. "It's like a Rosary," said Fabrizio.

"We're beginning to hear the infantry fire now," said the vivandière, whipping up her little horse, which seemed quite excited by the firing.

The cantinière turned to the right and took a side road that ran through the fields; there was a foot of mud in it; the little cart seemed about to be stuck fast: Fabrizio pushed the wheel. His horse fell twice; presently the road, though with less water on it, was nothing more than a bridle path through the grass. Fabrizio had not gone five hundred yards when his nag stopped short: it was a corpse, lying across the path, which terrified horse and rider alike.

Fabrizio's face, pale enough by nature, assumed a markedly green tinge; the cantinière, after looking at the dead man, said, as though speaking to herself: "That's not one of our Division." Then, raising her eyes to our hero, she burst out laughing.

"Aha, my boy! There's a titbit for you!" Fabrizio sat frozen. What struck him most of all was the dirtiness of the feet of this corpse which had already been stripped of its shoes and left with nothing but an old pair of trousers all clotted with blood.

"Come nearer," the cantinière ordered him, "get off your horse, you'll have to get accustomed to them; look," she cried, "he's stopped one in the head."

A bullet, entering on one side of the nose, had gone out at the opposite temple, and disfigured the corpse in a hideous fashion. It lay with one eye still open.

"Get off your horse then, lad," said the cantinière, "and give him a shake of the hand to see if he'll return it."

Without hesitation, although ready to yield up his soul with disgust, Fabrizio flung himself from his horse and took the hand of the corpse which he shook vigorously; then he stood still as though paralysed. He felt that he had not the strength to mount again. What horrified him more than anything was that open eye.

"The vivandière will think me a coward," he said to himself bitterly. But he felt the impossibility of making any movement; he would have fallen. It was a frightful moment; Fabrizio was on the point of being physically sick. The vivandière noticed this, jumped lightly down from her little carriage, and held out to him, without saying a word, a glass of brandy which he swallowed at a gulp; he was able to mount his screw, and continued on his way without speaking. The vivandière looked at him now and again from the corner of her eye.

"You shall fight to-morrow, my boy," she said at length; "to-day you're going to stop with me. You can see now that you've got to learn the business before you can become a soldier."

"On the contrary, I want to start fighting at once," exclaimed our hero with a sombre air which seemed to the vivandière to augur well. The noise of the guns grew twice as loud and seemed to be coming nearer. The explosions began to form a continuous bass; there was no interval between one and the next, and above this running bass, which suggested the roar of a torrent in the distance, they could make out quite plainly the rattle of musketry.

At this point the road dived down into a clump, of trees. The vivandière saw three or four soldiers of our army who were coming towards her as fast as their legs would carry them; she jumped nimbly down from her cart and ran into cover fifteen or twenty paces from the road. She hid herself in a hole which had been left where a big tree had recently been uprooted. "Now," thought Fabrizio, "we shall see whether I am a coward!" He stopped by the side of the little cart which the woman had abandoned, and drew his sabre. The soldiers paid no attention to him and passed at a run along the wood, to the left of the road.

"They're ours," said the vivandière calmly, as she came back, quite breathless, to her little cart. . . . "If your horse was capable of galloping, I should say: push ahead as far as the end of the wood, and see if there's anyone on the plain." Fabrizio did not wait to be told twice, he tore off a branch from a poplar, stripped it and started to lash his horse with all his might; the animal broke into a gallop for a moment, then fell back into its regular slow trot. The vivandière had put her horse into a gallop. "Stop, will you, stop!" she called after Fabrizio. Presently both were clear of the wood. Coming to the edge of the plain, they heard a terrifying din, guns and muskets thundered on every side, right, left, behind them. And as the clump of trees from which they emerged grew on a mound rising nine or ten feet above the plain, they could see fairly well a corner of the battle; but still there was no one to be seen in the meadow beyond the wood. This meadow was bordered, half a mile away, by a long row of willows, very bushy; above the willows appeared a white smoke which now and again rose eddying into the sky.

"If I only knew where the regiment was," said the cantinière, in some embarrassment. "It won't do to go straight ahead over this big field. By the way," she said to Fabrizio, "if you see one of the enemy, stick him with the point of your sabre, don't play about with the blade."

At this moment, the cantinière caught sight of the four soldiers whom we mentioned a little way back; they were coming out of the wood on to the plain to the left of the road. One of them was on horseback.

"There you are," she said to Fabrizio. "Hallo there!" she called to the mounted man, "come over here and have a glass of brandy." The soldiers approached.

"Where are the 6th Light?" she shouted.

"Over there, five minutes away, across that canal that runs along by the willows; why, Colonel Macon has just been killed."

"Will you take five francs for your horse, you?"

"Five francs! That's not a bad one, ma! An officer's horse I can sell in ten minutes for five napoleons."

"Give me one of your napoleons," said the vivandière to Fabrizio. Then going up to the mounted soldier: "Get off, quickly," she said to him, "here's your napoleon."

The soldier dismounted, Fabrizio sprang gaily on to the saddle, the vivandière unstrapped the little portmanteau which was on his old horse.

"Come and help me, all of you!" she said to the soldiers, "is that the way you leave a lady to do the work?"

But no sooner had the captured horse felt the weight of the portmanteau than he began to rear, and Fabrizio, who was an excellent horseman, had to use all his strength to hold him.

"A good sign!" said the vivandière, "the gentleman is not accustomed to being tickled by portmanteaus."

"A general's horse," cried the man who had sold it, "a horse that's worth ten napoleons if it's worth a liard."

"Here are twenty francs," said Fabrizio, who could not contain himself for joy at feeling between his legs a horse that could really move.

At that moment a shot struck the line of willows, through which it passed obliquely, and Fabrizio had the curious spectacle of all those little branches flying this way and that as though mown down by a stroke of the scythe.

"Look, there's the brute advancing," the soldier said to him as he took the twenty francs. It was now about two o'clock.

Fabrizio was still under the spell of this strange spectacle when a party of generals, followed by a score of hussars, passed at a gallop across one corner of the huge field on the edge of which he had halted: his horse neighed, reared several times in succession, then began violently tugging the bridle that was holding him. "All right, then," Fabrizio said to himself.

The horse, left to his own devices, dashed off hell for leather to join the escort that was following the generals. Fabrizio counted four gold-laced hats. A quarter of an hour later, from a few words said by one hussar to the next, Fabrizio gathered that one of these generals was the famous Marshal Ney. His happiness knew no bounds; only he had no way of telling which of the four generals was Marshal Ney; he would have given everything in the world to know, but he remembered that he had been told not to speak. The escort halted, having to cross a wide ditch left full of water by the rain overnight; it was fringed with tall trees and formed the left hand boundary of the field at the entrance to which Fabrizio had bought the horse. Almost all the hussars had dismounted; the bank of the ditch was steep and very slippery and the water lay quite three or four feet below the level of the field. Fabrizio, distracted with joy, was thinking more of Marshal Ney and of glory than of his horse, which, being highly excited, jumped into the canal, thus splashing the water up to a considerable height. One of the generals was soaked to the skin by the sheet of water, and cried with an oath: "Damn the f—— brute!" Fabrizio felt deeply hurt by this insult. "Can I ask him to apologise?" he wondered. Meanwhile, to prove that he was not so clumsy after all, he set his horse to climb the opposite bank of the ditch; but it rose straight up and was five or six feet high. He had to abandon the attempt; then he rode up stream, his horse being up to its head in water, and at last found a sort of drinking-place. By this gentle slope he was easily able to reach the field on the other side of the canal. He was the first man of the escort to appear there; he started to trot proudly down the bank; below him, in the canal, the hussars were splashing about, somewhat embarrassed by their position, for in many places the water was five feet deep. Two or three horses took fright and began to swim, making an appalling mess. A serjeant noticed the manœuvre that this youngster, who looked so very unlike a soldier, had just carried out.

"Up here! There is a watering-place on the left!" he shouted, and in time they all crossed.

On reaching the farther bank, Fabrizio had found the generals there by themselves; the noise of the guns seemed to him to have doubled; and it was all he could do to hear the general whom he had given such a good soaking and who now shouted in his ear:

"Where did you get that horse?"

Fabrizio was so much upset that he answered in Italian:

"L'ho comprato poco fa. (I bought it just now.)"

"What's that you say?" cried the general.

But the din at that moment became so terrific that Fabrizio could not answer him. We must admit that our hero was very little of a hero at that moment. However, fear came to him only as a secondary consideration; he was principally shocked by the noise, which hurt his ears. The escort broke into a gallop; they crossed a large batch of tilled land which lay beyond the canal. And this field was strewn with dead.

"Red-coats! red-coats!" the hussars of the escort exclaimed joyfully, and at first Fabrizio did not understand; then he noticed that as a matter of fact almost all these bodies wore red uniforms. One detail made him shudder with horror; he observed that many of these unfortunate red-coats were still alive; they were calling out, evidently asking for help, and no one stopped to give it them. Our hero, being most humane, took every possible care that his horse should not tread upon any of the red-coats. The escort halted; Fabrizio, who was not paying sufficient attention to his military duty, galloped on, his eyes fixed on a wounded wretch in front of him.

"Will you halt, you young fool!" the serjeant shouted after him. Fabrizio discovered that he was twenty paces on the generals' right front, and precisely in the direction in which they were gazing through their glasses. As he came back to take his place behind the other hussars, who had halted a few paces in rear of them, he noticed the biggest of these generals who was speaking to his neighbour, a general also, in a tone of authority and almost of reprimand; he was swearing. Fabrizio could not contain his curiosity; and, in spite of the warning not to speak, given him by his friend the gaoler's wife, he composed a short sentence in good French, quite correct, and said to his neighbour:

"Who is that general who is chewing up the one next to him?"

"Gad, it's the Marshal!"

"What Marshal?"

"Marshal Ney, you fool! I say, where have you been serving?"

Fabrizio, although highly susceptible, had no thought of resenting this insult; he was studying, lost in childish admiration, the famous Prince de la Moskowa, the "Bravest of the Brave."

Suddenly they all moved off at full gallop. A few minutes later Fabrizio saw, twenty paces ahead of him, a ploughed field the surface of which was moving in a singular fashion. The furrows were full of water and the soil, very damp, which formed the ridges between these furrows kept flying off in little black lumps three or four feet into the air. Fabrizio noticed as he passed this curious effect; then his thoughts turned to dreaming of the Marshal and his glory. He heard a sharp cry close to him; two hussars fell struck by shot; and, when he looked back at them, they were already twenty paces behind the escort. What seemed to him horrible was a horse streaming with blood that was struggling on the ploughed land, its hooves caught in its own entrails; it was trying to follow the others: its blood ran down into the mire.

"Ah! So I am under fire at last!" he said to himself. "I have seen shots fired!" he repeated with a sense of satisfaction. "Now I am a real soldier." At that moment, the escort began to go hell for leather, and our hero realised that it was shot from the guns that was making the earth fly up all round him. He looked vainly in the direction from which the balls were coming, he saw the white smoke of the battery at an enormous distance, and, in the thick of the steady and continuous rumble produced by the artillery fire, he seemed to hear shots discharged much closer at hand: he could not understand in the least what was happening.

At that moment, the generals and their escort dropped into a little road filled with water which ran five feet below the level of the fields.

The Marshal halted and looked again through his glasses. Fabrizio, this time, could examine him at his leisure. He found him to be very fair, with a big red face. "We don't have any faces like that in Italy," he said to himself. "With my pale cheeks and chestnut hair, I shall never look like that," he added despondently. To him these words implied: "I shall never be a hero." He looked at the hussars; with a solitary exception, all of them had yellow moustaches. If Fabrizio was studying the hussars of the escort, they were all studying him as well. Their stare made him blush, and, to get rid of his embarrassment, he turned his head towards the enemy. They consisted of widely extended lines of men in red, but, what greatly surprised him, these men seemed to be quite minute. Their long files, which were regiments or divisions, appeared no taller than hedges. A line of red cavalry were trotting in the direction of the sunken road along which the Marshal and his escort had begun to move at a walk, splashing through the mud. The smoke made it impossible to distinguish anything in the direction in which they were advancing; now and then one saw men moving at a gallop against this background of white smoke.

Suddenly, from the direction of the enemy, Fabrizio saw four men approaching hell for leather. "Ah! We are attacked," he said to himself; then he saw two of these men speak to the Marshal. One of the generals on the latter's staff set off at a gallop towards the enemy, followed by two hussars of the escort and by the four men who had just come up. After a little canal which they all crossed, Fabrizio found himself riding beside a serjeant who seemed a good-natured fellow. "I must speak to this one," he said to himself, "then perhaps they'll stop staring at me." He thought for a long time.

"Sir, this is the first time that I have been present at a battle," he said at length to the serjeant. "But is this a real battle?"

"Something like. But who are you?"

"I am the brother of a captain's wife."

"And what is he called, your captain?"

Our hero was terribly embarrassed; he had never anticipated this question. Fortunately, the Marshal and his escort broke into a gallop. "What French name shall I say?" he wondered. At last he remembered the name of the innkeeper with whom he had lodged in Paris; he brought his horse up to the serjeant's, and shouted to him at the top of his voice:

"Captain Meunier!" The other, not hearing properly in the roar of the guns, replied: "Oh, Captain Teulier? Well, he's been killed." "Splendid," thought Fabrizio. "Captain Teulier; I must look sad."

"Good God!" he cried; and assumed a piteous mien. They had left the sunken road and were crossing a small meadow, they were going hell for leather, shots were coming over again, the Marshal headed for a division of cavalry. The escort found themselves surrounded by dead and wounded men; but this sight had already ceased to make any impression on our hero; he had other things to think of.

While the escort was halted, he caught sight of the little cart of a cantinière, and his affection for this honourable corps sweeping aside every other consideration, set off at a gallop to join her.

"Stay where you are, curse you," the serjeant shouted after him.

"What can he do to me here?" thought Fabrizio, and he continued to gallop towards the cantinière. When he put spurs to his horse, he had had some hope that it might be his good cantinière of the morning; the horse and the little cart bore a strong resemblance, but their owner was quite different, and our hero thought her appearance most forbidding. As he came up to her, Fabrizio heard her say: "And he was such a fine looking man, too!" A very ugly sight awaited the new recruit; they were sawing off a cuirassier's leg at the thigh, a handsome young fellow of five feet ten. Fabrizio shut his eyes and drank four glasses of brandy straight off.

"How you do go for it, you boozer!" cried the cantinière. The brandy gave him an idea: "I must buy the goodwill of my comrades, the hussars of the escort."

"Give me the rest of the bottle," he said to the vivandière.

"What do you mean," was her answer, "what's left there costs ten francs, on a day like this."

As he rejoined the escort at a gallop:

"Ah! You're bringing us a drop of drink," cried the serjeant. "That was why you deserted, was it? Hand it over."

The bottle went round, the last man to take it flung it in the air after drinking. "Thank you, chum!" he cried to Fabrizio. All eyes were fastened on him kindly. This friendly gaze lifted a hundredweight from Fabrizio's heart; it was one of those hearts of too delicate tissue which require the friendship of those around it. So at last he had ceased to be looked at askance by his comrades; there was a bond between them! Fabrizio breathed a deep sigh of relief, then in a bold voice said to the serjeant:

"And if Captain Teulier has been killed, where shall I find my sister?" He fancied himself a little Machiavelli to be saying Teulier so naturally instead of Meunier.

"That's what you'll find out to-night," was the serjeant's reply.

The escort moved on again and made for some divisions of infantry. Fabrizio felt quite drunk; he had taken too much brandy, he was rolling slightly in his saddle: he remembered most opportunely a favourite saying of his mother's coachman: "When you've been lifting your elbow, look straight between your horse's ears, and do what the man next you does." The Marshal stopped for some time beside a number of cavalry units which he ordered to charge; but for an hour or two our hero was barely conscious of what was going on round about him. He was feeling extremely tired, and when his horse galloped he fell back on the saddle like a lump of lead.

Suddenly the serjeant called out to his men: "Don't you see the Emperor, curse you!" Whereupon the escort shouted: "Vive l'Empereur!" at the top of their voices. It may be imagined that our hero stared till his eyes started out of his head, but all he saw was some generals galloping, also followed by an escort. The long floating plumes of horsehair which the dragoons of the bodyguard wore on their helmets prevented him from distinguishing their faces. "So I have missed seeing the Emperor on a field of battle, all because of those cursed glasses of brandy!" This reflexion brought him back to his senses.

They went down into a road filled with water, the horses wished to drink.

"So that was the Emperor who went past then?" he asked the man next to him.

"Why, surely, the one with no braid on his coat. How is it you didn't see him?" his comrade answered kindly. Fabrizio felt a strong desire to gallop after the Emperor's escort and embody himself in it. What a joy to go really to war in the train of that hero! It was for that he had come to France. "I am quite at liberty to do it," he said to himself, "for after all I have no other reason for being where I am but the will of my horse, which started galloping after these generals."

What made Fabrizio decide to stay where he was was that the hussars, his new comrades, seemed so friendly towards him; he began to imagine himself the intimate friend of all the troopers with whom he had been galloping for the last few hours. He saw arise between them and himself that noble friendship of the heroes of Tasso and Ariosto. If he were to attach himself to the Emperor's escort, there would be fresh acquaintances to be made, perhaps they would look at him askance, for these other horsemen were dragoons, and he was wearing the hussar uniform like all the rest that were following the Marshal. The way in which they now looked at him set our hero on a pinnacle of happiness; he would have done anything in the world for his comrades; his mind and soul were in the clouds. Everything seemed to have assumed a new aspect now that he was among friends; he was dying to ask them various questions. "But I am still a little drunk," he said to himself, "I must bear in mind what the gaoler's wife told me." He noticed on leaving the sunken road that the escort was no longer with Marshal Ney; the general whom they were following was tall and thin, with a dry face and an awe-inspiring eye.

This general was none other than Comte d'A——, the Lieutenant Robert of the 15th of May, 1796. How delighted he would have been to meet Fabrizio del Dongo!

It was already some time since Fabrizio had noticed the earth flying off in black crumbs on being struck by shot; they came in rear of a regiment of cuirassiers, he could hear distinctly the rattle of the grapeshot against their breastplates, and saw several men fall.

The sun was now very low and had begun to set when the escort, emerging from a sunken road, mounted a little bank three or four feet high to enter a ploughed field. Fabrizio heard an odd little sound quite close to him: he turned his head, four men had fallen with their horses; the general himself had been unseated, but picked himself up, covered in blood. Fabrizio looked at the hussars who were lying on the ground: three of them were still making convulsive movements, the fourth cried: "Pull me out!" The serjeant and two or three men had dismounted to assist the general who, leaning upon his aide-de-camp, was attempting to walk a few steps; he was trying to get away from his horse, which lay on the ground struggling and kicking out madly.

The serjeant came up to Fabrizio. At that moment our hero heard a voice say behind him and quite close to his ear: "This is the only one that can still gallop." He felt himself seized by the feet; they were taken out of the stirrups at the same time as someone caught him underneath the arms; he was lifted over his horse's tail and then allowed to slip to the ground, where he landed sitting.

The aide-de-camp took Fabrizio's horse by the bridle; the general, with the help of the serjeant, mounted and rode off at a gallop; he was quickly followed by the six men who were left of the escort. Fabrizio rose up in a fury, and began to run after them shouting: "Ladri! Ladri! (Thieves! Thieves!)" It was an amusing experience to run after horse-stealers across a battlefield.

The escort and the general, Comte d'A——, disappeared presently behind a row of willows. Fabrizio, blind with rage, also arrived at this line of willows; he found himself brought to a halt by a canal of considerable depth which he crossed. Then, on reaching the other side, he began swearing again as he saw once more, but far away in the distance, the general and his escort vanishing among the trees. "Thieves! Thieves!" he cried, in French this time. In desperation, not so much at the loss of his horse as at the treachery to himself, he let himself sink down on the side of the ditch, tired out and dying of hunger. If his fine horse had been taken from him by the enemy, he would have thought no more about it; but to see himself betrayed and robbed by that serjeant whom he liked so much and by those hussars whom he regarded as brothers! That was what broke his heart. He could find no consolation for so great an infamy, and, leaning his back against a willow, began to shed hot tears. He abandoned one by one all those beautiful dreams of a chivalrous and sublime friendship, like that of the heroes of the Gerusalemme Liberata. To see death come to one was nothing, surrounded by heroic and tender hearts, by noble friends who clasp one by the hand as one yields one's dying breath! But to retain one's enthusiasm surrounded by a pack of vile scoundrels! Like all angry men Fabrizio exaggerated. After a quarter of an hour of this melting mood, he noticed that the guns were beginning to range on the row of trees in the shade of which he sat meditating. He rose and tried to find his bearings. He scanned those fields bounded by a wide canal and the row of pollard willows: he thought he knew where he was. He saw a body of infantry crossing the ditch and marching over the fields, a quarter of a league in front of him. "I was just falling asleep," he said to himself; "I must see that I'm not taken prisoner." And he put his best foot foremost. As he advanced, his mind was set at rest; he recognized the uniforms, the regiments by which he had been afraid of being cut off were French. He made a right incline so as to join them.

After the moral anguish of having been so shamefully betrayed and robbed, there came another which, at every moment, made itself felt more keenly; he was dying of hunger. It was therefore with infinite joy that after having walked, or rather run for ten minutes, he saw that the column of infantry, which also had been moving very rapidly, was halting to take up a position. A few minutes later, he was among the nearest of the soldiers.

"Friends, could you sell me a mouthful of bread?"

"I say, here's a fellow who thinks we're bakers!"

This harsh utterance and the general guffaw that followed it had a crushing effect on Fabrizio. So war was no longer that noble and universal uplifting of souls athirst for glory which he had imagined it to be from Napoleon's proclamations! He sat down, or rather let himself fall on the grass; he turned very pale. The soldier who had spoken to him, and who had stopped ten paces off to clean the lock of his musket with his handkerchief, came nearer and flung him a lump of bread; then, seeing that he did not pick it up, broke off a piece which he put in our hero's mouth. Fabrizio opened his eyes, and ate the bread without having the strength to speak. When at length he looked round for the soldier to pay him, he found himself alone; the men nearest to him were a hundred yards off and were marching. Mechanically he rose and followed them. He entered a wood; he was dropping with exhaustion, and already had begun to look round for a comfortable resting-place; but what was his delight on recognising first of all the horse, then the cart, and finally the cantinière of that morning! She ran to him and was frightened by his appearance.

"Still going, my boy," she said to him; "you're wounded then? And where's your fine horse?" So saying she led him towards the cart, upon which she made him climb, supporting him under the arms. No sooner was he in the cart than our hero, utterly worn out, fell fast asleep.

[CHAPTER FOUR]

Nothing could awaken him, neither the muskets fired close to the cart nor the trot of the horse which the cantinière was flogging with all her might. The regiment, attacked unexpectedly by swarms of Prussian cavalry, after imagining all day that they were winning the battle, was beating a retreat or rather fleeing in the direction of France.

The colonel, a handsome young man, well turned out, who had succeeded Macon, was sabred; the battalion commander who took his place, an old man with white hair, ordered the regiment to halt. "Damn you," he cried to his men, "in the days of the Republic we waited till we were forced by the enemy before running away. Defend every inch of ground, and get yourselves killed!" he shouted, and swore at them. "It is the soil of the Fatherland that these Prussians want to invade now!"

The little cart halted; Fabrizio awoke with a start. The sun had set some time back; he was quite astonished to see that it was almost night. The troops were running in all directions in a confusion which greatly surprised our hero; they looked shame-faced, he thought.

"What is happening?" he asked the cantinière.

"Nothing at all. Only that we're in the soup, my boy; it's the Prussian cavalry mowing us down, that's all. The idiot of a general thought at first they were our men. Come, quick, help me to mend Cocotte's trace: it's broken."

Several shots were fired ten yards off. Our hero, cool and composed, said to himself: "But really, I haven't fought at all, the whole day; I have only escorted a general.—I must go and fight," he said to the cantinière.

"Keep calm, you shall fight, and more than you want! We're done for.

"Aubry, my lad," she called out to a passing corporal, "keep an eye on the little cart now and then."

"Are you going to fight?" Fabrizio asked Aubry.

"Oh, no, I'm putting my pumps on to go to a dance!"

"I shall follow you."

"I tell you, he's all right, the little hussar," cried the cantinière. "The young gentleman has a stout heart." Corporal Aubry marched on without saying a word. Eight or nine soldiers ran up and joined him; he led them behind a big oak surrounded by brambles. On reaching it he posted them along the edge of the wood, still without uttering a word, on a widely extended front, each man being at least ten paces from the next.

"Now then, you men," said the corporal, opening his mouth for the first time, "don't fire till I give the order: remember you've only got three rounds each."

"Why, what is happening?" Fabrizio wondered. At length, when he found himself alone with the corporal, he said to him: "I have no musket."

"Will you hold your tongue? Go forward there: fifty paces in front of the wood you'll find one of the poor fellows of the Regiment who've been sabred; you will take his cartridge-pouch and his musket. Don't strip a wounded man, though; take the pouch and musket from one who's properly dead, and hurry up or you'll be shot in the bade by our fellows." Fabrizio set off at a run and returned the next minute with a musket and a pouch.

"Load your musket and stick yourself behind this tree, and whatever you do don't fire till you get the order from me. . . . Great God in heaven!" the corporal broke off, "he doesn't even know how to load!" He helped Fabrizio to do this while going on with his instructions. "If one of the enemy's cavalry gallops at you to cut you down, dodge round your tree and don't fire till he's within three paces: wait till your bayonet's practically touching his uniform.

WAR

"Throw that great sabre away," cried the corporal. "Good God, do you want it to trip you up? Fine sort of soldiers they're sending us these days!" As he spoke he himself took hold of the sabre which he flung angrily away.

"You there, wipe the flint of your musket with your handkerchief. Have you never fired a musket?"

"I am a hunter."

"Thank God for that!" went on the corporal with a loud sigh. "Whatever you do, don't fire till I give the order." And he moved away.

Fabrizio was supremely happy. "Now I'm going to do some real fighting," he said to himself, "and kill one of the enemy. This morning they were sending cannonballs over, and I did nothing but expose myself and risk getting killed; that's a fool's game." He gazed all round him with extreme curiosity. Presently he heard seven or eight shots fired quite close at hand. But receiving no order to fire he stood quietly behind his tree. It was almost night; he felt he was in a look-out, bear-shootings on the mountain of Tramezzina, above Grianta. A hunter's idea came to him: he took a cartridge from his pouch and removed the ball. "If I see him," he said, "it won't do to miss him," and he slipped this second ball into the barrel of his musket. He heard shots fired close to his tree; at the same moment he saw a horseman in blue pass in front of him at a gallop, going from right to left. "It is more than three paces," he said to himself, "but at that range I am certain of my mark." He kept the trooper carefully sighted with his musket and finally pressed the trigger: the trooper fell with his horse. Our hero imagined he was stalking game: he ran joyfully out to collect his bag. He was actually touching the man, who appeared to him to be dying, when, with incredible speed, two Prussian troopers charged down on him to sabre him. Fabrizio dashed back as fast as he could go to the wood; to gain speed he flung his musket away. The Prussian troopers were not more than three paces from him when he reached another plantation of young oaks, as thick as his arm and quite upright, which fringed the wood. These little oaks delayed the horsemen for a moment, but they passed them and continued their pursuit of Fabrizio along a clearing. Once again they were just overtaking him when he slipped in among seven or eight big trees. At that moment his face was almost scorched by the flame of five or six musket shots fired from in front of him. He ducked his head; when he raised it again he found himself face to face with the corporal.

"Did you kill your man?" Corporal Aubry asked him.

"Yes; but I've lost my musket."

"It's not muskets we're short of. You're not a bad b——; though you do look as green as a cabbage you've won the day all right, and these men here have just missed the two who were chasing you and coming straight at them. I didn't see them myself. What we've got to do now is to get away at the double; the Regiment must be half a mile off, and there's a bit of a field to cross, too, where we may find ourselves surrounded."

As he spoke, the corporal marched off at a brisk pace at the head of his ten men. Two hundred yards farther on, as they entered the little field he had mentioned, they came upon a wounded general who was being carried by his aide-de-camp and an orderly.

"Give me four of your men," he said to the corporal in a faint voice, "I've got to be carried to the ambulance; my leg is shattered."

"Go and f—— yourself!" replied the corporal, "you and all your generals. You've all of you betrayed the Emperor to-day."

"What," said the general, furious, "you dispute my orders. Do you know that I am General Comte B——, commanding your Division," and so on. He waxed rhetorical. The aide-de-camp flung himself on the men. The corporal gave him a thrust in the arm with his bayonet, then made off with his party at the double. "I wish they were all in your boat," he repeated with an oath; "I'd shatter their arms and legs for them. A pack of puppies! All of them bought by the Bourbons, to betray the Emperor!" Fabrizio listened with a thrill of horror to this frightful accusation.

About ten o'clock that night the little party overtook their regiment on the outskirts of a large village which divided the road into several very narrow streets; but Fabrizio noticed that Corporal Aubry avoided speaking to any of the officers. "We can't get on," he called to his men. All these streets were blocked with infantry, cavalry, and, worst of all, by the limbers and wagons of the artillery. The corporal tried three of these streets in turn; after advancing twenty yards he was obliged to halt. Everyone was swearing and losing his temper.

"Some traitor in command here, too!" cried the corporal: "if the enemy has the sense to surround the village, we shall all be caught like rats in a trap. Follow me, you." Fabrizio looked round; there were only six men left with the corporal. Through a big gate which stood open they came into a huge courtyard; from this courtyard they passed into a stable, the back door of which let them into a garden. They lost their way for a moment and wandered blindly about. But finally, going through a hedge, they found themselves in a huge field of buckwheat. In less than half an hour, guided by the shouts and confused noises, they had regained the high road on the other side of the village. The ditches on either side of this road were filled with muskets that had been thrown away; Fabrizio selected one: but the road, although very broad, was so blocked with stragglers and transport that in the next half-hour the corporal and Fabrizio had not advanced more than five hundred yards at the most; they were told that this road led to Charleroi. As the village clock struck eleven:

"Let us cut across the fields again," said the corporal. The little party was reduced now to three men, the corporal and Fabrizio. When they had gone a quarter of a league from the high road: "I'm done," said one of the soldiers.

"Me, too!" said another.

"That's good news! We're all in the same boat," said the corporal; "but do what I tell you and you'll get through all right." His eye fell on five or six trees marking the line of a little ditch in the middle of an immense cornfield. "Make for the trees!" he told his men; "lie down," he added when they had reached the trees, "and not a sound, remember. But before you go to sleep, who's got any bread?"

"I have," said one of the men.

"Give it here," said the corporal in a tone of authority. He divided the bread into five pieces and took the smallest himself.

"A quarter of an hour before dawn," he said as he ate it, "you'll have the enemy's cavalry on your backs. You've got to see you're not sabred. A man by himself is done for with cavalry after him on these big plains, but five can get away; keep in close touch with me, don't fire till they're at close range, and to-morrow evening I'll undertake to get you to Charleroi." The corporal roused his men an hour before daybreak and made them recharge their muskets. The noise on the high road still continued; it had gone on all night: it was like the sound of a torrent heard from a long way off.

"They're like a flock of sheep running away," said Fabrizio with a guileless air to the corporal.

"Will you shut your mouth, you young fool!" said the corporal, greatly indignant. And the three soldiers who with Fabrizio composed his whole force scowled angrily at our hero as though he had uttered blasphemy. He had insulted the nation.

"That is where their strength lies!" thought our hero. "I noticed it before with the Viceroy at Milan; they are not running away, oh, no! With these Frenchmen you must never speak the truth if it shocks their vanity. But as for their savage scowls, they don't trouble me, and I must let them understand as much." They kept on their way, always at an interval of five hundred yards from the torrent of fugitives that covered the high road. A league farther on, the corporal and his party crossed a road running into the high road in which a number of soldiers were lying. Fabrizio purchased a fairly good horse which cost him forty francs, and among all the sabres that had been thrown down everywhere made a careful choice of one that was long and straight. "Since I'm told I've got to stick them," he thought, "this is the best." Thus equipped, he put his horse into a gallop and soon overtook the corporal who had gone on ahead. He sat up in his stirrups, took hold with his left hand of the scabbard of his straight sabre, and said to the four Frenchmen:

"Those people going along the high road look like a flock of sheep . . . they are running like frightened sheep. . . ."

In spite of his dwelling upon the word sheep, his companions had completely forgotten that it had annoyed them an hour earlier. Here we see one of the contrasts between the Italian character and the French; the Frenchman is no doubt the happier of the two; he glides lightly over the events of life and bears no malice afterwards.

We shall not attempt to conceal the fact that Fabrizio was highly pleased with himself after using the word sheep. They marched on, talking about nothing in particular. After covering two leagues more, the corporal, still greatly astonished to see no sign of the enemy's cavalry, said to Fabrizio:

"You are our cavalry; gallop over to that farm on the little hill; ask the farmer if he will sell us breakfast: mind you tell him there are only five of us. If he hesitates, put down five francs of your money in advance; but don't be frightened, we'll take the dollar back from him after we've eaten."

Fabrizio looked at the corporal; he saw in his face an imperturbable gravity and really an air of moral superiority; he obeyed. Everything fell out as the commander in chief had anticipated; only, Fabrizio insisted on their not taking back by force the five francs he had given to the farmer.

"The money is mine," he said to his friends; "I'm not paying for you, I'm paying for the oats he's given my horse."

Fabrizio's French accent was so bad that his companions thought they detected in his words a note of superiority; they were keenly annoyed, and from that moment a duel began to take shape in their minds for the end of the day. They found him very different from themselves, which shocked them; Fabrizio, on the contrary, was beginning to feel a warm friendship towards them.

They had marched without saying a word for a couple of hours when the corporal, looking across at the high road, exclaimed in a transport of joy: "There's the Regiment!" They were soon on the road; but, alas, round the eagle were mustered not more than two hundred men. Fabrizio's eye soon caught sight of the vivandière: she was going on foot, her eyes were red and every now and again she burst into tears. Fabrizio looked in vain for the little cart and Cocotte.

"Stripped, ruined, robbed!" cried the vivandière, in answer to our hero's, inquiring glance. He, without a word, got down from his horse, took hold of the bridle and said to the vivandière: "Mount!" She did not have to be told twice.

"Shorten the stirrups for me," was her only remark.

As soon as she was comfortably in the saddle she began to tell Fabrizio all the disasters of the night. After a narrative of endless length but eagerly drunk in by our hero who, to tell the truth, understood nothing at all of what she said but had a tender feeling for the vivandière, she went on:

"And to think that they were Frenchmen who robbed me, beat me, destroyed me. . . ."

"What! It wasn't the enemy?" said Fabrizio with an air of innocence which made his grave, pale face look charming.

"What a fool you are, you poor boy!" said the vivandière, smiling through her tears; "but you're very nice, for all that."

"And such as he is, he brought down his Prussian properly," said Corporal Aubry, who, in the general confusion round them, happened to be on the other side of the horse on which the cantinière was sitting. "But he's proud," the corporal went on. . . . Fabrizio made an impulsive movement. "And what's your name?" asked the corporal; "for if there's a report going in I should like to mention you."

"I'm called Vasi," replied Fabrizio, with a curious expression on his face. "Boulot, I mean," he added, quickly correcting himself.

Boulot was the name of the late possessor of the marching orders which the gaoler's wife at B-had given him; on his way from B—— he had studied them carefully, for he was beginning to think a little and was no longer so easily surprised. In addition to the marching orders of Trooper Boulot, he had stowed away in a safe place the precious Italian passport according to which he was entitled to the noble appellation of Vasi, dealer in barometers. When the corporal had charged him with being proud, it had been on the tip of his tongue to retort: "I proud! I, Fabrizio Volterra, Marchesino del Dongo, who consent to go by the name of a Vasi, dealer in barometers!"

While he was making these reflexions and saying to himself: "I must not forget that I am called Boulot, or look-out for the prison fate threatens me with," the corporal and the cantinière had been exchanging a few words with regard to him.

"Don't say I'm inquisitive," said the cantinière, ceasing to address him in the second person singular, "it's for your good I ask you these questions. Who are you, now, really?"

Fabrizio did not reply at first. He was considering that never again would he find more devoted friends to ask for advice, and he was in urgent need of advice from someone. "We are coming into a fortified place, the governor will want to know who I am, and ware prison if I let him see by my answers that I know nobody in the 4th Hussar Regiment whose uniform I am wearing!" In his capacity as an Austrian subject, Fabrizio knew all about the importance to be attached to a passport. Various members of his family, although noble and devout, although supporters of the winning side, had been in trouble a score of times over their passports; he was therefore not in the least put out by the question which the cantinière had addressed to him. But as, before answering, he had to think of the French words which would express his meaning most clearly, the cantinière, pricked by a keen curiosity, added, to induce him to speak: "Corporal Aubry and I are going to give you some good advice."

"I have no doubt you are," replied Fabrizio. "My name is Vasi and I come from Genoa; my sister, who is famous for her beauty, is married to a captain. As I am only seventeen, she made me come to her to let me see something of France, and form my character a little; not finding her in Paris, and knowing that she was with this army, I came on here. I've searched for her everywhere and haven't found her. The soldiers, who were puzzled by my accent, had me arrested. I had money then, I gave some to the gendarme, who let me have some marching orders and a uniform, and said to me: 'Get away with you, and swear you'll never mention my name.'

"What was he called?" asked the cantinière.

"I've given my word," said Fabrizio.

"He's right," put in the corporal, "the gendarme is a sweep, but our friend ought not to give his name. And what is the other one called, this captain, your sister's husband? If we knew his name, we could try to find him."

"Teulier, Captain in the 4th Hussars," replied our hero.

"And so," said the corporal, with a certain subtlety, "from your foreign accent the soldiers took you for a spy?"

"That's the abominable word!" cried Fabrizio, his eyes blazing. "I who love the Emperor so and the French people! And it was that insult that annoyed me more than anything."

"There's no insult about it; that's where you're wrong; the soldiers' mistake was quite natural," replied Corporal Aubry gravely.

And he went on to explain in the most pedantic manner that in the army one must belong to some corps and wear a uniform, failing which it was quite simple that people should take one for a spy. "The enemy sends us any number of them; everybody's a traitor in this war." The scales fell from Fabrizio's eyes; he realised for the first time that he had been in the wrong in everything that had happened to him during the last two months.

"But make the boy tell us the whole story," said the cantinière, her curiosity more and more excited. Fabrizio obeyed. When he had finished:

"It comes to this," said the cantinière, speaking in a serious tone to the corporal, "this child is not a soldier at all; we're going to have a bloody war now that we've been beaten and betrayed. Why should he go and get his bones broken free, gratis and for nothing?"

"Especially," put in the corporal, "as he doesn't even know how to load his musket, neither by numbers, nor in his own time. It was I put in the shot that brought down the Prussian."

"Besides, he lets everyone see the colour of his money," added the cantinière; "he will be robbed of all he has as soon as he hasn't got us to look after him."

"The first cavalry non-com he comes across," said the corporal, "will take it from him to pay for his drink, and perhaps they'll enlist him for the enemy; they're all traitors. The first man he meets will order him to follow, and he'll follow him; he would do better to join our Regiment."

"No, please, if you don't mind, corporal!" Fabrizio exclaimed with animation; "I am more comfortable on a horse. And, besides, I don't know how to load a musket, and you have seen that I can manage a horse."

Fabrizio was extremely proud of this little speech. We need not report the long discussion that followed between the corporal and the cantinière as to his future destiny. Fabrizio noticed that in discussing him these people repeated three or four times all the circumstances of his story: the soldiers' suspicions, the gendarme selling him marching orders and a uniform, the accident by which, the day before, he had found himself forming part of the Marshal's escort, the glimpse of the Emperor as he galloped past, the horse that had been scoffed from him, and so on indefinitely.

With feminine curiosity the cantinière kept harking back incessantly to the way in which he had been dispossessed of the good horse which she had made him buy.

"You felt yourself seized by the feet, they lifted you gently over your horse's tail, and sat you down on the ground!" "Why repeat so often," Fabrizio said to himself, "what all three of us know perfectly well?" He had not yet discovered that this is how, in France, the lower orders proceed in quest of ideas.

"How much money have you?" the cantinière asked him suddenly. Fabrizio had no hesitation in answering. He was sure of the nobility of the woman's nature; that is the fine side of France.

"Altogether, I may have got left thirty napoleons in gold, and eight or nine five-franc pieces."

"In that case, you have a clear field!" exclaimed the cantinière. "Get right away from this rout of an army; clear out, take the first road with ruts on it that you come to on the right; keep your horse moving and your back to the army. At the first opportunity, buy some civilian clothes. When you've gone nine or ten leagues and there are no more soldiers in sight, take the mail-coach, and go and rest for a week and eat beefsteaks in some nice town. Never let anyone know that you've been in the army, or the police will take you up as a deserter; and, nice as you are, my boy, you're not quite clever enough yet to stand up to the police. As soon as you've got civilian clothes on your back, tear up your marching orders into a thousand pieces and go back to your real name: say that you're Vasi. And where ought he to say he comes from?" she asked the corporal.

"From Cambrai on the Scheldt: it's a good town and quite small, if you know what I mean. There's a cathedral there, and Fénelon."

"That's right," said the cantinière. "Never let on to anyone that you've been in battle, don't breathe a word about B——, or the gendarme who sold you the marching orders. When you're ready to go back to Paris, make first for Versailles, and pass the Paris barrier from that side in a leisurely way, on foot, as if you were taking a stroll. Sew up your napoleons inside your breeches, and remember, when you have to pay for anything, shew only the exact sum that you want to spend. What makes me sad is that they'll take you and rob you and strip you of everything you have. And whatever will you do without money, you that don't know how to look after yourself . . ." and so on.

The good woman went on talking for some time still; the corporal indicated his support by nodding his head, not being able to get a word in himself. Suddenly the crowd that was packing the road first of all doubled its pace, then, in the twinkling of an eye, crossed the little ditch that bounded the road on the left and fled helter-skelter across country. Cries of "The Cossacks! The Cossacks!" rose from every side.

"Take back your horse!" the cantinière shouted.

"God forbid!" said Fabrizio. "Gallop! Away with you! I give him to you. Do you want something to buy another cart with? Half of what I have is yours."

"Take back your horse, I tell you!" cried the cantinière angrily; and she prepared to dismount. Fabrizio drew his sabre. "Hold on tight!" he shouted to her, and gave two or three strokes with the flat of his sabre to the horse, which broke into a gallop and followed the fugitives.

Our hero stood looking at the road; a moment ago, two or three thousand people had been jostling along it, packed together like peasants at the tail of a procession. After the shout of: "Cossacks!" he saw not a soul on it; the fugitives had cast away shakoes, muskets, sabres, everything. Fabrizio, quite bewildered, climbed up into a field on the right of the road and twenty or thirty feet above it; he scanned the line of the road in both directions, and the plain, but saw no trace of the Cossacks. "Funny people, these French!" he said to himself. "Since I have got to go to the right," he thought, "I may as well start off at once; it is possible that these people have a reason for running away that I don't know." He picked up a musket, saw that it was charged, shook up the powder in the priming, cleaned the flint, then chose a cartridge-pouch that was well filled and looked round him again in all directions; he was absolutely alone in the middle of this plain which just now had been so crowded with people. In the far distance he could see the fugitives who were beginning to disappear behind the trees, and were still running. "That's a very odd thing," he said to himself, and remembering the tactics employed by the corporal the night before, he went and sat down in the middle of a field of corn. He did not go farther because he was anxious to see again his good friends the cantinière and Corporal Aubry.

In this cornfield, he made the discovery that he had no more than eighteen napoleons, instead of thirty as he had supposed; but he still had some small diamonds which he had stowed away in the lining of the hussar's boots, before dawn, in the gaoler's wife's room at B——. He concealed his napoleons as best he could, pondering deeply the while on the sudden disappearance of the others. "Is that a bad omen for me?" he asked himself. What distressed him most was that he had not asked Corporal Aubry the question: "Have I really taken part in a battle?" It seemed to him that he had, and his happiness would have known no bounds could he have been certain of this.

"But even if I have," he said to himself, "I took part in it bearing the name of a prisoner, I had a prisoner's marching orders in my pocket, and, worse still, his coat on my back! That is the fatal threat to my future: what would the Priore Blanès say to it? And that wretched Boulot died in prison. It is all of the most sinister augury; fate will lead me to prison." Fabrizio would have given anything in the world to know whether Trooper Boulot had really been guilty; when he searched his memory, he seemed to recollect that the gaoler's wife had told him that the hussar had been taken up not only for the theft of silver plate but also for stealing a cow from a peasant and nearly beating the peasant to death: Fabrizio had no doubt that he himself would be sent to prison some day for a crime which would bear some relation to that of Trooper Boulot. He thought of his friend the parroco Blanès: what would he not have given for an opportunity of consulting him! Then he remembered that he had not written to his aunt since leaving Paris. "Poor Gina!" he said to himself. And tears stood in his eyes, when suddenly he heard a slight sound quite close to him: a soldier was feeding three horses on the standing corn; he had taken the bits out of their mouths and they seemed half dead with hunger; he was holding them by the snaffle. Fabrizio got up like a partridge; the soldier seemed frightened. Our hero noticed this, and yielded to the pleasure of playing the hussar for a moment.

"One of those horses belongs to me, f—— you, but I don't mind giving you five francs for the trouble you've taken in bringing it here."

"What are you playing at?" said the soldier. Fabrizio took aim at him from a distance of six paces.

"Let go the horse, or I'll blow your head off."

The soldier had his musket slung on his back; he reached over his shoulder to seize it.

"If you move an inch, you're a dead man!" cried Fabrizio, rushing upon him.

"All right, give me the five francs and take one of the horses," said the embarrassed soldier, after casting a rueful glance at the high road, on which there was absolutely no one to be seen. Fabrizio, keeping his musket raised in his left hand, with the right flung him three five franc pieces.

"Dismount, or you're a dead man. Bridle the black, and go farther off with the other two. . . . If you move, I fire."

The soldier looked savage but obeyed. Fabrizio went up to the horse and passed the rein over his left arm, without losing sight of the soldier, who was moving slowly away; when our hero saw that he had gone fifty paces, he jumped nimbly on to the horse. He had barely mounted and was feeling with his foot for the off stirrup when he heard a bullet whistle past close to his head; it was the soldier who had fired at him. Fabrizio, beside himself with rage, started galloping after the soldier who ran off as fast as his legs could carry him, and presently Fabrizio saw him mount one of his two horses and gallop away. "Good, he's out of range now," he said to himself. The horse he had just bought was a magnificent animal, but seemed half starved. Fabrizio returned to the high road, where there was still not a living soul; he crossed it and put his horse into a trot to reach a little fold in the ground on the left, where he hoped to find the cantinière; but when he was at the top of the little rise he could see nothing save, more than a league away, a few scattered troops. "It is written that I shall not see her again," he said to himself with a sigh, "the good, brave woman!" He came to a farm which he had seen in the distance on the right of the road. Without dismounting, and after paying for it in advance, he made the farmer produce some oats for his poor horse, which was so famished that it began to gnaw the manger. An hour later, Fabrizio was trotting along the high road, still in the hope of meeting the cantinière, or at any rate Corporal Aubry. Moving all the time and keeping a look-out all round him, he came to a marshy river crossed by a fairly narrow wooden bridge. Between him and the bridge, on the right of the road, was a solitary house bearing the sign of the White Horse. "There I shall get some dinner," thought Fabrizio. A cavalry officer with his arm in a sling was guarding the approach to the bridge; he was on horseback and looked very melancholy; ten paces away from him, three dismounted troopers were filling their pipes.

"There are some people," Fabrizio said to himself, "who look to me very much as though they would like to buy my horse for even less than he cost me." The wounded officer and the three men on foot watched him approach and seemed to be waiting for him. "It would be better not to cross by this bridge, but to follow the river bank to the right; that was the way the cantinière advised me to take to get clear of difficulties. . . . Yes," thought our hero, "but if I take to my heels now, to-morrow I shall be thoroughly ashamed of myself; besides, my horse has good legs, the officer's is probably tired; if he tries to make me dismount I shall gallop." Reasoning thus with himself, Fabrizio pulled up his horse and moved forward at the slowest possible pace.

"Advance, you, hussar!" the officer called to him with an air of authority.

Fabrizio went on a few paces and then halted.

"Do you want to take my horse?" he shouted.

"Not in the least; advance."

Fabrizio examined the officer; he had a white moustache, and looked the best fellow in the world; the handkerchief that held up his left arm was drenched with blood, and his right hand also was bound up in a piece of bloodstained linen. "It is the men on foot who are going to snatch my bridle," thought Fabrizio; but, on looking at them from nearer, he saw that they too were wounded.

"On your honour as a soldier," said the officer, who wore the epaulettes of a colonel, "stay here on picket, and tell all the dragoons, chasseurs and hussars that you see that Colonel Le Baron is in the inn over there, and that I order them to come and report to me." The old colonel had the air of a man broken by suffering; with his first words he had made a conquest of our hero, who replied with great good sense:

"I am very young, sir, to make them listen to me; I ought to have a written order from you."

"He is right," said the colonel, studying him closely; "make out the order, La Rose, you've got the use of your right hand."

Without saying a word, La Rose took from his pocket a little parchment book, wrote a few lines, and, tearing out a leaf, handed it to Fabrizio; the colonel repeated the order to him, adding that after two hours on duty he would be relieved, as was right and proper, by one of the three wounded troopers he had with him. So saying he went into the inn with his men. Fabrizio watched them go and sat without moving at the end of his wooden bridge, so deeply impressed had he been by the sombre, silent grief of these three persons. "One would think they were under a spell," he said to himself. At length he unfolded the paper and read the order, which ran as follows:

"Colonel Le Baron, 6th Dragoons, Commanding the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division of the XIV Corps, orders all cavalrymen, dragoons, chasseurs and hussars, on no account to cross the bridge, and to report to him at the White Horse Inn, by the bridge, which is his headquarters.

"Headquarters, by the bridge of La Sainte, June 19, 1815.

"For Colonel Le Baron, wounded in the right arm,
and by his orders,

"LA ROSE, Serjeant."

Fabrizio had been on guard at the bridge for barely half an hour when he saw six chasseurs approaching him mounted, and three on foot; he communicated the colonel's order to them. "We're coming back," said four of the mounted men, and crossed the bridge at a fast trot. Fabrizio then spoke to the other two. During the discussion, which grew heated, the three men on foot crossed the bridge. Finally, one of the two mounted troopers who had stayed behind asked to see the order again, and carried it off, with:

"I am taking it to the others, who will come back without fail; wait for them here." And off he went at a gallop; his companion followed him. All this had happened in the twinkling of an eye.

Fabrizio was furious, and called to one of the wounded soldiers, who appeared at a window of the White Horse. This soldier, on whose arm Fabrizio saw the stripes of a cavalry serjeant, came down and shouted to him: "Draw your sabre, man, you're on picket." Fabrizio obeyed, then said: "They've carried off the order."

"They're out of hand after yesterday's affair," replied the other in a melancholy tone. "I'll let you have one of my pistols; if they force past you again, fire it in the air; I shall come, or the colonel himself will appear."

Fabrizio had not failed to observe the serjeant's start of surprise on hearing of the theft of the order. He realised that it was a personal insult to himself, and promised himself that he would not allow such a trick to be played on him again.

Armed with the serjeant's horse-pistol, Fabrizio had proudly resumed his guard when he saw coming towards him seven hussars, mounted. He had taken up a position that barred the bridge; he read them the colonel's order, which seemed greatly to annoy them; the most venturesome of them tried to pass. Fabrizio, following the wise counsel of his friend the vivandière, who, the morning before, had told him that he must thrust and not slash, lowered the point of his long, straight sabre and made as though to stab with it the man who was trying to pass him.

"Oh, so he wants to kill us, the baby!" cried the hussars, "as if we hadn't been killed quite enough yesterday!" They all drew their sabres at once and fell on Fabrizio: he gave himself up for dead; but he thought of the serjeant's surprise, and was not anxious to earn his contempt again. Drawing back on to his bridge, he tried to reach them with his sabre-point. He looked so absurd when he tried to wield this huge, straight heavy-dragoon sabre, a great deal too heavy for him, that the hussars soon saw with what sort of soldier they had to deal; they then endeavoured not to wound him but to slash his clothing. In this way Fabrizio received three or four slight sabre-cuts on his arms. For his own part, still faithful to the cantinière's precept, he kept thrusting the point of his sabre at them with all his might. As ill luck would have it, one of these thrusts wounded a hussar in the hand: highly indignant at being touched by so raw a recruit, he replied with a downward thrust which caught Fabrizio in the upper part of the thigh. What made this blow effective was that our hero's horse, so far from avoiding the fray, seemed to take pleasure in it and to be flinging himself on the assailants. These, seeing Fabrizio's blood streaming along his right arm, were afraid that they might have carried the game too far, and, pushing him against the left hand parapet of the bridge, crossed at a gallop. As soon as Fabrizio had a moment to himself he fired his pistol in the air to warn the colonel.

Four mounted hussars and two on foot, of the same regiment as the others, were coming towards the bridge and were still two hundred yards away from it when the pistol went off. They had been paying close attention to what was happening on the bridge, and, imagining that Fabrizio had fired at their comrades, the four mounted men galloped upon him with raised sabres: it was a regular cavalry charge. Colonel Le Baron, summoned by the pistol-shot, opened the door of the inn and rushed on to the bridge just as the galloping hussars reached it, and himself gave them the order to halt.

"There's no colonel here now!" cried one of them, and pressed on his horse. The colonel in exasperation broke off the reprimand he was giving them, and with his wounded right hand seized the rein of this horse on the off side.

"Halt! You bad soldier," he said to the hussar; "I know you, you're in Captain Henriot's squadron."

"Very well, then! The captain can give me the order himself! Captain Henriot was killed yesterday," he added with a snigger, "and you can go and f—— yourself!"

So saying, he tried to force a passage, and pushed the old colonel who fell in a sitting position on the roadway of the bridge. Fabrizio, who was a couple of yards farther along upon the bridge, but facing the inn, pressed his horse, and, while the breast-piece of the assailant's harness threw down the old colonel who never let go the off rein, Fabrizio, indignant, bore down upon the hussar with a driving thrust. Fortunately the hussar's horse, feeling itself pulled towards the ground by the rein which the colonel still held, made a movement sideways, with the result that the long blade of Fabrizio's heavy-cavalry sabre slid along the hussar's jacket, and the whole length of it passed beneath his eyes. Furious, the hussar turned round and, using all his strength, dealt Fabrizio a blow which cut his sleeve and went deep into his arm: our hero fell.

One of the dismounted hussars, seeing the two defenders of the bridge on the ground, seized the opportunity, jumped on to Fabrizio's horse and tried to make off with it by starting at a gallop across the bridge.

The serjeant, as he hurried from the inn, had seen his colonel fall, and supposed him to be seriously wounded. He ran after Fabrizio's horse and plunged the point of his sabre into the thief's entrails; he fell. The hussars, seeing no one now on the bridge but the serjeant, who was on foot, crossed at a gallop and rapidly disappeared. The one on foot bolted into the fields.

The serjeant came up to the wounded men. Fabrizio was already on his feet; he was not in great pain, but was bleeding profusely. The colonel got up more slowly; he was quite stunned by his fall, but had received no injury. "I feel nothing," he said to the serjeant, "except the old wound in my hand."

The hussar whom the serjeant had wounded was dying.

"The devil take him!" exclaimed the colonel. "But," he said to the serjeant and the two troopers who came running out, "look after this young man whose life I have risked, most improperly. I shall stay on the bridge myself and try to stop these madmen. Take the young man to the inn and tie up his arm. Use one of my shirts."

[CHAPTER FIVE]

The whole of this adventure had not lasted a minute. Fabrizio's wounds were nothing; they tied up his arm with bandages torn from the colonel's shirt. They wanted to make up a bed for him upstairs in the inn.

"But while I am tucked up here on the first floor," said Fabrizio to the serjeant, "my horse, who is down in the stable, will get bored with being left alone and will go off with another master."

"Not bad for a conscript!" said the serjeant. And they deposited Fabrizio on a litter of clean straw in the same stall as his horse.

Then, as he was feeling very weak, the serjeant brought him a bowl of mulled wine and talked to him for a little. Several compliments included in this conversation carried our hero to the seventh heaven.

Fabrizio did not wake until dawn on the following day; the horses were neighing continuously and making a frightful din; the stable was filled with smoke. At first Fabrizio could make nothing of all this noise, and did not even know where he was: finally, half-stifled by the smoke, it occurred to him that the house was on fire; in the twinkling of an eye he was out of the stable and in the saddle. He raised his head; smoke was belching violently from the two windows over the stable; and the roof was covered by a black smoke which rose curling into the air. A hundred fugitives had arrived during the night at the White Horse; they were all shouting and swearing. The five or six whom Fabrizio could see close at hand seemed to him to be completely drunk; one of them tried to stop him and called out to him: "Where are you taking my horse?"

WAR

When Fabrizio had gone a quarter of a league, he turned his head. There was no one following him; the building was in flames. Fabrizio caught sight of the bridge; he remembered his wound, and felt his arm compressed by bandages and very hot. "And the old colonel, what has become of him? He gave his shirt to tie up my arm." Our hero was this morning the coolest man in the world; the amount of blood he had shed had liberated him from all the romantic element in his character.

"To the right!" he said to himself, "and no time to lose." He began quietly following the course of the river which, after passing under the bridge, ran to the right of the road. He remembered the good cantinière's advice. "What friendship!" he said to himself, "what an open nature!"

After riding for an hour he felt very weak. "Oho! Am I going to faint?" he wondered. "If I faint, someone will steal my horse, and my clothes, perhaps, and my money and jewels with them." He had no longer the strength to hold the reins, and was trying to keep his balance in the saddle when a peasant who was digging in a field by the side of the high road noticed his pallor and came up to offer him a glass of beer and some bread.

"When I saw you look so pale, I thought you must be one of the wounded from the great battle," the peasant told him. Never did help come more opportunely. As Fabrizio was munching the piece of bread his eyes began to hurt him when he looked straight ahead. When he felt a little better he thanked the man. "And where am I?" he asked. The peasant told him that three quarters of a league farther on he would come to the township of Zonders, where he would be very well looked after. Fabrizio reached the town, not knowing quite what he was doing and thinking only at every step of not falling off his horse. He saw a big door standing open; he entered. It was the Woolcomb Inn. At once there ran out to him the good lady of the house, an enormous woman; she called for help in a voice that throbbed with pity. Two girls came and helped Fabrizio to dismount; no sooner had his feet touched the ground than he fainted completely. A surgeon was fetched, who bled him. For the rest of that day and the days that followed Fabrizio scarcely knew what was being done to him; he slept almost without interruption.

The sabre wound in his thigh threatened to form a serious abscess. When his mind was clear again, he asked them to look after his horse, and kept on repeating that he would pay them well, which shocked the good hostess and her daughters. For a fortnight he was admirably looked after and he was beginning to be himself again when he noticed one evening that his hostesses seemed greatly upset. Presently a German officer came into his room: in answering his questions they used a language which Fabrizio did not understand, but he could see that they were speaking about him; he pretended to be asleep. A little later, when he thought that the officer must have gone, he called his hostesses.

"That officer came to put my name on a list, and make me a prisoner, didn't he?" The landlady assented with tears in her eyes.

"Very well, there is money in my dolman!" he cried, sitting up in bed; "buy me some civilian clothes and to-night I shall go away on my horse. You have already saved my life once by taking me in just as I was going to drop down dead in the street; save it again by giving me the means of going back to my mother."

At this point the landlady's daughters began to dissolve in tears; they trembled for Fabrizio; and, as they barely understood French, they came to his bedside to question him. They talked with their mother in Flemish; but at every moment pitying eyes were turned on our hero; he thought he could make out that his escape might compromise them seriously, but that they would gladly incur the risk. A Jew in the town supplied a complete outfit, but when he brought it to the inn about ten o'clock that night, the girls saw, on comparing it with Fabrizio's dolman, that it would require an endless amount of alteration. At once they set to work; there was no time to lose. Fabrizio showed them where several napoleons were hidden in his uniform, and begged his hostesses to stitch them into the new garments. With these had come a fine pair of new boots. Fabrizio had no hesitation in asking these kind girls to slit open the hussar's boots at the place which he shewed them, and they hid the little diamonds in the lining of the new pair.

One curious result of his loss of blood and the weakness that followed from it was that Fabrizio had almost completely forgotten his French; he used Italian to address his hostesses, who themselves spoke a Flemish dialect, so that their conversation had to be conducted almost entirely in signs. When the girls, who for that matter were entirely disinterested, saw the diamonds, their enthusiasm for Fabrizio knew no bounds; they imagined him to be a prince in disguise. Aniken, the younger and less sophisticated, kissed him without ceremony. Fabrizio, for his part, found them charming, and towards midnight, when the surgeon had allowed him a little wine in view of the journey he had to take, he felt almost inclined not to go. "Where could I be better off than here?" he asked himself. However, about two o'clock in the morning, he rose and dressed. As he was leaving the room, his good hostess informed him that his horse had been taken by the officer who had come to search the house that afternoon.

"Ah! The swine!" cried Fabrizio with an oath, "robbing a wounded man!" He was not enough of a philosopher, this young Italian, to bear in mind the price at which he himself had acquired the horse.

Aniken told him with tears that they had hired a horse for him. She would have liked him not to go. Their farewells were tender. Two big lads, cousins of the good landlady, helped Fabrizio into the saddle: during the journey they supported him on his horse, while a third, who walked a few hundred yards in advance of the little convoy, searched the roads for any suspicious patrol. After going for a couple of hours, they stopped at the house of a cousin of the landlady of the Woolcomb. In spite of anything that Fabrizio might say, the young men who accompanied him refused absolutely to leave him; they claimed that they knew better than anyone the hidden paths through the woods.

"But to-morrow morning, when my flight becomes known, and they don't see you anywhere in the town, your absence will make things awkward for you," said Fabrizio.

They proceeded on their way. Fortunately, when day broke at last, the plain was covered by a thick fog. About eight o'clock in the morning they came in sight of a little town. One of the young men went on ahead to see if the post-horses there had been stolen. The postmaster had had time to make them vanish and to raise a team of wretched screws with which he had filled his stables. Grooms were sent to find a pair of horses in the marshes where they were hidden, and three hours later Fabrizio climbed into a little cabriolet which was quite dilapidated but had harnessed to it a pair of good post-horses. He had regained his strength. The moment of parting with the young men, his hostess's cousins, was pathetic in the extreme; on no account, whatever friendly pretext Fabrizio might find, would they consent to take any money.

"In your condition, sir, you need it more than we do," was the invariable reply of these worthy young fellows. Finally they set off with letters in which Fabrizio, somewhat emboldened by the agitation of the journey, had tried to convey to his hostesses all that he felt for them. Fabrizio wrote with tears in his eyes, and there was certainly love in the letter addressed to little Aniken.

In the rest of the journey there was nothing out of the common. He reached Amiens in great pain from the cut he had received in his thigh; it had not occurred to the country doctor to lance the wound, and in spite of the bleedings an abscess had formed. During the fortnight that Fabrizio spent in the inn at Amiens, kept by an obsequious and avaricious family, the Allies were invading France, and Fabrizio became another man, so many and profound were his reflexions on the things that had happened to him. He had remained a child upon one point only: what he had seen, was it a battle; and, if so, was that battle Waterloo? For the first time in his life he found pleasure in reading; he was always hoping to find in the newspapers, or in the published accounts of the battle, some description which would enable him to identify the ground he had covered with Marshal Ney's escort, and afterwards with the other general. During his stay at Amiens he wrote almost every day to his good friends at the Woolcomb. As soon as his wound was healed, he came to Paris. He found at his former hotel a score of letters from his mother and aunt, who implored him to return home as soon as possible. The last letter from Contessa Pietranera had a certain enigmatic tone which made him extremely uneasy; this letter destroyed all his tender fancies. His was a character to which a single word was enough to make him readily anticipate the greatest misfortunes; his imagination then stepped in and depicted these misfortunes to him with the most horrible details.

"Take care never to sign the letters you write to tell us what you are doing," the Contessa warned him. "On your return you must on no account come straight to the Lake of Como. Stop at Lugano, on Swiss soil." He was to arrive in this little town under the name of Cavi; he would find at the principal inn the Contessa's footman, who would tell him what to do. His aunt ended her letter as follows: "Take every possible precaution to keep your mad escapade secret, and above all do not carry on you any printed or written document; in Switzerland you will be surrounded by the friends of Santa Margherita.[8] If I have enough money," the Contessa told him, "I shall send someone to Geneva, to the Hôtel des Balances, and you shall have particulars which I cannot put in writing but which you ought to know before coming here. But, in heaven's name, not a day longer in Paris; you will be recognised there by our spies." Fabrizio's imagination set to work to construct the wildest hypotheses, and he was incapable of any other pleasure save that of trying to guess what the strange information could be that his aunt had to give him. Twice on his passage through France he was arrested, but managed to get away; he was indebted, for these unpleasantnesses, to his Italian passport and to that strange description of him as a dealer in barometers, which hardly seemed to tally with his youthful face and the arm which he carried in a sling.

Finally, at Geneva, he found a man in the Contessa's service, who gave him a message from her to the effect that he, Fabrizio, had been reported to the police at Milan as having gone abroad to convey to Napoleon certain proposals drafted by a vast conspiracy organised in the former Kingdom of Italy. If this had not been the object of his journey, the report went on, why should he have gone under an assumed name? His mother was endeavouring to establish the truth, as follows:

1st, that he had never gone beyond Switzerland.

2ndly, that he had left the castle suddenly after a quarrel with his elder brother.

On hearing this story Fabrizio felt a thrill of pride. "I am supposed to have been a sort of ambassador to Napoleon," he said to himself; "I should have had the honour of speaking to that great man: would to God I had!" He recalled that his ancestor seven generations back, a grandson of him who came to Milan in the train of the Sforza, had had the honour of having his head cut off by the Duke's enemies, who surprised him as he was on his way to Switzerland to convey certain proposals to the Free Cantons and to raise troops there. He saw in his mind's eye the print that illustrated this exploit in the genealogy of the family. Fabrizio, questioning the servant, found him shocked by a detail which finally he allowed to escape him, despite the express order, several times repeated to him by the Contessa, not to reveal it. It was Ascanio, his elder brother, who had reported him to the Milan police. This cruel news almost drove our hero out of his mind. From Geneva, in order to go to Italy, one must pass through Lausanne; he insisted on setting off at once on foot, and thus covering ten or twelve leagues, although the mail from Geneva to Lausanne was starting in two hours' time. Before leaving Geneva he picked a quarrel in one of the melancholy cafés of the place with a young man who, he said, stared at him in a singular fashion. Which was perfectly true: the young Genevan, phlegmatic, rational and interested only in money, thought him mad; Fabrizio on coming in had glared furiously in all directions, then had upset the cup of coffee that was brought to him over his breeches. In this quarrel Fabrizio's first movement was quite of the sixteenth century: instead of proposing a duel to the young Genevan, he drew his dagger and rushed upon him to stab him with it. In this moment of passion, Fabrizio forgot everything he had ever learned of the laws of honour and reverted to instinct, or, more properly speaking, to the memories of his earliest childhood.

The confidential agent whom he found at Lugano increased his fury by furnishing him with fresh details. As Fabrizio was beloved at Grianta, no one there had mentioned his name, and, but for his brother's kind intervention, everyone would have pretended to believe that he was at Milan, and the attention of the police in that city would not have been drawn to his absence.

"I expect the doganieri have a description of you," his aunt's envoy hinted, "and if we keep to the main road, when you come to the frontier of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, you will be arrested."

Fabrizio and his party were familiar with every footpath over the mountain that divides Lugano from the Lake of Como; they disguised themselves as hunters, that is to say as poachers, and as they were three in number and had a fairly resolute bearing, the doganieri whom they passed gave them a greeting and nothing more. Fabrizio arranged things so as not to arrive at the castle until nearly midnight; at that hour his father and all the powdered footmen had long been in bed. He climbed down without difficulty into the deep moat and entered the castle by the window of a cellar: it was there that his mother and aunt were waiting for him; presently his sisters came running in. Transports of affection alternated with tears for some time, and they had scarcely begun to talk reasonably when the first light of dawn came to warn these people who thought themselves so unfortunate that time was flying.

THE CONSTABLES

"I hope your brother won't have any suspicion of your being here," Signora Pietranera said to him; "I have scarcely spoken to him since that fine escapade of his, and his vanity has done me the honour of taking offence. This evening, at supper, I condescended to say a few words to him; I had to find some excuse to hide my frantic joy, which might have made him suspicious. Then, when I noticed that he was quite proud of this sham reconciliation, I took advantage of his happiness to make him drink a great deal too much, and I am certain he will never have thought of taking any steps to carry on his profession of spying."

"We shall have to hide our hussar in your room," said the Marchesa, "he can't leave at once; we haven't sufficient command of ourselves at present to make plans, and we shall have to think out the best way of putting those terrible Milan police off the track."

This plan was adopted; but the Marchese and his elder son noticed, next day, that the Marchesa was constantly in her sister-in-law's room. We shall not stop to depict the transports of affection and joy which continued, all that day, to convulse these happy creatures. Italian hearts are, far more than ours in France, tormented by the suspicions and wild ideas which a burning imagination presents to them, but on the other hand their joys are far more intense and more lasting. On the day in question the Contessa and Marchesa were literally out of their minds; Fabrizio was obliged to begin all his stories over again; finally they decided to go away and conceal their general joy at Milan, so difficult did it appear to be to keep it hidden any longer from the scrutiny of the Marchese and his son Ascanio.

They took the ordinary boat of the household to go to Como; to have acted otherwise would have aroused endless suspicions. But on arriving at the harbour of Como the Marchesa remembered that she had left behind at Grianta papers of the greatest importance: she hastened to send the boatmen back for them, and so these men could give no account of how the two ladies were spending their time at Como. No sooner had they arrived in the town than they selected haphazard one of the carriages that ply for hire near that tall mediæval tower which rises above the Milan gate. They started off at once, without giving the coachman time to speak to anyone. A quarter of a league from the town they found a young sportsman of their acquaintance who, out of courtesy to them as they had no man with them, kindly consented to act as their escort as far as the gates of Milan, whither he was bound for the shooting. All went well, and the ladies were conversing in the most joyous way with the young traveller when, at a bend which the road makes to pass the charming hill and wood of San Giovanni, three constables in plain clothes sprang at the horses' heads. "Ah! My husband has betrayed us," cried the Marchesa, and fainted away. A serjeant who had remained a little way behind came staggering up to the carriage and said, in a voice that reeked of the trattoria:

"I am sorry, sir, but I must do my duty and arrest you, General Fabio Conti."

Fabrizio thought that the serjeant was making a joke at his expense when he addressed him as "General." "You shall pay for this!" he said to himself. He examined the men in plain clothes and watched for a favourable moment to jump down from the carriage and dash across the fields.

The Contessa smiled—a smile of despair, I fancy—then said to the serjeant:

"But, my dear serjeant, is it this boy of sixteen that you take for General Conti?"

"Aren't you the General's daughter?" asked the serjeant.

"Look at my father," said the Contessa, pointing to Fabrizio. The constables went into fits of laughter.

"Show me your passports and don't argue the point," said the serjeant, stung by the general mirth.

"These ladies never take passports to go to Milan," said the coachman with a calm and philosophical air: "they are coming from their castle of Grianta. This lady is the Signora Contessa Pietranera; the other is the Signora Marchesa del Dongo."

The serjeant, completely disconcerted, went forward to the horses' heads and there took counsel with his men. The conference had lasted for fully five minutes when the Contessa asked if the gentlemen would kindly allow the carriage to be moved forward a few yards and stopped in the shade; the heat was overpowering, though it was only eleven o'clock in the morning. Fabrizio, who was looking out most attentively in all directions, seeking a way of escape, saw coming out of a little path through the fields and on to the high road a girl of fourteen or fifteen, who was crying timidly into her handkerchief. She came forward walking between two constables in uniform, and, three paces behind her, also between constables, stalked a tall, lean man who assumed an air of dignity, like a Prefect following a procession.

"Where did you find them?" asked the serjeant, for the moment completely drunk.

"Running away across the fields, with not a sign of a passport about them."

The serjeant appeared to lose his head altogether; he had before him five prisoners, instead of the two that he was expected to have. He went a little way off, leaving only one man to guard the male prisoner who put on the air of majesty, and another to keep the horses from moving.

"Wait," said the Contessa to Fabrizio, who had already jumped out of the carriage. "Everything will be settled in a minute."

They heard a constable exclaim: "What does it matter! If they have no passports, they're fair game whoever they are." The serjeant seemed not quite so certain; the name of Contessa Pietranera made him a little uneasy: he had known the general, and had not heard of his death. "The General is not the man to let it pass, if I arrest his wife without good reason," he said to himself.

During this deliberation, which was prolonged, the Contessa had entered into conversation with the girl, who was standing on the road, and in the dust by the side of the carriage; she had been struck by her beauty.

"The sun will be bad for you, Signorina. This gallant soldier," she went on, addressing the constable who was posted at the horses' heads, "will surely allow you to get into the carriage."

Fabrizio, who was wandering round the vehicle, came up to help the girl to get in. Her foot was already on the step, her arm supported by Fabrizio, when the imposing man, who was six yards behind the carriage, called out in a voice magnified by the desire to preserve his dignity:

"Stay in the road; don't get into a carriage that does not belong to you!"

Fabrizio had not heard this order; the girl, instead of climbing into the carriage, tried to get down again, and, as Fabrizio continued to hold her up, fell into his arms. He smiled; she blushed a deep crimson; they stood for a moment looking at one another after the girl had disengaged herself from his arms.

"She would be a charming prison companion," Fabrizio said to himself. "What profound thought lies behind that brow! She would know how to love."

The serjeant came up to them with an air of authority: "Which of these ladies is named Clelia Conti?"

"I am," said the girl.

"And I," cried the elderly man, "am General Fabio Conti, Chamberlain to H.S.H. the Prince of Parma; I consider it most irregular that a man in my position should be hunted down like a thief."

"The day before yesterday, when you embarked at the harbour of Como, did you not tell the police inspector who asked for your passport to go away? Very well, his orders to-day are that you are not to go away."

"I had already pushed off my boat, I was in a hurry, there was a storm threatening, a man not in uniform shouted to me from the quay to put back into harbour, I told him my name and went on."

"And this morning you escaped from Como."

"A man like myself does not take a passport when he goes from Milan to visit the lake. This morning, at Como, I was told that I should be arrested at the gate. I left the town on foot with my daughter; I hoped to find on the road some carriage that would take me to Milan, where the first thing I shall do will certainly be to call on the General Commanding the Province and lodge a complaint."

A heavy weight seemed to have been lifted from the serjeant's mind.

"Very well, General, you are under arrest and I shall take you to Milan. And you, who are you?" he said to Fabrizio.

"My son," replied the Contessa; "Ascanio, son of the Divisional General Pietranera."

"Without a passport, Signora Contessa?" said the serjeant, in a much gentler tone.

"At his age, he has never had one; he never travels alone, he is always with me."

During this colloquy General Conti was standing more and more on his dignity with the constables.

"Not so much talk," said one of them; "you are under arrest, that's enough!"

"You will be glad to hear," said the serjeant, "that we allow you to hire a horse from some contadino; otherwise, never mind all the dust and the heat and the Chamberlain of Parma, you would have to put your best foot foremost to keep pace with our horses."

The General began to swear.

"Will you kindly be quiet!" the constable repeated. "Where is your general's uniform? Anybody can come along and say he's a general."

The General grew more and more angry. Meanwhile things were looking much brighter in the carriage.

The Contessa kept the constables running about as if they had been her servants. She had given a scudo to one of them to go and fetch wine, and, what was better still, cold water from a cottage that was visible two hundred yards away. She had found time to calm Fabrizio, who was determined, at all costs, to make a dash for the wood that covered the hill. "I have a good brace of pistols," he said. She obtained the infuriated General's permission for his daughter to get into the carriage. On this occasion the General, who loved to talk about himself and his family, told the ladies that his daughter was only twelve years old, having been born in 1803, on the 27th of October, but that, such was her intelligence, everyone took her to be fourteen or fifteen.

"A thoroughly common man," the Contessa's eyes signalled to the Marchesa. Thanks to the Contessa, everything was settled, after a colloquy that lasted an hour. A constable, who discovered that he had some business to do in the neighbouring village, lent his horse to General Conti, after the Contessa had said to him: "You shall have ten francs." The serjeant went off by himself with the General; the other constables stayed behind under a tree, accompanied by four huge bottles of wine, almost small demi-johns, which the one who had been sent to the cottage had brought back, with the help of a contadino, Clelia Conti was authorised by the proud Chamberlain to accept, for the return journey to Milan, a seat in the ladies' carriage, and no one dreamed of arresting the son of the gallant General Pietranera. After the first few minutes had been devoted to an exchange of courtesies and to remarks on the little incident that had just occurred, Clelia Conti observed the note of enthusiasm with which so beautiful a lady as the Contessa spoke to Fabrizio; certainly, she was not his mother. The girl's attention was caught most of all by repeated allusions to something heroic, bold, dangerous to the last degree, which he had recently done; but for all her cleverness little Clelia could not discover what this was.

THE POLICE

She gazed with astonishment at this young hero whose eyes seemed to be blazing still with all the fire of action. For his part, he was somewhat embarrassed by the remarkable beauty of this girl of twelve, and her steady gaze made him blush.

A league outside Milan Fabrizio announced that he was going to see his uncle, and took leave of the ladies.

"If I ever get out of my difficulties," he said to Clelia, "I shall pay a visit to the beautiful pictures at Parma, and then will you deign to remember the name: Fabrizio del Dongo?"

"Good!" said the Contessa, "that is how you keep your identity secret. Signorina, deign to remember that this scapegrace is my son, and is called Pietranera, and not del Dongo."

That evening, at a late hour, Fabrizio entered Milan by the Porta Renza, which leads to a fashionable gathering-place. The dispatch of their two servants to Switzerland had exhausted the very modest savings of the Marchesa and her sister-in-law; fortunately, Fabrizio had still some napoleons left, and one of the diamonds, which they decided to sell.

The ladies were highly popular, and knew everyone in the town. The most important personages in the Austrian and religious party went to speak on behalf of Fabrizio to Barone Binder, the Chief of Police. These gentlemen could not conceive, they said, how anyone could take seriously the escapade of a boy of sixteen who left the paternal roof after a dispute with an elder brother.

"My business is to take everything seriously," replied Barone Binder gently; a wise and solemn man, he was then engaged in forming the Milan police, and had undertaken to prevent a revolution like that of 1746, which drove the Austrians from Genoa. This Milan police, since rendered so famous by the adventures of Silvio Pellico and M. Andryane, was not exactly cruel; it carried out, reasonably and without pity, harsh laws. The Emperor Francis II wished these overbold Italian imaginations to be struck by terror.

"Give me, day by day," repeated Barone Binder to Fabrizio's protectors, "a certified account of what the young Marchesino del Dongo has been doing; let us follow him from the moment of his departure on the 8th of March to his arrival last night in this city, where he is hidden in one of the rooms of his mother's apartment, and I am prepared to treat him as the most well-disposed and most frolicsome young man in town. If you cannot furnish me with the young man's itinerary during all the days following his departure from Grianta, however exalted his birth may be, however great the respect I owe to the friends of his family, obviously it is my duty to order his arrest. Am I not bound to keep him in prison until he has furnished me with proofs that he did not go to convey a message to Napoleon from such disaffected persons as may exist in Lombardy among the subjects of His Imperial and Royal Majesty? Note farther, gentlemen, that if young del Dongo succeeds in justifying himself on this point, he will still be liable to be charged with having gone abroad without a passport properly issued to himself, and also with assuming a false name and deliberately making use of a passport issued to a common workman, that is to say to a person of a class greatly inferior to that to which he himself belongs."

This declaration, cruelly reasonable, was accompanied by all the marks of deference and respect which the Chief of Police owed to the high position of the Marchesa del Dongo and of the important personages who were intervening on her behalf.

The Marchesa was in despair when Barone Binder's reply was communicated to her.

"Fabrizio will be arrested," she sobbed, "and once he is in prison, God knows when he will get out! His father will disown him!"

Signora Pietranera and her sister-in-law took counsel with two or three intimate friends, and, in spite of anything these might say, the Marchesa was absolutely determined to send her son away that very night.

"But you can see quite well," the Contessa pointed out to her, "that Barone Binder knows that your son is here; he is not a bad man."

"No; but he is anxious to please the Emperor Francis."

"But, if he thought it would lead to his promotion to put Fabrizio in prison, the boy would be there now; it is showing an insulting defiance of the Barone to send him away."

"But his admission to us that he knows where Fabrizio is, is as much as to say: 'Send him away!' No, I shan't feel alive until I can no longer say to myself: 'In a quarter of an hour my son may be within prison walls.' Whatever Barone Binder's ambition may be," the Marchesa went on, "he thinks it useful to his personal standing in this country to make certain concessions to oblige a man of my husband's rank, and I see a proof of this in the singular frankness with which he admits that he knows where to lay hands on my son. Besides, the Barone has been so kind as to let us know the two offences with which Fabrizio is charged, at the instigation of his unworthy brother; he explains that each of these offences means prison: is not that as much as to say that if we prefer exile it is for us to choose?"

"If you choose exile," the Contessa kept on repeating, "we shall never set eyes on him again as long as we live." Fabrizio, who was present at the whole conversation, with an old friend of the Marchesa, now a counsellor on the tribunal set up by Austria, was strongly inclined to take the key of the street and go; and, as a matter of fact, that same evening he left the palazzo, hidden in the carriage that was taking his mother and aunt to the Scala theatre. The coachman, whom they distrusted, went as usual to wait in an osteria, and while the footmen, on whom they could rely, were looking after the horses, Fabrizio, disguised as a contadino, slipped out of the carriage and escaped from the town. Next morning he crossed the frontier with equal ease, and a few hours later had established himself on a property which his mother owned in Piedmont, near Novara, to be precise, at Romagnano, where Bayard was killed.

It may be imagined how much attention the ladies, on reaching their box in the Scala, paid to the performance. They had gone there solely to be able to consult certain of their friends who belonged to the Liberal party and whose appearance at the palazzo del Dongo might have been misconstrued by the police. In the box it was decided to make a fresh appeal to Barone Binder. There was no question of offering a sum of money to this magistrate who was a perfectly honest man; moreover, the ladies were extremely poor; they had forced Fabrizio to take with him all the money that remained from the sale of the diamond.

THE CANON

It was of the utmost importance that they should be kept constantly informed of the Barone's latest decisions. The Contessa's friends reminded her of a certain Canon Borda, a most charming young man who at one time had tried to make advances to her, in a somewhat violent manner; finding himself unsuccessful he had reported her friendship for Limercati to General Pietranera, whereupon he had been dismissed from the house as a rascal. Now, at present this Canon was in the habit of going every evening to play tarocchi with Baronessa Binder, and was naturally the intimate friend of her husband. The Contessa made up her mind to take the horribly unpleasant step of going to see this Canon; and the following morning, at an early hour, before he had left the house, she sent in her name.

When the Canon's one and only servant announced: "Contessa Pietranera," his master was so overcome as to be incapable of speech; he made no attempt to repair the disorder of a very scanty attire.

"Shew her in, and leave us," he said in faint accents. The Contessa entered the room; Borda fell on his knees.

"It is in this position that an unhappy madman ought to receive your orders," he said to the Contessa who that morning, in a plain costume that was almost a disguise, was irresistibly attractive. Her intense grief at Fabrizio's exile, the violence that she was doing to her own feelings in coming to the house of a man who had behaved treacherously towards her, all combined to give an incredible brilliance to her eyes.

"It is in this position that I wish to receive your orders," cried the Canon, "for it is obvious that you have some service to ask of me, otherwise you would not have honoured with your presence the poor dwelling of an unhappy madman; once before, carried away by love and jealousy, he behaved towards you like a scoundrel, as soon as he saw that he could not win your favour."

These words were sincere, and all the more handsome in that the Canon now enjoyed a position of great power; the Contessa was moved to tears by them; humiliation and fear had frozen her spirit; now in a moment affection and a gleam of hope took their place. From a most unhappy state she passed in a flash almost to happiness.

"Kiss my hand," she said, as she held it out to the Canon, "and rise." (She used the second person singular, which in Italy, it must be remembered, indicates a sincere and open friendship just as much as a more tender sentiment.) "I have come to ask your favour for my nephew Fabrizio. This is the whole truth of the story without the slightest concealment, as one tells it to an old friend. At the age of sixteen and a half he has done an intensely stupid thing. We were at the castle of Grianta on the Lake of Como. One evening at seven o'clock we learned by a boat from Como of the Emperor's landing on the shore of the Gulf of Juan. Next morning Fabrizio went off to France, after borrowing the passport of one of his plebeian friends, a dealer in barometers, named Vasi. As he does not exactly resemble a dealer in barometers, he had hardly gone ten leagues into France when he was arrested on sight; his outbursts of enthusiasm in bad French seemed suspicious. After a time he escaped and managed to reach Geneva; we sent to meet him at Lugano. . . ."

"That is to say, Geneva," put in the Canon with a smile.

The Contessa finished her story.

"I will do everything for you that is humanly possible," replied the Canon effusively; "I place myself entirely at your disposal. I will even do imprudent things," he added. "Tell me, what am I to do as soon as this poor parlour is deprived of this heavenly apparition which marks an epoch in the history of my life?"

"You must go to Barone Binder and tell him that you have loved Fabrizio ever since he was born, that you saw him in his cradle when you used to come to our house, and that accordingly, in the name of the friendship he has shown for you, you beg him to employ all his spies to discover whether, before his departure for Switzerland, Fabrizio was in any sort of communication whatsoever with any of the Liberals whom he has under supervision. If the Barone's information is of any value, he is bound to see that there is nothing more in this than a piece of boyish folly. You know that I used to have, in my beautiful apartment in the palazzo Dugnani, prints of the battles won by Napoleon: it was by spelling out the legends engraved beneath them that my nephew learned to read. When he was five years old, my poor husband used to explain these battles to him; we put my husband's helmet on his head, the boy strutted about trailing his big sabre. Very well, one fine day he learns that my husband's god, the Emperor, has returned to France, he starts out to join him, like a fool, but does not succeed in reaching him. Ask your Barone with what penalty he proposes to punish this moment of folly?"

"I was forgetting one thing," said the Canon, "you shall see that I am not altogether unworthy of the pardon that you grant me. Here," he said, looking on the table among his papers, "here is the accusation by that infamous collo-torto" (that is, hypocrite), "see, signed Ascanio Valserra del Dongo, which gave rise to the whole trouble; I found it yesterday at the police headquarters, and went to the Scala in the hope of finding someone who was in the habit of going to your box, through whom I might be able to communicate it to you. A copy of this document reached Vienna long ago. There is the enemy that we have to fight." The Canon read the accusation through with the Contessa, and it was agreed that in the course of the day he would let her have a copy by the hand of some trustworthy person. It was with joy in her heart that the Contessa returned to the palazzo del Dongo.

"No one could possibly be more of a gentleman than that reformed rake," she told the Marchesa. "This evening at the Scala, at a quarter to eleven by the theatre clock, we are to send everyone away from our box, put out the candles, and shut our door, and at eleven the Canon himself will come and tell us what he has managed to do. We decided that this would be the least compromising course for him."

This Canon was a man of spirit; he was careful to keep the appointment; he shewed when he came a complete good nature and an unreserved openness of heart such as are scarcely to be found except in countries where vanity does not predominate over every other sentiment. His denunciation of the Contessa to her husband, General Pietranera, was one of the great sorrows of his life, and he had now found a means of getting rid of that remorse.

That morning, when the Contessa had left his room, "So she's in love with her nephew, is she," he had said to himself bitterly, for he was by no means cured. "With her pride, to have come to me! . . . After that poor Pietranera died, she repulsed with horror my offers of service, though they were most polite and admirably presented by Colonel Scotti, her old lover. The beautiful Pietranera reduced to living on fifteen hundred francs!" the Canon went on, striding vigorously up and down the room. "And then to go and live in the castle of Grianta, with an abominable seccatore like that Marchese del Dongo! . . . I can see it all now! After all, that young Fabrizio is full of charm, tall, well built, always with a smile on his face . . . and, better still, a deliciously voluptuous expression in his eye . . . a Correggio face," the Canon added bitterly.

"The difference in age . . . not too great . . . Fabrizio born after the French came, about '98, I fancy; the Contessa might be twenty-seven or twenty-eight: no one could be better looking, more adorable. In this country rich in beauties, she defeats them all, the Marini, the Gherardi, the Ruga, the Aresi, the Pietragrua, she is far and away above any of them. They were living happily together, hidden away by that beautiful Lake of Como, when the young man took it into his head to join Napoleon. . . . There are still souls in Italy! In spite of everything! Dear country! No," went on this heart inflamed by jealousy, "impossible to explain in any other way her resigning herself to vegetating in the country, with the disgusting spectacle, day after day, at every meal, of that horrible face of the Marchese del Dongo, as well as that unspeakable pasty physiognomy of the Marchesino Ascanio, who is going to be worse than his father! Well, I shall serve her faithfully. At least I shall have the pleasure of seeing her otherwise than through an opera-glass."

Canon Borda explained the whole case very clearly to the ladies. At heart, Binder was as well-disposed as they could wish; he was delighted that Fabrizio should have taken the key of the street before any orders could arrive from Vienna; for Barone Binder had no power to make any decision, he awaited orders in this case as in every other. He sent every day to Vienna an exact copy of all the information that reached him; then he waited.

It was necessary that, in his exile at Romagnano, Fabrizio

(1) Should hear mass daily without fail, take as his confessor a man of spirit, devoted to the cause of the Monarchy, and should confess to him, at the tribunal of penitence, only the most irreproachable sentiments.

(2) Should consort with no one who bore any reputation for intelligence, and, were the need to arise, must speak of rebellion with horror as a thing that no circumstances could justify.

(3) Must never let himself be seen in the caffè, must never read any newspaper other than the official Gazette of Turin and Milan; in general he should shew a distaste for reading, and never open any book printed later than 1720, with the possible exception of the novels of Walter Scott.

(4) "Finally" (the Canon added with a touch of malice), "it is most important that he should pay court openly to one of the pretty women of the district, of the noble class, of course; this will shew that he has not the dark and dissatisfied mind of an embryo conspirator."

Before going to bed, the Contessa and the Marchesa each wrote Fabrizio an endless letter, in which they explained to him with a charming anxiety all the advice that had been given them by Borda.

THE POLICE

Fabrizio had no wish to be a conspirator: he loved Napoleon, and, in his capacity as a young noble, believed that he had been created to be happier than his neighbour, and thought the middle classes absurd. Never had he opened a book since leaving school, where he had read only texts arranged by the Jesuits. He established himself at some distance from Romagnano, in a magnificent palazzo, one of the masterpieces of the famous architect Sanmicheli; but for thirty years it had been uninhabited, so that the rain came into every room and not one of the windows would shut. He took possession of the agent's horses, which he rode without ceremony at all hours of the day; he never spoke, and he thought about things. The recommendation to take a mistress from an ultra family appealed to him, and he obeyed it to the letter. He chose as his confessor a young priest given to intrigue who wished to become a bishop (like the confessor of the Spielberg[9]); but he went three leagues on foot and wrapped himself in a mystery which he imagined to be impenetrable, in order to read the Constitutionnel, which he thought sublime. "It is as fine as Alfieri and Dante!" he used often to exclaim. Fabrizio had this in common with the young men of France, that he was far more seriously taken up with his horse and his newspaper than with his politically sound mistress. But there was no room as yet for imitation of others in this simple and sturdy nature, and he made no friends in the society of the large country town of Romagnano; his simplicity passed as arrogance: no one knew what to make of his character. "He is a younger son who feels himself wronged because he is not the eldest" was the parroco's comment.

[8]Silvio Pellico has given this name a European notoriety: it is that of the street in Milan in which the police headquarters and prisons are situated.

[9]See the curious Memoirs of M. Andryane, as entertaining as a novel, and as lasting as Tacitus.

[CHAPTER SIX]

Let us admit frankly that Canon Borda's jealousy was not altogether unfounded: on his return from France, Fabrizio appeared to the eyes of Contessa Pietranera like a handsome stranger whom she had known well in days gone by. If he had spoken to her of love she would have loved him; had she not already conceived, for his conduct and his person, a passionate and, one might say, unbounded admiration? But Fabrizio embraced her with such an effusion of innocent gratitude and good-fellowship that she would have been horrified with herself had she sought for any other sentiment in this almost filial friendship. "After all," she said to herself, "some of my friends who knew me six years ago, at Prince Eugène's court, may still find me good-looking and even young, but for him I am a respectable woman—and, if the truth must be told without any regard for my vanity, a woman of a certain age." The Contessa was under an illusion as to the period of life at which she had arrived, but it was not the illusion of common women. "Besides, at his age," she went on, "boys are apt to exaggerate the ravages of time. A man with more experience of life . . ."

The Contessa, who was pacing the floor of her drawing-room, stopped before a mirror, then smiled. It must be explained that, some months since, the heart of Signora Pietranera had been attacked in a serious fashion, and by a singular personage. Shortly after Fabrizio's departure for France, the Contessa who, without altogether admitting it to herself, was already beginning to take a great interest in him, had fallen into a profound melancholy. All her occupations seemed to her to lack pleasure, and, if one may use the word, savour; she told herself that Napoleon, wishing to secure the attachment of his Italian peoples, would take Fabrizio as his aide-de-camp. "He is lost to me!" she exclaimed, weeping, "I shall never see him again; he will write to me, but what shall I be to him in ten years' time?"

MELANCHOLY

It was in this frame of mind that she made an expedition to Milan; she hoped to find there some more immediate news of Napoleon, and, for all she knew, incidentally news of Fabrizio. Without admitting it to herself, this active soul was beginning to be very weary of the monotonous life she was leading in the country. "It is a postponement of death," she said to herself, "it is not life." Every day to see those powdered heads, her brother, her nephew Ascanio, their footmen! What would her excursions on the lake be without Fabrizio? Her sole consolation was based on the ties of friendship that bound her to the Marchesa. But for some time now this intimacy with Fabrizio's mother, a woman older than herself and with no hope left in life, had begun to be less attractive to her.

Such was the singular position in which Signora Pietranera was placed: with Fabrizio away, she had little hope for the future. Her heart was in need of consolation and novelty. On arriving in Milan she conceived a passion for the fashionable opera; she would go and shut herself up alone for hours on end, at the Scala, in the box of her old friend General Scotti. The men whom she tried to meet in order to obtain news of Napoleon and his army seemed to her vulgar and coarse. Going home, she would improvise on her piano until three o'clock in the morning. One evening, at the Scala, in the box of one of her friends to which she had gone in search of news from France, she made the acquaintance of Conte Mosca, a Minister from Parma; he was an agreeable man who spoke of France and Napoleon in a way that gave her fresh reasons for hope or fear. She returned to the same box the following evening; this intelligent man reappeared and throughout the whole performance she talked to him with enjoyment. Since Fabrizio's departure she had not found any evening so lively. This man who amused her, Conte Mosca della Rovere Sorezana, was at that time Minister of Police and Finance to that famous Prince of Parma, Ernesto IV, so notorious for his severities, which the Liberals of Milan called cruelties. Mosca might have been forty or forty-five; he had strongly marked features, with no trace of self-importance, and a simple and light-hearted manner which was greatly in his favour; he would have looked very well indeed, if a whim on the part of his Prince had not obliged him to wear powder on his hair as a proof of his soundness in politics. As people have little fear of wounding one another's vanity, they quickly arrive in Italy at a tone of intimacy, and make personal observations. The antidote to this practice is not to see the other person again if one's feelings have been hurt.

"Tell me, Conte, why do you powder your hair?" Signora Pietranera asked him at their third meeting. "Powder! A man like you, attractive, still young, who fought on our side in Spain!"

"Because, in the said Spain, I stole nothing, and one must live. I was athirst for glory; a flattering word from the French General, Gouvion Saint-Cyr, who commanded us, was everything to me then. When Napoleon fell, it so happened that while I was eating up my patrimony in his service, my father, a man of imagination, who pictured me as a general already, had been building me a palazzo at Parma. In 1813 I found that my whole worldly wealth consisted of a huge palazzo, half-finished, and a pension."

A MINISTER

"A pension: 3,500 francs, like my husband's?"

"Conte Pietranera commanded a Division. My pension, as a humble squadron commander, has never been more than 800 francs, and even that has been paid to me only since I became Minister of Finance."

As there was nobody else in the box but the lady of extremely liberal views to whom it belonged, the conversation continued with the same frankness. Conte Mosca, when questioned, spoke of his life at Parma. "In Spain, under General Saint-Cyr, I faced the enemy's fire to win a cross and a little glory besides, now I dress myself up like an actor in a farce to win a great social position and a few thousand francs a year. Once I had started on this sort of political chessboard, stung by the insolence of my superiors, I determined to occupy one of the foremost posts; I have reached it. But the happiest days of my life will always be those which, now and again, I manage to spend at Milan; here, it seems to me, there still survives the spirit of your Army of Italy."

The frankness, the disinvoltura with which this Minister of so dreaded a Prince spoke pricked the Contessa's curiosity; from his title she had expected to find a pedant filled with self-importance; what she saw was a man who was ashamed of the gravity of his position. Mosca had promised to let her have all the news from France that he could collect; this was a grave indiscretion at Milan, during the month that preceded Waterloo; the question for Italy at that time was to be or not to be; everyone at Milan was in a fever, a fever of hope or fear. Amid this universal disturbance, the Contessa started to make inquiries about a man who spoke thus lightly of so coveted a position, and one which, moreover, was his sole means of livelihood.

Certain curious information of an interesting oddity was reported to Signora Pietranera. "Conte Mosca della Rovere Sorezana," she was told, "is on the point of becoming Prime Minister and declared favourite of Ranuccio-Ernesto IV, the absolute sovereign of Parma and one of the wealthiest Princes in Europe to boot. The Conte would already have attained to this exalted position if he had cared to shew a more solemn face: they say that the Prince often lectures him on this failing.

"'What do my manners matter to Your Highness,' he answers boldly, 'so long as I conduct his affairs?'

"This favourite's bed of roses," her informant went on, "is not without its thorns. He has to please a Sovereign, a man of sense and intelligence, no doubt, but a man who, since his accession to an absolute throne, seems to have lost his head altogether and shews, for instance, suspicions worthy of an old woman.

"Ernesto IV is courageous only in war. On the field of battle he has been seen a score of times leading a column to the attack like a gallant general; but after the death of his father Ernesto III, on his return to his States, where, unfortunately for him, he possesses unlimited power, he set to work to inveigh in the most senseless fashion against Liberals and liberty. Presently he began to imagine that he was hated; finally, in a moment of ill temper, he had two Liberals hanged, who may or may not have been guilty, acting on the advice of a wretch called Rassi, a sort of Minister of Justice.

"From that fatal moment the Prince's life changed; we find him tormented by the strangest suspicions. He is not fifty, and fear has so reduced him, if one may use the expression, that whenever he speaks of Jacobins, and the plans of the Central Committee in Paris, his face becomes like that of an old man of eighty; he relapses into the fantastic fears of childhood. His favourite Rassi, the Fiscal General (or Chief Justice), has no influence except through his master's fear; and whenever he is alarmed for his own position, he makes haste to discover some fresh conspiracy of the blackest and most fantastic order. Thirty rash fellows have banded themselves together to read a number of the Constitutionnel, Rassi declares them to be conspirators, and sends them off to prison in that famous Citadel of Parma, the terror of the whole of Lombardy. As it rises to a great height, a hundred and eighty feet, people say, it is visible from a long way off in the middle of that immense plain; and the physical outlines of the prison, of which horrible things are reported, makes it the queen, governing by fear, of the whole of that plain, which extends from Milan to Bologna."

"Would you believe," said another traveller to the Contessa, "that at night, on the third floor of his palace, guarded by eighty sentinels who every quarter of an hour cry aloud a whole sentence, Ernesto IV trembles in his room. All the doors fastened with ten bolts, and the adjoining rooms, above as well as below him, packed with soldiers, he is afraid of the Jacobins. If a plank creaks in the floor, he snatches up his pistols and imagines there is a Liberal hiding under his bed. At once all the bells in the castle are set ringing, and an aide-de-camp goes to awaken Conte Mosca. On reaching the castle, the Minister of Police takes good care not to deny the existence of any conspiracy; on the contrary, alone with the Prince, and armed to the teeth, he inspects every corner of the rooms, looks under the beds, and, in a word, gives himself up to a whole heap of ridiculous actions worthy of an old woman. All these precautions would have seemed highly degrading to the Prince himself in the happy days when he used to go to war and had never killed anyone except in open combat. As he is a man of infinite spirit, he is ashamed of these precautions; they seem to him ridiculous, even at the moment when he is giving way to them, and the source of Conte Mosca's enormous reputation is that he devotes all his skill to arranging that the Prince shall never have occasion to blush in his presence. It is he, Mosca, who, in his capacity as Minister of Police, insists upon looking under the furniture, and, so people say in Parma, even in the cases in which the musicians keep their double-basses. It is the Prince who objects to this and teases his Minister over his excessive punctiliousness. 'It is a challenge,' Conte Mosca replies; 'think of the satirical sonnets the Jacobins would shower on us if we allowed you to be killed. It is not only your life that we are defending, it is our honour.' But it appears that the Prince is only half taken in by this, for if anyone in the town should take it into his head to remark that they have passed a sleepless night at the castle, the Grand Fiscal Rassi sends the impertinent fellow to the citadel, and once in that lofty abode, and in the fresh air, as they say at Parma, it is a miracle if anyone remembers the prisoner's existence. It is because he is a soldier, and in Spain got away a score of times, pistol in hand, from a tight corner, that the Prince prefers Conte Mosca to Rassi, who is a great deal more flexible and baser. Those unfortunate prisoners in the citadel are kept in the most rigorously secret confinement, and all sorts of stories are told about them. The Liberals assert that (and this, they say, is one of Rassi's ideas) the gaolers and confessors are under orders to assure them, about once a month, that one of them is being led out to die. That day the prisoners have permission to climb to the platform of the huge tower, one hundred and eighty feet high, and from there they see a procession file along the plain with some spy who plays the part of a poor devil going to his death."

These stories and a score of others of the same nature and of no less authenticity keenly interested Signora Pietranera: on the following day she asked Conte Mosca, whom she rallied briskly, for details. She found him amusing, and maintained to him that at heart he was a monster without knowing it. One day as he went back to his inn the Conte said to himself: "Not only is this Contessa Pietranera a charming woman; but when I spend the evening in her box I manage to forget certain things at Parma the memory of which cuts me to the heart."—This Minister, in spite of his frivolous air and his polished manners, was not blessed with a soul of the French type; he could not forget the things that annoyed him. When there was a thorn in his pillow, he was obliged to break it off and to blunt its point by repeated stabbings of his throbbing limbs. (I must apologise for the last two sentences, which are translated from the Italian.) On the morrow of this discovery, the Conte found that, notwithstanding the business that had summoned him to Milan, the day spun itself out to an enormous length; he could not stay in one place, he wore out his carriage-horses. About six o'clock he mounted his saddle-horse to ride to the Corso; he had some hope of meeting Signora Pietranera there; seeing no sign of her, he remembered that at eight o'clock the Scala Theatre opened; he entered it, and did not see ten persons in that immense auditorium. He felt somewhat ashamed of himself for being there. "Is it possible," he asked himself, "that at forty-five and past I am committing follies at which a sub-lieutenant would blush? Fortunately nobody suspects them." He fled, and tried to pass the time by strolling up and down the attractive streets that surround the Scala. They are lined with caffè which at that hour are filled to overflowing with people. Outside each of these caffè crowds of curious idlers perched on chairs in the middle of the street sip ices and criticise the passers-by. The Conte was a passer-by of importance; at once he had the pleasure of being recognised and addressed. Three or four importunate persons of the kind that one cannot easily shake off seized this opportunity to obtain an audience of so powerful a Minister. Two of them handed him petitions; the third was content with pouring out a stream of long-winded advice as to his political conduct.

"One does not sleep," he said to himself, "when one has such a brain; one ought not to walk about when one is so powerful." He returned to the theatre, where it occurred to him that he might take a box in the third tier; from there his gaze could plunge, unnoticed by anyone, into the box in the second tier in which he hoped to see the Contessa arrive. Two full hours of waiting did not seem any too long to this lover; certain of not being seen he abandoned himself joyfully to the full extent of his folly. "Old age," he said to himself, "is not that, more than anything else, the time when one is no longer capable of these delicious puerilities?"

Finally the Contessa appeared. Armed with his glasses, he studied her with rapture: "Young, brilliant, light as a bird," he said to himself, "she is not twenty-five. Her beauty is the least of her charms: where else could one find that soul always sincere, which never acts with prudence, which abandons itself entirely to the impression of the moment, which asks only to be carried away towards some new goal? I can understand Conte Nani's foolish behaviour."

The Conte supplied himself with excellent reasons for behaving foolishly, so long as he was thinking only of capturing the happiness which he saw before his eyes. He did not find any quite so satisfactory when he came to consider his age and the anxieties, sometimes of the saddest nature, that burdened his life. "A man of ability, whose spirit has been destroyed by fear, gives me a sumptuous life and plenty of money to be his Minister; but were he to dismiss me to-morrow, I should be left old and poor, that is to say everything that the world despises most; there's a fine partner to offer the Contessa!" These thoughts were too dark, he came back to Signora Pietranera; he could not tire of gazing at her, and, to be able to think of her better, did not go down to her box. "Her only reason for taking Nani, they tell me, was to put that imbecile Limercati in his place when he could not be prevailed upon to run a sword, or to hire someone else to stick a dagger into her husband's murderer. I would fight for her twenty times over!" cried the Conte in a transport of enthusiasm. Every moment he consulted the theatre clock which, with illuminated figures upon a black background, warned the audience every five minutes of the approach of the hour at which it was permissible for them to visit a friend's box. The Conte said to himself: "I cannot spend more than half an hour at the most in the box, seeing that I have known her so short a time; if I stay longer, I shall attract attention, and, thanks to my age and even more to this accursed powder on my hair, I shall have all the bewitching allurements of a Cassandra." But a sudden thought made up his mind once and for all. "If she were to leave that box to pay someone else a visit, I should be well rewarded for the avarice with which I am hoarding up this pleasure." He rose to go down to the box in which he could see the Contessa; all at once he found that he had lost almost all his desire to present himself to her.

"Ah! this is really charming," he exclaimed with a smile at his own expense, and coming to a halt on the staircase; "an impulse of genuine shyness! It must be at least five and twenty years since an adventure of this sort last came my way."

He entered the box, almost with an effort to control himself; and, making the most, like a man of spirit, of the condition in which he found himself, made no attempt to appear at ease, or to display his wit by plunging into some entertaining story; he had the courage to be shy, he employed his wits in letting his disturbance be apparent without making himself ridiculous. "If she should take it amiss," he said to himself, "I am lost for ever. What! Shy, with my hair covered with powder, hair which, without the disguise of the powder, would be visibly grey! But, after all, it is a fact; it cannot therefore be absurd unless I exaggerate it or make a boast of it." The Contessa had spent so many weary hours at the castle of Grianta, facing the powdered heads of her brother and nephew, and of various politically sound bores of the neighbourhood, that it never occurred to her to give a thought to her new adorer's style in hairdressing.

The Contessa's mind having this protection against the impulse to laugh on his entry, she paid attention only to the news from France which Mosca always had for her in detail, on coming to her box; no doubt he used to invent it. As she discussed this news with him, she noticed this evening the expression in his eyes, which was good and kindly.

"I can imagine," she said to him, "that at Parma, among your slaves, you will not wear that friendly expression; it would ruin everything and give them some hope of not being hanged!"

The entire absence of any sense of self-importance in a man who passed as the first diplomat in Italy, seemed strange to the Contessa; she even found a certain charm in it. Moreover, as he talked well and with warmth, she was not at all displeased that he should have thought fit to take upon himself for one evening, without ulterior consequences, the part of squire of dames.

It was a great step forward, and highly dangerous; fortunately for the Minister, who, at Parma, never met a cruel fair, the Contessa had arrived from Grianta only a few days before: her mind was still stiff with the boredom of a country life. She had almost forgotten how to make fun; and all those things that appertain to a light and elegant way of living had assumed in her eyes as it were a tint of novelty which made them sacred; she was in no mood to laugh at anyone, even a lover of forty-five, and shy. A week later, the Conte's temerity might have met with a very different sort of welcome.

At the Scala, it is not usual to prolong for more than twenty minutes or so these little visits to one's friends' boxes; the Conte spent the whole evening in the box in which he had been so fortunate as to meet Signora Pietranera. "She is a woman," he said to himself, "who revives in me all the follies of my youth!" But he was well aware of the danger. "Will my position as an all-powerful Bashaw in a place forty leagues away induce her to pardon me this stupid behaviour? I get so bored at Parma!" Meanwhile, every quarter of an hour, he registered a mental vow to get up and go.

"I must explain to you, Signora," he said to the Contessa with a laugh, "that at Parma I am bored to death, and I ought to be allowed to drink my fill of pleasure when the cup comes my way. So, without involving you in anything and simply for this evening, permit me to play the part of lover in your company. Alas, in a few days I shall be far away from this box which makes me forget every care and indeed, you will say, every convention."

A week after this monstrous visit to the Contessa's box, and after a series of minor incidents the narration of which here would perhaps seem tedious, Conte Mosca was absolutely mad with love, and the Contessa had already begun to think that his age need offer no objection if the suitor proved attractive in other ways. They had reached this stage when Mosca was recalled by a courier from Parma. One would have said that his Prince was afraid to be left alone. The Contessa returned to Grianta; her imagination no longer serving to adorn that lovely spot, it appeared to her a desert. "Should I be attached to this man?" she asked herself. Mosca wrote to her, and had not to play a part; absence had relieved him of the source of all his anxious thoughts; his letters were amusing, and, by a little piece of eccentricity which was not taken amiss, to escape the comments of the Marchese del Dongo, who did not like having to pay for the carriage of letters, he used to send couriers who would post his at Como or Lecco or Varese or some other of those charming little places on the shores of the lake. This was done with the idea that the courier might be employed to take back her replies. The move was successful.

Soon the days when the couriers came were events in the Contessa's life; these couriers brought her flowers, fruit, little presents of no value, which amused her, however, and her sister-in-law as well. Her memory of the Conte was blended with her idea of his great power; the Contessa had become curious to know everything that people said of him; the Liberals themselves paid a tribute to his talents.

The principal source of the Conte's reputation for evil was that he passed as the head of the Ultra Party at the Court of Parma, while the Liberal Party had at its head an intriguing woman capable of anything, even of succeeding, the Marchesa Raversi, who was immensely rich. The Prince made a great point of not discouraging that one of the two Parties which happened not to be in power; he knew quite well that he himself would always be the master, even with a Ministry formed in Signora Raversi's drawing-room. Endless details of these intrigues were reported at Grianta. The bodily absence of Mosca, whom everyone described as a Minister of supreme talent and a man of action, made it possible not to think any more of his powdered head, a symbol of everything that is dull and sad; it was a detail of no consequence, one of the obligations of the court at which, moreover, he was playing so distinguished a part. "It is a ridiculous thing, a court," said the Contessa to the Marchesa, "but it is amusing; it is a game that it is interesting to play, but one must agree to the rules. Who ever thought of protesting against the absurdity of the rules of piquet? And yet, once you are accustomed to the rules, it is delightful to beat your adversary with repique and capot."

MILAN

The Contessa often thought about the writer of these entertaining letters; the days on which she received them were delightful to her; she would take her boat and go to read them in one of the charming spots by the lake, the Pliniana, Belan, the wood of the Sfrondata. These letters seemed to console her to some extent for Fabrizio's absence. She could not, at all events, refuse to allow the Conte to be deeply in love; a month had not passed before she was thinking of him with tender affection. For his part, Conte Mosca was almost sincere when he offered to hand in his resignation, to leave the Ministry and to come and spend the rest of his life with her at Milan or elsewhere. "I have 400,000 francs," he added, "which will always bring us in an income of 15,000."—"A box at the play again, horses, everything," thought the Contessa; they were pleasant dreams. The sublime beauty of the different views of the Lake of Como began to charm her once more. She went down to dream by its shores of this return to a brilliant and distinctive life, which, most unexpectedly, seemed to be coming within the bounds of possibility. She saw herself on the Corso, at Milan, happy and gay as in the days of the Viceroy: "Youth, or at any rate a life of action would begin again for me."

Sometimes her ardent imagination concealed things from her, but never did she have those deliberate illusions which cowardice induces. She was above all things a woman who was honest with herself. "If I am a little too old to be doing foolish things," she said to herself, "envy, which creates illusions as love does, may poison my stay in Milan for me. After my husband's death, my noble poverty was a success, as was my refusal of two vast fortunes. My poor little Conte Mosca had not a twentieth part of the opulence that was cast at my feet by those two worms, Limercati and Nani. The meagre widow's pension which I had to struggle to obtain, the dismissal of my servants, which made some sensation, the little fifth floor room which brought a score of carriages to the door, all went to form at the time a striking spectacle. But I shall have unpleasant moments, however skilfully I may handle things, if, never possessing any fortune beyond my widow's pension, I go back to live at Milan on the snug little middle-class comfort which we can secure with the 15,000 lire that Mosca will have left after he retires. One strong objection, out of which envy will forge a terrible weapon, is that the Conte, although separated long ago from his wife, is still a married man. This separation is known at Parma, but at Milan it will come as news, and they will put it down to me. So, my dear Scala, my divine Lake of Como, adieu! adieu!"

In spite of all these forebodings, if the Contessa had had the smallest income of her own she would have accepted Mosca's offer to resign his office. She regarded herself as a middle-aged woman, and the idea of the court alarmed her; but what will appear in the highest degree improbable on this side of the Alps is that the Conte would have handed in that resignation gladly. So, at least, he managed to make his friend believe. In all his letters he implored, with an ever increasing frenzy, a second interview at Milan; it was granted him. "To swear that I feel an insane passion for you," the Contessa said to him one day at Milan, "would be a lie; I should be only too glad to love to-day at thirty odd as I used to love at two-and-twenty! But I have seen so many things decay that I had imagined to be eternal! I have the most tender regard for you, I place an unbounded confidence in you, and of all the men I know, you are the one I like best." The Contessa believed herself to be perfectly sincere; and yet, in the final clause, this declaration embodied a tiny falsehood. Fabrizio, perhaps, had he chosen, might have triumphed over every rival in her heart. But Fabrizio was nothing more than a boy in Conte Mosca's eyes: he himself reached Milan three days after the young hothead's departure for Novara, and he hastened to intercede on his behalf with Barone Binder. The Conte considered that his exile was now irrevocable.

A RECENT CREATION

He had not come to Milan alone; he had in his carriage the Duca Sanseverina-Taxis, a handsome little old man of sixty-eight, dapple-grey, very polished, very neat, immensely rich but not quite as noble as he ought to have been. It was his grandfather, only, who had amassed millions from the office of Farmer General of the Revenues of the State of Parma. His father had had himself made Ambassador of the Prince of Parma to the Court of ——, by advancing the following argument: "Your Highness allots 30,000 francs to his Representative at the Court of ——, where he cuts an extremely modest figure. Should Your Highness deign to appoint me to the post, I will accept 6,000 francs as salary. My expenditure at the Court of —— will never fall below 100,000 francs a year, and my agent will pay over 20,000 francs every year to the Treasurer for Foreign Affairs at Parma. With that sum they can attach to me whatever Secretary of Embassy they choose, and I shall shew no curiosity to inquire into diplomatic secrets, if there are any. My object is to shed lustre on my house, which is still a new one, and to give it the distinction of having filled one of the great public offices."

The present Duca, this Ambassador's son and heir, had made the stupid mistake of coming out as a Semi-Liberal, and for the last two years had been in despair. In Napoleon's time, he had lost two or three millions owing to his obstinacy in remaining abroad, and even now, after the re-establishment of order in Europe, he had not managed to secure a certain Grand Cordon which adorned the portrait of his father. The want of this Cordon was killing him by inches.

At the degree of intimacy which in Italy follows love, there was no longer any obstacle in the nature of vanity between the lovers. It was therefore with the most perfect simplicity that Mosca said to the woman he adored:

"I have two or three plans of conduct to offer you, all pretty well thought out; I have been thinking of nothing else for the last three months.

"First: I hand in my resignation, and we retire to a quiet life at Milan or Florence or Naples or wherever you please. We have an income of 15,000 francs, apart from the Prince's generosity, which will continue for some time, more or less.

"Secondly: You condescend to come to the place in which I have some authority; you buy a property, Sacca, for example, a charming house in the middle of a forest, commanding the valley of the Po; you can have the contract signed within a week from now. The Prince then attaches you to his court. But here I can see an immense objection. You will be well received at court; no one would think of refusing, with me there; besides, the Princess imagines she is unhappy, and I have recently rendered her certain services with an eye to your future. But I must remind you of one paramount objection: the Prince is a bigoted churchman, and, as you already know, ill luck will have it that I am a married man. From which will arise a million minor unpleasantnesses. You are a widow; it is a fine title which would have to be exchanged for another, and this brings me to my third proposal.

THE DUCA SANSEVERINA

"One might find a new husband who would not be a nuisance. But first of all he would have to be considerably advanced in years, for why should you deny me the hope of some day succeeding him? Very well, I have made this curious arrangement with the Duca Sanseverina-Taxis, who, of course, does not know the name of his future Duchessa. He knows only that she will make him an Ambassador and will procure him the Grand Cordon which his father had and the lack of which makes him the most unhappy of mortals. Apart from this, the Duca is by no means an absolute idiot; he gets his clothes and wigs from Paris. He is not in the least the sort of man who would do anything deliberately mean, he seriously believes that honour consists in his having a Cordon, and he is ashamed of his riches. He came to me a year ago proposing to found a hospital, in order to get this Cordon; I laughed at him then, but he did not by any means laugh at me when I made him a proposal of marriage; my first condition was, you can understand, that he must never set foot again in Parma."

"But do you know that what you are proposing is highly immoral?" said the Contessa.

"No more immoral than everything else that is done at our court and a score of others. Absolute Power has this advantage, that it sanctifies everything in the eyes of the public: what harm can there be in a thing that nobody notices? Our policy for the next twenty years is going to consist in fear of the Jacobins—and such fear, too! Every year, we shall fancy ourselves on the eve of '93. You will hear, I hope, the fine speeches I make on the subject at my receptions! They are beautiful! Everything that can in any way reduce this fear will be supremely moral in the eyes of the nobles and the bigots. And you see, at Parma, everyone who is not either a noble or a bigot is in prison, or is packing up to go there; you may be quite sure that this marriage will not be thought odd among us until the day on which I am disgraced. This arrangement involves no dishonesty towards anyone; that is the essential thing, it seems to me. The Prince, on whose favour we are trading, has placed only one condition on his consent, which is that the future Duchessa shall be of noble birth. Last year my office, all told, brought me in 107,000 francs; my total income would therefore be 122,000; I invested 20,000 at Lyons. Very well, choose for yourself; either, a life of luxury based on our having 122,000 francs to spend, which, at Parma, go as far as at least 400,000 at Milan, but with this marriage which will give you the name of a passable man on whom you will never set eyes after you leave the altar; or else the simple middle-class existence on 15,000 francs at Florence or Naples, for I am of your opinion, you have been too much admired at Milan; we should be persecuted here by envy, which might perhaps succeed in souring our tempers. Our grand life at Parma will, I hope, have some touches of novelty, even in your eyes which have seen the court of Prince Eugène; you would be wise to try it before shutting the door on it for ever. Do not think that I am seeking to influence your opinion. As for me, my mind is quite made up: I would rather live on a fourth floor with you than continue that grand life by myself."

A MATCH

The possibility of this strange marriage was debated by the loving couple every day. The Contessa saw the Duca Sanseverina-Taxis at the Scala Ball, and thought him highly presentable. In one of their final conversations, Mosca summed up his proposals in the following words: "We must take some decisive action if we wish to spend the rest of our lives in an enjoyable fashion and not grow old before our time. The Prince has given his approval; Sanseverina is a person who might easily be worse; he possesses the finest palazzo in Parma, and a boundless fortune; he is sixty-eight, and has an insane passion for the Grand Cordon; but there is one great stain on his character: he once paid 10,000 francs for a bust of Napoleon by Canova. His second sin, which will be the death of him if you do not come to his rescue, is that he lent 25 napoleons to Ferrante Palla, a lunatic of our country but also something of a genius, whom we have since sentenced to death, fortunately in his absence. This Ferrante has written a couple of hundred lines in his time which are like nothing in the world; I will repeat them to you, they are as fine as Dante. The Prince then sends Sanseverina to the Court of ——, he marries you on the day of his departure, and in the second year of his stay abroad, which he calls an Embassy, he receives the Grand Cordon of the ——, without which he cannot live. You will have in him a brother who will give you no trouble at all; he signs all the papers I require in advance, and besides you will see nothing of him, or as little as you choose. He asks for nothing better than never to shew his face at Parma, where his grandfather the tax-gatherer and his own profession of Liberalism stand in his way. Rassi, our hangman, makes out that the Duca was a secret subscriber to the Constitutionnel through Ferrante Palla the poet, and this slander was for a long time a serious obstacle in the way of the Prince's consent."

Why should the historian who follows faithfully all the most trivial details of the story that has been told him be held responsible? Is it his fault if his characters, led astray by passions which he, unfortunately for himself, in no way shares, descend to conduct that is profoundly immoral? It is true that things of this sort are no longer done in a country where the sole passion that has outlived all the rest is that for money, as an excuse for vanity.

Three months after the events we have just related, the Duchessa Sanseverina-Taxis astonished the court of Parma by her easy affability and the noble serenity of her mind; her house was beyond comparison the most attractive in the town. This was what Conte Mosca had promised his master. Ranuccio-Ernesto IV, the Reigning Prince, and the Princess his Consort, to whom she was presented by two of the greatest ladies in the land, gave her a most marked welcome. The Duchessa was curious to see this Prince, master of the destiny of the man she loved, she was anxious to please him, and in this was more than successful. She found a man of tall stature but inclined to stoutness; his hair, his moustache, his enormous whiskers were of a fine gold, according to his courtiers; elsewhere they had provoked, by their faded tint, the ignoble word flaxen. From the middle of a plump face there projected to no distance at all a tiny nose that was almost feminine. But the Duchessa observed that, in order to notice all these points of ugliness, one had first to attempt to catalogue the Prince's features separately. Taken as a whole, he had the air of a man of sense and of firm character. His carriage, his way of holding himself were by no means devoid of majesty, but often he sought to impress the person he was addressing; at such times he grew embarrassed himself, and fell into an almost continuous swaying motion from one leg to the other. For the rest, Ernesto IV had a piercing and commanding gaze; his gestures with his arms had nobility, and his speech was at once measured and concise.

Mosca had warned the Duchessa that the Prince had, in the large cabinet in which he gave audiences, a full length portrait of Louis XIV, and a very fine table by Scagliola of Florence. She found the imitation striking; evidently he sought to copy the gaze and the noble utterance of Louis XIV, and he leaned upon the Scagliola table so as to give himself the pose of Joseph II. He sat down as soon as he had uttered his greeting to the Duchessa, to give her an opportunity to make use of the tabouret befitting her rank. At this court, duchesses, princesses, and the wives of Grandees of Spain alone have the right to sit; other women wait until the Prince or Princess invites them; and, to mark the difference in rank, these August Personages always take care to allow a short interval to elapse before inviting the ladies who are not duchesses to be seated. The Duchessa found that at certain moments the imitation of Louis XIV was a little too strongly marked in the Prince; for instance, in his way of smiling good-naturedly and throwing back his head.

THE COURT OF PARMA

Ernesto IV wore an evening coat in the latest fashion, that had come from Paris; every month he had sent to him from that city, which he abhorred, an evening coat, a frock coat, and a hat. But by an odd blend of costume, on the day on which the Duchessa was received he had put on red breeches, silk stockings and very close-fitting shoes, models for which might be found in the portraits of Joseph II.

He received Signora Sanseverina graciously; the things he said to her were shrewd and witty; but she saw quite plainly that there was no superfluity of warmth in his reception of her.—"Do you know why?" said Conte Mosca on her return from the audience, "it is because Milan is a larger and finer city than Parma. He was afraid, had he given you the welcome that I expected and he himself had led me to hope, of seeming like a provincial in ecstasies before the charms of a beautiful lady who has come down from the capital. No doubt, too, he is still upset by a detail which I hardly dare mention to you; the Prince sees at his court no woman who can vie with you in beauty. Yesterday evening, when he retired to bed, that was his sole topic of conversation with Pernice, his principal valet, who is good enough to confide in me. I foresee a little revolution in etiquette; my chief enemy at this court is a fool who goes by the name of General Fabio Conti. Just imagine a creature who has been on active service for perhaps one day in his life, and sets out from that to copy the bearing of Frederick the Great. In addition to which, he aims also at copying the noble affability of General La Fayette, and that because he is the leader, here, of the Liberal Party (God knows what sort of Liberals!)."

"I know your Fabio Conti," said the Duchessa; "I had a good view of him once near Como; he was quarrelling with the police." She related the little adventure which the reader may perhaps remember.

"You will learn one day, Signora, if your mind ever succeeds in penetrating the intricacies of our etiquette, that young ladies do not appear at court here until after their marriage. At the same time, the Prince has, for the superiority of his city of Parma over all others, a patriotism so ardent that I would wager that he will find some way of having little Clelia Conti, our La Fayette's daughter, presented to him. She is charming, upon my soul she is; and was still reckoned, a week ago, the best-looking person in the States of the Prince.

"I do not know," the Conte went on, "whether the horrors that the enemies of our Sovereign have disseminated against him, have reached the castle of Grianta; they make him out a monster, an ogre. The truth is that Ernesto IV was full of dear little virtues, and one may add that, had he been invulnerable like Achilles, he would have continued to be the model of a potentate. But in a moment of boredom and anger, and also a little in imitation of Louis XIV cutting off the head of some hero or other of the Fronde, who was discovered living in peaceful solitude on a plot of land near Versailles, fifty years after the Fronde, one fine day Ernesto IV had two Liberals hanged. It seems that these rash fellows used to meet on fixed days to speak evil of the Prince and address ardent prayers to heaven that the plague might visit Parma and deliver them from the tyrant. The word tyrant was proved. Rassi called this conspiracy; he had them sentenced to death, and the execution of one of them, Conte L——, was atrocious. All this happened before my time. Since that fatal hour," the Conte went on, lowering his voice, "the Prince has been subject to fits of panic unworthy of a man, but these are the sole source of the favour that I enjoy. But for this royal fear, mine would be a kind of merit too abrupt, too harsh for this court, where idiocy runs rampant. Would you believe that the Prince looks under the beds in his room before going to sleep, and spends a million, which at Parma is the equivalent of four millions at Milan, to have a good police force; and you see before you, Signora Duchessa, the Chief of that terrible Police. By the police, that is to say by fear, I have become Minister of War and Finance; and as the Minister of the Interior is my nominal chief, in so far as he has the police under his jurisdiction, I have had that portfolio given to Conte Zurla-Contarini, an imbecile who is a glutton for work and gives himself the pleasure of writing eighty letters a day. I received one only this morning on which Conte Zurla-Contarini has had the satisfaction of writing with his own hand the number 20,715."

The Duchessa Sanseverina was presented to the melancholy Princess of Parma, Clara-Paolina, who, because her husband had a mistress (quite an attractive woman, the Marchesa Balbi), imagined herself to be the most unhappy person in the universe, a belief which had made her perhaps the most trying. The Duchessa found a very tall and very thin woman, who was not thirty-six and appeared fifty. A symmetrical and noble face might have passed as beautiful, though somewhat spoiled by the large round eyes which could barely see, if the Princess had not herself abandoned every attempt at beauty. She received the Duchessa with a shyness so marked that certain courtiers, enemies of Conte Mosca, ventured to say that the Princess looked like the woman who was being presented and the Duchessa like the sovereign. The Duchessa, surprised and almost disconcerted, could find no language that would put her in a place inferior to that which the Princess assumed for herself. To restore some self-possession to this poor Princess, who at heart was not wanting in intelligence, the Duchessa could think of nothing better than to begin, and keep going, a long dissertation on botany. The Princess was really learned in this science; she had some very fine hothouses with quantities of tropical plants. The Duchessa, while seeking simply for a way out of a difficult position, made a lifelong conquest of Princess Clara-Paolina, who, from the shy and speechless creature that she had been at the beginning of the audience, found herself towards the end so much at her ease, that, in defiance of all the rules of etiquette, this first audience lasted for no less than an hour and a quarter. Next day, the Duchessa sent out to purchase some exotic plants, and posed as a great lover of botany.

The Princess spent all her time with the venerable Father Landriani, Archbishop of Parma, a man of learning, a man of intelligence even, and a perfectly honest man, but one who presented a singular spectacle when he was seated in his chair of crimson velvet (it was the privilege of his office) opposite the armchair of the Princess, surrounded by her maids of honour and her two ladies of company. The old prelate, with his flowing white locks, was even more timid, were such a thing possible, than the Princess; they saw one another every day, and every audience began with a silence that lasted fully a quarter of an hour. To such a state had they come that the Contessa Alvizi, one of the ladies of company, had become a sort of favourite, because she possessed the art of encouraging them to talk and so breaking the silence.

To end the series of presentations, the Duchessa was admitted to the presence of H.S.H. the Crown Prince, a personage of taller stature than his father and more timid than his mother. He was learned in mineralogy, and was sixteen years old. He blushed excessively on seeing the Duchessa come in, and was so put off his balance that he could not think of a word to say to that beautiful lady. He was a fine-looking young man, and spent his life in the woods, hammer in hand. At the moment when the Duchessa rose to bring this silent audience to an end:

"My God! Signora, how pretty you are!" exclaimed the Crown Prince; a remark which was not considered to be in too bad taste by the lady presented.

The Marchesa Balbi, a young woman of five-and-twenty, might still have passed for the most perfect type of leggiadria italiana, two or three years before the arrival of the Duchessa Sanseverina at Parma. As it was, she had still the finest eyes in the world and the most charming airs, but, viewed close at hand, her skin was netted with countless fine little wrinkles which made the Marchesa look like a young grandmother. Seen from a certain distance, in the theatre for instance, in her box, she was still a beauty, and the people in the pit thought that the Prince shewed excellent taste. He spent every evening with the Marchesa Balbi, but often without opening his lips, and the boredom she saw on the Prince's face had made this poor woman decline into an extraordinary thinness. She laid claim to an unlimited subtlety, and was always smiling a bitter smile; she had the prettiest teeth in the world, and in season and out, having little or no sense, would attempt by an ironical smile to give some hidden meaning to her words. Conte Mosca said that it was these continual smiles, while inwardly she was yawning, that gave her all her wrinkles. The Balbi had a finger in every pie, and the State never made a contract for 1,000 francs without there being some little ricordo (this was the polite expression at Parma) for the Marchesa. Common report would have it that she had invested six millions in England, but her fortune, which indeed was of recent origin, did not in reality amount to 1,500,000 francs. It was to be out of reach of her stratagems, and to have her dependent upon himself, that Conte Mosca had made himself Minister of Finance. The Marchesa's sole passion was fear disguised in sordid avarice: "I shall die on straw!" she used occasionally to say to the Prince, who was shocked by such a remark. The Duchessa noticed that the ante-room, resplendent with gilding, of the Balbi's palazzo, was lighted by a single candle which guttered on a priceless marble table, and that the doors of her drawing-room were blackened by the footmen's fingers.

"She received me," the Duchessa told her lover, "as though she expected me to offer her a gratuity of 50 francs."

The course of the Duchessa's successes was slightly interrupted by the reception given her by the shrewdest woman of the court, the celebrated Marchesa Raversi, a consummate intriguer who had established herself at the head of the party opposed to that of Conte Mosca. She was anxious to overthrow him, all the more so in the last few months, since she was the niece of the Duca Sanseverina, and was afraid of seeing her prospects impaired by the charms of his new Duchessa. "The Raversi is by no means a woman to be ignored," the Conte told his mistress; "I regard her as so far capable of sticking at nothing that I separated from my wife solely because she insisted on taking as her lover Cavaliere Bentivoglio, a friend of the Raversi." This lady, a tall virago with very dark hair, remarkable for the diamonds which she wore all day, and the rouge with which she covered her cheeks, had declared herself in advance the Duchessa's enemy, and when she received her in her own house made it her business to open hostilities. The Duca Sanseverina, in the letters he wrote from ——, appeared so delighted with his Embassy, and above all, with the prospect of the Grand Cordon, that his family were afraid of his leaving part of his fortune to his wife, whom he loaded with little presents. The Raversi, although definitely ugly, had for a lover Conte Baldi, the handsomest man at court; generally speaking, she was successful in all her undertakings.

The Duchessa lived in the greatest style imaginable. The palazzo Sanseverina had always been one of the most magnificent in the city of Parma, and the Duca, to celebrate the occasion of his Embassy and his future Grand Cordon, was spending enormous sums upon its decoration; the Duchessa directed the work in person.

The Conte had guessed aright; a few days after the presentation of the Duchessa, young Clelia Conti came to court; she had been made a Canoness. In order to parry the blow which this favour might be thought to have struck at the Conte's influence, the Duchessa gave a party, on the pretext of throwing open the new garden of her palazzo, and by the exercise of her most charming manners made Clelia, whom she called her young friend of the Lake of Como, the queen of the evening. Her monogram was displayed, as though by accident, upon the principal transparencies. The young Clelia, although slightly pensive, was pleasant in the way in which she spoke of the little adventure by the Lake, and of her warm gratitude. She was said to be deeply religious and very fond of solitude. "I would wager," said the Conte, "that she has enough sense to be ashamed of her father." The Duchessa made a friend of this girl; she felt attracted towards her, she did not wish to appear jealous, and included her in all her pleasure parties; after all, her plan was to seek to diminish all the enmities of which the Conte was the object.

Everything smiled on the Duchessa; she was amused by this court existence where a sudden storm is always to be feared; she felt as though she were beginning life over again. She was tenderly attached to the Conte, who was literally mad with happiness. This pleasing situation had bred in him an absolute impassivity towards everything in which only his professional interests were concerned. And so, barely two months after the Duchessa's arrival, he obtained the patent and honours of Prime Minister, honours which come very near to those paid to the Sovereign himself. The Conte had complete control of his master's will; they had a proof of this at Parma by which everyone was impressed.

To the southeast, and within ten minutes of the town rises that famous citadel so renowned throughout Italy, the main tower of which stands one hundred and eighty feet high and is visible from so far. This tower, constructed on the model of Hadrian's Tomb, at Rome, by the Farnese, grandsons of Paul III, in the first half of the sixteenth century, is so large in diameter that on the platform in which it ends it has been possible to build a palazzo for the governor of the citadel and a new prison called the Farnese tower. This prison, erected in honour of the eldest son of Ranuccio-Ernesto II, who had become the accepted lover of his stepmother, is regarded as a fine and singular monument throughout the country. The Duchessa was curious to see it; on the day of her visit the heat was overpowering in Parma, and up there, in that lofty position, she found fresh air, which so delighted her that she stayed for several hours. The officials made a point of throwing open to her the rooms of the Farnese tower.

The Duchessa met on the platform of the great tower a poor Liberal prisoner who had come to enjoy the half-hour's outing that was allowed him every third day. On her return to Parma, not having yet acquired the discretion necessary in an absolute court, she spoke of this man, who had told her the whole history of his life. The Marchesa Raversi's party seized hold of these utterances of the Duchessa and repeated them broadcast, greatly hoping that they would shock the Prince. Indeed, Ernesto IV was in the habit of repeating that the essential thing was to impress the imagination. "Perpetual is a big word," he used to say, "and more terrible in Italy than elsewhere": accordingly, never in his life had he granted a pardon. A week after her visit to the fortress the Duchessa received a letter commuting a sentence, signed by the Prince and by his Minister, with a blank left for the name. The prisoner whose name she chose to write in this space would obtain the restoration of his property, with permission to spend the rest of his days in America. The Duchessa wrote the name of the man who had talked to her. Unfortunately this man turned out to be half a rogue, a weak-kneed creature; it was on the strength of his confessions that the famous Ferrante Palla had been sentenced to death.

The unprecedented nature of this pardon set the seal upon Signora Sanseverina's position. Conte Mosca was wild with delight; it was a great day in his life and one that had a decisive influence on Fabrizio's destiny. He, meanwhile, was still at Romagnano, near Novara, going to confession, hunting, reading nothing, and paying court to a lady of noble birth, as was laid down in his instructions. The Duchessa was still a trifle shocked by this last essential. Another sign which boded no good to the Conte was that, while she would speak to him with the utmost frankness about everyone else, and would think aloud in his presence, she never mentioned Fabrizio to him without first carefully choosing her words.

"If you like," the Conte said to her one day, "I will write to that charming brother you have on the Lake of Como, and I will soon force that Marchese del Dongo, if I and my friends in a certain quarter apply a little pressure, to ask for the pardon of your dear Fabrizio. If it be true, as I have not the least doubt that it is, that Fabrizio is somewhat superior to the young fellows who ride their English thoroughbreds about the streets of Milan, what a life, at eighteen, to be doing nothing with no prospect of ever having anything to do! If heaven had endowed him with a real passion for anything in the world, were it only for angling, I should respect it; but what is he to do at Milan, even after he has obtained his pardon? He will get on a horse, which he will have had sent to him from England, at a certain hour of the day; at another, idleness will take him to his mistress, for whom he will care less than he will for his horse. . . . But, if you say the word, I will try to procure this sort of life for your nephew."

"I should like him to be an officer," said the Duchessa.

"Would you recommend a Sovereign to entrust a post which, at a given date, may be of some importance to a young man who, in the first place, is liable to enthusiasm, and, secondly, has shewn enthusiasm for Napoleon to the extent of going to join him at Waterloo? Just think where we should all be if Napoleon had won at Waterloo! We should have no Liberals to be afraid of, it is true, but the Sovereigns of ancient Houses would be able to keep their thrones only by marrying the daughters of his Marshals. And so military life for Fabrizio would be the life of a squirrel in a revolving cage: plenty of movement with no progress. He would have the annoyance of seeing himself cut out by all sorts of plebeian devotion. The essential quality in a young man of the present day, that is to say for the next fifty years perhaps, so long as we remain in a state of fear and religion has not been re-established, is not to be liable to enthusiasm and not to shew any spirit.

"I have thought of one thing, but one that will begin by making you cry out in protest, and will give me infinite trouble for many a day to come: it is an act of folly which I am ready to commit for you. But tell me, if you can, what folly would I not commit to win a smile?"

"Well?" said the Duchessa.

"Well, we have had as Archbishops of Parma three members of your family: Ascanio del Dongo who wrote a book in sixteen-something, Fabrizio in 1699, and another Ascanio in 1740. If Fabrizio cares to enter the prelacy, and to make himself conspicuous for virtues of the highest order, I can make him a Bishop somewhere, and then Archbishop here, provided that my influence lasts. The real objection is this: shall I remain Minister for long enough to carry out this fine plan, which will require several years? The Prince may die, he may have the bad taste to dismiss me. But, after all, it is the only way open to me of securing for Fabrizio something that is worthy of you."

They discussed the matter at length: the idea was highly repugnant to the Duchessa.

"Prove to me again," she said to the Conte, "that every other career is impossible for Fabrizio." The Conte proved it.

"You regret," he added, "the brilliant uniform; but as to that, I do not know what to do."

After a month in which the Duchessa had asked to be allowed to think things over, she yielded with a sigh to the sage views of the Minister. "Either ride stiffly upon an English horse through the streets of some big town," repeated the Conte, "or adopt a calling that is not unbefitting his birth; I can see no middle course. Unfortunately, a gentleman cannot become either a doctor or a barrister, and this age is made for barristers.

"Always bear in mind, Signora," the Conte went on, "that you are giving your nephew, on the streets of Milan, the lot enjoyed by the young men of his age who pass for the most fortunate. His pardon once procured, you will give him fifteen, twenty, thirty thousand francs; the amount does not matter; neither you nor I make any pretence of saving money."

The Duchessa was susceptible to the idea of fame; she did not wish Fabrizio to be simply a young man living on an allowance; she reverted to her lover's plan.

"Observe," the Conte said to her, "that I do not pretend to turn Fabrizio into an exemplary priest, like so many that you see. No, he is a great gentleman, first and foremost; he can remain perfectly ignorant if it seems good to him, and will none the less become Bishop and Archbishop, if the Prince continues to regard me as a useful person.

"If your orders deign to transform my proposal into an immutable decree," the Conte went on, "our protégé must on no account be seen in Parma living with modest means. His subsequent promotion will cause a scandal if people have seen him here as an ordinary priest; he ought not to appear in Parma until he has his violet stockings[10] and a suitable establishment. Then everyone will assume that your nephew is destined to be a Bishop, and nobody will be shocked.

"If you will take my advice, you will send Fabrizio to take his theology and spend three years at Naples. During the vacations of the Ecclesiastical Academy he can go if he likes to visit Paris and London, but he must never shew his face in Parma." This sentence made the Duchessa shudder.

She sent a courier to her nephew, asking him to meet her at Piacenza. Need it be said that this courier was the bearer of all the means of obtaining money and all the necessary passports?

Arriving first at Piacenza, Fabrizio hastened to meet the Duchessa, and embraced her with transports of joy which made her dissolve in tears. She was glad that the Conte was not present; since they had fallen in love, it was the first time that she had experienced this sensation.

Fabrizio was profoundly touched, and then distressed by the plans which the Duchessa had made for him; his hope had always been that, his affair at Waterloo settled, he might end by becoming a soldier. One thing struck the Duchessa, and still further increased the romantic opinion that she had formed of her nephew; he refused absolutely to lead a caffè-haunting existence in one of the big towns of Italy.

"Can't you see yourself on the Corso of Florence or Naples," said the Duchessa, "with thoroughbred English horses? For the evenings a carriage, a charming apartment," and so forth. She dwelt with exquisite relish on the details of this vulgar happiness, which she saw Fabrizio thrust from him with disdain. "He is a hero," she thought.

"And after ten years of this agreeable life, what shall I have done?" said Fabrizio; "what shall I be? A young man of a certain age, who will have to move out of the way of the first good-looking boy who makes his appearance in society, also mounted upon an English horse."

Fabrizio at first utterly rejected the idea of the Church. He spoke of going to New York, of becoming an American citizen and a soldier of the Republic.

"What a mistake you are making! You won't have any war, and you'll fall back into the caffè life, only without smartness, without music, without love affairs," replied the Duchessa. "Believe me, for you just as much as for myself, it would be a wretched existence there in America." She explained to him the cult of the god Dollar, and the respect that had to be shewn to the artisans in the street who by their votes decided everything. They came back to the idea of the Church.

"Before you fly into a passion," the Duchessa said to him, "just try to understand what the Conte is asking you to do; there is no question whatever of your being a poor priest of more or less exemplary and virtuous life, like Priore Blanès. Remember the example of your uncles, the Archbishops of Parma; read over again the accounts of their lives in the supplement to the Genealogy. First and foremost, a man with a name like yours has to be a great gentleman, noble, generous, an upholder of justice, destined from the first to find himself at the head of his order . . . and in the whole of his life doing only one dishonourable thing, and that a very useful one."

"So all my illusions are shattered," said Fabrizio, heaving a deep sigh; "it is a cruel sacrifice! I admit, I had not taken into account this horror of enthusiasm and spirit, even when wielded to their advantage, which from now onwards is going to prevail amongst absolute monarchs."

ITALIAN PRUDENCE

"Remember that a proclamation, a caprice of the heart flings the enthusiast into the bosom of the opposite party to the one he has served all his life!"

"I an enthusiast!" repeated Fabrizio; "a strange accusation! I cannot manage even to be in love!"

"What!" exclaimed the Duchessa.

"When I have the honour to pay my court to a beauty, even if she is of good birth and sound religious principles, I cannot think about her except when I see her."

This avowal made a strange impression upon the Duchessa.

"I ask for a month," Fabrizio went on, "in which to take leave of Signora C——, of Novara, and, what will be more difficult still, of all the castles I have been building in the air all my life. I shall write to my mother, who will be so good as to come and see me at Belgirate, on the Piedmontese shore of Lake Maggiore, and, in thirty-one days from now, I shall be in Parma incognito."

"No, whatever you do!" cried the Duchessa. She did not wish Conte Mosca to see her talking to Fabrizio.

The same pair met again at Piacenza. The Duchessa this time was highly agitated: a storm had broken at court; the Marchesa Raversi's party was on the eve of a triumph; it was on the cards that Conte Mosca might be replaced by General Fabio Conti, the leader of what was called at Parma the Liberal Party. Omitting only the name of the rival who was growing in the Prince's favour, the Duchessa told Fabrizio everything. She discussed afresh the chances of his future career, even with the prospect of his losing the all-powerful influence of the Conte.

"I am going to spend three years in the Ecclesiastical Academy at Naples," exclaimed Fabrizio; "but since I must be before all things a young gentleman, and you do not oblige me to lead the life of a virtuous seminarist, the prospect of this stay at Naples does not frighten me in the least; the life there will be in every way as pleasant as life at Romagnano; the best society of the neighbourhood was beginning to class me as a Jacobin. In my exile I have discovered that I know nothing, not even Latin, not even how to spell. I had planned to begin my education over again at Novara; I shall willingly study theology at Naples; it is a complicated science." The Duchessa was overjoyed. "If we are driven out of Parma," she told him, "we shall come and visit you at Naples. But since you agree, until further orders, to try for the violet stockings, the Conte, who knows the Italy of to-day through and through, has given me an idea to suggest to you. Believe or not, as you choose, what they teach you, but never raise any objection. Imagine that they are teaching you the rules of the game of whist; would you raise any objection to the rules of whist? I have told the Conte that you do believe, and he is delighted to hear it; it is useful in this world and in the next. But, if you believe, do not fall into the vulgar habit of speaking with horror of Voltaire, Diderot, Raynal and all those harebrained Frenchmen who paved the way to the Dual Chamber. Their names should not be allowed to pass your lips, but if you must mention them, speak of these gentlemen with a calm irony: they are people who have long since been refuted and whose attacks are no longer of any consequence. Believe blindly everything that they tell you at the Academy. Bear in mind that there are people who will make a careful note of your slightest objections; they will forgive you a little amorous intrigue if it is done in the proper way, but not a doubt: age stifles intrigue but encourages doubt. Act on this principle at the tribunal of penitence. You shall have a letter of recommendation to a Bishop who is factotum to the Cardinal Archbishop of Naples: to him alone you should admit your escapade in France and your presence on the 18th of June in the neighbourhood of Waterloo. Even then, cut it as short as possible, confess it only so that they cannot reproach you with having kept it secret. You were so young at the time!

THE COURT

"The second idea which the Conte sends you is this: if there should occur to you a brilliant argument, a triumphant retort that will change the course of the conversation, do not give in to the temptation to shine; remain silent: people of any discernment will see your cleverness in your eyes. It will be time enough to be witty when you are a Bishop."

Fabrizio began his life at Naples with an unpretentious carriage and four servants, good Milanese, whom his aunt had sent him. After a year of study, no one said of him that he was a man of parts: people looked upon him as a great nobleman, of a studious bent, extremely generous, but something of a libertine.

That year, amusing enough for Fabrizio, was terrible for the Duchessa. The Conte was three or four times within an inch of ruin; the Prince, more timorous than ever, because he was ill that year, believed that by dismissing him he could free himself from the odium of the executions carried out before the Conte had entered his service. Rassi was the cherished favourite who must at all costs be retained. The Conte's perils won him the passionate attachment of the Duchessa; she gave no more thought to Fabrizio. To lend colour to their possible retirement, it appeared that the air of Parma, which was indeed a trifle damp as it is everywhere in Lombardy, did not at all agree with her. Finally, after intervals of disgrace which went so far as to make the Conte, though Prime Minister, spend sometimes twenty whole days without seeing his master privately, Mosca won; he secured the appointment of General Fabio Conti, the so-called Liberal, as governor of the citadel in which were imprisoned the Liberals condemned by Rassi. "If Conti shows any leniency towards his prisoners," Mosca observed to his lady, "he will be disgraced as a Jacobin whose political theories have made him forget his duty as a general; if he shows himself stern and pitiless, and that, to my mind, is the direction in which he will tend, he ceases to be the leader of his own party and alienates all the families that have a relative in the citadel. This poor man has learned how to assume an air of awed respect on the approach of the Prince; if necessary, he changes his clothes four times a day; he can discuss a question of etiquette, but his is not a head capable of following the difficult path by which alone he can save himself from destruction; and in any case, I am there."

The day after the appointment of General Fabio Conti, which brought the ministerial crisis to an end, it was announced that Parma was to have an ultra-monarchist newspaper.

"What feuds the paper will create!" said the Duchessa.

"This paper, the idea of which is perhaps my masterpiece," replied the Conte with a smile, "I shall gradually and quite against my will allow to pass into the hands of the ultra-rabid section. I have attached some good salaries to the editorial posts. People are coming from all quarters to beg for employment on it; the excitement will help us through the next month or two, and people will forget the danger I have been in. Those seriously minded gentlemen P—— and D—— are already on the list."

"But this paper will be quite revoltingly absurd."

"I am reckoning on that," replied the Conte. "The Prince will read it every morning and admire the doctrines taught by myself as its founder. As to the details, he will approve or be shocked; of the hours which he devotes every day to work, two will be taken up in this way. The paper will get itself into trouble, but when the serious complaints begin to come in, in eight or ten months' time, it will be entirely in the hands of the ultra-rabids. It will be this party, which is annoying me, that will have to answer; as for me, I shall raise objections to the paper; but after all I greatly prefer a hundred absurdities to one hanging. Who remembers an absurdity two years after the publication of the official gazette! It is better than having the sons and family of the hanged man vowing a hatred which will last as long as I shall and may perhaps shorten my life."

The Duchessa, always passionately interested in something, always active, never idle, had more spirit than the whole court of Parma put together; but she lacked the patience and impassivity necessary for success in intrigue. However, she had managed to follow with passionate excitement the interests of the various groups, she was beginning even to establish a certain personal reputation with the Prince. Clara-Paolina, the Princess Consort, surrounded with honours but a prisoner to the most antiquated etiquette, looked upon herself as the unhappiest of women. The Duchessa Sanseverina paid her various attentions and tried to prove to her that she was by no means so unhappy as she supposed. It should be explained that the Prince saw his wife only at dinner: this meal lasted for thirty minutes, and the Prince would spend whole weeks without saying a word to Clara-Paolina. Signora Sanseverina attempted to change all this; she amused the Prince, all the more as she had managed to retain her independence intact. Had she wished to do so, she could not have succeeded in never hurting any of the fools who swarmed about this court. It was this utter inadaptability on her part that led to her being execrated by the common run of courtiers, all Conti or Marchesi, with an average income of 5,000 lire. She realised this disadvantage after the first few days, and devoted herself exclusively to pleasing the Sovereign and his Consort, the latter of whom was in absolute control of the Crown Prince. The Duchessa knew how to amuse the Sovereign, and profited by the extreme attention he paid to her lightest word to put in some shrewd thrusts at the courtiers who hated her. After the foolish actions that Rassi had made him commit, and for foolishness that sheds blood there is no reparation, the Prince was sometimes afraid and was often bored, which had brought him to a state of morbid envy; he felt that he was deriving little amusement from life, and grew sombre when he saw other people amused; the sight of happiness made him furious. "We must keep our love secret," she told her admirer, and gave the Prince to understand that she was only very moderately attached to the Conte, who for that matter was so thoroughly deserving of esteem.

This discovery had given His Highness a happy day. From time to time, the Duchessa let fall a few words about the plan she had in her mind of taking a few months' holiday every year, to be spent in seeing Italy, which she did not know at all; she would visit Naples, Florence, Rome. Now nothing in the world was more capable of distressing the Prince than an apparent desertion of this sort; it was one of his most pronounced weaknesses, any action that might be interpreted as showing contempt for his capital city pierced him to the heart. He felt that he had no way of holding Signora Sanseverina, and Signora Sanseverina was by far the most brilliant woman in Parma. A thing without parallel in the lazy Italian character, people used to drive in from the surrounding country to attend her Thursdays; they were regular festivals; almost every week the Duchessa had something new and sensational to present. The Prince was dying to see one of these Thursdays for himself; but how was it to be managed? Go to the house of a private citizen! That was a thing that neither his father nor he had ever done in their lives!

There came a certain Thursday of cold wind and rain; all through the evening the Prince heard carriages rattling over the pavement of the piazza outside the Palace, on their way to Signora Sanseverina's. He moved petulantly in his chair: other people were amusing themselves, and he, their sovereign Prince, their absolute master, who ought to find more amusement than anyone in the world, he was tasting the fruit of boredom! He rang for his aide-de-camp: he was obliged to wait until a dozen trustworthy men had been posted in the street that led from the Royal Palace to the palazzo Sanseverina. Finally, after an hour that seemed to the Prince an age, during which he had been minded a score of times to brave the assassins' daggers and to go boldly out without any precaution, he appeared in the first of Signora Sanseverina's drawing-rooms. A thunderbolt might have fallen upon the carpet and not produced so much surprise. In the twinkling of an eye, and as the Prince advanced through them, these gay and noisy rooms were hushed to a stupefied silence; every eye, fixed on the Prince, was strained with attention. The courtiers appeared disconcerted; the Duchessa alone shewed no sign of surprise. When finally her guests had recovered sufficient strength to speak, the great preoccupation of all present was to decide the important question: had the Duchessa been warned of this visit, or had she like everyone else been taken by surprise?

The Prince was amused, and the reader may now judge of the utterly impulsive character of the Duchessa, and of the boundless power which vague ideas of departure, adroitly disseminated, had enabled her to assume.

As she went to the door with the Prince, who was making her the prettiest speeches, an odd idea came to her which she ventured to put into words quite simply, and as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

"If Your Serene Highness would address to the Princess three or four of these charming utterances which he lavishes on me, he could be far more certain of giving me pleasure than by telling me that I am pretty. I mean that I would not for anything in the world have the Princess look with an unfriendly eye on the signal mark of his favour with which His Highness has honoured me this evening."

The Prince looked fixedly at her and replied in a dry tone:

"I was under the impression that I was my own master and could go where I pleased."

The Duchessa blushed.

"I wished only," she explained, instantly recovering herself, "not to expose His Highness to the risk of a bootless errand, for this Thursday will be the last; I am going for a few days to Bologna or Florence."

When she reappeared in the rooms, everyone imagined her to be at the height of favour, whereas she had just taken a risk upon which, in the memory of man, no one had ever ventured. She made a sign to the Conte, who rose from the whist-table and followed her into a little room that was lighted but empty.

"You have done a very bold thing," he informed her; "I should not have advised it myself, but when hearts are really inflamed," he added with a smile, "happiness enhances love, and if you leave to-morrow morning, I shall follow you to-morrow night. I shall be detained here only by that burden of a Ministry of Finance which I was stupid enough to take on my shoulders; but in four hours of hard work, one can hand over a good many accounts. Let us go back, dear friend, and play at ministerial fatuity with all freedom and without reserve; it may be the last performance that we shall give in this town. If he thinks he is being defied, the man is capable of anything; he will call it making an example. When these people have gone, we can decide on a way of barricading you for to-night; the best plan perhaps would be to set off without delay for your house at Sacca, by the Po, which has the advantage of being within half an hour of Austrian territory."

For the Duchessa's love and self-esteem this was an exquisite moment; she looked at the Conte, and her eyes brimmed with tears. So powerful a Minister, surrounded by this swarm of courtiers who loaded him with homage equal to that which they paid to the Prince himself, to leave everything for her sake, and with such unconcern!

When she returned to the drawing-room she was beside herself with joy. Everyone bowed down before her.

"How prosperity has changed the Duchessa!" was murmured everywhere by the courtiers, "one would hardly recognise her. So that Roman spirit, so superior to everything in the world, does after all, deign to appreciate the extraordinary favour that has just been conferred upon her by the Sovereign!"

Towards the end of the evening the Conte came to her: "I must tell you the latest news." Immediately the people who happened to be standing near the Duchessa withdrew.

"The Prince, on his return to the Palace," the Conte went on, "had himself announced at the door of his wife's room. Imagine the surprise! 'I have come to tell you,' he said to her, 'about a really most delightful evening I have spent at the Sanseverina's. It was she who asked me to give you a full description of the way in which she has decorated that grimy old palazzo.' Then the Prince took a seat and went into a description of each of your rooms in turn.

"He spent more than twenty-five minutes with his wife, who was in tears of joy; for all her intelligence, she could not think of anything to keep the conversation going in the light tone which His Highness was pleased to impart to it."

This Prince was by no means a wicked man, whatever the Liberals of Italy might say of him. As a matter of fact, he had cast a good number of them into prison, but that was from fear, and he used to repeat now and then, as though to console himself for certain unpleasant memories: "It is better to kill the devil than to let the devil kill you." The day after the party we have been describing, he was supremely happy; he had done two good actions: he had gone to the Thursday, and he had talked to his wife. At dinner, he addressed her again; in a word, this Thursday at Signora Sanseverina's brought about a domestic revolution with which the whole of Parma rang; the Raversi was in consternation, and the Duchessa doubly delighted: she had contrived to be of use to her lover, and had found him more in love with her than ever.

"All this owing to a thoroughly rash idea which came into my mind!" she said to the Conte. "I should be more free, no doubt, in Rome or Naples, but should I find so fascinating a game to play there? No, indeed, my dear Conte, and you provide me with all my joy in life."

[10]In Italy, young men with influence or brains become Monsignori and prelati, which does not mean bishop; they then wear violet stockings. A man need not take any vows to become Monsignore; he can discard his violet stockings and marry.

[CHAPTER SEVEN]

It is with trifling details of court life as insignificant as those related in the last chapter that we should have to fill up the history of the next four years. Every spring the Marchesa came with her daughters to spend a couple of months at the palazzo Sanseverina or on the property of Sacca, by the bank of the Po; there they spent some very pleasant hours and used to talk of Fabrizio, but the Conte would never allow him to pay a single visit to Parma. The Duchessa and the Minister had indeed to make amends for certain acts of folly, but on the whole Fabrizio followed soberly enough the line of conduct that had been laid down for him: that of a great nobleman who is studying theology and does not rely entirely on his virtues to bring him advancement. At Naples, he had acquired a keen interest in the study of antiquity, he made excavations; this new passion had almost taken the place of his passion for horses. He had sold his English thoroughbreds in order to continue his excavations at Miseno, where he had turned up a bust of Tiberius as a young man which had been classed among the finest relics of antiquity. The discovery of this bust was almost the keenest pleasure that had come to him at Naples. He had too lofty a nature to seek to copy the other young men he saw, to wish for example to play with any degree of seriousness the part of lover. Of course he never lacked mistresses, but these were of no consequence to him, and, in spite of his years, one might say of him that he still knew nothing of love: he was all the more loved on that account. Nothing prevented him from behaving with the most perfect coolness, for to him a young and pretty woman was always equivalent to any other young and pretty woman; only the latest comer seemed to him the most exciting. One of the most generally admired ladies in Naples had done all sorts of foolish things in his honour during the last year of his stay there, which at first had amused him, and had ended by boring him to tears, so much so that one of the joys of his departure was the prospect of being delivered from the attentions of the charming Duchessa d'A——. It was in 1821 that, having satisfactorily passed all his examinations, his director of studies, or governor, received a Cross and a gratuity, and he himself started out to see at length that city of Parma of which he had often dreamed. He was Monsignore, and he had four horses drawing his carriage; at the stage before Parma he took only two, and on entering the town made them stop outside the church of San Giovanni. There was to be found the costly tomb of Archbishop Ascanio del Dongo, his great-granduncle, the author of the Latin genealogy. He prayed beside the tomb, then went on foot to the palazzo of the Duchessa, who did not expect him until several days later. There was a large crowd in her drawing-room; presently they were left alone.

"Well, are you satisfied with me?" he asked her as he flung himself into her arms; "thanks to you, I have spent four quite happy years at Naples, instead of eating my head off at Novara with my mistress authorised by the police."

THE COURT

The Duchessa could not get over her astonishment; she would not have known him had she seen him go by in the street; she discovered him to be, what as a matter of fact he was, one of the best-looking men in Italy; his physiognomy in particular was charming. She had sent him to Naples a devil-may-care young rough-rider; the horsewhip he invariably carried at that time had seemed an inherent part of his person: now he had the noblest and most measured bearing before strangers, while in private conversation she found that he had retained all the ardour of his boyhood. This was a diamond that had lost nothing by being polished. Fabrizio had not been in the room an hour when Conte Mosca appeared; he arrived a little too soon. The young man spoke to him with so apt a choice of terms of the Cross of Parma that had been conferred on his governor, and expressed his lively gratitude for certain other benefits of which he did not venture to speak in so open a fashion, with so perfect a restraint, that at the first glance the Minister formed an excellent impression of him. "This nephew," he murmured to the Duchessa, "is made to adorn all the exalted posts to which you will raise him in due course." So far, all had gone wonderfully well, but when the Minister, thoroughly satisfied with Fabrizio, and paying attention so far only to his actions and gestures, turned to the Duchessa, he noticed a curious look in her eyes. "This young man is making a strange impression here," he said to himself. This reflexion was bitter; the Conte had reached the fifties, a cruel word of which perhaps only a man desperately in love can feel the full force. He was a thoroughly good man, thoroughly deserving to be loved, apart from his severities as a Minister. But in his eyes that cruel word fifties threw a dark cloud over his whole life and might well have made him cruel on his own account. In the five years since he had persuaded the Duchessa to settle at Parma, she had often aroused his jealousy, especially at first, but never had she given him any real grounds for complaint. He believed indeed, and rightly, that it was with the object of making herself more certain of his heart that the Duchessa had had recourse to those apparent bestowals of her favour upon various young beaux of the court. He was sure, for instance, that she had rejected the offers of the Prince, who, indeed, on that occasion, had made a significant utterance.

"But if I were to accept Your Highness's offer," the Duchessa had said to him with a smile, "how should I ever dare to look the Conte in the face afterwards?"

"I should be almost as much out of countenance as you. The dear Conte! My friend! But there is a very easy way out of that difficulty, and I have thought of it: the Conte would be put in the citadel for the rest of his days."

At the moment of Fabrizio's arrival, the Duchessa was so beside herself with joy that she never even thought of the ideas which the look in her eyes might put into the Conte's head. The effect was profound and the suspicions it aroused irremediable.

Fabrizio was received by the Prince two hours after his arrival; the Duchessa, foreseeing the good effect which this impromptu audience would have on the public, had been begging for it for the last two months; this favour put Fabrizio beyond all rivalry from the first; the pretext for it had been that he would only be passing through Parma on his way to visit his mother in Piedmont. At the moment when a charming little note from the Duchessa arrived to inform the Prince that Fabrizio awaited his orders, the Prince was feeling bored. "I shall see," he said to himself, "a saintly little simpleton, a mean or a sly face." The Town Commandant had already reported the newcomer's first visit to the tomb of his archiépiscopal uncle. The Prince saw enter the room a tall young man whom, but for his violet stockings, he would have taken for some young officer.

This little surprise dispelled his boredom: "Here is a fellow," he said to himself, "for whom they will be asking me heaven knows what favours, everything that I have to bestow. He is just come, he probably feels nervous: I shall give him a little dose of Jacobin politics; we shall see how he replies."

A FIRST AUDIENCE

After the first gracious words on the Prince's part:

"Well, Monsignore," he said to Fabrizio, "and the people of Naples, are they happy? Is the King loved?"

"Serene Highness," Fabrizio replied without a moment's hesitation, "I used to admire, when they passed me in the street, the excellent bearing of the troops of the various regiments of His Majesty the King; the better classes are respectful towards their masters, as they ought to be; but I must confess that, all my life, I have never allowed the lower orders to speak to me about anything but the work for which I am paying them."

"Plague!" said the Prince, "what a slyboots! This is a well-trained bird, I recognise the Sanseverina touch." Becoming interested, the Prince employed great skill in leading Fabrizio on to discuss this scabrous topic. The young man, animated by the danger he was in, was so fortunate as to hit upon some admirable rejoinders: "It is almost insolence to boast of one's love for one's King," he said; "it is blind obedience that one owes to him." At the sight of so much prudence the Prince almost lost his temper: "Here, it seems, is a man of parts come among us from Naples, and I don't like that breed; a man of parts may follow the highest principles and even be quite sincere; all the same on one side or the other he is always first cousin to Voltaire and Rousseau."

This Prince felt himself almost defied by such correctness of manner and such unassailable rejoinders coming from a youth fresh from college; what he had expected never occurred; in an instant he assumed a tone of good-fellowship and, reverting in a few words to the basic principles of society and government, repeated, adapting them to the matter in hand, certain phrases of Fénelon which he had been made to learn by heart in his boyhood for use in public audiences.

"These principles surprise you, young man," he said to Fabrizio (he had called him Monsignore at the beginning of the audience, and intended to give him his Monsignore again in dismissing him, but in the course of the conversation he felt it to be more adroit, better suited to moving turns of speech, to address him in an informal and friendly style). "These principles surprise you, young man. I admit that they bear little resemblance to the bread and butter absolutism" (this was the expression in use) "which you can read every day in my official newspaper. . . . But, great heavens, what is the good of my quoting that to you? Those writers in my newspaper must be quite unknown to you."

"I beg Your Serene Highness's pardon; not only do I read the Parma newspaper, which seems to me to be very well written, but I hold, moreover, with it, that everything that has been done since the death of Louis XIV, in 1715, has been at once criminal and foolish. Man's chief interest in life is his own salvation, there can be no two ways of looking at it, and that is a happiness that lasts for eternity. The words Liberty, Justice, the Good of the Greatest Number, are infamous and criminal: they form in people's minds the habits of discussion and want of confidence. A Chamber of Deputies votes no confidence in what these people call the Ministry. This fatal habit of want of confidence once contracted, human weakness applies it to everything, man loses confidence in the Bible, the Orders of the Church, Tradition and everything else; from that moment he is lost. Even upon the assumption—which is abominably false, and criminal even to suggest—that this want of confidence in the authority of the Princes by God established were to secure one's happiness during the twenty or thirty years of life which any of us may expect to enjoy, what is half a century, or a whole century even, compared with an eternity of torment?" And so on.

One could see, from the way in which Fabrizio spoke, that he was seeking to arrange his ideas so that they should be grasped as quickly as possible by his listener; it was clear that he was not simply repeating a lesson.

Presently the Prince lost interest in his contest with this young man whose simple and serious manner had begun to irritate him.

"Good-bye, Monsignore," he said to him abruptly, "I can see that they provide an excellent education at the Ecclesiastical Academy of Naples, and it is quite simple when these good precepts fall upon so distinguished a mind, one secures brilliant results. Good-bye." And he turned his back on him.

"I have quite failed to please this animal," thought Fabrizio.

"And now, it remains to be seen," said the Prince as soon as he was once more alone, "whether this fine youngman is capable of passion for anything; in that case, he would be complete. . . . Could anyone repeat with more spirit the lessons he has learned from his aunt? I felt I could hear her speaking; should we have a revolution here, it would be she that would edit the Monitore, as the Sanfelice did at Naples! But the Sanfelice, in spite of her twenty-five summers and her beauty, got a bit of a hanging all the same! A warning to women with brains." In supposing Fabrizio to be his aunt's pupil, the Prince was mistaken: people with brains who are born on the throne or at the foot of it soon lose all fineness of touch; they proscribe, in their immediate circle, freedom of conversation which seems to them coarseness; they refuse to look at anything but masks and pretend to judge the beauty of complexions; the amusing part of it is that they imagine their touch to be of the finest. In this case, for instance, Fabrizio believed practically everything that we have heard him say; it is true that he did not think twice in a month of these great principles. He had keen appetites, he had brains, but he had faith.

The desire for liberty, the fashion and cult of the greatest good of the greatest number, after which the nineteenth century has run mad, were nothing in his eyes but a heresy which, like other heresies, would pass away, though not until it had destroyed many souls, as the plague while it reigns unchecked in a country destroys many bodies. And in spite of all this Fabrizio read the French, newspapers with keen enjoyment, even taking rash steps to procure them.

Fabrizio having returned quite flustered from his audience at the Palace, and having told his aunt of the various attacks launched at him by the Prince:

"You ought," she told him, "to go at once to see Father Landriani, our excellent Archbishop; go there on foot; climb the staircase quietly, make as little noise as possible in the ante-rooms; if you are kept waiting, so much the better, a thousand times better! In a word, be apostolic!"

"I understand," said Fabrizio, "our man is a Tartuffe."

"Not the least bit in the world, he is virtue incarnate."

"Even after the way he behaved," said Fabrizio in some bewilderment, "when Conte Palanza was executed?"

THE ARCHBISHOP

"Yes, my friend, after the way he behaved: the father of our Archbishop was a clerk in the Ministry of Finance, a man of humble position, and that explains everything. Monsignor Landriani is a man of keen, extensive and deep intelligence; he is sincere, he loves virtue; I am convinced that if an Emperor Decius were to reappear in the world he would undergo martyrdom like Polyeuctes in the opera they played last week. So much for the good side of the medal, now for the reverse: as soon as he enters the Sovereign's, or even the Prime Minister's presence, he is dazzled by the sight of such greatness, he becomes confused, he begins to blush; it is physically impossible for him to say no. This accounts for the things he has done, things which have won him that cruel reputation throughout Italy; but what is not generally known is that, when public opinion had succeeded in enlightening him as to the trial of Conte Palanza, he set himself the penance of living upon bread and water for thirteen weeks, the same number of weeks as there are letters in the name Davide Palanza. We have at this court a rascal of infinite cleverness named Rassi, a Chief Justice or Fiscal General, who at the time of Conte Palanza's death, cast a spell over Father Landriani. During his thirteen weeks' penance, Conte Mosca, from pity and also a little out of malice, used to ask him to dinner once and even twice a week: the good Archbishop, in deference to his host, ate like everyone else; he would have thought it rebellious and Jacobinical to make a public display of his penance for an action that had the Sovereign's approval. But we knew that, for each dinner at which his duty as a loyal subject had obliged him to eat like everyone else, he set himself a penance of two days more of bread and water.

"Monsignor Landriani, a man of superior intellect, a scholar of the first order, has only one weakness: he likes to be loved: therefore, grow affectionate as you look at him, and, on your third visit, shew your love for him outright. That, added to your birth, will make him adore you at once. Show no sign of surprise if he accompanies you to the head of the staircase, assume an air of being accustomed to such manners: he is a man who was born on his knees before the nobility. For the rest, be simple, apostolic, no cleverness, no brilliance, no prompt repartee; if you do not startle him at all, he will be delighted with you; do not forget that it must be on his own initiative that he makes you his Grand Vicar. The Conte and I will be surprised and even annoyed at so rapid an advancement; that is essential in dealing with the Sovereign."

Fabrizio hastened to the Archbishop's Palace: by a singular piece of good fortune, the worthy prelate's footman, who was slightly deaf, did not catch the name del Dongo; he announced a young priest named Fabrizio; the Archbishop happened to be closeted with a parish priest of by no means exemplary morals, for whom he had sent in order to scold him. He was in the act of delivering a reprimand, a most painful thing for him, and did not wish to be distressed by it longer than was necessary; accordingly he kept waiting for three quarters of an hour the great-nephew of the Archbishop Ascanio del Dongo.

How are we to depict his apologies and despair when, after having conducted the priest to the farthest ante-room, and on asking, as he returned, the man who was waiting what he could do to serve him, he caught sight of the violet stockings and heard the name Fabrizio del Dongo? This accident seemed to our hero so fortunate that on this first visit he ventured to kiss the saintly prelate's hand, in a transport of affection. He was obliged to hear the Archbishop repeat in a tone of despair: "A del Dongo kept waiting in my ante-room!" The old man felt obliged, by way of apology, to relate to him the whole story of the parish priest, his misdeeds, his replies to the charges, and so forth.

"Is it really possible," Fabrizio asked himself as he made his way back to the palazzo Sanseverina, "that this is the man who hurried on the execution of that poor Conte Palanza?"

"What is Your Excellency's impression?" Conte Mosca, inquired with a smile, as he saw him enter the Duchessa's drawing-room. (The Conte would not allow Fabrizio to address him as Excellency.)

"I have fallen from the clouds; I know nothing at all about human nature: I would have wagered, had I not known his name, that man could not bear to see a chicken bleed."

"And you would have won your wager," replied the Conte; "but when he is with the Prince, or merely with myself, he cannot say no. To be quite honest, in order for me to create my full effect, I have to slip the yellow riband of my Grand Cordon over my coat; in plain evening dress he would contradict me, and so I always put on a uniform to receive him. It is not for us to destroy the prestige of power, the French newspapers are demolishing it quite fast enough; it is doubtful whether the mania of respect will last out our time, and you, my dear nephew, will outlive respect altogether. You will be simply a fellow-man!"

Fabrizio delighted greatly in the Conte's society; he was the first superior person who had condescended to talk to him frankly, without make-believe; moreover they had a taste in common, that for antiquities and excavations. The Conte, for his part, was flattered by the extreme attention with which the young man listened to him; but there was one paramount objection: Fabrizio occupied a set of rooms in the palazzo Sanseverina, spent his whole time with the Duchessa, let it be seen in all innocence that this intimacy constituted his happiness in life, and Fabrizio had eyes and a complexion of a freshness that drove the older man to despair.

For a long time past Ranuccio-Ernesto IV, who rarely encountered a cruel fair, had felt it to be an affront that the Duchessa's virtue, which was well known at court, had not made an exception in his favour. As we have seen, the mind and the presence of mind of Fabrizio had shocked him at their first encounter. He took amiss the extreme friendship which Fabrizio and his aunt heedlessly displayed in public; he gave ear with the closest attention to the remarks of his courtiers, which were endless. The arrival of this young man and the unprecedented audience which he had obtained provided the court with news and a sensation for the next month; which gave the Prince an idea.

He had in his guard a private soldier who carried his wine in the most admirable way; this man spent his time in the trattorie, and reported the spirit of the troops directly to his Sovereign. Carlone lacked education, otherwise he would long since have obtained promotion. Well, his duty was to be in the Palace every day when the strokes of twelve sounded on the great clock. The Prince went in person a little before noon to arrange in a certain way the shutters of a mezzanino communicating with the room in which His Highness dressed. He returned to this mezzanino shortly after twelve had struck, and there found the soldier; the Prince had in his pocket writing materials and a sheet of paper; he dictated to the soldier the following letter:

"Your Excellency has great intelligence, doubtless, and it is thanks to his profound sagacity that we see this State so well governed. But, my dear Conte, such great success never comes unaccompanied by a little envy, and I am seriously afraid that people will be laughing a little at your expense if your sagacity does not discern that a certain handsome young man has had the good fortune to inspire, unintentionally it may be, a passion of the most singular order. This happy mortal is, they say, only twenty-three years old, and, dear Conte, what complicates the question is that you and I are considerably more than twice that age. In the evening, at a certain distance, the Conte is charming, scintillating, a wit, as attractive as possible; but in the morning, in an intimate scene, all things considered, the newcomer has perhaps greater attractions. Well, we poor women, we make a great point of this youthful freshness, especially when we have ourselves passed thirty. Is there not some talk already of settling this charming youth at our court, in some fine post? And if so, who is the person who speaks of it most frequently to Your Excellency?"

A LETTER

The Prince took the letter and gave the soldier two scudi.

"This is in addition to your pay," he said in a grim tone. "Not a single word of this to anyone, or you will find yourself in the dampest dungeon in the citadel." The Prince had in his desk a collection of envelopes bearing the addresses of most of the persons at his court, in the handwriting of this same soldier who was understood to be illiterate, and never even wrote out his own police reports: the Prince picked out the one he required.

A few hours later, Conte Mosca received a letter by post; the hour of its delivery had been calculated, and just as the postman, who had been seen going in with a small envelope in his hand, came out of the ministerial palace, Mosca was summoned to His Highness. Never had the favourite appeared to be in the grip of a blacker melancholy: to enjoy this at his leisure, the Prince called out to him, as he saw him come in:

"I want to amuse myself by talking casually to my friend and not working with my Minister. I have a maddening headache this evening, and all sorts of gloomy thoughts keep coming into my mind."

I need hardly mention the abominable ill-humour which agitated the Prime Minister, Conte Mosca della Rovere, when at length he was permitted to take leave of his august master. Ranuccio-Ernesto IV was a past-master in the art of torturing a heart, and it would not be unfair at this point to make the comparison of the tiger which loves to play with its victim.

The Conte made his coachman drive him home at a gallop; he called out as he crossed the threshold that not a living soul was to be allowed upstairs, sent word to the auditor on duty that he might take himself off (the knowledge that there was a human being within earshot was hateful to him), and hastened to shut himself up in the great picture gallery. There at length he could give full vent to his fury; there he spent an hour without lights, wandering about the room like a man out of his mind. He sought to impose silence on his heart, to concentrate all the force of his attention upon deliberating what action he ought to take. Plunged in an anguish that would have moved to pity his most implacable enemy, he said to himself: "The man I abhor is living in the Duchessa's house; he spends every hour of the day with her. Ought I to try to make one of her women speak? Nothing could be more dangerous; she is so good to them; she pays them well; she is adored by them (and by whom, great God, is she not adored?)! The question is," he continued, raging: "Ought I to let her detect the jealousy that is devouring me, or not to speak of it?

"If I remain silent, she will make no attempt to keep anything from me. I know Gina, she is a woman who acts always on the first impulse; her conduct is incalculable, even by herself; if she tries to plan out a course in advance, she goes all wrong; invariably, when it is time for action, a new idea comes into her head which she follows rapturously as though it were the most wonderful thing in the world, and upsets everything.

"If I make no mention of my suffering, nothing will be kept back from me, and I shall see all that goes on. . . .

NIGHT THOUGHTS

"Yes, but by speaking I bring about a change of circumstances: I make her reflect; I give her fair warning of all the horrible things that may happen. . . . Perhaps she will send him away" (the Conte breathed a sigh of relief), "then I shall practically have won; even allowing her to be a little out of temper for the moment, I shall soothe her . . . and a little ill-temper, what could be more natural? . . . she has loved him like a son for fifteen years. There lies all my hope: like a son . . . but she had ceased to see him after his dash to Waterloo; now, on his return from Naples, especially for her, he is a different man. A different man!" he repeated with fury, "and that man is charming; he has, apart from everything else, that simple and tender air and that smiling eye which hold out such a promise of happiness! And those eyes—the Duchessa cannot be accustomed to see eyes like those at this court! . . . Our substitute for them is a gloomy or sardonic stare. I myself, pursued everywhere by official business, governing only by my influence over a man who would like to turn me to ridicule, what a look there must often be in mine! Ah! whatever pains I may take to conceal it, it is in my eyes that age will always shew. My gaiety, does it not always border upon irony? . . . I will go farther, I must be sincere with myself; does not my gaiety allow a glimpse to be caught, as of something quite close to it, of absolute power . . . and irresponsibility? Do I not sometimes say to myself, especially when people irritate me: 'I can do what I like!' and indeed go on to say what is foolish: 'I ought to be happier than other men, since I possess what others have not, sovereign power in three things out of four . . .?' Very well, let us be just! The habit of thinking thus must affect my smile, must give me a selfish, satisfied air. And, how charming his smile is! It breathes the easy happiness of extreme youth, and engenders it."

Unfortunately for the Conte, the weather that evening was hot, stifling, with the threat of a storm in the air; the sort of weather, in short, that in those parts carries people to extremes. How am I to find space for all the arguments, all the ways of looking at what was happening to him which, for three mortal hours on end, kept this impassioned man in torment? At length the side of prudence prevailed, solely as a result of this reflexion: "I am in all probability mad; when I think I am reasoning, I am not, I am simply turning about in search of a less painful position, I pass by without seeing it some decisive argument. Since I am blinded by excessive grief, let us obey the rule, approved by every sensible man, which is called Prudence.

"Besides, once I have uttered the fatal word jealousy, my course is traced for me for ever. If on the contrary I say nothing to-day, I can speak to-morrow, I remain master of the situation." The crisis was too acute; the Conte would have gone mad had it continued. He was comforted for a few moments, his attention came to rest on the anonymous letter. From whose hand could it have come? There followed then a search for possible names, and a personal judgment of each, which created a diversion. In the end, the Conte remembered a gleam of malice that had darted from the eyes of the Sovereign, when it had occurred to him to say, towards the end of the audience: "Yes, dear friend, let us be agreed on this point: the pleasures and cares of the most amply rewarded ambition, even of unbounded power, are as nothing compared with the intimate happiness that is afforded by relations of affection and love. I am a man first, and a Prince afterwards, and, when I have the good fortune to be in love, my mistress speaks to the man and not to the Prince." The Conte compared that moment of malicious joy with the phrase in the letter; "It is thanks to your profound sagacity that we see this State so well governed." "Those are the Prince's words!" he exclaimed, "in a courtier they would be a gratuitous piece of imprudence; the letter comes from His Highness."

This problem solved, the faint joy caused by the pleasure of guessing the solution was soon effaced by the cruel spectre of the charming graces of Fabrizio, which returned afresh. It was like an enormous weight that fell back on the heart of the unhappy man. "What does it matter from whom the anonymous letter comes?" he cried with fury, "does the fact that it discloses to me exist any the less? This caprice may alter my whole life," he said, as though to excuse himself for being so mad. "At the first moment, if she cares for him in a certain way, she will set off with him for Belgirate, for Switzerland, for the ends of the earth. She is rich, and besides, even if she had to live on a few louis a year, what would that matter to her? Did she not admit to me, not a week ago, that her palazzo, so well arranged, so magnificent, bored her? Novelty is essential to so youthful a spirit! And with what simplicity does this new form of happiness offer itself! She will be carried away before she has begun to think of the danger, before she has begun to think of being sorry for me! And yet I am so wretched!" cried the Conte, bursting into tears.

He had sworn to himself that he would not go to the Duchessa's that evening; never had his eyes thirsted so to gaze on her. At midnight he presented himself at her door; he found her alone with her nephew; at ten o'clock she had sent all her guests away and had closed her door.

At the sight of the tender intimacy that prevailed between these two creatures, and of the Duchessa's artless joy, a frightful difficulty arose before the eyes of the Conte, and one that was quite unforeseen. He had never thought of it during his long deliberation in the picture gallery: how was he to conceal his jealousy?

Not knowing what pretext to adopt, he pretended that he had found the Prince that evening excessively ill-disposed towards him, contradicting all his assertions, and so forth. He had the distress of seeing the Duchessa barely listen to him, and pay no attention to these details which, forty-eight hours earlier, would have plunged her in an endless stream of discussion. The Conte looked at Fabrizio: never had that handsome Lombard face appeared to him so simple and so noble! Fabrizio paid more attention than the Duchessa to the difficulties which he was relating.

"Really," he said to himself, "that head combines extreme good-nature with the expression of a certain artless and tender joy which is irresistible. It seems to be saying: 'Love and the happiness it brings are the only serious things in this world.' And yet, when one comes to some detail which requires thought, the light wakes in his eyes and surprises one, and one is left dumbfoundered.

"Everything is simple in his eyes, because everything is seen from above. Great God! how is one to fight against an enemy like this? And after all, what is life without Gina's love? With what rapture she seems to be listening to the charming sallies of that mind, which is so boyish and must, to a woman, seem without a counterpart in the world!"

An atrocious thought gripped the Conte like a sudden cramp. "Shall I stab him here, before her face, and then kill myself?"

He took a turn through the room, his legs barely supporting him, but his hand convulsively gripping the hilt of his dagger. Neither of the others paid any attention to what he might be doing. He announced that he was going to give an order to his servant; they did not even hear him; the Duchessa was laughing tenderly at something Fabrizio had just said to her. The Conte went up to a lamp in the outer room, and looked to see whether the point of his dagger was well sharpened. "One must behave graciously, and with perfect manners to this young man," he said to himself as he returned to the other room and went up to them.

He became quite mad; it seemed to him that, as they leaned their heads together, they were kissing each other, there, before his eyes. "That is impossible in my presence," he told himself; "my wits have gone astray. I must calm myself; if I behave rudely, the Duchessa is quite capable, simply out of injured vanity, of following him to Belgirate; and there, or on the way there, a chance word may be spoken which will give a name to what they now feel for one another; and after that, in a moment, all the consequences.

CECCHINA

"Solitude will render that word decisive, and besides, once the Duchessa has left my side, what is to become of me? And if, after overcoming endless difficulties on the Prince's part, I go and shew my old and anxious face at Belgirate, what part shall I play before these people both mad with happiness?

"Here even what else am I than the terzo incomodo?" (That beautiful Italian language is simply made for love: Terzo incomodo, a third person when two are company.) What misery for a man of spirit to feel that he is playing that execrable part, and not to be able to muster the strength to get up and leave the room!

The Conte was on the point of breaking out, or at least of betraying his anguish by the discomposure of his features. When in one of his circuits of the room he found himself near the door, he took his flight, calling out, in a genial, intimate tone: "Good-bye, you two!— One must avoid bloodshed," he said to himself.

The day following this horrible evening, after a night spent half in compiling a detailed sum of Fabrizio's advantages, half in the frightful transports of the most cruel jealousy, it occurred to the Conte that he might send for a young servant of his own; this man was keeping company with a girl named Cecchina, one of the Duchessa's personal maids, and her favourite. As good luck would have it, this young man was very sober in his habits, indeed miserly, and was anxious to find a place as porter in one of the public institutions of Parma. The Conte ordered the man to fetch Cecchina, his mistress, instantly. The man obeyed, and an hour later the Conte appeared suddenly in the room where the girl was waiting with her lover. The Conte frightened them both by the amount of gold that he gave them, then he addressed these few words to the trembling Cecchina, looking her straight in the face:

"Is the Duchessa in love with Monsignore?"

"No," said the girl, gaining courage to speak after a moment's silence. . . . "No, not yet, but he often kisses the Signora's hands, laughing, it is true, but with real feeling."

This evidence was completed by a hundred answers to as many furious questions from the Conte; his uneasy passion made the poor couple earn in full measure the money that he had flung them: he ended by believing what they told him, and was less unhappy. "If the Duchessa ever has the slightest suspicion of what we have been saying," he told Cecchina, "I shall send your lover to spend twenty years in the fortress, and when you see him again his hair will be quite white."

Some days elapsed, during which Fabrizio in turn lost all his gaiety.

"I assure you," he said to the Duchessa, "that Conte Mosca feels an antipathy for me."

"So much the worse for His Excellency," she replied with a trace of temper.

This was by no means the true cause of the uneasiness which had made Fabrizio's gaiety vanish. "The position in which chance has placed me is not tenable," he told himself. "I am quite sure that she will never say anything, she would be as much horrified by a too significant word as by an incestuous act. But if, one evening, after a rash and foolish day, she should come to examine her conscience, if she believes that I may have guessed the feeling that she seems to have formed for me, what part should I then play in her eyes? Nothing more nor less than the casto Giuseppe!" (An Italian expression alluding to the ridiculous part played by Joseph with the wife of the eunuch Potiphar.)

UNCERTAINTIES