Part 9
Ere she had left Scotland, Corinne had heard the announcement of the proposed marriage. She retired to Florence, and dwelt there in unending misery. Her poetic faculty, her love of the arts, could not console her, for they were utterly subjugated by her despair. Her whole soul had been given to her love for Oswald. And when he had forsaken her, her life had been broken by the blow.
It was four years ere Oswald returned to England, and soon afterwards he and Lucy were summoned to the deathbed of Lady Edgarmond. He now had a dangerous illness; in his delirium he cried for the southern sun. Lucy heard him, and remembered Corinne. Oswald had striven to forget his former passion, but could not help at times contrasting Corinne's warmth of feeling with Lucy's coldness. Lucy had been taught by her mother that it was immodest to avow affection even for a husband. She loved Oswald, but her pride concealed her love.
Oswald was ordered to Italy by his physicians, and his wife and child accompanied him. At Milan the earth was snow-covered; beyond there, the rivers were in flood, and the land was covered by cold, damp fog.
"Where is your lovely Italy?" asked Lucy.
"I know not where or when I shall regain her," sadly answered Oswald. As he approached Florence, where he had heard that Corinne was dwelling, his heart became terribly agitated. He had learnt, through his old friend d'Erfeuil, that Corinne had been faithful to him, that she had followed him to England, and sought to see him, that he and not she was the betrayer.
On arriving at Florence, Oswald met Prince Castel Forte, whose faithful, unrewarded homage to Corinne was still unchanged. Corinne, the Prince told him, was ill and growing weaker every day. Oswald's desertion, he said plainly, had mortally wounded her.
Oswald, dismally repentant, handed Castel Forte a letter to Corinne in which he begged permission to see her. In answer she declined the permission, but asked to see his wife and child.
The little girl was taken to her; Lucy had resolved not to go, but was struck with fear lest the child's affection should be won away from her. She went at length, determined to reproach Corinne, but all her anger vanished at the sight of the wasted woman on the sickbed. The sisters embraced in tears.
Castel Forte had told Corinne of the reserve and coldness that separated Lucy from her husband. Her last wish was to reconcile them, and thus aid by means of another, the happiness of the man she loved.
"Pride not yourself in your perfections, dear sister," she said; "let your charm consist in seeming to forget them; be Corinne and Lucy in one; let not grace be injured by self-respect."
Lucy bore her words in mind; the barriers between herself and her husband were gradually removed, and Oswald guessed who was removing them.
At last the end came. Corinne lay on a sofa, where she could gaze upon the sky. Castel Forte held her dying hand. Lucy entered; behind her came Oswald. He fell at her feet. She would have spoken, but her voice failed. She looked up--the moon was covered by just such a cloud as they had seen at Naples. Corinne pointed to it--one sigh--and her hand sank powerless in death.
* * * * *
STENDHAL (HENRI BEYLE)
The Chartreuse of Parma
Stendhal is the best-known pseudonym (for there were others) of the refined, somewhat eccentric, and still distinguished French author whose real name was C. Marie Henri Beyle. Born at Grenoble on January 23, 1783, he found his way as a youth to Milan, and fought with Bonaparte at Marengo. Afterwards he followed various occupations at Paris and Marseilles; went through the Russian campaign of 1812; and returned to Italy, where he began to establish a reputation as a critic of music and of painting. "La Chartreuse de Parme," his most successful work of fiction, was written in the winter of 1830. Like his other novels, it is discursive and formless; but is considered remarkable alike for its keenness of analysis and its exposition of the acid, materialistic philosophy of its author. A friend of that other eclectic, Mérimée, Stendhal was not much thought of in his own time until the profound praises of Balzac drew all eyes upon him; and in much more recent times interest in the best of his writings has revived on account of his keen and impartial analysis of whatever subject he touched upon. Beyle died on March 22, 1842.
_I. Fabrice del Dongo_
"Three members of your family," said Count Mosca to the Duchess of Sanseverina, "have been Archbishops of Parma. Could a better career be open to your nephew Fabrice?"
The Duchess disliked the notion; and indeed Fabrice del Dongo seemed a person but little fitted for an ecclesiastical career. His ambitions were military; his hero was Napoleon. The great escapade of his life had been a secret journey into France to fight at Waterloo. His father, the Marquis del Dongo, was loyal to the Austrian masters of Lombardy; and during Fabrice's absence his elder brother Arcanio had laid an information against him as a conspirator against Austrian rule. Consequently Fabrice, on his return, found himself exposed to the risk of ten years in an Austrian prison. By his own address and by the good offices of his aunt, the Countess Pietravera, Fabrice was able to escape from Milanese territory.
Immediately afterwards the Countess wedded the aged and wealthy Duke of Sanseverina, and transferred her beauty and unbounded social talents from Milan to the court of Prince Ranuce Ernest IV., absolute ruler of Parma. The Duke had his ambitions gratified by an appointment as Ambassador to a distant country; the Duchess, left behind at Parma, was able to devote herself to the interests of Count Mosca, the Prince's chief Minister, and to counteract the intrigues of the celebrated Marchioness Raversi, head of the party that sought to overthrow him.
The welfare of her beloved nephew was the most cherished of all the Duchess's aims, and she succeeded in inspiring Count Mosca with an equal enthusiasm for the prosperity of that errant youth. But she hesitated over the project of making him an Archbishop.
"You must understand," explained the Count, "that I do not intend to make Fabrice an exemplary priest of the conventional kind. No, he will above all remain a great noble; he may continue to be absolutely ignorant if he so pleases, and will become a Bishop and an Archbishop just the same--provided, of course, that I succeed in retaining the Prince's confidence."
Ultimately the Duchess agreed, and undertook to persuade Fabrice to enter the Church. The persuasion was not easy; but at length Fabrice, having been convinced that the clerical yoke would bear but lightly upon him, consented to the step, and as a preliminary spent three years in a theological college at Naples.
When at the end of the three years Fabrice, now a Monsignore, returned to Parma, matters there were at a crisis; the Raversi party were gaining ground, and Count Mosca was in danger. Nor did the Prince's interview with the young cleric improve matters. Ranuce Ernest IV. had two ruling passions--an ambition to become ruler of united Italy, and a fear of revolution. Count Mosca, the diplomatist, was the only man who could further his hopes in the one direction; his fears in the other were carefully kept alive by Rassi, the fiscal-general--to such an extent that each night the Prince looked under his bed to see if by chance a liberal were lurking there. Rassi was a man of low origin, who kept his place partly by submitting good-humouredly to the abuse and even the kicks of his master, and partly by rousing that master's alarms and afterwards allaying them by hanging or imprisoning liberals, with the ready assistance of a carefully corrupted judicial bench.
Towards this nervous Prince, Fabrice bore himself with an aristocratic assurance, and a promptness and coolness in conversation that made a bad impression. His political notions were correct enough, according to the Prince's standard; but plainly, he was a man of spirit, and the Prince did not like men of spirit; they were all cousins-germane of Voltaire and Rousseau. He deemed Fabrice, in short, a potential if not an actual liberal, and therefore dangerous.
Nevertheless Count Mosca carried the day against his rivals--a triumph due less to his own efforts than to those of the Duchess, to whose charms as the court's chief ornament the Prince was far from insusceptible. The Count's success was Fabrice's; that youth found himself established as co-adjutor to the Archbishop of Parma, with a reversion to the Archbishopric on the demise of its worthy occupant.
On Fabrice's return from Naples, the Duchess had found him developed from a boy into a young man, and the handsomest young man in Italy; her affection for him became sisterly; she was nearly in love with him. She had no cause for jealousy, for Fabrice, although prone to flirtation, had no affairs of the heart. The word love, as yet, had no meaning for him.
_II.--Giletti_
One of our hero's flirtations had consequences with a very pronounced bearing on his after career. During a surreptitious visit to the theatre he became captivated with the actress, Marietta Valserra. Stolen visits of two minutes duration to Marietta's lodging on the fourth floor of an old house behind the theatre were an agreeable variation of the monotony of Fabrice's clerical duties, and of his visits among the most important and least entertaining families in Parma. But the trifling little intrigue came to the ears of Count Mosca, with the result that the travelling company to which Marietta belonged received its passports and was requested to move on.
In the affair, moreover, Fabrice had a rival. Giletti was the low comedian of the company, and the ugliest member of it; he assumed proprietorship over Marietta, who, although she did not love him, was at any rate horribly afraid of him. Giletti several times threatened to kill Fabrice; whereby Fabrice was not disturbed.
Count Mosca was passionately archaeological, and this taste he shared with Fabrice, who had cultivated the hobby at Naples. It so happened that the two were engaged in excavations near the bridge over the Po where the main road passes into Austrian territory at Castel-Maggiore. Early one morning Fabrice, after surveying the work that was going on in the trenches, strolled away with a gun, intent upon lark-shooting. A wounded bird dropped on the road; and as Fabrice followed it he encountered a battered old carriage driving towards the frontier. In it were Giletti, Marietta and an old woman who passed as Marietta's mother.
Giletti leapt to the conclusion that Fabrice had come there, gun in hand, to insult him, and possibly to carry off Marietta. He leapt out of the carriage.
"Brigand!" he yelled, "we are only a league from the frontier--now I can finish you!"
Fabrice saw a pistol levelled at him at a distance of three feet; he knocked it aside with the butt of his gun, and it went off harmlessly. Giletti then clutched the gun; the two men wrestled for it, and it exploded close to Giletti's ear. Staggered for an instant, he quickly recovered himself; drawing from its sheath a "property" sword, he fell once more upon Fabrice.
"Look out! he will kill you," came an agitated whisper from Marietta; "take this!"
A sort of hunting knife was flung out of the carriage door. Fabrice picked it up, and was nearly stunned forthwith by a blow from the handle of the "property" sword. Happily Giletti was too near to use his sword-point. Pulling himself together, Fabrice gave his enemy a gash on the thigh. Giletti, swearing furiously, injured Fabrice on the cheek. Blood poured down our hero's face. The thought, "I am disfigured for life!" flashed through his mind. Enraged at the idea, he thrust the hunting knife at Giletti's breast with all his force. Giletti fell and lay motionless.
"He is dead!" said Fabrice to himself. Then, turning to the coach, he asked, "Have you a looking-glass?"
His eyes and teeth were undamaged; he was not permanently disfigured. Hastily, then, he turned to thoughts of escape. Marietta gave him Giletti's passport; obviously his first business was to get across the frontier. And yet the Austrian frontier was no safe one for him to cross. Were he recognised, he might expect ten years in an Imperial fortress. But this was the less immediate danger, and he determined to risk it.
With considerable trepidation he walked across the bridge, and presented Giletti's passport to the Austrian gendarme.
The gendarme looked at it, and rose, "You must wait, monsieur; there is a difficulty," he said, and left the room. Fabrice was profoundly uncomfortable; he was nearly for bolting, when he heard the gendarme say to another, "I am done up with the heat; just go and put your visa on a passport in there when you have finished your pipe; I'm going for some coffee."
This gendarme, in fact, knew Giletti, and was quite well aware that the man before him was not the actor. But, for all he could tell, Giletti had lent the passport for reasons of his own. The easiest way out of the difficulty was to get another gendarme to see to the visa. This man affixed it as a matter of course, and Fabrice escaped danger number one.
The rest was very easy, thanks to Ludovico, an old servant of the Duchess, whom Fabrice met at an eating-house where he had turned in for some very necessary refreshment. With the aid of this excellent fellow Fabrice had his wounds attended to, and was safely smuggled out of Austrian territory into Bologna.
_III.--The Citadel_
The party opposed to Count Mosca hastened to take advantage of Fabrice's offence. He was represented as a murderer; the workmen in the trenches who had seen the affray, and knew that Fabrice had acted in self-defence, were either bribed or got out of the way. Rassi accused Fabrice of being a liberal; and since the Prince was ill-disposed towards the young man, not all the endeavours of Count Mosca could save him from a sentence of twenty years' imprisonment, should he be so impudent as to venture upon the territory of Parma.
Just before the sentence was presented to the Prince for final confirmation, the Prince learnt that the Duchess of Sanseverina sought an audience with him. He rubbed his hands; the greatest beauty of his court had come to beg mercy for her nephew; there would be tears and frantic appeals. For a quarter of an hour the Prince gloated over the prospect; then he ordered that the Duchess be admitted.
She entered--in travelling costume; never had she looked more charming, never more cheerful. "I trust your Serene Highness will pardon my unorthodox costume," she said, smiling archly; "but as I am about to leave Parma for a very long time, I have felt it my duty to come and thank you ere I go for all the kindnesses you have deigned to confer upon me."
The Prince was astonished and profoundly chagrined. "Why are you going?" he asked, as calmly as he could.
"I have had the project for some time," she replied, "and a little insult paid to Monsignor del Dongo has hastened it."
The Prince was beside himself. What would his court be without the Duchess? At all costs he must check her flight.
At this moment Count Mosca, pale with anxiety, begged admittance. He had just heard of the Duchess's intention to leave Parma.
"Let me speak as a friend to friends," said the Prince, collecting himself; "what can I do, Madame, to arrest your hasty resolution?"
"If your highness were to write a gracious letter revoking the unjust sentence upon Fabrice del Dongo, I might re-consider my decision; and, let me add, if the Marchioness Raversi were advised by you to retire to the country early to-morrow morning for the benefit of her health--"
"Was there ever such a woman?" cried the Prince, stamping up and down the room.
But he agreed. At his orders Count Mosca sat down and wrote the letter required. The Prince objected to the phrase "unjust sentence," and Count Mosca, courtier-like, abstained from using it. The Prince did not mind the banishment of the Marchioness Raversi; he liked exiling people.
At seven o'clock next morning the Prince summoned Rassi, and dictated to him another letter. The sentence of twenty years, upon the criminal del Dongo was to be reduced by the Prince's clemency, at the supplication of the Duchess Sanseverina, to twelve years; and the police were instructed to do their utmost to arrest the offender.
The only difficulty was that of tempting Fabrice into the territory of Parma. A hint to the Marchioness Raversi and her associates removed the obstacle. A forged letter, purporting to be from the Duchess, reached Fabrice at Bologna, telling him that there would be little danger in his meeting her at Castelnovo, within the frontier. Fabrice repaired joyfully to Castelnovo. That night he lay a prisoner in the citadel of Parma; while the Duchess, alone in her room with locked door, sobbed her heart out and raved helplessly against the treachery of princes.
"So long as her nephew is in the citadel," said the Prince to himself, "the Duchess will be in Parma."
The citadel of Parma is a colossal building with a flat roof 180 feet above the level of the ground. On this roof are erected two structures: one, the governor's residence; the other, the Famese tower, a prison specially erected for a recalcitrant prince of earlier days. In this tower Fabrice, as a prisoner of importance, was confined; and as he looked from the window on the evening of his arrival and beheld the superb panorama of the distant Alps, he reflected pleasantly that he might have found a worse dungeon.
On the next morning his attention was absorbed by something nearer at hand. His window overlooked one belonging to the governor's palace; in this window were many bird cages, and at eleven o'clock a maiden came to feed the birds. Fabrice recognised her as Celia Conti, the governor's daughter. He succeeded in attracting her attention; she blushed and withdrew. But next day she came again at the same hour. On the third day, however, a heavy wooden shutter was clapped upon the window. Nothing daunted, Fabrice proceeded patiently to cut a peep-hole in the shutter by aid of the mainspring of his watch. When he had succeeded in removing a square piece of the wood, he looked with delight upon Clelia gazing at his window with eyes of profound pity, unconscious that she was observed.
Gradually he broke down the maiden's reserve. She discovered the secret of the peep-hole; she consented to communicate with him; finally the two conversed by a system of signals. Fabrice even dared to tell Clelia that he loved her--and truly he was in love, for the first time in his life. The worst of it was that these declarations were apt to bring the conversation to an end; so Fabrice was sparing of them.
Clelia, meanwhile, was in sore perplexity. Her father, General Fabio Conti the governor, was a political opponent of Count Mosca, and had ambitions of office. These ambitions might be forwarded, he deemed, by the successful marriage of his daughter. He did not desire that she should remain a lovely recluse, feeding birds on the top of the citadel. Accordingly he had presented to her an ultimatum; either she must marry the Marquis Crescenzi, the wealthiest nobleman of Parma, who sought her hand, or she must retire to a convent.
The signalled conversations with Fabrice, therefore, could not last long. And yet she had beyond doubt fallen deeply in love with Fabrice. She knew he was her father's prisoner, and belonged to the party hostile to her father; she was ashamed, as a daughter, of her love for him. But she admired him, and pitied him; she was well aware that he was a victim of political intrigue, for why should a nobleman of Fabrice's standing be thus punished for killing a mere actor? The stolen interviews with the captive were as dear to her as to him; and so dear were they to him that, after months of imprisonment he declared that he had never been so happy in his life.
_IV.--The Escape_
One night, as Fabrice looked through his peep-hole, he became aware of a light flashing from the town. Obviously some attempt was being made at signalling. He observed the flashes, counting them in relation to the order of the letters in the alphabet--one for A, two for B, and so on. He discovered that the message was from the Duchess, and was directed to himself. He replied, on the same system, by passing his lantern in front of the peep-hole. The answer from the distance was important; arrangements were being made for his escape. But he did not want to escape.
Next day he told Clelia of his message, and of his unwillingness to leave the prison. She gave no answer, but burst into tears. How could she tell him that she herself must presently leave--for marriage or a convent?
Next day, Fabrice, by his gaoler's connivance, received a long letter from Clelia. She urged him to escape, declaring that at any time the Prince might order his execution, and in addition that he was in danger of death by poison. Straightway he sought an interview with Clelia, with whom he had not hitherto conversed save by signals from their windows. The gaoler arranged that they should meet when Fabrice was being conducted from his cell to the roof of the Farnese tower, where he was occasionally allowed to take exercise.
"I can speak but few words to you," she said trembling, with tears in her eyes. "Swear that you will obey the Duchess, and escape when she wishes and as she wishes."
"And condemn myself to live far away from her whom I love?"
"Swear it! for my sake, swear it!" she implored hint.
"Well then, I swear it!"
The preparations were quickly advanced. Three knotted ropes were smuggled with Clelia's aid into Fabrice's cell--one for descending the 35 feet between his window and the roof of the citadel; another for descending the tremendous wall of 180 feet between the roof and the ramparts; a third for the 30 feet between the top of the ramparts and the ground.
A feast-day, when the garrison of the citadel would presumably be drunk, was chosen for the attempt. Fabrice spent the time of waiting in cutting a hole in his shutter large enough to enable him to get through. Fortunately, on the night of the feast-day a thick fog arose and enveloped the citadel. The Duchess had seen to it that the garrison was plentifully supplied with wine.
Fabrice attached one of the shorter ropes to his bed, and struggled through the shutter--an ungainly figure, for round his body was wound the immense rope necessary for the long descent. Once on the roof-platform he made his way along the parapet until he came to a new stove which he had been told marked the best spot for lowering the rope. He could hear the soldiers talking near at hand, but the fog made him invisible. Unrolling his rope, and fastening his rope to the parapet by threading it through a water-duct, he flung it over; then, with a prayer and a thought of Clelia, he began to descend.