The Charterhouse of Parma quotes

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:

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;

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.”

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!”

“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 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.

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.

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.

“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.

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;

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.

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 …

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;

This reasoning was by no means unsound; but Fabrizio had fallen a long way from that elevation of sublime happiness to which he had found himself transported an hour earlier.

The thought of privilege had withered that plant, always so delicate, which we name happiness.

“If we are not to believe in astrology,” he went on, seeking to calm himself;

He was far from employing his time in studying with patience the actual details of things in order to discover their causes.

Reality still seemed to him flat and muddy; I can understand a person’s not caring to look at it, but then he ought not to argue about it.

Above all, he ought not to fashion objections out of the scattered fragments of his ignorance.

From a distance he looked and saw the footman gathering up the money.

“There is a truly reasonable man,” Fabrizio said to himself with a laugh, “not an unnecessary word.”

He proceeded rapidly southwards, halted, towards midday, at a lonely house, and took the road again a few hours later. At two o’clock in the morning he was on the shore of Lake Maggiore;

It was by a foolish error of imagination that Napoleon was led to surrender to the prudent John Bull, instead of seeking to conquer America. John Bull, in his countinghouse, had a hearty laugh at his letter in which he quotes Themistocles.

In all ages, the base Sancho Panza triumphs, you will find, in the long run, over the sublime Don Quixote.

If you are willing to agree to do nothing extraordinary, I have no doubt that you will be a highly respected, if not a highly respectable Bishop. In any case, what I said just now holds good:

When they had reached the resting-place in a clump of alders and willows, very leafy and very cool, Lodovico went to a house more than an hour’s journey away in search of ink and paper.

“Great heavens, how comfortable I am here,” cried Fabrizio. “Fortune, farewell! I shall never be an Archbishop!”

On his return, Lodovico found him fast asleep and did not like to arouse him. The boat did not arrive until the sun had almost set; as soon as Lodovico saw it appear in the distance he called Fabrizio, who wrote a couple of letters.

the curious thing was that this ex-coachman had passions and points of view that were vivid and picturesque; he became cold and commonplace as soon as he began to write.

“It is the opposite of what we see in society,” thought Fabrizio; “people know nowadays how to express everything gracefully, but their hearts have nothing to say.”

He realised that the greatest pleasure he could give to this faithful servant would be to correct the mistakes in spelling in his sonnets.

but, albeit he was not wanting in intelligence, nor above all in logic, it never once occurred to his mind that the employment on his behalf of Conte Mosca’s influence was a form of Simony.

This is where the Jesuitical education triumphs: it forms the habit of not paying attention to things that are clearer than daylight.

A Frenchman, brought up among conflicting personal interests and in the prevailing irony of Paris might, without being deliberately unfair, have accused Fabrizio of hypocrisy at the very moment when our hero was opening his soul to God with the utmost sincerity and the most …

… of the Marchesa Raversi, the Prince, as well as the whole city of Parma, believed that Fabrizio had procured the assistance of twenty or thirty peasants to overpower a bad actor who had had the insolence to challenge him for the favours of little Marietta.

In despotic courts, the first skilful intriguer controls the Truth, as the fashion controls it in Paris.

“But, what in the devil’s name!” exclaimed the Prince to the Archbishop; “one gets things of that sort done for one by somebody else; but to do them oneself is not the custom; besides, one doesn’t kill a comedian like Giletti, one buys him.”

Your Excellency adopts too many precautions; that sort of thing is all right to say in public, or before a court.”

“This man believes me to be a murderer, and loves me none the less for it,” thought Fabrizio, falling from the clouds.

Three days after Peppe’s departure, he was greatly astonished to receive an enormous letter, sealed with a plait of silk, as in the days of Louis XIV, and addressed a Sua Eccellenza reverendissima monsignor Fabrizio del Dongo, primo gran vicario della diocesi di Parma, canonico, …

… was held in Parma of his affair, she wished above all things to comfort him, and in any event the death of a ridiculous creature like Giletti did not seem to her the sort of thing that could be seriously charged against a del Dongo.

“How many Gilettis have not our ancestors sent into the other world,” she said to the Conte, “without anyone’s ever taking it into his head to reproach them with it?”

Fabrizio, taken completely by surprise, and getting for the first time a glimpse of the true state of things, set himself down to study the Archbishop’s letter. Unfortunately the Archbishop himself believed him to be better informed than he actually was.

The presence of this Chief Justice used to distract the Prince in his moments of ill humour; then he amused himself by outraging him.

It can be seen that Rassi was almost the perfect courtier: a man without honour and without humour.

“Secrecy is essential above all things,” the Prince shouted to him without greeting him, treating him, in fact, exactly as he would have treated a scullion, he who was so polite to everybody. “From when is your sentence dated?”

“What is His Highness’s will?” asked Clelia.

“His tongue said: Prison! His eyes: Death!”

“Death! Great God!” exclaimed Clelia.

Do not distress yourself too much about what is happening to you! Are we not sent here below to be unhappy?’ How those fine eyes of hers remained fastened on me, even when the horses were moving forward with such a clatter under the arch!”

Fabrizio completely forgot to feel wretched.

Clelia accompanied her father to various houses;

The mere shape of her brow might have told an attentive observer that air, so instinct with nobility, that manner, so far superior to vulgar charms, sprang from a profound indifference to everything that was vulgar.

It was the absence and not the impossibility of interest in anything.

Since her father had become governor of the citadel, Clelia had found happiness, or at least freedom from vexations in her lofty abode.

“What sort of man is Dugnani, the Vicar of San Paolo?”

“A small mind and a great ambition,” replied the Archbishop; “few scruples and extreme poverty, for we too have our vices!”

“Egad, Monsignore,” exclaimed the Minister, “you portray like Tacitus”; and he took leave of him, laughing. No sooner had he returned to his Ministry than he sent for Priore Dugnani.

While the terrified Rassi was trying to answer, the Conte shut the door on him with impatience.

“Those fellows,” he said to himself, “cannot see power unless it is cloaked in insolence.”

So saying, this great Minister abandoned himself to an action so ridiculous that we have some misgivings about recording it. He ran to take from his desk a portrait in miniature of the Duchessa, and covered it with passionate kisses.

pillars, black also and of the noblest proportions, were placed in line along the black walls without touching them, and these walls were decorated with a number of skulls in white marble, of colossal proportions, elegantly carved and supported underneath by crossbones.

“There is an invention of the hatred that cannot kill,” thought Fabrizio, “and what a devilish idea to let me see it.”

An iron staircase of light filigree, similarly coiled about a pillar, gave access to the second floor of this prison, and it was in the rooms of this second floor, which were some fifteen feet in height, that for the last year General Fabio Conti …

“

In any case, it is indeed surprising to be in prison and to have to reason with oneself in order to be unhappy.

Upon my soul, I come back to my theory, perhaps I have a great character.”

“However,” he told himself, “if she knew that I could see her so easily, timid and reserved as she is, she would probably slip away out of my sight.”

He was far more happy next day (out of what miseries does love create its happiness!)

: while she was looking sadly at the huge screen, he succeeded in slipping a tiny piece of wire through the hole which the iron cross had bored, and made signs to her which she evidently understood, at least in the sense that they implied:

thus he had but little hope of escape. At the same time he reminded himself of a maxim of Priore Blanès:

“The lover thinks more often of reaching his mistress than the husband of guarding his wife; the prisoner thinks more often of escaping than the gaoler of shutting his door; and so, whatever the obstacles may be, the lover and the prisoner ought to succeed.”

That evening Fabrizio could hear quite distinctly a considerable number of men cross the iron bridge, known as the Slave’s bridge, because once a Dalmatian slave had succeeded in escaping, by throwing the guardian of the bridge down into the court below.

the Prince, according to her, had basely betrayed her, and Conte Mosca, as was natural to his courtier’s spirit, albeit innocently, had supported the Prince. Once her revenge was settled, she felt her strength, every step that her mind took gave her happiness.

I am inclined to think that the immoral happiness which the Italians find in revenge is due to the strength of their imagination; the people of other countries do not properly speaking forgive; they forget.

The Duchessa did not see Palla again until the last days of Fabrizio’s imprisonment. As the reader may perhaps have guessed, it was he who gave her the idea of his escape:

Thereupon he was blamed even by the true Liberals, as having caused by his imprudence the death of eight poor soldiers.

It is thus that petty despotisms reduce to nothing the value of public opinion.

The poor man was torturing his mind so as not to speak too openly of his affection, and to construct amusing letters; barely did a distracted eye glance over them.

What avails, alas, the fidelity of a respected lover when one’s heart is pierced by the coldness of the other whom one sets above him?

In the space of two months the Duchessa answered him only once, and that was to engage him to explore how the land lay round the Princess, and to see whether, despite the impertinence of the fireworks, a letter from her, the Duchessa, would be …

“I am very grateful for the Signora’s kindness.”

Politics in a work of literature are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention.

We are about to speak of very ugly matters, as to which, for more than one reason, we should like to keep silence;

the Princess, meanwhile, hurriedly left the play; entering the big cabinet, the Grand Mistress made a profound reverence to mother and son, and left them alone.

One may imagine the agitation of the court, these are the things that make it so amusing.

At the end of an hour the Prince himself appeared at the door of the Cabinet and summoned the Duchessa; the Princess was in tears; her son’s expression had entirely altered.

“

One punishes crimes to prevent their recurrence.

Was the late Prince poisoned? That is a very doubtful question. Was he poisoned by the Jacobins? That is what Rassi would dearly like to prove, for then he becomes for Your Highness a permanently necessary instrument.

The Conte discussed the merits of each judge, and offered to change the names. But the reader is perhaps a little tired of all these details of procedure, no less than of all these court intrigues.

From the whole business one can derive this moral, that the man who mingles with a court compromises his happiness, if he is happy, and, in any event, makes his future depend on the intrigues of a chambermaid.

On the other hand in America, in the Republic, one has to spend the whole weary day paying serious court to the shopkeepers in the street, and must become as stupid as they are; and there, one has no Opera.

“

Rassi owes his life to the fact that I love you more than Fabrizio; no, I do not wish to poison all the evenings of the old age which we are going to spend together.

”

She completely overlooked the moral reflection which would not have escaped a woman brought up in one of those Northern religions which allow self-examination: “I was the first to use poison, and I am perishing by poison.”

In Italy reflections of that sort, in moments of passion, appear in the poorest of taste, as a pun would seem in Paris in similar circumstances.

The Duchessa, in desperation, risked going into the drawing-room where she found the Marchese Crescenzi, who was in waiting that day.

You desire that I should act without consulting my Ministers, I who have been reigning for barely three months! You ask of me a great exception to my ordinary mode of action, which I regard as highly reasonable.

It is you, Signora, who are here and now the Absolute Sovereign

, you give me reason to hope in a matter which is everything to me; but, in an hour’s time, when this imaginary poison, when this nightmare has vanished, my presence will become an annoyance to you, I shall forfeit your favour, Signora.

but newcomers will have to show proof of their eight quarterings.

Which has given rise to the saying that it is clear that Rassi gives no quarter.

”

Try to speak for half an hour on religion; you will utter heresies at first; but hire a learned and discreet theologian to help you with your sermons, and warn you of your mistakes, you can put them right the day after.”

The kind of misery which a crossed love brings to the soul has this effect, that everything which requires attention and action becomes an atrocious burden.

But Fabrizio told himself that his influence with the people, if he acquired any, might one day be of use to his aunt, and also to the Conte, his veneration for whom increased daily, as his public life taught him to realise the dishonesty of …