The Duchessa hoped to make herself so indispensable that she would be able to obtain an indefinite adjournment by saying to the Prince:
"If you have the barbarity to insist upon subjecting me to that humiliation, which I will never forgive you, I leave your States the day after."
Consulted by the Duchessa as to the fate of Rassi, the Conte shewed himself most philosophic.
General Fabio Conti and he went for a tour of Piedmont.
A singular difficulty arose in the trial of Fabrizio: the judges wished to acquit him by acclamation, and at the first sitting of the court.
The Conte was obliged to use threats to enforce that the trial should last for at least a week, and the judges take the trouble to hear all the witnesses.
"These fellows are always the same," he said to himself.
The day after his acquittal, Fabrizio del Dongo at last took possession of the place of Grand Vicar to the worthy Archbishop Landriani.
On the same day the Prince signed the dispatches necessary to obtain Fabrizio's nomination as Coadjutor with eventual succession, and less than two months afterwards he was installed in that office.
Everyone complimented the Duchessa on her nephew's air of gravity; the fact was that he was in despair.
The day after his deliverance, followed by the dismissal and banishment of General Fabio Conti and the Duchessa's arrival in high favour, Clelia had taken refuge with Contessa Contarmi, her aunt, a woman of great wealth and great age, occupied exclusively in looking after her health.
Clelia could, had she wished, have seen Fabrizio; but anyone acquainted with her previous commitments who had seen her behaviour now might have thought that with her lover's danger her love for him also had ceased.
Not only did Fabrizio pass as often as he decently could before the palazzo Contarini, he had also succeeded, after endless trouble, in taking a little apartment opposite the windows of its first floor.
On one occasion Clelia, having gone to the window without thinking, to see a procession pass, drew back at once, as though terror-stricken; she had caught sight of Fabrizio, dressed in black, but as a workman in very humble circumstances, looking at her from one of the windows of this rookery, which had panes of oiled paper, like his cell in the Torre Farnese.
Fabrizio would fain have been able to persuade himself that Clelia was shunning him in consequence of her father's disgrace, which current report put down to the Duchessa; but he knew only too well another cause for this aloofness, and nothing could distract him from his melancholy.
He had been left unmoved by his acquittal, his installation in a fine office, the first that he had had to fill in his life, by his fine position in society, and finally by the assiduous court that was paid to him by all the ecclesiastics and all the devout laity in the diocese.
The charming apartment that he occupied in the palazzo Sanseverina was no longer adequate.
Greatly to her delight, the Duchessa was obliged to give up to him all the second floor of her palazzo and two fine rooms on the first, which were always filled with people awaiting their turn to pay their respects to the young Coadjutor.
The clause securing his eventual succession had created a surprising effect in the country; people now ascribed to Fabrizio as virtues all those firm qualities in his character which before had so greatly scandalised the poor, foolish courtiers.
It was a great lesson in philosophy to Fabrizio to find himself perfectly insensible of all these honours, and far more unhappy in this magnificent apartment, with ten flunkeys wearing his livery, than he had been in his wooden cell in the Torre Farnese, surrounded by hideous gaolers, and always in fear for his life.
His mother and sister, the Duchessa V——, who came to Parma to see him in his glory, were struck by his profound melancholy.
The Marchesa del Dongo, now the least romantic of women, was so greatly alarmed by it that she imagined that they must, in the Torre Farnese, have given him some slow poison.
Despite her extreme discretion, she felt it her duty to speak of so extraordinary a melancholy, and Fabrizio replied only by tears.
A swarm of advantages, due to his brilliant position, produced no other effect on him than to make him ill-tempered.
His brother, that vain soul gangrened by the vilest selfishness, wrote him what was almost an officiai letter of congratulation, and in this letter was enclosed a draft for fifty thousand francs, in order that he might, said the new Marchese, purchase horses and a carriage worthy of his name.
Fabrizio sent this money to his younger sister, who was poorly married.
Conte Mosca had ordered a fine translation to be made, in Italian, of the genealogy of the family Valserra del Dongo, originally published in Latin by Fabrizio, Archbishop of Parma.
He had it splendidly printed, with the Latin text on alternate pages; the engravings had been reproduced by superb lithographs made in Paris.
The Duchessa had asked that a fine portrait of Fabrizio should be placed opposite that of the old Archbishop.
This translation was published as being the work of Fabrizio during his first imprisonment.
But all the spirit was crushed out of our hero; even the vanity so natural to mankind; he did not deign to read a single page of this work which was attributed to himself.
His social position made it incumbent upon him to present a magnificently bound copy to the Prince, who felt that he owed him some compensation for the cruel death to which he had come so near, and accorded him the grand entry into his bed-chamber, a favour which confers the rank of Excellency.
Chapter 13
The only moments in which Fabrizio had any chance of escaping from his profound melancholy were those which he spent hidden behind a pane, the glass of which he had had replaced by a sheet of oiled paper, in the window of his apartment opposite the palazzo Contarmi, in which, as we know, Clelia had taken refuge; on the few occasions on which he had seen her since his leaving the citadel, he had been profoundly distressed by a striking change, and one that seemed to him of the most evil augury.
Since her fall, Clelia's face had assumed a character of nobility and seriousness that was truly remarkable; one would have called her a woman of thirty.
In this extraordinary change, Fabrizio caught the reflexion of some firm resolution.
"At every moment of the day," he said to himself, "she is swearing to herself to be faithful to the vow she made to the Madonna, and never to see me again."
Fabrizio guessed a part only of Clelia's miseries; she knew that her father, having fallen into deep disgrace, could not return to Parma and reappear at court (without which life for him was impossible) until the day of her marriage to the Marchese Crescenzi; she wrote to her father that she desired this marriage.
The General had then retired to Turin, where he was ill with grief.
Truly, the counter-effect of that desperate remedy had been to add ten years to her age.
She had soon discovered that Fabrizio had a window opposite the palazzo Contarmi; but only once had she had the misfortune to behold him; as soon as she saw the poise of a head or a man's figure that in any way resembled his, she at once shut her eyes.
Her profound piety and her confidence in the help of the Madonna were from then onwards her sole resources.
She had the grief of feeling no respect for her father; the character of her future husband seemed to her perfectly lifeless and on a par with the emotional manners of high society; finally she adored a man whom she must never see again, and who at the same time had certain rights over her.
She would need, after her marriage, to go and live two hundred leagues from Parma.
Fabrizio was aware of Clelia's intense modesty, he knew how greatly any extraordinary enterprise, that might form a .subject for gossip, were it discovered, was bound to displease her.
And yet, driven to extremes by the excess of his melancholy and by Clelia's constantly turning away her eyes from him, he made bold to try to purchase two of the servants of Signora Contarini, her aunt. One day, at nightfall, Fabrizio, dressed as a prosperous countryman, presented himself at the door of the palazzo, where one of the servants whom he had bribed was waiting for him; he announced himself as coming from Turin and bearing letters for Clelia from her father.
The servant went to deliver the message, and took him up to an immense ante-room on the first floor of the palazzo.
It was here that Fabrizio passed what was perhaps the most anxious quarter of an hour in his life.
If Clelia rejected him, there was no more hope of peace for his mind.
"To put an end to the incessant worries which my new dignity heaps upon me, I shall remove from the Church an unworthy priest, and, under an assumed name, seek refuge in some Charterhouse."