"According to the vow which I respect and which nevertheless is the bane of my life, since you refuse to see me during the day," he said once to Clelia, "I am obliged to live perpetually alone, with no other distraction than my work; and besides I have not enough work.
In the course of this stern and sad way of passing the long hours of each day, an idea has occurred to me, which is now torturing me, and against which I have been striving in vain for six months: my son will not love me at all; he never hears my name mentioned.
Brought up amid all the pleasing luxury of the palazzo Crescenzi, he barely knows me.
On the rare occasions when I do see him, I think of his mother, whose heavenly beauty he recalls to me, and whom I may not see, and he must find me a serious person, which, with children, means sad."
"Well," said the Marchesa, "to what is all this speech leading? It frightens me."
"To my having my son; I wish him to live with me; I wish to see him every day; I wish him to grow accustomed to loving me; I wish to love him myself at my leisure.
Since a fatality without counterpart in the world decrees that I must be deprived of that happiness which so many other tender hearts enjoy, and forbids me to pass my life with all that I adore, I wish at least to have beside me a creature who recalls you to my heart, who to some extent takes your place.
Men and affairs are a burden to me in my enforced solitude; you know that ambition has always been a vain word to me, since the moment when I had the good fortune to be locked up by Barbone; and anything that is not felt in my heart seems to me fatuous in the melancholy which in your absence overwhelms me."
One can imagine the keen anguish with which her lover's grief filled the heart of poor Clelia; her sorrow was all the more intense, as she felt that Fabrizio had some justification.
She went the length of wondering whether she ought not to try to obtain a release from her vow.
Then she would receive Fabrizio during the day like any other person in society, and her reputation for sagacity was too well established for any scandal to arise.
She told herself that by spending enough money she could procure a dispensation from her vow; but she felt also that this purely worldly arrangement would not set her conscience at rest, and that an angry heaven might perhaps punish her for this fresh crime.
On the other hand, if she consented to yield to so natural a desire on the part of Fabrizio, if she sought not to hurt that tender heart which she knew so well, and whose tranquillity her singular vow so strangely jeopardised, what chance was there of abducting the only son of one of the greatest nobles in Italy without the fraud's being discovered?
The Marchese Crescenzi would spend enormous sums, would himself conduct the investigations, and sooner or later the facts of the abduction would become known.
There was only one way of meeting this danger, the child must be sent abroad, to Edinburgh, for instance, or to Paris; but this was a course to which the mother's affection could never consent.
The other plan proposed by Fabrizio, which was indeed the more reasonable of the two, had something sinister about it, and was almost more alarming still in the eyes of this despairing mother; she must, said Fabrizio, feign an illness for the child; he would grow steadily worse, until finally he died in the Marchese Crescenzi's absence.
A repugnance which, in Clelia, amounted to terror, caused a rupture that could not last.
Clelia insisted that they must not tempt God; that this beloved son was the fruit of a crime, and that if they provoked the divine anger further, God would not fail to call him back to Himself.
Fabrizio spoke again of his strange destiny:
"The station to which chance has called me," he said to Clelia, "and my love oblige me to dwell in an eternal solitude, I cannot, like the majority of my brethren, taste the pleasures of an intimate society, since you will receive me only in the darkness, which reduces to a few moments, so to speak, the part of my life which I may spend with you."
Tears flowed in abundance. Clelia fell ill; but she loved Fabrizio too well to maintain her opposition to the terrible sacrifice that he demanded of her.
Apparently, Sandrino fell ill; the Marchese sent in haste for the most celebrated doctors, and Clelia at once encountered a terrible difficulty which she had not foreseen: she must prevent this adored child from taking any of the remedies ordered by the doctors; it was no small matter.
The child, kept in bed longer than was good for his health, became really ill.
How was one to explain to the doctors the cause of his malady?
Torn asunder by two conflicting interests both so dear to her, Clelia was within an ace of losing her reason.
Must she consent to an apparent recovery, and so sacrifice all the results of that long and painful make-believe?
Fabrizio, for his part, could neither forgive himself the violence he was doing to the heart of his mistress nor abandon his project.
He had found a way of being admitted every night to the sick child's room, which had led to another complication.
The Marchesa came to attend to her son, and sometimes Fabrizio was obliged to see her by candle-light, which seemed to the poor sick heart of Clelia a horrible sin and one that foreboded the death of Sandrino.
In vain had the most famous casuists, consulted as to the necessity of adherence to a vow in a case where its performance would obviously do harm, replied that the vow could not be regarded as broken in a criminal fashion, so long as the person bound by a promise to God failed to keep that promise not for a vain pleasure of the senses but so as not to cause an obvious evil.
The Marchesa was none the less in despair, and Fabrizio could see the time coming when his strange idea was going to bring about the death of Clelia and that of his son.
He had recourse to his intimate friend, Conte Mosca, who, for all the old Minister that he was, was moved by this tale of love of which to a great extent he had been ignorant.
"I can procure for you the Marchese's absence for five or six days at least: when do you require it?"
A little later, Fabrizio came to inform the Conte that everything was in readiness now for them to take advantage of the Marchese's absence.
Two days after this, as the Marchese was riding home from one of his estates in the neighbourhood of Mantua, a party of brigands, evidently hired to execute some personal vengeance, carried him off, without maltreating him in any way, and placed him in a boat which took three days to travel down the Po, making the same journey that Fabrizio had made long ago, after the famous affair with Giletti.
On the fourth day, the brigands marooned the Marchese on a desert island in the Po, taking care first to rob him completely, and to leave him no money or other object that had the slightest value.
It was two whole days before the Marchese managed to reach his palazzo in Parma; he found it draped in black and all his household in mourning.
This abduction, very skilfully carried out, had a deplorable consequence: Sandrino, secretly installed in a large and fine house where the Marchesa came to see him almost every day, died after a few months.
Clelia imagined herself to have been visited with a just punishment, for having been unfaithful to her vow to the Madonna: she had seen Fabrizio so often by candle-light, and indeed twice in broad daylight and with such rapturous affection, during Sandrino's illness.
She survived by a few months only this beloved son, but had the joy of dying in the arms of her lover.
Fabrizio was too much in love and too religious to have recourse to suicide; he hoped to meet Clelia again in a better world, but he had too much intelligence not to feel that he had first to atone for many faults.
A few days after Clelia's death, he signed several settlements by which he assured a pension of one thousand francs to each of his servants, and reserved a similar pension for himself; he gave landed property, of an annual value of 100,000 lire or thereabouts, to Contessa Mosca; a similar estate to the Marchesa del Dongo, his mother, and such residue as there might be of the paternal fortune to one of his sisters who was poorly married.
On the following day, having forwarded to the proper authorities his resignation of his Archbishopric and of all the posts which the favour of Ernesto V and the Prime Minister's friendship had successively heaped upon him, he retired to the Charterhouse of Parma, situated in the woods adjoining the Po, two leagues from Sacca.
Contessa Mosca had strongly approved, at the time, her husband's return to office, but she herself would never on any account consent to cross the frontier of the States of Ernesto V.
She held her court at Vignano, a quarter of a league from Casalmaggiore, on the left bank of the Po, and consequently in the Austrian States.
In this magnificent palace of Vignano, which the Conte had built for her, she entertained every Thursday all the high society of Parma, and every day her own many friends.
Fabrizio had never missed a day in going to Vignano.
The Contessa, in a word, combined all the outward appearances of happiness, but she lived for a very short tune only after Fabrizio, whom she adored, and who spent but one year in his Charterhouse.
The prisons of Parma were empty, the Conte immensely rich, Ernesto V adored by his subjects, who compared his rule to that of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany.
TO THE HAPPY FEW