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 throe 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.
Chapter 2
… Alors que Vesper vient embrunir nos yeux, Tout epris d'avenir, je contemple les deux, En qui Dieu nous escrit, par notes non obscures, Les sorts et les destins de toutes creatures.
Car lui, du fond des deux regardant un humain, Parfois mu de pitie, lui montre le chemin; Par les astres du ciel qui sont ses caracteres, Les choses nous predit et bonnes et contraires; Mais les hommes charges de terre et de trepas, Meprisent tel ecrit, 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 Blanes, 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 Giovila, 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).
The fact was that the Priore Blanes, 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 Blanes 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 Blanes 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.