"As a favour, Signor Conte," he cried, "if Your Excellency decides to accept this estate of 600,000 francs or the gratuity in money, I beg that he will not choose any other intermediary than myself.
I should make an effort," he added, lowering his voice, "to have the gratuity increased, or else to have a forest of some importance added to the land.
If Your Excellency would deign to introduce a little gentleness and tact into his manner in speaking to the Prince of this youngster they've locked up, a Duchy might perhaps be created out of the lands which the nation's gratitude would offer him.
I repeat to Your Excellency; the Prince, for the moment, abominates the Duchessa, but he is greatly embarrassed, so much so indeed that I have sometimes thought there must be some secret consideration which he dared not confess to me.
Do you know, we may find a gold mine here, I selling you his most intimate secrets, and quite openly, for I am supposed to be your sworn enemy.
After all, if he is furious with the Duchessa, he believes also, and so do we all, that you are the one man in the world who can carry through all the secret negotiations with regard to the Milanese.
Will Your Excellency permit me to repeat to him textually the Sovereign's words?" said Rassi, growing heated; "there is often a character in the order of the words which no translation can render, and you may be able to see more in them than I see."
"I permit everything," said the Conte, as he went on, with an air of distraction, tapping the marble table with his gold snuff-box; "I permit everything, and I shall be grateful."
"Give me a patent of hereditary nobility independently of the Cross, and I shall be more than satisfied.
When I speak of ennoblement to the Prince, he answers:
'A scoundrel like you, noble!
I should have to shut up shop next day; nobody in Parma would wish to be ennobled again.'
To come back to the business of the Milanese, the Prince said to me not three days ago: There is only that rascal to unravel the thread of our intrigues; if I send him away, or if he follows the Duchessa, I may as well abandon the hope of seeing myself one day the Liberal and beloved ruler of all Italy.' "
At this the Conte drew breath.
"Fabrizio will not die," he said to himself.
Never in his life had Rassi been able to secure an intimate conversation with the Prime Minister. He was beside himself with joy: he saw himself on the eve of being able to discard the name Rassi, which had become synonymous throughout the country with everything that was base and vile.
The lower orders gave the name Rassi to mad dogs; recently more than one soldier had fought a duel because one of his comrades had called him Rassi.
Not a week passed, moreover, in which this ill-starred name did not figure in some atrocious sonnet.
His son, a young and innocent school-boy of sixteen, used to be driven out of the caffe on the strength of his name.
It was the burning memory of all these little perquisites of his office that made him commit an imprudence.
"I have an estate," he said to the Conte, drawing his chair closer to the Minister's; "it is called Riva.
I should like to be Barone Riva."
"Why not?" said the Minister.
Rassi was beside himself.
"Very well, Signor Conte, I shall take the liberty of being indiscreet. I shall venture to guess the object of your desires; you aspire to the hand of the Princess Isotta, and it is a noble ambition.
Once you are of the family, you are sheltered from disgrace, you have our man tied down.
I shall not conceal from you that he has a horror of this marriage with the Princess Isotta. But if your affairs were entrusted to some skilful and well-paid person, you would be in a position not to despair of success."
"I, my dear Barone, should despair of it; I disavow in advance everything that you can say in my name; but on the day on which that illustrious alliance cornes at length to crown my wishes and to give me so exalted a position in the State, I will offer you, myself, 300,000 francs of my own money, or else recommend the Prince to accord you a mark of his favour which you yourself will prefer to that sum of money."
The reader finds this conversation long: and yet we are sparing him more than half of it; it continued for two hours more.
Rassi left the Conte's presence mad with joy; the Conte was left with a great hope of saving Fabrizio, and more than ever determined to hand in his resignation.
He found that his credit stood in need of renewal by the succession to power of persons such as Rassi and General Conti; he took an exquisite delight in a possible method which he had just discovered of avenging himself on the Prince:
"He may send the Duchessa away," he cried, "but, by gad, he will have to abandon the hope of becoming Constitutional King of Lombardy." (This was an absurd fantasy: the Prince had abundance of brains, but, by dint of dreaming of it, he had fallen madly in love with the idea. )
The Conte could not contain himself for joy as he hurried to the Duchessa's to give her a report of his conversation with the Fiscal.
He found the door closed to him; the porter scarcely dared admit to him the fact of this order, received from his mistress's own lips.
The Conte went sadly back to the ministerial palazzo; the rebuff he had just encountered completely eclipsed the joy that his conversation with the Prince's confidant had given him.
Having no longer the heart to devote himself to anything, the Conte was wandering gloomily through his picture gallery when, a quarter of an hour later, he received a note which ran as follows:
"Since it is true, dear and good friend, that we are nothing more now than friends, you must come to see me only three times in the week.
In a fortnight we shall reduce these visits, always so dear to my heart, to two monthly.
If you wish to please me, give publicity to this apparent rupture; if you wished to pay me back almost all the love that I once felt for you, you would choose a new mistress for yourself.
As for myself, I have great plans of dissipation: I intend to go a great deal into society, perhaps I shall even find a man of parts to make me forget my misfortunes.
Of course, in your capacity as a friend, the first place in my heart will always be kept for you; but I do not wish, for the future, that my actions should be said to have been dictated by your wisdom; above all, I wish it to be well known that I have lost all my influence over your decisions.
In a word, dear Conte, be assured that you will always be my dearest friend, but never anything else.
Do not, I beg you, entertain any idea of a resumption, it is all over.
Count, always, upon my friendship."
This last stroke was too much for the Conte's courage: he wrote a fine letter to the Prince resigning all his offices, and addressed it to the Duchessa with a request that she would forward it to the Palace.
A moment later, he received his resignation, torn across, and on one of the blank scraps of the paper the Duchessa had condescended to write:
'No, a thousand times no!"
It would be difficult to describe the despair of the poor Minister.
"She is right, I quite agree," he kept saying to himself at every moment; "my omission of the words unjust proceedings is a dreadful misfortune; it will involve perhaps the death of Fabrizio, and that will lead to my own."
It was with death in his heart that the Conte, who did not wish to appear at the Sovereign's Palace before being summoned there, wrote out with his own hand the motu proprio which created Rassi Cavaliere of the Order of San Paolo and conferred on him hereditary nobility; the Conte appended to it a report of half a page which set forth to the Prince the reasons of state which made this measure advisable.