The Charterhouse of Parma

I not heard it said that with patience and a watch-spring with a jagged edge one can cut through wood and even iron? So I shall be able to saw through this screen.” The work of concealing his watch, which occupied him for hours, did not seem to him at all long; he was thinking of the different ways of attaining his object and of what he himself could do in the way of carpentering. “If I get to work the right way,” he said to himself, “I shall be able to cut a section clean out of the oak plank which will form the screen, at the end which will be resting on the windowsill; I can take this piece out and put it back according to circumstances; I shall give everything I possess to Grillo, so that he may be kind enough not to notice this little device.” All Fabrizio’s happiness was now involved in the possibility of carrying out this task, and he could think of nothing else. “If I can only manage to see her, I am a happy man.⁠ ⁠… No,” he reminded himself, “she must also see that I see her.” All night long his head was filled with devices of carpentering, and perhaps never gave a single thought to the court of Parma, the Prince’s anger, etc., etc. We must admit that he did not think either of the grief in which the Duchessa must be plunged. He waited impatiently for the morrow; but the carpenter did not appear again: evidently he was regarded in the prison as a Liberal. They took care to send another, a sour-faced fellow who made no reply except a growl that boded ill to all the pleasant words with which Fabrizio sought to cajole him. Some of the Duchessa’s many attempts to open a correspondence with Fabrizio had been discovered by the Marchesa Raversi’s many agents, and, by her, General Fabio Conti was daily warned, frightened, put on his mettle. Every eight hours six soldiers of the guard relieved the previous six in the great hall with the hundred pillars on the ground floor: in addition to these, the governor posted a gaoler on guard at each of the three successive iron gates of the corridor, and poor Grillo, the only one who saw the prisoner, was condemned to leave the Torre Farnese only once a week, at which he showed great annoyance. He made his ill humour felt by Fabrizio, who had the sense to reply only in these words: “Plenty of good nebbiola d’Asti, my friend.” And he gave him money.

“Well now, even this, which consoles us in all our troubles,” exclaimed the indignant Grillo, in a voice barely loud enough to be heard by the prisoner, “we are forbidden to take, and I ought to refuse it, but I accept; however, it’s money thrown away; I can tell you nothing about anything. Go on, you must be a rare bad lot, the whole citadel is upside down because of you; the Signora Duchessa’s fine goings on have got three of us dismissed already.”

“Will the screen be ready before midday?” This was the great question which made Fabrizio’s heart throb throughout that long morning; he counted each quarter as it sounded from the citadel clock. Finally, when the last quarter before noon struck, the screen had not yet arrived; Clelia reappeared and looked after her birds. Cruel necessity had made Fabrizio’s daring take such strides, and the risk of not seeing her again seemed to him so to transcend all others that he ventured, looking at Clelia, to make with his finger the gesture of sawing through the screen; it is true that as soon as she had perceived this gesture, so seditious in prison, she half bowed and withdrew.

“How now!” thought Fabrizio in amazement, “can she be so unreasonable as to see an absurd familiarity in a gesture dictated by the most imperious necessity? I meant to request her always to deign, when she is attending to her birds, to look now and again at the prison window, even when she finds it masked by an enormous wooden shutter; I meant to indicate to her that I shall do everything that is humanly possible to contrive to see her. Great God! Does this mean that she will not come tomorrow owing to that indiscreet gesture?” This fear, which troubled Fabrizio’s sleep, was entirely justified; on the following day Clelia had not appeared at three o’clock, when the workmen finished installing outside Fabrizio’s windows the two enormous screens; they had been hauled up piecemeal, from the terrace of the great tower, by means of ropes and pulleys attached to the iron bars outside the windows. It is true that, hidden behind a shutter in her own room, Clelia had followed with anguish every movement of the workmen; she had seen quite plainly Fabrizio’s mortal anxiety, but had nevertheless had the courage to keep the promise she had made to herself.

Clelia was a little devotee of Liberalism; in her girlhood she had taken seriously all the Liberal utterances which she had heard in the company of her father, who thought only of establishing his own position; from this she had come to feel a contempt, almost a horror for the flexible character of the courtier; whence her antipathy to marriage. Since Fabrizio’s arrival, she had been racked by remorse: “And so,” she said to herself, “my unworthy heart is taking the side of the people who seek to betray my father! He dares to make me the sign of sawing through a door!⁠ ⁠… But,” she at once went on with anguish in her heart, “the whole town is talking of his approaching death! Tomorrow may be the fatal day! With the monsters who govern us, what in the world is not possible? What meekness, what heroic serenity in those eyes, which perhaps are about to close forever! God! What must be the Duchessa’s anguish! They say