“That is perhaps the calling for which I have some talent. Hitherto all our authors who have made themselves famous have been men paid by the government or the religion that they sought to undermine. I, in the first place, risk my life; in the second place, think, Signora, of the reflections that disturb my mind when I go out to rob! Am I in the right, I ask myself. Does the office of Tribune render services that are really worth a hundred francs a month? I have two shirts, the coat in which you see me, a few worthless weapons, and I am sure to end by the rope; I venture to think that I am disinterested. I should be happy but for this fatal love which allows me to find only misery now in the company of the mother of my children. Poverty weighs upon me because it is ugly: I like fine clothes, white hands. …”
He looked at the Duchessa’s in such a fashion that fear seized hold of her.
“Goodbye, Sir,” she said to him: “can I be of any service to you in Parma?”
“Think sometimes of this question: his task is to awaken men’s hearts and to prevent them from falling asleep in that false and wholly material happiness which is given by monarchies. Is the service that he renders to his fellow-citizens worth a hundred francs a month? … My misfortune is that I am in love,” he said in the gentlest of tones, “and for nearly two years my heart has been occupied by you alone, but until now I have seen you without alarming you.” And he took to his heels with a prodigious swiftness which astonished the Duchessa and reassured her. “The police would have hard work to catch him,” she thought; “he must be mad, after all.”
“He is mad,” her servants informed her; “we have all known for a long time that the poor man was in love with the Signora; when the Signora is here we see him wandering in the highest parts of the woods, and as soon as the Signora has gone he never fails to come and sit in the very places where she has rested; he is careful to pick up any flowers that may have dropped from her nosegay and keeps them for a long time fastened in his battered hat.”
“And you have never spoken to me of these eccentricities,” said the Duchessa, almost in a tone of reproach.
“We were afraid that the Signora might tell the Minister Mosca. Poor Ferrante is such a good fellow! He has never done harm to anyone, and because he loves our Napoleon they have sentenced him to death.”
She said no word to the Minister of this meeting, and, as in four years it was the first secret that she had kept from him, a dozen times she was obliged to stop short in the middle of a sentence. She returned to Sacca with a store of gold. Ferrante showed no sign of life. She came again a fortnight later: Ferrante, after following her for some time, bounding through the wood at a distance of a hundred yards, fell upon her with the swiftness of a hawk, and flung himself at her feet as on the former occasion.
“Where were you a fortnight ago?”
“In the mountains, beyond Novi, robbing the muleteers who were returning from Milan where they had been selling oil.”
“Take this purse.”
Ferrante opened the purse, took from it a sequin which he kissed and thrust into his bosom, then handed it back to her.
“You give me back this purse, and you are a robber!”
“Certainly; my rule is that I must never possess more than a hundred francs; now, at this moment, the mother of my children has eighty francs, and I have twenty-five; I am five francs to the bad, and if they were to hang me now I should feel remorse. I have taken this sequin because it comes from you and I love you.”
The intonation of this very simple speech was perfect. “He does really love,” the Duchessa said to herself.
That day he appeared quite distracted. He said that there were in Parma people who owed him six hundred francs, and that with that sum he could repair his hut in which now his poor children were catching cold.
“But I will make you a loan of those six hundred francs,” said the Duchessa, genuinely moved.
“But then I, a public man—will not the opposite party have a chance to slander me, and say that I am selling myself?”
The Duchessa, in compassion, offered him a hiding-place in Parma if he would swear that for the time being he would not exercise his magistrature in that city, and above all would not carry out any of those sentences of death which, he said, he had in petto.
“And if they hang me, as a result of my rashness,” said Ferrante gravely, “all those scoundrels, who are so obnoxious to the People, will live for long years to come, and by whose fault? What will my father say to me when he greets me up above?”
The Duchessa spoke to him at length of his young children, to whom the damp might give fatal illnesses; he ended by accepting the offer of the hiding place in Parma.
The Duca Sanseverina, during the solitary half-day which he had spent in Parma after his marriage, had shown the Duchessa a highly singular hiding place which exists in the southern corner of the palazzo of that name. The wall in front, which dates from the middle ages, is eight feet thick; it has been hollowed out inside, so as to provide a secret chamber twenty feet in height but only two in width. It is close to where the visitor admires the reservoir mentioned in all the accounts of travels, a famous work of the twelfth century, constructed at the time of the siege of Parma by the
