“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” the Duchessa told herself with a gloomy sadness. “Grief has aged me, or else he is really in love, and I have now only the second place in his heart.” Demeaned, cast down by the greatest of all possible griefs, the Duchessa said to herself at times: “If, by the will of Heaven, Ferrante should become mad altogether, or his courage should fail, I feel that I should be less unhappy.” From that moment this half-remorse poisoned the esteem that the Duchessa had for her own character. “So,” she said to herself bitterly, “I am repenting of a resolution I have already made. Then I am no longer a del Dongo!”
“It is the will of Heaven,” she would say: “Fabrizio is in love, and what right have I to wish that he should not be in love? Has one single word of genuine love ever passed between us?”
This idea, reasonable as it was, kept her from sleeping, and in short, a thing which showed how old age and a weakening of the heart had come over her, she was a hundred times more unhappy than at Parma. As for the person who could be responsible for Fabrizio’s strange abstraction, it was hardly possible to entertain any reasonable doubt: Clelia Conti, that pious girl, had betrayed her father since she had consented to make the garrison drunk, and never once did Fabrizio speak of Clelia! “But,” added the Duchessa, beating her breast in desperation, “if the garrison had not been made drunk, all my stratagems, all my exertions became useless; so it is she that saved him!”
It was with extreme difficulty that the Duchessa obtained from Fabrizio any details of the events of that night, which, she said to herself, “would at one time have been the subject of an endlessly renewed discussion between us! In those happy times he would have talked for a whole day, with a force and gaiety endlessly renewed, of the smallest trifle which I thought of bringing forward.”
As it was necessary to think of everything, the Duchessa had installed Fabrizio at the port of Locarno, a Swiss town at the head of Lake Maggiore. Every day she went to fetch him in a boat for long excursions over the lake. Well, on one occasion when she took it into her head to go up to his room, she found the walls lined with a number of views of the town of Parma, for which he had sent to Milan or to Parma itself, a place which he ought to be holding in abomination. His little sitting-room, converted into a studio, was littered with all the apparatus of a painter in watercolours, and she found him finishing a third sketch of the Torre Farnese and the governor’s palazzo.
“The only thing for you to do now,” she said to him with an air of vexation, “is to make a portrait from memory of that charming governor whose only wish was to poison you. But, while I think of it,” she went on, “you ought to write him a letter of apology for having taken the liberty of escaping and making his citadel look foolish.”
The poor woman little knew how true her words were: no sooner had he arrived in a place of safety than Fabrizio’s first thought had been to write General Fabio Conti a perfectly polite and in a sense highly ridiculous letter; he asked his pardon for having escaped, offering as an excuse that a certain subordinate in the prison had been ordered to give him poison. Little did he care what he wrote, Fabrizio hoped that Clelia’s eyes would see this letter, and his cheeks were wet with tears as he wrote it. He ended it with a very pleasant sentence: he ventured to say that, finding himself at liberty, he frequently had occasion to regret his little room in the Torre Farnese. This was the principal thought in his letter, he hoped that Clelia would understand it. In his writing vein, and always in the hope of being read by someone, Fabrizio addressed his thanks to Don Cesare, that good chaplain who had lent him books on theology. A few days later Fabrizio arranged that the small bookseller of Locarno should make the journey to Milan, where this bookseller, a friend of the celebrated bibliomaniac Reina, bought the most sumptuous editions that he could find of the works that Don Cesare had lent Fabrizio. The good chaplain received these books and a handsome letter which informed him that, in moments of impatience, pardonable perhaps to a poor prisoner, the writer had covered the margins of his books with silly notes. He begged him, accordingly, to replace them in his library with the volumes which the most lively gratitude took the liberty of presenting to him.
Fabrizio was very modest in giving the simple name of notes to the endless scribblings with which he had covered the margins of a folio volume of the works of Saint Jerome. In the hope that he might be able to send back this book to the good chaplain, and exchange it for another, he had written day by day on the margins a very exact diary of all that occurred to him in prison; the great events were nothing else than ecstasies of divine love (this word “divine” took the place of another which he dared not write). At one moment this divine love led the prisoner to a profound despair, at other times a voice heard in the air restored some hope and caused transports of joy. All this, fortunately, was written
