That evening, the Prince was so infuriated by the horrors that he had discovered that he would not take part in the play.
“I should be more than happy,” he said to the Duchessa, “if you would reign over my States as you reign over my heart. To begin with, I am going to tell you how I have spent my day.” He then told her everything, very exactly: the burning of Conte Rassi’s patent, the appointment of Lange, his report on the poisoning, and so forth. “I find that I have very little experience for ruling. The Conte humiliates me by his jokes. He makes jokes even at the Council; and, in society, he says things the truth of which you are going to disprove; he says that I am a boy whom he leads wherever he chooses. Though one is a Prince, Signora, one is none the less a man, and these things annoy one. In order to give an air of improbability to the stories which Signor Mosca may repeat, they have made me summon to the Ministry that dangerous scoundrel Rassi, and now there is that General Conti who believes him to be still so powerful that he dare not admit that it was he or the Raversi who ordered him to destroy your nephew; I have a good mind simply to send General Fabio Conti before the court; the judges will see whether he is guilty of attempted poisoning.”
“But, Prince, have you judges?”
“What!” said the Prince in astonishment.
“You have certain learned counsel who walk the streets with a solemn air; apart from that they always give the judgment that will please the dominant party at your court.”
While the young Prince, now scandalised, uttered expressions which showed his candour far more than his sagacity, the Duchessa was saying to herself:
“Does it really suit me to let Conti be disgraced? No, certainly not; for then his daughter’s marriage with that honest simpleton the Marchese Crescenzi becomes impossible.”
On this topic there was an endless discussion between the Duchessa and the Prince. The Prince was dazed with admiration. In consideration of the marriage of Clelia Conti to the Marchese Crescenzi, but on that express condition, which he laid down in an angry scene with the ex-governor, the Prince pardoned his attempt to poison; but, on the Duchessa’s advice, banished him until the date of his daughter’s marriage. The Duchessa imagined that it was no longer love that she felt for Fabrizio, but she was still passionately anxious for the marriage of Clelia Conti to the Marchese; there lay in that the vague hope that gradually she might see Fabrizio’s preoccupation disappear.
The Prince, rapturously happy, wished that same evening publicly to disgrace the Minister Rassi. The Duchessa said to him with a laugh:
“Do you know a saying of Napoleon? A man placed in an exalted position, with the eyes of the whole world on him, ought never to allow himself to make violent movements. But this evening it is too late, let us leave business till tomorrow.”
She wished to give herself time to consult the Conte, to whom she repeated very accurately the whole of the evening’s conversation, suppressing however the frequent allusions to a promise which was poisoning her life. The Duchessa hoped to make herself so indispensable that she would be able to obtain an indefinite adjournment by saying to the Prince: “If you have the barbarity to insist upon subjecting me to that humiliation, which I will never forgive you, I leave your States the day after.”
Consulted by the Duchessa as to the fate of Rassi, the Conte showed himself most philosophic. General Fabio Conti and he went for a tour of Piedmont.
A singular difficulty arose in the trial of Fabrizio: the judges wished to acquit him by acclamation, and at the first sitting of the court. The Conte was obliged to use threats to enforce that the trial should last for at least a week, and the judges take the trouble to hear all the witnesses. “These fellows are always the same,” he said to himself.
The day after his acquittal, Fabrizio del Dongo at last took possession of the place of Grand Vicar to the worthy Archbishop Landriani. On the same day the Prince signed the dispatches necessary to obtain Fabrizio’s nomination as Coadjutor with eventual succession, and less than two months afterwards he was installed in that office.
Everyone complimented the Duchessa on her nephew’s air of gravity; the fact was that he was in despair. The day after his deliverance, followed by the dismissal and banishment of General Fabio Conti and the Duchessa’s arrival in high favour, Clelia had taken refuge with Contessa Contarini, her aunt, a woman of great wealth and great age, occupied exclusively in looking after her health. Clelia could, had she wished, have seen Fabrizio; but anyone acquainted with her previous commitments who had seen her behaviour now might well have thought that with her lover’s danger her love for him also had ceased. Not only did Fabrizio pass as often as he decently could before the palazzo Contarini, he had also succeeded, after endless trouble, in taking a little apartment opposite the windows of its first floor. On one occasion Clelia, having gone to the window without thinking, to see a procession pass, drew back at once, as though terror-stricken; she had caught sight of Fabrizio, dressed in black, but as a workman in very humble circumstances, looking at her from one of the windows of this rookery, which had panes of oiled paper, like his cell in the Torre Farnese. Fabrizio would fain have been able to persuade himself that Clelia was shunning him in consequence of her father’s disgrace, which current report put down to the Duchessa? but he knew only too well another cause for this aloofness, and nothing could distract him from his melancholy.
He had been left unmoved by
