Clelia resigned herself; she had not seen Fabrizio; she still hoped that he might not have come to this party. But at the moment when the concert was about to begin, the Princess having given the ladies leave to be seated, Clelia, who was not at all alert in that sort of thing, let all the best places near the Princess be snatched from her, and was obliged to go and look for a chair at the end of the room, in the very corner to which Fabrizio had withdrawn. When she reached her chair, the costume, unusual in such a place, of the General of the Friars Minor caught her eye, and at first she did not observe the other man, slim and dressed in a plain black coat, who was talking to him; nevertheless a certain secret impulse brought her gaze to rest on this man. “Everyone here is wearing uniform, or a richly embroidered coat: who can that young man be in such a plain black coat?” She was looking at him, profoundly attentive, when a lady, taking her seat beside her, caused her chair to move. Fabrizio turned his head: she did not recognise him, he had so altered. At first she said to herself: “That is like him, it must be his elder brother; but I thought there were only a few years between them, and that is a man of forty.” Suddenly she recognised him by a movement of his lips.
“Poor man, how he has suffered!” she said to herself. And she bent her head, bowed down by grief, and not in fidelity to her vow. Her heart was convulsed with pity; “after nine months in prison, he did not look anything like that.” She did not look at him again; but, without actually turning her eyes in his direction, she could see all his movements.
After the concert, she saw him go up to the Prince’s card-table, placed a few feet from the throne; she breathed a sigh of relief when Fabrizio was thus removed to a certain distance from her.
But the Marchese Crescenzi had been greatly annoyed to see his wife relegated to a place so far from the throne; all evening he had been occupied in persuading a lady seated three chairs away from the Princess, whose husband was under a financial obligation to him, that she would do well to change places with the Marchesa. The poor woman resisting, as was natural, he went in search of the debtor husband, who let his better half hear the sad voice of reason, and finally the Marchese had the pleasure of effecting the exchange; he went to find his wife. “You are always too modest,” he said to her. “Why walk like that with downcast eyes? Anyone would take you for one of those cits’ wives astonished at finding themselves here, whom everyone else is astonished, too, to see here. That fool of a Grand Mistress does nothing else but collect them! And they talk of retarding the advance of Jacobinism! Remember that your husband occupies the first position, among the gentlemen, at the Princess’s court; and that even should the Republicans succeed in suppressing the court, and even the nobility, your husband would still be the richest man in this State. That is an idea which you do not keep sufficiently in your head.”
The chair on which the Marchese had the pleasure of installing his wife was but six paces from the Prince’s card-table: she saw Fabrizio only in profile, but she found him grown so thin, he had, above all, the air of being so far above everything that might happen in this world, he who before would never let any incident pass without making his comment, that she finally arrived at the terrible conclusion: Fabrizio had altogether changed; he had forgotten her; if he had grown so thin, that was the effect of the severe fasts to which his piety subjected him. Clelia was confirmed in this sad thought by the conversation of all her neighbours: the name of the Coadjutor was on every tongue; they sought a reason for the signal favour which they saw conferred upon him: for him, so young, to be admitted to the Prince’s table! They marvelled at the polite indifference and the air of pride with which he threw down his cards, even when he had His Highness for a partner.
“But this is incredible!” cried certain old courtiers; “his aunt’s favour has quite turned his head. … But, mercifully, it won’t last; our Sovereign does not like people to put on these little airs of superiority.” The Duchessa approached the Prince; the courtiers, who kept at a most respectful distance from the card-table, so that they could hear only a few stray words of the Prince’s conversation, noticed that Fabrizio blushed deeply. “His aunt has been teaching him a lesson,” they said to themselves, “about those grand airs of indifference.” Fabrizio had just caught the sound of Clelia’s voice, she was replying to the Princess, who, in making her tour of the ballroom, had addressed a few words to the wife of her Cavaliere d’onore. The moment arrived when Fabrizio had to change his place at the whist-table; he then found himself directly opposite Clelia, and gave himself up repeatedly to the pleasure of contemplating her. The poor Marchesa, feeling his gaze rest upon her, lost countenance altogether. More than once she forgot what she owed to her vow: in her desire to read what was going on in Fabrizio’s heart, she fixed her eyes on him.
The Prince’s game ended, the ladies rose to go into the supper-room. There was some slight confusion. Fabrizio found himself close to Clelia; his mind was still quite made up, but he happened to recognise a faint perfume which she used on her clothes; this sensation overthrew all the resolutions that he had made. He approached her and
