It may be imagined that such letters were not entrusted to the post. Contessa Mosca replied from Naples: “We have a concert every Thursday, and a conversazione on Sundays; there is no room to move in our rooms. The Conte is enchanted with his excavations, he devotes a thousand francs a month to them, and has just brought some labourers down from the mountains of the Abruzzi, who cost him only three and twenty soldi a day. You must really come and see us. This is the twentieth time and more, you ungrateful man, that I have given you this invitation.”
Fabrizio had no thought of obeying the summons: the letter which he wrote every day to the Conte or Contessa seemed in itself an almost insupportable burden. The reader will forgive him when he learns that a whole year passed in this way, without his being able to address a single word to the Marchesa. All his attempts to establish some correspondence with her had been repulsed with horror. The habitual silence which, in his boredom with life, Fabrizio preserved everywhere, except in the exercise of his functions and at court, added to the spotless purity of his morals, made him the object of a veneration so extraordinary that he finally decided to pay heed to his aunt’s advice.
“The Prince has such a veneration for you,” she wrote to him, “that you must be on the lookout for disgrace; he will lavish on you signs of indifference, and the atrocious contempt of the courtiers will follow on the heels of his. These petty despots, however honest they may be, change like the fashions, and for the same reason: boredom. You will find no strength to resist the Sovereign’s caprices except in preaching. You improvise so well in verse! Try to speak for half an hour on religion; you will utter heresies at first; but hire a learned and discreet theologian to help you with your sermons, and warn you of your mistakes, you can put them right the day after.”
The kind of misery which a crossed love brings to the soul has this effect, that everything which requires attention and action becomes an atrocious burden. But Fabrizio told himself that his influence with the people, if he acquired any, might one day be of use to his aunt, and also to the Conte, his veneration for whom increased daily, as his public life taught him to realise the dishonesty of mankind. He decided to preach, and his success, prepared for him by his thinness and his worn coat, was without precedent. People found in his utterances a fragrance of profound sadness, which, combined with his charming appearance and the stories of the high favour that he enjoyed at court, captivated every woman’s heart. They invented the legend that he had been one of the most gallant captains in Napoleon’s army. Soon this absurd rumour had passed beyond the stage of doubt. Seats were reserved in the churches in which he was to preach; the poor used to take their places there as a speculation from five o’clock in the morning.
His success was such that Fabrizio finally conceived the idea, which altered his whole nature, that, were it only from simple curiosity, the Marchesa Crescenzi might very well come one day to listen to one of his sermons. Suddenly the enraptured public became aware that his talent had increased twofold. He allowed himself, when he was moved, to use imagery the boldness of which would have made the most practised orators shudder; at times, forgetting himself completely, he gave way to moments of passionate inspiration, and his whole audience melted in tears. But it was in vain that his aggrottato eye sought among all the faces turned towards the pulpit that one face the presence of which would have been so great an event for him.
“But if ever I do have that happiness,” he said to himself, “either I shall be taken ill, or I shall stop short altogether.” To obviate the latter misfortune, he had composed a sort of prayer, tender and impassioned, which he always placed in the pulpit, on a footstool; his plan was to begin reading this piece, should the Marchesa’s presence ever place him at a loss for a word.
He learned one day, through those of the Marchesa’s servants who were in his pay, that orders had been given to prepare for the following evening the box of the casa Crescenzi at the principal theatre. It was a year since the Marchesa had appeared at any public spectacle, and it was a tenor who was creating a furore and filling the house every evening that was making her depart from her habit. Fabrizio’s first impulse was an intense joy. “At last I can look at her for a whole evening! They say she is very pale.” And he sought to imagine what that charming face could be like, with its colours half obliterated by the war that had been waged in her soul.
His friend Lodovico, in consternation at what he called his master’s madness, found, with great difficulty, a box on the fourth tier, almost opposite the Marchesa’s. An idea suggested itself to Fabrizio; “I hope to put it into her head to come to a sermon, and I shall choose a church that is quite small, so as to be
