“He has no suspicion that my little Fabrizio is here,” the singer said to herself, delighted, “and now we can make a fool of him in the most priceless fashion!”
Fabrizio had no inkling of his good fortune; finding next day that the singer’s windows were carefully shuttered, and not seeing her anywhere, he began to feel that the joke was lasting rather too long. He felt some remorse. “In what sort of position am I putting that poor Conte Mosca, and he the Minister of Police! They will think he is my accomplice, I shall have come to this place to ruin his career! But if I abandon a project I have been following for so long, what will the Duchessa say when I tell her of my essays in love?”
One evening when, on the point of giving up everything, he was moralising thus to himself, as he strolled under the tall trees which divided Fausta’s palazzo from the citadel, he observed that he was being followed by a spy of diminutive stature; in vain did he attempt to shake him off by turning down various streets, this microscopic being seemed always to cling to his heels. Growing impatient, he dashed into a lonely street running along the bank of the Parma, where his men were ambushed; on a signal from him they leaped out upon the poor little spy, who flung himself at their feet; it was Bettina, Fausta’s maid; after three days of boredom and seclusion, disguised as a man to escape the dagger of Conte M⸺, of whom her mistress and she were in great dread, she had undertaken to come out and tell Fabrizio to see someone loved him passionately and was burning to see him, but that the said person could not appear any more in the church of San Giovanni. “The time has come,” Fabrizio said to himself, “hurrah for persistence!”
The little maid was exceedingly pretty, a fact which took Fabrizio’s mind from his moralisings. She told him that the avenue and all the streets through which he had passed that evening were being jealously watched, though quite unobtrusively, by M⸺’s spies. They had taken rooms on the ground floors or on the first storeys of the houses; hidden behind the shutters and keeping absolutely silent, they observed everything that went on in the apparently quite deserted street, and heard all that was said.
“If those spies had recognised my voice,” said little Bettina, “I should have been stabbed without mercy as soon as I got back to the house, and my poor mistress with me, perhaps.”
This terror rendered her charming in Fabrizio’s eyes.
“Conte M⸺,” she went on, “is furious, and the Signora knows that he will stick at nothing. … She told me to say to you that she would like to be a hundred leagues away from here with you.”
Then she gave an account of the scene on St. Stephen’s day, and of the fury of M⸺, who had missed none of the glances and signs of affection which Fausta, madly in love that day with Fabrizio, had directed towards him. The Conte had drawn his dagger, had seized Fausta by the hair, and, but for her presence of mind, she must have perished.
Fabrizio made the pretty Bettina come up to a little apartment which he had near there. He told her that he came from Turin, and was the son of an important personage who happened at that moment to be in Parma, which meant that he had to be most careful in his movements. Bettina replied with a smile that he was a far grander gentleman than he chose to appear. It took our hero some little time to realise that the charming girl took him for no less a personage than the Crown Prince himself. Fausta was beginning to be frightened, and to love Fabrizio; she had taken the precaution of not mentioning his name to her maid, but of speaking to her always of the Prince. Finally Fabrizio admitted to the pretty girl that she had guessed aright: “But if my name gets out,” he added, “in spite of the great passion of which I have furnished your mistress with so many proofs, I shall be obliged to cease to see her, and at once my father’s Ministers, those rascally jokers whom I shall bring down from their high places some day, will not fail to send her an order to quit the country which up to now she has been adorning with her presence.”
Towards morning, Fabrizio arranged with the little lady’s maid a number of plans by which he might gain admission to Fausta’s house. He summoned Lodovico and another of his retainers, a man of great cunning, who came to an understanding with Bettina while he himself wrote the most extravagant letter to Fausta; the situation allowed all the exaggerations of tragedy, and Fabrizio did not miss the opportunity. It was not until day was breaking that he parted from the little lady’s maid, whom he left highly satisfied with the ways of the young Prince.
It had been repeated a hundred times over that, Fausta having now come to an understanding with her lover, the latter was no longer to pass to and fro beneath the windows of the little palazzo except when he could be admitted there, and that then a signal would be given. But Fabrizio, in love with Bettina, and believing himself to have come almost to the point with Fausta, could not confine himself to his village two leagues outside Parma. The following evening, about midnight, he came on horseback and with a good escort to sing under Fausta’s windows an air then in fashion, the words of which he altered. “Is not this the way in which our friends the lovers behave?” he asked himself.
Now that Fausta had shown a desire to meet him,
