The Charterhouse of Parma (Translated by Richard Howard 1999) by Stendhal

Author:Stendhal [Stendhal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9780307791436
Publisher: Modern Library; Random House
Published: 1839-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Well!” exclaimed the General, catching sight of his brother Don Cesare, “here is the Duchess about to spend a hundred thousand scudi to make a fool of me and help our prisoner escape!”

But for the moment we are obliged to leave Fabrizio in his prison, at the very top of the Citadel of Parma; he is well guarded, and perhaps we shall find him, when we return to him, somewhat changed. Meanwhile we shall concern ourselves chiefly with the Court, where some extremely complicated plots, and above all the passions of an unhappy woman, will determine his fate. As he climbed the three hundred and eighty steps to his prison in the Farnese Tower, under the Governor’s eyes, Fabrizio, who had so dreaded this moment, discovered that he had no time to brood over his misfortunes.

Returning home after Count Zurla’s party, the Duchess dismissed her serving-women with a gesture; then, collapsing fully dressed onto her bed: “Fabrizio is in the power of his enemies,” she exclaimed aloud, “and perhaps on my account they will poison him!”

How to describe the despairing moment which followed this account of the situation, in a woman so little swayed by reason, so much the slave of the present sensation, and, without confessing it to herself, so wildly in love with the young prisoner? There were inarticulate cries, transports of rage, convulsive movements, but not a single tear. She had dismissed her serving-women for the sake of concealment, expecting to burst into sobs as soon as she was alone, but the tears, that first relief of great sufferings, failed her completely. Rage, indignation, the sense of her inferiority when matched with the Prince, overwhelmingly ruled this proud spirit.

“Am I not humiliated enough!” she kept exclaiming. “I am being flouted and, worse still, Fabrizio’s life is in danger! And I have no way of seeking revenge! Stop there, my Prince! Kill me, if you like, you have the power; but afterward I shall have your life. But alas, poor Fabrizio, what good will that do you? How different from that day when I sought to leave Parma! And yet then I believed I was unhappy … what blindness! I was about to break all the habits of a pleasant life: alas, without knowing it, I was on the brink of an event which would decide my fate forever. If, by his miserable habits of a fawning courtier, the Count had not removed the phrase unjust proceedings from that fatal leter the Prince’s vanity granted me, we would be saved. I had had the luck (rather than the skill, it must be confessed) to involve his vanity with regard to his beloved Parma. When I threatened to leave is when I was free! Good God! What a slave I am now, stuck here in this wretched sewer, and Fabrizio chained in the Citadel, that prison which for so many great spirits has been the antechamber of death! And I can no longer restrain that tiger by the

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