The Charterhouse of Parma Read Online Free PDF

by umbrellas and whose agony lasted some five hours. A priest who happened to be the Marchese del Dongo’s confessor might have saved Prina by opening the grille of San Giovanni, in front of which the unfortunateMinister had been dragged and even for a moment left in the gutter; but this priest jeeringly refused to open his grille, and six months later the Marchese had the happiness of securing for him a handsome preferment.
    He loathed Count Pietranera, his brother-in-law, who, without fifty louis’ income, dared to be content with his lot, determined to show himself loyal to what he had loved all his life, and had the insolence to display that spirit of justice without consideration of persons, which the Marchese called an infamous Jacobinism. The Count had refused to take service with Austria; this refusal was made known to the authorities, and some months after Prina’s death the same persons who had hired his assassins managed to have General Pietranera thrown into prison. Whereupon his wife the Countess obtained a passport and requested post-horses for Vienna, in order to tell the Emperor the truth. Prina’s assassins were intimidated, and one of them, a cousin of Countess Pietranera, brought her at midnight, an hour before she was to leave, her husband’s order of release. The next day the Austrian general sent for Count Pietranera, received him with every possible distinction, and assured him that his pension as a retired officer would be paid on the most advantageous terms. The worthy General Bubna, a man of discernment as well as of feeling, appeared to be quite ashamed of Prina’s murder and of the Count’s imprisonment.
    After this squall, staved off by the Countess’s firm character, the pair lived as well as they could upon the retirement pension which, thanks to General Bubna’s recommendation, was paid forthwith. Fortunately, it so happened that for the last five or six years, the Countess had enjoyed cordial relations with an extremely wealthy young man who was also an intimate friend of the Count, and who lost no time in placing at their disposal the finest pair of English horses to be seen in Milan, his box at La Scala, and his villa in the country. But the Count, whose generous spirit had the conscience of his very bravery, was a man readily carried away and at such times allowed himself to speak inopportunely. One day when he was hunting with some young men, one of them, who had served under other ensigns than the Count’s, began making jokes about the courage of the soldiers of the Republic on the other side of the Alps; the Count slapped his face, a fracas immediatelyensued, and the Count, who was the sole exponent of his point of view amid all these young men, was killed. There was a great deal of talk about this duel, if duel it was, and the persons involved then decided to make a journey to Switzerland.
    That absurd courage known as resignation, the courage of a fool who lets himself be hanged without uttering a word, was not among the Countess’s qualities. Outraged by her husband’s death, she would have had Limercati, the wealthy young man who was her faithful friend, undertake the journey to Switzerland forthwith and there offer Count Pietranera’s murderer either a slap in the face or a bullet in the breast.
    Limercati treated such an enterprise as a consummate absurdity, and the Countess immediately realized that her disdain had killed her love. She multiplied her attentions to Limercati, seeking to awaken his love and subsequently to forsake him, reducing him to despair. In order to render such a scheme of revenge intelligible to French readers, I should explain that in Milan, a region quite remote from our own, a man may still be driven to despair by love. The Countess who, in her mourning robes, easily eclipsed all her rivals, flirted with the young men of good society, and one of them, Count Nani, who had long since observed that he had found Limercati’s merit somewhat heavy,