The Charterhouse of Parma Read Online Free PDF Page B

somewhat starched for a woman of such spirit, fell madly in love with the Countess. She wrote to Limercati:
    Will you for once behave like a man with a brain? Imagine that you have never known me.
    I remain, with a trace of contempt perhaps, your most humble servant.
    Gina Pietranera
    Upon reading this missive, Limercati departed for one of his castles; maddened by passion, he spoke of blowing his brains out, an unheard-of thing in countries where Hell is a reality. The day after he arrived in the country, he had written the Countess to offer her his hand and his income of two hundred thousand francs. She returned his letter unopened, employing Count Nani’s groom for the commission. Whereupon Limercati was to spend three years on his estates, returningto Milan every two months but without ever having the courage to remain there, and boring all his friends with his passion for the Countess, and with a detailed narrative of the favors she had once shown him. In the early stages, he added that she was ruining herself with Count Nani, and that she would be dishonored by such a liaison.
    The fact is that the Countess had no love whatever for Count Nani, as she declared to him once she was quite certain of Limercati’s despair. The Count, a man of the world, implored her not to divulge the sad truth she had confided to him:
    “If you will be so kind,” he added, “as to continue receiving me, with all the marks of distinction granted to a reigning lover, I shall perhaps gain a suitable position for myself.”
    Having received this heroic declaration, the Countess had no further need of Count Nani’s horses or his box at the opera. But for fifteen years she had been accustomed to a life of the greatest elegance: she was now obliged to solve this difficult or, frankly, impossible problem: how to live in Milan on a pension of fifteen hundred francs. She left her
palazzo
, rented a couple of rooms in an attic, and dismissed all her servants, even her chambermaid, whom she replaced by an old charwoman. This sacrifice was in fact less heroic and less painful than it appears to us; in Milan poverty is not a matter for ridicule, and therefore does not show itself to frightened souls as the worst of evils. After some months of such noble poverty, during which the Countess was besieged by continual letters from Limercati, as well as from Count Nani, who also sought her hand, it occurred to the Marchese del Dongo, in general so detestably stingy, that his enemies might well gloat over his sister’s reduced circumstances. What! A del Dongo reduced to living on a pension from the Viennese court, which had given him such offense!
    He wrote her that an apartment and an allowance worthy of his sister would await her at the Castle of Grianta. The Countess’s volatile soul enthusiastically embraced the notion of this new kind of life; it had been twenty years since she had lived in this venerable castle rising majestically amid the old chestnut-trees planted in the days of the Sforzas. “There,” she mused, “I shall find repose, and at my age, is that not happiness?” (Since she was all of thirty-one, she regarded herselfas having reached the period of seclusion.) “On that sublime lake where I was born, a calm and happy life awaits me at last.”
    I do not know whether she was deceiving herself, but there can be no doubt that this passionate soul, who had just found it so easy to reject the offer of one enormous fortune after the next, brought happiness to the Castle of Grianta. Her two nieces were mad with joy. “You have brought back to me the happy days of my youth,” the Marchesa exclaimed as she took her in her arms; “the day before you came I was a hundred years old!”
    The Countess began revisiting, accompanied by Fabrizio, all those enchanting places surrounding Grianta, so celebrated by travelers: Villa Melzi, which affords such a fine view of the castle from the opposite side of the lake; beyond, the sacred grove of the