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Ebook has 658 lines and 66699 words, and 14 pages

Illustrator: J. F. Gueldry

PICCIOLA

THE PRISONER OF FENESTRELLA OR, CAPTIVITY CAPTIVE

NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1893

ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED AT THE APPLETON PRESS, U.S.A.

FACING PAGE

The priest at Charney's bedside 40

A reverie 61

Napoleon reviewing the troops 96

Teresa before the Empress 116

The farewell 212

INTRODUCTORY EPISTLE TO MADAME VIRGINIE ANCELOT.

I have reread my book, and I tremble in offering it to you; yet who can appreciate it better? You like neither romances nor dramas; my work is neither a romance nor a drama.

The tale which I have related, madam, is simple; so simple, indeed, that perhaps never has pen laboured on a subject more utterly restricted. My heroine is so unimportant! Not that I wish beforehand to throw the fault of failure on her; for if the action of my little history is thus meagre, its principle is lofty, its aim is elevated; and if I fail in attaining my purpose, it will be that my strength is insufficient. Yet I am not careless as to the fate of my labour, for in it are the deepest of my convictions; and believe me that, more from benevolence than vanity, I hope, though the crowd of ordinary readers may pass over my work with carelessness, that still for some it may possess a charm, for others, utility.

Do you find interest in the truth of a story? If so, I offer that to you to compensate for what you may not find in the story itself.

You remember that lovely woman, so lately dead, the Countess de Charney, whose expression, though mournful, seemed already to breathe of Heaven. Her look, so open, so sweet, which seemed to caress while wandering over you, and to make the heart swell as it lingered; from which one turned away only to be drawn again within its enchantment; you have seen it, at first timid as that of a young girl, suddenly become animated, brilliant, and self-possessed, exhibiting all its native energy, power, and devotion. Such was the woman; a marvellous union of tenderness and courage, of the weakness of sense and the strength of soul.

Such have I known her; such did others know her, long before me, when her soul was excited only by the affections of a daughter and of a wife. You understand the pleasure with which I dwell with you on such a woman; I may not often again have the opportunity. Still, she is not the heroine of my story.

In the only visit which you made her at Belleville, where was the tomb of her husband, and now, alas! her own, you more than once seemed surprised with what you saw. You were struck with an old, white-haired man, who sat next her at table, whose appearance and manners were coarse, even for his class. You saw him speak familiarly with the daughter of the countess, who, beautiful as her mother had been, answered him with kindness, and even with deference, giving him the name of godfather, which, indeed, was the relation he bore to her. Perhaps you have not forgotten a flower, dried and colourless, in a rich case; and, also, that when you asked her concerning it, a saddened look stole over the countenance of the widow, and your questions remained unanswered. This answer you now have before you.

Honoured with the confidence and affection of the countess, more than once, before that simple flower, between her and the venerable man, have I listened to long and touching details. Besides this, I hold the manuscripts of the count, his letters, and his two prison journals.

I have carefully retained in my memory those precious details; I have attentively perused those manuscripts; I have made important extracts from those letters; and in those journals have I found my inspiration. If, then, I succeed in rousing in your soul the feelings which have agitated mine in presence of these relics of the captive, my fears for my little book are vain.

One word. I have given throughout to my hero his title of count, even during a time in which such dignities were obsolete. This is because I have always heard him so called, in French and in Italian; and in my memory his name and his title are inseparably connected.

You now understand me, madam. You will not expect in this book a history of important events, or the vivid details of love. I have spoken of utility; and of what use is a love-story? In that sweet study, practice is worth more than theory, and each one needs his own experience: each one hastens to acquire it, and cares little to seek it already prepared in books. It is useless for old men, moralists by necessity, to cry, "Shun that dangerous rock, where we have once been shipwrecked!" Their children answer them, "You have tempted that sea, and we must tempt it in turn. We claim our right of shipwreck."

Charles Veramont, Count de Charney, whose name is not wholly effaced from the annals of modern science, and may be found inscribed in the mysterious archives of the police under Napoleon, was endowed by nature with an uncommon capacity for study. Unluckily, however, his intelligence of mind, schooled by the forms of a college education, had taken a disputatious turn. He was an able logician rather than a sound reasoner; and there was in Charney the composition of a learned man, but not of a philosopher.

Political and legislative science furnished him with more positive groundwork; but these, from one end of Europe to the other, were crying aloud for Reform; and when he tried to specify a few of the more flagrant abuses, they proved so deeply rooted in the social system--so many destinies were based on a fallacious principle, that he was actually discouraged. Charney had not the strength of mind, or insensibility of heart, indispensable to overthrow, in other nations, all that the tornado of the Revolution had left standing in his own.

He recollected, too, that hosts of estimable men, as learned, and perhaps as well-intentioned as himself, professed theories in total opposition to his own. If he were to set the four quarters of the globe on fire for the mere satisfaction of a chimera? This consideration, more startling than even his historical doubts, reduced him to the most painful perplexity.

Metaphysics afforded him a last resource. In the ideal world, an overthrow is less alarming; since ideas may clash without danger in infinite space. In waging such a war, he no longer risked the safety of others; he endangered only his own peace of mind.

The farther he advanced into the mysteries of metaphysical science, analyzing, arguing, disputing--the more deeply he became enveloped in darkness and mystery. Truth, ever flying from his grasp, vanishing under his gaze, seemed to deride him like the mockery of a will-o'-the-wisp, shining to delude the unwary. When he paused to admire its luminous brilliancy, all suddenly grew dark; the meteor having disappeared to shine again on some remote and unexpected point; and when, persevering and tenacious, Charney armed himself with patience, followed with steady steps, and attained the sanctuary, the fugitive was gone again! This time he had overstepped the mark! When he fancied the meteor was in his hand--grasped firmly in his hand--it had already slipped through his fingers, multiplying into a thousand brilliant and delusive particles. Twenty rival truths perplexed the horizon of his mind, like so many false beacons beguiling him to shipwreck. After vacillating between Bossuet and Spinoza--deism and atheism--bewildered among spiritualists, materialists, idealists, ontologists, and eclectics, he took refuge in universal skepticism, comforting his uneasy ignorance by bold and universal negation.

Having set aside the doctrine of innate ideas, and the revelation of theologians, as well as the opinions of Leibnitz, Locke, and Kant, the Count de Charney now resigned himself to the grossest pantheism, unscrupulously denying the existence of one high and supreme God. The contradiction existing between ideas and things, the irregularities of the created world, the unequal distribution of strength and endowment among mankind, inspired his overtasked brain with the conclusion that the world is a conglomeration of insensate matter, and CHANCE the lord of all.

Chance, therefore, became his GOD here, and nothingness his hope hereafter. He adopted his new creed with avidity--almost with triumph--as if the audacious invention had been his own. It was a relief to get rid of the doubts which tormented him by a sweeping clause of incredulity; and from that moment Charney, biding adieu to science, devoted himself exclusively to the pleasures of the world.

The death of a relation placed him in possession of a considerable fortune. France, reorganized by the consulate, was resuming its former habits of luxury and splendour. The clarion of victory was audible from every quarter; and all was joy and festivity in the capital. The Count de Charney figured brilliantly in the world of magnificence, elegance, taste, and enlightenment. Having attracted around him the gay, the graceful, and the witty, he unclosed the gates of his splendid mansion to the glittering divinities of the day--to fashion, bon ton, and distinction of every kind. Lost in the giddy crowd, he took part in all its enjoyments and dissipations; amazed that amid such a vortex of pleasures he should still remain a stranger to happiness!

Music, dress, the perfumed atmosphere surrounding the fair and fashionable, were the chief objects of his interest. Vainly had he attempted to devote himself to the society of men renowned for wit and understanding. The ignorance of the learned, the errors of the wise, excited only his compassion or contempt.

Such is the misfortune of proficiency! No one reaches the artificial standard we have created. Even those who are as learned as ourselves are learned after some other fashion; and from our lofty eminence we look down upon mankind as upon a crowd of dwarfs and pigmies. In the hierarchy of intellect, as in that of power, elevation is isolated--to be alone is the destiny of the great.

Truth and error were equally against him. To virtue he was a stranger, to vice indifferent. He had experienced the vanity of knowledge; but the bliss of ignorance was denied him. The gates of Eden were closed against his re-entrance. Reason appeared fallacious, joy apocryphal. The noise of entertainments wearied him; the silence of home was still more tedious; in company, he became a burden to others; in retirement, to himself. A profound sadness took possession of his soul!

In spite of all Charney's efforts, the demon of philosophical analysis, far from being exorcised, served to tarnish, undermine, contract, and extinguish the brilliancy of every mode of life he selected. The praise of his friends, the endearments of his loves, seemed nothing more than the current coin given in exchange for a certain portion of his property, the paltry evidence of a necessity for living at his expense.

Decomposing every passion and sentiment, and reducing all things to their primitive element, he, at length, contracted a morbid frame of mind, amounting almost to aberration of intellect. He fancied that in the finest tissue composing his garments, he could detect the exhalations of the animal of whose fleece it was woven--on the silk of his gorgeous hangings, the crawling worm which furnishes them. His furniture, carpets, gewgaws, trinkets of coral or mother-of-pearl, all were stigmatized in his eyes as the spoil of the dead, shaped by the labours of some squalid artisan. The spirit of inquiry had destroyed every illusion. The imagination of the sceptic was paralyzed!

To such a heart as that of Charney, however, emotion was indispensable. The love which found no single object on which to concentrate its vigour expanded into tenderness for all mankind; and he became a philanthropist!

With the view of serving the cause of his fellow-creatures, he devoted himself to politics, no longer speculative, but active; initiated himself into secret societies, and grew a fanatic for freedom, the only superstition remaining for those who have renounced the higher aspirations of human nature. He enrolled himself in a plot--a conspiracy against nothing less than the sovereignty of the victorious Napoleon!

In this attempt, Charney fancied himself actuated by patriotism, by philanthropy, by love of his countrymen! More likely by animosity against the one great man, of whose power and glory he was envious! An aristocrat at heart, he fancied himself a leveller. The proud noble who had been robbed of the title of count, bequeathed him by his ancestors, did not choose that his inferior in birth should assume the title of emperor, which he had conquered at the point of his sword.

It matters little in what plot he embarked his destinies; at that epoch, there was no lack of conspiracies! It was one of the many hatched between 1803 and 1804, and not suffered to come to light: the police--that second providence which presides over the safety of empires--was beforehand with it! Government decided that the less noise made on the occasion, the better; they would not even spare it so much as a discharge of muskets on the Plaine de Grenelle, the scene of military execution: but the heads of the conspiracy were privately arrested, condemned, almost without trial, and conveyed away to solitary confinement in various state prisons, citadels, or fortresses, of the ninety-six departments of consular France.

In traversing the Alps on my way to Italy--an humble tourist, with my staff in my hand, and my wallet on my shoulder, I remember pausing to contemplate, near the pass of Rodoretto, a torrent swollen by the melting of the glaciers. The tumultuous sounds produced by its course, the foaming cascades into which it burst, the varying colors and hues created by the movement of its waters, yellow, white, green, black, according to its channel through marl, slate, chalk, or peat earth--the vast blocks of marble or granite it had detached without being able to remove, around which a thousand ever-changing cataracts added roar to roar, cascade to cascade; the trunks of trees it had uprooted, of which the still foliaged branches emerging from the water were agitated by the winds, while the roots were buffeted by the waves; fragments of the very banks clothed with verdure, and driven like floating islands against the trees, as the trees were driven in their turn against the blocks of granite--all this, these murmurs, clashings, and roarings, confined between narrow and precipitous banks, impressed me with wonder and admiration. And this torrent was the Clusone!

It was then I visited Fenestrella, a large town celebrated for peppermint water, and the fortress which crowns the two mountains between which it is situated, communicating with each other by covered ways, but partly dismantled during the wars of the Republic. One of the forts, however, was repaired and refortified when Piedmont became incorporated into France.

In this fortress of Fenestrella, was Charles Veramont, Count de Charney, incarcerated, on an accusation of having attempted to subvert the laws of government, and introduce anarchy and confusion into the country.

Estranged by rigid imprisonment, alike from men of science and men of pleasure, and regretting neither--renouncing without much effort his wild projects of political regeneration--bidding a forced farewell to his fortune, by the pomps of which he had been undazzled--to his friends, who were grown tiresome, and his mistresses, who were grown faithless; having for his abode, instead of a princely mansion, a bare and gloomy chamber--the jailer of Charney was now his sole attendant, and his imbittered spirit his only companion.

But what signified the gloom and nakedness of his apartment? The necessaries of life were there, and he had long been disgusted with its superfluities. Even his jailer gave him no offence. It was only his own thoughts that troubled him!

Vainly did he strive to throw off this frightful consciousness, when in the solitude of his reveries it alternately chilled and scorched his shrinking bosom: and once more, the unhappy Charney began to cling for support to the visible and material world--now, alas! how circumscribed around him. The room assigned to his use was at the rear of the citadel, in a small building raised upon the ruins of a vast and strong foundation, serving formerly for defence, but rendered useless by a new system of fortification.

Four walls, newly whitewashed, so that he was denied even the amusement of perusing the lucubrations of former prisoners, his predecessors; a table, serving for his meals; a chair, whose insulated unity reminded him, that no human being would ever sit beside him there in friendly converse; a trunk for his clothes and linen; a little sideboard of painted deal, half worm-eaten, offered a singular contrast to the rich mahogany dressing-case, inlaid with silver, standing there as the sole representative of his former splendours. A clean, but narrow bed, window-curtains of blue cloth . Such was the complement of furniture allotted to the Count de Charney.

Over his chamber was another, wholly unoccupied; he had not a single companion in that detached portion of the fortress.

The remainder of his world consisted in a short, massive, winding stone staircase, descending into a small paved court, sunk into what had been a moat, in the earlier days of the citadel, in which narrow space he was permitted to enjoy air and exercise during two hours of the day. Such was the ukase of the commandant of Fenestrella.

From this confined spot, however, the prisoner was able to extend his glance towards the summits of the mountains, and command a view of the vapours rising from the plain; for the walls of the ramparts, lowering suddenly at the extremity of the glacis, admitted a limited proportion of air and sunshine into the court. But once shut up again in his room, his view was bounded by an horizon of solid masonry, and a surmise of the majestic and picturesque aspect of nature it served to conceal. Charney was well aware that to the right rose the fertile hills of Saluces; that to his left were developed the last undulations of the valley of Aorta and the banks of the Chiara; that before him lay the noble plains of Turin; and behind, the mighty chain of Alps, with its adornment of rocks, forests, and chasms, from Mount Genevra to Mount Cenis. But, in spite of this charming vicinage, all he was permitted to behold was the misty sky suspended over his head by a frame-work of rude masonry; the pavement of the little court, and the bars of his prison, through which he might admire the opposite wall, adorned with a single small square window, at which he had once or twice caught glimpses of a doleful human countenance.

What a world from which to extract delight and entertainment! The unhappy Count wore out his patience in the attempt! At first, he amused himself with scribbling with a morsel of charcoal on the walls of his prison the dates of every happy event of his childhood; but from this dispiriting task he desisted, more discouraged than ever. The demon of scepticism next inspired him with evil counsel; and having framed into fearful sentences the axioms of his withering creed, he inscribed them also on his wall, between recollections consecrated to his sister and mother!

Still unconsoled, Charney at length made up his mind to fling aside his heart-eating cares, adopt, by anticipation, all the puerilities and brutalization which result from the prolongation of solitary confinement. The philosopher attempted to find amusement in unravelling silk or linen; in making flageolets of straw, and building ships of walnut-shells. The man of genius constructed whistles, boxes, and baskets, of kernels; chains and musical instruments, with the springs of his braces; nay, for a time, he took delight in these absurdities; then, with a sudden movement of disgust, trampled them, one by one, under his feet!

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