The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal Read Free Book Online Page B

Fabrizio was even friendlier than usual; then, taking her hands in his: “Get me out of here—I swear on my honor to come back to this prison as soon as the fighting is over.”
    “Poppycock! Do you have what it takes?”
    He looked troubled, not understanding her expression. The jailer’s wife, seeing this, decided his funds were running low, and instead of stipulating gold napoleons as she had planned, now spoke only of francs. “Listen,” she said, “if you can get hold of a hundred francs, I’ll put double napoleons on the corporal’s eyes when he comes on guard duty tonight. He won’t be able to see you leave jail, and if his regiment has to march tomorrow, he’ll agree to it.”
    The bargain was soon struck. The jailer’s wife even consented to hide Fabrizio in her room, from which he could easily escape the following day.
    The next morning, before dawn, this woman was overcome by a tender impulse and said to Fabrizio: “My boy, you’re still much too young to go in for this nasty business: take my advice and don’t come back here.”
    “Don’t come back …” repeated Fabrizio. “Then is it a crime to want to defend one’s country?”
    “Enough of that. Just remember I saved your life; the case was clear—you would have been shot. But don’t tell anyone, you’ll lose both of us our jobs, my man
and
me. And above all, don’t go telling that silly story of a Milanese gentleman disguised as a barometer salesman—it’s too stupid! Listen to me now: I’m going to give you the uniform of a hussar who died in here a couple of days ago: don’t open your mouth if you can help it, but if some billeting sergeant or an officer asks you questions you have to answer, say you were lying sick in some farmer’s house after he found you trembling with fever in a roadside ditch and took you in out of charity. If they’re not satisfied with an answer like that, say you’re going back to your regiment. They may arrest you because of your accent, so then you say you were born in Piedmont and stayed in France last year after conscription, something like that …”
    For the first time, after thirty-three days of rage, Fabrizio understood everything that had happened to him. He had been taken for a spy. He argued with the jailer’s wife, who had been so tender that morning; and finally, while she was taking in the hussar’s uniform with a needle, he managed to make sense of his story to the astonished creature. She believed it for a while, he seemed so naive and looked so handsome in his hussar’s uniform!
    “Since you’re so eager to fight,” she remarked, half-convinced at last, “you’d better enlist in a regiment once you get to Paris. If you buy some recruiting sergeant a drink, you’ll get what you want!”
    The jailer’s wife added a good deal of advice for the future, and finally, at dawn, let Fabrizio out of her room, after making him swear a hundred times over that he would never utter her name, whateverhappened. Once Fabrizio had left the little town, walking boldly along with the hussar’s sword under his arm, he was overcome by a scruple: “Here I am,” he mused, “with the uniform and the map of a hussar who died in jail, apparently because he stole a cow and some silverware! So I’ve inherited his identity, so to speak … without wanting to or expecting anything of the kind! Beware of prison! The signs are clear: I’ll have a lot to suffer from prisons!”
    Not an hour had passed since Fabrizio had parted from his benefactress, when it began raining so hard that the new hussar could barely walk, encumbered as he was by the heavy boots which were certainly not his size. He met up with a farmer riding on a sorry nag he purchased then and there with the help of sign-language; the jailer’s wife had suggested he speak as little as possible, on account of his accent.
    On that day the army, which had just won the battle of Ligny, was marching straight for Brussels; it was the eve