The Charterhouse of Parma

In a surprise commendation, Archbishop Landriani recommends Fabrizio’s promotion, which Mosca negotiates in order to avoid upsetting the Prince. Fabrizio receives the news calmly, “like a true grand seigneur who quite naturally believed he was entitled to such extraordinary advancement” (219). Faced anew with Parma politics, Fabrizio laments “those fine resolutions made at the lakeshore” (214).

Fabrizio travels to Sanguigna to participate in an excavation of statues. Wandering from the site in order to hunt, he encounters Marietta with Giletti, who thinks that the armed Fabrizio plans to abduct her. Giletti instigates a sword fight and wounds Fabrizio who, enraged at the notion of his own disfigurement, kills Giletti. Fabrizio regards his wounds in a mirror and, once he realizes Giletti is dead, retreats into Austrian territory. Taking Giletti’s passport and heeding the advice of the older actress accompanying Marietta, Fabrizio crosses the border on foot. Given obvious discrepancies in his false passport, Fabrizio risks arrest and considers his options in imaginative detail. The border officer, who knows that Fabrizio is not Giletti, allows Fabrizio to pass in order to avoid unforeseen trouble. Fabrizio is ashamed of his fear before the officers, “these clerks with brass jewelry” (231).

In a tavern, Fabrizio meets his former coachman, the poet Ludovic, who helps him escape with such devotion that Fabrizio is moved to tears by “the perfect loyalty [of] […] these peasants” (234). Ludovic suggests Fabrizio write a letter to Gina but hesitates so much in giving this advice that Fabrizio wonders if the nobility are at fault: “It’s all due to our vanity, which this man has seen quite clearly from his seat on the box” (237). Fabrizio’s letter redresses the rumors already spreading in Parma, where “the first intriguer controls the truth” (247). Ludovic, who accompanies Fabrizio in his escape, recites sonnets which prompt Fabrizio to wonder that, in the reverse dilemma of the nobility, the coachman has lively visions which however turn cold on the page.

Unsafe in “the region […] where everyone talks of passports,” Ludovic and Fabrizio retreat to Bologna, where Fabrizio prays in a church for his deliverance but forgets to list among the sins “the plan to become Archbishop solely because Count Mosca was Prime Minister” (240, 242). The narrator blames Fabrizio’s lapse on his clerical education, which “forbids personal examination” (242). In another tavern, Fabrizio recognizes a footman of Gina’s sent to supply him with a passport in the name of Joseph Bossi, a student of theology. Fabrizio gives alms to a beggar, but a crowd surrounds him until the footman beats them back.

Fabrizio’s entitlement blinds him to the opposition gathering against him in Parma. Gina considers “the death of so absurd a creature as Giletti hardly […] of a nature to be seriously held against a del Dongo” (250) and, along with the Archbishop, sees the event as a pretext for challenging Mosca’s power. Fabrizio lingers in Bologna, where he reunites with Marietta and forgets his troubles with a characteristic “tendency to be happy with whatever filled his life” (257). Yet Fabrizio fails to find himself in love. In what the narrator describes as “a wretched pique of vanity,” Fabrizio takes an interest in a traveling singer, whose jealous lover Fabrizio is still more interested in defying (261). Justifying the risk he runs to his protectors as a harmless indulgence, Fabrizio follows the pair back to Parma. It is another attempt to find love, this time through music, but Fabrizio instead finds himself bored.

In Parma, the singer’s lover knows that a rival is pursuing her, but he takes that rival to be to the Crown Prince. Intrigued by the dramatic turns of his pursuit, Fabrizio sets out to serenade the singer beneath her window when he is ambushed by the lover’s men and paraded down the city’s streets. When the procession passes Gina’s palazzo, Fabrizio escapes through the garden and from the city. He writes an apology to Gina and Mosca for the havoc wrought by the episode, explaining that “I was in love with love” (277). Witnesses to the procession had not recognized Fabrizio, and Mosca imprisons the singer as well as an innocent visitor whom he forces into a false confession. Fabrizio challenges the lover to a duel and, disguised beneath a fencing mask, wounds but does not kill him. Fabrizio returns to Bologna, feeling more than ever that “fate had doomed I’m never to know the noble and intellectual side of love” (283).