The Charterhouse of Parma

Rassi attempts to investigate the Prince’s poisoning, but Gina, who manipulates the court against Rassi and endears herself to the young Prince, little fears her arrest. She stages theater performances in which she facilitates the young Prince’s participation as a boon to his confidence and advises him on the case of “his father’s alleged murderers.” Ferrante, whose involvement in the murder Rassi had already determined, writes to Gina of his planned departure for America as a lover of republican, anti-monarchic revolution—which he characterizes as “the one rival you have in my heart” (500). It is not from anti-tyrannical sentiments that Gina advises the Prince to avoid executions but rather to avoid the gallows herself. He considers this advice, in the company of his mother the dowager Princess, who together constitute with Gina “three actors in this tedious scene” of a monarch’s long struggle to relinquish retributive power (504). Gina eventually convinces him to destroy Rassi’s investigations by reading a fable of La Fontaine’s “The Gardener and his Lord,” in which a gardener’s plot is ruined by his lord’s attempt to save it. She also invokes Rassi’s low birth, which assures the Prince of her respect for nobility above intelligence. As the Prince decides, Gina thinks to herself, “[H]e really has a stupid face” (509).