Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  In his decrepitude Atto Melani was experiencing the bitter defeat of his king’s arrogant and overbearing ideals, and with it the failure of an entire life, his own, spent in the arduous (and all too often humiliating) service of France.

  The French who had visited the imperial treasure chamber here in Hofburg, Melani went on, had gone guffawing back to France, to tell the Most Christian King how little – in comparison with the treasures of Versailles – the jewels of the Habsburgs were worth.

  “They laugh and say that the gallery and the five cabinets are full of cheap trinkets or little more. Among the paintings there are just a few Correggios that are of any value; the jewel cabinet is ridiculous, apart from one piece, it seems, a large bowl hollowed out of a single emerald, so valuable that only the Emperor is allowed to touch it; not to mention the great clock cabinet, which only has one item in any way special: a mechanical crab, whose movements seem so natural that you can hardly tell it from a real one; the agate cabinet is adequate, with a few fine larger pieces, and some vases of lapis lazuli, while the coin cabinet is incredibly feeble: no coins of value and everything set out haphazardly. And the last cabinet, so they tell me, only contains absurdities like little waxen images and ivory toys, suitable for a child of five!” exclaimed the Abbot with his eyebrows raised in wondering arches.

  However, the French, Atto commented, changing tone, would have done well to withhold their contempt, since the frugality of these great Caesars had been entirely to the benefit of their subjects, while in France people were dying of hunger.

  “In Vienna there had never been any room for favourites and adventurers like Concini, black souls like Richelieu, profiteers like Mazarin, traitors like Condé, crafty concubines like Madame de Maintenon: in the Caesarean court only the ministers chosen by the Emperor hold posts of command. The great noblemen here have served the imperial house for centuries, they are not treacherous serpents. It is not only the treasure chamber but the whole palace that is modest, and there are half as many servants as in Versailles. Displays of splendour and great palaces are left to the noblemen; the Emperor only needs decorum, tradition and religion. He leaves the government of the regions in the hands of the great families; in exchange they accept his primacy. Here there are no plots, poisonings, luxuries, obscure magic rituals, and all the indecencies that dishonour Versailles, which, if I were to tell you about . . .”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “you spoke to me about them years ago, as you also told me about the calumnies against Superintendent Fouquet, and the black masses of Montespan, the King’s lover . . .”

  “Ah, that woman . . . But have I really told you all these things already?”

  Melani’s memory was beginning to fade. No wonder, now he was well over eighty-five.

  “Yes, Signor Atto, both in the Inn of the Donzello and at Villa Spada.”

  “What a memory. Most fortunate. Whereas I am good for nothing now.”

  “Uncle, don’t talk like that,” intervened his nephew Domenico for the first time. “Pay no attention,” he said to me. “He likes to complain. Thank God, he is much better than he seems.”

  “If only the Most Christian King would grant me the freedom to leave Paris! I would go straight back to my home in Tuscany,” moaned Atto disconsolately. “I’d be fine, down there, in Pistoia, among my relatives, on my estate at Castel Nuovo. I bought it years ago, and I’ve never seen it yet. I’ve even furnished it with a portrait gallery: the King, the Connestabilessa, the two cardinals, the Dauphin and the Dauphine with the King on horseback between them . . . I sent the four small ovals with Galathea that were in the Villa of the Vessel and which Abbot Benedetti bequeathed to me, and I’ve had them hung at an angle above the four small windows in the gallery. But I have to make do with imagining the effect from my nephews’ letters! And if I stay in Paris I’ll be reduced to poverty, with no real money but those notes from the mint that are mere waste paper! The city is full of them, 150 million livres, they say, because in the rest of the kingdom nobody wants them. They’re the work of the devil and the ruin of France; if you change them for Italian money they give you less than half, so that even the slightest outlay for my smallholding costs me a fortune, and I’ve not even been able to afford iron hoops for my wine barrels . . .” Here Atto sobbed. “I’ve reached the point of banking on the King’s lottery which they play on St John’s Day, and begging God to grant me a win that I can spend entirely on Castel Nuovo. But the King will not let me go; he says he’s grown up with me, that he cannot do without Abbot Melani, and if I insist he gets angry and sends me away, and each time I make all those awful journeys to Versailles to implore him to let me return to Italy, and they’re terrible on my poor old bones . . .”

  “Move from Paris to Tuscany? At your age?” I said in amazement.

  “What did I tell you?” said his nephew, with a wink. “He took all the hardships of the journey here from France like a twenty-year-old.”

  “Do not exaggerate, please, Domenico,” said the Abbot irritably.

  The nephew may have been exaggerating; but the fact remained that the old castrato was sitting calmly in front of me after having travelled across the windy plains, through the snowy mountain passes, over the frozen rivers that separate cold Paris from freezing Vienna. All this without the precious gift of sight and, what was more, after crossing the border under the false name of a modest functionary of the imperial post. To carry off this trick he must have hidden his blindness and given up the privilege of travelling in a litter in addition to a whole series of comforts and luxuries that would have aroused suspicion. The art of lying, I told myself, repressing a smile, would be the last gift to abandon Abbot Melani’s weary spirit . . .

  Even so I was astonished to hear of his financial problems: Abbot Melani must have made great sacrifices to pay for my post as master chimney-sweep complete with house and vineyard!

  “Signor Atto, it must have cost you a fortune to send me here, I really had no idea . . .”

  “Forget it, forget it,” Melani waved away my concerns. “Let’s get back to us. As I mentioned, I’m here on a peace mission. But now let’s pay and leave.”

  He gave a slight circumspect shake of his head as if to indicate that it would be more prudent not to talk here.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” he announced, “and you will listen to what I have to say to you. Only when walking can we be sure there are no unauthorised eavesdroppers.”

  Domenico summoned the waitress with a nod and she helped Atto get to his feet and put his coat back on. After this she kindly put a good piece of chocolate decorated with marzipan into his hand, and the old Abbot munched it without waiting to be asked twice.

  “My compliments, excellent service,” Melani praised her, happily leaning on the young woman’s soft, delicate arm and backing up his words with a generous tip.

  We set off towards St Stephen’s and then towards the Street of the Red Tower.

  On 11th September 1709, Atto started up again, the tremendous Battle of Malplaquet was fought. The French left eight thousand dead on the field. The allied forces, led by Marlborough and Eugene of Savoy, lost twenty-one thousand, but even so the victory was theirs. Immediately afterwards they besieged and conquered the fortress of Mons, and managed to hold those of Tournai and Lille.

  The following year, 1710, began for France with another series of military defeats. The enemy was penetrating into the heart of the kingdom; there was even a second front opening up in the south, where, with the help of the Duke of Savoy, Prince Eugene’s cousin and Lord of Piedmont, the enemy forces of Marshal Mercy were threatening to enter. June saw the fall of Douai, Béthune, Aire and Saint-Venant. The allies began to plan a raid as far as Paris. On every front France was defeated. In Spain the French were badly defeated at Saragozza in August. In Germany, France’s unfortunate ally, Bavaria, was dismembered by the Emperor and given in fief among his relatives. The electorate of Cologne, another ally of Louis, had already been annihilated. In Hungary
the rebel magnates, whom France supported with the aim of wearing down the Empire in the East, were defeated by Joseph I; their leader Rakoczy was broken forever, his party ruined.

  The two crowns, as Atto called France and Spain, were in pieces. The Kingdom of France had no money, no army, no food, and was on the verge of total collapse, exposed to the unprecedented incursions of its enemies. The Kingdom of Spain, which Louis XIV had endeavoured against the rest of Europe to keep in the hands of his grandson Philip of Anjou (this was the reason for the war), had also been crushed. Trade had been wiped out, the countryside devastated, the population exhausted or killed, the country split in two by a fratricidal war between the supporters of France and those of its enemies.

  “At this point Louis XIV is no longer asking for peace: he is imploring it,” stated Atto, as we turned into Wool Street.

  The Most Christian King of France had begun new secret negotiations with the enemy powers in the Dutch city of Gertruidenberg, but his envoys were still treated with contempt. The conditions demanded by the allies were deliberately absurd: the Most Christian King should forcibly drive his own grandson Philip from the throne of Spain within two months. And so the war continued. A new hope of peace had come from England: power struggles among ministers and the crown were weakening the party of the Duke of Marlborough and strengthening those who were tired of squandering money on the war and were seeking peace.

  “In January, just three months ago,” whispered Atto Melani with extreme circumspection, “an unknown priest, a certain Gautier, a secret envoy of the English, presented himself to the Marquis of Torcy offering to negotiate a separate peace. Since then secret negotiations have been opened with the Earl of Oxford and the Secretary of State, St John.”

  “But didn’t you say that the English were negotiating with France along with with the Empire and Holland in that city . . . in Gertruidenberg?”

  “Shhh! Do you want everyone to hear?” Atto hushed me. Then he answered almost inaudibly: “The peace talks of Gertruidenberg have failed. Now the English are negotiating unbeknown to the Empire and Holland. Anything is allowable in war, even this. But it won’t be much use.”

  “Why?”

  He stopped and turned towards me, as if he could see me.

  “Because here in Vienna is the man who is impeding peace. His name is Eugene of Savoy. For his own personal interests he wants to continue the war at all costs, and the Emperor listens to him. But I will convince His Caesarean Majesty to change his mind.”

  “The Most Serene Prince Eugene is impeding the path to peace?” I exclaimed in surprise.

  “What would Eugene of Savoy do if the war were over? He would go back to being what he was before: a half-blood Italian born and raised on French territory, where he was so cruelly mocked and derided that he had to run away, dressed as a woman, no less. He was only accepted here in the Empire because the Austrians, in war, are utter dunces.”

  I was stupefied. I had heard nothing but panegyrics for Eugene. In Austria he was a genuine national hero, second only to our beloved Emperor Joseph the Victorious. We resumed our walk.

  “His lucky day is 11th September: the day his mother was welcomed at the court of Paris, where she would meet her husband. The same day as the Battle of Zenta, in which Eugene won his first great triumph against the Turks. And the same day as the Battle of Malplaquet, in which our hero destroyed the French armies of Marshal Villars.”

  I could not understand why Atto insisted on talking to me about Eugene of Savoy. It was true that, although he was a hero venerated throughout the Empire, I knew very little about him. I was aware, but only because I had heard it from Atto himself, that his mother was a cruel and wicked woman: Olimpia Mancini, niece of Cardinal Mazarin, who had procured for her a rich marriage with a cadet of the Piedmontese Dukes of Savoy. I well remembered what Atto had told me all those years ago about the perfidious Olimpia: Mazarin’s scheming niece had even plotted against her sweet sister Mary, the first love of the Most Christian King, whom I had had the honour of meeting through Atto in Rome eleven years earlier.

  I also knew that Eugene had been despised by Louis XIV and for this reason had fled Paris when young. But apart from that I knew very little about the man who was considered in the Empire the greatest general of all time, the inscrutable military genius whose life’s mission was war, who was ready to sacrifice all to it.

  “Eugene is as indispensable to this cowardly people as a dog to a flock of sheep. Find someone over here, with the exception of Emperor Joseph I, who deserves to be called a soldier! Who drove the Turks from Vienna in 1683?” continued Atto, warming to his subject. “I’ll tell you: the great Polish king John Sobieski, the Bavarian Maximilian Emanuel, the French Charles of Lorrain, the Palatine Louis of Baden, the Italian Pope. He was there too, Eugene of Savoy, even though he was only twenty. Everyone, in short, except the master of the house: the late Emperor Leopold . . .”

  We were now slowly crossing Carinthia Street, on our way back to the Blue Bottle.

  “I know, I know, Signor Atto, you told me when we first met. The Emperor had left Vienna.”

  “Left? Say rather that he had cut and run in a blue funk . . . but let’s get back to ourselves,” Atto said. “As I was saying, this wretched war would have been over long ago if Eugene of Savoy were not hindering peace.”

  It would not even have broken out, I wanted to answer back, if someone had not forged the will of the previous king of Spain . . . But that was an old story, and the past cannot be changed.

  “Do you really accuse the Most Serene Prince of such base intentions?” I asked. “Do you seriously believe he would put the whole of Europe to fire and the sword and constantly risk his own life just for the sake of personal glory?”

  “Dog Nose was born . . . sorry, I mean, Eugene was born in 1663, boy. He’s the same age as you: forty-eight. I saw him grow up and believe me, he has no life outside of war. He is war. And I can’t blame him.”

  “Why did you call him Dog Nose?”

  “Oh, it’s just a comic name that his old playmates gave him. Not very well brought-up lads. You see, Eugene’s upbringing was, let’s say, lacking in some respects,” said Atto in a curiously embarrassed tone. “As a boy he fell in with disreputable company, and the military life was the best remedy. At the age of fifteen they had even given him a priest’s tonsure, but he was already thinking of becoming a soldier. When His Most Christian Majesty refused to give him charge of a regiment, he fled from France disguised as a woman of the people, to come and realise his dream of war here, in the Empire.”

  Atto Melani was now talking like a river in spate, but I still could not understand why he persisted in expatiating on Prince Eugene, and my attention was flagging. Instead I was pondering on the latest events: when had he come to Vienna? Two days ago, the 8th, to be precise. And when had the Turkish Agha arrived? The 7th. What a coincidence: just a day apart. Atto Melani, agent in the service of the Most Christian King; the Turks, traditional allies of France. What were the odds? Both coming to Vienna on account of Prince Eugene.

  I had known Melani for thirty years. I knew all too well that if something momentous was stirring and Atto was in the neighbourhood, he was bound to have a hand in it. Could the Agha’s mysterious embassy have been brought about by some obscure manoeuvre of the Abbot’s? I was almost half a century old, as Atto well remembered, and he was eighty-five. It was not so easy to hoodwink me now; I would keep my ears open.

  In any case, that was why Atto had “suddenly” remembered his debt to me and had sent me to Vienna . . .

  Once again he needed me – poor helpless being that I was, but still affectionate and idealistic – to weave his plots! Benefactor indeed!

  I was swaying to and fro, like a felucca adrift, tossed on the currents of contrary feelings. What a generous man Abbot Melani was: instead of vanishing from my life, he had made me prosperous. What a profiteer Abbot Melani was: instead of sending me to Vienna he could perfectly well have
given me a piece of land in Tuscany as he had promised! By now my two girls would both be married, instead of waiting on the outcome of my new life in the capital of the Empire. On the other hand, if he had not needed me in Vienna, would he not have left me to rot in Rome in my tufo cellar?

  Under the weight of these thoughts my expression had grown baleful and my footsteps heavy and circumspect, when Abbot Melani’s words at last caught my attention again:

  “What nobody remembers is that the Savoys by tradition are great traitors.”

  “Traitors?” I said with a start.

  “They reign over a duchy straddling the Alps, which is not large but extremely important from a strategic point of view. It’s the gateway into Italy for the two crowns, the French and the Spanish. And they have shamelessly exploited this, continually switching alliances. How many times in Paris have I been left with no letters from Italy because the Duke of Savoy had suddenly taken it into his head to arrest all the couriers passing through his states! There has never been any way to check these recurring acts of high-handedness, which amount to little more than blackmail, nor to neutralise the family’s outrageous acts of treachery.”

  We had returned to the Blue Bottle. Atto was cold, and wanted to conclude our conversation somewhere warm. We entered and took our seats.

  Eugene’s great-grandfather, he continued, Duke Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy, in his reign of almost fifty years had managed to switch sides three times. First he had married the daughter of Philip II of Spain; then he had passed over to the French side, hoping they would help him expand his dominions in Italy; then he had gone back to the Spanish side. His son Victor Amadeus I had married a French princess, Christine. When he died, the widow, to keep her power, had to fight not against some foreign power but against her husband’s brothers, who treacherously wanted to depose her.