That evocation seemed to lacerate Atto's heart and soul, but not because he, who had once been enamoured of Maria, had harnessed himself to telling of her love for an unbeatable rival. His real torment, I seemed to see, was different. The elevation of the masculine material by feminine spirit about which he was now instructing me, he, Atto the eunuch, had had to accomplish in solitude, on himself.
"That boiling and formless lava had to be forged into wisdom," he continued, "into insight and purity of soul, into discernment, even into trust in one's fellow man, so that he should be as pure as a dove and as prudent as a serpent, to use the words of the Evangelist. None more than the Most Christian King was suited for such an inclination of spirit and intellect," he chanted melodiously.
This was then the royal road marked out for the fiery young King by Maria's lively vision. Maria was the first serious thing that Louis desired. She was refused him.
He clamoured for her with all the breath in his body, but did not upset the constituted order. Still unaware of his own power,
Louis had remained immersed in the romantic vapours of adolescence: a protracted lethargy in which his mother Anne and the Cardinal had taken care to keep him, for their own convenience.
"And you, then, think that the Most Christian King suffered so much from this that his soul is still scarred by it?"
"Worse than that. To suffer, one must have a heart, and he renounced his own. He was left - how can one put it - a stranger to himself. Only thus was he able to emerge from the abyss of despair into which that curtailed passion had cast him. But one cannot with impunity renounce one's own heart. Saint Augustine reminds us that the absence of the good generates evil."
Thus, it was not long before coldness and cruelty took the place of suffering in the King's young heart. In a cruel volte-face, while love could have brought forth the best qualities from his nature, love denied brought forth the worst in him.
"His reign became, and remains to this day, the reign of tyranny, of suspicion, of the arbitrary, of futility raised to the rank of virtue," he whispered in a barely audible voice, aware that the words which he had just pronounced could, if they reached hostile ears, be the cause of his downfall.
He took his handkerchief and wiped his forehead and his lips with it, wearily dabbing the drops of perspiration from his face.
"All the women he had after that were despised by him," he then said with renewed passion, "as happened to his wife Maria Teresa; or venerated, but then set aside, like his mother. Or merely lusted after, like his many mistresses."
In every one of them, Louis sought Maria. But no longer having a heart to respond to, precisely because of that old loss, in reality he never sought after the soul of any of them, even when it would have been worth doing so, as with poor Mademoiselle de la Valliere. And, almost without realising it, he allowed no woman to take the place of that old love; indeed, he ended up by becoming openly misogynistic. He forbade his wife Maria Teresa to attend the Royal Council, which according to tradition was her due, and immediately after his marriage he even removed his mother Anne of Austria from it. Even if he paid her a compliment when, shortly after her death, he said that she had been "a good King", an indication of how insulting the feminine appellation seemed to him. All in all, he treated every one of his mistresses with extreme cruelty.
"In 1664, he said to his ministers: 'I order you all, if you should ever see a woman, whoever she may be, gain influence over me and govern me, to put me on my guard: I shall be rid of her within twenty-four hours.' And he had been married for three years."
"Excuse the question," I interrupted, "but how could Louis think of marrying Maria, who was not of royal blood?"
"A legitimate, but unfounded doubt. And here I shall grant you a little revelation: were you aware that His Most Christian Majesty is no longer a widower, but has taken wife again?"
"It is true that I no longer read the gazettes, but I am sure that if there were a new Queen of France, I'd have learned it just walking down the street!" I exclaimed in astonishment.
"There is in fact no Queen. This is a secret marriage, even if it is an open secret. It took place one night seventeen years ago, not long after you and I left one another and I returned to Paris. And I can assure you the august spouse is, to put it kindly, not presentable in society. A small example: when she was little, she even asked for charity."
The King, with Madame de Maintenon (for that was the name of the chosen one) had wished to accomplish what twenty-four years before had been refused him - or rather, what he had not had the courage to do: a marriage desired only by him, against the wishes of all others.
"But this gesture of his was by then only an empty shell," groaned Atto sadly. "La Maintenon is no Mancini. Her hair does not 'smell of heather' as the young King was wont to repeat, in ecstasy before the exuberant locks of my Maria. And this belated marriage," concluded Atto with conviction, "was nothing but a silent and distant homage to the first and only love of his life, while the 'secret' spouse (everyone knows this but no one dares breathe a word of it) gained from the marriage more than anything else the rages and bilious humour of the King who made it clear to her that he could be rid of her whenever the fancy took him. So now, la Maintenon, unlike Maria, cannot take the liberty of proffering the least word of advice to the King without being bitterly upbraided for all her pains. It remained to her only to boast of that, as though she had been confined to the shadows of her own volition," added the Abbot with obvious scorn.
The Most Christian King, secretly married! And what was more, or so it seemed, to a woman of lowly origins. How had that been possible? A thousand questions were on the tip of my tongue, but Atto was already continuing his tale.
"All this, in short, to tell you that in my opinion the King of France would have been prepared to marry Maria. But you must remember above all," Atto insisted, "that Louis was at that time King in name only. In fact it was Cardinal Mazarin and the Queen Mother who reigned. Nothing, but nothing, in the absolute deference which Louis showed for His Eminence and his mother gave any hint that things might change. Louis might perfectly well have spent his whole life like his father Louis XIII, leaving the affairs of state in the hands of his minister."
Atto was sure that not even Louis thought matters might sooner or later change. At twenty-one years of age, he was still taking shelter under his mama's skirts in the Cardinal's shadow, like a callow youth. Yet the King had reached his majority five years earlier! His mother's Regency had long since ended.
Louis never opposed the matrimonial plans which Mazarin prepared for him, first with Marguerite of Savoy and then with the Infanta of Spain, having already seen how fleeting such political promises could be. What was more, in twenty years of life, he had never once rebelled against his tutors, not even so much as raising a single "if" or "but".
But above all, the Abbot declaimed, what did he care for political wrangling or for the web of matrimonial manoeuvres which Mazarin was weaving around him? Louis did not live in everyday reality: it was too vulgar and squalid for him, or so he thought.
When they became friends, Maria read Plutarch's Lives of Illustrious Men to the young King; she too, born with a warrior's heart, dreamed of one day becoming an "illustrious man". As for Louis, anxious to escape from the political wilderness to which Mazarin had exiled him, he plunged headlong into those tales and at last felt himself to be a hero.
From that moment on his thoughts took on a different colouring, one both bloodier and truer, encompassing the distant events of the Fronde, the humiliations endured by his family at the hands of the populace in revolt, those tragic days which had, without his even realising it, robbed him of childhood's carefree joys.
Maria loved poetry and recited it well, with style and sensitivity. She recommended that Louis read romances and verse: from the historians of the ancient world like Herodotus to poems chivalrous and bucolic. He filled his pockets with them, enjoyed them, and showed powers of discernment which astonis
hed the court, where no one was aware that he possessed such qualities.
He was transformed, gay, conversing with everyone; he emerged from the gilded apathy that had hitherto held him in subjugation and took a lively part in discussions about this or that book. Superimposing their own faces and names on the protagonists of their reading, Louis and Maria projected themselves into a universe of romance in which they felt themselves to be the heroes.
On a fine sunny morning, Louis commanded that a picnic should be held at a remote and rocky place called Franchard, and with him he brought a whole orchestra. Upon arriving, Louis descended from his carriage, filled his lungs with the fine air of the hills and, without thinking twice, set off to climb to the top of the hill. He seemed somewhat excited; everyone looked at him with a mixture of anxiety and disapproval. Maria followed him, while he held her arm chivalrously during the climb up those steep and rugged rocks. As soon as he reached the summit, Louis ordered the orchestra and the court to join him there; a desire which was fulfilled at the cost of no little effort and risk. As they grazed their knees on the stones, the courtiers cast disconcerted and impatient glances at one another. No King of France had ever set out to climb mountains like a goat, least of all with an orchestra and the whole court. Nor would Louis have done it, they thought, if it had not been for that woman, that Italian.
On another day, at Bois-le-Vicomte, Maria and Louis were walking along a tree-lined avenue. At a certain point, perhaps to help her, he held out his arm to her. Maria stretched out her hand, which lightly struck the pommel of the King's sword. Louis then drew the sword which had dared stand in the way of Maria's hand and cast it as far as he was able, in order to punish it. An act of puerile chivalry, which soon did the rounds at court.
Louis, with the ingenuousness of his passion, was making a fool of himself, even if no one had the courage to tell him so, and it was the common opinion that no adult sentiment could possibly underlie such childish behaviour.
"But the courtiers were wrong," I cried out.
"They were both wrong and right," Atto corrected me. "That love, as neither the King nor Maria dared yet call the enthusiasm which drew them to one another, did at times take on the infantile and pathetic tones of a juvenile infatuation; that I cannot deny. But this was only because Louis, too long and too closely guarded by his mother and the Cardinal, was at the age of twenty living for the first time, and suddenly, in chaotic and disorderly confusion, what his heart should already have experienced at the age of sixteen."
At the age of sixteen, however, Louis XIV had experienced only the most pallid initiation to venery. The Queen had opposed this, while his godfather had been a party to it: an old chambermaid, a few docile and willing servant girls, even a maid of honour, and a superficial friendship with a sister of Maria's. But nothing - Mazarin took good care - nothing that might touch the King's heart. Only his meeting with Maria had opened the gates of love, and Louis was no longer willing to go back on that.
All the anxieties, the intemperance, the blushes, the theatrical gestures: all the torments of burgeoning pubescence the young King suffered with Maria, at an age when a monarch has usually put such things behind him and his heart has already experienced the roughness and hardness of the art of reigning.
Likewise, Atto continued, the inexpert and imprudent youth consumes his ardour like a blaze devouring straw; he suffers from furious infatuations, for a real damsel or for the heroine of some fairy tale, and for both he feels prepared to slice the globe in two with a sword. Only, the volubility of his young heart soon tears him away from these things and he then drinks of Lethe's waters of oblivion. Next, it all begins anew: new dreams, new attachments, new passions, new senseless words, in the divine madness of those brief years of passage when the future has not the slightest importance.
But all things are destined to dissolve, one after the other, in the oblivion of a new present. Approaching the age of twenty, there remains only a confused reminiscence, a vague sensation of pleasure mixed with danger: the new man will keep a safe distance from those impetuous currents, and turning his mind to the future, will place on his heart the leash of good sense; with that good sense, choosing the mother of his children, and loving her with a heart filled with conjugal devotion.
"The heart knows no commands, Signor Atto," was my only comment.
"A King's heart is different."
When Louis, thanks to Maria, awoke from his overlong lethargy, he had the misfortune to meet the woman of his life too early and too late; he was too inexpert to know how to gain her for himself, too adult to forget her. His heart was in turmoil for her, his mind was subjugated by her. Reasons of state were still no more than a thought in the background, both remote and obscure.
I knew very well what Atto was thinking of when he expressed himself in those terms: not only of the youth of the Most Christian King but of his own; those years of glory as a castrato singer touring Europe, caught between music, espionage, the faithful service of great lords, with danger breathing down his neck and a secret amorous passion which set his senses ablaze.
It was then, as I penetrated his fervour with that oblique intuition, that, puffing up his chest, he sang a plaintive melody.
Se dardo pungente
d'un guardo lucente
il sen mi feri,
se in pena d'amore
si strugge 'I mio core
la notte ed il di.. .[1]
Whose that lucent look was that had wounded the breast of Abbot Melani was all too clear to me. It was almost as though he, by the power of thought, had taken on Louis's flesh, as a warrior dons a coat of armour, to taste the joys and sufferings of that amorous passion which was denied him.
Atto sang in a feeble, breathless voice. Seventeen years had gone by since I had last heard him. At that time, his voice, once so famous because well tempered and powerful, was already reduced to perhaps half of its former vigour, if not less. Yet the airs which he sang, those of his master Luigi Rossi (Le Seigneur Luigi, as he called him) had lost nothing of their enchantment.
That thread of a voice was still celestial, swift, superfine, capable of speaking to the heart a thousand times better than an entire school of sages could speak to the intellect. Gone were the body and power of his song, yet there remained, vulnerable but intact, only its intimate and ineffable beauty.
Now Atto was repeating those verses, as though their words held for him some hidden, painful meaning:
Se un volto divino
quest'alma rubo,
se amar e destino
resista chi puo!*
The Abbot was still tormented by the memory of Maria. He felt that he had looked upon her through Louis's eyes, he had brushed her with his palms, kissed her with his lips and even experienced with the King's heart the desperate distress of separation. Sensations which for Atto, year after year, had become more true, more real than if he had known them in his own flesh. He, the eunuch, being unable to attain Maria, had in the end possessed her through the King.
Thus was consumed and renewed that bizarre love among three, between two souls separated forever and a third, the jealous custodian of their past. To me was granted the unique and secret honour of being witness to this.
* If features divine / Stole this soul away, / If Fate Love entwines, / Resist then who may!
Melani suddenly broke off singing and, with a quick jump, showing that he had recovered his vigour, leapt down from the little wall which had afforded him rest and support.
"And now, let us go into the villa. There must be someone in there who will at last have us arrested," said he laughing.
I found it hard to break the enchantment which the image of Maria, evoked by the Abbot in words and in song, had wrought in my spirit.
"Was that an air by your master, Le Seigneur Luigi?"
"I see that you have not forgotten," he replied. "No, this is by Francesco Cavalli, from his Giasone. I think that was the opera most played in the past half-century."
Saying this, Atto left me and walked ahead of me; he was unwilling to say more.
Jason, or jealousy. 1 had never heard that famous opera, but I knew very well the celebrated Greek myth of the jealousy of Medea, queen of Colchis, for Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, and his love for Hypsipyle, queen of Lemnos. Another love triangle.
We moved towards the north side of the villa, opposite that overlooking the road. A distich was inscribed above the entrance gate:
Si te, ut saepe solet, species haec decipit alta;
Nec me, nec Caros decipit arcta Domus.
Once again, I had the curious, inexpressible sensation that the words painted or carved on the walls of the villa referred to, or even mirrored, some unknown reality.
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