Secretum

by Rita Monaldi;Francesco Sorti

  This, in all probability, was the true motive behind Melani's presence at the Villa Spada during that time: he and the Connestabilessa were taking advantage of the invitation extended to both to attend the Spada wedding to meet once more. All of this was, I thought, far removed from the conclave or the Spanish succession.

  Maria, however, was late arriving. She had already missed the day of the ceremony. Whatever could be keeping her? Perhaps she really was suffering from a persistent fever, as she declared in her letters; or perhaps, I came to imagine, she was held back by a natural reluctance to engage in amorous skirmish, leading her to play hard to get, almost as though Atto himself were her former love, rather than his ambassador.

  I heard Abbot Melani's footsteps. He had woken up and was coming up to see what I had done.I looked again at The Faithful Shepherd. The book was really tiny, I thought. It would be child's play to slip it into my pocket and take it with me without the Abbot seeing. I would return it later. Now, it was useful to me. I would read Maria's letters in the light of those verses.

  "At long last! May one know what you are up to?" he exclaimed, seeing me at the top of the stairs.

  "As you had gone to sleep, I thought I'd let you rest awhile."

  "And that was wrong of you, for without your help I have been able to get practically nothing done," retorted Atto, trying to hide his embarrassment.

  It was an elegant way of confessing that, as soon as I had left him alone, he had dozed off.

  "Now it will be enough to feel our way," the Abbot continued. "I mean to explore the Vessel systematically, from top to bottom. The dish must be somewhere here. We have already searched the second floor more than enough. We shall therefore begin with the ground floor, then we shall go up to the first floor and, lastly, to the third floor, where the servants' quarters are."

  As he descended the spiral staircase in front of me, I scrutinised from behind his bent and age-worn figure, still, however, made vibrant by the call to action. Looking at him, I was moved by the thought of the nature of his mission. For once, Melani had surprised me, revealing sentiments and ideas nobler than those I had ascribed to him, rather than the base ones which had, alas, all too often driven him in the past.

  It was thus, with my soul overflowing with emotion, that I entered the other parts of the villa, to help Atto in his search for Capitor's three gifts, and above all, the dish.

  We inspected the great hall on the ground floor: the shelves, the dressers, the drawers. Every single object (cutlery, glasses, ornaments) was where we had found it on our first visit. It was in that room that were exhibited, as we knew, a number of portraits of lovely and noble ladies of France (including the portrait of Maria which I had admired on our first tour of the premises).As I was rising after pointlessly stirring up the dust under a divan, I found myself face to face with one such portrait to which I had not previously accorded any attention.

  "Madame de Montespan," announced Melani as he too approached that face of extraordinary, disturbing beauty. "Onetime favourite of the King of France. A relationship which lasted ten years and produced seven children; almost a second Queen."

  I had just enough time to admire the abundant flesh of her bosom, the blue eyes fired with the will to elicit desire, the lips ready for kisses, the well-rounded arms. Atto had already passed to the next portrait.

  "Louise de la Valliere," he announced. "His Majesty's first official adultery, as I have already told you," he added, pointing to that face of singular purity, crowned by thick silvery blonde tresses, a veritable synthesis of finesse, elegance and ethereal refinement, so much so that she seemed to have been formed by the Lord to manifest to humanity the blessed triad of grace, modesty and tenderness and almost magically, through her sea- coloured eyes, to win hearts and fidelity.

  "How different they are!" I exclaimed. "This one is so pure, and the other so... how can I put it?"

  "Turbid and sinful? Come straight out with it: that la Montespan was no angel one can see at a glance," laughed the Abbot, "but almost importantly, they are both far removed from the frank and impetuous temperament which radiated from Maria's person. These are two Frenchwomen, even if the one's the opposite of the other. Maria is Italian," concluded Atto, emphasising the last words, while his eyes lit up with renewed ardour at the thought of her.Now at last I realised from what a privileged and intimate observer I had hitherto had the good fortune to hear the tale of the drama which had so perturbed the soul of the Most Christian King. Thus, I trembled with the desire to hear the remainder of that old, unhappy story, now that I knew it to be still going on. Above all, I was by now convinced that Atto was on the point of meeting Maria to bear her some important embassy of love from the Most Christian King, and I was determined to discover what this might be.

  "The King of France had many loves after the departure of Maria Mancini, if I remember correctly," I remarked, while the Abbot guided me into the salon with the portraits of kings and princes.

  "He had many favourites," Atto corrected me, "and never fewer than two at a time."

  "Two? Is that the custom among French sovereigns?"

  "No, of course not," smiled the Abbot, opening a huge dresser full of Venetian crystal and Savona porcelain and rummaging inside it; "far from it." Never had such a thing been seen in France: a Queen and two titular mistresses, all three condemned to live shoulder to shoulder. Without counting the fact that Madame de Montespan was already married. Henri IV Louis's grandfather, had a mistress, but he never thought of imposing her on the Queen."

  "I imagine that you see this as yet another unfortunate consequence of his abandoning Maria," said I, holding out the bait in my impatient desire to satisfy my curiosity about the present relations between the Most Christian King and the Connestabilessa.

  "The deluge of pain that rained down on the heart of the young King, he transformed into a universal deluge, capable of submerging entire peoples for generations and generations," intoned the Abbot. "So Louis could not have Maria for his Queen? Then, let the other Queens pay! He could not have Maria as a woman by his side? So he surrounded himself by women without number, and all at the same time."

  The King, explained Atto, always had at least two mistresses at the same time, who were in turn betrayed and abandoned for others, and this was a continuous process; nor could they ever be sure of the King's feelings or of what he intended for them. "The Three Queens" was what they called that constant triad."He who has suffered an injury needs to inflict it in turn upon others, ad infinitum," Melani summed up. "As he could not belong to Maria, Louis chose to share his time among many, and so to belong to none. With cold calculation, and at the same time, icy wrath, he divided his life among his many women: his wife, the long-term mistresses, the thousand lovers of a month or of a night, causing them all immense pain. Help me to lift this carpet, please."

  He kept them all on tenterhooks, continuously, and not even the court could ever be sure whether the ladies with whom Louis loved to show himself off were really the favourites of the moment or if their star was already setting and their only use had become to serve as foils to divert attention from some new, secret preference. All submitted to the Sovereign's scourge; and none dared raise her head.

  "The drastic change in the King's character was evident at court from the day after his marriage," said the Abbot. "Louis bundled all Maria Teresa's Spanish retinue off to Madrid."

  The Queen, Atto continued, by now in full spate of recollection, opposed not the least resistance, but in exchange requested a boon from her spouse: to be able always to remain with him. Always. Louis granted her that. He ordered the Grand Marechal des Loges never to separate them. He kept his promise until her death: at the Louvre, at Fontainebleau, at Saint-Germain and even Versailles, he always slept beside her, abandoning his mistress's bed in the middle of the night and returning to the bedchamber of his legitimate consort where he remained until daylight. All this, without exception, without a word of explanation and without any exciteme
nt; even when Maria Teresa's bedchamber was crossed by wet-nurses bearing a bundle in their arms, the latest bastard of the King's mistresses, delivered in one of the adjoining rooms. Even the concession which had seemed to the poor Queen to be a boon, Louis transformed into a perverse and cruel reprisal.

  "But how is that possible? The King's mistresses occupying rooms adjoining the Queen's bedchamber?""Here comes the best bit," replied Abbot Melani with sad irony. "His Majesty's favourite hunting grounds were among the Queen's maids of honour. And correspondingly, when Louis grew weary of some concubine, he would often cover his withdrawal by granting her a position in his consort's retinue. So much so that Maria Teresa always sighed 'I am fated to be served by my husband's mistresses.'"

  The Abbot glanced curiously into a huge light-grey soup tureen, decorated with pomegranates of shining green and crimson porcelain.

  "For two decades, the King sired a child a year, and I speak only of those who were recognised; but of these only six were children of the Queen. Seven came from la Montespan, the rest from other mistresses," Atto explained, arching his eyebrows. "Colbert, his Minister, for as long as he lived, was the King's dumb slave. He served as his intermediary, procuring wet-nurses, babes' clothing and compliant chirurgeons to assist at his mistresses' deliveries. He even found among his old servants adoptive families in which to raise the secret bastards, or in other words the children of the concubines of the moment," added the Abbot, prodding the stuffing of an armchair.

  The King did not stop at imposing upon the Queen this painful cohabitation with mistresses and their brats. When he travelled, he put them all in the same carriage and even compelled them to eat elbow to elbow. Then came the worst: Louis made his new bastards legitimate and even declared them Bourbon princes. For them, he arranged royal weddings, going so far as to inaugurate the unheard of mixing of bastards with the legitimate Bourbons. He even wedded one of his bastard daughters to a "nephew of France", forcing the son of his brother Philippe to marry the last daughter he had fathered on Madame de Montespan. The court grumbled; the young man's parents were desperate, there were scenes, tears and very public scandals. The King exulted.

  "Where will it all end, at this rate?" hissed Atto vehemently.

  "If I have understood you, there is reason to fear for the future of the throne."

  He stopped to catch his breath after detaching from the wall a large picture, the frame of which had seemed to him (erroneously) too massive not to hide a hidden chamber in its backing."I am afraid that one day the King may place his bastards in the line of succession to the throne. And that will be the end. It will mean that no longer will the Queen's son become King but anyone, just anyone, can do so. At that point, any plebeian will ask: Why not me?"

  "Let us be seated a moment," suggested Atto, slumping onto a day-bed. "Let us rest awhile, then we shall resume our search."

  I sat down too, in a great armchair, and at once gave a great yawn.

  "Of course, the Most Christian King," I observed, picking up where Atto had left off, "consoled himself soon enough with all those mistresses after Maria's departure."

  It was a provocation, in the hope that he might betray something of the current contacts between the Sovereign and the Connestabilessa. Atto took the bait.

  "But what are you saying? Do you not listen when I am speaking? His first mistress, Louise de la Valliere, he used only to take his revenge on the Queen Mother, who had separated him from Maria by making him believe that he would soon forget her. But this affair with Louise was a triumph that came too late, a pointless reprisal against his old mother, the fruit of posthumous courage, a vindictive libation offered upon the sepulchre of his own heart," he declaimed with heartfelt pomposity.

  What vain satisfaction, continued the Abbot, could the King gain from forcing the Queen his consort and the Queen Mother to dine at the same table as his mistress? Or by such behaviour as bringing her surreptitiously into his mother's apartments, or making her sit with him at the gaming table, together with his brother and sister-in-law, then making that known to the old Queen, like an insolent child? Yet Louis XIV was concerned to defend his own reputation, when he forced Louise to give birth with a mask over her face, assisted by chirurgeons who had been brought to her blindfold.Poor Louise was a docile instrument, unambitious and naturally modest, in the hands of a King with only pride where his heart should have been. Louis meant to impose her on his mother for as long as she lived, in a confrontation in which the real object of his vengeance - as with the hatred with which he persecuted Fouquet - was the looming shade of Mazarin.

  When there was no longer anything to fight about, he dismissed her, already bored, despite the three children she had borne him.

  "Louise was not made for the sophisticated social round, games and gossip, intrigues and all the coquetry and capriciousness of life at court," sighed Atto, yawning and stretching on his day-bed. "She was far from stupid, she loved reading, but she had no repertoire of jokes, no witty repartee, she coined no epigrams. In other words, she was not Maria," he concluded with an insolent little smile.

  We rose and continued our hunt for Capitor's dish. We began by searching the room where there was a billiard table. On the walls it was adorned with various framed prints: some represented antique bas-reliefs, others were after the manner of Annibale Carracci, and included various portraits of famous men. We took them off the wall to see whether there might be a secret compartment behind them, but were disappointed. The felt of the billiard table, all covered in dust, had turned from bright green to the colour of dew. One solitary white ball lay in the middle of the table, abandoned and imprisoned, almost a metaphor for the heart of Louise de la Valliere, a hostage in the wilderness of Louis's indifference. Atto gave it a sharp tap, causing it to bounce on the opposite cushion, then continued his account.

  Thus, the King very soon went to see Mademoiselle de la Valliere only to delight in the coquetry and provocations of another lady, Madame de Montespan, known as Athenais. One day, having to depart for the wars in Flanders, he left Louise alone at Versailles, four months with child, and took Madame de Montespan with him, in the Queen's retinue.

  "Ladies of the court at war? And even the Queen?"

  "But with all that you have read on your own account, did you not even know that?" he asked, as we left the billiard room and turned to the great dining hall.

  Thence, we entered a room that led to the back of the garden, facing east. We went out. Here began a drive which led, as we were soon to discover, to a gracious little grotto."I tell you once more, I have been reading books, not false, lying newspapers," I replied, irked and trying to cover a certain embarrassment.

  "Very well, like the Turks, the King enjoyed dragging with him to the wars all the conveniences he enjoyed at court: the finest furniture of the crown, the porcelain, the golden cutlery and all that was needed to organise ballets and firework displays in every town he came to; and, of course, women.

  What a strange experience for villagers and country folk, I thought, to witness at close quarters that mad mixture of war and the festivities of the royal court, with plumed cavaliers escorting gilded carriages, unreal jewel cases concealing the most beautiful women in the realm!

  "If only from the mud that spattered the decor, and from the King's face, thin and sunburnt," continued Atto, "and lastly from the tiredness of his women, exhausted by the voyage and the inhuman hours they were forced to keep, it was plain enough that this was no promenade in the park of Versailles. I remember one journey in particular. Passing Auxerre, where the women are rather good-looking, the inhabitants had all come out to see the royal family and the ladies in the carriage with the Queen. The ladies themselves put their heads out of the carriage windows to look. It was then that the good people of Auxerre burst out laughing: 'Ah, quelles sont laides' - 'How ugly they are!' The King laughed long and loud and spoke of nothing else that day," laughed the Abbot.

  The Most Christian King brought the whole court with
him during the War of Devolution, which Louis started after the death of Philip IV his father-in-law, to claim a part of Spanish Flanders as Maria Teresa's inheritance.

  "He brought just about everyone, except Louise, you said. And what about the Queen?"

  "Maria Teresa was the first to be compelled to go, seeing that, at least nominally, the war was being fought on her behalf. And whenever a city fell into French hands, she had to go and take possession of it officially."But Louise, a simple, passionate heart, decided to risk her pregnancy and brave the King's wrath by joining the court in Flanders. She arrived exhausted. The King, in no way impressed - on the contrary, much amused - listened to the description of the scene when the poor pregnant maiden slumped half dead, together with the ladies accompanying her, on the benches of Maria Teresa's antechamber, while the latter vomited out of fury and vexation.

  Meanwhile, we had reached the little grotto. Surely, Capitor's dish could not be there, but we both felt the need to breathe clean air after all the dust with which we had filled our lungs.

  In the purity of the breezes which my breast inhaled in the garden, I seemed to find the description of la Valliere: Louise the ingenue, the enthusiast; a timid zephyr soon swept aside.