"The dirty trick that was played on her, a little over ten years ago, was one of the most horrendous crimes of French military history," Atto stated, without mincing his words, by now engrossed in his tale. "The methodical and ferocious sacking of her land, the Palatinate, and of the castle of her birth, perpetrated in her name but without her consent. This was a masterpiece of devilish perfidy."
As he had once done with Maria Teresa and her supposed right to receive Spanish Flanders as part of her dowry, Louis claimed the Palatinate on behalf of his sister-in-law and against her will. She begged him desperately for an audience, but he would not receive her. Meanwhile, he ordered the French troops to conduct a scorched-earth campaign, but in the towns rather than the countryside, where that had previously been military practice. Thus, instead of a few scattered peasants' hutments, he had whole cities razed to the ground: Mannheim, and especially Heidelberg, where the magnificent pink sandstone castle was thrown into the waters of the Neckar.
"Years have passed since then, but the thing was so unheard-of that the French officers who took part in the campaign are still ashamed of it. It is only thanks to the spontaneous compassion of the Marechal de Tesse that, at the very last moment, when the fires were already burning, the gallery of the princess's family portraits was saved, in an effort to mitigate the desperation which he knew would overcome her when she heard of the disaster."
In vain did Louis' confessor whisper such expressions as "love for one's neighbour" in his ear, in the shadow of the confessional: the King would rise angrily, muttering "Chimaeras!" and shrugging his shoulders, before brusquely turning his back upon the father confessor without so much as a farewell.
On the contrary, the King continued in the same vein quite unperturbed. He inflicted the same torments upon the other German in his family: the Grand Dauphine, his daughter-in-law.
"She had it in her to become a queen one day, the real queen whom France had so long lacked. She had both the qualities and talents which could one day have enabled her to bear the weight of government. I still remember the King's admiring stare whenever she spoke."
Quite by surprise, however, Louis XIV told her that she was no longer to be informed of matters pertaining to government and, shortly after that, he did not disdain to enter into conflict with the Grand Dauphine's native land, Bavaria, rejecting with subtle pleasure every one of the young woman's attempts at mediation. For her, this was the end. Melancholy undermined her spirit and pervaded her whole body: from the waist downwards, it swelled up and within a few days she died amidst convulsions.
"This was a nemesis for the kingdom," moaned Abbot Melani. "With the death of the Grand Dauphine, France was left without the figure of a queen: no longer was there a queen mother or a reigning queen, nor was there a dauphine. The past, present and future of the royal family are the sphere of women and the force behind this destruction was in great part the King himself. Nor does he show any sign of regretting what he has done. Indeed, by marrying Madame de Maintenon, not only has he removed any possibility of seeing a new sovereign on the throne, but he has even gone so far as to exhort the Dauphin, now a widower too, to marry an old mistress of his, an actress," said Atto, listlessly fishing in his plate for a few scraps of artichoke.
"In other word, the Queen has been. . . abolished," I exclaimed, depositing on the tray the well-picked skeleton of the francolin and helping myself to another one.
"Only the old man who stands before you knows the origin of these excesses, in those remote, bitter days long, long ago. They go back to that dawn at the fortress of Brouage when the supreme pain of the separation from Maria suddenly engendered the need for hardness of heart: a mask which the King donned then and has never since removed. Only in these last few years, with advancing age, His Majesty has no longer been able completely to conceal that ancient, unassuaged suffering. Madame de Maintenon's confessor, to whom she complains every morning, knows all about this."
"And what do you know of it?"
"The confessor complains to me," laughed the Abbot. "What everyone can see is that the King goes to see Madame de Maintenon three times a day: before mass, after lunch and in the evening on his return from the hunt. What very few, however, know of is the mysterious bouts of weeping that regularly seize him at the end of the day, when he goes to bid his wife goodnight: he becomes sad, then his temper flares up, and ends up weeping uncontrollably. Sometimes, he even faints; and all this, without the couple exchanging so much as one word."
"Surely Madame de Maintenon must nevertheless have guessed what it is that so worries him?"
"On the contrary, that is precisely the source of her own worries: 'I am quite unable to get him to talk,' she is wont to repeat when she feels worn out by the struggle to communicate. For Madame de Maintenon, the King is a sphinx."
That is why, Abbot Melani continued, the King's enigmatic goodnight to his wife has become for her a cause of anger, even disgust. The King likes to conclude his sentimental and lachrymose outpourings with brief outbursts of quite another, far more vulgar nature which she, given her age, finds repugnant. "These are painful moments," she confides to her confessor. Only after obtaining physical satisfaction does the King go on his way, with his cheeks still lined by tears and without uttering a syllable.
"On the next day, however, he is the same tyrant as ever. Indeed, with age his tyranny has become ever harsher; so that, by now, life at Versailles, especially for the women of his family, has become a torment. Whenever His Majesty undertakes the smallest journey, even only to go to Fontainebleau, he insists on taking daughters and nephews with him in the same carriage, just as he was once wont to drag a party of mistresses in his wake. He treats them all with the same hardness of heart, deaf to their lamentations, blind to their fatigue; he makes them eat, converse and be gay on command. Pregnancies do not exempt women from having to travel in the King's retinue, and so much the worse if there is a miscarriage. None dares keep count of the pregnancies which never reached term because of those unreasonable journeys by carriage."
I was horrified.
"And what is one to say," the Abbot continued with a smile, "of the torments to which he subjects Madame de Maintenon? He has made her travel under conditions which one would not impose on a servant. I well recall one such journey to Fontainebleau when we feared she might die on the road. Supposing that Madame de Maintenon has a fever or a headache, what does he do? He invites her to the draughty theatre where the icy blasts and the glare from a thousand candles reduce her to a wreck. Or she's lying sick in bed, all muffled up against her proverbial draughts. He visits her and throws all the windows wide open, even when it is freezing outside."
"One would not think that for the past forty years he has been the greatest king in the world," I commented in some perplexity after a few moments of silence.
"The Most Christian King is still struggling against the old defeat inflicted upon him by his mother, Queen Anne; while torturing all the women of his family, it is on her that he would really like to turn the tables. But the King's is a lost battle. The dead, my boy, are quite invincible in that one can't answer them back."
Atto's long narration, which had seemed like a river in full spate, came now to a halt. He had meant to tell of the love which Louis XIV still bore Maria, and in speaking of her, to relive it. Instead, he had ended up expatiating upon the old King's misdeeds. Yet the essence of the tale remained unchanged: the wives, mistresses, rancours and revenges of the Most Christian King all tended towards her: Maria. That name encapsulated forty years of European history. For that woman, invoked so belatedly and so vainly, le plus grand Roi du monde had put Europe to fire and the sword. A heart torn to shreds had fed on the hearts of entire peoples, even the King's own kith and kin. And now she, the innocent cause of it all, would soon be among us.
Someone knocked at the door. It was Buvat. The Connestabilessa had arrived.
"She is walking in the garden," said the secretary with ill-concealed embarrassment.
"Very well," replied Atto, dismissing his secretary without asking him for further details, as though he were reporting the arrival of just any visitor.
But it was hard for him to pretend. He had the slightly stifled voice of one unwilling to admit an upheaval of the soul, and striving at all costs to show equanimity.
"How stuffy it is today," he commented, as soon as the door had closed. "Rome is always too hot in summer. And it is so humid. I remember that in the first years when I came here I suffered tremendously from that. Do you not feel hot too?"
"Yes.. . I do feel hot," I answered mechanically.
He went over to the window, looking into the distance, as if pausing for thought.
I was astounded. Maria was there outside; he could join her at any moment. It was unquestionably up to Atto to go and look for his friend. Yet he was doing nothing. After all the tales I had heard, after he had told me of all the stages in the love between Maria and the Most Christian King and indeed of his own castrato's crippled love for the selfsame woman, after waiting for her for days on end, after all those letters overflowing with passion, after thirty years' separation. . . After all this, Atto was not moving an inch. He was looking out of the window, still in his dressing gown, speaking not a word. I looked at his plate: he had left the delicious meat of the francolins untouched, eating only some greens. His stomach must be beset by very different ferments.
I stood up and went to his side. It was as I thought. There was no risk of mistaken identity, for all the guests from the week's celebrations had left. Accompanied by a lackey and a maid of honour, she moved gracefully through the garden, admiring Tranquillo Romauli's flower beds with bemused wonderment, from time to time caressing some plant, observing with pleasure the luxuriant and refined ambience of Villa Spada, even now that the festivities were over and there was much disorder all around. She seemed untroubled by the goings and comings of servants and porters, dismantling platforms or carrying sacks of rubbish. She must be rather weary after her journey but this did not show.
"Even if we're to judge only by the number of people working there now, these celebrations must have cost your Cardinal a fortune," said Atto with a hint of irony.
"Perhaps we should... I mean, perhaps you should..." I stammered.
But Abbot Melani ignored the suggestion. He wandered wearily over to the wardrobe, opened it and began carelessly to review all the rich apparel within. Then he opened a little medicine chest and looked, with a sceptical expression that I had never before seen in him, at the whole collection of balms, ceruses and little boxes of beauty spots. Turning again to the wardrobe, from the darkness of the interior he brought forth a few pairs of shoes into the light of day. Rather scornfully he turned them over with his foot, rolling these beribboned creations onto the floor in disorder. Atto examined them impotently, as though he knew they could do nothing to satisfy his desires. He then began unwillingly to pull out suits of clothes.
"With the dead, 'tis too late to cry out 'You were wrong!'" said he suddenly.
As he stared at all those rich materials, Atto's mind was still dwelling on the phantasms of the past. Maria awaited him in the gardens, but he remained glued to his memories like a limpet clinging to a rock and (the image was his own) refusing to let go-
"The Queen Mother was mistaken in her plans, but it was Mazarin who did the greatest wrong," he continued, distractedly caressing a tabby shirt hanging in the wardrobe. "If the Cardinal had not been there, Louis would certainly have overcome his mother's resistance and married Maria, and the Queen of England's necklace would have been his gift for their betrothal, not their parting."
"The greatest wrong, did you say?"
"Indeed. A wrong for which the Cardinal paid with his life."
"What are you referring to?"
"Do you recall what I told you about Capitor and her enigmatic warnings to His Eminence?" he asked, while his interest was aroused by a waistcoat with a ruffle in pleated Venetian lace.
"Yes, if my memory does not deceive me, Capitor said A Virgin who weds the Crown brings death.'"
"You have not remembered the whole message. She added that death would take place when 'the moons join the suns at the wedding'," he recited, feeling his way through breeches, cuffs, caftans, collars and tunics.
"Ah yes, I remember but, to tell the truth, you never explained that last riddle to me."
"At the time, it was not understood, so that not much attention was paid to it. Everyone was concentrating upon the 'virgin', Maria, and Louis's 'crown' which would, supposedly, bring death to the recipient of Capitor's vaticination, namely Mazarin. They all wondered how he would react to that dark presage."
"That was why Mazarin separated Maria and the King," I remembered.
"Exactly. Louis married Maria Teresa, the Infanta of Spain, on the ninth of June. But, like lightning falling from a blue sky, nine months later, on the ninth of March, Mazarin died. Capitor's prophecy had come true."
"I do not understand."
"My boy, with age, you seem to have grown slower on the uptake," said the Abbot, mocking me. The contact with his precious treasures of apparel seemed to be restoring his good humour: "Nine, nine and nine."
I stared at him, perplexed.
"Come, do you still not understand?" said Melani, growing impatient. "The number of 'moons', or months, was equal to that of'suns' or days, from the wedding. The number of suns of the nuptials was nine, for the marriage between His Majesty and Maria Teresa was celebrated on the ninth of June. Nine moons (or nine months) later, the Cardinal died, on the ninth of March, the very day of the ninth moon."
While my face showed plainly how disconcerted I was by all this, the Abbot tried to match a pearl-coloured sash with a pair of violet-red stockings.
"In that case, Capitor's prophecy did not come true," I then objected. "She said that Mazarin would die if 'the virgin' married 'the crown', but that did not happen."
"On the contrary, it did," retorted Atto. "The virgin was not Maria but the King himself, and do you know why?"
"The virgin. .. the King?"
"Tell me, on what day was His Majesty born?"
"In September, if my memory does not fail me; you told me that on his birthday he had Fouquet arrested. . . Yes, that would have been the 5th September."
"And in which sign of the zodiac is the 5th September?"
"In Virgo?"
"Bravo, you're getting there. The King is a native of Virgo, the sign of the virgin. On the other hand, 'the crown' is that of Spain which Maria Teresa brought with her in her dowry and which now enables France to advance claims to the Spanish throne."
"How did you deduce that?"
"I was not alone in doing so," Melani retorted, trying on a blackish Brandenburg cassock, then a mother-of-pearl-coloured Bohemian cape and a short gris castor cloak, which, worn too long in front of the mirror, were making him almost die of heat. "What was worse, the Cardinal himself realised that, by separating Maria and Louis and compelling the latter to marry the Infanta, he had signed his own death warrant. But that came too late; he was already on his deathbed. With the little strength that remained to him, he cried out and struggled, suffocated by the revelation and trying to tear off his sweat-soaked clothes, as though he could thus undo the fatal nuptials for which he had striven so hard. With my own eyes, I saw him despair. I remember that at one point his eyes, which by then had grown opaque, stared intensely at me and I read in his terrified look how he and 1 had struggled side by side during the negotiations at the Isle of Pheasants to obtain Maria Teresa's hand despite the claims of the Emperor Leopold. He did not survive that last lightning bolt of memory: his poor body was shaken as by a thunderbolt and Cardinal Jules Mazarin, Italian by birth, Sicilian by blood and French by adoption, gave up the ghost."
"From your manner of speaking, it seems you placed the greatest possible trust in Capitor's words," I remarked with a hint of sarcasm, while in my mind the horror of that lugubrious tale was mixed with
no little irony for the Abbot, who was as sceptical about the apparitions at the Vessel as he was convinced of that Spanish madwoman's prophetic powers.
"One moment, one moment," Atto hastened to correct me, tottering on a pair of high-heeled shoes which his swollen feet would not fit into, "I never said that I believed in Capitor's magic."
"But if now..."
"No," he interrupted me haughtily, "listen to me carefully. Do you know why Mazarin died on the ninth of March? Because he had realised that on that day there fell the ninth moon after the ninth of June, the day of the Most Christian King's wedding."
"I don't understand."
"He was already very ill, that's true; but this revelation, together with the fated date, brought about a renal colic which cut his life short in the small hours. In other word, Capitor's prophecy was indeed the cause of the Cardinal's death, which was, however, brought about by his superstition, not her powers," declaimed Abbot Melani, with a huge blond periwig sitting askew on his head and another chestnut brown one in his hand, undecided as to which to choose. "For better or for worse, we are, my boy, affected only by what we believe."
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