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  After exploring in vain the drive in which the gentleman and the maiden had appeared, I made my way into a side-path, then another and yet another, each time emerging in the end in the great central courtyard. To no avail: the two seemed to have vanished into nothingness. Perhaps they had entered the villa, I thought; indeed, they must have done so.

  When I rejoined Abbot Melani, he seemed to have recovered some colour.

  "Do you feel better?" I asked.

  "Yes, yes, of course. It is nothing, simply… a passing impres sion."

  Nevertheless he seemed still to be in a state of shock. It was almost as though someone had just apprised him of grave and un expected tidings. While remaining comfortably seated, he leaned on his stick.

  "If you feel better, perhaps we can go," I ventured to suggest.

  "No, no, we are fine here, really. And besides, we are in no hurry. How thirsty I am. I really am so very thirsty."

  We approached one of the two fountains, where he quenched his thirst, while I helped him not to lose his balance. We then returned to the drives, casting an eye back from time to time on the Vessel, which had fallen silent. Atto had taken me by the arm, leaning discreetly on it.

  "As I told you, the villa belonged to Elpidio Benedetti, who bequeathed it to a relative of Mazarin," he reminded me. "But you do not know who this person was. I shall tell you. Filippo Giuliano Mancini, Duke of Nevers, brother to one of the most famous women in France: Maria Mancini, the Connestabilessa Colonna."

  I raised my eyes. No longer would I need to think up subterfuges to extract half-truths from Buvat: the Abbot was at last about to raise the veil on the mysterious Maria.

  I seemed for an instant to hear the distant melody of the folia coming from the villa. It was not the same folia as before. This time it was more inward and learned, distant and detached; a viola da gamba, perhaps, or even a voix humaine, a voice both elegiac and crepuscular.

  But Atto did not seem to hear it. Briefly, he fell silent, almost as though to draw within himself the bowstring of feelings, and to shoot skilfully the arrow of narration.

  "Remember, my boy, a heart yearns for another heart once in a lifetime, and that is all."

  I knew to what he was referring. Buvat had mentioned it to me: the first love of the Most Christian King had also been his greatest. And the woman in question was none other than Maria Mancini, Cardinal Mazarin's niece. But reasons of state had brought that story to an abrupt end.

  "Louis played his card with Maria and lost," he continued, without even realising that he had begun to refer to his king with such familiarity. It was a grand passion, and it was repressed, crushed, trodden under foot, in defiance of all the laws of nature and of love. Although this was all well circumscribed in place and in time, and between two spirits only, the reaction of the forces that had been unnaturally repressed was beyond measure. That strangled love, my boy, was to bring the avenging angels down on the world: war, famine, hunger and death. The destiny of individuals and entire peoples, the history of France and of Europe: all has been trampled by the revenging wrath of the furies which emerged from the ashes of that love."

  This was the revenge of history for that destiny denied, for that wrong undergone; small, when measured by the yardstick of reason. Immense, however, if calculated by that of the heart. Indeed, with no one else, not even with the Queen Mother Anne, had the young king ever enjoyed an understanding comparable to that which he experienced with Maria.

  "Usually, the gift of reciprocal and lasting understanding between hearts is granted to gentle spirits," declaimed Abbot Melani. "In other words, to those who allow their passions to grow only in humble and orderly gardens. To those men and women whose hearts are like unto the magnificent exuberance of the forest it is given to know only passions as absolute as they are fleeting, straw fires capable of lighting up a moonless night, yet which last but the space of that night."

  Well, continued Atto, this did not apply to Louis and Maria. Their passion burned fiercely but tenaciously. And it was from that passion that there sprung an ineffable, secret complicity of hearts which united them after a manner that would never be seen in other places or at other times.

  Because of this, the world hated them. Alas, they were then still too green: their skin, and especially that of the young King, was too thin to withstand the cunning, the venom and the subtle ferocity of the court.

  Not that the Sovereign was so young: when he fell in love with Maria, he was already twenty. Yet, at that no longer so tender age the King was not yet married, nor even betrothed.

  "A most unusual thing, contrary to all custom!" exclaimed Abbot Melani. "Usually one does not wait so long to marry a young king. All the more so, given that the royal family of France had not many heirs to the throne: after Philippe, the King's brother, and his uncle Gaston of Orleans, who was old and sick, the first Prince of the Blood was the Grand Conde, the serpent in the family's bosom, the rebel of the Fronde, defeated and now in the service of the Spanish foe…"

  But Anne and Mazarin were biding their time, taking care to keep Louis's head under a canopy of blissful ignorance so that they could reign undisturbed. The young Sovereign was aware of nothing; he loved entertainments, ballets and music, and he let Mazarin govern. Louis seemed never to turn his thoughts to the future and the inevitable, tremendous responsibilities of government. He seemed to be as slack and apathetic as his father, that Louis XIII whom he had scarcely known. Even the three years of exile during the Fronde, at the tender age of ten, when he had already lost his father, did not seem to have caused him more than a momentary, infantile homesickness.

  "Excuse me," I interrupted him, "but how is it possible that from so meek and unwarlike a being there should have emerged the Most Christian King?"

  "That is a mystery and no one can explain it except by the facts which I am about to recount to you. It has always been said that he changed because of the Fronde and that it was the revolt of the people and the nobles that dictated the reaction of the years that followed. Stuff and nonsense! Ten years passed between the Fronde and the sharp change in the King's soul. So that was not what caused it. His Majesty remained a timid, dreamy youth until 1660, almost until he married. Within the space of a single year he had already become the inflexible Sover eign of whom you too have heard so much. And do you know what took place in that year?"

  "The forced separation from Mistress Mancini?" I asked rhetorically, while Atto nodded in confirmation.

  "What hatred was turned against those two poor young people: the hatred of the Queen Mother, that of Mazarin…"

  "But how was that possible? The Cardinal her uncle should have been well pleased."

  "Ah, there's much that could be said on that subject… For the time being, it will suffice that you should know this: despite the fact that the Cardinal showed great skill in convincing everyone at court that he was placing every obstacle in the way of that love, out of his supposed sense of family honour, duty to the monarchy and so on and so forth, I never swallowed any of that. I knew Mazarin perfectly well, his forebears were Sicilian and from the Abruzzi; for him, the only thing that counted was personal profit and the rank of his family. That is all."

  Atto made a gesture as though to say that he knew all about it. Then he continued his narration.

  "As I was telling you, they all bitterly detested that love, but as they dared not blame the King, they nurtured a singular hatred for poor Maria, who was, moreover, already disliked both at court and within her own family."

  "Why ever was that?"

  "She was hated at court because she was Italian: they had had more than enough, what with all the Italians whom Mazarin had brought over to Paris," said Atto, who had himself been one of those Italians. "And in her family, she had been abhorred since her first cry; when she was born, her father compiled her horoscope and saw with horror that she was destined to be the cause of rebellions and calamities, even a war. Being obsessed with astrology — a passion which was to beco
me one of Maria's — even on his deathbed, he recommended her mother to be on her guard against her."

  Maria's mother needed no persuading: she tormented her throughout her childhood. She never failed to remind her of her defects, even physical ones ("Invisible details," Atto insisted.) She did not even want her to accompany her to Paris with her other children, and yielded only to Maria's repeated and heartfelt pleas. The maiden was then aged fourteen. Once at court, her mother isolated her as much as possible, confining her to her chamber, while her younger sisters were allowed to approach the Queen. On her deathbed, she emulated her husband: after recommending her other children to her brother the Cardinal, she begged him to place Maria, her third child, in a convent, reminding him of her father's astrological prediction.

  Her mother's animosity wounded her to the quick, Abbot Melani gravely commented, and, together with that unmistakably masculine air which Maria was wont at times adopt with her intimates — her laughter sometimes a trifle too ribald, her gait perhaps too heavy and martial, those scathing jibes of hers that always found their mark but which would perhaps have been more at home in the mouth of a soldier of fortune than on the docile lips of a young maiden — all these things betrayed how little faith in her own feminine nature Maria had gained from her mother's instruction.

  "Yet she was so very feminine!" exclaimed Atto.

  He looked around him, as though seeking a special corner of the park, a magical place in which a presence, some entity, might lend substance to his words and from the word make flesh. He turned to look at me.

  "I shall tell you more: she was beautiful, indeed perfect, a creature from another world. And that is not my judgement, but the truth. If, however, you were to refer to anyone who knew her — with the possible exception of her husband Lorenzo Onofrio, may God keep him in glory — you may be quite sure that they would be shocked to hear that and would dissent. And do you know why? Because her movements in no way accorded with her womanly qualities. In other words, she did not behave like a beautiful woman."

  Not that she was lacking in grace, far from it. But from the moment that she sensed a man's attention focus on her, she felt almost ill. If she was walking, she would begin to limp; if she was seated at table, she would become hunched up; if she was speaking, she would fall silent, not like any timid maiden of her age, no, hers was too prompt and lively a wit. Indeed, one could be certain that, after holding her breath for a moment, she would sally forth with some infelicitous joke accompanied by raucous laughter. These things all chilled the French in her company, for none could guess that this was the expression of her inner lack of ease and thus of her great purity of heart; on the contrary, everyone was ready to despise her as though she were some country wench.

  That is why her sinuous swan's neck was disdained as being too thin, her flaming eyes were seen as hard, her thick dark curls as dry and crinkled, and the pallor of her cheeks (induced by the grim, hostile looks of courtiers) was attributed to a naturally wan complexion.

  "In truth, Maria's cheeks could not have been further from wan: how many times have I seen them catch fire from the elan and fervour of her young spirit! And the same could be said of her mouth, which was red and large, with perfectly spaced teeth, and yet no painter ever dared depict her as she was, so much did her mouth differ from the thin lips then in fashion, which from close up reminded one of nothing so much as a pigeon's crupper…"

  "It is painful to know that so great a beauty should have remained hidden from itself," said I to second Melani's heartfelt eloquence.

  "Of course, she did not stay that way all her life. It was maternity that transformed her. When next I saw her in Rome, a young mother, although her broken heart had remained in Paris, her entire being had attained the plenitude of femininity. By becoming a mother herself, she had at last exorcised the icy phantasm of her own mother."

  "Your understanding of Maria's true nature was quite immediate," I said.

  "I was not alone in this. His Majesty, too, saw it, since he fell in love with her. Even then, despite his limited experience of the fair sex, he was certainly not likely to become besotted with a displeasing face or one that was merely colourless or just acceptable! But, as I have told you, Maria was convinced, because of her mother's cruel judgements, that she was inadequate, sour, unwomanly. In other words: ugly. Oh, if only there had existed a painter magician who could, unseen, have immortalised the image of Maria in a portrait, as she was at that time! I'd have paid with my blood to commission such a picture, for when Maria was truly herself, forgetting her fears, she was magnificent. To immortalise her in an instant, when she was living according to her true nature: that would have been the necessary miracle. And not the portraits which were made at court, which express nothing but the embarrassment with which she posed before the painter, with a drawn smile and an unnatural pose: as she thought herself to be and not as she was."

  At the time of her amours with Louis, Maria still felt herself to be, not the nightingale she truly was, but a screech owl croaking on a branch. But that was by no means a bad thing. It was indeed because of this that, as soon as she arrived in France, she plunged into her studies, convinced that she must make up for her lack of grace by dint of knowledge. From barely a year and a half of education at the Convent of the Visitation, she drew far greater profit than her sisters and cousins who were enclosed there with her. Her impeccable French, with the exotic charm of Italian inflections, a show of culture in all fields (which was really in Maria's case far more than a mere show), a visceral love for the literature of chivalry and for poetry — which she loved to recite aloud — and lastly a passion for ancient history, all these things placed her immeasurably above the vainglorious ladies of the court who permitted themselves to judge her so spitefully.

  And thus, when she made her debut at court, Maria revealed an intellect and wit far beyond her years. Her temperament, which could not conceive of love without a challenge, soon enough found in the Sovereign much raw material which cried out only to be worked on.

  "As is the case with so many young men, the intellect was ripe, and yet he was still a little child; matter still inert, yet ready to be modelled, primordial essence which invokes the enlightened wisdom of a feminine spirit, at once elevated and strong," added Atto, raising his finger to heaven in a gesture of teaching, as though in comprehension of feminine essence rather than of women themselves.

  "The maker and the work of art, Hephaistos and the shield of Achilles: that was how Maria and Louis were for one another. Like that Achaean shield, he was already exquisitely fashioned; she could have given him that divine spark of strength, goodness and justice which issue only from a happy and gratified heart."

  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 t
his 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.