this war would never have taken place.
For two years, I tormented myself with the thought of the plot in which I had perhaps been the precious, decisive pawn. A year ago, I at last made up my mind and wrote an account of these events. I even had a frontispiece printed, with a wealth of decorations, and placed it at the beginning of these pages. I shall send the whole lot to Abbot Melani, seeing that he paid me for it, and shall at the same time claim my daughters' dowries. Now that they are twelve and eight years of age, I still have a good deal of time before it will be too late to find a good husband for them.
Will he answer me? At times I am overcome by floods of rancour against that champion of intrigue and mendacity. Then the scapular of the Madonna of the Carmel comes into my hands, with the three little pearls which he kept for seventeen years in memory of me and returned to me in Ugonio's lair. And then I say to myself that I should perhaps recall Abbot Melani only with feelings of affection.
I fear that there will be no more time for making claims. Atto Melani, Counsellor to the Most Christian King and Abbot of Beaubec, is (or would today be) seventy-six. I look around and see that few, very few men of his age are still on their feet, still healthy and vigilant; or even so much as alive. The dangerous life he has lived can only have left its mark on his weary bones. It remains only for me to hope.
Now, the present worries me even more than the future. Maria did well to warn her Louis that the forged will would resolve nothing. Now that the cannon are firing, I too am all too well aware that all those intrigues, all those efforts to resolve the Spanish succession by deceit, while avoiding war, were in vain. Philip of Anjou mounted the Spanish throne, as the Sun King wished, but France was dragged into a conflict with the other powers from which the whole world may never recover. 'A great fratricidal struggle, a new Peloponnese war,' the Connestabilessa had prophesied.
In those July days at Villa Spada, I had believed I was making myself useful to my little daughters. Instead, I had aided and abetted a plot which was driving Europe to destruction. Was that the reward for all that effort on my part, for climbing the cupola of Saint Peter's in the dark?
Two days ago, I went to look for the answer in the place which in the past had furnished me with more answers than I had found anywhere: the Vessel. I needed solitude, and at the same time, I needed someone to talk to. Cloridia was out assisting with a childbirth. Melani and Buvat were in Paris — the Devil take them. I wondered whether the curious individual might still, however, be where I had left him. Two years had passed, but there are times when nothing is impossible.
King Solomon said: 'In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.'
As though not a day had passed, I found him in his usual place, perched on the cornice of the Vessel and — need I say it? — playing the folia on the violin.
He had at once greeted me with the usual quotation from the Bible, as though he had read in my eyes what it was that I sought. How could I fault him for that? To the Vessel, one came only as a seeker.
'And he also said that in wisdom, and in knowledge, is vanity and vexation of spirit,' the Dutchman added.
It was true, so true. Now that I knew, I suffered. As when I met Abbot Melani nineteen years ago and my young boy's illusions fell one after the other under the hammer blows of reality.
'That is precisely what folly exists for,' the violinist added, speaking loud and clear to make himself heard as he pressed on the bow, his face melting into a broad smile. 'Folly gladdens the heart and, as Hildegarde of Bingen preached so well, converts the tristitia seculae into coeleste gaudium or, in other words, it transforms pain for the world into the joy of heaven!'
After two years, I was once again hearing the folia. The notes played arpeggiato drew Albicastro's words and his very limbs after them, remoulding them to the proud accents of the dance. In counterpoint with his words, those concepts became unfamiliar, ineffable music.
For a few minutes, he seemed intent only on playing, and I decided to move on a little further. Once again, I entered the park of the Vessel, walking quietly; my thoughts, however, were soon racing, fluttering to the burning rhythm of the folia.
Illuminated by the resonant lightning flashes of that music, the events I had lived through took on a thousand facets, ogling me and letting me run after them, then suddenly letting their commotion fall silent, so that sometimes I would think, 'There, I have them,' only for them to start swirling in some quite different guise. When at last they'd foiled my green certitudes, they seemed to suggest to me new ways of knowledge.
Outside me were the thousand worlds of the folia. Within me, in my thoughts, there were, however, two worlds. In one of these, Atto and Maria were squalid spies in the service of the King of France, who in their letters, in order to trouble the waters, pretended to weave an amorous intrigue. In the other world, however, Abbot Melani was the faithful, gallant messenger of love between the Connestabilessa and the Most Christian King, taking advantage of politics to court as they had done forty years before, still using the same pseudonyms, Silvio and Dorinda, as in their readings from the time when they were living out their love.
Which of the two worlds was real, and which illusory? Had I seen only masks, or men and women of flesh and blood?
While the music filled all the space around me, I sharpened thought's scalpel. What had Atto said to me on the day when he took flight? 'If the King of France's separation from Maria Mancini were now to bring Bourbon blood to the throne of Spain, the two would not have been separated in vain.'
Then I understood. Those two worlds, the world of the spies and that of the lovers, were not mutually exclusive. They coexisted and even fed one another.
Maria and Louis had been separated because of Spain. Forty years later, they were still writing to one another, and still because of Spain. Their passion had had to give way to reasons of state, with which it was nevertheless firmly interwoven. Maria spied for Louis, but out of love. The secret code was The Faithful Shepherd, once their favourite reading. And Atto acted as go- between, then as now.
If Maria had not loved Louis, perhaps she would not even have obeyed his orders. This was clear from her letters. 'I understand the point of view shared by Lidio and yourself, but I repeat my own opinion: it is all pointless.' She would never have wished to bring the forged signature of Charles II to Madrid; a useless piece of deceit, she thought, and one that would turn against its author.
Like Croesus, King of Lydia, before him, who wanted to hear Solon tell him that he was the happiest of men, the Most Christian King wanted to demonstrate to the Connestabilessa that she would by means of that false signature be bringing him the crown of Spain on a silver platter. Then he would be the most powerful of kings and thus the happiest of mortals. Atto had announced it to Maria: 'What you will receive when we meet will convince you… You know what value he sets upon your judgement.'
But she, like Solon, had shaken her head. Had she not written it clearly? 'What today may seem good will tomorrow turn out to be a disaster. For oftentimes God gives men a gleam of happiness, and then plunges them into ruin.'
She did not believe that false will could, by fulfilling the Most Christian King's lust for power, make for his happiness as a man. But for the sake of her old love, she had given in: 'I shall come. I shall do as Lidio desires. So we shall meet at the Villa Spada. This I promise you.' Louis expected of her a double obedience, to love and to the state.
So, said I to myself, what the Abbot had delivered had been far more than a mere token of love. That sheet of paper bearing the words yo el Rey had changed the world's history.
Yet Atto had entrusted it to me, a humble peasant and servant to the Spada household. He had not handed it in person to Maria. Why?
So as not to dirty his hands and to deliver through an ignorant messenger that false signature which burned hotter than a thousand bonfires; that, I had thought two years earlier, in the full spate of my anger. Yet, the Abbot had accompanied me to the very door of the convent: an imprudent move for one supposed to have premeditated everything.
No, the law of the two co-existing worlds, that of feelings and of vile politics, applied also to Atto. At the last moment — this I realised only now — his heart had given way. He had lacked the courage to stand before the woman whom he had loved for thirty years without ever having seen her. He had not dared to appear to her with his shoulders weighed down by too many winters; nor, perhaps, to behold her as she now was. Were not Atto's eyes perhaps the very eyes of the Most Christian King? If Maria did not wish to show herself to the King, then
