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accustomed to mime his desire for a good drink of wine.

I was on the point of inviting him to be more reasonable and patient for at least a few more days, but Cristofano stopped me with his hand.

'Are you not aware of his greater presence of mind? Spirits call for spirits: we can certainly allow him half a glass of red wine.'

'But he made free with the wine until the day when he fell sick.'

'Precisely. The point is that wine should be consumed in moderation: it is nutritious, it aids the digestion, it produces blood, it comforts and calms, brings joy, clarity of mind and vivacity. So go down to the cellar and fetch a little red wine, my boy,' said he, with a trace of impatience in his tone, 'For a little beaker will do Pellegrino the world of good.'

While I was descending the stairs, the doctor called after me 'Please make sure that it is chilled! In Messina, when they began to use snow to chill wine and food, all pestiferous fevers caused by constipation of the first veins ceased forthwith. Since then, a thousand fewer have died each year!'

I reassured Cristofano: in addition to bread and leathern bottles full of water, we were kept regularly supplied with pressed snow.

I returned from the cellars with a little carafe of good red wine and a glass. Hardly had I filled it than the doctor explained that my master's failing had been an immoderate consumption of wine, and that could turn a man raving mad, stupid, lustful, garrulous and even murderous. Temperate drinkers included Augustus and Caesar; while winebibbers included Claudius, Tiberius, Nero and Alexander, who, out of drunkenness, would sleep two days in a row.

Thereupon, he grasped the glass and downed half of it in a single gulp. 'It is not too bad; both robust and smooth,' said he, raising the glass with the few remaining drops in it and observing its fine ruby colour. 'And, as I was saying, the right dose of wine changes the vices of nature into their opposites, so that the impious man becomes pious, the miser, liberal, the proud, humble, the lazy, energetic, the timid, bold: mental taciturnity and sloth are transformed into astuteness and eloquence.'

He emptied the glass, refilled it and then emptied it in one rapid gulp.

'But beware of drinking after fulfilling one's bodily functions or after the sexual act,' he warned me, while wiping his lips with the back of one hand and pouring himself a third dose with the other. 'It is best to drink after consuming bitter almonds and cabbage or, following one's meal, peaches, quince jelly, pomegranates and other astringents.'

He then administered the few remaining sips to poor Pellegrino.

Thereupon, we repaired to Dulcibeni's chamber, where the latter seemed somewhat irked to see me at Cristofano's side. I soon understood why: the physician had asked him to uncover his private parts. The old man glanced at me and complained. I understood that I had violated his privacy, and turned around. Cristofano assured him that he would not need to expose himself to my sight and that he should not be ashamed before a physician. He then requested that he kneel on all fours upon the bed, leaning on his elbows, so that his sores would be well exposed. Dulcibeni consented unwillingly, not without first helping himself to the contents of his snuffbox. Cristofano made me squat before Dulcibeni, so as to be able to grasp him firmly by the shoulders. The doctor would soon be beginning to anoint the haemorrhoids with his caustic, and a false movement could cause the liquid to flow onto his cullions or his tail, which would be cruelly injured thereby. When the physician warned him, Dulcibeni suppressed a shiver and took a pinch of his indispensable snuff.

Cristofano set to work. Initially, as expected, Dulcibeni struggled with the burning pain and emitted brief, restrained moans. In order to distract him, the doctor tried to engage him in conversation, asking from what city he came, how he had come to the Donzello from Naples and so on, all questions which I had prudently avoided putting to him. Dulcibeni (as Abbot Melani had foreseen) always replied in monosyllables, letting one conversational opening after another die away without supplying a single element of information that might be of use to me. The doctor then turned to the dominant topic of those days, namely the siege of Vienna, and asked him what they were saying about that in Naples.

'I would not know,' he replied laconically, as I had expected.

'But there has been talk of this for months, all over Europe. Who do you expect to win, the Christians or the Infidels?'

'Both, and neither,' said he with evident distaste.

I wondered whether, on this occasion too, Dulcibeni might launch into another soliloquy on the topic which now seemed so to irritate him, once the physician and I had left the apartment.

'What do you mean?' insisted Cristofano, while his manipulations drew a hoarse cry from Dulcibeni. 'In a war, for as long as no treaty is concluded, there is always a victor and a loser.'

The patient reared up and it was only by grasping him by the collar that I could hold him down. I could not understand whether it was the pain that so irritated him: the fact is that, this time, Dulcibeni preferred an interlocutor of flesh and blood to his reflection in the mirror.

'But what do you know of it? There is so much talk of Christians and of Ottomans, of Catholics and Protestants, of the faithful and the Infidels, as though the faithful and the Infidels really existed. Whereas, in reality, all alike scatter the seeds of hatred among the members of the Church: here, the Roman Catholics, there the Gallicans, and so on and so forth. But greed and the thirst for power profess no faith in anything but themselves.'

'But I beg of you!' interrupted Cristofano. 'To say that Christians and Turks are one and the same thing! What if Padre Robleda should hear you?'

Dulcibeni, however, was not listening to him. While he angrily sniffed the contents of his precious box (part of which, however, fell on the floor) his voice was sometimes coloured by rage, as though in protest at the painful burning of the sores which Cristofano was inflicting upon him. While holding him firm, I endeavoured not to look too directly at him, which was no easy thing to do, given the position which I was constrained to adopt.

At a certain juncture, the austere patient began to inveigh against the Bourbons and the Habsburgs, but also against the Stuarts and the House of Orange, as I had already heard him do in his bitter and solitary invective against their incestuous marriages. When the physician, good Tuscan that he was, uttered a few words in defence of the Bourbons (who were related to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, his prince), he checked him, raging with particular rancour against France.

'To what a pass have the antique feudal nobility come, they who were the mark and pride of that nation! The nobles who crowd Versailles today, what do you suppose they are now, but the King's bastards? Conde, Conti, Beaufort, the Duke of Maine, the Duke of Vendome, the Duke of Toulouse… Princes of the Blood, they call them. But what blood? That of the whores who happened to pass through the Sun King's bed or that of his grandfather Henry of Navarre.'

The latter, continued Dulcibeni, had marched on Chartres for the sole purpose of laying his hands upon Gabrielle d'Estrees who, before granting her favours, demanded that her father be made governor of the city and her brother, bishop. D'Estrees succeeded in selling herself to the King for her weight in gold, despite the fact that she was a veteran of the beds of Henry III, (from whom old d'Estrees had extracted six thousand ecus), the banker Zamet, the Duke of Guise, the Duke of Longueville and the Duke of Bellegarde. And all that despite the ambiguous fame of her grandmother, the mistress of Francis I, Pope Clement VI and Charles de Valois.

'Should one be surprised,' asked Dulcibeni, 'if the great feudal lords of France wanted to purge the kingdom of such abominations, or if they stabbed Henry of Navarre? But it was already too late! The blind power of sovereigns has ever since despoiled and robbed them without mercy.'

'It seems to me that you are exaggerating,' retorted Cristofano, raising his eyes from his delicate work and anxiously observing his overheated patient.

In my eyes, too, Dulcibeni seemed to be exaggerating. Of course, he was exhausted by the painful burns inflicted by the caustic. Yet, the doctor's calm and almost distracted objections really did not merit those reactions of boiling wrath. The almost febrile trembling of his members suggested that, in reality, Dulcibeni was prey to a singular state of nervous overexcitement. He was calmed only by repeated pinches of snuff. I again promised myself that I would report all this as soon as possible to Abbot Melani.

'If I am to believe you,' Cristofano then added, 'one would conclude that there is nothing good at Versailles or indeed at any other court.'

'Versailles, you speak to me of Versailles; where the noble blood of the fathers is daily defiled! What has