Atto, too, I thought with a snigger, hated to speak of the man who had fathered Maria's children and had made her flesh thrill, if not her heart. Nevertheless, I had already heard a great deal about the stormy ten-year long marriage between Constable Colonna and his indomitable consort.
'Did you not fear the King's ire, passing him news that might injure his feelings?'
'I have already told you, word by word and blow by blow, how Louis lived in the twenty years that followed his marriage with Maria Teresa: his heart was sunken into a deep, disturbed sleep. I did no more than to throw pebbles of light, sharp crystal splinters which, cutting through that torpor with the stiletto of jealousy, for a brief instant struck the King's heart and veins with the blinding lightning of Maria's memory, more brilliant than all the brocades and jewels with which he covered his mistresses, all that astounding machinery with which his pageantry and fetes, his plays and ballets were filled and all those deafening orchestras with which he surrounded himself. Dreams, moments, soon upset by the magnificent hubbub of the court, too brief for him to become fully aware; and yet there they lay, lurking in a corner of his soul, whispering to him, perhaps on nights when he lay between waking and sleep, that she existed.'
I was moved by the fidelity with which Abbot Melani had humbly sacrificed his impossible love for Maria Mancini. For twenty years, alone and in secret, he had maintained the silver thread which still joined those two unfortunate hearts, without them so much as realising it.
Perhaps the Abbot would now reveal to me his current task as go-between; but he remained silent, overcome by his memories.
Then he drew forth from his pocket a richly wrought little box shaped like a golden seashell. He opened it and took out a few citron pastilles which he threw into the carafe of water in order to make a refreshing beverage. As soon as the pastilles had dissolved, Atto drank deeply.
'Ah, this citron-juice is truly delicious,' he commented with a sigh, wiping his lips. 'Marchese Salviati sends me these regularly. And don't you find my little seashell lovely, eh?' said he, alluding to the box which I was in fact admiring. 'It comes from the Indies and it is as fine and pleasing as can be, do you not think so? Maria sent it to me as a present a few years ago.'
The Abbot's voice was tinged with emotion.
There was a knock at the door: a valet asked if the Abbot required anything.
'Yes, please,' Atto answered, clearing his throat. 'Bring me something to eat. And what about you, my boy?'
I accepted willingly, seeing that hunger was causing my stomach to complain, as no little time had elapsed since lunch.
'Just think how different France and all Europe might have been,' Atto resumed, 'if Maria Mancini had reigned happily at Louis's side. The invasions of Flanders and the German principalities, the brutal destruction of the Palatinate, hunger and poverty within France's borders to finance all those wars, and who knows what else might have been spared us.'
'Well,' I could not help provoking him, 'you regret so much what happened, yet were matters not as they now stand, France would have no claim to the the Spanish throne.'
The Abbot was cut to the quick.
'There is no contradiction whatever,' said he, rising to his full height. 'The past is the past and can be altered only in our imagination, as happened at the Vessel. We can only so arrange matters that past events should not have been in vain.'
'What do you mean?'
'If His Majesty's separation from Maria Mancini were now to bring Bourbon blood to the throne of Spain,' Atto declaimed pompously, waving his index finger as he spoke, 'their suffering, from the blind and pointless torment of forty years ago, would be sublimated into a supreme sacrifice for the good of the royal household of France and, plainly, to the greater glory of God from whom the monarch's power emanates.'
At first, I found it difficult to grasp what he was getting at in that obscure oratorical display. One thing, however, was perfectly clear to me: for the first time since his arrival at Villa Spada, Atto was talking with me of the succession to the Spanish throne.
'Only thus will they not have been separated in vain,' he added.
The war in Flanders, for example, Melani continued, could only have been undertaken by the Most Christian King in his capacity as consort of Maria Teresa, seeing that the purpose of that conflict was to claim his wife's dowry from the Spaniards.
'In other words, then as now, the Most Christian King has been determined to extort, if needs be by violence, all that he could lay his hands on which might serve to avenge him of the violence which he himself once suffered. The violence of which I spoke to you: once suffered, then inflicted upon others, do you remember?' the Abbot reminded me.
'Yes, from what you've told me, I know that his favourite ways of getting his own back have been through women and wars.'
'Queens and raison d'Etat. the very things which once separated him from Maria Mancini forever.'
That was why, Atto continued in a hoarse voice, Louis XIV never held back whenever there was any opportunity to make women suffer; even better if he could mix the matter up with politics, as in the case of the Princess Palatine and the Grande Dauphine.
'These were two women whom the King admired greatly. They were not fragile and forever sighing like Louise de la Val- liere or social climbers like Athenai's de Montespan. Worse, they were independent spirits, fighting for their ideals with all their strength, just as he himself had once tried to do against his mother and his godfather.'
Louis identified no little with those two rather masculine and idealistic young women. But he, in his own time, had lost his battle; and now he could not allow them to win theirs. The King was unhappy: at court, none could allow themselves the luxury of being happy, or even serene. The King was small of stature: none dared wear heels or more imposing periwigs that would make them taller than he.
'The King is small? But you told me that he was tall and good looking, and…'
'What does that matter? I told you what they all say and always will say and what will always be depicted in court portraits. Besides, with those red heels and those towering wigs, I challenge you to find a single monarch in Europe taller than he. The Most Christian King, my boy — and this is really in confidence between the two of us — when he takes off his shoes and that false hair, is not very much taller than you.'
They brought us a dish with two pairs of roast francolins accompanied by green beans, artichokes and sour fruit, with wine and little flat breads with sesame. Atto started with the greens, while I immediately got my teeth into the francolins' breasts.
So, heaven help anyone whom the King found to be at peace for too long, even if this were out of resignation. And such was the character of the Princess Palatine (so called, because she came from the Palatinate): young, ugly and perfectly aware of the fact, the King's German sister-in-law was the second wife of Monsieur, in other words, his younger brother Philippe, and, unlike his first wife, the restless and unlucky Henrietta of England, she had been able to find a peaceful modus vivendi with that strange husband of hers. He did not like women, but she was sufficiently masculine not to disgust him. And, with the miraculous help of some holy image in the right place at the right time, he had even managed to make her pregnant and thus to provide the male heir his luckless late wife had been unable to conceive. Thereafter, the couple separated their beds by common accord and to their mutual satisfaction, united only by their love for their children. Madame Palatine's serene resignation was, however, to be shortlived.
'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.
