'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.'
Atto imagined that he had silenced me with his exegesis. He wanted at all costs to avoid any close contact with the kind of occult phenomena which had so irritated and confused him during our incursions to the Vessel.
This was not, however, the truth: I well recalled how enthusiastically Melani had, when he first spoke of Capitor, described the prophetic powers of that Spanish madwoman who had come to court in the retinue of Don John the Bastard. However, I held back and refrained from pointing this out to him.
'And yet,' he himself admitted after a moment's silence, without, however, breaking off his minuet of trying out new periwigs, 'I must confess that something else in Capitor's words really came very close to being prophetic.'
This was, Melani explained, the sonnet about the globe as the wheel of fortune, which we also read above one of the doors at the Vessel. Atto recited the last lines:
Behold, one to the heights hath risen
Et alter est expositus ruinae;
The third is stripped of all; deep down, to waste is driven.
Quartus ascendet iam, nec quisquam sine
By labouring he gained his benison,
