Secundum legis ordinem divinae.
'This happened after the Cardinal's death,' said Atto, grasping a perfume for periwigs and rapidly perusing a belt and two pocket watches: 'Colbert's ascent must inevitably bring to mind, 'Behold, one to the heights hath risen', while the brewing storm that preceded the fall of Superintendent Fouquet seemed to fit perfectly with ' et alter est expositus ruinae ' or, 'the other is exposed to ruin'. The fourth prefigured the coming to power of the Most Christian King in person who ' ascendetiam' or, 'is now ascending'. In fact, the young King did gird up his loins immediately after Flis Eminence's death and take personal control of the government of the state, as the sonnet says, 'nec quisquam sine' By labouring he gained his benison', in other words, on the strength of his own efforts, but also, ' secundum legis ordinem divinae'' or, 'according to the order of divine right' precisely upon which the King's power rests.'
'In your interpretation of the sonnet, the third personage is, however, missing, the one who's 'stripp'd of all; deep down, to waste is driven'.'
'Bravo. I see that you may be slow on the uptake, but you are by no means inattentive. The third character is Mazarin himself.'
'Did he really die poor?' I asked, utterly astonished. 'When we first met, I seem to recall you telling me that he left a fabulous inheritance.'
'Your memory is absolutely correct. Only, he chose his heir badly. Armand de la Meilleraye, Ortensia Mancini's husband, was mad,' he exclaimed, trying out all sorts and colours of capes, cloaks and cowls, in all materials from jujube-red Ormuz muslins to scarlet ferrandine silk and wool blends, brocaded cloth of gold and silver, bicoloured moire satins, and so compulsively that it truly seemed he too had taken leave of his senses.
Armand de la Meilleraye: almost indifferent to the dubious spectacle which the Abbot, by now almost naked, was making of himself, I was deep in thought. I already knew from Buvat that, when Maria left Paris, Atto had transferred his attentions to Ortensia, thus enraging her mad spouse, who sent out ruffians to hunt him down and give him a beating and thus caused him to flee from France. Melani had taken advantage of this to go to Rome and, with the King's blessing and financial assistance, to seek out Maria, newly married to the Constable Colonna.
''Tis almost risible,' continued the Abbot, by now lost in his dance of the costumes which, from a graceful minuet, had degenerated into an unseemly sarabande: 'Mazarin had sought far and wide the best match for the most beautiful and sought-after of his nieces and had decided to make him his universal heir. The choice fell upon a nephew of Richelieu, the Due de la Meilleraye, who thus became master of the Cardinal's boundless and ill-gotten fortune. They married barely ten days before the death of Mazarin, who thus had no idea of the sad individual to whom he had abandoned his fortune.'
Armand de la Meilleraye, Atto narrated with acid sarcasm for his one-time enemy, was without question utterly mad. He was ashamed to have inherited from Mazarin, whom he regarded as a thief destined for hellfire. He therefore took an extreme pleasure in accepting the inheritance with the secret intent of destroying and delapidating it. He sought out the victims of the Cardinal's depredations and exhorted them to sue his heir, namely himself. In this way, he collected over three hundred lawsuits and did his very best to lose them all, thus restituting the great man's ill-gotten gains.
For that purpose, he obtained the advice of the best and most costly lawyers, and then did exactly the opposite of whatever they recommended. One morning, what was more, he put paints and hammers into the hands of a group of servants and led them to the gallery where His Eminence had lovingly collected extraordinary works of art: and there he began violently to strike Greek and Roman statues, because they were naked, and ordered the servants to cover the paintings depicting nudity with black paint: Titians, Correggios and who knows what else. When the King's minister, Colbert, arrived distraught, hoping to save those masterpieces, he found the madman, exhausted but calm at last, in the midst of all the wreckage; midnight had struck: it was Sunday, the day of rest. The destruction had come to a halt, but almost nothing had survived.
'As cruel irony would have it, in the last days of his life, Mazarin was seen wandering around his gallery, caressing those very statues and those marvellous paintings, sobbing and repeating over and over: And to think that I must leave all this! To think that I must leave all this!''
'It seems almost as though he was struck down by a curse,' I observed.
'The schemes whereby great men try to make their memory eternal, are utterly ridiculous,' exclaimed Atto in response.
He fell silent, shaken by the very phrase which he himself had just pronounced.
'Ridiculous…' he repeated mechanically while, despite himself, his lips drooped, forming a tragic mask.
The old castrato lowered his gaze to his chest. He looked at the breeches, the sash, the Venetian lace jabot and all the other things he had put on — more than one would ever place on a tailor's dummy. He moved slowly to the window and glanced into the park, where, I supposed, the Connestabilessa must still be waiting.
Suddenly, there came flying capes and cloaks, sashes and jabots, the Bohemian cape, the cuffs, the pleated silk cloak and the stockings. The precious silks, the shining satins, the amber fur, the cloths enriched with gold and silver thread, the moire satins, the Milanese salia and the Genoese sateens, all flew into the air, flung by Atto in handfuls. There followed what looked like a bewitched aerial army of empty costumes: tabbies, grograms, striped and flowered linens, muslins, ferrandines and doublets all flew menacingly upwards. My eyes were confused amidst the colours of pearl, fire, musk, dried roses, ginger, scarlet, maroon, dove-grey, grenadine, berrettino grey, nacre, tan, milky white, moire and gris castor, and blinded by the gold and silver braiding and fringes which Atto was hurling to the floor in a silent, desperate frenzy.
I was utterly at a loss in the face of Melani's assault on his sartorial masterpieces; all the more so when I recalled how, many years ago, he had cursed in the honeycomb of underground galleries beneath Rome every time a splash of mud dirtied his lace cuffs or his red abbot's stockings.
When at last the curious army of costumes lay lifeless on the ground and the entire wardrobe was scattered far and wide, Atto's old body lay, like that of a half-naked satyr, slumped on the divan at the foot of the bed. Hardly had I overcome the icy grip on my members and rushed to the Abbot's assistance than the latter suddenly raised his face from his hands where he had plunged it and, standing up once more, moved away from me and slipped on his dressing gown.
'Now do you understand the verse in the sonnet on fortune recited by Capitor?' he asked me, as though nothing unusual had taken place.
He went to the console and poured two glasses of sweetened red wine, one of which he handed me.
'The third is stripp'd of all, deep down, to waste is driven,' said he, seeing that he was unable to get a word out of me: 'Hardly was he dead, than Cardinal Mazarin lost all that he had intrigued for.'
'Yes,' was all I was capable of saying.
I gulped down the wine in one go. My hands were trembling. Atto poured me another glass. He was avoiding my eyes. Fortunately, the fumes of alcohol soon dispelled those of emotion and I found myself once more at peace.
'That was a true prophecy,' I exclaimed, once I had digested the Abbot's revelations concerning Capitor's words.
'Either that or a diabolical coincidence,' he replied.
I smiled. The old castrato was irredeemable; he would not admit in my presence to the inexplicable nature of certain phenomena; I would leave him that little satisfaction.
'There is one so-called 'prophecy' of Capitor's that certainly has not come to pass,' the Abbot insisted, for any such flaw corroborated his convictions. 'That which she pronounced before the charger with the Tetrachion: 'He who deprives the crown of Spain of its sons, the crown of Spain will deprive of his sons.'
What does that mean? Who has deprived Spain of heirs? King Charles II has no heirs; no one has been deprived of any. Capitor was talking nonsense, and that is the fact of the matter.'
'But, if I remember well,' I objected, 'Capitor, when she presented the dish, said first of all 'Two in one'. And in doing so, she pointed first to the couple formed by Neptune and Amphitrite, then to the sceptre in the form of a trident, is that not so?'
'What are you getting at?' Atto grumbled, sounding as though he wished to set the matter to one side once and for all.
'Does it not seem to fit in rather curiously with the monstrous Tetrachion of whom Cloridia spoke?'
'I do not see how,' the Abbot retorted drily.
'Perhaps the Tetrachion is a pair of twins attached to one another at the side, like the two deities on the
