While the dinner continued, I sought his eyes in vain, for he was seated with his back to me and I could see only the nape of his neck.
Transformed into some new Pier delle Vigne, I must needs bear up: dinner was only beginning and I had better arm myself with patience. The first half of the first hot course had only just been served: fresh eggs drowned in milk with soup under that, butter, slices of lemon, sugar and cinnamon; and boiled head of sturgeon, with its bland savour, served with flowers, herbs, lemon juice, pepper and almonds (one slice for each guest).
The heat from the torch was unbearable, and under the Turkish turban I sweated buckets. The servants who had gone off a-courting with the peasant girls had done well, said I to myself. Yet I knew all too well that I would never have had the heart to betray Don Paschatio and abandon him at so critical a time. The only relief from the heat and the torment of immobility was to know that I was in the company of seven others like myself, each bearing his torch and, what is more, to be able to be a spectator at this meeting of all those eminences and as many noblemen. The place to which I was assigned near the table was, moreover, singular, as I shall soon have occasion to explain.
Hardly had I resigned myself to my punishment when, all of a sudden, Atto turned to me.
'Come, my boy, where I am sitting, 'tis so dark that I feel as though I were in a cave, will you or will you not be so kind as to come closer with that torch of yours?' he called out to me in a loud voice, making an ugly grimace as though I were an anonymous servant quite unknown to him.
I could but obey. I stood right behind him, lighting up his part of the table, which was in any case already perfectly well lit, as well as I could. What the deuce could Atto have in his head? Why had he ill-treated me and why was he now tormenting me?
In the meanwhile, the conversation between the guests, which was conducted quite freely, had turned to frivolous subjects. Unfortunately, I was not always able to understand who was speaking, since from my viewpoint I could see a good many of the guests, but not all of them. Moreover, on that evening, most of the faces and voices were still unknown to me (while in the following days I was to learn to recognise almost all of them).
'… Pardon me, Monsignor, but only a kennel-man is permitted to bear an arquebus.'
'Yes, Your Excellency, but let me tell you, if you will permit me, that he may have it carried by a groom.'
'Very well. And so?'
'As I was saying, if the boar is cowardly and dares not fight in the open, it is killed with the arquebus, as was the custom on the Caetani estates, which are the best hunting grounds.'
'No, no, how then are we to speak of those of Prince Perretti?'
'Pardon me, all of you, and please do not take offence, but all these are nothing compared to the lands of the Duke of Bracciano,' corrected the Princess Orsini, widow of the said Duke.
'Your Highness must mean those of the Prince Odescalchi,' said a thin, icy voice. I looked at the speaker. It was the nobleman who had not joined into the laughter at Cardinal Durazzo's witticism about the pope who compared himself with Pontius Pilate.
For a moment, the table talk froze. The Princess Orsini, in her passion to defend the memory of the family possessions, had all too easily forgotten that, in order to avoid bankruptcy, the Orsini had sold land and more land to Prince Livio Odescalchi and that those estates and the feudal rights that went with them had changed their names as well as changing hands.
'You are quite right, cousin,' said she condescendingly, addressing the gentleman as do nobles when speaking to persons with whom they have bonds of kinship or amity. 'And 'tis indeed most fortunate that they should now bear the name of your household.'
The person who had contradicted the Princess was, then, Don Livio Odescalchi, nephew of the late Pope Innocent XI. It followed that this must have been the pontiff concerning whom Cardinal Durazzo had told an amusing anecdote only moments earlier, which had however not amused Prince Odescalchi, to whom his late uncle had left his immense fortune. At last I was seeing in person the nephew of that pope about whom I had, seventeen years previously at the Locanda del Donzello, learned things to make one's hair stand on end. I hurriedly dismissed those memories of episodes which had caused such suffering for my wife and my late father-in-law.
I learned that evening that Don Livio had also owned a box at the Tor di Nona theatre, which he would no longer be able to enjoy, since the present Pope had had the theatre demolished. This explained why Monsignor Aldovrandi had insisted on that topic.
'By the smithy of Hephaestus, boy, you are roasting my neck. Would you kindly move that way?'
Atto had yet again turned around rudely to upbraid me, almost shoving me to a new post, further away from him. By means of these two moves he had shifted me almost five yards from my original position, almost to the far end of that branch of the table.
Dinner was proceeding with singular freedom of manners and speech, a point which even I who was utterly unfamiliar with that most elevated milieu remarked at once. Only from time to time, irrepressibly, did the quarrelsome haughtiness of the great families and the subtle but venomous pride of those at the summit of the ecclesiastical hierarchy show its face. Yet the rigid protocol which those eminences and princes would have had to observe when meeting one another individually had been magically dissolved, perhaps by the amenity and delightful qualities of the place chosen for banqueting.
'Pray, pardon me, all of you, a moment's silence! I should like to raise my glass to the health of Cardinal Spada, who is, as Your Excellencies well know, absent on account of pressing affairs of state,' said Monsignor Pallavicini, Governor of Rome, at a certain point. 'He has recommended me to be, if not a father, at least an uncle to his guests tonight.'
A gentle ripple of approving laughter ran through the assembly.
'As soon as I see him,' continued Monsignor Pallavicini, 'I shall express to him my gratitude for his political gifts, and in particular for not providing us with a table laid in the Spanish or in the French style, but surrounded instead by Ottomans.'
Another amused murmur arose.
'And this last reminds us of our shared destiny as Christians,' added Pallavicini amiably, while throwing a swift glance at Cardinal d'Estrees, Ambassador Extraordinary a latere of the Most Christian King, always too much in cahoots with the Ottoman Sublime Porte.
'And as the enemies of heresy,' came the prompt reply of d'Estrees, whose call to order alluded to the fact that, although a Catholic, the Austrian Emperor was allied with Dutch and English heretics.
'Let us not speak too much to him of the Sublime Porte or D'Estrees will take umbrage and be off,' I heard someone whisper rather too loudly.
'Gently, gently with all this talk,' quoth Cardinal Durazzo, who had missed nothing. 'First a janissary would not deign to serve me figs and now that he hears all this murmuring about heretics, he'll get it into his head to set his torch to me and burn me.'
The company burst once more into hearty roars of laughter as soon as they caught the allusion to my initial misadventure with Cardinal Durazzo, while I must needs stay sadly impassive and keep holding my torch quite straight.
It was precisely in view of such political skirmishing that Cardinal Spada, that most prudent of men, had, as I had learned from Don Paschatio, taken a series of counter-measures. So as to avoid, for example, the possibility that someone might peel fruit after the French fashion or, on the contrary, according to that of Spain, fruit was served already peeled.
Of course, for some years now there had no longer been any risk of seeing some gentlemen apparelled in the Spanish fashion and others, a la francaise, for thanks to the splendours ofVersailles, it was now the great mode for all to dress after the manner of the Most Christian King. Yet, for that very reason, it was all the rage to show to which party one belonged by means of a whole series of little details: from the handkerchief in one's cloak (those of the Spanish party wearing it on the right, while the Francophiles wore it on the left), or the stockings (white for the French party, red for the Hispanophiles), so that it was no accident if Abbot Melani had that evening chosen to wear white in the place of his usual red Abbot's hose.
Nor could the ladies be prevented from getting themselves up with a bunch of flowers on their right bosom if they were Guelphs (that is, of the Hispanic persuasion) or on the left if they were Ghibellines (on the French side). However, in order to avoid the table at which all were to eat being set too much in accordance with the traditions of the one side or the other, in particular as to the placing of the crockery which is, as is well known, the decisive factor for determining the political affiliation of the guests, it had been decided to abandon established etiquette
