her skin was not in truth extremely white, but combining candour with sanguine vivacity, blending fair and brown, it made her seem a new Venus (because, as the proverb says, brown does not diminish beauty but rather augments it). The oval of her face was not elongated, but possessed rather a roundness that equalled all the beauty of the celestial spheres. Her hair, almost disdaining the gold so common in this world, was of lustrous raven black with deepest blue reflections, and not a hint of coarseness to it; if anything, it seemed black only to presage the obsequies of whosoever should be caught up in its inexorable snares. The forehead was high and large, well in proportion with her other charms; her eyebrows were dark, but while in others this might have rendered the regard over-haughty, when her iris was revealed, it was like clouds giving way to the sun after a shower.
I looked at her, stealing the view from the accidental gap between the leaves, and those great eyes, round rather than slit, incomparable in their vivacity, capable of ferocity but not of rancour, seemed to me the sweetest and most cruel of instruments: fatal comets, casting pitiless amorous rays capable of blinding even the most lynx- like; yet, for all that, not harsh, because accompanied by myriad marks of innocent tenderness. Her lips were of animated coral, such that cinnabar could not be lovelier in colour, and vivacious. Her nose was perfectly proportioned and the whole aspect of her head was of incomparable majesty, supported by the marvellous pedestal of her neck beneath which rose two hills of Iblis, if not two apples of Paris, which would have sufficed for her to be declared instantly the Goddess of Beauty. Her arms were so lusciously rounded that it would have been impossible to pinch them; her hand (of a sudden, she raised it to her chin) was an admirable accomplishment of nature, the fingers being perfectly proportioned and with a whiteness comparable only to that of milk.
So many and admirable were the maiden's movements and actions that if only to be able to make this crude and imperfect description I have considered them one by one, so delightful and attractive were they: her laughter so moving and yet without the slightest affectation, her voice so insinuating, her gestures so harmonious with what she was saying (or seemed to be saying) that even hearing her without seeing her, anyone would have found something that went straight to his heart.
It was then, and only then that, after having grasped nothing more of the conversation between the twain than those thanks — 'I shall be grateful to you for the rest of my life. You are my truest friend.. ' — which could imply everything or nothing whatever, that Atto, tugging at my arm, caught my attention.
I turned. He was as pale as if he had suffered an indisposition. He gestured that I was to go along the hedge with him and appear before the two strangers. He set out nervously before me, compelling me to follow him at a trot. Arriving at the end of the drive, he stopped.
'Look and tell me if they are still there.'
I obeyed.
'No, Signor Atto, I no longer can see them. They must have moved.'
'Look for them.'
He sat down on a wall and seemed suddenly to have grown old and tired.
I offered no resistance to his command, since the magnificent vision of the maiden had been enough to spur my courage and curiosity. If someone had surprised me, well, I would have improvised, saying that I was in the service of a gentleman, a subject of His Most Christian Majesty King Louis the Fourteenth of France, who had permitted himself to traverse the confines of the villa solely out of a desire to render a tribute to the owner, whoever he might be. And, besides, had not the Vessel always been a French establishment in Rome?
After exploring in vain the drive in which the gentleman and the maiden had appeared, I made my way into a side-path, then another and yet another, each time emerging in the end in the great central courtyard. To no avail: the two seemed to have vanished into nothingness. Perhaps they had entered the villa, I thought; indeed, they must have done so.
When I rejoined Abbot Melani, he seemed to have recovered some colour.
'Do you feel better?' I asked.
'Yes, yes, of course. It is nothing, simply… a passing impres sion.'
Nevertheless he seemed still to be in a state of shock. It was almost as though someone had just apprised him of grave and un expected tidings. While remaining comfortably seated, he leaned on his stick.
'If you feel better, perhaps we can go,' I ventured to suggest.
'No, no, we are fine here, really. And besides, we are in no hurry. How thirsty I am. I really am so very thirsty.'
We approached one of the two fountains, where he quenched his thirst, while I helped him not to lose his balance. We then returned to the drives, casting an eye back from time to time on the Vessel, which had fallen silent. Atto had taken me by the arm, leaning discreetly on it.
'As I told you, the villa belonged to Elpidio Benedetti, who bequeathed it to a relative of Mazarin,' he reminded me. 'But you do not know who this person was. I shall tell you. Filippo Giuliano Mancini, Duke of Nevers, brother to one of the most famous women in France: Maria Mancini, the Connestabilessa Colonna.'
I raised my eyes. No longer would I need to think up subterfuges to extract half-truths from Buvat: the Abbot was at last about to raise the veil on the mysterious Maria.
I seemed for an instant to hear the distant melody of the folia coming from the villa. It was not the same folia as before. This time it was more inward and learned, distant and detached; a viola da gamba, perhaps, or even a voix humaine, a voice both elegiac and crepuscular.
But Atto did not seem to hear it. Briefly, he fell silent, almost as though to draw within himself the bowstring of feelings, and to shoot skilfully the arrow of narration.
'Remember, my boy, a heart yearns for another heart once in a lifetime, and that is all.'
I knew to what he was referring. Buvat had mentioned it to me: the first love of the Most Christian King had also been his greatest. And the woman in question was none other than Maria Mancini, Cardinal Mazarin's niece. But reasons of state had brought that story to an abrupt end.
'Louis played his card with Maria and lost,' he continued, without even realising that he had begun to refer to his king with such familiarity. It was a grand passion, and it was repressed, crushed, trodden under foot, in defiance of all the laws of nature and of love. Although this was all well circumscribed in place and in time, and between two spirits only, the reaction of the forces that had been unnaturally repressed was beyond measure. That strangled love, my boy, was to bring the avenging angels down on the world: war, famine, hunger and death. The destiny of individuals and entire peoples, the history of France and of Europe: all has been trampled by the revenging wrath of the furies which emerged from the ashes of that love.'
This was the revenge of history for that destiny denied, for that wrong undergone; small, when measured by the yardstick of reason. Immense, however, if calculated by that of the heart. Indeed, with no one else, not even with the Queen Mother Anne, had the young king ever enjoyed an understanding comparable to that which he experienced with Maria.
'Usually, the gift of reciprocal and lasting understanding between hearts is granted to gentle spirits,' declaimed Abbot Melani. 'In other words, to those who allow their passions to grow only in humble and orderly gardens. To those men and women whose hearts are like unto the magnificent exuberance of the forest it is given to know only passions as absolute as they are fleeting, straw fires capable of lighting up a moonless night, yet which last but the space of that night.'
Well, continued Atto, this did not apply to Louis and Maria. Their passion burned fiercely but tenaciously. And it was from that passion that there sprung an ineffable, secret complicity of hearts which united them after a manner that would never be seen in other places or at other times.
Because of this, the world hated them. Alas, they were then still too green: their skin, and especially that of the young King, was too thin to withstand the cunning, the venom and the subtle ferocity of the court.
Not that the Sovereign was so young: when he fell in love with Maria, he was already twenty. Yet, at that no longer so tender age the King was not yet married, nor even betrothed.
'A most unusual thing, contrary to all custom!' exclaimed Abbot Melani. 'Usually one does not wait so long to marry a young king. All the more so, given that the royal family of France had not many heirs to the throne: after Philippe, the King's brother, and his uncle Gaston of Orleans, who was old and sick, the first Prince of the Blood was the Grand Conde, the serpent in the family's bosom, the rebel of the Fronde, defeated and now in the service of the Spanish foe…'
But Anne and Mazarin were biding their time, taking care to keep Louis's head under a canopy of blissful ignorance so that they could reign undisturbed. The young Sovereign was aware of nothing; he loved entertainments, ballets and music, and he let Mazarin govern. Louis seemed never to turn his thoughts to the future
