Secretum

'The maker and the work of art, Hephaistos and the shield of Achilles: that was how Maria and Louis were for one another. Like that Achaean shield, he was already exquisitely fashioned; she could have given him that divine spark of strength, goodness and justice which issue only from a happy and gratified heart.'

That evocation seemed to lacerate Atto's heart and soul, but not because he, who had once been enamoured of Maria, had harnessed himself to telling of her love for an unbeatable rival. His real torment, I seemed to see, was different. The elevation of the masculine material by feminine spirit about which he was now instructing me, he, Atto the eunuch, had had to accomplish in solitude, on himself.

'That boiling and formless lava had to be forged into wisdom,' he continued, 'into insight and purity of soul, into discernment, even into trust in one's fellow man, so that he should be as pure as a dove and as prudent as a serpent, to use the words of the Evangelist. None more than the Most Christian King was suited for such an inclination of spirit and intellect,' he chanted melodiously.

This was then the royal road marked out for the fiery young King by Maria's lively vision. Maria was the first serious thing that Louis desired. She was refused him.

He clamoured for her with all the breath in his body, but did not upset the constituted order. Still unaware of his own power,

Louis had remained immersed in the romantic vapours of adolescence: a protracted lethargy in which his mother Anne and the Cardinal had taken care to keep him, for their own convenience.

'And you, then, think that the Most Christian King suffered so much from this that his soul is still scarred by it?'

'Worse than that. To suffer, one must have a heart, and he renounced his own. He was left — how can one put it — a stranger to himself. Only thus was he able to emerge from the abyss of despair into which that curtailed passion had cast him. But one cannot with impunity renounce one's own heart. Saint Augustine reminds us that the absence of the good generates evil.'

Thus, it was not long before coldness and cruelty took the place of suffering in the King's young heart. In a cruel volte-face, while love could have brought forth the best qualities from his nature, love denied brought forth the worst in him.

'His reign became, and remains to this day, the reign of tyranny, of suspicion, of the arbitrary, of futility raised to the rank of virtue,' he whispered in a barely audible voice, aware that the words which he had just pronounced could, if they reached hostile ears, be the cause of his downfall.

He took his handkerchief and wiped his forehead and his lips with it, wearily dabbing the drops of perspiration from his face.

'All the women he had after that were despised by him,' he then said with renewed passion, 'as happened to his wife Maria Teresa; or venerated, but then set aside, like his mother. Or merely lusted after, like his many mistresses.'

In every one of them, Louis sought Maria. But no longer having a heart to respond to, precisely because of that old loss, in reality he never sought after the soul of any of them, even when it would have been worth doing so, as with poor Mademoiselle de la Valliere. And, almost without realising it, he allowed no woman to take the place of that old love; indeed, he ended up by becoming openly misogynistic. He forbade his wife Maria Teresa to attend the Royal Council, which according to tradition was her due, and immediately after his marriage he even removed his mother Anne of Austria from it. Even if he paid her a compliment when, shortly after her death, he said that she had been 'a good King', an indication of how insulting the feminine appellation seemed to him. All in all, he treated every one of his mistresses with extreme cruelty.

'In 1664, he said to his ministers: 'I order you all, if you should ever see a woman, whoever she may be, gain influence over me and govern me, to put me on my guard: I shall be rid of her within twenty-four hours.' And he had been married for three years.'

'Excuse the question,' I interrupted, 'but how could Louis think of marrying Maria, who was not of royal blood?'

'A legitimate, but unfounded doubt. And here I shall grant you a little revelation: were you aware that His Most Christian Majesty is no longer a widower, but has taken wife again?'

'It is true that I no longer read the gazettes, but I am sure that if there were a new Queen of France, I'd have learned it just walking down the street!' I exclaimed in astonishment.

'There is in fact no Queen. This is a secret marriage, even if it is an open secret. It took place one night seventeen years ago, not long after you and I left one another and I returned to Paris. And I can assure you the august spouse is, to put it kindly, not presentable in society. A small example: when she was little, she even asked for charity.'

The King, with Madame de Maintenon (for that was the name of the chosen one) had wished to accomplish what twenty-four years before had been refused him — or rather, what he had not had the courage to do: a marriage desired only by him, against the wishes of all others.

'But this gesture of his was by then only an empty shell,' groaned Atto sadly. 'La Maintenon is no Mancini. Her hair does not 'smell of heather' as the young King was wont to repeat, in ecstasy before the exuberant locks of my Maria. And this belated marriage,' concluded Atto with conviction, 'was nothing but a silent and distant homage to the first and only love of his life, while the 'secret' spouse (everyone knows this but no one dares breathe a word of it) gained from the marriage more than anything else the rages and bilious humour of the King who made it clear to her that he could be rid of her whenever the fancy took him. So now, la Maintenon, unlike Maria, cannot take the liberty of proffering the least word of advice to the King without being bitterly upbraided for all her pains. It remained to her only to boast of that, as though she had been confined to the shadows of her own volition,' added the Abbot with obvious scorn.

The Most Christian King, secretly married! And what was more, or so it seemed, to a woman of lowly origins. How had that been possible? A thousand questions were on the tip of my tongue, but Atto was already continuing his tale.

'All this, in short, to tell you that in my opinion the King of France would have been prepared to marry Maria. But you must remember above all,' Atto insisted, 'that Louis was at that time King in name only. In fact it was Cardinal Mazarin and the Queen Mother who reigned. Nothing, but nothing, in the absolute deference which Louis showed for His Eminence and his mother gave any hint that things might change. Louis might perfectly well have spent his whole life like his father Louis XIII, leaving the affairs of state in the hands of his minister.'

Atto was sure that not even Louis thought matters might sooner or later change. At twenty-one years of age, he was still taking shelter under his mama's skirts in the Cardinal's shadow, like a callow youth. Yet the King had reached his majority five years earlier! His mother's Regency had long since ended.

Louis never opposed the matrimonial plans which Mazarin prepared for him, first with Marguerite of Savoy and then with the Infanta of Spain, having already seen how fleeting such political promises could be. What was more, in twenty years of life, he had never once rebelled against his tutors, not even so much as raising a single 'if' or 'but'.

But above all, the Abbot declaimed, what did he care for political wrangling or for the web of matrimonial manoeuvres which Mazarin was weaving around him? Louis did not live in everyday reality: it was too vulgar and squalid for him, or so he thought.

When they became friends, Maria read Plutarch's Lives of Illustrious Men to the young King; she too, born with a warrior's heart, dreamed of one day becoming an 'illustrious man'. As for Louis, anxious to escape from the political wilderness to which Mazarin had exiled him, he plunged headlong into those tales and at last felt himself to be a hero.

From that moment on his thoughts took on a different colouring, one both bloodier and truer, encompassing the distant events of the Fronde, the humiliations endured by his family at the hands of the populace in revolt, those tragic days which had, without his even realising it, robbed him of childhood's carefree joys.

Maria loved poetry and recited it well, with style and sensitivity. She recommended that Louis read romances and verse: from the historians of the ancient world like Herodotus to poems chivalrous and bucolic. He filled his pockets with them, enjoyed them, and showed powers of discernment which astonished the court, where no one was aware that he possessed such qualities.

He was transformed, gay, conversing with everyone; he emerged from the gilded apathy that had hitherto held him in subjugation and took a lively part in discussions about this or that book. Superimposing their own faces and names on the protagonists of their reading, Louis and Maria projected themselves into a universe of romance in