'You will understand that the Cardinal hesitated when faced with that rhyming dedication which was both unexpected and somewhat insolent.'
'Why insolent?'
'If you listened carefully, you will have noticed that the sonnet is rather curious.'
'In the first place, it contains verses in Latin.'
'Not only that.'
'Well, it says something like the proverb that the world's a ladder: some go down and some, up; one day, you're in luck, the next, the wind may change.'
'Quite. And Mazarin, who was at the height of his power, did not care to be reminded that, secundum legis ordinem divinae, in other words, according to the order of God's law, he must sooner or later resign himself to relinquishing his command.'
Someone at court hastened at once to whisper in his ear that the sphere which imitates the world (giving the illusion of being able with a glance and with the sense of touch to embrace the entire terrestrial orb) subtly suggests the notion of possession of lands, cities, entire nations: in other words, the prerogative of monarchs. This was a manner of saying that Capitor, and Don John, and in the final analysis, all Spain, recognised him as the real Sovereign of France. All the more so in that the Bastard had taken pains to make it clear that he was donating the terrestrial sphere to the Cardinal, while keeping only the globe of the constellations for himself. This interpretation ended up by flattering His Eminence, so that he regained his good humour.
Capitor then unveiled the second gift. It was a great and marvellous golden charger in the Flemish style with subjects in silver in relief, representing the god of the sea, Neptune, trident in hand in lieu of a sceptre, together with his spouse, the nereid Amphitrite. They were seated rather closely side by side on a rich chariot drawn by a pair of Tritons at the gallop, gloriously parting the waves and leaving a vast land behind them.
'One of the finest Flemish chargers that I have ever seen. It must have been worth a fortune,' commented Atto. 'Curiously, Capitor called it by a strange name, which imprinted itself in my mind because it was neither French nor Spanish, nor of any language of our times, and this I shall tell you later.'
On the dish a number of pastilles of incense had been placed, which Capitor burned, releasing their potent and noble perfume. When the smoke began to thin, the madwoman turned to the Cardinal with a lopsided smile and, pointing with menacing mien, first at the two marine deities, then at the trident, proclaimed: 'Two in One!'
Mazarin, continued Abbot Melani, was rather flattered. Like many of those present, he had seen in the two deities himself and Queen Anne, and in Neptune's sceptre, the French crown, held firmly in his hand. Others, however, saw in the marine allegory of the chariot ploughing the immense sea and leaving the land behind it, and above all in the trident in Neptune's grasp, not the crown of France but that of Spain, mistress of the oceans and of two continents, exhausted by wars and thus falling into Mazarin's hands. And that sent Mazarin into raptures.
'He who deprives the crown of Spain of its sons, the crown of Spain will deprive of his sons,' Capitor added even more enigmatically, instantly silencing the murmuring of the audience.
'Here too, there was a wealth of possible interpretations. Everyone understood that the warning was aimed at Philip IV of Spain, all of whose male heirs had died at a tender age. According to others, it was because his sister Anne of Austria had been made to sign a deed renouncing the Spanish throne, thus depriving the Spanish crown of its descendants in the female line; while there were those who interpreted it in terms of Philip's obstinate refusal to appoint Don John the Bastard as his heir, despite the fact that many wanted him for their future King.'
Capitor moved to the third gift. Yet again, she raised the red cloth with a sharp tug, casting it away. This time, it was a splendid goblet, yet again of silver and gold, with a long stem in the form of a centaur holding up the calyx.
'An object of the finest workmanship,' commented Melani, 'but above all, symbolic, like the other two presents.'
The goblet was in fact full of a dense and oily matter, almost like plaster. Capitor explained that this was myrrh.
'The madwoman then invited me to step forward, and handed me the music. I already knew what she had asked me to sing, and there was no need to rehearse it even once. The accompaniment on the guitar was elementary and even the lunatic's modest musical ability was quite sufficient.'
'What did you sing?'
'A little song by an anonymous poet that was quite well known at the time: the ' Passacalli della vita^' or 'Passacaglia of Life'.'
'And was it well liked?'
Atto made a face which betrayed all the bitterness of that memory with the icy fear induced by a bad presentiment.
'Not one bit, alas. Indeed, it was from this that all the trouble began.'
'What trouble?'
In lieu of a reply, Atto chanted to me with a sure but discreet voice the passacaglia which, accompanied by a visionary madwoman, he had intoned some forty years before in the presence of the King of Spain's bastard son:
Oh, how wrong you are to think That the years will never end -
We must die.
And our life is just a dream And as good as it may seem It will very soon have passed
Die we must.
Just forget the medicine You 'll have no use for quinine All those cures are just a lie -
We must die.
Oh, when singing you can die Or when playing lute and fife Leave your love and lose your life -
We must die.
And when dancing you may die, Drinking ale or eating pie,
Dust can but return to dust,
Die we must.
Maidens, youths and little babes, All men move towards their graves -
We must die.
Sick or sound, brave or poltroon, Death will have us late or soon
We must die.
If this you will not contemplate, It already is too late All your senses you have lost, And you've given up the ghost -
Die we must.
Then he wiped a veil of perspiration from his brow. He seemed to be living a second time the remote, chilling moments in which he realised that he had been made the instrument of some oblique warning to Mazarin.
At the end of the song, Atto cast a furtive glance at His Eminence. The Cardinal was as white as a sheet. He had in no wise lost control of his emotions, nor had he betrayed any annoyance, yet the castrato, who knew every wrinkle in his face, had clearly discerned his unexpressed fear.
'You see,' Abbot Melani instructed me, 'if you would truly know great statesmen, you must needs have spent no little time in their close retinue. That is because whoever governs a state needs to be a master of dissimulation, so that no one can fathom his nature. However, through the position which I had occupied, I was able to observe His Eminence from close quarters for quite some time. The Cardinal, who was by nature rather fearless and determined, feared only one thing: death.'
'But how can that be?' I asked, astonished; 'I thought that cardinals, princes and ministers, who are so close to the secrets and machinations of states, were… how can I put it?…'
'Somewhat more distanced from these things because distracted by the high demands of affairs of state, is that not what you thought? Absolutely false. You must know that the power which such eminent personages exercise in no way saves them from the same phantasms as beset the humble. That is because human beings are always and quite invariably made of the same substance, and indeed the fact of rising among the learned and influential exposes one to the risk of imagining oneself to be godlike, so that it becomes hard to resign oneself to the fact that Our Lady Death will sooner or later come and make us equal to the least of her subjects.'
Thus, Cardinal Mazarin had for some time been engaged in a vain struggle with the spectre of death, against
