'Did you too think of it?'
'It was you who explained it to me: Capitor, the Spanish lunatic, whose nickname 'Capitor' is, you said, only a deformation of lapitora, which is supposed to be Spanish for 'the madwoman'.'
'Tout se tient.'* This, however, is a folia that seems never to come to an end. Every time we hear it there are new variations, while Capitor's folly did come to an end.'
'Do you mean that she left France in the end?'
'Yes, one day she and the Bastard did go. But nothing was ever the same as before.'
'What happened?'
'A series of unfortunate circumstances which may have led to the scene which we have just witnessed,' Atto whispered, at last deciding to utter some words on the apparition of Maria and Fouquet.
After Capitor's spectacle, Abbot Melani told me, the Cardinal's attitude changed radically. The madwoman's obscure prophecy, 'A virgin who weds the crown brings death', was breathing down his neck and terror's trumpet resounded in his ears: the *'It all holds together.' (Translator's note.) union between Louis and Maria must be eradicated, crushed, prevented by all means. Frightened, the Cardinal thought, 'My head depends upon it,' hiding behind his usual pallor his new unavowable fear.
Thus, over the next two months, in the spring of 1659, ever more fearful obstacles came between the two lovers. In June, Mazarin formally decreed that Maria must leave the court. The Cardinal, who planned to travel to the Pyrenees in order to discuss a number of details of the peace treaty with Spain, would take his niece with him and separate from her during the journey, sending her on to La Rochelle, where she was to reside with her two younger sisters Ortensia and Marianna. The departure date: 22nd June.
The Queen, fearing Louis's reaction, took care not to break the news to him. Mazarin therefore charged Maria with announcing her departure to the King. Louis's wrath exploded: he threatened Mazarin with disgrace, and Maria's despair immeasurably increased his rage and thirst for revenge. For three days, he would not let his mother speak; in utter desperation, he cast himself at the feet of Mazarin and the Queen, begging them in tears to allow him to marry Maria. With consummate rhetoric and in a firm voice, Mazarin reminded the young King that he, the Cardinal, had been chosen by his father and mother to assist him with his counsel, that he had served him with inviolable fidelity and that he could never have done anything that might damage the glory of France and of the crown; and finally, that he was the tutor of his niece Maria and would rather have killed her than consent to such a betrayal.
The King, in tears, gave way. When they were alone, Mazarin said to the Queen: 'What are we to do? In his place, I'd do the same thing.'
Even after that day, Louis kept telling Maria that he would never consent to marry the Infanta of Spain, that he expected to overcome the resistance of the Cardinal and his mother and that only she would one day sit on the French throne. As a pledge of his faith, he gave her the most precious necklace which he had acquired from the Queen of England and which he had set aside for the day of his betrothal.
Maria, however, had no more illusions: deeply wounded by her loved one's weakness, she even went so far once as to urge Louis to wed the Infanta.
Louis tried to reassure her, swearing that he had thoughts for none but her and would surely find a solution. Such promises could no longer satisfy the woman who received them, nor even the man who pronounced them.
The days that followed were nothing but an alternation of contrasting sentiments and humours: of Maria's love for the King, on the one hand, and love for her honour, on the other. At court meanwhile, Louis constantly repeated that his pain at the separation was unbearable. But words no longer sufficed.
'Few men, my boy, have seen what I then saw, and none will ever speak of it, of that you may be sure,' said Atto.
So that the looseness of his tongue would not cause his legs to grow heavy, Atto and I took a brief promenade under the pergolas of the park. In that place populated by the phantasms of the past, every drive seemed to elicit from him an episode, every hedge a phrase, every flower bed a detail.
On the eve of Maria's departure, the King was far from resigned. On 21st June, the day before the separation, the Queen Mother and her son had a long private conversation in the bath chamber. Afterwards the King was seen to leave with swollen eyes. Maria was to depart; Louis had lost a battle, yet hoped somehow to win the war.
On the next day, suffering from an exceptionally violent lovesickness, he was bled twice, on the foot and on the arm (in the days that followed he was subjected to four purges and to another six treatments with leeches). Sobbing unrestrainedly and promising in a loud voice that he would make her his wife, Louis accompanied Maria to her carriage.
'She, obviously, could not understand. He was the King, he could do what he wanted; and yet he was yielding to his mother and to the Cardinal.'
'And what did Maria say to him?'
'Ah Sire! You weep: but you are the King, and it is I who am departing!'' said Atto with a thin smile on his lips.
'But why did the King not impose his will?'
'You should know that only the absence of the beloved reveals her importance. Louis felt in love but precisely because it was the first time he did not realise that it would be the only one. Queen Anne convinced her son that with time he would forget and one day he would be grateful to her for the hurt she was inflicting on him. He believed her. And the damage was irreparable.'
We again sat down on a marble bench.
Once Maria had gone, there began between the two an intense, impassioned exchange of letters. She chose to leave her sisters at La Rochelle and to take refuge at the nearby fortress of Brouage.
It was August. Louis, with Queen Anne and the court in his train, set out for the Pyrenees where the treaty between France and Spain was to be signed; and the seal of that accord was to be the marriage between Louis and the Infanta.
'As I think I have already mentioned to you, I was part of that expedition which played an important role in the history of Europe,' said Atto with ill-concealed pride.
On the 13th and 14th the Mazarinettes went to greet the King and his mother who were passing through those parts. Although they all spent the night in the same palace, Maria and Louis were not permitted so much as to exchange one word. And he, the King, put up with this in silence.
'It was then that the thought crossed my mind: His Majesty will never be any better than that weakling of a father of his, Louis XIII! The Cardinal can sleep quietly in his bed…' said Atto scornfully.
It was on that very occasion, when the young King was mounting his horse to continue the journey, that Melani was the bearer of a most secret letter from Maria: the last farewell.
'No one but me has ever known of the existence of that letter. It was long and heart-rending. I shall never forget the words with which it ended.'
Atto recited from memory:
Des pointes de fer affreuses, herissees, terribles, vont etre entre Vous et moi. Mes larmes, mes sanglots font trembler ma main. Mon imagination se trouble, je ne puis plus ecrire. Je ne sgais ce que je dis. A Dieu, Seigneur, le peu de vie qui me reste ne se soutiendra que par mes souvenirs. O souvenirs charmants! Que ferez vous de moy, que feray je de vous? Jeperds la raison. Adieu, Seigneur, pour la derniere fois.'*
'And this was truly her last farewell to their love,' he concluded.
'But,' I suggested, 'did you secretly read that letter?' 'Eh?' murmured Atto, embarrassed. 'Silence, and do not interrupt me.'
While I laughed inwardly at having caught Melani out (it was clear that he had taken a discreet look at Maria's letter before delivering it to the King), the latter continued his narration.
Mazarin strove to persuade Maria to accept the proposal of marriage from the Constable Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, a member of the noble and most ancient Roman family which the Cardinal's own father had served. Mazarin himself had served Filippo Colonna, Lorenzo Onofrio's grandfather. It had been Filippo Colonna who had dissuaded Mazarin from marrying the daughter of an obscure notary with whom he had fallen in love and who had instead set him on the way of the soutane — the prelature — wherein he had, as his patron had predicted, found great good fortune. The young King's way seemed thus to be traced by and modelled on that of the Cardinal, who pitilessly bestowed on his ward the broken web of his own destiny.
