perfidious Countess of Soissons that the young and passionate Charles of Lorraine was courting Maria amiably and probably with success. The King grew furious with Maria, despised her, mistreated her. She in her turn grew cold; then he returned to the fold and began to visit her at the Palais Mazarin in the rue des Petits Champs.
'In other words, just in front of my present home,' said Atto with calculated nonchalance. 'And the courtiers, led by those two gossips Madame de La Fayette and Madame de Motteville, who still detested Maria out of envy, insinuated that Louis was going there more for the beauty of Ortensia, the youngest of the Mancini girls, than for love of Maria.'
'Was that true?'
'What did it matter? Louis XIVwas now married. The promises had been broken, the dream had vanished. Only a year before the lovelorn couple competed with poetic verses, now they went for one another with barbed, venomous remarks. They had become the eidolon, the phantasms of themselves. They had let life slip away from them, and the loss was final.'
'Excuse me, Signor Atto, but you mentioned the Countess de Soissons?' I asked, wanting to be certain of the name.
'Yes, so you know her?' replied Atto with irony, irritated by my interruption. 'Now listen and keep silent.'
So I did keep silent, but my thoughts were straying elsewhere, to the letter from Maria in which she had spoken of the dangerous poisoner, the mysterious Countess of S., the memory of whom was so painful to the Connestabilessa. Was she perhaps this Soissons? The Abbot's tale, however, was already galloping on its way and distracted me from my reflections.
It was in the year between the marriage with Maria Teresa and the death of Mazarin, explained Melani, that Louis understood his error, and what was more tragic, that there was no remedy for it. His mother's prophecies had not come true: happiness had not come. But there could be no turning back.
'All or nothing — that was the King of France. And still is. Maria was his all and they took her from him. Since then Louis has been nothing.'
'What do you mean?'
'The dissolution, the destruction, the systematic and deliberate dismantling of the monarchy and of the figure of the King himself.'
With a grimace, I betrayed my dissent. Was not Louis XIV the Most Christian King of France, not the most feared sovereign in Europe?
I did not contradict Atto. Other thoughts were racing through my mind.
'Signor Atto, what has all this to do with the apparitions of Superintendent Fouquet and Maria Mancini?'
'It has indeed plenty to do with them. Louis was almost twenty-two years old in 1660, when he married Maria Teresa. He was still an indecisive, inexpert young man, incapable of opposing Mazarin and his mother. Barely one year later, as you well know, he celebrated his twenty-third birthday on 5th September by having poor Nicolas arrested; then he imprisoned him for life in the remote fortress of Pinerol, inflicting a thousand torments on him. Now, I ask you, how is it possible that the timid, dreaming young man he had been twelve months before should have suddenly become such a fury?'
'The answer, in your opinion, is the loss of Maria Mancini,' I anticipated him, 'yet the meaning of the two scenes we have just witnessed still remains obscure to me.'
'What you and I saw a little while ago? Nicolas handing a purse full of money to Maria. And, in their first apparition, Maria saying: 'I shall be grateful to you for the rest of my life. You are my truest friend.' Well, you should know that today's apparition explains why Maria expressed those words of affection and gratitude to Fouquet.'
'Meaning?'
'I shall take it step by step. When Cardinal Mazarin died, Maria found herself unable to obtain payment of her own dowry from the universal successor to His Eminence's fortune, that dangerous madman the Due de la Meilleraye, the husband of her sister Ortensia. This was a painful situation, because apart from that money, Maria possessed absolutely nothing. She went for help to Fouquet, who had admired her and valued her company since her arrival at court. And it was directly owing to the
Superintendent's timely intercession that Maria at last gained her dowry from her brother-in-law.'
'So that bag of coins and all those papers were Maria's dowry?'
'Yes, the papers will have been letters of exchange or things of that sort.'
'So that is why Maria, as we saw on our first visit here, said to Fouquet: 'I shall be grateful to you for the rest of my life. You are my truest friend.'' I concluded with passion.
I realised at that moment that the Abbot and I were now talking about these visions as though they were utterly normal phenomena.
'Signor Atto, it seems almost as though the facts which you are narrating to me here in the Vessel are actually congregating in this very place and… they are in fact restoring the past to life.'
'The past, the past, if only it were more simple,' groaned Atto with a sigh. 'That past never happened.'
I was shocked.
'That meeting between Fouquet and Maria about the dowry, and even Maria Mancini's thanks to Fouquet are not just the manifestation of some past event, do you understand? For it was not thus that Fouquet delivered her dowry to Maria, nor did she ever pronounce those words to the Superintendent.'
'How can you be sure of that?' I asked dubiously.
'Because Maria wrote those very words of thanks and esteem in a letter which, moreover, the Superintendent never read: the letter was intercepted by Colbert, who had already plotted Fou- quet's downfall, with the King's complicity. As you know, when the news of Fouquet's arrest came, Maria and I were already in Rome; I received the dreadful news in a note from my friend de Lionne, one of His Majesty's ministers.
'And the dowry?'
'Likewise. Maria was already on the point of leaving for Italy, driven from Paris and destined to wed Constable Colonna by the Cardinal's will, albeit posthumous: the dowry was sent directly to Rome, such was the haste of the Queen Mother and the court to be rid of her.'
'In other words, the Superintendent never gave Maria her dowry in person, nor could he ever have heard or even read those words: 'I shall be grateful to you for the rest of my life. You are my truest friend.''
'Exactly.'
'So we have then witnessed two events which never took place.'
'That is not quite correct, or rather, it is incomplete. If Maria had not been driven from Paris, if Fouquet had not been arrested, then they might perhaps have been able to meet: he would have delivered in person that legacy of her uncle's and she would have expressed those thanks directly to him. Maria's departure was, moreover, a matter of great pain to Nicolas, who foresaw the disastrous consequences to which it would sooner or later lead; even if he, I think, could not imagine that he would be the first victim of the new King's vengeance arising from the ashes of that love.'
'So we have seen what should have happened between Maria and Fouquet if malign conspiracies had not wrecked the natural course of their lives…' I understood in a flash, while the breath stopped in my breast.
'Seen, seen…' the Abbot corrected me, abruptly changing his tone, and suddenly denying the turn our thinking was taking. 'How you let your mind run away with you. I'd say that we simply imagined these things. Do not forget that we might simply be the victims of vapours released from the ground, and perhaps encouraged by my tales.'
'Signor Atto, what you say may certainly be true of the second of the three episodes we have witnessed: Maria Mancini in the company of the young King. But neither for the first nor for the last: how could I have imagined with such exactitude circumstances of which I did not even know the existence? Or do you mean to tell me that our hallucinations have the quality of clairvoyance?'
'Perhaps: rather, you have simply shared a hallucination of mine.'
'What does that mean?'
'Well, it might have been an episode of transmission of thought. Recently in France and England, a number of treatises have come out, like that of the Abbe de Vallemont, which explain that this is a real phenomenon readily explicable by the laws of reason. This takes place through the action of the most subtle and invisible corpuscles emitted by our thoughts, which sometimes meet with those of others and impregnate their imagination.'
'So they say, then, that we are surrounded by invisible parcels of others' thoughts?'
'Exactly. A little like the exhalations of quicksilver.'
