when one was alone with him, or when two or three other men were present, but be became offensive as soon as there were women in the room and impossible if the women were pretty.
He came to the Villa Manovale dressed in blood-red ecclesiastical garments under polished battle armour. He wore spurs to the dinner table. He stared at Manovale's body as if it were unclothed. She felt encouraged in her task.
`You are the Medici representative in Rome?' he asked mockingly.
She smiled at him. She allowed the smile to begin gently, then, with experienced control, she slowly increased its heat to lasciviousness.
`I understand,' he said.
On the day after his arrival, a papal messenger, brought an invitation to the archbishop suggesting that he join. His Holiness at dinner at two o'clock the following morning at the Vatican.
Unwilling to consider going to bed to be reawakened, the archbishop asked Signora Manovale if she would lay on a `merry luncheon' at ten o'clock in the evening before his meeting with the pope.
The signora invited Paolo Orsini, the industrial condottiere, so that the archbishop would have someone with whom he could talk shop if he chose. She brought in the famous actor Alghieri Melvini and Giovanni di Gianni, a man who controlled the grain in Rome and who was a new client of the Medici bank, recruited by her. There were women to set these men off but, seated at the archbishop's left, speaking in both Latin and German, was Maria Louise Sterz whom the signora introduced only to her guest of honour. He was soon so delighted with her that he made it clear that he wished to speak to no one else at the table.
John, of Nassau remained in Rome for eleven days, six days longer than his original intention. He saw the pope once again and spent the rest of his stay with Marie Louise. When she was absent – seeing her dressmaker, she said – her mother comforted the archbishop with fine wine and soon established a relationship for him with the Medici bank. She assured him that the Medicis would be so honoured to have big account that they would immediately open a branch for his convenience in Mainz as well as, she was hopeful, for the convenience of the Church's considerable banking business in Swabia and for the bank deposits of those dioceses which neighboured on the archbishop's jurisdiction and which looked to him for protection from the Teuton and Polish princes. His Eminence, Archbishop and Count, wanted something from her, so the matter of which Italian bank held his money was of little interest to him. Therefore, when the Count of Nassau left Rome, the signora had made a banking coup which delivered over 500,000 florins each year to the new Medici branch at Mainz and 25,000 gold florins to Decima Manovale, at the commission of 5 per cent which had been arranged by the bank to come into effect immediately when she produced the business.
15
The Archbishop of Mainz departed from Rome at the head, of his troop of 600 horsemen, with his household of 192 people, and with Maria Louise Sterz, whom he had leased from Signora Manovale at terms no more strenuous than those she had secured from Cosimo di Medici for Maria Giovanna Toreton.
That night, Pierre D'Ailly, the Bishop of Cambrai, arrived in Rome after his journey from France. He had travelled with only ten men. I worked with D'Ailly several years later. It was a cheerless task, like trying to touch a man by addressing his reflection in a mirror. He was a smart fellow who had seen everything and had done everything. He never lost sight of himself.
Manovale received him in the company of an exclamatorily attractive young woman of seventeen, whom she introduced as Mademoiselle Helene MaCloi. Everyone spoke French. The. two women dined with the bishop that night and soon he and Mademoiselle MaCloi were into a dense discourse which excited the bishop. He drank much wine and insisted, when the evening came to an end, that the young woman take him to his bed.
Each day at one o'clock, Cardinal Spina (disguised) came to the house, a few minutes before luncheon was served for two in the bishop's apartment. Each day, Cardinal Spina remained with the bishop until 4.45 p.m. They met for three consecutive days. Signora Manovale observed and listened to their conversations through a gallery slit, high up in the room and reported them by courier to Cosimo di Medici.
After Spina left each day, the bishop napped until seven o'clock, after which he bathed and did calisthenic exercises. When he dressed for the evening's dinner with the two ladies, he did not don ecclesiastic robes but wore a fashionable knight's surcoat made of fabrics of great sophistication and garments which were extremely short and padded with a mighty codpiece. His hose were laced to his upper garments. Buttons ran in long rows up and down his arms: As he gazed longingly into his looking glass, he combed his hair in radiation from the centre of his crown with the line at the back dipping well below the cropped fringe on his forehead. He wore the long, pointed shoes which his king, Charles VI, had forbidden to be worn in France because they made it impossible for the wearer to kneel in prayer. By the time he was well scented, Mademoiselle MaCloi was waiting for him with her mother in the large salon. There, they discussed French literature: Guillaume de Dole; the idealistic conception of human love as portrayed in Roman de la Rose, and Gautier de Coinci's Les Miracles de la Sainte Vierge.
Dinner was served on a balcony overlooking an inner garden, where the bishop said that not anywhere in France, not even in Paris, had he encountered a woman who so combined beauty with intellectuality, who not only understood the true culture but had the ability to listen, as did Mademoiselle MaCloi. `I am too old by far for such things,' he said; `but were I not, I should have to say that I have lost my heart to you.'
`We love with our minds, you and I,' the young woman said fervently., `Although,' she added, blushing skilfully, `you have not allowed it to stop there.'
`Oh, I can race for a bit, but then I am exhausted,' the bishop said. 'Such a body as yours requires constant worship.'
`But your mind is an instrument of prodigious skill at lovemaking,' she protested. `When you fill my heart with the poems of Eustache Deschamps and Olivier de la Marche, fighting the battle of realism against idealism, you are wooing with the strength of youth for the love of all women.'
He patted her absent-mindedly. `I must leave for Paris,' he said. `I have lain awake nights plotting how I can take you with me yet still know that you will be served well with love in those years which lay in wait before me like brigands.'
`It is a problem for the mind,' she said gently. `Therefore you will find a solution.'
`I have done so,' he answered softly, reaching out to hold her hand, oblivious of Manovale's presence.
'Please --tell me.'
`I hesitate.''
`But – why?'
`It is unorthodox.'
`You aren't capable of a flawed solution – is he, signora?'
`Let us hear him,' the signora said:
D'Ailly smiled ruefully. `When I was Chancellor of the University of Paris,' he said, `I had a student who was so brilliant in his kindness and so generous with his intelligence that, when I became a bishop of the Holy Church, I went to the king and persuaded him to name this student in my place as chancellor,'
`That is friendship,' Helene said.
`It is my history,' D'Ailly said. `Because I desire to have you near me – for the rare quick race and for the ecstatic talk and response, I am proposing that, for long-enduring lovemaking as well as for the
fulfilment of minds, you allow yourself to be shared by my student, the Chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson.'
`In the same bed?' she asked shyly.
`Sometimes. Sometimes not. But could such a paradise be possible?'
`Mademoiselle MaCloi is my daughter, my lord bishop,' Manovale said.
`What? My dear woman, how titillating.'
Helene rose. `You two will need to talk,' she said.
`Does your mother speak for you?' the bishop asked blandly. `She speaks for me.' Helene turned to leave the room. `Wait!'
Helene turned back to him.
