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 which they felt themselves to be the heroes.
On a fine sunny morning, Louis commanded that a picnic should be held at a remote and rocky place called Franchard, and with him he brought a whole orchestra. Upon arriving, Louis descended from his carriage, filled his lungs with the fine air of the hills and, without thinking twice, set off to climb to the top of the hill. He seemed somewhat excited; everyone looked at him with a mixture of anxiety and disapproval. Maria followed him, while he held her arm chivalrously during the climb up those steep and rugged rocks. As soon as he reached the summit, Louis ordered the orchestra and the court to join him there; a desire which was fulfilled at the cost of no little effort and risk. As they grazed their knees on the stones, the courtiers cast disconcerted and impatient glances at one another. No King of France had ever set out to climb mountains like a goat, least of all with an orchestra and the whole court. Nor would Louis have done it, they thought, if it had not been for that woman, that Italian.
On another day, at Bois-le-Vicomte, Maria and Louis were walking along a tree-lined avenue. At a certain point, perhaps to help her, he held out his arm to her. Maria stretched out her hand, which lightly struck the pommel of the King's sword. Louis then drew the sword which had dared stand in the way of Maria's hand and cast it as far as he was able, in order to punish it. An act of puerile chivalry, which soon did the rounds at court.
Louis, with the ingenuousness of his passion, was making a fool of himself, even if no one had the courage to tell him so, and it was the common opinion that no adult sentiment could possibly underlie such childish behaviour.
"But the courtiers were wrong," I cried out.
"They were both wrong and right," Atto corrected me. "That love, as neither the King nor Maria dared yet call the enthusiasm which drew them to one another, did at times take on the infantile and pathetic tones of a juvenile infatuation; that I cannot deny. But this was only because Louis, too long and too closely guarded by his mother and the Cardinal, was at the age of twenty living for the first time, and suddenly, in chaotic and disorderly confusion, what his heart should already have experienced at the age of sixteen."
At the age of sixteen, however, Louis XIV had experienced only the most pallid initiation to venery. The Queen had opposed this, while his godfather had been a party to it: an old chambermaid, a few docile and willing servant girls, even a maid of honour, and a superficial friendship with a sister of Maria's. But nothing — Mazarin took good care — nothing that might touch the King's heart. Only his meeting with Maria had opened the gates of love, and Louis was no longer willing to go back on that.
All the anxieties, the intemperance, the blushes, the theatrical gestures: all the torments of burgeoning pubescence the young King suffered with Maria, at an age when a monarch has usually put such things behind him and his heart has already experienced the roughness and hardness of the art of reigning.
Likewise, Atto continued, the inexpert and imprudent youth consumes his ardour like a blaze devouring straw; he suffers from furious infatuations, for a real damsel or for the heroine of some fairy tale, and for both he feels prepared to slice the globe in two with a sword. Only, the volubility of his young heart soon tears him away from these things and he then drinks of Lethe's waters of oblivion. Next, it all begins anew: new dreams, new attachments, new passions, new senseless words, in the divine madness of those brief years of passage when the future has not the slightest importance.
But all things are destined to dissolve, one after the other, in the oblivion of a new present. Approaching the age of twenty, there remains only a confused reminiscence, a vague sensation of pleasure mixed with danger: the new man will keep a safe distance from those impetuous currents, and turning his mind to the future, will place on his heart the leash of good sense; with that good sense, choosing the mother of his children, and loving her with a heart filled with conjugal devotion.
"The heart knows no commands, Signor Atto," was my only comment.
"A King's heart is different."
When Louis, thanks to Maria, awoke from his overlong lethargy, he had the misfortune to meet the woman of his life too early and too late; he was too inexpert to know how to gain her for himself, too adult to forget her. His heart was in turmoil for her, his mind was subjugated by her. Reasons of state were still no more than a thought in the background, both remote and obscure.
I knew very well what Atto was thinking of when he expressed himself in those terms: not only of the youth of the Most Christian King but of his own; those years of glory as a castrato singer touring Europe, caught between music, espionage, the faithful service of great lords, with danger breathing down his neck and a secret amorous passion which set his senses ablaze.
It was then, as I penetrated his fervour with that oblique intuition, that, puffing up his chest, he sang a plaintive melody.
Se dardo pungente d'un guardo lucente il sen mi feri, se in pena d'amore si strugge 'I mio core la notte ed il di… [1]
Whose that lucent look was that had wounded the breast of Abbot Melani was all too clear to me. It was almost as though he, by the power of thought, had taken on Louis's flesh, as a warrior dons a coat of armour, to taste the joys and sufferings of that amorous passion which was denied him.
Atto sang in a feeble, breathless voice. Seventeen years had gone by since I had last heard him. At that time, his voice, once so famous because well tempered and powerful, was already reduced to perhaps half of its former vigour, if not less. Yet the airs which he sang, those of his master Luigi Rossi (Le Seigneur Luigi, as he called him) had lost nothing of their enchantment.
That thread of a voice was still celestial, swift, superfine, capable of speaking to the heart a thousand times better than an entire school of sages could speak to the intellect. Gone were the body and power of his song, yet there remained, vulnerable but intact, only its intimate and ineffable beauty.
Now Atto was repeating those verses, as though their words held for him some hidden, painful meaning:
Se un volto divino quest'alma rubo, se amar e destino resista chi puo!*
The Abbot was still tormented by the memory of Maria. He felt that he had looked upon her through Louis's eyes, he had brushed her with his palms, kissed her with his lips and even experienced with the King's heart the desperate distress of separation. Sensations which for Atto, year after year, had become more true, more real than if he had known them in his own flesh. He, the eunuch, being unable to attain Maria, had in the end possessed her through the King.
Thus was consumed and renewed that bizarre love among three, between two souls separated forever and a third, the jealous custodian of their past. To me was granted the unique and secret honour of being witness to this. * I f features divine / Stole this soul away, / If Fate Love entwines, / Resist then who may!
Melani suddenly broke off singing and, with a quick jump, showing that he had recovered his vigour, leapt down from the little wall which had afforded him rest and support.