Veritas (Atto Melani) (26 page)

In April famine struck. The city was besieged by swarms of poor peasants who were dying of hunger; no one could leave Paris without the risk of being robbed and killed. The people were
exhausted, famished and desperate. At the end of the month there was almost a general uprising: in the church of St Roch a pauper, who had been begging in church, was arrested by a group of
archers. As the transgressor (even though unarmed) resisted arrest, the archers beat him to death in front of the shocked congregation. The people then rose up and tried to lynch the guards, who
only escaped by taking refuge in a nearby house. Meanwhile the flame of revolt had been kindled: hordes of enraged citizens came to St Roch from all over Paris, and the tumult lasted for hours and
hours before being finally quelled.

In May the famine merely multiplied the number of tumults; the only bread available was as black as ink, and cost over a Julius a pound! On market days there was always the danger of the whole
city rising up.

In June the city’s coffers were exhausted, there was no money except for the war, and yet even the soldiers no longer received any wages and had to get their families to send them
money.

When the cold season returned, the frost killed all the olive trees, a vital resource for the south of France, and the fruit trees turned barren. The harvest was wiped out and the storehouses
were empty. Corn, which came cheap from eastern and African ports, was continually plundered by enemy fleets, against which France had very few ships. The King had to sell his gold plate for a mere
four hundred thousand francs; the richest lords in the kingdom had their silverware melted by the mint. While Paris only ate jet-black bread, in Versailles the King’s table was furnished with
humble oat-bread. But in the gazettes not a single word was said about all this grinding poverty, thundered Atto; the newspapers contained nothing but barefaced lies and bombast.

“You will have wondered what your dear old Abbot Melani was up to in Paris,” he said sadly. “Well, I suffered from hunger, like everyone else.”

The Sun King had realised by now that he had to make peace with his Dutch, English, German and Austrian enemies at all costs. But his overtures, addressed to the Dutch by diplomatic paths, were
scornfully rejected over and over again.

“No one must know,” whispered Atto Melani, leaning towards me, “but even the Marquis of Torcy humbled himself in an attempt to obtain peace.”

Torcy, who was considered abroad as the principal minister of France, left Versailles for Amsterdam under a false name and turned up at the palace of the Grand Pensionary of Holland, who learned
to his amused surprise that this great enemy was humbly waiting for him in the antechamber to sue for peace. He turned him down. Torcy then made the same request to Prince Eugene, commander of the
imperial forces, and to the Duke of Marlborough, leader of the English army. They too turned him down. The French then tried to bribe Marlborough, again without success. The Sun King was finally
reduced to the unthinkable: he sent a letter to the governors of his cities and to the whole population, in which he endeavoured to justify his conduct and the terrible war that was bleeding the
land dry.

“Really?” I said, amazed at Atto’s last words, never having heard anything about the Most Christian King other than how arrogant, scornful, implacable and cruel he was.

“This war has changed many things, boy,” answered the Abbot.

“Including the greatest king in the world?” I asked, citing the definition of the Most Christian King that I had heard from Atto thirty years earlier.

“
Le plus grand roi du monde
, the greatest king in the world, yes,” he repeated in a tone that was new to me, adding to the sugary tinkle of those words a dose of vinegary
scepticism. “Which is the greatest king in the world? The proud Sun or the sober and patient Jove? The bloody barbarous
condottieri
or the best Caesars of the Roman Empire? And in
truth, whose mind does not marvel at the contemplation of Caesar’s military ardour, Augustus’s royal arts, Tiberius’s profound and arcane mind, Vespasian’s economy,
Titus’s amiable virtues, Trajan’s heroic goodness?” Atto proclaimed heatedly. “Who does not admire Hadrian’s various and manifold literature, Antonine’s clemency
and equity, Marcus Aurelius’s wisdom, Pertinax’s strict discipline, Septimus Severus’s fierce and versatile simulation? What can I say of Diocletian’s nobility of spirit,
Great Constantine’s sublime piety and victorious fortune, Julian’s perspicacious spirit, Theodosius’s tolerance, religion and parsimony and the many virtues and high prerogatives
of the other Roman emperors? It was these virtues that made them eternal in the grateful memory of the human race, certainly not the blood spilled in military campaigns!”

I could not understand what Abbot Melani was leading up to.

“Much could be said to commemorate the majesty of the laws, the gravity of the senate, the splendour of the equestrian order, the magnificence of the public buildings, the riches of their
treasury, the valour of the captains, the number of the legions, the maritime armies, the royal tributaries, and Africa, Europe and Asia held under the will of one single man. But if the
sovereignty of the Roman Caesars’ imperial rule lasted a thousand years it was due less to blood and martial valour than to good sense and the gift of reason, of true freedom and of righteous
rules of living bestowed upon the subjugated peoples.”

It had certainly not been, I reflected, the policy of the Most Christian King to bestow freedom and righteous rules of living on his conquered peoples: his first concern was to put everything
and everyone to fire and the sword. He had even done so in the Palatinate, although it was the birthplace of his sister-in-law. I had never heard Atto Melani lavish such praise on virtues of
government so remote from those of his sovereign; indeed, I had always heard him seek to justify the dubious conduct of the French.

“In like fashion was Deioces exalted to the throne of the Medes,” continued the Abbot. “Venerated for his rectitude, he was called to settle their differences with fairness.
Similarly, Rome, when still unregulated and fierce, called Numa Pompilius from the Sabines as their ruler, his only known merit being the austere and religious severity of his habits. And what
other aim did the ancient republic have than the universal peace of its peoples, and the eradication of barbarism and blind brutality, perennial sources of vices, and wasteful ravagers of human
concord and civil life? It was thus only fair that an empire founded on reason and on true valour, governed by the rule of honesty, whose aim was peace among its peoples, and in which each member
was granted free access to dignities and to honours, should still be universally venerated as legitimate and holy, and its leader be recognised and obsequiously adored as the living oracle of
reason and of true valour. The legitimate heir of that ancient Roman Empire is the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation and your Most August Caesar Joseph the First, the Victorious.”

“Your words surprise me, Signor Atto, but I cannot but agree with you. The wisdom of the Caesars of the House of Habsburg spared Vienna the insult of the famine that raged throughout
Europe,” I declared.

“Remember, boy: no praise is more befitting to an Emperor than that of virtue: true nobility is nothing if not virtue ingrained in a family, passed on from father to son,” Melani
pronounced solemnly. “Without virtue the royal family is destined to perish and with it the whole kingdom. The Habsburgs will sit on the throne of the Hofburg much longer than the lineage of
the Most Christian King in France.”

I could not believe my ears. Was this the voice of Atto Melani, the faithful servant of His Most Christian Majesty, the secret agent of the crown of France, whom I had always seen blindly
serving his king, even at the cost of tarnishing himself with appalling crimes? Now of all times, in the middle of a war?

“The French care for nothing but appearance, and at that they are true masters,” he went on. “His Most Christian Majesty has created around himself the grandest, costliest and
most magnificent of spectacles. He has outdone every other monarch in the splendour of his court, and the trumpets of glory and fame have sounded for him every day. His cannons have pounded half
Europe, his money has corrupted every foreign minister. The tentacles of France have extended everywhere, but to what end? Now its body is like a beached octopus: empty, flaccid and
rotten.”

He adjusted his black glasses on his nose, as if to insert a pause that his impatience barely accepted.

“How much has all that glory cost France? How many peasants have died of hunger to pay for their king’s cannons and ballets? In France they waste as much as 250 thousand silver scudi
on the court, a third of the state’s budget, while in Austria they spend less than 50 thousand. They drove my friend Fouquet from the ministry of finance and slandered him; but it was only
then that the public finances truly collapsed, with the court now spending three times as much as it did in the days of Louis XIII, and the kingdom in ruins! So who is the thief?”

He fell silent and wiped a bead of sweat from above his lips. Then he replaced the handkerchief in his pocket with hasty annoyance.

“Ah, my dear! I wish I could roll up the surface of the world like a carpet and drag the adversities of Paris right here, before your eyes. Then you would see it all for yourself: people
dying of hunger, desperate citizens, bakeries assaulted for a crust of bread, riots brutally crushed. You would see families selling their meagre possessions to survive, war widows prostituting
themselves for their family’s sake, children begging in the streets, newborn babies dying of cold. Is this glory? Everything is falling apart in Louis’s kingdom. The Horsemen of the
Apocalypse are four in number, but only one, the white steed of War, is galloping at such speed. One day you will come and see me in Paris, at Versailles. That is when you will appreciate the
greatness of Vienna.”

“Of Vienna?”

“The French adore show, and at Versailles everything is show,” sighed Atto. “In that false universe, everything revolves around the Sun King and his radiance. Any mortal being
can walk quite undisturbed into the gardens, the royal palace, even the royal apartments: only His Majesty’s little room for private meals is private. You can see him take lunch and dinner or
attend his morning
levée
, when he wakes up with his breath still rancid from the previous evening’s partridges. When he comes out from mass, there are so many people waiting
for him you would think you were in some square in Paris. And between the Tuileries and the Louvre there are only supposed to be a few authorised courtiers; instead there’s such a crowd of
carriages, idle strollers and domestic servants that one might as well be at the fish market. There are so many people bustling around the royal palaces, both inside and outside, and they behave so
shamelessly, that in order to reduce the number of thefts in the Royal Chapel the death penalty is supposed to be in force. Wholly absurd, since no one is ever executed. At lunchtime any parasite
can worm his way into the rooms, maybe chatting with His Majesty’s nephew, and sit down at the table of the great master of the house, or at that of the chamberlain, of the almoner, that of
the court preachers or the King’s confessors. Amid this drunken bedlam, where idle chat and extravagance have free rein, while you bow in some corridor as the golden salt cellar is carried
towards His Majesty’s table, you will be surrounded by gossip about lovers and the sodomitic adventures of this or that person. If you are ill, you can let yourself by touched by the King
during the
toucher
, when he touches invalids with the same hand that throughout his life has penned orders for invasions and the butchering of entire nations. If you have an important
friend, you can take part in the
débotté
, when His Majesty graciously allows his boots to be removed: foolish rituals which he now uses for his own glorification, but which
go back centuries, to the days of the Valois. And over these years, while the courtiers have quarrelled among themselves for the most prestigious position, for a higher salary or just out of mutual
hatred, and have dared to mock the sovereign who tolerates them, France has been bleeding itself dry with the cost of the war and sinking ever deeper into its present inferno. On the other hand, in
Vienna . . .”

“In Vienna?” I repeated again, amazed to hear Atto praising the enemies of France.

“Can you not see with your own eyes? In France it is waste that reigns, and in Austria parsimony. There adultery is the rule for every sovereign, and here faith to one’s consort.
Only servants enter the Emperor’s bedchamber, and not every passing flatterer. He does not have himself portrayed in a chariot crushing all those that resist him, nor does he order operas
from that bootlicker Lulli showing himself dressed up as Perseus, slaying dragons and conquering princesses. Instead, Leopold, the father of the present Emperor, had himself portrayed in the act of
bowing down before the power of the Lord, thanking Him for removing the plague from Vienna.”

In his decrepitude Atto Melani was experiencing the bitter defeat of his king’s arrogant and overbearing ideals, and with it the failure of an entire life, his own, spent in the arduous
(and all too often humiliating) service of France.

The French who had visited the imperial treasure chamber here in Hofburg, Melani went on, had gone guffawing back to France, to tell the Most Christian King how little – in comparison with
the treasures of Versailles – the jewels of the Habsburgs were worth.

“They laugh and say that the gallery and the five cabinets are full of cheap trinkets or little more. Among the paintings there are just a few Correggios that are of any value; the jewel
cabinet is ridiculous, apart from one piece, it seems, a large bowl hollowed out of a single emerald, so valuable that only the Emperor is allowed to touch it; not to mention the great clock
cabinet, which only has one item in any way special: a mechanical crab, whose movements seem so natural that you can hardly tell it from a real one; the agate cabinet is adequate, with a few fine
larger pieces, and some vases of lapis lazuli, while the coin cabinet is incredibly feeble: no coins of value and everything set out haphazardly. And the last cabinet, so they tell me, only
contains absurdities like little waxen images and ivory toys, suitable for a child of five!” exclaimed the Abbot with his eyebrows raised in wondering arches.