In December of ’29 the French again crossed the Alps. According to their pacts, Charles Emmanuel should have let them pass, but—evidence of his reliability—he reiterated his claims to the Monferrato and demanded six thousand French soldiers to besiege Genoa, which was really an obsession of his. Richelieu, who considered him a snake, said neither yes nor no. A captain, who dressed at Casale as if he were at court, described one day of the past February: “A marvelous feast, my friends! The musicians of the royal palace were missing, but the fanfares were there! His Majesty, followed by the army, rode before all Turin in a black suit worked in gold, a plume in his hat, and his cuirass gleaming!”
Roberto was expecting an account of a great attack, but no, this occasion was merely another parade. The King did not attack; he made a surprise diversion to Pinerolo and appropriated it, or reappropriated it, since a few hundred years earlier it had been a French city. Roberto had a vague idea of where Pinerolo was, and he could not understand how taking it would relieve Casale. Are we also under siege at Pinerolo perhaps, he wondered.
The Pope, worried by the turn things were taking, sent his representative to Richelieu, urging him to return the city to the Savoys. At table then they gossiped abundantly about that envoy, one Giulio Mazzarini, a Sicilian, a Roman plebeian—no, no, the abbé insisted, the natural son of an obscure officer from the mountains south of Rome. Somehow this Mazzarini had become a captain in the service of the pope; but he was doing everything he could to win the confidence of Richelieu, whose great favorite he now was. And he was someone to keep an eye on; for at that moment he was at Ratisbon, or on his way there, which is at the end of the earth, but it was in Ratisbon that the fate of Casale would be decided, not in some mine or countermine.
Meanwhile, as Charles Emmanuel was trying to cut lines of communication with the French troops, Richelieu also took Annecy and Chambéry, and Savoyards and French were fighting at Avigliana. In this slow game, the imperials were entering Lorraine to threaten France.
Wallenstein was moving to help the Savoys, and in July a handful of imperials, transported on barges, took by surprise a lock at Mantua, the whole army had overrun the city, sacked it for seventy hours, emptying the ducal palace from top to bottom and, to reassure the pope, the Lutherans of the imperial army had despoiled every church in the city. Yes, those same Landsknechts that Roberto had seen arriving to lend Spinola a helping hand.
The French army was still engaged in the north, and no one could say if it would arrive in time, before Casale fell. They could only hope in God, the abbé said. “Gentlemen, it is political wisdom to realize that human means must always be sought, as if divine means did not exist; and divine means sought, as if human means did not exist.”
“So let us hope in divine means,” one gentleman exclaimed, but with an expression anything but devout, waving his cup until he had spilled some wine on the abbé’s cassock. “Sir, you have stained me with wine,” the abbé cried, blanching, which was the form indignation took in those days.
“Pretend,” the other replied, “that the mishap occurred during the Consecration. Wine is wine.”
“Monsieur de Saint-Savin,” the abbé cried, rising and putting his hand to his sword, “this is not the first time you have dishonored your own name by taking Our Lord’s in vain! You would have done better, God forgive me, to stay in Paris dishonoring the ladies, as is the custom with you Pyrrhonians!”
“Come, come,” Saint-Savin replied, obviously drunk, “we Pyrrhonians went about at night to provide music for the ladies, and the men of courage who wanted to enjoy some fine jest would join us. But when the lady failed to come to her window, we knew she preferred to remain in the bed the family confessor was warming for her.”
The other officers had risen and were restraining the abbé, who tried to draw his sword. Monsieur de Saint-Savin is in his cups, they said to him, allowances had to be made for a man who had fought well those recent days, out of respect for the comrades who had just died.
“So be it,” the abbé concluded, leaving the hall. “Monsieur de SaintSavin, I invite you to end the night reciting a De Profundis for our fallen friends, and I will then consider myself satisfied.”
The abbé went out, and Saint-Savin, who was sitting next to Roberto, leaned on his shoulder and commented: “Dogs and river birds make less noise than we do shouting a De Profundis. Why all the bell-ringing and all the Masses to resuscitate the dead?” He abruptly drained his cup, admonished Roberto with a raised finger, as if to direct him to a proper life and to the supreme mysteries of our holy religion. “Sir, be proud: today you came close to a happy death; and behave in future with the same nonchalance, knowing that the soul dies with the body.
Go then to death after having savored life. We are animals among animals, all children of matter, save that we are the more disarmed. But since, unlike animals, we know we must die, let us prepare for that moment by enjoying the life that has been given us by chance and for chance. Let wisdom teach us to employ our days in drinking and amiable conversation, as is proper to gentlemen scorning base spirits. Comrades, life is in our debt! We are rotting at Casale, and we were born too late to enjoy the times of the good King Henry, when at the Louvre you encountered bastards, monkeys, madmen and court buffoons, dwarfs and legless beggars, castrati and poets, and the king was amused by them.
Now Jesuits lascivious as rams fulminate against the readers of Rabelais and the Latin poets, and would have us all be virtuous and kill the Huguenots. Lord God, war is a beautiful thing, but I want to fight for my own pleasure and not because my adversary eats meat on Friday. The pagans were wiser than we. They had their three gods, but at least their mother Cybele did not claim to give birth and yet remain a virgin.”
“Sir!” Roberto protested, as the others laughed.
“Sir,” Saint-Savin replied, “the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life. We should rather aspire to a heaven where only the planets live in eternal bliss, receiving neither rewards nor condemnations, but enjoying merely their own eternal motion in the arms of the void. Be strong like the sages of ancient Greece and look at death with steady eye and no fear. Jesus sweated too much, awaiting it. Why should he have been afraid, for that matter, since he was going to rise again?”
“That will do, Monsieur de Saint-Savin,” an officer virtually ordered him, taking him by the arm. “Do not scandalize this young friend of ours, as yet unaware that in Paris nowadays blasphemy is the most exquisite form of bon ton; he might take you too seriously. And you, Monsieur de la Grive, go to bed, too. Remember that the Good Lord, in His mercy, will forgive even Monsieur de Saint-Savin. As that theologian said, strong is a king who destroys all, stronger still is a woman who obtains all, but strongest is wine, which drowns reason.”
“You quote by halves, sir,” Saint-Savin mumbled as two of his comrades were dragging him out almost bodily.
“That phrase is attributed to the Tongue, which added: Stronger still, however, is Truth and I who speak it. And my tongue, even if it now moves with difficulty, will not be silent. The wise man must attack falsehood not only with his sword but also with his tongue. My friends, how can you call merciful a divinity that desires our eternal unhappiness only to appease his rage of an instant? We must forgive our neighbor, and he need not? And we should love such a cruel being? The abbé calls me Pyrrhonian, but we Pyrrhonians, if he must so call us, are concerned with consoling the victims of imposture. Once three companions and I distributed rosaries with obscene medals among some ladies. If you only knew how devout they became immediately thereafter!”
He went out, accompanied by the laughter of the whole company, and the officer remarked, “If God will not pardon his tongue, at least we will, for he has such a beautiful sword.” Then he said to Roberto, “Keep him as your friend, and don’t vex him any more than necessary. He has felled more Frenchmen in Paris over a point of theology than my whole company has run through Spaniards here. I would not
