He died. Deciding on a noble lie, to which the abbé consented, all said that Saint-Savin died in a clash with some Landsknechts who were approaching the castle. Toiras and all the officers mourned him as a hero. The abbé told how in the clash he, too, had been wounded, and he prepared to receive an ecclesiastical benefice on his return to Paris.
In a brief period of time Roberto lost father, beloved, health, friend, and probably the war.
He could find no consolation in Padre Emanuele, who was too taken up with his councils. Roberto returned to the service of Monsieur de Toiras, last familiar image, and bearing his orders, he witnessed the final events.
On September 13th envoys of the King of France, the duke of Savoy, and Captain Mazzarini arrived at the castle. The relief army was also negotiating with the Spanish. Not the least bizarre note in that siege: the French sought a truce in order to arrive in time to save the city; the Spanish granted it because their camp, devastated by the plague, was also in a critical state, desertions were increasing, and Spinola was by now clinging to life with his teeth. Toiras found himself forced to accept the terms of the agreement imposed by the newcomers, which allowed him to continue defending Casale after Casale was already taken. The French would establish themselves in the citadel, abandoning the city and the castle itself to the Spanish, at least until the 15th of October. If by that date the relief army had not arrived, the French would abandon the citadel, too, truly defeated. Otherwise the Spanish would relinquish both city and castle.
Meanwhile, the besiegers had to provide the besieged with victuals. This is surely not the way we might feel a siege should have gone in those days, but such was the agreement. This was not waging war, it was playing dice, interrupting the game when the opponent had to go and urinate. Or perhaps it was like betting on a winning horse. And the horse was that approaching army, whose dimensions increased gradually on the wings of hope, though no one had seen it. Living in Casale, in the citadel, was like living on the Daphne: imagining a distant Island, and with intruders in the house.
The Spanish vanguards had behaved well, but now the main body of the army was entering the city, and the Casalesi had to deal with bullies who requisitioned everything, raped the women, clubbed the men, and treated themselves to the pleasures of city life after months in the woods and fields. Equally distributed among conquerors, conquered, and those shut up in the citadel: the plague.
On September 25th there was a rumor that Spinola had died. Rejoicing in the citadel and bewilderment among the conquerors, orphaned, too, like Roberto. These were days more colorless than those on the Daphne, until October 22nd when the relief army was announced, already at Asti.
The Spanish started arming the castle, and lining up cannons on the banks of the Po, not respecting (while Toiras cursed) the agreement that at the army’s arrival they were to abandon Casale. The Spanish, through the words of Senor de Salazar, recalled that the agreement set the 15th of October as the final date; if anything it was the French who should have relinquished the citadel a week since.
On October 24th, from the ramparts of the citadel great movements of enemy forces were observed; Toiras prepared to support the arriving French with his cannons. In the next few days the Spanish began to load their baggage onto river barges to ship it to Alessandria, and to those in the citadel this seemed a good sign. Then the enemies on the river began also constructing boat bridges to prepare for the retreat. To Toiras this looked so inelegant that he began firing his cannons on them. Out of pique, the Spanish arrested all the French still to be found in the city, and why there were any left, I confess I have no idea, but this is what Roberto reports, and at this point, where that siege is concerned, I am ready to believe anything.
The French were near, and it was known that Mazzarini, acting on the Pope’s orders, was doing everything possible to prevent the clash. The captain moved from one army to the other, he returned to confer in Padre Emanuele’s convent, rode off again to carry counterproposals to this side and that. Roberto saw him only and always from a distance, covered with dust, doffing his hat abundantly to all. Both sides meanwhile were blocked, because the first to move would be checkmated. Roberto even wondered if by chance the relief army was not an invention of young Mazzarini, who was making besieged and besiegers dream the same dream.
In fact since June a meeting of the imperial electors had been in session at Ratisbon, and France had sent her ambassadors there, including Père Joseph. And, as they shared out cities and regions, an agreement on Casale was reached as early as October 13th. Mazzarini learned of it quite quickly, as Padre Emanuele said to Roberto, and it was only a matter of convincing both those who were arriving and those who were waiting for them. The Spanish had received abundant news, but each despatch contradicted the others; the French knew something, too, but they feared Richelieu was not in agreement and, for that matter, he was not, but from those days on, the future cardinal Mazarin studied how to make things go his way and behind the back of the man who would later become his patron.
This is how things stood when on October 26th the two armies found themselves face-to-face. To the east, along the hills towards Frassineto, the French army was deployed; opposite, with the river to the left, in the plain between the walls and the hills, was the Spanish army, which Toiras was cannonading from behind.
A line of enemy wagons was coming from the city; Toiras assembled what little cavalry he had left and sent it outside the walls to stop them. Roberto had begged to take part in this action, but permission was not granted. Now he felt as if on the bridge of a ship from which he could not go ashore, watching a vast stretch of sea and the mountains of an Island denied him.
Firing was suddenly heard, perhaps the two vanguards were coming to grips: Toiras had decided on a sortie to engage the men of His Catholic Majesty on two fronts. The troops were about to emerge from the walls, when Roberto, from the bastions, saw a black rider, heedless of the first bullets, galloping between the two armies just along the line of fire, waving a paper and shouting, as those present later recalled, “Peace! Peace!”
It was Captain Mazzarini. In the course of his last pilgrimages between one shore and the other, he had convinced the Spanish to accept the agreements of Ratisbon. The war was over. Casale remained with Nevers, the French and Spanish pledged to leave it. While the ranks were breaking up, Roberto leaped onto the trusty Pagnufli and sped to the scene of the failed conflict. He saw gentlemen in gilded armor exchanging elaborate salutes, formalities, and dance-steps as some little makeshift tables were being set up for the signing of the treaties.
The next day departures began, first the Spanish and then the French, but with confusion, casual encounters, exchanges of gifts, offers of friendship, while in the city corpses of the plague victims rotted in the sun, widows sobbed, some burghers found themselves enriched with both ready money and the French disease, having lain with no women save their wives.
Roberto tried to find his peasants again. But of La Griva’s army there was no word. Some must have died of the plague, others were simply missing. Roberto thought they had gone home, and from them his mother had probably learned of her husband’s death. He asked himself if he should not be close to her at this moment, but he no longer understood where his duty lay.
It is hard to say if his faith had been shaken most by the infinitely small and infinitely big worlds, in a void without God and without rule, that Saint-Savin had made him glimpse, or by the lessons of prudence from Saletta and Salazar, or by the art of Heroic Devices that Padre Emanuele bequeathed him as the sole science.
From the way he recalls it on the Daphne I tend to believe that at Casale, while he lost both his father and himself in a war of too many meanings and of no meaning at all, Roberto learned to see the universal world as a fragile tissue of enigmas, beyond which there was no longer an Author; or if there was, He seemed lost in the remaking of Himself from too many perspectives.
If there Roberto had sensed a world now without any center, made up only of
