It is natural that—his fancy having taken the most thorny path—he should immediately conceive a case of mistaken identity, of someone who had passed himself off as Roberto and in such guise received from Lilia that for which Roberto would have bartered his life. So, then, Ferrante had reappeared, and all the threads of the past were knotted once more. Maleficent alter ego, Ferrante had thrust himself into this story, playing on Roberto’s absences, his delays, his early departures, and at the right moment had garnered the reward for Roberto’s speech on the Powder of Sympathy.
And in his distress, Roberto heard a knocking at the door. Ah, Hope! dream of wakeful men! He rushed to open, convinced he would see her on the threshold: it was instead an officer of the Cardinal’s guards, with two men as escort.
“Monsieur de la Grive, I presume,” he said. Then, identifying himself as Captain de Bar, he went on: “I am sorry to have to do what I am now obliged to do. But you, sir, are under arrest, and I must beg you to give me your sword. If you come with me now in a mannerly fashion, we will board the carriage awaiting us, like two friends, and you will have no cause for embarrassment.” He indicated that he did not know the reason for the arrest, and hoped it was all a misunderstanding. Roberto followed him in silence, formulating the same wish, and at the end of the journey, consigned with many apologies to a sleepy guard, he found himself in a cell of the Bastille.
He spent two very cold nights there, visited only by a few rats (a provident preparation for his voyage on the Amaryllis) and by a guard who to every question replied only that this place had housed so many illustrious guests that he had long since given up wondering why they had fetched up here; and considering that a great gentleman like Bassompierre had been here for seven years, it was not Roberto’s place to start complaining after a few hours.
Having left Roberto for those two days to anticipate the worst, on the third evening de Bar returned, arranged for him to wash, and announced that he was to appear before the Cardinal. Roberto understood at least that he was a prisoner of State.
They reached the palace late in the evening, and already from the stir at the door it was evident that this evening was exceptional. The stairs were crowded with people of every condition scurrying in opposite directions; gentlemen and ecclesiastics came into the antechamber, breathless, and politely expectorated against the frescoed walls, assuming a doleful expression, then entered another hall, from which members of the household emerged, in loud voices calling servants who could not be found and motioning all the others to be silent.
Roberto was also led into that hall, where he saw only people’s backs, while all peered in at the door of yet another room, on tiptoe, making not a sound, as if to witness some sad spectacle. De Bar looked around, apparently seeking someone; finally he motioned Roberto to remain in a corner, and went off.
Another guard was trying to make many of those present leave the room, his courtesy varying according to their rank; he saw Roberto unshaven, his clothing disheveled after his detention. When the guard asked him roughly what he was doing there, Roberto answered that the Cardinal was expecting him, to which the guard replied that the Cardinal, to everyone’s misfortune, was himself expected by Someone of far greater importance.
In any case, the man left Roberto where he was, and little by little, when de Bar (by now the only friendly face he knew) did not return, Roberto moved closer to the gathering, and after waiting a bit and then pushing a bit, he reached the threshold of the inner room.
There he saw and recognized, in a bed at the far end, resting on a snowbank of pillows, the shadow of the man that all France feared and very few loved. The great Cardinal was surrounded by doctors in black robes, who seemed to be interested chiefly in their own debate; an acolyte wiped the prelate’s lips as weak fits of coughing formed a reddish spume; under the covers you could see the painful respiration of a now exhausted body, one hand emerged from a nightshirt, clutching a crucifix. Suddenly a sob escaped the acolyte. Richelieu with effort turned his head, tried to smile, murmuring, “Did you believe I was immortal?”
As Roberto was asking himself who could possibly have summoned him to the bed of this dying man, there was a great confusion behind him. Some whispered the name of the pastor of Saint-Eustache, and as all stood aside, a priest entered with his suite, bearing the holy oil.
Roberto felt someone touch his shoulder; it was de Bar. “Come,” he said, “the Cardinal is awaiting you.” Bewildered, Roberto followed him along a corridor. De Bar led him into a room, signaling him again to wait, then withdrew.
The room was spacious, with a great globe in the center and a clock on a little table in one corner against red drapery. To the left of the drapery, under a full-length portrait of Richelieu, Roberto finally saw a man with his back to him, in cardinal’s robes, standing at a lectern and writing. The Cardinal moved his head slightly, motioning Roberto to approach, but as Roberto did so, the older man bent over the inclined board, placing his left hand as a screen along the margin of the page even though, at the respectful distance where Roberto still stood, he could have read nothing.
Then the personage turned, in an unfolding of purple, and stood for a few seconds erect, as if to reproduce the pose of the great portrait behind him, his right hand resting on the lectern, the left at his breast, affectedly, the palm held upwards. At last he sat on a stool beside the clock, coyly stroked his moustache and goatee, and asked, “Monsieur de la Grive?”
Monsieur de la Grive until this moment had been convinced he was dreaming, in a nightmare of this same Cardinal’s dying a dozen yards away, but now he saw him rejuvenated, with features less sharp, as if on the pale aristocratic face of the portrait someone had shadowed the complexion and re-drawn the lip with more defined and sinuous lines. Then that voice with the foreign accent wakened in him the long-forgotten memory of the captain who twelve years before had galloped between the opposing forces at Casale.
Roberto was facing Cardinal Mazarin, and he realized that slowly, during the death-agony of his protector, this man had been assuming his functions. Already the guard referred to “the” Cardinal, as if there were no longer any other.
Roberto was about to answer the question, but he soon became aware that the Cardinal only made a show of interrogating: actually he was asserting, and his interlocutor could only agree.
“Monsieur de la Grive,” the Cardinal, in fact, affirmed, “Lord Pozzo di San Patrizio. We know the castle, as we know the Monferrato region well. So fertile, it could even be France. Your father, in the days at Casale, fought with honor and was more loyal to us than others of your compatriots.” He said us as if at that time he was already the creature of the King of France. “You also acted bravely on that occasion, we are told. Will you believe, then, that we are all the more, and paternally, sorry that as a guest in this country you have not observed the rules of hospitality? Did you not know that in this kingdom laws are applied equally to citizens and to guests? Naturally, naturally we will not forget that a gentleman is always a gentleman, whatever crime he may have committed: you will enjoy the same advantages granted Cinq-Mars, whose memory you apparently do not execrate as you should. You will also die by the axe and not by the rope.”
Roberto could not be ignorant of a question that had all France talking.
The Marquis de Cinq-Mars had tried to convince the King to dismiss Richelieu, and Richelieu had convinced the King that Cinq-Mars was conspiring against the throne. In Lyons the condemned man attempted to behave with bold dignity before the executioner, but the latter made such an appalling mess of the victim’s neck that the indignant crowd had then massacred him.
As Roberto, aghast, was about to speak, the Cardinal forestalled him with a gesture. “Come now, San Patrizio,” he said, and Roberto inferred that this name was being used to remind him he was a foreigner; though the Cardinal was speaking to him in French when he could have spoken in Italian. “You have succumbed to the vices of this city and this country. As His Eminence the Cardinal is accustomed to saying, the innate frivolity of the French brings them to desire change because of the tedium caused by the present. Some of these light-minded gentlemen, whom the King has taken care to make still lighter by relieving them of their head, seduced you with their subversive propositions. Your case is not the sort that need disturb any tribunal.
The States, whose preservation is of necessity extremely dear to us, would quickly be ruined if in matters of crime that tend to
