When he received from the English the assignment to return to Spain to gather further declarations from priests prepared to slander the Holy See, Ferrante encountered in a tavern of the port a Genoese traveler. Gaining his confidence, he soon discovered that the man was actually one Mahmut, a renegade who in the East had embraced the faith of the Mohammedans, but, disguised as a Portuguese merchant, was collecting information about the English navy, while other spies in the hire of the Sublime Porte were doing the same in France.
Ferrante avowed that he had worked for Turkish agents in Italy and had embraced the same religion, assuming the name of Dgennet Oglou. He immediately sold his new acquaintance his news of movements in the English ports, and was given a sum to take a message to Mahmut’s brothers in France. The English ecclesiastics believed he had already set out for Spain, but he was unwilling to reject a chance to earn more from his stay in England. So, getting in touch with men of the Admiralty, he described himself as a Venetian, Messer Scampi (a name he invented, recalling Captain Gambero), who had performed secret duties for the Council of that Republic, with particular reference to the plans of the French merchant marine. Now, banished as a consequence of a duel, he had to seek refuge in a friendly country. To show his good faith, he was able to inform his new masters that France had obtained information on the English ports through Mahmut, a Turkish spy now living in London disguised as a Portuguese.
In the possession of Mahmut, promptly arrested, notes on the English ports were duly discovered, and thus Ferrante or, rather, Scampi, was judged reliable. Promised a situation in England and blessed with a good initial sum, he was sent to France to join other English agents there.
On arriving in Paris, he immediately passed on to Richelieu some of the information the English had taken from Mahmut. Then he found the friends whose addresses the Genoese renegade had given him, and he presented himself as Charles de la Bresche, a former monk who had gone over to the service of the crescent and had just arranged in London a plot to cast discredit on the whole breed of Christians. Those agents gave him credence, because they had already learned of a pamphlet in which the Anglican Church had published the malefactions of a Spanish priest—and in Madrid, when the news reached there, they arrested the prelate to whom Ferrante had attributed his treason, and now the man was awaiting death in the dungeons of the Inquisition.
Ferrante persuaded the Turkish agents to confide in him the information they had gathered about France, and he sent it straightaway to the English Admiralty, receiving further payment. Then he returned to Richelieu and revealed to him the existence in Paris of a Turkish plot. Once again Richelieu admired Ferrante’s skill and loyalty. And he invited him to undertake a task still more arduous.
For some time the Cardinal had been concerned about activities in the salon of the marquise de Rambouillet, and he had been seized by the suspicion that among those free spirits there was murmuring against him. He first made the mistake of sending to La Rambouillet a faithful courtier of his, who foolishly made enquiries about possible sedition. Arthénice replied that her guests were so familiar with her regard for His Eminence that even if they had misgivings about him, they would never dare speak anything but the greatest good of him in her presence.
Richelieu now planned to have a foreigner appear in Paris, one who could gain admittance to those consistories. Now Roberto had no desire to invent all the cabals by which Ferrante achieved an introduction to that salon, but he found it proper to have him arrive there forearmed with some recommendation, and in disguise: a wig and a white beard, a face aged with pomades and tinctures, a black patch over the left eye—and voilà, the Abbé de Morfi.
Roberto could not think that Ferrante, in every way similar to him, had been at his side on those now distant evenings, but he remembered seeing an elderly abbé with a black patch on his eye, and he decided that the old man must have been Ferrante.
So in that world—and after ten or more years—he had found Roberto again! It is impossible to express the joyous rancor with which the deceiver rediscovered his hated brother. With a face that would have seemed transfigured and overwhelmed by malevolence had it not been hidden beneath his disguise, Ferrante told himself that at last he had the opportunity to annihilate Roberto, and to take possession of his name and his wealth.
First, he spied on him, for weeks and weeks in the course of those evenings, studying that face to catch in it the trace of every thought. Accustomed as he was to concealing, he was also very skilled at discovering. For that matter, love cannot be hidden: like any fire, it is revealed by smoke. Following Roberto’s glances, Ferrante immediately understood that he loved the Lady. He then told himself that his first step would be to take from Roberto what he held most dear.
Ferrante noticed that Roberto, after attracting the attention of the Lady with his talk, lacked the courage to approach her. His brother’s shyness served the spy’s purposes: the Lady could easily interpret it as indifference, and to scorn affection is the most effective way to extinguish it. Roberto was clearing the path for Ferrante. Ferrante allowed the Lady to suffer in uncertain expectation, then—calculating the right moment—he set himself to flatter her.
But could Roberto allow Ferrante a love equal to his own? Certainly not. Ferrante considered woman the portrait of inconstancy, minister of fraud, fickle in speech, belated in action, and quick in caprice. Educated by would-be ascetics who never ceased reminding him that El hombre es el fuego, la mujer la estopa, viene el diablo y sopla, he was accustomed to considering every daughter of Eve an imperfect animal, an error of Nature, a torture for the eyes if ugly, a suffering of the heart if beautiful, tyrant of any who loved her, enemy of any who scorned her, disordered in her desires, implacable in her dislikes, capable of enchanting with the mouth and enchaining with the eyes.
But it was this very disdain that impelled him to entrap; from his lips came words of adulation, but in his heart he was celebrating the degradation of his victim.
Ferrante was thus preparing to lay his hands on that body that Roberto had not dared graze with his thoughts. Was he, despiser of everything that for Roberto was object of devotion, ready—now—to steal Lilia and make her the insipid ingénue of his comedy? What torture. And what painful duty, to follow the insane logic of Romances, which imposes participation in the most odious affects, for you must conceive as the children of your own imagination the most odious of protagonists.
But there was nothing to be done. Ferrante would have Lilia—otherwise why create a fiction, if not to die of it?
What happened and how, Roberto could not picture (nor was he ever tempted to try). Perhaps Ferrante late one night stole into Lilia’s chamber, clinging to some ivy (whose tenacious embrace is a nocturnal invitation to every loving heart) that climbed up to her window.
There is Lilia, showing signs of outraged virtue, to such a degree that anyone would be convinced of her indignation, anyone except a man like Ferrante, ready to believe the readiness of all human beings to betray. And here is Ferrante, sinking to his knees before her and speaking. What does he say? He says, in a false voice, everything that Roberto would not only have liked to say to her but has said, without her knowing that he said it.
How can the villain have managed—Roberto asked himself—to learn the tenor of the letters I sent her? And further, of the letters Saint-Savin dictated to me at Casale, which I later destroyed. And even the letters I am writing now, on this ship. And yet there is no doubt, Ferrante is declaiming in sincere tones sentences Roberto knew very well:
“My Lady, in the wondrous architecture of the Universe it has been written since the first day of Creation that I would encounter you and love you…. Forgive the raving of a desperate man, or, better, pay no heed to it; it was never said that sovereigns had to justify the death of their slaves…. Have you not made of my eyes two alembics, the better to distill my life and convert it into limpid water? I beseech you, do not turn your lovely head away: bereft of your gaze, I am blind, for you do not see me, deprived of your word, I am mute, for you do not speak to me, and I shall be without memory if you do not remember me…. Oh, let love at least make of me an insensible shard, a mandrake, a fountain of stone that weeps away every anguish!”
The Lady now surely trembled, in her eyes burned all the love she had formerly concealed, burned with the strength of a prisoner whose bars of Reserve someone has broken, offering the silken ladder of Opportunity.
Ferrante had only to press on, and he did not confine himself to saying what Roberto had written; he
