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Then, there was that strange, suspicious coincidence: as Dulci­beni had recalled, Fouquet's last words were
"Ahi, dunque è pur vero"—
"Alas, so it is really true"—a verse from an aria by Maestro Luigi Rossi which I had one day heard Atto sing in the most heartbroken tones. "Alas, so it is really true... that you have changed your mind." Thus the verse ended, like an unambiguous act of accusation.

Again, I had heard those same words murmured when, almost drowning in the Cloaca Maxima, we in our turn came close to leaving this world. Why, even then, in the face of death, had that verse come to his lips?

With the eyes of fantasy, I imagined that I had traitorously taken the life of a dear friend, and tried to immerse myself in the guilt that would surely consume me after such an act. If I had heard my friend's last words, would they not perhaps resound forever in my ears, until they found an open echo in my mouth?

And when Dulcibeni had accused him, reproaching him with that heartbreaking, lamenting verse, I had heard Melani's voice break un­der the weight of guilt, whatever the cause of that guilt might be.

No longer was he the Atto Melani I had known; neither the same fascinating mentor, nor the same trusted leader. He was again Atto Melani, the castrato, whom I had come to know when I overheard the talk of Devize, Cristofano and Stilone Priaso: Abbot of Beaubec by the prerogative of the King of France, intriguer, liar, traitor, spy of exceptional skill; and perhaps an assassin, too.

I remembered then that the abbot had never given me a satisfac­tory explanation as to why, in his sleep, he had murmured the words
"barricades mysterieuses
": and I at last understood that he must have heard them repeated, without understanding their meaning, when he was shaking the dying Fouquet by the shoulders and—as Cristo­fano had reported—crying out questions which were destined to re­main forever unanswered.

In the end, I felt great pity for the abbot, deceived, as Dulcibeni had said, by his own King. By now I knew that Atto had omitted something from his account of his search through Colbert's study: he had shown to Louis XIV the letters which revealed Fouquet's pres­ence in Rome.

I was utterly at a loss to comprehend: how, how could he have had the nerve thus to betray his former benefactor? Perhaps Atto had wished once more to demonstrate his unfailing devotion to his Most Christian Majesty. It would be an important gesture: offering the King on a silver platter the man whose friendship had, some twenty years previously, condemned him to exile far from France. Yet, this had been a fatal error, and the King had repaid the faithful castrato with yet another betrayal. He had dispatched him to Rome precisely to assassinate Fouquet, without revealing to him the true reasons for that terrible command, or the abyss of death and hatred within his own heart. Who knows what absurd tale the King concocted, or what shameful lies he employed to besmirch once more the trampled hon­our of the old Superintendent.

During those last days which I spent in the Donzello, I was beset by the shameful image of Abbot Melani selling the life of his poor old friend to the Sovereign, and then knowing not how to avoid carrying out that cruel despot's atrocious commands.

How had he had the gall to act out for me the part of the broken­hearted friend? He must have needed to draw upon all his art as a theatrical castrato, so spoke my raging thoughts. Or perhaps those tears were real; but they were tears only of remorse.

I do not know whether Atto wept when, constrained by his Sovereign's commands, he was preparing his hasty departure for Rome in order to put an end to Fouquet's life, or whether he executed his orders like an obedient servant.

He must have been unnerved by the last weary words of the blind old Superintendent when he was dying by his hand; by those laboured phrases which babbled of mysterious barricades and obscure secrets, but perhaps even more by those opaque and honest eyes. He must then have understood that he was the victim of his King's lies.

Once the irremediable had taken place, he could but try to under­stand. That was why he had undertaken all those investigations, with my unwitting collaboration.

Soon, my thinking could take me no further. Nor could I escape from the throes of my disgust for Abbot Melani. I ceased to speak to him. With my reflections, the old trust between us had dissolved, and along with it, the familiarity which had so swiftly grown between us during those few days of life together at the Donzello.

Yet, no one more than he had been a master and an inspiration to me. I therefore strove to maintain, at least outwardly, the obliging solicitude to which I had accustomed him. From my eyes and voice, however, the light and warmth which only friendship can confer, had departed.

I observed the same transformation in him; now we were strangers to one another, and he knew it. Now that Dulcibeni was bedridden and all his plans had been foiled, Abbot Melani had no longer any foe to overcome, any ambush to set, any enigma to solve; and now that the imperatives of action had all fallen away, he no longer sought to justify himself in my eyes or to offer me explanations of his behaviour, as he had hitherto done in response to my repeated remonstrances. In the last few days, he had withdrawn into an embarrassed silence, one which only guilt could have erected around him.

Only once, one morning, while I was in the kitchen, preparing luncheon, did he take my arm and squeeze my hands in his. "Come to Paris with me. My house is spacious, I shall arrange for you to re­ceive the best instruction. You shall be my son," said he in grave and heartfelt tones.

I felt something in my hand; I opened it, and there were my three marguerites, the little Venetian pearls given to me by Brenozzi. I should have realised: he had stolen them from under my nose, that first time we visited the little closet, in order to induce me to take part in his investigations.

And now he was returning them to me, thus putting an end to his last deception. Was this perhaps an attempt at reconciliation?

I thought one moment, then decided: "You wish me to become your son?!" I exclaimed, with a cruel laugh for the castrato who could never have any.

And, opening my fist, I let the pearls fall to the floor.

That vain little act of revenge placed a tombstone on our rela­tions; with those three little pearls, there rolled away our pacts, our trust, our affection and all that had brought us so close in the past few days. It was all over.

All was not, however, resolved. Something was still missing from the picture which we had built up: what could be the real reason behind the atrocious hatred which Dulcibeni bore the Odescalchi and, in particular, Pope Innocent XI? A motive did indeed exist: the abduc­tion and disappearance of Dulcibeni's daughter. Yet, as Atto had cor­rectly noted, this did not seem to be the only motive.

It was when I was racking my brains over this question, a couple of days after the night of the Colosseum, that I received, blinding and unexpected, one of those rare insights which, like lightning bolts, illuminate one's life. (At the time of writing, I speak from experi­ence.)

Once again, I turned over in my memory what I had learned from the reconstruction which Abbot Melani had presented to Dulcibeni. The latter's twelve-year-old daughter, a slave of the Odescalchi, had been abducted and carried off to Holland by Huygens and Francesco Feroni, a slave merchant.

Where was Dulcibeni's daughter now? A slave in Holland, since Feroni's right-hand man had been besotted with her; or sold in some other land. I had, however, heard that some of the most beautiful slave girls did, sooner or later, succeed in gaining their freedom: by means of prostitution, obviously, which I knew to be a flourishing trade in those lands reclaimed from the sea.

What would she have looked like? If she were still alive, she would now be about nineteen years old. From her mother, whose skin was dark, she would certainly have inherited a similar complexion. It was difficult to imagine her face, without having known her mother's. She would surely have been ill-treated, imprisoned, beaten. Her body, I thought, must bear the signs of this.

"How did you know?" was Cloridia's only question.

"From your wrists—the scars on your wrists. And also, your talk of Holland, the Italian merchants whom you so abominate, the name of Feroni, the coffee which reminds you of your mother, your way of always asking after Dulcibeni, your age and the colour of your skin, your search with the divining rod, which brought you here. And then there was the Arcana of Justice, do you remember?: the reparation of past wrongs, of which you spoke to me. Lastly, the sneezes of Abbot Melani, who is sensitive to Dutch materials. And you and your father are the only persons to wear those in this hostelry."

Naturally, Cloridia was not satisfied with these explanations, and, in order to justify my intuition, I had to recount to her a great part of my adventures during the preceding days. Initially, she did not, of course, believe many of my revelations, despite the fact that I had omitted many events which I myself would have found fantastic or improbable.

Obviously, it was rather difficult to prove to her that her father had plotted an attempt on the life of the Pope, and of this she be­came convinced only a long time afterwards.

In the end, however, after lengthy and patient explanations, she believed in my good faith and in most of the facts with which I had acquainted her. The narration, interspersed with her many ques­tions, took almost a whole night, during the course of which we natu­rally paused at times to rest and, during those pauses, it was I who requested and she who instructed.

"And did he never suspect it?" I asked her at the end.

"Never, I am sure of that."

"Will you tell him?"

"At first, I wanted to do so," she replied after a brief silence. "I had sought him so long... But now I have changed my mind. In the first place, he would not believe me; and then, the news would not even make him happy. And then, you know, there is my mother: I cannot forget that."

"Then we two shall be the only ones to know," I observed.

"It will be better that way."

"That no one else should know?"

"No, better that you too should know," said she, caressing my head.

At this juncture, one last item of news was impatiently awaited, and not only by myself. The universal jubilation for the victory at Vienna filled the city with joyous festivities. Dulcibeni's efforts to destroy the True Religion in Europe had come too late. But, what of the Pope? Had Tiracorda's leeches already taken effect? Perhaps the author of the victory over the Turks was at that very moment tossing and turning feverishly under his blankets, stricken by the plague. We certainly would not have been able to know this then; certainly not from the prison of our chambers. Soon, however, we were to be overtaken by events which at long last freed us from our imprisonment.

I have already had cause to mention that, in the days before the beginning of the quarantine, strong reverberations had been heard, coming from the ground under the inn, and immediately afterwards Master Pellegrino had discovered a fissure in the wall of the staircase on the first floor. The phenomenon had, of course, given rise to no lit­tle concern; but that had, however, been overshadowed by the death of Fouquet, the imposition of the quarantine and many successive events. However, Stilone Priaso's astrological almanack had, as I had been able to read with my own eyes, predicted for those days "earth­quakes and subterranean fires". If this had been a mere coincidence, it seemed designed to perturb even the calmest of spirits.

The memory of those subterranean rumblings still instilled a cer­tain disquiet in my soul, made all the greater by the crack in the staircase which—I could not decide whether this was the work of my imagination—seemed every day to grow longer and deeper.

It was perhaps because of that state of anxiety that, on the night of the 24th and 25th September, I awoke in the small hours. I opened my eyes, finding my dark, damp chamber even narrower and more suffocating than usual. What had disturbed me? I had no need to relieve my bladder, nor had I been awoken by some loud noise. No: it was a sinister, diffuse creaking, coming from I knew not where. It was like the groan of pebbles grinding against each other, as though they were being slowly crushed by a gigantic millstone.

Thought and action were one: I flung open my door and rushed into the corridor, then down to the lower floors, yelling at the top of my voice. The inn was about to collapse.

Cristofano, with praiseworthy presence of mind, at once warned the night watchman, so that he should let us escape to the safety of the street. The evacuation of the Donzello, observed with a mixture of curiosity and unease by some neighbours who had at once rushed to their windows, was neither easy nor devoid of perils. The creak­ing came from the stairs, where the fissure had, in the space of a few hours, grown into a chasm. As usual, it required the courage of a few (Atto Melani, Cristofano and myself) to bear the helpless Dulcibeni to safety. The convalescent Bedfordi managed on his own. Thus, too, my master, although confused, found the usual presence of mind to utter imprecations against his misfortune. Once we were all outside, it seemed almost as though the peril had ceased. It would not, how­ever, have been wise to return, and that was emphasised by the noise of a great fall of rubble within. Cristofano consulted closely with the watchman.