History was, however, kinder to Buvat than to Atto; while Abbot Melani was consigned to oblivion, Buvat had a notable part in
Le Chevalier d'Harmentel
by Alexandre Dumas, Pere.
Atto and Fouquet
I found a brief biography of Atto (Archivio di Stato di Firenze,
Fondo Tordin.
350) p. 62) written a few years after his death by his nephew Luigi, from whom we learn that he really was a friend of Fouquet, as we read in the apprentice's memoir. Indeed, according to Atto's nephew, the Superintendent corresponded copiously with Abbot Melani. Of that correspondence, to tell the truth, no trace has ever been found.
What, then, were Atto's real relations with the Superintendent?
When Fouquet was arrested, Atto was in Rome. As was mentioned in the apprentice's memoir, he had fled from the wrath of the Due de la Meilleraye, Mazarin's powerful heir, who had seen the castrato poke his nose into his house too often and had asked the King to exile him. In Paris, however, it was rumoured that he was involved in the Fouquet scandal.
From Rome, in the autumn of 1661, Atto wrote to Hugues de Lionne, Minister of Louis XIV It is a heartfelt letter (traced by me in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris,
Correspondance politique,
Rome (142), pp. 227 et seq.; the original being in French), in which the tormented syntax and the spelling mistakes reveal the depth of his anxiety:
Rome, on the last day of October, 1661
You tell me that there is no Remedie for my Sicknesse and that the King is still irritated with me.
To write this to me is to notify me that I am under Sentence of Death, and you have been inhuman, knowing my Innocence as you do, not in some Way to have gilded the Pill, for you are not unaware of how much I adore the King, or of the Passion which I have always had to serve him as he should be served.
Had God wished that I should not have loved him so and that I should have been more attached to Monsieur Fouquet: at least I would be justly punished for a Crime which I had committed, and I should not lament for myself. Now, however, I am the most wretched young Man in the World, nor shall I ever be able to console myself, for I do not consider the King as a great Prince, but as a Person for whom I experienced the transports of a Love as great as a Human Person can know. I aspired only duteously to serve him and well to merit his goode Graces, without in any way thinking of the least Rewarde, and I can tell you that I would not have remayned so long in France, even during the Lifetime of the Lord Cardinall [Mazarin], were it not for the Love which I bore the King.
My Soul is not strong enough to bear so great a Misfortune.
I dare not compleyn, not knowing to whom to impute such a Disgrace, and even if it seems to me that the King does me a great Injustice, yet I cannot so muche as murmur, since he was right to be surprised that I had an exchange of Correspondence with Monsieur le Surintendant.
He had due Cause to believe me to be a perfidious and wicked Person, seeing that I sent to Monsieur Fouquet the Drafts of Letters which I addressed to His Majesty. He is right to condemn my Conduct and the Terms of which I employ
[sic]
when writing to Monsieur Fouquet.
If, my poor Monsieur de Lionne, the King has treated me justly, declaring that he is displeased with me, because the Hande that
has betrayed all his Letters deserves to be cut off, yet my Heart is innocent, and my Soul has committed no Errour: they have ever been faithfull to the King, and if the King would be just, he must condemn the one, and absolve the others; for the extreme Love which my Heart has borne the King has led my Hande to err. It has erred because I have felt to Excesse the Desire to return close to him; and because, in my Tyme of Need, abandoned by all, I believed the Surintendant to be the beste and most faithfull Minister of the King, who manifested his Goodnesse to him more than to any Other.
These are the four Motives which led me thus to write to Monsieur Fouquet, and there is not a single Worde in my Letteres that I cannot justify, and if the King would condescend to have the Goodnesse to grant me that Grace, which has never been refused to any Criminel, please have all my Letters examined, and may I be put to the Question, may I go to Prisoun, even before replying, so as to be punished, or to be pardoned, if such are my Desarts.
Nothing will be found in the Letteres which I have written to Monsieur Fouquet, except that I wrote to him at the Tyme when I fell in Disgrace, which prooves that I did not know him before that.
Those Accounts will not be found to shewe that he made any Summe of Monnaye over to me, or that I was one of those who received a Pension from him.
By Means of some of his Letteres, I can well prove the Truth of all that he wrote me, and that he, knowing the Reasoun which led me to write to him, told me (whether truthfully or in Flatterie) that he would emploie his goode Offices with the King and that he wished to take Care of my Interests.
And here is a Copie of the last Lettere, the only one which I have received since my arrival in Rome. Should you desire the Originall, you have but to tell me...
Atto confessed then that, when he wrote to the King, he passed the draft of his letters to the Superintendent! These were letters from an agent of France, and they were addressed to the Sovereign himself: a mortal sin.
Atto, however, denied that he had done this for money: he had contacted Fouquet only after falling in disgrace, in other words when the ire of the Due de la Meilleraye exploded and he needed a place to hide (just as Devize recounted in the apprentice's memoir).
In proof of what he claimed, Atto sent a copy of the letter which Fouquet had written to him. It is a moving document: the Superintendent wrote to the castrato on 27th August, 1661, only a few days before his arrest. This is one of the last letters that he wrote as a free man.
Fontainebleau, 27th August, 1661
I have received your letter of the first of this month, together with that from Cardinal N.
I would have written to you earlier, if I had not had a fever which kept me in bed for two weeks and which left me only yesterday.
I am preparing to leave the day after tomorrow to accompany the King to Britanny, and I shall endeavour so to arrange matters that the Italians do not intercept our letters again; I shall speak of this to Monsieur de Neveaux as soon as I arrive in Nantes.
Do not worry about your interests, since I am taking special care of them, and although in the past few days my indisposition has prevented me from conversing with the King as usual, I have not failed to bear witness to him of your zeal in his service, and he is well pleased about that.
This letter will be delivered to you by Monsieur l'Abbe de Crecy, whom you can trust. I have read with pleasure what you communicate to me on behalf of Cardinal N., and I beg you to tell him that there is nothing that I would not do to serve him. I also beg you to be so kind as to present my compliments to Madame N.; I always honour her perfectly and am completely at her service.
The confusion in which I now find myself on the eve of so important a journey prevents me from replying in greater detail to all the content of your letter. Send me a memorandum of what is owed to you of your pension and you may be sure that I shall fail in nothing to demonstrate to you the esteem in which I hold you and how much I desire to serve you.
If Fouquet really wrote thus to Atto (the original, if it existed, has been lost) it was not a brilliant idea to try to disculpate himself by showing these lines to the King. What took place between the castrato and the Superintendent was too ambiguous, the climate surrounding them too charged with suspicions: intercepted letters, confidential mail, a Cardinal N. (perhaps Rospigliosi, Atto's friend?) and a mysterious Madame N. (perhaps Maria Mancini, Mazarin's niece, the King's former mistress who may also have been in Rome at that time?)
But above all, the ballet which Atto and Fouquet danced around the King drew suspicion. The first passed his own correspondence with Louis XIV secretly to the second, who in his turn recommended his friend to the Sovereign. And then, there was that pension with which Fouquet promised to help Atto...Despite the scandal in which he found himself involved, Fouquet did not betray his friend. During his trial, when he was asked about their relations, Fouquet replied evasively, thus succeeding in saving Atto from prison; I have found full confirmation of this in the minutes of the trial, exactly as Devize told the guests of the Donzello.
Atto Melani's last years
In his last years, the castrato Melani must have been weighed down by solitude. That perhaps explains why he spent the last part of his life at his house in Paris, with two nephews, Leopoldo and Domenico. So it may well be true that, as the apprentice of the Donzello says in his manuscript, he had offered to take him with him.
On his deathbed, Atto ordered that all his papers were to be packed and taken to the house of a trusted friend. He knew that during his agony, his house would be full of curious bystanders and profiteers, hungry to find out his secrets. And perhaps he was thinking back to the time, as he told the apprentice-boy, of his own trespassing in the study of the less far-sighted Colbert.
The initial dedication
Rita and Francesco told me that they had found the apprentice's memoirs among Atto's papers. Now, how had they ended up there? To understand that, we must read attentively the mysterious initial dedication, the anonymous letter, without sender or addressee, which precedes the apprentice's tale:
Sir,
in conveying to you these Memoirs which I have at last recover'd, I dare hope that Your Excellency will recognise in my Efforts to comply with your Wishes that Excess of Passion and of Love which has ever been the cause of my Felicity, whenever I have had Occasion to bear Witness thereof to Your Excellency.
In the last pages of his account, the apprentice, consumed by remorse, writes to Atto, again offering him his friendship. However, he lets slip the fact that he had kept a diary, and had subsequently compiled a detailed memoir of what had taken place at the inn.
The apprentice says that Atto never replied, and he even fears for the latter's life. We, however, know that the sly abbot made good his escape and lived for many years afterwards. He must, therefore, have received that letter. I can even imagine the first instant of pleasure registering on his face when he read those lines, followed by fear; and then, by resolve: he charged some faithful miscreant to go to Rome and filch the apprentice's memoir before it fell into the wrong hands. Those pages revealed too many secrets and accused him of the most horrendous crimes.
The anonymous dedication will, then, have been written to Atto by his ruffian, once the latter had fulfilled his task. That explains why Rita and Francesco said to me that they had found the apprentice's memoir among Melani's papers.
Did Atto and the apprentice ever meet again? Perhaps, one day, Abbot Melani, seized by nostalgia, may have suddenly ordered his
valet de chambre
to fill his travelling trunks, as he must set out urgently for the court of Rome...
Innocent XI & William of Orange:
Documents
History in need of rewriting
The liberation of Vienna in 1683, the religious disputes between France and the Holy See, the conquest of England by William of Orange in 1688 and the end of English Catholicism, the political isolation of Louis XIV in the face of the other powers, the entire European political picture in the second half of the seventeenth century and during the decades that followed: a whole chapter of European history will need rewriting in light of the documents which reveal the secret manoeuvrings of Pope Innocent XI and the Odescalchi family. But to do that will mean raising a curtain of silence, hypocrisy and lies.
The historian Charles Gerin
(Revue des questions historiques,
XX, 1876, p. 428) points out that, when in 1689 Louis XIV and James II asked Innocent XI to stem the financial aid being sent to the Habsburgs (who were continuing to push back the Turks) and to send money urgently for the Catholic troops of the Stuart king, fighting in Ireland against the heretical forces of William of Orange, the Pope responded with phrases whose full significance can only be appreciated today. He explains that in Vienna he is fighting "a perpetual crusade" in which he, like his predecessors, has taken "a personal part". He is furnishing the allies with "his own galleys, his own soldiers and his own money" and defending, not only the integrity of Christian Europe, but "his particular interests as a temporal Sovereign and an Italian Prince". After the landing of the Prince of Orange, Innocent XI betrayed himself with a revealing phrase, reported by Leopold von Ranke (
Englische Geschichte, vornehtnlich im Siebzehnten Jahrhundert
, Vol. Ill, Leipzig, 1870. p. 201.):
Salus ex inimicis nostris
, salvation comes from our enemies.