Imprimatur

Addendum

Dear Alessio,

You will at last have completed your reading of my two old friends' opus. It will now be up to you to take the final step that will place it in the hands of the Holy Father. While consigning these lines to paper, I pray that the Holy Spirit may inspire your reading and the decision to which it gives rise.

Almost forty years have passed since I received by post the typescript narrating the tale of the Donzello and its dwarf apprentice. Obviously, my first thought was that here was a work in which fantasy was predominant. True, the two authors had (or so they said) drawn upon a historical document: the unpublished memoir of an apprentice, dating back to 1699. I knew moreover, as a priest and a scholar, that the text was correct in regard to Abbot Morandi and Tommaso Campanella, the Jansenists and the Jesuits, the ancient Societas Orationis et Mortis, as well as the no longer existent monastery of the Celestines, and even the bizarre beliefs circulating in the seventeenth century concerning Confession and Extreme Unction. Finally, the many examples of lexical licence and a certain cavalier handling of Latin quotations all point indisputably to the language in use in the seventeenth century.

Indeed, the characters often indulge in all the linguistic and terminological excesses of the writers of baroque treatises, including their heavy pomposity.

Apart, however, from those few points, what was in fact freely invented? Doubt was unavoidable; and not only because of the audacious and at times bewilderingly sensational character of the plot, but the very representation of the two protagonists, who-as I have already mentioned-resemble all too closely the traditional duo of investigators comprising Sherlock Holmes and his assistant and narrator, Watson; not to mention Agatha Christie's Poirot and Hastings, all of whom likewise show a preference for investigating in enclosed spaces (trains, ships, islands): just like the Locanda del Donzello…

Do we not also find in the seventeenth-century memoirs of Lazarillo de Tormes an analogous teacher-and-pupil couple, an old man and a young one? And what are we to say then of Dante and his "maestro e duca” Virgil, who guides and instructs him in infernal galleries all too like the subterranean tunnels beneath the Donzello?

I therefore assumed that 1 had before me a Bildungsroman, to employ the terminology of literary experts, among whom I certainly cannot be numbered: in other words, a novel which instructs; in this instance, written in the form of a memoir. Is it not perhaps true that the ingenuous apprentice becomes an adult in the course of the nights spent underground following Abbot Melani and his teachings?

Be that as it may, I soon realized that such considerations did not answer the question: who was the author of this text? My two friends, or the apprentice himself? Or both? And, if so, in what proportions?

For as long as the presumed models that I found remained distant in time, I was completely unable to reach any conclusion. What point was there in obstinately referring back to the fact that in the work of Aretino or, better, in Boccaccio's Decameron, the narrative is divided up into days, and, above all-just as in the Donzello-the characters are held in captivity because of the plague and, in order to while the time away, tell each other the most varied tales? Might that not be the model present in the mind of our unknown apprentice?

"Books always speak of other books and every story tells a tale which has already been told": so I concluded, to quote someone whose name I forget. I therefore desisted from such wild-goose chases.

There were, however, a number of blatant borrowings which cast far deeper doubts upon the authenticity of the entire text: for example, one of the tirades in which Pompeo Dulcibeni rails against crowned heads, accusing them of opportunism and incest, was lifted in part, without a by-your-leave, from a famous speech by Robespierre, to which the authors themselves jokingly referred by leaving Dulcibeni on his bed "sans culotte".

Finally, the text contains no few excesses, such as the eccentric figures of Ugonio and Ciacconio: modelled on the archetype of the tomb- robbers or tombaroli, those predators of antiquities who still infest our land to this day; like the other corpisantari Baronio and Gallonio, they take their names from famous seventeenth-century scholars and explorers of the catacombs. Not to mention the courtesan Cloridia who, when listening to and interpreting the apprentice-boy's dreams, has him lie down on her bed and sits behind his head, obviously in anachronistic imitation of the psychoanalyst's typical posture.

Even the malevolent representation of the personage of Pope Innocent XI seemed to me no more than a clumsy attempt to upset historical reality. As a good citizen of Como, I was of course well acquainted with the figure and the work of this Pope and fellow-citizen. Likewise, I was aware of the malign comments and calumnies which-even during his lifetime-were spread concerning him, for obvious purposes of political propaganda, and which Padre Robleda so foolishly divulged to the young apprentice. Such insinuations had, however, been amply disproved by the most serious historians. To take one example, Papasogli had penned an excellent though weighty monograph of over three hundred pages on the Blessed Innocent XI. Published nearly a century ago, in the 1950s, this work had done much to cleanse his memory of all deceit. Even before that, Pastor, that giant among Church historians, had cleared away many suspicions.

Nor was this the only improbability: there was also the story of Superintendent Fouquet.

In the apprentice's tale, Fouquet dies in the Locanda del Donzello, poisoned byAtto Melani on 11th September, 1683; yet, even in school text-books we read that the Superintendent died in the fortress of Pinerol in 1680, and not in Rome in 1683! A number of fanciful historians and novelists have, it is true, put forward the hypothesis that Fouquet did not die in prison, and the question is too old and too worn for me to need repeat it here. Voltaire, who was able to speak with the Superintendent's still surviving relatives, held that we shall never know with certainty when or where he died. Yet it really did seem to me excessive to affirm, as I had read in the opus sent to me by my two old friends, that Fouquet died in Rome, in a hostelry, assassinated on the orders of Louis XIV

Here, I had found something that simply could not hold water, a mere manipulation of history. I was at that point close to consigning the typescript to the waste-paper basket. Had I not found the proof that it was a forgery? I was soon, however, to discover that matters were not quite so simple.

Everything began to become more and more unclear when I decided to study the figure of Fouquet in depth. For centuries, the Superintendent has been held up by history books as the veritable prototype of the venial and corrupt minister. Colbert, on the contrary, passes for a model statesman. According to Atto Melani, however, the honest Fouquet was an innocent victim of the envy and hostility of the mediocre Colbert. At first, I ascribed that surprising reversal to pure fantasy, all the more so in that I found in the text echoes of an old novel about Fouquet by Paul Morand. I was, however, soon to revise my beliefs. I found in a library an authoritative essay penned by the French historian, Daniel Dessert, who, a century ago-documents in hand- spoke out to restore Fouquet's merited glory and to unmask the baseness and conspiracies of Colbert. In his admirable essay, Dessert set out point by point (and proved unequivocally) all that Atto told the young man in defence of the Superintendent.

Unfortunately, as so often happens to those who call hoary old myths into question, the precious work of Dessert was consigned to oblivion by the consortium of historians, whom Dessert had made so bold as to accuse of laziness and ignorance. It is, nevertheless, significant that no historian has ever had the courage to disprove his weighty and impassioned study.

Thus, the dramatic case of Fouquet, as evoked with such feeling by Abbot Melani, was anything but a mere narrative invention. Not only that: continuing my library research, I also verified the acquaintance between Kircher and Fouquet which, although not clearly documented, is quite probable, given the fact that the Jesuit (Anatole France mentions this in his opuscule on Fouquet, and it is partially borne out in Kircher's writings) really was interested in the Superintendent's mummies.

Even the thoroughly mysterious tale of Fouquet's sequestration at Pinerol, as I have scrupulously verified, is authentic in every detail. The Sun King really did seem to be holding the Superintendent in prison for fear of what he knew; yet it has never been discovered what that might have been. The ambiguous Comte de Lauzun is also faithfully represented, he who for ten years was imprisoned at Pinerol, where he succeeded in communicating secretly (and quite inexplicably) with Fouquet and was released immediately after the Superintendent's demise.

The book did, then, contain a number of solid and well-documented references to historical reality.

"Now, what if it were all true?" I found myself thinking, as I turned the pages of this disturbing typescript.

At that juncture, I was unable to restrain myself from undertaking a number of other library searches, in the hope of uncovering some gross error which might demonstrate the falseness of my two friends' writings, and which might enable me to be free of the question. I must confess, I was afraid.

Alas, my suppressed fears were borne out. With unimaginable rapidity, bursting out from dictionaries, encyclopaedias and contemporary manuals, there emerged before my eyes-exactly as I had read in the typescript-descriptions of Rome, quarantine measures, all the theories concerning the plague, both in London and in Rome, Cristofano's remedies and the apprentice's menus; and similarly with Louis XIV, Maria Teresa, the Venetian mirror-makers, even down to Tiracorda's riddles and the plan of the underground galleries in the Holy City.

My head was in a whirl of thoughts about the divining rod, the interpretation of dreams, numerological and astrological doctrines, the saga of mamacoca (i.e. coca); and lastly, the battle for Vienna, including the secrets of French siege technique which the Turks had so mysteriously acquired, as well as the mystery of the strategic errors which led to the Infidels' ruinous defeat.

In the Casanatense Library in Rome, still incredulous before an original page from the Bible printed by Komarek, I gave myself up for lost: all that I had read proved stupefyingly authentic, down to the most insignificant details.

Albeit unwillingly, I found myself bound to continue. Instead of errors, I had found proven facts and circumstances. I was beginning to feel myself the victim of an astute trap, an evil system of wheels within wheels, a spider's web in which, the further one penetrates, the more one is ensnared.

I therefore decided to look into the theories of Kircher: I already knew quite a few things about his life and writings, but I had never heard either of the secretum pestis or indeed of the supposed secretum vitae capable of dispelling the plague, let alone of a rondeau in which its secret was encrypted. It is true that I had, like Padre Robleda, read Kircher's Magnes, sive de arte magnetica, in which the German Jesuit claims that music has therapeutic powers and even recommends the use of a melody composed by himself as an antidote for the bite of the tarantula. I also knew that in modern times Kircher had been labelled a charlatan: in his treatise on the plague, for example, he claimed that he had seen the bacilli of the disease under the microscope. Yet, the historians object, in Kircher's time, there did not exist sufficiently powerful magnifying lenses. So, was it all invented?

If that were the case, I would need to assemble all the necessary proofs. In the first place, I clarified my ideas about the disease known as the plague: this is the bubonic plague, caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis which is transmitted by fleas to rats, and by the latter to man. It has nothing to do with the various animal plagues, or with the so-called pulmonary plague which from time to time strikes in the Third World.

The surprise came when I read that bubonic plague has not existed for centuries, nor does anyone know why.

I even found myself smiling when I read that in Europe (and even earlier in Italy) the plague practically disappeared at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, almost contemporaneously with the events at the Donzello. I was expecting that.

Many theories exist about its mysterious disappearance, yet none is definitive. Some see in this a consequence of more advanced measures of sanitation adopted by mankind; others, however, think that we must thank the arrival in Europe of Rattus norvegicus (the brown rat) which supplanted Rattus rattus (the black rat), which is host to Xenopsilla cheopis, the flea that acts as carrier of the plague bacillus. Others attribute the merit to new brick and tile buildings, replacing those built of timber and straw, or to the removal of domestic granaries, which drove rats from housing. Yet others insist upon the role played by pseudo-tuberculosis, a benign illness which has the effect of giving immunity to bubonic plague.

From academic discussions, however, only one thing emerges with certainty: between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europe was mysteriously freed of its most ancient scourge, just as Kircher had promised to bring this about by applying his secrets.

The coincidences grew even thicker when I thought of the enigma of the "Barricades Mysterieuses", the rondeau which seems to be the casket enclosing the secretum vitae, just as Kircher's tarantella contains the antidote to the bite of the tarantula. But it was at this juncture that, may the Lord pardon me, I had the secret satisfaction of at last discovering a fatal historical error.

I needed only to leaf through any old musical dictionary to learn that the "Barricades Mysterieuses" was not the work of the scarcely known guitarist and composer Francesco Corbetta, as stated in the text of my two friends, but was written by Francois Couperin, the celebrated French composer and harpsichordist, who was born in 1668 and died in 1733. The rondeau is taken from the first book of his Pieces de Clavecin, it was, thus, written for the harpsichord, and not the guitar. Most importantly, it was first published only in 1713: thirty years after the events which are supposed to have taken place in the Locanda del Donzello. The anachronism committed by the two young writers was serious enough to deprive their work of any claim to authenticity, let alone verisimilitude.

Once I had discovered that grave and unexpected inconsistency, it seemed useless to confute the rest of that ingenious narrative. How could a text containing so serious an error possibly threaten the glorious memory of the Blessed Innocent XI?

For some time, in moments of ease at the day's end, I would skim lazily through the typescript, and my thoughts would go out more to the two writers of those pages than to the contents of the story. This disturbing tale, full of poisonous gossip concerning the Pope my countryman, seemed to me an open provocation, even a bad joke. In my soul, there prevailed that distaste and natural mistrust which, I must confess, I have always felt for journalists.

The years passed. By now, I had almost forgotten my two old friends, and with them the typescript which lay buried in an old chest. In an excess of prudence, I had, however, kept it well hidden from the prying eyes of strangers, who might have read it without being armed with the requisite counter-poisons.

I could not yet know how wise that precaution would prove to be.

Three years ago, when I was informed that His Holiness wished to reopen the process of canonisation of Pope Innocent XI, I could not so much as remember where that pile of faded yellow papers might be. Yet it was soon to knock again at my door.

It happened in Como, one damp November evening. Following the pressing insistence of some friends, I was present at a concert organised by an excellent musical association in my diocese. Towards the end of the first half, the nephew of an old companion from my student days played the piano. It had been a hard day and I had, until then, participated rather distractedly in the evening's proceedings. Suddenly, however, an insinuating and ineffable motif attracted me as no music ever had. It was a dance, baroque in style, but with dreaming accents and harmonies which undulated back and forth from Scarlatti to Debussy, from Franck back to Rameau. I have always been a lover of good music and am the proud possessor of a not inconsiderable record collection. If, however, I had been asked from which century those timeless notes came, I would not have known how to answer.

Only at the end of the piece did I open the programme, which I had forgotten on my knees, and read the title of the music: "Les Barricades Mysterieuses".

Once again, the apprentice-boy's account had not lied. That music had an incomparable power to enchant, to confound, unaccountably to fascinate the heart and the mind. After listening, the memory could not shake itself loose. I was not surprised that the young man should have been so perturbed by it, or that, years later, he still continued to turn that motif over in his memory. The mystery of the secretum vitae was wrapped within another mystery.

This was not in itself enough to enable me to say that all the rest was true, but it was too much for me to resist the temptation to continue to the bitter end.

The morning after, I acquired a costly complete recording of Couperin's many Pieces de Clavecin. After listening to it most attentively for days and days, the conclusion seemed evident: no music of Couperin's resembled the "Barricades Mysterieuses". I consulted dictionaries, I read monographs. The few critics who mentioned it all agreed that Couperin had composed nothing else like it. The dances from Couperin's suites almost all have a descriptive title: "Les Sentiments", "La Lugubre", "L’Ame-en-peine", "La Voluptueuse", and so on. There are also titles like "La Raphaele", "L’Angelique", "La Milordine" or "La Castellane": each alluded to some lady who was well-known at court and whom contemporaries would amuse themselves recognizing in the music. Only for the "Barricades Mysterieuses" did no explanation exist. A musicologist defined the piece as "truly mysterious".

It was as though it were someone else's work. But then, whose could it be? Full of bold dissonances, of languishing, distilled harmonies, the "Barricades" are too far removed from the sober style of Couperin. In an ingenious interplay of echoes, both anticipated and delayed, the four voices of the polyphony merge in the delicate clockwork of an arpeggio. This is the style brise, which the harpsichordists had copied from the lute players. And the lute is the closest relative of the guitar…

I began to admit the hypothesis that "Les Barricades Mysterieuses" might really have been written by Corbetta, as the apprentice-boy had said. But why then had Couperin published it under his own name? And how had it come into his hands?

According to the manuscript, the author of the rondeau was the obscure Italian musician Francesco Corbetta. It all seemed to be a pure invention: the idea had never entered any musicologist's mind. There was, however, an interesting precedent: even when Corbetta was still living, controversies broke out as to the authorship of some of his pieces. Corbetta himself accused one of his pupils of stealing some of his music and publishing it under his own name.

I was able to verify without the slightest difficulty that Corbetta really had been Devize's master and friend: it was therefore all the more likely that some scores must have passed from the one to the other. In those days, there was little printed music and musicians personally copied whatever was of interest to them.

When Corbetta died in 1681, Robert Devize (or de Visee, according to modern orthography) already enjoyed great fame as a virtuoso and teacher of the guitar, the lute, the theorbo and the large guitar. Louis XIV in person required him to play for him almost every evening. Devize frequented the foremost court salons. There he played in duo with other celebrated musicians, including, as it happens, the harpsichordist Francois Couperin.

So, Devize and Couperin did know one another and they played together; in all probability, they will have exchanged compliments, opinions, advice, perhaps even confidences. We know that Devize amused himself playing Couperin's music on the guitar (some of his transcriptions have come down to us). It is not improbable that Couperin will in turn have tried his friend's suites for guitar on the harpsichord. And it is inevitable that notebooks and scores should have passed from hand to hand. Perhaps, one evening, while Devize was distracted by the co-quettishness of some court ladies, Couperin may have taken that fine rondeau with the strange title from his friend's papers, thinking that he would return it the next time that they met.

Under the charm of that celestial music, and of the mystery that was taking form under my eyes, in a short time I again devoured the whole tale, minutely noting in a little exercise book all events and circumstances that would need verification. I knew that only thus could I clear my heart forever of the shadowy suspicion: was that strange story only a clever invention which, manipulating the truth, spread falsehood?

The fruit of the three years' work which followed is all in the pages which you are about to read. I would advise you that, in the event of your wishing to consult them, I have kept Photostat copies of all the documents and books cited.

One enigma above all caused me great anxiety, since it risked transforming the canonisation of the Blessed Innocent XI into a catastrophe. That was Dulcibeni's great secret, the origin of all his troubles and the real motive behind all his plotting: was Innocent XI really in cahoots with William of Orange?

Unfortunately, the apprentice mentions the question only in the final pages of his memoir, when Dulcibeni's enigma is dissolved. Nor had my two friends chosen to enrich the story with other relevant information, acting on their own initiative. Why on earth, I wondered with extreme disappointment, had two curious journalists like themselves failed to do so? Perhaps, I hopefully surmised, they had not succeeded in finding anything against the great Odescalchi.

My duty nevertheless required me to investigate and authoritatively to dispel all shadows and calumnies from the image of the Blessed Innocent. I therefore reread the revelations which the apprentice learned in the end from Pompeo Dulcibeni.

KINGDOM OF FRANCE

According to the Jansenist, William's debt to the Pope was secured by the Prince of Orange's personal possessions. Where, then, were his possessions? I realised that I had no idea where William's personal fief was situated. Perhaps in Holland? I looked at an atlas, and when I at last located Orange, I could hardly contain my surprise.

The Principality of Orange was situated in the south of France, surrounded by the Legation of Avignon. The latter was in fact a state of the Church; since the Middle Ages, Avignon had been part of the Papal States. And, in its turn, the Legation of Avignon was surrounded by France! A bizarre situation: the Principality of Orange was surrounded by its Catholic enemy, encircled in turn by another enemy: Louis XIV the great adversary of Innocent XI.

So the search must be conducted in Avignon; or rather, among the documentation pertaining to Avignon. I therefore obtained a special pass to the Secret Archives of the Vatican and spent several weeks there. I already knew where I must search: in the diplomatic and administrative correspondence between Avignon and Rome. I sorted through piles of correspondence, hoping to find some mention of Orange, William, or loans of money. For days and days, I found nothing. I was about to give up when, in a package of letters completely devoid of any interest, I found three loose quarto notebooks. These dated back to the last months of 1689, a few months after the death of Innocent XI. The new Pope, Alexander VIII Ottoboni, had only just ascended to the papal throne. Alas, the three quarto notebooks seemed comprehensible only to initiates:

22 76 18 11 97 46 98 64 48 36

71 37 81 18 73 67 14 38 69

26 10 48 46 31 22 14 76

39 0 71 48 76 98 13 48 76

39 37 71 44 22 41 67 14

0 22 34 13 83 78 89 5

77 44 0 64 0 39 93 14 11

48 97 84 34 48 11 76 0

2499 0 55 0 71 11 37 18 16

34 73 93 39 0 29 22 76 18

22 97 97 37 98 38 2575

5 36 14 34 0 76 13 84 18

79 69 2347 94 18 22 19 19

14 78 2316 97 48 94

36 34 37 14 18 71 71 73

18 22 97 46 39 37 46

88 48 71 19 34 37 76 16 37

18 0 98 46 18 13 13 48 39

93 0 34 94 20 97 14 77 76

36 14 38 69 2610 555

48 2336 0 55 64 0 16

37 71 73 39 0 16 44 48 16

39 14 19 14 18 81 0 34 31

22 18 16 73 34 48 79 71…

And so on, for twelve pages, with a total of twenty-four columns like that reproduced here. It was a letter in cipher, and at first I despaired of understanding anything.

Fortunately, however, the ciphers used in the letter were those habitually employed at the time by the Vatican Secretariat of State. I therefore compared the letter with other deciphered letters and succeeded at length in decoding a brief preliminary passage: unsudditofedelissimodellasantasedeedibvontalentogentilhvomoavignon ese, mihafattopervenireunalettera, aluiscrittadavnsvdditodelprincipedeoranges…

It took me days of work to obtain a correct and legible version of the text. I was, moreover, compelled to keep a number of indecipherable terms in figures, but these were fortunately not necessary for understanding the text. It was a letter from Monsignor Cenci, Papal Vice-Legate of Avignon, who was writing to Rome in order to describe a strange negotiation:

A most faithful Subject of the Holy See and one of goodly Talents, a Gentleman of Avignon, has passed to me a Missive, sent to him by a Subject of the Prince of Orange, which tells of the great Desire of the Subjects of that Principality to come under the Dominion of the Holy See…

If he speaks to me of that Matter, I shall listen to and report all that he tells me, nor shall I accept or reject 2657. It seems there can be no Doubt but that this is being done with the Agreement of the House of Orange…

My Ministry has obliged me to communicate what I know concerning this exceedingly important Negotiation. The enclosed Folio contains a Copy of the aforementioned Letter, which was written to Signor Salvador, Auditor of the Rota of Avignon, by Monsieur de Beaucastel, Gentleman, of Courteson…

Here was what had happened: Monsieur de Beaucastel, a gentleman of the small town of Courthezon and a subject of the Prince of Orange, had first contacted a priest at Avignon, the Auditor of the Rota Paolo de Salvador, and then Vice-Legate Cenci. Beaucastel was the bearer of a proposal which was, to say the least, surprising: the Principality of Orange desired to offer itself to the papacy. I was astonished: how could the subjects of William of Orange, who were, for the most part Protestants, wish to give themselves to the papacy? And how could they be so sure that William would consent thereto?

Rummaging further in the correspondence between Rome and Avignon, I found the other letters exchanged between Cenci and the Vatican Secretariat of State, and even the initial missive from Beau- castel to Salvador. At the risk of seeming over-meticulous, I note that these documents, hitherto unknown to historians, are to be found in the Secret Archives of the Vatican, Fondo segreteria di Stato — legazione di Avignone-. folder 369 (Monsieur de Beaucastel to Paolo de Salvador, 4th October, 1689), folder 350 (two letters from Monsignor Cenci to the Vatican Secretariat of State, undated, and one from Cardinal Ottoboni to Cenci, dated 6th December, 1689) and in folder 59 (Monsignor Cenci to Cardinal Ottoboni, 12th December, 1689).

The few letters in cipher were all accompanied by their decoded version. I noted with surprise, however, that the only one which I had translated-the first and most important of all-was not thus accompanied. It was as though someone, in view of the extreme gravity of the contents, had arranged for the disappearance of the deciphered version… Moreover, the letter was not in its proper place, far from the packet of letters which contained the other missives.

Despite the difficulties, I succeeded at long last in reconstructing an extraordinary story, which no historian had yet brought to light.

The motive for the citizens of Orange wishing to come under the papal flag was as simple as it was troubling. William of Orange had accumulated a mountain of debt to Innocent XI; and the subjects of Orange, who had already had to disburse a great deal of money to the papacy, thought that they could best resolve their problems by directly offering their own annexation to the state of the Church: "Here in the Kingdom," writes Monsignor Cenci, "it is quite widely believed that the Prince of Orange still owes the previous pontificate large sums, in payment whereof he believes he can offer possession of a State from which he can gain little capital."

Precisely for that reason, however, not all the subjects of Orange were in agreement: "In the Past, we have already given too much Money to the Church!" protested Monsieur de Saint-Clement, former Treasurer of the Principality.

In Rome, however, Beaucastel's proposal was coldly turned down. The Secretary of State, Cardinal Rubini, and the nephew of the new

Pope, Cardinal Ottoboni, ordered Cenci to reject the embarrassing offer. It could not be otherwise: the new Pope knew absolutely nothing about such debts. It was, moreover, out of the question that the glorious Pope Innocent XI might have lent money to a heretic prince…

I was deeply shocked. The letters found in the Secret Archives of the Vatican confirmed what Dulcibeni had revealed to the young apprentice: William of Orange had been in debt to Innocent XI. Not only that: if the Prince of Orange did not pay up, that would result in the seizure of his personal property. Indeed, the debt had become so high that William's possessions and his subjects considered spontaneously donating themselves!

I could not, however, remain content with this. I had to find confirmation of the declarations of the subjects of Orange. I therefore needed to clarify my ideas about William: where did he obtain the money to finance his warlike undertakings? And who had financed the invasion of England?

All the histories of the Glorious Revolution, as the coup d'etat whereby the Prince of Orange grabbed the throne of England is now called, sing from the same hymnal: William is good, William is strong, William is so idealistic and disinterested that he does not even want to become King!

If we are to believe the historians, the valiant William seems to have lived on air: but who on earth had given him, since his youth, the wherewithal to fight and to defeat the armies of Louis XIV? Someone must have found him the money to pay for the munitions, the mercenaries (who in those days accounted for the greater part of all armies), the cannons and a few generals worthy of the name.

All the European monarchs then bogged down in wars were beset by the same problems of finding money with which to finance them. The Prince of Orange, however, had an advantage: if there was one city in which money circulated in the seventeenth century-a great deal of money-it was Amsterdam, where, not by chance, the banks of Jewish moneylenders flourished. The capital of the United Provinces was the richest financial market in Europe, just as Cloridia, and later the other guests, told the apprentice of the Donzello.

I consulted a few good books on economic history and discovered that, in the days of William of Orange, a good many of the businessmen in Amsterdam were Italian. The city was full of names like Tensini, Verrazzano, Balbi, Quingetti, and then there were the Burlamacchi and the Calandrini who were already present in Antwerp (almost all of whom were mentioned in the apprentice's tale, first by Cloridia, then by Cristofano). They were Genoese, Florentine, Venetian, all merchants and bankers, some also agents of Italian Principalities and Republics. The most enterprising had succeeded in penetrating the closed circle of the Amsterdam aristocracy. Others were well placed in the lucrative but perilous slave trade: such was the case of Francesco Feroni.

The most interesting case, however, was that of the Bartolotti, from Bologna: originally humble brewers, then merchants, and, in the end, the most prosperous of financiers. They had intermarried with a Dutch family until all trace of their original Italian blood was lost. In fact, the Protestant Bartolotti had in the space of a few decades become wealthy enough to be able to finance the House of Orange, lending money in quantity, first to William's grandfather, then to the Prince himself. The loans were sometimes secured against mortgages on lands in Holland and Germany.

Money against land: according to Dulcibeni, the Odescalchi had entered into an identical pact with the House of Orange. An interesting coincidence.

For the time being, I had learned enough about the Italian merchants and financiers of the House of Orange. It was time to pass on to the Odescalchi, and to get their papers to talk.

I spent months and months, I no longer recall how many, in the archives of Palazzo Odescalchi and the Rome State Archives, with only the help of one young assistant, both of us tormented by the cold and the dust, all day long with our heads bent over papers. We combed through all the papers of Innocent XI, in search of anything that could lead us to William of Orange: letters, contracts, rescripts, reports, memoranda, diaries, ledgers. All to no avail.

Much time had passed since the start of my research, and I had the feeling that I had run into the sands. I began to toy with the idea of giving up: until the thought came to me that Dulcibeni had spoken of Venice, saying that all the money for Holland had been sent from there. And in Venice, there was a branch of the Odescalchi concern: it was there that I must seek the way through to my goal.

From the will of Carlo Odescalchi, Benedetto's elder brother, I learned that the property of the family had always remained commune et indivisa between the two: in other words, what belonged to the one belonged to the other. That was why the Pope seemed so poor on paper. Only by examining his brother's accounts was I able to discover how much he really possessed.

Carlo Odescalchi was in fact the fulcrum of the family's economic activity: he administered the family's considerable possessions in Lombardy; he also directed from Milan the branch in Venice, which was managed by two procurators. I therefore sought the two books containing the Inventory of Property referred to in Carlo's will. These could have resolved the problem. If a list of debtors were annexed to them, William of Orange would have appeared among them. Strangely enough, however, there was no trace of any such inventory.

I then took a look at Carlo's private ledgers, and at last found what I sought. In the heavy vellum-bound volumes kept by the brother of the Blessed Innocent XI until his death, and today held by the State Archives of Rome, there emerged trading and transactions on a colossal scale: millions and millions of scudi. A small proportion of the operations concerned commercial transactions: revenue from excise duties and rents. Then came what interested me: hundreds of financial operations, largely carried out from Venice by two procurators, Cernezzi and Rezzonico, who received commissions for these transactions. The blood in my temples throbbed violently when I saw that most of these operations were directed towards Holland. I wondered how the matter had never yet come to light; an archivist explained to me that these two ledgers had for centuries lain forgotten in the cellars of Palazzo Odescalchi and had only recently been sold to the State Archives of Rome. No one had yet looked into them.

It was not difficult to get to the bottom of the matter. Between 1660 and 1671, Carlo Odescalchi had ordered payments in various currencies from Venice to Holland totalling 153,000 scudi: a sum almost equal to the entire, gigantic annual outgoings of the ecclesiastical state (173,000 scudi) at the time when Benedetto was elected pope.

Within the space of nine years, between 1660 and 1669, the Odescalchi sent a good 22,000 scudi to the financier Jan Deutz, founder and proprietor of one of the principal Dutch banks. The Deutz family were literally a piece of Holland, not only for the vast wealth which they had accumulated, but the government posts which they occupied at all levels, and their links of kinship and marriage with the most prominent members of the country's ruling class. Jan Deutz's brother-in-law had been the Grand Pensioner Jan de Witt, preceptor and mentor of the young William III. Jan Deutz the Younger, the banker's son and partner, was a member of the Amsterdam city council from 1692 until 1719; Deutz's daughters and granddaughters married burgomasters, generals, merchants and bankers.

That was only the beginning: between June and December 1669, a further 6000 scudi were sent by the Odescalchi to a company of which Guillelmo Bartolotti, one of William of Orange's financiers, was a partner. That was the decisive proof: the Odescalchi sent money to the Bartolotti, and they lent it to William. Thus, the money passed from the coffers of the Odescalchi to those of the House of Orange.

The more I knocked, the more doors opened up to me. Between November 1660 and October 1665, the Venetian procurators of the Odescalchi sent another 22,000 scudi to a certain Jean Neufville. Now, Neufville was certainly no minor figure in William's entourage; his daughter Barbara married Hiob de Wildt, who served first as Secretary of the Admiralty at Amsterdam and later as Admiral- General, appointed by William himself. The de Wildts had, moreover, always had ties with the House of Orange; Hiob's grandfather, Gillis de Wildt, had been appointed to the Haarlem city council by Prince Maurice of Orange. Hiob de Wildt, however, gathered the finance necessary for the invasion of England in 1688 and, after William ascended to the English throne in 1688, acted as his personal representative in Holland.

Finally, in October 1665, a small sum was also sent by the Odescalchi's procurators to the company of Daniel and Jan Baptista Hochepied, the first of whom was a member of the Council of Amsterdam as well as Chairman of the East India Company: the commercial and financial powerhouse of Protestant Holland.

So it was true. Dulcibeni had invented nothing: the Dutch secretly financed by the Odescalchi were precisely those whom the Jansenist had finally revealed to the young apprentice. This tied in with one important detail: in order to leave no traces, the money was sent to friends of the House of Orange by the two Venetian proxies of the Odescalchi, Cernezzi and Rezzonico. Sometimes Carlo Odescalchi noted in his ledgers that such and such an operation was to be made in the name of Cernezzi and Rezzonico, but the money was his; and thus, his brother's too.

Finally, I also found loans to the slaver Francesco Feroni: 24,000 scudi in ten years, from 1661 to 1671: who knows how much those loans may have earned? That would explain the Odescalchi's willingness to accept Feroni's claims on Dulcibeni's daughter.

Not only that: the Odescalchi had also lent money to the Genoese Grillo and Lomellini, holders of the Spanish royal charter for the traffic in slaves, and in their turn friends and financiers of Feroni. Since these documents, too, have never been studied by historians, I shall indicate where they are to be found (Archivio di Stato di Roma, Fondo Odescalchi, XXIII, A (1), p. 216. Gf. also XXXII E (3), (8)).

I checked how many scudi were sent by the Odescalchi to Holland and have drawn up a graph of these operations:

The money was certainly used to finance wars. That is confirmed by the dates: in 1665, for instance, when payments reached their maximum of 43,964 scudi, Holland went to war with England.

My work would have been considerably easier if I had been able to compare Carlo Odescalchi's ledgers with his commercial correspondence. Strangely, however, the letters from 1650 until 1680, which must give the names of debtors in Holland, are nowhere to be found: they are neither in the Rome State Archives nor in the Archives of Palazzo Odescalchi, the only two places holding the family's documents where these may be consulted.

Nor is it the first time that there have been strange disappearances in this affair. Louis XIV had a high-ranking spy in his pay in Rome: Cardinal Cybo, a close collaborator of Innocent XI. Cybo passed the French a most precious piece of information: the Vatican Secretary of State Lorenzo Casoni was in secret contact with the Prince of Orange.

Whether true or false, at the end of the eighteenth century, unknown hands spirited away the volumes of Casoni's correspondence preserved in the Vatican.

Even the saddest and most embarrassing details of my two old friends' typescript have turned out to be true. It was not possible, I had at first thought, that Innocent XI and his family should have disposed of Cloridia as their own chattel, going so far as to cede her to Feroni, like common slave merchants.

After consulting a number of well-documented papers on the subject, however, I was compelled to revise my ideas. Like many patrician families, the Odescalchi family kept slaves as a matter of course. Livio Odescalchi, the Pontiff's nephew, for example, was the master of fifteen-year-old Ali, a native of Smyrna. And the Blessed Innocent XI possessed Selim, a nine-year-old Moorish boy. Nor was that all.

In 1887, the Archivist Emeritus Giuseppe Bertolotti published in an obscure specialist periodical, the Rivista di Disciplina Carceraria (. Review of Prison Discipline), a detailed study on slavery in the Papal State. From this emerged a surprising picture of the Blessed Innocent, which is certainly not to be found in any of his biographies.

All the popes, down to and beyond the baroque age, made use of slaves acquired or captured in war, either on the pontifical galleys or for private purposes. But the contracts signed by Innocent XI in regard to slaves were by far the most cruel, observed Bertolotti, who was disgusted by the "slaver's contracts in human flesh" personally subscribed to by the Pontiff.

After years of inhuman labour, the galley slaves, by now incapable of working any longer, begged to be freed. To ransom them, Pope Innocent claimed the poor savings which, year after year, these wretched slaves had somehow scraped together. Thus, Salem Ali from Alexandria, suffering from a disease of the eyes and declared unfit for work by the doctors, had to pay 200 scudi into the papal coffers in order to be freed from the chains of the papal galleys. Ali Mustafa, from Constantinople, acquired from the Maltese galleys for 50 scudi and suffering from "incapacity owing to pains and sciatica" had to pay 300 scudi into the Vatican treasury. Mamut Abdi from Toccado, sixty years old, of which twenty-two had been spent in slavery, had to part with 100 scudi. Mamut Amurat, from the Black Sea, Sixty-five years old and in poor health, could afford only 80 scudi.

Those without money were made to wait until death resolved the problem. Meanwhile, they were thrown into prison, where the doctors found themselves having to cope with poor bodies destroyed by overwork and hardships, horrible ulcers and unhealed wounds decades old.

Upset by this discovery, I looked for the documents used by Ber-tolotti, who described them as "easily consulted". Here again, I drew a blank: these too had disappeared.

The documents should have been in the Rome State Archives, Acta Diversorum of the Chamberlain and Treasurer of the Apostolic Chamber for the year 1678. The Chamberlain's volumes cover all the years until 1677, then start again in 1679; the volume for 1678 is the only one missing.

As for the Treasurer, a single miscellaneous volume covers operations between 1676 and 1683. Here, too, there is no trace of those for 1678.

Belua insatiabilis, insatiable beast: was that not what the prophecy of Malachy called Innocent XI?

After months spent coughing amidst the dust of seventeenth- century manuscripts, I took up a printed work, the Epistolario Innocenziano. one hundred and thirty-six letters written by Benedetto Odescalchi over a period of twenty years to his nephew Antonio Maria Erba, a Milanese senator. The patient curator of this volume, Pietro Gini of Como, cannot have realised, in his enthusiastic devotion, what kind of material he was feeding to the printers.

These are, it is true, private letters. But it is precisely from his family correspondence that the man's overbearing character and his attitude to money emerge. Cadastral acts, lands, inheritances, mortgaged loans, claims for damages, sums to be demanded, confiscations from debtors. Every sentence, every line, every note is poisoned by an obsessive fixation with money. Apart from a few other family disputes and inquiries after the health of spouses, the letters of Innocent XI contain nothing else.

There abounds, however, advice on how to keep close watch over money, and how to obtain repayment from debtors. It is always better not to have anything to do with the courts of law, the Pope reflects in a letter dated 1680, but if one wants to see one's money back, then one should be the first to sue: there will always be time to come to an arrangement.

Even his close circle seemed somewhat perplexed by the Pope's consuming passion. A manuscript note by his nephew Livio, from about 1676, states that "some minister" must be found "to correspond about the family's business affairs, for if the Pope continues to want to do everything with his own head and in his own hand, his health will not be able to stand the strain."

The obsession with money consumed even his flesh.

Dear Alessio, now I know. Under my eyes, day after day, the memoirs of the apprentice of the Donzello have become reality. The secrets which, in the end, Pompeo Dulcibeni revealed to the young man, and which motivated his attempt on the life of Innocent XI, are all true.

The Blessed Innocent was an accomplice of Protestant heretics, thus gravely damaging Catholic interests: he allowed England to be invaded by William of Orange for the sole purpose of obtaining repayment of a monetary debt.

Pope Innocent was also a financier of the slave trade, nor did he renounce the personal possession of slaves; and he treated those who were old and dying with sanguinary cruelty.

He was a niggardly and avaricious man, incapable of raising himself above material concerns, obsessed by the thought of lucre.

The figure and the work of Innocent XI were thus unjustly celebrated and elevated, using false, devious and partial arguments. Evidence was concealed: the inventory of the will of Carlo Odescalchi, the letters and commercial receipts of the Odescalchi archives from 1650 until 1680, the correspondence of Secretary of State Casoni, the contracts concerning the redemption of slaves cited by Bertolotti, together with other papers of which I shall have to report the, at best, inexplicable disappearance in my final documents.

Thus the lie triumphed in the end. The financier of heretics was pronounced the Saviour of Christendom. The greedy merchant became a wise administrator; the stubborn politician, a capable statesman. Revenge was dressed up as pride, the miser was called frugal, the ignorant man became simple and plain-living, evil stole the clothing of goodness; and goodness, abandoned by all, became earth, dust, smoke, shadow, nothing.

Now, perhaps, I understand the dedication chosen by my two friends: "To the defeated". Fouquet was defeated: to Colbert, glory; to him, ignominy. Defeated, too, was Pompeo Dulcibeni, who could not obtain justice: his leeches failed. Defeated, likewise, was Atto Melani: he was constrained by the Sun King to kill his friend Fouquet. And, despite a thousand vicissitudes, he failed to extract from Dulcibeni his closely guarded secret. Defeated was the apprentice-boy who, faced with the vision of evil, lost his faith and his innocence: from aspirant gazetteer, he descended to taking refuge in the hard and simple life of a son of the soil. Defeated, too, was his very memory which, although composed with so much care and labour, lay forgotten for centuries.

All the agitation of these personages was in vain. Against the malign forces of injustice which dominate the history of the world, they were powerless. Their strivings were, perhaps, useful only to themselves, to discover and to understand what-for a long, long time- none would be privileged to know. Those strivings served perhaps above all to augment their sufferings.

If this should be a novel, it is the novel of labour lost.

I hope that you will, dear Alessio, pardon me for the outburst to which I abandoned myself in these last lines. For my part, I have done what I could. It will be for historians one day to complete the labour of selection from the archives, the scrupulous verification of sources, of circumstances, of details.

First, however, it will be for His Holiness, and for Him alone, to judge whether the opus of my two friends should be published or kept secret. The implications of its dissemination would be manifold, nor would they concern only the Church of Rome. How, indeed, will the British Orangemen be able stubbornly and arrogantly to parade through the streets of Derry and Belfast when, on the 12 th of July each year they celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, the victory in which William of Orange finally crushed the Catholic forces? What meaning will be left to their celebration of Protestant extremism when they know that they owe that victory to a pope?

The ancient vaticinations do not lie; the Holy Father will now take the right, the inspired, decision. According to the prophecy of Saint Malachy, as evoked by Padre Robleda, our well-beloved (and rather long-lived) Pontiff will be the last, and the holiest Pope: De Gloria Olivae, as he is called in the prophecy.

I am aware that the list of popes attributed to Malachy has long been recognised as a forgery dating from the sixteenth century, and not the Middle Ages. Yet no scholar has succeeded in explaining how it correctly foresaw the names of modern popes right down to the present day.

That list tells us that time has now run out: Fides intrepida (Pius XI), Pastor angelicus (Pius XII), Pastor et nauta (John XXIII), Flos florum (Paul VI), De Medietate Lunae (John Paul I), De labore Solis (John Paul II) and last of all De Gloria Olivae: all the 111 Pontiffs. The Holy Father is, then, perhaps he who will prepare the return of Peter to this earth, when each shall be judged and every wrong set right.

Cloridia told the apprentice that she had come to Rome following the way of numbers and the oracle of the Tarot: the Arcana of Judgement called for "the reparation of past wrongs" and the "equitable judgement of posterity". If the prophecy of Malachy is true, then, that time has come.

All too often, history has been insulted, betrayed, distorted. If, now, we do not intervene, if we do not proclaim the truth out loud, if the writings of my two friends are not published, it is possible that evidence will continue to disappear: that the letters of Monsieur de Beaucastel and Monsignor Cenci will be lost, placed by mistake in the wrong folder, or that the ledgers of Carlo Odescalchi will vanish inexplicably, as have so many documents.

I know, dear Alessio, that you are concerned to respect the schedules which your office lays down. For that very reason, I trust that you will transmit these papers to His Holiness with all diligence, so that he may weigh up whether to order a late, yet still timely, imprimatur.