Veritas

Paris

6^TH JANUARY 1714

Someone accidentally jostles me and jerks me back to the present. The few bystanders are moving: Abbot Melani’s funeral is now at an end. The silver angels that have compassionately supported his mortal remains during the ceremony now return the bier to his old servants, and they make towards the side chapel near the high altar, opposite the door to the sacristy, for the entombment. The place is ready, open and empty, awaiting the coffin. The funerary monument by the Florentine Rastrelli will soon ornament the chapel with a noble bust of the Abbot, for any French subjects who pass this way to remember him by.

It took the epidemic of catarrhal influenza, recorded in the medical annals and well described by Doctor Viti in his treatise, to break the old Abbot’s resistance. The first symptoms began in December: fever; coughing; some slight inflammation of the throat; low, weak pulse; copious spitting of thin blood. Atto joked: “Here’s the Tekuphah,” laughing to overcome his fear at having really reached the end. We treated him with massages and barley water, which made him sweat and brought about great improvements. But the spitting was still copious, though now it was white. The doctors declared: “spurious lymphatic pleuritis”: cryptic words that sounded like Ugonio talking. They administered myrrh mixed with camphor, laxatives, emollients and even whale sperm, a remedy that was so expensive that the Abbot lost all the benefit when the moment came to pay.

When the worst was over, Atto once again had all his wits about him and had recovered his usual spirits. However, I often saw him by the window, absorbed, with his half-closed eyes ranging over the grey slate rooftops, while he hummed for the umpteenth time an aria written for him by Luigi Rossi, and — I was sure of it — thought with a smile of the boy king listening to him in the castle of Saint Germain, sixty years earlier. And perhaps he thought of the capricious intertwining of fortune and bad luck, of jealous fits, friendships, betrayals, impossible loves; of acts of violence endured; of one in particular, and of the destiny it had implacably determined. Observing him unseen, I liked to imagine that he was using the delicate scales of memory to weigh up faults and merits, knowing that he had served music and the Most Christian King with equal loyalty; and that soon it would be time to serve a greater master.

Domenico, Champigny and I still feared the excessive catarrh he had in his chest and the slight tertian fever that disturbed him during the day. We prayed he would get through the winter, but he appeared resigned to the will of God. He was fully prepared and ready for the great step, and discussed his death with firmness and constancy, instructing Domenico on a number of things that he wanted carried out afterwards, and personally making sure that all his writings and books were packed up and delivered to Count Bardi, the envoy of the Medici in Paris, who could then send them on to Pistoia. There were too many secrets hidden in Abbot Melani’s letters and memoirs to run the risk of leaving them in the house after his death!

Just over a week ago, on St Stephen’s Day, 26th December, I heard him complain: “The season could not be more contrary to my convalescence,” immediately adding with a touch of vanity: “But even the most robust are feeling it.” What an optimist Abbot Melani was! He talked of his death, but he did not really believe in it. What he stubbornly called convalescence was actually agony.

After four days, on 30th December, he insisted on getting out of bed, saying that he felt suffocated, so that we had to humour him by putting him on a chair. Even that was not enough: he wanted to walk a few paces across the room, supported by me and Domenico. But as soon as he tried to move, he exclaimed, “Alas, I can’t make it”, and we had to make him sit down at once. He had fainted and we put him straight back to bed. Cloridia rushed to our summons, and bathed him with the water of the Queen of Hungary, sent to him most considerately every year by Gondi, the Grand Duke’s secretary, and it soon brought him round. But just a quarter of an hour later the illness seized hold of him again.

“Don’t abandon me,” he said, and then lost consciousness and remained like that, without speaking or moving, for almost four days, to the amazement of the doctors, who had never seen such a resilient heart in a man of eighty-eight. The day before yesterday, Wednesday 4th January, two hours after midnight, he opened his eyes and looked at me. I was seated by his bed. I had never abandoned him, as he had done with me three years earlier; I took his cold bony hands in mine. He murmured: “Stay with me.” Then, with a long sigh of weariness, he went.

As I cross the church of the Barefoot Augustinians, I feel as if Atto is still by my side: like that other time, that freezing 20th April three years ago, in another church, also — by a twist of fate — of the Barefoot Augustinians. The occasion was the exequies of His Caesarean Majesty Joseph the Victorious. Nothing in the world could have stopped me being there: the only other funeral I have ever attended. I cannot follow Abbot Melani’s bier without feeling lashed by the icy north wind of memories.

In the Loggia of the Cavaliers the Emperor, having received the benediction of the Bishop of Vienna, had been transferred to a new sarcophagus, draped in black and gold velvet, and sealed forever with golden nails. The coffin was adorned with gold all over: the locks, the keys, the handles and the initials I.I., Joseph I, engraved in the middle. The Barefoot Carmelite Sisters of St Joseph had covered the bier with the cloth they always preserve for the burials of the Caesars. At the foot they had placed the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary; at the head the Caesarian insignia with the Golden Fleece; and in the middle the dagger and short sword with their imperial eagle hilts. The urn with the heart and tongue of the deceased had been transported, in the absolute silence imposed by the ceremony, to the Loretan Chapel of the church of the Barefoot Augustinians, and placed there among the other eight urns containing the hearts of his predecessors, starting with the young Ferdinand IV who had begun the tradition out of devotion to the Madonna of Loreto. Immediately afterwards, the shrine containing the brain, eyes and bowels had been taken in a six-horse carriage escorted by a procession of candles to the Cathedral of St Stephen and placed there in the archducal crypt: twenty-two other collections of grey matter and internal organs, those of the previous Habsburgs of Austria, would silently receive it.

During the ceremony, black night had stolen in, and with it had come the much-feared farewell. We returned to the Loggia de’ Cavalieri, where the Queen Mother and the other members of the imperial family had arrived in the meantime — all except the widow Queen, whose great grief had detained her in the palace with her youngest daughter. Followed by the whole court and the Papal Nuncio, the bier was then transported along the low corridor of the palace to the church of the Barefoot Augustinians and placed there on a black litter, around which, in the hour between 20 and 21, every funeral rite had been solemnly celebrated. The Augustinians then handed things over to the Capuchins for the interment.

And now it was the moment of the people. The faithful subjects had come from all around into the church of the Capuchins, and at 21 hours, announced by the powerful tolling of the bells of all the churches in the Archduchy of Austria and illuminated by thousands and thousands of torches protected by glass lanterns and fixed to every bell tower to vanquish the mournful darkness, the Emperor’s lifeless body made its entrance between two dozen white torches, their flames flickering in the furious wind, carried by the scions of the nobility. It was awaited by the city guard, with their banners held upside down, while from the dark belly of the drums the rhythmic rumble of death reverberated all around.

Atto and I were also awaiting the deceased, almost suffocated amid the immense crowd. I could barely make out the procession; right behind the bier walked the Queen Mother, impassive and impenetrable, surrounded by three gentlemen of the chamber and illuminated by the torches of seven noble scions: Her Majesty Eleanor Magdalen Theresa had just been named Regent. Abbot Melani, as I would learn later, with the help of Camilla and of Vinzenz Rossi, had succeeded in getting the forged letter of Prince Eugene into her hands, to put a stop somehow to the Prince’s desire for war and prevent him from becoming equally powerful under the future emperor Charles. Atto knew very well that Eugene would continue the war against France even without his allies England and Holland. There was no knowing whether that letter would finally be of any use or not.

Behind the Queen Mother came Joseph’s sisters and elder daughter, also escorted by a cluster of torches, buffeted mercilessly by the raging wind.

The court musicians intoned the Libera me Domine and Joseph was at last escorted to his final resting place: the crypt of the Capuchins. In that very year the Emperor had prophetically enlarged it, doubling its capacity. Now it would receive him in the large central sarcophagus, the golden key to which would be preserved forever in the imperial treasure chamber along with all the other tomb keys of the Habsburgs of Austria. And so ended the barely thirty-three years of the earthly adventure of His Caesarean Majesty Joseph the Victorious, first of his name.