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At the opposite end of the kitchen, there was another door; and through this we entered the next room. We were forced to light the lantern for a moment, but I covered it prudently with my hand.

We found ourselves facing a four-poster bed with a striped yel­low and red satin cover. On either side stood a pair of little wooden tables and, in a corner, a simple chair, covered in worn stamped leath­er. Judging by the old furnishings, and by a certain stale and stuffy odour, the chamber must have been in disuse.

We gestured to Ugonio to go back and wait for us in the stable: in the event of our having to beat a rapid retreat, two intruders might perhaps succeed in escaping, but with three, we should certainly be in worse trouble.

The chamber which we had just visited also had a second door. After again extinguishing the lantern, we listened carefully at that doorway. The residents' voices seemed distant enough for us to risk opening it, which we did most delicately, entering another, fourth, space. We were now in the entrance-hall of the house. The front door, as we could sense despite the almost complete darkness, was to our left. In front of us, at the end of a little corridor, began a spiral staircase, set into the wall and leading to the upper storey. From the top of the stairs, there filtered an uncertain glimmer which just ena­bled us to find our way.

With extreme caution, we approached the stairs. The noises and speech which we had first heard in the distance now seemed to have almost died out. Mad and foolhardy though the idea seemed to me, Atto began to climb the stairs, and I behind him.

Halfway up the stairs, between the ground and the first floor, we found a little room lit by a candelabrum, with various fine objects in it which we stopped briefly to examine. 1 was astounded by the wealth of the furnishings, the like of which I had never seen before: we must be in the house of a well-to-do gentleman. The abbot ap­proached a little inlaid walnut table covered with a green cloth. He raised his eyes and discovered a number of fine paintings: an Annun­ciation, a Pieta, a Saint Francis with Angels in a gold-bordered walnut frame, another picture representing John the Baptist, a little picture on paper with a tortoiseshell and gilt frame and, lastly, a plaster oc­tagon bas-relief representing Mary Magdalene. I saw a wash-stand which seemed to me to be in pear-wood, turned with great art and skill. Above it, there hung a small copper and gold crucifix with a cross fashioned from ebony. Completing the little parlour, there was a little table in light-coloured wood with its fine little drawers, and two chairs.

In a few more steps, we reached the first floor, which seemed at first to be deserted and enveloped in gloom. Atto Melani pointed out to me the next flight, leading even higher, and on which the light fell clearer and stronger. We craned our necks and saw that on the wall by the stairs was a sconce with four large candles, beyond which one came to the second floor, where, in all probability, the people of the house were at that moment.

We remained briefly immobile on the stairs, listening intently. There was not a sound; we continued to climb. Suddenly, however, a loud noise startled us. A door on the first floor had been opened and then roughly slammed, and in the interval we heard two men's voices, too confused to be intelligible. Gradually, we heard steps ap­proaching the stairs from the chambers. Atto and I looked at one an­other in confusion; hurriedly, we rushed up the four or five remaining stairs. Beyond the sconce, we found a second little room halfway up, and there we halted, hoping that the footsteps would not continue up the stairs, in the direction of our temporary hiding place. We were lucky. We heard one door close, and then another, until we could hear neither footsteps nor the two men's voices.

Crouching awkwardly in the little room halfway up the stairs, Atto and I exchanged looks of relief. Here too, a candelabrum afforded us sufficient light. Once we had recovered our breath and allowed our panic to subside, we took a look around us. Around the walls of the second small room, we discovered tall and well-stocked bookshelves, with many volumes placed in good order. Abbot Melani took one in his hand and examined the frontispiece.

It was a
Life of the Blessed Margaret of Cortona,
by an unknown au­thor. Atto closed the book and returned it to its place. There then passed through his hands: the first of an eight-volume
Theatrum Vitae Humanae,
a
Life of Saint Philip Neri,
a
Fundamentum Doctrinae motus gravium Vitali Iordani,
a
Tractatus de Ordine Iudiciorum,
a fine edition of the
Institutiones ac meditationes in Graecam linguam
, a French grammar, and lastly, a book which explained
The Art of Learning to Die a Good Death.

After rapidly leafing through this last curious volume of moral reflections, Atto shook his head in irritation.

"What are you looking for?" I asked him in the lowest voice of which I was capable.

"Is it not obvious? The owner. These days, everyone marks their books, at least those of value, with their name."

So I assisted Atto and there soon passed through my hands the
De arte Gimnastica
of Gerolamo Mercuriale, a
Vocabularium Ecclesiasticum
and a
Pharetra divini Amoris,
while Atto set aside with a snort the
Works
of Plato and a
Theatre of Mankynde
by Gaspare de Villa Lobos, before greeting with surprise a copy of
Bacchus in Tuscany
by his be­loved Francesco Redi.

"I do not understand it," he whispered impatiently at the end of the search. "There is everything here: history, philosophy, Christian doctrine, languages ancient and modern, devotional works, various curiosities and even a little astrology. Here, take a look:
The Arcana of the Stars
by a certain Antonio Carnevale and the
Ephemerides Andreae Argoli.
Yet in no book is there the owner's name."

Seeing that fortune had thus far remained on our side, and that we had avoided only by a hair's-breadth being surprised by the mas­ter of the house, I was about to suggest to Atto that we should be on our way when, for the first time, I came across a book on medicine.

I had in fact been searching on another shelf, where I came across a volume by Vallesius, then the
Medicina Septentrionalis
and
Practical Anatomy
by Bonetus, a
Booke of Roman Antidotes
, a
Liber observationum medicarum Ioannes Chenchi
, a
De Mali Ipocondriaci
by Paolo Tacchia, a
Commentarium Ioannis Casimiri in Hippocratis Aphorismos,
an
Enciclopedia Chirurgica Rationalis
by Giovanni Doleo and many other precious texts on medicine, chirurgie and anatomy. I was, among other things, struck by four volumes of a seven-volume edition of the works of Galen, all rather finely bound, in vermilion leather with golden lettering; the three others were not in their place. I picked one up, enjoying the feel of the precious binding, and opened it. A small inscription, at the foot of the frontispiece and on the right-hand side read:
Ioannis Tiracordae.
The same thing, I rapidly established, was to be found in all the other books on medicine.

"I know!" I whispered excitedly. "I know where we are."

I was about to share my discovery when we were again surprised by the sound of a door opening on the first floor, and by an old man's voice:

"Paradisa! Come down, our friend is about to take his leave of us."

A woman's voice replied from the second floor that she would be coming at once.

So we were about to be caught between two fires: the woman descending from the second floor and the master of the house await­ing her on the first. There was no door to the little room and it was, moreover, too small for us to crouch in unseen. We should be discovered.

Hearing, understanding and acting came together in a single movement. Like lizards hunted by. a hawk, we scuttled down the stairs in furtive desperation, hoping to reach the first floor before the two men. Otherwise, there would be no escape.

In less than a second came the moment of truth: we had just come down a few stairs when we heard the voice of the master of the house.

"And tomorrow, do not forget to bring me your little liqueur!" said he, under his breath but in a rather jovial tone of voice, obviously addressing his guest, while they approached the foot of the stairs. There was no more time: we were lost.

Whenever I think back on those moments of terror, I tell myself that only divine mercy saved us from many punishments, which we doubtless deserved. I also reflect that, if Abbot Melani had not had recourse to one of his ploys, matters would have gone very differ­ently.

Atto had a flash of inspiration and energetically blew out the four candles which illuminated this flight of stairs. We again took refuge in the little room where, this time in unison, we puffed up our chests and blew out the candelabrum. When the master of the house looked up the stairs, he was confronted with pitch darkness and heard the woman's voice begging him to light the candles again. This had the double effect of not giving us away and making the two men return, bearing a single oil lamp, in order to fetch a candle. In that brief lapse of time, we groped our way swiftly down the stairs.

Hardly had we reached the ground floor than we rushed into the abandoned bedchamber, then into the kitchen and, thence, to the coach-house. There, in my haste, I tripped and fell headlong on the fine layer of hay, making one of the nags nervous. Atto rapidly closed the door behind us, and Ugonio had no difficulty in locking it in time.

We remained motionless in the dark, panting, with our ears glued to the door. We thought that we could hear two or more people de­scending into the courtyard. Footsteps moved over the cobbles in the direction of the doorway to the street. We heard the heavy door open, then slam shut. Other footsteps turned back until they were lost on the stairs. For two or three minutes, we remained in sepulchral silence. The peril seemed to have passed.

We then lit a lantern and went through the trapdoor. As soon as the heavy wooden lid had closed on us, I was at last able to inform Abbot Melani of my discovery. We had entered the house of Giovanni Tiracorda, the old court physician to the Pope.

"Are you certain of that?" asked Abbot Melani as we again de­scended into the subterranean city.

"Of course I am," I replied.

"Tiracorda, what a coincidence," commented Atto with a little laugh.

"Do you know him?"

"It is an extraordinary coincidence. Tiracorda was physician to the conclave in which my fellow-citizen Pope Clement IX Rospigliosi was elected. I was present, too."

I, however, had never addressed a word to the old
Archiater.
Tiracorda, having been chief physician to two popes, was honoured in the quarter, so much so that he was still addressed as
Archiater
, although in reality his office was now that of locum. He lived in a little palazzo belonging to Duke Salviati, situated in the Via dell'Orso, only a few houses beyond the Donzello, on the corner of the Via della Stufa delle Donne. The map of the underground galleries which Atto Melani had drawn had proven to be accurate: moving from one gallery to another and coming to Tiracorda's stable, we had almost arrived back at our point of departure. I knew little, indeed very little indeed, about Ti­racorda: that he had a wife (perhaps the Paradisa whose name we had heard him call not long before), and that in their large and fine house there also lived two or three maidservants who helped with the work of the household, and that he practised his art at the Arcispedale di Santo Spirito, at Sassia.

He was more rotund than tall, with rounded shoulders and almost no neck, and a great prominent stomach on which he often rested his joined hands, as though he incarnated the virtues of patience and tolerance. All this suggested a phlegmatic and pusillanimous charac­ter. Sometimes I had seen him from a window walking down the Via dell'Orso, trotting along in a garment that reached almost to his feet; oft had I observed him, smoothing his mustachios and the goatee on his chin, in lively conversation with some shopkeeper. Caring little for periwigs despite his baldness, with his hat constantly in hand, his slightly bumpy pate, crowning a low, wrinkled forehead and pointed ears, shone in the sun. Crossing his path, I had once been struck by how rosy his cheeks were and how kindly his expression: with eyebrows that screened the deep-set eyes and the tired eyelids of a physician accustomed, yet never resigned, to looking upon the suf­fering of others.