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"I do not understand, it is all strange," I commented. "Why did Kircher not publish his findings?"

"Perhaps he feared that someone might make improper use of them. It would take little to steal so precious a thing, once the manu­script was handed over to the printers. Now, can you imagine the disaster for the whole world if such secrets were to fall into the wrong hands?"
"He must, then, have greatly esteemed Fouquet to confide such a thing to him alone."

"I can tell you that one needed speak only once with the Squirrel to be won over by him. Kircher added, however, that the
secretum vitae
is hidden by
arcanae obices.

"Arcanae obices?
That means 'mysterious obstacles'. But what does it refer to?

"I have not the least idea. Perhaps it is part of the jargon of the alchemists, the spagyrists or the necromancers. Kircher knew religions, rituals, superstitions and devilries from all the world over. Or perhaps
arcanae obices
is a coded expression which Fouquet could decipher af­ter reading the letter."

"But Fouquet could not receive the letter," I objected, "while he was in prison at Pinerol."

"That is a correct observation. Yet someone must have delivered it to him, since we found it among Dulcibeni's effects. So the deci­sion to allow him to have it was taken by whoever controlled all his correspondence..."

I fell silent, not daring to draw the appropriate conclusions.

"... that is, His Majesty the King of France," said Atto, swallow­ing, as though he were frightened by his own words.

"But then," I hesitated, "the
secretum pestis..."

"Was what the King wanted from Fouquet."

That, I thought, was all that we needed. Scarcely had Atto named him and it was as though the Most Christian King, First-Born and Most Dearly Beloved Son of the Church, had somehow entered the hostelry in a freezing, angry gust, and was about to sweep away all that remained of poor Fouquet within the walls of the Donzello.

"Arcanae obices, arcanae obices"
Melani chanted to himself, with his fingers drumming on his knees.

"Signor Atto," I interrupted him, "do you believe that, in the end, Fouquet revealed the
secretum pestis
to the King?"

"Arcanae...
What did you say? I do not know, I really do not know."

"Perhaps Fouquet left prison because he had confessed," I pro­posed.

"Indeed, had he escaped, the news would have spread at once. I believe that matters must have gone otherwise: when Fouquet was arrested, there were found on him letters from a mysterious prelate which spoke of the secret of the pestilence. Those letters must have been kept by Colbert. If, when I entered the
Coluber's
study, more time had been given me, I should probably have discovered those too."

"And then?"

"And then began the trial of Fouquet. And now we know why the King and Colbert used every means to prevent Fouquet from being condemned to no more than exile: they wanted him in prison so that they could extort from him the
secretum pestis.
Moreover, not having understood who the mysterious ecclesiastic might be, they could turn only to Fouquet. Now, if they had understood that it was Kircher..."

"Of what use would the secret of the pestilence have been to them?"

It was all too clear, said Atto, growing fervent: control of the pesti­lence would have enabled Louis XIV to settle accounts once and for all with his enemies. The dream of using the plague for military pur­poses was, he said, centuries old. Already Thucydides told how the Athenians, when their city was decimated by the disease, suspected their enemies of the Peloponnesian League of having provoked the visitation by poisoning their wells. In more recent times, the Turks had tried (with scant success) to use the contagion to overcome be­sieged cities by catapulting infected bodies over the ramparts.

Fouquet held the secret weapon which the Most Christian King would have been more than delighted to use to bring to heel Spain and the Empire and to crush William of Orange and Holland.

His imprisonment had, then, been so rigorous only in order to convince Fouquet to talk, and to be quite sure that he would not pass the secret to one of his many friends. That was why he was forbidden to write. But Fouquet did not yield.

"Why ever should he have done so?" Abbot Melani asked himself rhetorically. "Keeping the secret to himself was his sole guarantee of remaining alive!"

Perhaps the Superintendent had for years simply denied that he really knew how to disseminate the pestilence; or perhaps he had put up a series of half-truths in order to gain time and to obtain less cruel conditions of imprisonment.

"But then, why was he freed?" I asked.

"The letter from Kircher, by now utterly delirious, had reached Paris and Fouquet could therefore no longer deny all knowledge, thus endangering his own life and that of his family. Perhaps in the end Fouquet did give in and promise the King the
Secretum pestis
in ex­change for his own freedom. After that, however, he did not respect his agreement. That is why, then... Colbert's spies set their sights on him."

"Might not the contrary have been the case?" I asked.

"What do you mean to say?"

"Perhaps it was the King who did not respect the agreement."

"Enough of that. I will not permit you to opine that His Maj­esty..."

Atto never finished his sentence, caught up in a sudden vortex of who knows what thoughts. I understood that his pride could not bear to hear my hypothesis: that the King might have promised the Superintendent his freedom, while intending to eliminate him im­mediately afterwards. That had not happened solely because, as I began fervidly to imagine, Fouquet had somehow foreseen the move and succeeded in boldly avoiding the ambush. But perhaps my fan­tasy was getting the better of me. I studied the abbot's face: his eyes staring straight in front of him, he was following the same reasoning as me, of that I was sure.

"One thing, however, is certain," said he suddenly.

"And what might that be?"

"In Fouquet's flight and in the
secretum pestis,
other persons are involved: many others. Lauzun, first and foremost, who was surely sent to Pinerol in order to loosen Fouquet's tongue, perhaps against the promise that he would soon return to Mademoiselle, his wealthy little wife. Then, there is Devize, who accompanied Fouquet here to the Donzello. Perhaps Corbetta, Devize's master, is also part of the picture, for, like his pupil, he was utterly devoted to poor Queen Maria Teresa, as well as being an expert in cryptography. Do not for­get that the
secretum vitae
has been somehow concealed in
arcanae obices.
Bear in mind also that Devize has been lying from the start: do you remember his lies about the theatres in Venice? Last, but not least, we have Dulcibeni, Fouquet's confidant, in whose undergar­ments lay hidden the letter which speaks of the
secretum pestis.
He is but a merchant, yet when he speaks of the pestilence, one would think he was Paracelsus."

He stopped to draw breath. His mouth was dry.

"Do you think that Dulcibeni knows the
secretum pestis?"

"That is possible. Now, however, it is late, and we should be terminating our discussion."

"All this story strikes me as absurd," said I, trying to calm him. "Do you not fear making too many suppositions?"

"I have already told you. If you would understand matters of state, you must take a different view of facts from that which you employ in the ordinary way. What counts is not what you think, but how. No one knows everything, not even the King. And, when you do not know, you must learn to suppose, and to suppose truths which may at first sight appear to be utterly absurd: you will then discover without fail that it is all dramatically true."

Ashen-faced, he went out, scanning the corridor to the left and the right, as though someone might be lying in ambush for him; yet Atto's fear, which had at last become fully manifest, was no longer such a mystery to me. No longer did I envy him his secret mission, his relations in many courts, his skills as a man of action and intrigue.

He had come to Rome in order to serve the King of France and to investigate a mystery. Now he knew that, if he would resolve that mystery, he must investigate the King himself.

*

I awoke the next day gnawed by a certain febrile anxiety. Despite the long-drawn-out reflections in which Atto and I had engaged the night before and the little sleep which I had, yet again, allowed myself, I was perfectly vigilant and ready for action. What I might be able to do was in reality not very clear to me: too many mysteries haunted the inn and their sheer number prevented me from resolv­ing any of them. Threatening or unattainable presences (Louis XIY Colbert, Queen Maria Teresa, Kircher himself) had made their way into the hostelry and into our lives. The scourge of the pestilence had not yet left off from tormenting and terrifying us; some of our guests had, moreover, for days now assumed guises and comport­ments which were at once indecipherable and enigmatic. As though all that were not enough, the astrological almanack purloined from Stilone Priaso promised disastrous and death-dealing events for the days to come.

As I descended the stairs on my way to the kitchen, I heard the voice of Atto Melani resounding, quietly yet agonisingly:

Infelice pensier,

chi tie conforta?

Ohime!

Chi tie consiglia?...*

Atto, too, must have felt confused and discouraged—and that, far more than me! I hastened on my way, deliberately refusing to dwell upon such disheartening thoughts. As usual, I diligently assisted Cristofano in the kitchen and in serving meals. I had prepared snails boiled and lightly fried in oil, with ground garlic, mint, parsley, spices and a slice of lemon; and these were greatly appreciated.

* Unhappy thought, / Who can give comfort for't? / Alas! / Who can give counsel?

I worked with a will, almost as though I were sustained by an excess of vital heat. This beneficial disposition of body and soul was crowned by an event as joyous as it was unexpected.

"Cloridia has asked for you," announced Cristofano after lunch­eon. "You are to go directly to her chamber."

The reason for that call (and this, Cristofano knew) was com­pletely frivolous. I found Cloridia with her bodice half-unlaced and her head bent over the tub, washing her hair. The chamber was inun­dated with the effluvia of sweet essences. Stunned, I heard her ask me to pour onto her head the vinegar contained in a phial which lay upon her dressing table: later, I learned that she used it to make her tresses more lustrous.

While I went about this, I recalled the doubts which I had enter­tained about Cloridia's parting words at our previous encounter. Speak­ing to me of the extraordinary numerological coincidences between her date of birth and that of Rome, she had mentioned a wrong suffered in connection with her return to this city. She had then explained to me that she had found her way to the Donzello by following a certain
virga ardentis
(or ardent rod) which was also called "trembling" or "protruding". This, also because of the equivocal gesture with which she had accompanied her explanation, I had taken to be an indecent allusion. I had then promised myself that I would find out what she really meant. And now, the same Cloridia had suddenly called me and provided me with the opportunity to put my question.

"Pass me the towel. No, not that one, the smaller coarse linen towel," she commanded me, while twisting her hair.

I obeyed. She wrapped her hair in the cloth, after drying her shoulders.

"Would you comb my hair now?" she asked in honeyed tones. "It is so curly that it is almost impossible for me to disentangle it alone without pulling it."

I was happy to undertake so agreeable a service. She sat with her back to me, still half-free from the laces of her bodice, and explained to me that I should begin at the tips and then work back to the roots of her hair. This seemed to me to be the right time to ask her to re­count to me what had brought her to the Donzello, and I reminded her of what she had told me last time that we met. Cloridia agreed.

"Then, what is the ardent or trembling rod, Monna Cloridia? I asked.

"Thy rod and thy staff do comfort me," she recited. "Psalm 22."

I breathed a sigh of relief.

"Are you not acquainted with this? It is simply a forked hazel branch, about a foot and a half long and a finger's breadth thick, cut not more than one year before. It is also known as the rod of Pallas, the Caduceus of Mercury, Circe's wand, Aaron's rod and Jacob's staff. Then there are other names: the divine, the lucent, protruding, tran­scendent, cadent or superior rod: all names given it by the Italians who work in the quicksilver mines of Trent and the Tyrol. It is akin to the Augur's Rod of the Romans, who used it in the place of the sceptre; to the rod which Moses used to smite the rock and bring forth water; to the rod of Asahuerus, King of the Medes and Persians, from whom Esther, once she had kissed its tip, obtained all that she asked."

And she plunged into an explanation of rare and lucid doctrine; for, as I well recalled, Cloridia was no mere strumpet, she was a courte­san: and no woman lived who could couple such sublime erudition with the amatory arts.

"The rod has been used for over two hundred years to discover metals, and for a century, to find water. But everyone knows that. Since time immemorial, however, it has been used to capture crimi­nals and assassins in great numbers in the most distant countries: in the lands of Edom, Sarmatia, Getulia, Gothland, Rhaetia, Raphia, Hibernia, Sleasia, Lower Cirenaica, Marmaris, Mantiana, Confluentia, Prufuik, Alexandria Major, Argenton, Frisia, Gaeta, Cuspia, Livonia, Casperia, Serica, Brixia, Trabezond, Syria, Cilicia, Mutina, Arabia Fe­lix, Malines in Brabant, Liburnia, Slavonia, Oxiana, Pamphilia, Garamantia and finally Lydia, which was formerly known as Maeonia, where flow the rivers Hermes and Pactolus, famed in poesy and song. In Gedrosia, an assassin was even followed for more than forty-five leagues over land and over thirty leagues by sea and arrested at last. With the rod, they had found out the bed in which he had slept, the table where he had eaten, his cooking pots and crockery."

Thus I learned from Cloridia that the mysterious rod works thanks to the porousness of bodies which constantly give off impalpable par­ticles through a process of continual emanation. Somewhere between visible bodies and inconceivable and unintelligible beings there exists a median category of volatile agents, which are rather subtle and active, and are called corpuscles, or particles of matter, atoms or subtle matter.

These corpuscles are most mysterious but exceedingly useful. They may be an emanation of the very substance from which they originate, or else they may be a third substance, which the brain, (the recepta­cle thereof), distributes through the nerves and muscles to produce the various movements. In other cases, however, such corpuscles are present in the air near to the irradiating matter which uses the air as a vehicle whereby to conduct its own imprint to the absorbent matter.

"That is, for example, how bell and clapper function, imprinting an impulse on the nearby air, which in turn presses against other air, and so on, until it strikes our ear, which registers the sensation of the sound," explained Cloridia.

Now, it was such corpuscles which produced sympathy and an­tipathy, and even love.

"Indeed, the search for a thief or an assassin will be based upon antipathy. In the market at Amsterdam, I saw a herd of pigs grunt angrily at a butcher the moment that he approached them, all striv­ing to hurl themselves at him, as far as the tethers tied around their necks would allow. This was because those swine had perceived the corpuscles of other pigs which had just been slaughtered by the butcher: corpuscles which impregnated the man's clothing, agitating the air all around him and disturbing the herd of living swine."

For this same reason, I learned (not without surprise) that the blood of a man assassinated, or even only wounded, (or that of a woman who has been violated), flows from the wound in the direction of the male­factor. The spirits and corpuscles which emanate from the blood of the victim envelop the evil-doer and are most strongly agitated because of the horror aroused by so cruel and sanguinary a man, and this makes it easy for the rod to follow suchlike and to find them out.

Yet, even if the act took place indirectly and at a distance, for example, on commission, or in the case of acts and decisions which have been the cause of death or violence for one or many, the rod is able to trace them, always with the proviso that it should start from the place where the crime was committed. The spirit of the guilty is indeed agitated by the mortal alarms to which the horror of so great a crime gives rise, and by the eternal fear of the ultimate torment which, as Holy Scripture says, ever watches at the gates of the wicked.

"'Fugit impius nemine persequente"
: the impious flee, even when no one follows them," cited Cloridia with unexpected erudition, raising her head and letting her pupils shoot forth darts.

Likewise, it was through antipathy that, if a wolf's tail were to be hung on the wall of a cowshed, the cattle would be unable to eat; that the vine flees the cabbage; that hemlock keeps its distance from rue, and, although hemlock is a mortal poison, it will not be harmful if, immediately after it has been taken, one imbibes the juice of rue. Again, there is irreconcilable antipathy between the scorpion and the crocodile, the elephant and the swine, the lion and the cock, the crow and the owl, the wolf and the sheep, as well as the toad and the weasel.

"But, as I have already said, the corpuscles also produce sympathy and love," continued Cloridia, who then recited:

Vi son nodi segreti, vi son simpatie,

il cui dolce accordo fa nelle anime armonie,

si che s'amano e I'una e l'altra, e si lasciano avviluppar

da questi non so che, che non si posson esplicar.*

"Well, my dear, what we are unable to explain is in fact the corpuscles. According to Giobatta Porta, there is, for instance, great sympathy between the male and the female palm, between the vine and the olive, between the fig and the myrtle. And it is out of sym­pathy that a maddened bull will grow calm when tied to a fig tree; or an elephant, upon seeing a ram. And know," said she, her voice growing softer, "that according to Cardano the lizard feels sympathy for man, and likes to look upon him and to seek his saliva, which he drinks avidly."

Meanwhile, she had stretched her arms behind her and, grasping the hand that combed her, had drawn me to her side.

"In the same way," she said, as though nothing had taken place, "the affection or secret attraction which we feel imperiously for cer­tain persons from the first time that we encounter them is caused by an emission of spirits or corpuscles from that person which gently make their imprint on the eyes and the nerves, until they reach the brain and make for a sensation of agreeableness."

Trembling, I worked on her temples with the comb.

"And do you know something?" she added winningly. "This at­traction has the magnificent power of rendering the object of our desires most perfect and most worthy in our eyes."

* There are secret ties, there are sympathies, / Whose sweet accord makes har­monies in Souls, / So then they love, and let themselves infolded be / In that I-know-not-what to which they have no key.

No one could ever have seen
me
as being most perfect, no, certainly not: this I repeated to myself as I struggled to master my violent emotion; yet meanwhile, I could not so much as articulate a single word.

Cloridia leaned her head against my chest and sighed.

"Now you must unravel the hair at the nape of my neck, without however hurting me: there the hair is most entwined but also most fragile and sensitive."

Having said which, she made me sit facing her, on her high bed, and placed her head in my lap, with her face downwards, showing me her neck. Still bewildered and confused, I felt the warmth of her breath upon my groin. I began again to comb her curls. I felt my head completely empty.

"I have not yet explained to you how to use the rod successfully," she began again, slowly, while I felt her find the most comfortable position.

"Remember, first and foremost, that nature has one single mecha­nism in all its operations and this alone can explain the movement of the rod. One must first of all dip the tip of the rod in some material, if possible humid and warm (like blood or other humours), which has to do with whatever is sought after. This is because touch can some­times discover what the eyes cannot. Then one takes the rod between two fingers, holding it at the level of the belly. One can also balance it on the back of one's hand, but in my opinion that does not work. One should then proceed in the direction where one thinks what one seeks is to be found. One must walk back and forth, up and down, several times, until the rod rises: and thus, one can be sure that the direction one has taken is the right one. The inclination of the rod is, in fact, the same thing as the inclination of the needle of a compass: it responds to a magnetic attraction. The important thing, with the rod, is never to agitate it brusquely, for that may break the volume of vapours and exhalations coming from the place one seeks and which, by impregnating the rod, cause it to rise in the right direction. Every now and then, it is good to take in one's hands the two horns which are at the base of the rod, but without squeezing too much, and in such a way that the back of the hands faces the ground and taking care that the tip of the rod is always well raised and pointing towards the goal. You should also know that the rod will not move in just any­one's hands. This calls for a special gift and much art. For example, it will not move in the hands of someone whose perspiration is gross, rough and abundant, since such corpuscles will break the column of vapours, exhalations and smokes. It does, however, sometimes hap­pen that the rod may not move even in the hands of someone who has previously used it successfully. (Not that I have ever experienced that, thank heavens.) What may occur is that something alters the constitution of the person handling the rod, causing their blood to ferment violently. Something in the air or food may produce acrid or acid salts. Overwork, staying up late at night or studies may cause perspiration which is excessively acrid and rough and passes from the hands to the interstices of the rod, thus hindering the column of vapours, so that these will not move. This is because the rod acts as a catalyser of the invisible corpuscles, like a microscope. You should see what a spectacle there is when the rod at last attains..."