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alone!
    The Cavaliere, blinking back the drops of sweat that had passed the escarpment of his eyebrows, wondered if this were not one of the King’s nasty practical jokes.
    Maybe it wasn’t a good meal, said the King. I was sure it was a good meal. How could it not be a good meal if it was so tasty?
    The Cavaliere said it was very tasty.
    The King said, Tell me a story.
    A story, said the Cavaliere.
    (A courtier: someone who repeats back to you the last word or words that you’ve said.)
    Yes, tell me about a chocolate mountain. A huge mountain all chocolate. That’ what I’d like to climb.
    Once upon a tine there was a mountain dark as night.
    As chocolate!
    And inside it was all white, with caves and labyrinths and—
    Was it cold inside, interrupted the King. If it’s hot the chocolate will melt.
    It’s cold, said the Cavaliere, wiping his brow with a silk handkerchief soaked in essence of tuberose.
    Is it like a city? A whole world?
    Yes.
    But a little world. Very cozy. I wouldn’t need so many servants. I’d like a little world with people, maybe the people would be little too, who would do everything I wanted.
    So they do already, observed the Cavaliere.
    Not so, protested the King. You know how I’m ordered about by the Queen, by Tanucci, by everyone except you, my good dear friend. I need a chocolate world, yes! That’s my world. Everything I want. All the women, whenever I wanted. And they could be chocolate too and I would eat them. Don’t you ever imagine what it would be like to eat people?
    He licked his fat white hand. Umm, mine is salty! Slipping the hand in his armpit, he continued: And it would have a big kitchen. And the Queen would help me cook, she would hate that. She would peel the garlic, millions of shiny cloves, and I would stick them inside her, and then we’d have garlic babies. And the people would run after me, begging me to feed them, I would throw food at them, I’d make them eat.
    Frowning, he let his head loll. A roulade of spluttering noises climaxed in a deep cavernous exhalation of the bowels.
    That was good, the King said. He reached out and thwacked the Cavaliere’s lean rump. The Cavaliere nodded and felt his own bowels churn. But this is the life of a courtier, is it not. The Cavaliere was not one of the rulers of this world.
    Help me, said the King to the Master of the Royal Bedchamber at the open door. He was having trouble getting to his feet, he is that fat.
    The Cavaliere considered the span of human reactions to the disgusting. At one extreme, Catherine, who was appalled by the manic vulgarity of the King as by so much else at the court. At the other, the King, for whom the disgusting was a source of delight. And himself in the middle, where a courtier must be, neither indignant nor insensible. To be indignant would itself be vulgar, a sign of weakness, of lack of breeding. Eccentric habits in great ones must be borne. (Had not the Cavaliere been the childhood playmate, older by seven years, of another king who sometimes exhibited signs of outright lunacy?) There’s no changing the way people are. No one changes, everyone knows that.
    *   *   *
    The ungainly King is easily impressed, almost as much by the thin English knight’s imperturbability as by the cleverness of the Hapsburg wife imported for him from Vienna when he was seventeen, who since the birth of their first son sits on the Council of State and is the real ruler of the kingdom. How agreeable if, instead of that formidable, supercilious, gloomy man on the throne in Madrid, someone like the Cavaliere had been his father. The Cavaliere loves music, doesn’t he? So does the King; it is, for him, like food. Is not the Cavaliere a sportsman, too? Besides always clambering up that beastly mountain, he loves to fish, ride, hunt. And hunting is the King’s ruling passion, which he practices by excluding the exertion, difficulty, and