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occasional danger that limits and is thought to give zest and legitimacy to slaughtering animals. The beaters corraled endless columns of wild boar, deer, and hare, and then drove them past the King, who stood in a roofless sentry box of solid masonry in the park at his country palace or on a horse in the middle of a field. Out of a hundred shots, he never missed more than one. Then he descended and went to work, sleeves rolled to his elbows, carving up the steaming, bloody bodies.
    The King relished the smell of the blood rising from the carcasses, of tripe or macaroni thickening in the cauldron, of his own excretory labors or those of his brood of young children, of pine trees and the intoxication of jasmine. The long bulbous organ that had earned him the nickname of King Big Nose was imperious as well as startlingly ugly. Hot smells drew him: peppery food, barely dead animals, a yielding moist woman. But also the smell of his terrifying father, the odor of melancholy. (He can just barely smell it on the Cavaliere, on whom it is much fainter, repressed.) The reassuringly animal-like odor of his wife would draw him into her body, but afterward, as he was falling asleep, another odor (or a dream of an odor) would wake him. The pungent molecules caressed the inside of his thick nostrils, flew to his brain. He liked everything that is formless, abundant. Odors focus, distract. Odors cling, follow. They extend, diffuse. A world of odors is ungovernable—one does not dominate an odor, it dominates you—and the King did not really like governing. Oh, for a tiny kingdom!
    His sensuality was the only intelligence he possessed; deliberately left almost illiterate by his father, he had been designed as a weak ruler. Because of his taste for fraternizing with the city’s immense tribe of layabouts, he was also nicknamed the Beggar King, but his superstitions were those shared by everyone here, not only the uneducated. His amusements were a bit more original. Besides nasty pranks and the killing sports, which he practiced at a uniquely wholesale rate, the occupations of servants diverted him from the constraints of royal mummery. Arriving at the grandiose palace at Caserta, the Cavaliere had once found the King busy taking down lamps from the walls and cleaning them. When a crack regiment was stationed on the grounds of the palace at Portici, the King set up a tavern in the encampment and sold wine to the soldiers.
    The King doesn’t act like a king (how disappointing!), he doesn’t enact his pure difference from others: no wit, no grandeur, no distance. Only coarseness and appetite. But Naples often shocked, even as it bewitched. That good Catholic from provincial, relentlessly clerical Salzburg, Leopold Mozart, was appalled by the pagan superstitions of the nobility and by the rank idolatry of Church ceremony. English travelers became indignant over the indecent wall paintings and phallic objects at Pompeii. Everyone was scornful of the caprices of the juvenile King. And where everyone is shocked is a place where everyone tells stories.
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    Like every foreign diplomat, the Cavaliere had his much-polished store of tales of how outrageous the King could be with which to regale distinguished visitors. It is not the King’s scatological humor that makes him unusual, the Cavaliere might start by saying. Jokes about defecation are common in most Italian courts, I am told. Really, his auditor would say.
    If the Cavaliere began with a version of his accompanying the King to the privy, he might move on to another story in which chocolate plays a role.
    This story, which he had told many visitors, concerned events that happened three years after his arrival as envoy. Charles III of Spain, who is the Neapolitan king’s father, and Maria Theresa of Austria having concluded their negotiations for an alliance of the two dynasties, the empress having selected one of her many daughters, the