eyes of a chosen lady, or gentleman, in the audience. Then they would look away and glue their eyes on the instrument, with subtle feeling massaging the strings strung tautly across its softly rounded pear-shaped core; then all at once they would again gaze at their victim, whose eyes would mist with excitement and whose vision would soften and blur, and a thick liquid would course down the spine from head to solar plexus and, on its way to the heart, spill into the abdominal cavity. There was no joking with these lutenists, who were known in feudal courts as masters of ceremony and masseurs of souls. When sorrow needed to be kneaded from a soul, when a heart wanted soothing or the black bile that makes a person prey to melancholy, if not madness, had to be staunched, the lutenist would press just the right string, and its sound would flow through the diseased point or organ, reverberate with it and bring the listener relief.
The noble countess, a great admirer and patroness of music and of those who composed and played it, would also organize a less selective programme for the populace, who elicited a less refined and more uninhibited music from the performers. These were not first-rank musicians, but second-class entertainers. At times they were not even lutenists but strummers, accompanied by various percussionists and singers (female ones, too) as well as pipes and horns – all things that could be carried in the same cart in which the musicians
travelled from place to place.
These musicians (in the view of many, plain vagrants) would play an evening or two for the populace, who took the precaution of stocking their bellies with food and drink, the latter distilled in their own cellars. And when music combines with the reverberations of brandy, when the spirit is awash with spirits, good sense can soon break free of its bonds and people start howling and baying with frothing mouths, muddled and maddened, and in glassy-eyed, saliva-soaked lust have their way with each other. Since the musicians appeared in the greatest numbers on Midsummer’s Night, after the first hay was gathered, the largest demographic increase in the populace would occur the following year at Eastertide – increases not uncommonly marked by a colourful range of physiognomies and complexions and somewhat unusual foreign features.
Something similar happened to the noble lord, who on Maundy Thursday acquired his long-awaited heir. Or, to be precise, heiress, of whom, as the years passed, rumours spread that, even before she took her first steps, her little fingers were reaching for the strings and she would rather cradle a lute in her arms than her rag dolls; that by the time she was really walking she could already strum a few chords and was singing before she was talking; and at the age of ten, it was said, she had even composed a few melodies. It was also strangely suspicious that, in a manner unnatural to her sex, the young Lady Agnes Hypatia was extremely fond of the fine arts and abstruse sciences, and when it came time for her to marry, she made it clear that she herself would choose her husband. Her father, the noble Count Friedrich, was pulling his hair out. Not only could he not hit the nail on the head in bed, he was none too successful at bringing up his daughter either – so said women who knew about such matters, at which remarks his noble lady would always smile enigmatically. It was curious that the daughter, like the noble lord, had green eyes and brown hair, while her mother’s hair still gleamed with a warm honeyed radiance, and something of the count’s features, too, might have been discerned in the daughter’s face were it not that the young lady was unusually temperamental and bold-spirited – this more than anything else raised doubts as to whether she was truly the fruit of the master’s loins.
But to shorten the story a little (which will not be difficult as it was, to be sure, not long), of the candidates for marriage, the young lady selected the man she thought least irksome, temperamentally most amusing and not at all ugly. Her father concluded that she had chosen a man who would neither impede nor restrain her passion for the fine arts, the humanities, natural science and spiritual beauty, whose priceless value lies in the fact that it serves no end and whose sole purpose is to offer an elevated spiritual pleasure to whoever can recognize it. But is it possible to divide the spirit from the body as if splitting firewood? This question only a very few considered in those days.
The bridegroom came from the knightly family of the noble Katzensteiners, known widely as ‘the noble Cats’, who operated as a harmonious clowder. The sons were famous for their fencing skills and nimble duels with bladed weapons. At chivalric tournaments the victories went as a matter of course to the noble Cats, who were also gallant, if not to an equal extent educated. As they were known
to behave properly with women, the daughter’s decision eased her mother’s worries, but no one doubted that the young wife, in her husband’s presence, would be the one who sharpened thoughts, tormented wits and, indeed, sparkled with wit herself.
The young lady, looking to foreign examples, had the idea of creating her own circle of talents and sages, starting, reasonably enough, with local scholars; she would have gone on to acquire better-known and more widely influential minds as well if her life had not fallen victim to that banality we call death. It came to her not in military garb, nor was there any epidemiological dimension to it: it did not lodge itself in her body, blacken her armpits and groin or produce oozing boils.
Hers was a lofty death. A pure death. One warm summer’s day, the young lady, book in hand, was strolling by herself in the garden among the rose blossoms, which she loved above all other flowers. She was also fond of lilies, hydrangeas and oleanders, which, however, she knew were poisonous and so, perhaps, was also slightly repulsed by them. As she had done countless times, she walked along the garden paths lost in thought, this time with a book by the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino (or perhaps it was an ancient author); her brow was pressed into three furrows, as it always was when she was thinking at full power. In vain did the female members of the castle staff urge her not to frown, and generally to think as little as possible, so her face would not be prematurely etched in wrinkles or her soul filled with melancholy, as happened with men who thought too much about useless matters, things relating to various philosophies and alchemies, astronomies and mathematics. ‘They are men, after all, while you are a lady,’ they tried to persuade her, to no avail. But the wrinkles never formed, and she never succumbed to Saturn’s gloomy influence, for on that warm morning, between breakfast and the midday meal, while engrossed in the study of life’s fundamental questions, she suddenly fainted on the little path; perhaps she lay in the sand too long without help, or perhaps it would not have mattered if somebody had been walking alongside her and offered immediate assistance. There was no blood, no visible injury. The young lady had simply collapsed, and that same afternoon she expired in her bed.
Her mother did not consent to the physician’s entreaty to let him examine her late daughter’s body so he might discover the reason for her tragically abrupt and untimely death. ‘Let’s call it the will of God,’ she told him. ‘Nothing will bring my little girl back to life.’ It did not seem very likely that someone could have poisoned her in malice, for, despite her intellectual caprices, everyone respected the young lady and loved her without reservation. Just as unlikely was the idea that she might have poisoned herself by accident, for she had met with the physician every week and, among other topics, they had discussed plants and toxins; she was also very careful and never attempted even the simplest alchemical experiments on her own. There had been no sign of illness before her death, nothing on which to pin any explanation for her sudden demise. Well, almost nothing. For something, indeed, had not escaped the notice of the noble populace: the young lady of the castle was much, was far too much, inclined to thinking. And it was very likely that the constant pressure in her head caused by the great quantity of her thoughts had burst her brain. Nor must it be forgotten that she was a woman, and the female brain, which is smaller and lighter than the male one and of a more rarefied substance, is not made for heavy thoughts; it is made for understanding the instructions of one’s parents and, later, one’s husband, for bringing up children and managing the household, for social obligations and dances; space might be found in the female brain for embroidery and some, too, for light music-making and one, or at most two, foreign languages (including Latin). But heavy thoughts about the origins of the world, physics, ethics, mathematics, the arts and other masculine studies will overburden the female brain until it simply cracks. An excessive amount of thought, therefore, had very likely dug the young woman’s grave. Proponents of this theory blamed the mother, who throughout her daughter’s life had never given her proper direction or discouraged her involvement in matters