Glorious Ones by Francine Prose

station in the eyes of the others. To tell the truth, I pitied him. I had sympathy for his dreams of glory, of wild love; I had a few of them myself. And I pitied him for being so obsessed with that worthless Vittoria. She had a good heart, I suppose, but she was so coarse, so graceless, so common-looking—I couldn’t understand how any sensible man could worship her so passionately.
    But no one could ever accuse Flaminio Scala of being a sensible man. He stubbornly insisted on playing the role of the Lover, as well as that of the Captain. Knowing what we knew, it was embarrassing to watch him perform. He grovelled on his knees, licked the dust off Vittoria’s shoes, tried to put his hands all over her.
    “Perhaps you underestimate me now,” he’d sigh on stage. “But someday, when I am immortal, when I am enthroned with the gods in heaven, and all the nightingales on earth have learned to sing my name, then you will know what I was, then you will know what kind of man loved you!”
    “When you are immortal,” the Inamorata would giggle, “I’ll be rotting in my grave.”
    But of course, it was Flaminio who wrote the plays; despite Vittoria’s protests, the dramas ended the way he wanted. The hero was so noble that he had to win the girl. Nothing else seemed possible. The scenarios always ended with the two of them embracing, center stage.
    The audiences loved it. Flaminio and Vittoria were a terrific success; their popularity filled my treasury. It was Amante and the Inamorata who got us invited to France.
    But, after that miserable journey, after that incident in the cave and that disgrace at court, the roles of the Lover and his mistress began to change again.
    It was obvious, I suppose. But, for a long time, no one noticed. They’d all been under Flaminio’s spell since that dramatic repentance scene. Even I—Pantalone, the observer—even I failed to see how craftily Andreini was working. No one even suspected until that famous show at Perugia, when he pulled the rabbit out of his cap, for everyone to see.
    He was always a sneaky one, Andreini. He calls himself a realist. But I call him a schemer, a conniver. If I was really the miser they say, you’d think I’d like Francesco; now that he and Isabella are in charge, I need two boys to help me with the cashboxes. But I could never trust a man who has everything plotted out in advance, who knows every move, every turn. His brain is like a chessboard. There are lumps of ice in his heart. He moves slowly, sinuously, like a snake.
    Of course, Andreini’s changed since Isabella’s started leading him down a few tricky paths of her own. But in those days, Francesco was a master. His scheme was so clever, so well executed, so perfectly obvious! On that night at Perugia, when we finally saw it, we were filled with admiration.
    Who would have suspected? In the beginning, Andreini had been taken into the troupe to play Arlechino—the trickster, the clown, the half-wild cat, the cold eye. But, for the most part, he’d been hired for his acrobatics, his body.
    According to Vittoria, he’d come up from the audience one day and astounded the entire company with an amazing display of gymnastics—somersaults, leaps, and contortions which he claimed to have learned among the Chinese and Turks.
    Right then, Flaminio knew he’d discovered a gold mine. Usually, the acrobats were small, wiry fellows like Brighella. Flaminio realized that the crowds had never seen anything like Francesco before. When they saw his long-limbed body cartwheeling across the stage, they’d think they were watching some exotic, wild animal.
    So for a long time, we thought of him as the athlete. Years passed before that sneaky Andreini let us know that he also spoke five languages, mimed like an angel, wrote like a professional. But, in those days, he and Flaminio were so close that the Captain seemed genuinely pleased to discover his friend’s accomplishments. So he let Andreini play a