They agreed that they pursued tranquillity; they also agreed it was hard to attain. Agreement followed agreement. He so quickly put them at their ease that after supper (which except for lacking wine was delicious) Tinkel asked him how he knew where to find them. ‘A little bird told me,’ he replied. Coffee was served. Iced water accompanied it. Conversation continued, but less briskly. Banian fidgeted and looked constrained; so, too, did the Provincial Governor. A silence fell, broken by the Provincial Governor saying, ‘I am about to make a strange request. I hope you won’t think me too forward.’ Ludo, Moor, Tinkel and Nimmerlein implied that they couldn’t dream of thinking it, and looked tutorially at Banian. ‘I am a poet,’ continued the Provincial Governor. ‘I expand myself in poetry. What a seraglio is to some, my poems are to me. But like a seraglio they are secluded. No one listens to them. May I read you one of my poems?’ Without waiting for assent, he clapped his hands. A servant brought in a large basket filled with scrolls. ‘Naturally, I compose them in Turkish.’ He picked a scroll, and began to read aloud. His voice was rich and commanding. He read slowly, waving his hand to mark the stresses, and pausing at frequent intervals, as though to inhale some particular beauty. ‘Now I will read it in French.’

In Foligno he was so entranced by a travelling puppet theatre that he followed it from city to city, disregarding cascades, Roman arches, vistas, Vesuvius, the Vatican Library, for the pleasure of seeing Orlando furiously raving with an unmoved white calico face.

When the order was rescinded and the travelling players came once more, Hamlet was in attendance on the Queen, indispensably regulating a conversazione. He bore his disappointment so gracefully that Nel said she would go to the opening performance alone, to give him an account of it. She had an answer to all his objections. She would plead her belly as an excuse for absence from the afternoon assembly. She was no more with child than she had ever been, and Elfin pregnancies are so infrequent that hers would have been in the Court Circular; but the excuse was a formality employed by every lady at Court. In case anything went wrong with her invisibility, she would wear a mask. If he insisted on a chaperon, she would take her lady’s maid, vowed to secrecy. At the thought of a lady’s maid vowed to secrecy over his cherished foible of low taste, Hamlet’s self-respect revolted. Nel went alone.

Wace, a Norman poet of the mid-twelfth century, had heard so much about the fairy Kingdom of Brocéliande, in Brittany, that he went to see its wonders for himself; and found nothing, except that he had gone on a fool’s errand: