The answer to that was, quite simply, yes.

Grottorosso’s madness was not the kind for which one is locked away, it was not the kind which was ever immediately clear to even the most practised eye; it was a ‘gentle madness’, more eccentric than lunatic, and one which was easily, and often far too quickly, confused with genius – which, after all, is a modest sign of madness in any man.

But Grottorosso was not any man in any sense. Certainly as far as he himself was concerned, he was extraordinary; a piece of self-knowledge which suffused him with delight. From the moment of his birth his astonished parents, nurses and maids were left in no doubt as to this quality. No plump, pink gurgling baby this: a muscular, cold-eyed creature, strong and determined, who fed at the breast of his wet-nurse like a carnivore, and beat, pummelled and roared for constant attention from all about him. At one year he staggered about on legs as sturdy and straight as columns, at two he ran; at three he spoke fluently, the words ‘I’, ‘want’, ‘shall’, ‘give’, ‘no’, and ‘take’ predominating over the more usual ‘Papa’ or ‘Mamma’ which never, at any time, figured in his growing vocabulary, being replaced neatly and tidily by ‘him’ or ‘her’. At four he could hum Rossini and read La Fontaine with ease, and at five, breaking away from a crucified governess one day in Rome, he tripped over a cat, which he had been about to kick, and crashed cruelly down the marble stairs of the Victor Emanuel memorial to land heavily on his head at the bottom, which left him with a fractured skull from which he eventually recovered, and a secret terror of marble staircases, from which he did not. For the rest of his life he ascended or descended only among a tight group of people or by firmly clasping a handrail. This was put down, to those who were aware of it, as a mere form of his brilliant eccentricity. But he knew only too well that it was a hideous flaw in his otherwise steel-like strength and masculinity. A flaw which he did all he could to conceal, even from himself. He despised, above all things, weakness and indecision, and was absolutely unforgiving of both in all their forms. The Tower of Pisa made him ill.