It was the night before his coronation, and the young King sat alone in his chamber. His courtiers had taken their leave, bowing ceremoniously, and retired to the Great Hall for final lessons in etiquette from the Professor; some still possessed natural manners, a grave offence for a courtier.
The lad—only sixteen—was not sorry to see them go. With a sigh of relief, he flung himself back on the soft cushions of his embroidered couch, lying there wild-eyed and open-mouthed, like a woodland Faun or a young forest animal newly snared.
Indeed, it was hunters who had found him. They came upon him by chance as he followed the flock of the poor goatherd who had raised him, a boy who always fancied himself the goatherd's son. He was, in truth, the child of the old King's only daughter, born of a secret marriage to a man far beneath her station—a stranger, some said, whose lute-playing magic won the Princess's love; others spoke of an artist from Rimini, whom the Princess honored too much, and who vanished suddenly, leaving his cathedral work unfinished. When just a week old, the infant was stolen from his sleeping mother's side and given to a childless peasant couple living deep in the forest.
Grief, plague, or a swift Italian poison in spiced wine—as the court physician or rumors suggested—slew the young mother within an hour of her waking. As the trusty messenger bearing the child across his saddle knocked at the goatherd's rude door, the Princess's body was being lowered into an open grave in a deserted churchyard beyond the city gates. It was said another body lay there too: a young man of marvellous foreign beauty, his hands bound, his breast stabbed with many red wounds.
Such was the story whispered among men. What was certain was that the dying old King, moved perhaps by remorse or a desire to keep the kingdom in his line, had sent for the lad and, before the Council, acknowledged him as heir.
From the first moment of recognition, he showed a strange passion for beauty, destined to greatly influence his life. Those who accompanied him to his suite often spoke of his cry of pleasure upon seeing the delicate raiment and rich jewels prepared for him, and the fierce joy with which he cast aside his rough leather tunic and coarse sheepskin cloak. He did at times miss the fine freedom of his forest life and chafed at the tedious daily court ceremonies, but the wonderful palace—Joyeuse, as it was called—seemed a new world fashioned for his delight. Whenever he could escape council or audience, he would run down the great staircase, with its gilt bronze lions and bright porphyry steps, and wander from room to room, from corridor to corridor, as if seeking in beauty an anodyne for pain, a restoration from sickness.
On these journeys of discovery—which were to him real voyages through a marvellous land—he was sometimes accompanied by slim, fair-haired court pages in floating mantles and gay fluttering ribbons; but more often he went alone, feeling through a quick instinct, almost a divination, that the secrets of art are best learned in secret, and that Beauty, like Wisdom, loves the lonely worshipper.
Many curious stories were told of him then. It was said a stout Burgomaster, come to deliver a florid oratorical address, once saw him kneeling in real adoration before a great new picture from Venice, which seemed to herald the worship of new gods. Another time, he was missed for hours and, after a lengthy search, was found in a little chamber in a northern turret, gazing as if in a trance at a Greek gem carved with the figure of Adonis. He was seen, so the tale went, pressing warm lips to the marble brow of an antique statue discovered in a riverbed during the building of a stone bridge, a statue inscribed with the name of Hadrian's Bithynian slave. He once passed a whole night noting the effect of moonlight on a silver image of Endymion.