The night before the coronation day the young King was sitting alone in her magnificent bedroom. The court had already retired, he otveshivaya low bows according to the customs of the time, stiff, and returned to the Great Hall of the Palace, to receive final instructions with Professor Etiquette — because some of them have not lost a natural manner, and is unlikely to resemble that courtier this serious flaw. The young man — a king was a young man who was barely sixteen years old — not upset care attendants, with a deep sigh of relief, he sat on the soft cushions luxury bed and lay there, his mouth open in front of him and looking fearful eyes, like swarthy forest faun or a young beast who fell into the trap set by hunters. It is indeed found hunters accidentally met a young man, when he, barefoot and with a pipe in his hand, drove a herd of poor shepherd, who nurtured his son and he has always honored themselves. The son of the only daughter of the old King, who was born of a secret union with the person standing far below it — a stranger, as one said, that wondrous charms his lute earned the love of a young princess, or, as others have said, an artist from Rimini, to whom the Princess had many, perhaps too much attention has suddenly disappeared from the city, and did not finish the painting in the Cathedral, — he, when he was a week old, was abducted by his mother while she slept, and given into the care of a peasant and his wife who did not have their children and lived in the deep forest, more than a day's ride from the city. An hour after you wake up it has given birth to a blond girl died of grief, or the plague, as asserted by court physicians, or from lightning Italian poison, mix with a cup of wine with spices, as it was said people, and while the faithful messenger uvezshy baby in the saddle dismounted from his horse lathered and knocked on the door of roughly cemented shepherd's hut, the body of the Princess was lowered into the grave, dug in an abandoned cemetery outside the city gates, in the grave, where, as told, lay the body of the young men are already endowed with miraculous alien beauty, with her hands strapped behind backs with ropes, and breast, peppered with scarlet dagger wounds. That, at least, read the rumor. And it is true that on his deathbed, whether old King repented of his great sin, or simply wished to preserve the kingdom for his descendants, sent for the young men and the presence of the Council declared him as his successor. And it seems that in the first moment the young man showed signs of that strange passion for beauty that was to so much influence on his life.
