Simultaneously, Colonel Baron D’Asfeld was sent to Venice, where the Duke of Mantua was spending the winter, there to exchange the ratification of the treaty; he arrived in the January of 1679, and at once informed Pinchesne, the French representative, of his mission. But the duke refused to ratify the treaty until Mattioli, who was still on the way from Paris, should have arrived to give him the benefit of his opinion concerning it; and here, be it noticed, is the first sign of Mattioli’s double-dealing as shown in the extraordinary slowness of his journey home from Paris.
What was the reason of that slowness?—but let us wait and see.
The parts were now reversed; whereas, the French had been formerly anxious for delays, they were now all afire with eagerness to put the business through; whilst the Duke of Mantua and his Mattioli, once so impatient of any hitch in the negotiations, now seemed scarcely interested any longer in the question of Casale. Pressed by D’Asfeld and Pinchesne to promise that he would be at that place by the 20th of February at latest, the duke declined to commit himself; and when he answered them at last through Mattioli (who, on his arrival in Italy, was once more prevented for a time from attending to business by another of his inopportune attacks of illness) Duke Charles sent word to say that he could not possibly get to Casale before the 10th of March, urging three separate reasons for his inability to do so. These were: That he had not sufficient funds for such a journey; that he was unwilling to leave his heir-presumptive, Don Vincenzo Gonzaga, behind at Mantua at such a crisis; and “the obligation he found himself under of holding a sort of carousal with several Venetian gentlemen.” Could anything be more frankly careless than this last; more plainly indicative of the fact that Duke Charles, disappointed by the smallness of the monetary advantage proffered him in return for the control of Casale, was either desirous of obtaining more by giving an impression of indifference in the matter, or else, that he was genuinely indifferent, by reason of the knowledge that Mattioli was even at that moment (and by preconcerted arrangement with himself) displaying the political wares so undervalued by Louis XIV to other and more generous purchasers along the road from Paris to Venice?