Enough of business; now, gossip.
Madame deigns to recognize me now that I am known to be a Countess. For the longest time, she regarded me as a parasite, a strangling vine, and so I expected she would be the last person at Court to accept me as a noblewoman. But she astonished me with a welcome that was courteous and almost warm, and begrudged me a few moments’ polite conversation, when I encountered her in the gardens the other day. I believe her previous coldness toward me came from two reasons. One is that like all the other foreign royals, la Palatine (as Liselotte is sometimes referred to here) is insecure about her rank, and tends to exalt herself by belittling those whose bloodlines are even more questionable than hers. This is not an attractive feature but it is all too human! The second reason is that her chief rival at Court is de Maintenon, who came up from a wretched state to become the unofficial Queen of France. And so whenever Madame sees a woman at Court who has aspirations, it reminds her of the one she hates.
Many nobles of ancient families sneer at me because I handle money. Liselotte is not, however, one of these. On the contrary, I believe it explains why she has accepted me.
Now that I have spent two years in the household of Mme. la duchesse d’Oyonnax, surrounded by the very type of ambitious young woman Madame despises so much, I can understand why she takes such care to avoid them. Those girls have very few assets: their names, their bodies, and (if they are lucky enough to have been born with any) their wits. The first of these-their names, and the pedigrees attached-suffice to get them in the gates. They are like an invitation to the ball. But most of those families have more liabilities than assets. Once one of those girls has found a position in some household at Versailles, she has only a few years to make arrangements for the remainder of her life. She is like a plucked rose in a vase. Every day at dawn she looks out the window to see a gardener driving a wagon loaded with wilted flowers that are taken out to the countryside to be used for mulch, and the similitude to her own future is clear. In a few years she will be outshined, at all the parties, by younger girls. Her brothers will inherit any assets the family might have. If she can marry well, as Sophie did, she may have a life to look forward to; if not, she will be shipped off to some convent, as two of Sophie’s beautiful and brilliant sisters were. When that desperation is combined with the heedless irresponsible nature of young persons generally, cruelty becomes mundane.
It’s only reasonable for Madame to want to avoid young women of that type. She has always assumed that I was one of them-having no way to distinguish me from the others. But lately, as I mentioned, she has become aware that I handle investments. This sets me apart-it tells her that I have interests and assets outside of the intrigues of Court and so am not as dangerous as the others. In effect, she is treating me as if I had just married a rich handsome Duke, and gotten all my affairs in order. Instead of a cut rose in a vase, I am a rose-bush with living roots in rich soil.
Or perhaps I’m reading too much into a brief conversation!
She asked me if the hunting was good on Qwghlm. Knowing how much she loves to hunt, I told her it was miserable, unless throwing stones at rats qualified-and how, pray tell, was the hunting here at Versailles? Of course I meant the vast game parks that the King has constructed around the chateau, but Liselotte shot back, “Indoors or out?”
“I have seen game taken indoors,” I allowed, “but only through trapping or poisoning, which are common peasant vices.”
“Qwghlmians are more accustomed to the outdoor life?”
“If only because our dwellings keep getting blown down, madame.”
“Can you ride, mademoiselle?” she asked.
“After a fashion-for I learned bareback style,” I answered.
“There are no saddles where you come from?”
“In olden days there were, for we would suspend them from tree-branches overnight, to prevent them from being eaten by small creatures in the night-time. But then the English cut down the trees, and so now it is our custom to ride bareback.”
“I should like to see that,” she returned, “but it is hardly proper.”
“We are guests in the King’s house and must abide by his standards of propriety,” I said dutifully.
“If you can ride well in a saddle here, I shall invite you to St. Cloud-that is my estate, and you may abide by my rules there.”
“Do you think Monsieur would object?”
“My husband objects to everything I do,” she said, “and so he objects to nothing. ”
In my next letter, I’ll let you know whether I passed the riding-test, and got the invitation to St. Cloud.
And I will send the quarterly figures as well!
Eliza de la Zeur
Therefore it happeneth commonly, that such as value themselves by the greatness of their wealth, adventure on crimes, upon hope of escaping punishment, by corrupting public justice, or obtaining pardon by money, or other rewards.
–Hobbes, Leviathan
NOW AS ENGLAND WAS Acountry of fixed ways, they imprisoned him in the same chamber where they had put Oldenburg twenty years before.
But some things changed even in England; James II was peevish and fitful where his older brother had been merry, and so Daniel was kept closer than Oldenburg had been, and allowed to leave the chamber to stroll upon the walls only rarely. He spent all his time in that round room, encircled by the eldritch glyphs that had been scratched into the stone by condemned alchemists and sorcerers of yore, and pathetic Latin plaints graven by Papists under Elizabeth.
Twenty years ago he and Oldenburg had made idle jests about carving new graffiti in the Universal Character of John Wilkins. The words he had exchanged with Oldenburg still seemed to echo around the room, as if the stone were a telescope mirror that forever recurved all information towards the center. The idea of the Universal Character now seemed queer and naive to Daniel, and so it didn’t enter his mind to begin scratching at the stone for the first fortnight or so of his imprisonment. He reckoned that it would take a long time to make any lasting mark, and he assumed he would not live long enough. Jeffreys could only have put him in here to kill him, and when Jeffreys set his mind to killing someone there was no stopping him, he did it the way a farmer’s wife plucked a chicken. But no specific judicial proceedings were underway-a sign that this was not to be a judicial murder (meaning a stately and more or less predictable one), but the other kind.
It was marvelously quiet at the Tower of London, the Mint being shut down at the moment, and people never came to visit him, and this was good-rarely was a murder victim afforded such an opportunity to get his spiritual house in order. Puritans did not go to confession or have a special sacrament before dying, as Papists did, but even so, Daniel supposed there must be a bit of tidying-up he could do, in the dusty corners of his soul, before the men with the daggers came.
So he spent a while searching his soul, and found nothing there. It was as sparse and void as a sacked cathedral. He did not have a wife or children. He lusted after Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, but something about being locked up in this round room made him realize that she neither lusted after nor particularly liked him. He did not have a career to speak of, because he was a contemporary of Hooke, Newton, and Leibniz, and therefore predestined for roles such as scribe, amanuensis, sounding-board, errand-boy. His thorough training for the Apocalypse had proved a waste, and he had gamely tried to redirect his skills and his energies towards the shaping of a secular Apocalypse, which he styled Revolution. But prospects for such a thing looked unfavorable at the moment. Scratching something on the wall might enable him to make a permanent mark on the world, but he would not have time.