She was matronly, decent, and genuinely popular: the living embodiment of the traditional Lavardac virtues of simple sincere loyalty to King and Church, in that order, without all of the scheming. In other words, she was just what a hereditary noble was supposed to be; which made her both an asset and a liability to the King. By supporting him blindly, and always doing the right thing, she made of her family a bulwark to his reign. But by exhibiting genuine nobility, she was implicitly making a strong case for the entire idea of a hereditary peerage with much power and responsibility, and making the new arrivals-Eliza included-seem like conniving arrivistes by comparison. Sitting in the Duchess’s sleigh and firmly massaging the erect penis of the King’s cryptanalyst, Eliza had to admit the validity of this point; but she admitted it to herself. She had no choice but to make do with what she had-which at the moment was nothing at all, except for a handful of Rossignol. She still did not have more than a few coins to her name.
The sleigh moved briskly on the trail, which had been groomed in advance of the party. In a few moments they passed out of the formal garden and into a huddle of buildings that was concealed from view of La Dunette’s windows by adroit landscaping. The scent of manure from the hunting-stable of Louis-Francois de Lavardac d’Arcachon was driven away suddenly by a cloud of lavender-scented steam, surging from the open side of a shed where a servant was stirring a vat over a great smoky fire.
“You make your own soap here?” Eliza said. “The fragrance is wonderful.”
“Of course we do, mademoiselle!” said the Duchess, astonished by the fact that Eliza found this worthy of mention. Then something occurred to her: “You should use it.”
“I already impose on your hospitality too much, my lady. Paris is so well-supplied with parfumiers and soap-makers, I am happy to go there and-”
“Oh, no!” exclaimed the Duchess. “You must never buy soap in Paris-from strangers! Especially with the orphan to think of!”
“As you know, my lady, little Jean-Jacques is now in the care of the Jesuit fathers. They make their own soap, probably-”
“As they had better!” said the Duchess. “But you bring clothes to him sometimes. You will have them laundered here, in my soap.”
Eliza did not really care, and was happy to give her assent, since the Duchess of Arcachon was so firm on this point; if she hesitated for a moment, it was only because she was a bit nonplussed.
“You should use the Duchess’s soap, mademoiselle,” said Pontchartrain firmly.
“Indeed!” said Rossignol-who, given the circumstances, would probably be speaking in one-word sentences for a while.
“I accept your soap with all due gratitude, madame,” said Eliza.
“My laundresses do not wear gloves!” huffed the Duchess, as if she had been challenged on some point. This rather dampened conversation for some moments. They had passed clear of the out-buildings, and circumvented a paddock where the Duke’s hunting-mounts were exercised in better weather, and entered now into a wooded game-park, bony and bare under twilight. Pontchartrain opened the shades on a pair of carriage-lanterns that dangled above the corners of the benches, and presently they were gliding along through the dim woods in a little halo of lamplight. In a few moments they came to a stone wall that cut the forest in twain. It was pierced by a gate, which stood open, and which was guarded, in name anyway, by half a dozen musketeers, who were standing around a fire. The wall was twenty-six miles long. The gate was one of twenty-two. Passing through it, they entered the Grand Parc, the hunting-grounds of the King.
The Duchess seemed to regret the matter of the soap, and now suddenly worked herself up into a lather of good cheer.
“Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur has said she will start a salon at La Dunette! I have told her, I do not know how such a thing is done! For I am just a foolish old hen, and not one for clever discourse! But she has assured me, one need only invite a few men who are as clever as Monsieur Rossignol and Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, and then it just-happens!”
Pontchartrain smiled. “Madame la duchesse, you would have me and Monsieur Rossignol believe that when two such ladies as you and the Countess are together in private, you have nothing better to do than talk about us?”
The Duchess was taken aback for a moment, then whooped. “Monsieur, you tease me!”
Eliza gave Rossignol an especially hard squeeze, and he shifted uneasily.
“So far, it does not seem to be happening, for Monsieur Rossignol is so quiet!” observed the Duchess in a rare faux pas; for she should have known that the way to make a quiet person join the conversation is not to point out that he is being quiet.
“Before you joined us, madame, he was telling me that he has been wrestling with a most difficult decypherment-a new code, the most difficult yet, that is being used by the Duke of Savoy to communicate with his confederates in the north. He is distracted-in another world.”
“On the contrary,” said Rossignol, “I am quite capable of talking, as long as you do not ask me to compute square roots in my head, or something.”
“I don’t know what that is but it sounds frightfully difficult!” exclaimed the Duchess.
“I’ll not ask you to do any such thing, monsieur,” said Pontchartrain, “but some day when you are not so engaged-perhaps at the Countess’s salon-I should like to speak to you of what I do. You might know that Colbert, some years ago, paid the German savant Leibniz to build a machine that would do arithmetic. He was going to use this machine in the management of the King’s finances. Leibniz delivered the machine eventually, but he had in the meantime become distracted by other problems, and now, of course, he serves at the court of Hanover, and so has become an enemy of France. But the precedent is noteworthy: putting mathematical genius to work in the realm of finance.”
“Indeed, it is interesting,” allowed Rossignol, “though the King keeps me very busy at cyphers.”
“What sorts of problems did you have in mind, monsieur?” Eliza asked.
“What I am going to tell you is a secret, and should not leave this sleigh,” Pontchartrain began.
“Fear not, monseigneur; is any thought more absurd than that one of us might be a foreign spy?” Rossignol asked, and was rewarded by the sensation of four sharp fingernails closing in around his scrotum.
“Oh, it is not foreign spies I am concerned about in this case, but domestic speculators,” said the Count.
“Then it is even more safe; for I’ve nothing to speculate with,” said Eliza.
“I am going to call in all of the gold and silver coins,” said Pontchartrain.
“All of them? All of them in the entire country!?” exclaimed the Duchess.
“Indeed, my lady. We will mint new gold and silver louis, and exchange them for the old.”
“Heavens! What is the point of doing it, then?”
“The new ones will be worth more, madame.”
“You mean that they will contain more gold, or silver?” Eliza asked.
Pontchartrain gave her a patient smile. “No, mademoiselle. They will have precisely the same amount of gold or silver as the ones we use now-but they will be worth more, and so to obtain, say, nine louis d’or of the new coin, one will have to pay the Treasury ten of the old.”
“How can you say that the same coin is now worth more?”
“How can we say that it is worth what it is now?” Pontchartrain threw up his hands as if to catch snowflakes. “The coins have a face value, fixed by royal decree. A new decree, a new value.”
“I understand. But it sounds like a scheme to make something out of nothing-a perpetual motion machine. Somewhere, somehow, in some unfathomable way, it must have repercussions.”
“Quite possibly,” said Pontchartrain, “but I cannot make out where and how exactly. You must understand, the King has asked me to double his revenues to pay for the war. Double! The usual taxes and tariffs have already been squeezed dry. I must resort to novel measures.”