The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  “I am not willing to be less than your equal partner.”

  “But you cannot ever be my equal partner. Only Leibniz—”

  “Then go and make love to Leibniz!” Fatio cried. He stood poised where he was for a few moments as if he could not believe he’d said it—waiting, Daniel thought, for Newton to retract everything he’d said. But Isaac Newton was long past being able to change his mind. Fatio was left with only one thing he could possibly do: He ran away.

  Once Fatio had passed out of view, Daniel began to hear a distant moaning or wailing. He assumed that he was hearing Fatio crying out in grief. But it grew louder. He feared for a moment that Fatio might be coming back toward him with a weapon drawn.

  “Daniel!” said Locke sharply.

  Locke had gotten to his feet and was standing over Newton, blocking Daniel’s view. Locke had begun his career as a physician and seemed to have reverted to his old form now; with one hand he was throwing off the mass of blankets in which Newton had been wrapped up this whole while, with the other, he was reaching for Newton’s throat to check his pulse. Daniel rushed toward them, fearing that Isaac had suffered a stroke, or an apoplectic fit. But Newton knocked Locke’s hand away from his neck with a shout of “Murder! Murder!”

  Locke took half a step back. Daniel drew up on Newton’s other side to find him flailing all of his limbs, like a man who was drowning in air. The violence of his movements seemed to levitate his whole body out of his chair for an instant. He fell hard onto the stone patio, yelped, and went stiff, his entire body trembling like a plucked twist of catgut. Daniel dropped to a knee and placed a hand on one of Newton’s bony shoulders. What meager flesh he had was hard and thrumming. Newton started away as if Daniel had touched him with a hot iron and rolled blindly against the chair leg, which caught him in the midsection. In a heartbeat he contracted into a fœtal position, wrapping his whole body round the leg of the chair like a toddler who grips his mother’s leg with his whole being because he does not want her to walk away. “Murder, murder!” he repeated, more quietly now, as if dreaming of it, though it might have been Mother, mother.

  Locke spoke from between his hands, which he had clapped over his face like the covers of a book. “The greatest mentality of the world—demented. Oh, God have mercy.”

  Daniel sat down crosslegged next to Isaac. “Mr. Locke, if you would be so good as to have one of the servants bring me a cup of coffee. I am going to do something I have not done in three decades: sit up all night worrying about Isaac Newton.”

  “What you have done was necessary and in no way do I fault you for it,” Locke said, “but gravely I fear that he shall never be the same.”

  “You are right. He will be merely the most successful Natural Philosopher in all of history. Which is a better thing to be than a false Messiah. It will take him years to get used to his new station in the world. By the time he is himself again, I’ll be out of his reach, in Boston, Massachusetts.”

  Bonaventure Rossignol to Eliza

  MARCH 1694

  My lady,

  I pray this intercepts you in Hamburg, but I worry that it shall never catch up with you. I am a mortal, earthbound, attempting to get a message to a Goddess who travels in a flying chariot.

  Of late I wonder: Do you really ken the devastation of Trade? You might scoff at such a question, as you do naught but trade. But to us earthbound mortals, it seems that you float about in a golden nimbus of prosperity, like the halo about a saint. And the company you keep can only enhance this illusion. Besides you, the only people in France who are not prostrate from Famine and Want of Money are your friends Jean Bart and Samuel Bernard. Bernard because he has taken over St.-Malo, driven out what was left of the old Compagnie des Indes, and fitted out his own fleet. Bart because the Navy ran out of money and had to be sold off to private investors. What does it say about our commerce, when the most attractive investment in France is a fleet of buccaneers preying on the commerce of other Realms?

  And so I have every confidence that Captain Bart has conveyed you in safety, and even in comfort, to Hamburg; for what Navy in Christendom could stand against a fleet so well financed, so richly supplied with Baltic timber, and so brilliantly led? (Though I do hope he hurries back, as the British Navy is bombarding Dieppe.) I worry, though, that the posts will fail somewhere between Paris and Hamburg. For all is bankrupt. The spring breezes are redolent, not of tilled earth and burgeoning wildflowers, but the rotting flesh of all the livestock that froze to death during the winter. Rice—rice!—is coming in to Marseille from Alexandria, but no one has the means to buy it, for the wellsprings of our coinage have quite dried up. Our Army’s commanders slouch despondently around Versailles, wishing they’d had the foresight to join the Navy—as, owing to a want of specie, and even of credit, they cannot fight this year, but only squat in their fortresses, succumbing to disease, and beating back whatever assaults the English may mount against them, supposing that England has two pennies to rub together.

  At any rate, my lady, do let me know if this has reached you, and of your itinerary. I know you would be informed of the latest exchanges between Vrej Esphahnian and his family. It will take me a long time to encrypt the report. If my late father’s map collection is to be credited, three hundred miles of winding Elbe lie between you and your destination; this should give you time sufficient to accomplish the decipherment. Perhaps I can arrange for it to catch up with your river-boat at Hitzacker or Schnackenburg or Fischbeck or one of the other euphoniously named villages that, according to my father’s maps, are soon to be adorned with the grace and beauty of the duchesse d’Arcachon and her baby girl Adelaide.

  Bon. Ross.

  Eliza to Rossignol

  MARCH 1694

  Bon-bon,

  Yours reached me in Hamburg, where we have been interviewing river-captains and buying provisions for the journey inland. What a grim petulant mood you were in when you let this dribble from your quill! A few remarks:

  —Adelaide is no baby, but a toddler of fourteen months, careering around the deck pursued by a squadron of stooping and waddling nurses who are all terrified she’ll go over the side.

  —Hitzacker is said to be a perfectly lovely village; I’m sorry you don’t favor the name of it.

  —The parlous condition of Trade is well known to me; who do you suppose arranged for the rice to be shipped from Egypt? Do you think it is a bad thing that there shall be no great battles this year? And have you forgotten that my son Lucien sickened and died over the winter just past? Where was my golden halo of prosperity when the Angel of Death came for him in St.-Malo? Really, you quite forget yourself.

  But I forgive you. The grimness of your discourse tells me much that is useful of the mood among the Quality of Paris and Versailles. If it eases your mind, know that the confusion of which you complain is the death-throes of an old system—as when a man’s heart stops beating but his limbs continue to twitch for some time afterwards. The English, being a small and disorderly country, understood this a few years earlier than the French. Or perhaps that is giving them too much credit. They did not understand, but sensed, it. The tide of quicksilver that rose up in that country around the time of Plague and Fire produced a generation of more than normally acute minds—some, such as Newton, almost too tight-strung to endure the world. These men had power before, but knew not what to do with it, and lost it. In exile they formed the Juncto, which with the recent elections has taken over the government. The things that the Juncto does during the coming year—the Bank of England, the Recoinage, &c.—are the beginnings of the new way of things that shall replace the old one that has died, or is dying. France lags, having more of lead and less of quicksilver in her constitution, and lacking a Juncto; but the same forces are at work there.

  You need only look to Lyon for an example. When Lothar von Hacklheber journeyed to Lyon in April of 1692 and accepted, from M. Castan, half a million livres tournoises of French government obligations in exchange for sil
ver deliverable at London, no one thought twice about it. It was a large transaction, to be sure, but altogether routine. If you had gone to him, or to any of the other German or Swiss bankers in Lyon, at that time, and said, “This is the last such loan that shall ever be made in Lyon, and it shall never be repaid,” they’d have thought you a madman.

  Yet all through 1692 Castan temporized, and promised to pay interest, and sought alternatives to paying it back. The bad harvest that autumn rendered payment quite out of the question, and the lines of galériens marching through Lyon en route to Marseille—mostly ordinary Parisians who had been caught looting bakeries—served to place the “sufferings” of Lothar in perspective. The immense military operation of last year consumed what money the Treasury had. The French victories (costly though they were) at Heidelberg, at sea, at Landen, and in Piedmont might have given Lothar some hope of seeing his money again. If so, that hope died in the winter just past, along with so many other things. The bankers of Lyon now look upon Lothar’s April 1692 loan as the moment it all went wrong; the end of an epoch. My correspondents there tell me that real estate in that city is to be had for nothing now, because the Swiss and German bankers are all turning their backs on it, cutting their losses, packing their coffers, and moving out. One day France will have its equivalent of the Bank of England, and it will probably be in Paris; but not for a long time, and until then, her finances will be in perpetual confusion.

  It is for all of these reasons that I have resolved to descend on Leipzig now. But in order for me to know how best to set my pieces on the board, as it were, vis-à-vis Lothar, I must have the very latest on the Esphahnians, and the machinations of Father Édouard de Gex. For I know that hardly a day passes without his pestering you for the latest news concerning Vrej and his movements about Hindoostan.

  Here, we are still shopping for a conveyance. Boats in every country are as various as breeds of dogs. In Bohemia, in the forests that surround the headwaters of the Vltava, they fashion barges of oak, and float them down to be finished around Prague. These carry Silesian coal down to places like Magdeburg and Hamburg, where local boatmen buy them and fix them up for their own uses. So though they may have all looked the same as they were being wrought in Bohemia, where the waters of the Elbe began as raindrops dripping from pine-needles, by the time I inspect them in Hamburg, where the Elbe is a mile wide, each has become as unique as its owner. The notion of conveying a Duchess, her daughter, and her household three hundred miles up the Elbe is extraordinary to these boatmen, who as a rule do not venture more than one or two days’ journey upriver; but some of the more adventurous spirits among them are warming to the idea, and I don’t suppose it shall be long before we have come to terms with one of them, and set out. The spring thaws shall place an abundance of water under the flat bottom of our Zille (as these barge-boats are called), so that we shall not have to be so concerned with shoals; but by the same token, the vigorous flow of the river will make it impossible to sail upstream on any but the windiest of spring days, and so we shall progress only as fast as an ox-team on the river-bank can draw us. Figure ten miles a day, on average; from this and from your father’s maps, you may put your mathematical acumen to use in guessing whither to post your reply. I guess Magdeburg; if you are slow, Wittenberg.

  Eliza

  Eliza to Pontchartrain

  MARCH 1694

  Monsieur,

  A man of your erudition, a scholar as well as a nobleman, must know that the office of contrôleur-général comes with certain perquisites. If you have been slow to avail yourself of the same, it is not out of ignorance, but because your only thought is to be of service to the Most Christian King. I have long noted, but never mentioned this, for it was obvious that you were satisfied. But the latest letters from my friends in France are of a very grim cast, which has caused me to wonder whether you have, as you lay in bed in the dark hours of the night, regretted that you had not been more forward in looking after your own interests during those early years when France’s prosperity was the envy of the world, and her credit as good as gold.

  I would be remiss if I did not let you know of a certain opportunity. As you know, France has since ancient times owed money to any number of different creditors at any given time. Part of the job of the contrôleur-général is to see that these obligations are discharged by assigning them to sources of revenue; for example, if France owes such-and-such number of livres to Signore Fiorentino, the contrôleur-général might go to some French count and say, “This year, when you collect the taxes on your lands, send the proceeds to Signore Fiorentino, as we owe him a debt.” A consequence of this is that not all French government debts are of equal value; for if the count, in the example above, was honnête, his lands bountiful, and the weather good, why, Signore Fiorentino would be repaid promptly and in full, while some other creditor, whose loan had been assigned to a less reliable source of revenue, might come up short-handed. It is this variability that makes the work of the contrôleur-général so endlessly absorbing. Not to mention profitable; for nothing in law or custom prevents the contrôleur-général himself from purchasing some loans that have gone bad, and then re-assigning them to more reliable sources of revenue, so that they are suddenly worth more. It is a perquisite of the office, and no one would give it a second thought if you were to avail yourself of it.

  As it happens, for several years I have been purchasing underperforming loans from diverse petty nobles who did their parts to be of service to the King when the present war broke out. The total number of such transactions now numbers in the hundreds. The principals of all of these loans, summed, come to rather more than half a million livres, though I acquired them for less than a quarter of that amount. I will now sell them to you, Monsieur, for just what I paid for them, plus a soupçon of five percent. If, as I suspect, you lack the liquid assets necessary to close such a transaction, I will accept your word as a nobleman, and not think of being repaid until after you have had the leisure to plumb all of these obligations into adequate sources of revenue. Once you have accomplished that, you should be able to see that each of these loans is repaid in full, which means that you could in theory get back quadruple what you shall owe me.

  No gratitude is expected, or desired; my only wish, as ever, is to be of service.

  Eliza, duchesse d’Arcachon My lady,

  Rossignol to Eliza

  APRIL 1694

  My lady,

  I hope this finds you on a tidy and well-skippered Zille halfway up the Elbe. Please forgive me for the intemperate remarks contained in my previous letter. The situation in all places has become so bizarre, so suddenly, that I know not what to make of it. Half of London—the better half—is said to have been abandoned. Because there is no silver, Persons of Quality have no means of conveying rents from their lands in the country, to town; so they have no choice but to board up their town-houses and move to the country, where they can live on barter. It seems the worst possible moment for the Whigs to have taken power, and to have put in the Marquis of Ravenscar at the Exchequer; but perhaps it is the case that he, like you, perceives some opportunity where others see only confusion, and has chosen this moment to strike.

  To business. You asked for the latest on the Esphahnians. I will tell you what I know.

  You’ll recall that after the severed head of your father-in-law turned up at his own birthday party on the evening of 14 October 1690, we heard little that was of any use on this channel for several years. Vrej Esphahnian had contrived to get a letter out from Egypt a few days before the duc d’Arcachon’s demise, and several months later he posted a brief note from Mocha in which he directed his family not to make any effort to reply, as he could not predict where the currents of trade would next take him.

  In the meantime I had not been idle. It was clear to me that the Esphahnians used some form of steganography in their letters, but I could not make out how they did it. The family was scattered among several hovels, entresols, and prisons
around Paris. I hired thieves to rifle through their possessions, and at length found some letters that Vrej had sent to them from Spain and Barbary beginning in 1685. In the margins and interlinear spaces of these, I saw an inscription writ in letters of vermilion. It was plain enough that this was some sort of invisible ink, which had been made visible by some secret art known to the Esphahnians. By reading these, I was able to learn more of Vrej’s story.

  He had been sent to Spain early in 1685 to establish a family trading circuit there. But he had been taken by the Barbary Corsairs and enslaved. Yet his owner soon recognized that he had talents beyond pulling oars, and put him to work in a port city near Morocco, whence he was able to correspond with his family. From them, he learned of the disaster that had befallen the Paris Esphahnians after they had made the mistake of sub-letting their entresol to Jack Shaftoe. By this time they had been released from the Bastille, but one of them had died in prison, and their business was of course destroyed, so that in coming years many would drift in and out of debtors’ prisons.

  In 1688 Vrej’s owner traded him to Algiers. There he became acquainted with another literate slave, a Jew of great intelligence, and over the course of several conversations with this Jew learned that Jack Shaftoe was still alive, as a galley-slave in the same city. During the winter of 1688–89, Vrej wrote to his family in Paris apprising them of this and proposing to find Jack and cut his throat, or arrange for it to be done, as revenge. Of course I do not have a copy of what was sent back in response; but it is easy enough to infer, from what Vrej wrote in his next letter, that older and wiser heads in Paris had prevailed. Jack Shaftoe was looked on as a sort of madman, a victim of possession, not responsible for his actions (though Vrej questions this, and suspects it is all an act), and no advantage to the family, temporal or spiritual, is seen in killing the poor man. Rather, it is suggested that Vrej seek some advantage in his dealings with the Jew.