This brings my subject around to business. You should know that my resources are limited and, for the most part, illiquid. However, many of the assets of the Lavardac family naturally produce revenue. Farms, for example, generate rents, which are delivered to our coffers. Those coffers are also drained by countless expenses, but if the affairs of the family are well managed, some surplus may from time to time result. It then becomes my responsibility to see to it that the surplus is put to productive use. Many opportunities for investment present themselves to me every day; I try to distribute the available capital among these in a rational way.
So the rumors that you have evidently been hearing are correct. I have, on several occasions, purchased distressed loans from persons who have lent money to the King’s treasury and who have found that the interest payments on those loans are insufficient for their needs.
Like all proper transactions in a market, these must be of benefit to both parties. To the original lender (which would be you, in this case) the benefit is that you receive hard money, where before you had only a piece of paper signed by the contrôleur-général promising to make interest payments. For me, the benefit is somewhat more difficult to explain. It is a service I perform for the King. Suffice it to say that by consolidating a large number of such loans into a single instrument, representing a very large amount of government debt, I may help to bring some simplicity and clarity to what would otherwise be a most complex and tedious welter of affairs. In this way the œconomy of France may be better regulated and altogether more efficient.
At this point it is necessary to bring up the awkward and distasteful subject of terms. Specifically, we must decide what is to be the discount at which your loan is to be sold—i.e., for each hundred livres tournoises of principal that you originally loaned to his majesty’s treasury, how many livres tournoises are you to receive from the buyer now? Such discussions are naturally repellent to Persons of Quality. Fortunately, we may refer the matter to an impartial judge: the market. For if you were the only man in France who had ever tried to sell such a loan, why, we should have to work out terms without any reference to established customs or precedents. Endless discussion would be entailed, every word of it beneath our dignity as nobility of France. But as it happens there are many hundreds of recent precedents. I myself have purchased no fewer than eighty-six loans. At the moment, you are one of seven men who is offering me such an opportunity. When the number of participants is so large, a price emerges, as if by magic. And so I can tell you that the price of one hundred livres tournoises of French government debt, three years ago, was eighty-one livres tournoises. Two years ago it was sixty-five, a year ago it was holding steady around forty, and today it is twenty-one. Which is to say that for every hundred you loaned the Treasury, I will pay you twenty-one today. Tomorrow the price may rise again, in which case it would benefit you to hold on to the loan, and sell it later; on the other hand, it might decline further, in which case you may wish you had sold it today. It is regrettably not possible for me to offer you advice in the matter.
My attorney at Versailles is M. Ladon and I have let him know that he may hear from you on this. He is quite proficient in such transactions, having, as I mentioned, carried out more than four score of them. If you elect to proceed, he shall see to it that all of the requisite papers, &c., are drawn up correctly.
In closing, I thank you again for your assistance in sending the letters to England. I shall probably need to send more in the near future; but now that you have shown me where to go, and introduced me to the right men, my staff, some of whom are old Marines from around Dunkerque, should know what to do.
Eliza, duchesse d’Arcachon
Café Esphahan, Rue de l’Orangerie, Versailles
26 APRIL 1692
“YOU WERE EXPECTING SOMEONE DIFFERENT? It is all right, madame. So was I.”
This was how Samuel Bernard introduced himself to Eliza, lobbing the words across the coffee-house as he cut toward her table.
By arranging the meeting in a coffee-house in the town, as opposed to a salon in a château, Eliza had already obviated several days’ invitation-passing and preliminary maneuvers. Not satisfied even with this level of efficiency, Bernard had now lopped off half an hour’s introductory persiflage by jumping into the middle of the conversation before he had even reached her table. He came on as if he meant to place her under arrest. Heads turned towards him, froze, and then turned away; those who wished to gawk, looked out the windows and gawked at his carriage and his squadron of musket-brandishing bodyguards.
Bernard scooped up Eliza’s hand as if it were a thrown gauntlet. He thrust out a leg to steady himself, bowed low, planted a firm dry smack on her knuckles, and gleamed. Gleamed because threads of gold were worked into the dark fabric of his vest. “You thought I was a Jew,” he said, and sat down.
“And what did you think I was, monsieur?”
“Oh, come now! You already know the answer. You just aren’t thinking! I shall assist you. Why did you phant’sy I was a Jew?”
“Because everyone says so.”
“But why?”
“They are mistaken.”
“But when otherwise well-informed persons are mistaken it is because they wish to be mistaken, no?”
“I suppose that’s logical.”
“Why would they wish to be mistaken about me—or you?”
“Monsieur Bernard, it has been so long since I began a conversation so briskly! Allow me a moment to catch my breath. Would you care to order something? Not that you are in need of further stimulation.”
“I shall have coffee!” Bernard called out to an Armenian boy with a peach-fuzz moustache, dressed like a Turk, who had been edging toward them, impelled by significant glares and subtile finger-flicks from the proprietor, Christopher Esphahnian, but intimidated by Bernard. The garçon sped into the back, relieved to have been given orders. Bernard glanced about the coffee-house. “I could almost believe I was in Amsterdam,” he remarked.
“From the lips of a financier, that is flattery,” Eliza said. “But I believe that the intent of the decorator was to make you believe you were in Turkey.”
Bernard snorted. “Does it work for you, madame?”
“No, for I have been in the coffee-houses of Amsterdam, and I share your opinion.”
“You do not say that you have been in Turkey.”
“Do I need to? Or have others been saying it for me?”
Bernard smiled. “We return to our subject! People say of me that I am a Jew, and of you that you are an odalisque, sent here by the Grand Turk as a spy—”
“They do!?”
“Yes. Why?”
The good thing about Bernard was that when he said something jarring he would quickly move on to something else. Eliza decided ’twere better to keep pace with him than to dwell on this matter of her and the Grand Turk. “The only thing I can think of that you and I have in common, monsieur, is a predilection for finance.”
Bernard let it be seen that he was not fully satisfied with this attempt. He had a long, complicated French nose, close-set eyes, and a mouth turned up tight, like a recurved bow, at the corners. The look on his face might have been one of frustration, or intense concentration; perhaps both. He was trying to get her to see something. “Why do I wear cloth of gold? Because I am some kind of a fop? No! I dress well, but I am not a fop. I wear this to remind me of something.”
“I supposed it was to remind others that—”
“That I am the richest man in France? Is that what you were going to say?”
“No, but it is what I was thinking.”
“Another rumor—like that I am a Jew. No, madame, I wear this because it used to be my trade.”
“Did you say trade!?”
“My family were Huguenots. I was baptized in the Protestant church of Charenton. You can’t see it any more, it was pulled down by a Catholic mob a few years ago. My grandfather was a painter of portraits for the Court. My father, a
miniaturist and an engraver. But God did not bestow on me any artistic talent, and so I was apprenticed to a seller of cloth-of-gold.”
“Did you serve out your whole apprenticeship, monsieur?”
“Pourquoi non, madame, for then as now, I always fulfill my contracts. My formal métier is maître mercier grossiste pour draps d’or, d’argent, et de soie de Paris.”
“I think I finally begin to understand your point, Monsieur Bernard. You are saying that you and I have in common that we do not belong.”
“We make no sense!” Bernard exclaimed, throwing up both hands and raising his eyebrows in dismay, mocking a certain type of courtier. “To these people—” and he shoveled his hands across the Rue de l’Orangerie at Versailles—“we are what meteors, comets, sunspots are to astronomers: monstrous deviations, fell portents of undesired change, proof that something is wrong in a system that was supposedly framed by the hand of God.”
“I have heard some in this vein, too, from Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir—”
Bernard would not allow such a foolish sentence to be finished; he spewed air and rolled his eyes. “Him! What would he know of us? He is the epitome of who I mean—son of a Duke! A bastard, I’ll grant you, and enterprising, in his way; yet still wholly typical of the established order.”
Eliza now judged it best to stop talking, for Bernard had led her off into some wild territory—as if enlisting her, a Duchess, in some sort of insurgency. Bernard saw her discomfort, and physically drew back. The Armenian boy whispered up on slippered feet, bearing on a gaudy salver a tiny beaker of coffee clenched in a writhen silver zarf. Eliza gazed out the windows for a few moments, letting Bernard enjoy the first few sips. His guards had long since set up a perimeter defense around the Café Esphahan. But if she looked beyond that, cater-corner across the Rue de l’Orangerie, she could see deep into a vast rectangular plot embraced on three sides by a vaulted gallery-cum-retaining wall that supported the southern wing of the King’s palace. This garden was open to the south so that during the winter it could gather in the feeble offerings of the sun. The King’s orange trees, which lived in portable boxes of dirt, were still cowering back inside the warm gallery, for the last few nights had been clear and cold. But the garden was crowded with palm trees; and it was the sight of their blowing fronds, and not the faux-Turkish decor inside the café, that made it possible for her to phant’sy that she was sitting along some walled garden of the Topkapi Palace.
Bernard had settled down a bit. “Never fear, madame, for my father and I both converted to Catholicism after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Just as you have married a hereditary Duke.”
“I don’t really see what those two have to do with each other.”
“They were, if you will, sacraments that we undertook to show that we were submitting to the established order of this country—the same order that we undermine by pursuing what you so aptly described as our predilection for finance.”
“I don’t know that I agree with that, monsieur.”
Bernard ignored Eliza’s weak protest. “Sooner or later the King will probably make me a Count or some such, and people will pretend to forget that I once served an apprenticeship. But do not be fooled. To them, you and I are as noble; as French; and as Catholic; as him!” and Bernard shot out one hand as if hurling a dagger. The target was a painting on the ceiling that depicted an immense, shirtless, muscle-bound, ochre-skinned hashishin with a red turban and a handlebar moustache raising a scimitar above his head. “And that is why they say Iama Jew; for this amounts to saying, an inexplicable monster.”
“As long as it’s just us inexplicable monsters here,” said Eliza (as indeed it was; for most of the other patrons had bolted) “shall we—”
“Indeed, yes. Let us review the figures,” said Bernard, and blinked twice. “The number of invasion troops is some twenty thousand. Each receives five sols per day; so that is five thousand livres a day. The number of sergeants is, in round numbers, a tenth of the number of troops, but they receive twice the pay; add another thousand livres a day. Lieutenants receive a livre a day, captains get two and a half; at any rate, when you add it all up, reckoning dragoons, cavalry, et cetera, it comes to some eight thousand a day—”
“I have made it ten thousand, to allow for other expenses,” said Eliza.
“C’est juste. So why do you ask for half a million livres in London?”
“Monsieur, England is not so large as France, ’tis true; and yet it is much larger than some scraps of land in the Netherlands that have been fought over for months. Years.”
“Those places you speak of in the Low Countries are fortified. England is not.”
“The point is well taken, but the distance between the landing-sites in Devon and London is considerable. It took William of Orange a month and a half to cover the same interval, when he invaded.”
“Very well, I grant you that fifty days’ pay—almost two months—for this army comes to half a million livres. But why must every last penny of it be minted in advance, in London? Surely if the campaign progresses beyond a beach-head there will be opportunities to ship specie to the island later.”
“Perhaps and perhaps not, monsieur. I only know of this one opportunity, and seek to make the most of it. You make this more complicated than it is. I have been asked to tender advice on how the troops might be paid. You and I seem to agree that half a million livres is a reasonable, though perhaps generous, estimate of the amount that will be required. This is not too large an amount for the normal channels of commerce. I ask for as much as I think shall be needed. If half that amount is actually coined at the Tower of London, then I shall consider the transaction to have come off passing well.”
“The matter becomes complicated when the entire transaction is made to pass through Lyon,” said Bernard. “It is a large bolus for the Dépôt to swallow. If we could instead transfer it through a public market where there were proper banks…”
“Monsieur Bernard. You tempt me. For nothing would afford me such fascination as to sit here with you all morning and afternoon drinking coffee and discoursing of the peculiarities of Lyon and the Dépôt. Quite possibly we might have similar views on it. But as matters stand, Lyon is, by long tradition, France’s connexion to the financial system of the world, and it is through Lyon that we must send all of this money. It may be a bit quaint, a bit odd; but fortunately there are sophisticated houses there, such as the Hacklhebers, who have ready access to public markets in other cities.”
“I understand, madame,” said Bernard. “But the carrying capacity of the Dépôt is limited. France fights on more than one front. There are other demands on the credit of her treasury.”
“I have seen the silver with my own eyes, Monsieur Bernard. It was stacked in the hold of Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain’s jacht in St.-Malo. This is merely an alternate, more prudent means of getting it to London.”
“And I do not question that, madame. But during wartime, the temptation will be strong to use that silver elsewhere—to spend it twice.”
“Now I perceive why it is that you are shunned by Court fops, monsieur. For you to suggest that Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain would do anything of the sort is most rude.”
“Ah, madame, but I said nothing of that noble man. It is not he who matters in this case—for, last I heard, Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain was not the King of France.”
“Then you are being even more impertinent!”
“Not at all. For the King is the King, and it is his prerogative to spend his money twice, or even three times, if that is his pleasure, and neither I nor any other Frenchman will say a word against him! It might, however, make a difference to the Dépôt.”
“Suppose the Dépôt was asked to adapt to these trying new circumstances, and it was found wanting, and in consequence, France had to get a modern banking system? Would that not be better for France, and for you, monsieur?”
“For me, perhaps—as well as for you. For Fra
nce, there might be grave disruptions.”
“That is beyond my scope. I am like a housewife shopping for turnips in the market. If I go to my old traditional turnip-sellers and they ask too high a price for turnips of poor quality, and not enough of them, why, I shall go and buy my turnips elsewhere.”
“Very well,” said Bernard, “I depart for Lyon this afternoon to meet with Monsieur Castan. I might relay your challenge to the Dépôt and we might see if they have got enough turnips for you.”
“Monsieur, what is this word might doing in the sentence? You do not strike me as a flirtatious man, in general.”
“You have a house in St.-Malo, madame.”
“Indeed, monsieur.”
“It is said you are quite fond of the place—more so than La Dunette.” Bernard glanced in that general direction, for La Dunette was only a couple of musket-shots up the hill from the Rue de l’Orangerie. But all he could see in that quarter was another gaudy painting of wild Turks in action.
“You would like it, too, for St.-Malo is a place where Commerce rules.”
“I understand. For that is where the ships of the Compagnie des Indes call, or have I been misinformed?”
“Many ships call there; but if India is a particular interest of yours, monsieur, then that is what we shall speak of.”
“How can it not be of interest to us, madame? Have you any notion of the profits made in that part of the world by the V.O.C. and the British East India Company?”
“Of course, monsieur. They are proverbial. As is the perpetual failure and reincarnation of the Compagnie des Indes. You need only ask Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir—”
“The history is all too well known. I am more concerned with the future.”
“Then truly you are a shameless flirt, Monsieur Bernard, for I can scarcely contain my curiosity any longer—what are you thinking?”
The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World Page 167