The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World

by Neal Stephenson

  Leibniz to Eliza

  21 APRIL 1692

  Eliza,

  You asked—some might say, commanded—me to be on the alert for any news out of Leipzig touching on Lothar von Hacklheber in general, and Jean-Jacques—or, as they call him, Johann—in particular. This is not made any easier by the fact that Lothar knows, in a vague way, that I am linked to you. Moreover, I must confess that I am torn between a desire to give you what you have asked me for, and a reluctance to pass on information that is sure to tear open this wound that Lothar inflicted on you a year and a half ago.

  So I have avoided going to Leipzig. But yesterday Leipzig came to me, here in Hanover. As you must have heard, my patrons, Ernst August and Sophie, who until recently have been titled the Duke and Duchess of Hanover, have for some time been campaigning in Vienna to have their dignity raised to that of Elector and Electress. France has been opposed to it, and held them in check by diverse political counter-maneuvers whose particulars would fill book after tedious book. To make a long story short, the war, and in particular the recent developments along the Savoy front, has put the Emperor into a state of mind where he will do anything to spite Louis XIV; accordingly, Ernst August and Sophie are, as of a couple of weeks ago, the Elector and the Electress of Hanover, an eyelash below a King and Queen as these things are measured. This has set into motion a whole train of ramifications and realignments, &c., &c., that will give the courtiers along the Leine Strasse things to natter about for years to come. Some of the ramifications are, of course, financial, and so bankers from all over the Empire have come to call on Sophie and Ernst August, to offer their felicitations and to see if they might be of service in the new Electorate. It is all about as interesting to me, as physics is to them; except that one of these visitors has been Lothar. Sophie and Ernst August invited him to dine with them at the Palace of Herrenhausen outside of Hanover. In filling out the guest list, the chamberlain added my name, which must have seemed logical, as I am a Leipziger and my family has certain ties to that of von Hacklheber. They had no way of knowing about my link to you or the awkwardness that would arise from the matter of Jean-Jacques. Indeed, Sophie is so civilized, and exerts such a civilizing influence on Ernst August, that it would never enter their minds that one of their dinner-guests could be guilty of such an atrocity as baby-snatching. So, quite innocently, they invited me and Lothar to the same dinner, and seated us across the table from each other!

  I cannot describe what it is like to sit across from such a man through a long dinner, without spoiling your appetite for a whole fortnight. I’ll limit my report to the conversation. Much of this concerned the war, and was more or less interesting; but you must hear of nothing else there, and so I shall move on to what concerns you personally.

  Lothar, you must remember, was there for one purpose, which was to impress Sophie and Ernst August with his intelligence, his foresight, and his many connexions in the world; and so, at a certain point in the evening, after a certain amount of drink had been taken, he hazarded a prediction about the spring campaign. For how better for a banker to impress a potential client than to predict the future, and get it right?

  France, he predicted, would soon suffer a humiliation in the northwest—he used the word Fehlschlag, which is difficult to translate but means a failed attempt, a miscarriage. He implied clearly that it would take place on or near English soil.

  Of course Sophie is not easily impressed by such theatrics. She said, “If you are so sure of this prediction, Baron von Hacklheber, why are you not putting your money where your mouth is? For your mouth may be large, but we all know that your purse is larger yet.” This fetched a laugh, even from Lothar. When the commotion had died down, he announced that he would place just such a bet very soon—i.e., that he intended to so dispose his bank’s resources that he would gain money if the Fehlschlag took place as he had foretold. And to bolster his claim further, he vowed that he would donate a certain sum to any charity Sophie named, and that the money would come out of his profits on the bet, if it paid off, but out of his own purse if he were proved wrong.

  Asked by Sophie how he could be so certain about this, he turned an eye in my direction and said that he knew persons in France, of considerable wealth and power, who had in the past been insolent to him, but more recently had been brought to heel—he actually employed the term bei Fuß! which is a dog-training command. You see now, Eliza, why I am so reluctant to act as a conduit for this sort of information. Even those at the table who did not know who Lothar was talking about found it a little disgusting.

  That is my news, just as you requested it. Frankly, I pine for the days when my letters to you were filled with Natural Philosophy. Perhaps we can resume such discussions in happier times to come. Until then, I have the honor to be, &c.,

  Leibniz

  P.S. You also requested news of your friend Princess Eleanor and her daughter Princess Caroline. I have met them in Berlin; little Caroline is just as charming as you claimed, and just as intelligent. Eleanor has been betrothed to the Elector of Saxony, who is an ogre straight out of a færy-tale, and who has a mistress reputed to be even worse. The best place to send letters to them will probably be the Electoral court at Dresden.

  Eliza to Samuel de la Vega

  5 MAY 1692

  Here is how peculiar France is: They are calling people Jews who have no trace of Jewishness. It is a long story, of which I’ll tell you more if we ever see each other again. It put me in mind of Amsterdam, where there are to be found Jews who really are Jews—a much more logical arrangement!

  That is not my only reason for writing to you. For some years I have made little effort to follow the commodities markets in Amsterdam, as, from the remove of Versailles, it it impossible to do this competently. Lately, however, I have taken a position in silver. The details are unimportant. Suffice it to say that I must needs be alert to any moves in the silver market that may occur in the first half of June. My sources of information are not what they once were, and so I am reduced to the estate of a little girl with her nose pressed against the glass; I must judge the trends in the market by observing the behavior of larger and better-informed players.

  Though the House of Hacklheber is not the largest, it is probably the best-informed concern in metals. Accordingly, I have resolved to take my cues from them. It would be of great significance to me if the Hacklhebers were suddenly to remove a large quantity (a few tons) of silver from their Amsterdam warehouse. You know where it is. If my guess is correct, the bullion would be transferred directly to a ship on the Ijsselmeer.

  Can you spare someone to keep an eye on the Hacklhebers’ warehouse? As time draws nearer, I shall supply more precise information as to the exact time at which the transfer might occur. The information that I shall require is as follows: the name of the ship carrying the bullion and a complete description of her sail plan, &c., so that she may be identified from a distance, as well as the date and time of her departure from Amsterdam.

  In coming weeks, I’ll be moving around quite a bit, and so there is little point in your trying to guess my whereabouts. Rather, you should send the particulars to me in care of my good friend and confidant, Captain Jean Bart, of Dunkerque. Captain Bart is a trustworthy fellow; there is no need (and there shall be no time!) to encrypt the message. You know more than I about getting messages out fast, so I’ll hold my tongue where that is concerned; but I am guessing you’ll want to send riders out from Amsterdam to Scheveningen and there transfer the message to a fast boat, Dunkerque-bound. There should be plenty of time to arrange this; but if you want help setting up the boat, just inform Captain Bart.

  I think I have given you enough information now that you shall be able to place bets of your own in the silver market, which are likely to profit you; but if, when all is said and done, you have spent more than you have gained, forward your complaints to me in St.-Malo and they’ll not fall on deaf ears.

  Eliza

  Eliza to the Marquis of Rav
enscar

  15 MAY 1692

  Your Grace’s recent letter to me was so courteous as to put the lucubrations of these French flatterers to shame. I must warn you, however, that en route it must have fallen into the hands of some mischievous boy, who added a very rude postscript.

  It was most considerate of you to answer all of my silly questions about the Mint. As you must have surmised, I do have in mind taking part in a transaction that will only profit me if the price of silver should happen to rise late in the month of May. I only hope and pray that all of the silver in London is not bought up in the meantime! I tell you this in confidence, my lord, not wishing that you, who have been so forward in assisting me, should suffer any reverses in consequence of what I am about to do. Know, then, that to be in possession of a large quantity of silver, in London, late in the month of May, would be no bad thing. But do you make your purchases discreetly, lest you touch off a buying panic that would drive up the price to absurd heights. For if people see that the Marquis of Ravenscar is selling gold to buy silver, they will assume he is privy to something, and flock to Threadneedle Street to follow his example. While you might admittedly profit from such a speculative bubble by selling into it at the peak (by no means later than the middle of June), it would cause any amount of disturbance and trouble to the current Government; which I am certain you, a good English patriot, should prefer to avoid, even if you are a Whig and that government be run by the Tories.

  Eliza

  Eliza to Samuel Bernard

  18 MAY 1692

  Monsieur Bernard,

  I am en route from St.-Malo to Cherbourg aboard the jacht of my husband. In Cherbourg I’ll post this on to Le Havre; I pray it reaches you soon in Paris. I shall tarry in Cherbourg until the invasion is launched.

  In St.-Malo this morning I received your despatch of the 12th instant stating that you have the Bills of Exchange in your pocket and want only instructions as to whom they should be endorsed.

  This amounts to asking me for the names of the agents who shall be sent across the Channel to present the Bills for payment in London. I regret to inform you that the names of these agents are not known to me yet (though I have some ideas as to who they shall be). Even if they were, I should be chary of sending them to you in a letter during wartime; for the enemy has spies everywhere, and consider what disaster would ensue if our agents’ names became known. For most of them are Englishmen secretly loyal to James Stuart—and if they were caught in England with these Bills in their pockets, they should suffer the penalty for High Treason, which is to be half-hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn Cross.

  A safer expedient would be for you to endorse the bills to a trusted intermediary who is resident here at Cherbourg, and who shall not be setting foot outside of France until after the invasion. That intermediary can then hold the Bills until the last moment and then endorse them to the several agents just before they cross the Channel. In this way the identity of the agents shall never be exposed to any risk of discovery.

  To serve in this role of intermediary, several candidates come to mind, for Cherbourg is crowded just now with notable personages. But all of them are busy and distracted. I, meanwhile, have nothing to do save gaze out the window of my cabin in the sterncastle of this jacht, and watch the preparations. As odd as it might sound, I may be the safest person to choose for this rôle, since there is obviously no likelihood whatever of my crossing the Channel and falling into the hands of enemy interrogators; this alone should be a great comfort to the agents whose names I shall write across the backs of those bills before they set forth on their perilous missions. So, unless you object very strongly, simply endorse the Bills to me and send them to me at Cherbourg.

  I don’t know how Lothar is sending the avisas to London, but presumably his channels are swifter than ours, and his payers in England will be ready and waiting for our payees whensoever they arrive.

  Eliza

  P.S. I look forward to continuing our conversation about St.-Malo. The merchants of the Compagnie des Indes, who on a normal day swagger about that town as if they owned it, have been displaced, and quite out-classed, by the captains and admirals of our invasion fleet. As a result they are almost pathetically eager to talk to anyone about anything—including the state of our commerce with India. My head is full of more information than it can hold, and all of it useless to me. After the invasion, we must meet again at the Café Esphahan, and I’ll tell you all that I know.

  Samuel Bernard to Eliza

  23 MAY 1692

  Madame la comtesse,

  Five Bills should be enclosed, each in the amount of one hundred thousand livres tournoises and each endorsed, for the time being, to you. These are drawn ultimately on the credit of the French treasury as personified by M. le comte de Pontchartrain. If you see him, perhaps you could think of a polite way of reminding him that the chain of credit passes through yours truly; my friend Monsieur Castan; and diverse members of the Dépôt of Lyon.

  It is a good thing that I went to Lyon, for in the end it was necessary for me to involve myself in the negotiations with Lothar (he was obviously present in Lyon, but we were never in the same room together; his factor Gerhard Mann mediated all of our discussions).

  Monsieur Castan is cunning and assiduous, but when presented with something outside his scope he does not respond well, and is apt to become flustered and then irritable. This happened very early in our talks with the House of Hacklheber. It took some time for me to understand why: Lothar believes that the invasion will never actually happen; or that if it does, it will be snuffed out within a few hours. In consequence, our negotiations over the terms of these Bills were strangely duplicitous. The nominal purpose was to pay troops in England, and so we had to settle terms in such a way that we—meaning France—could get silver coin in England, while allowing Lothar to realize some profit. In that sense I got what we wanted, viz. wholly legitimate, negotiable Bills which you now have in your hand. But Lothar’s true purpose, as I eventually came to understand, was to reap a large windfall at very little risk by expressing a willingness to forward silver for an invasion that would never materialize. In effect he was selling us insurance against the contingency that our invasion fails to fail. It was this subtext that M. Castan had not understood, with the result that he was bewildered by what he saw as erratic demands made by the House of Hacklheber.

  At the beginning we proposed that the five Bills’ dates of expiry should be at one-week intervals. We envisioned, in other words, that, beginning shortly after the invasion, our agents would present Bills in London approximately once a week for a period of five weeks, as our army fought its way across southern England toward London. We presumed that Lothar would prefer it thus, as it would spread out the transaction over a long period of time and simplify the logistics of buying or shipping the silver and having it minted. This was when we were still naïve enough to believe that Lothar construed payment of the bills as an opportunity. Later, as I have mentioned, I perceived that Lothar actually sees the possible consummation of this transaction as a risk to be hemmed in and mitigated as strictly as possible. Accordingly, he hated the idea of staggering the Bills’ dates, because it would mean committing himself to be at risk (risk of having to pay silver to some unknown person in London) over a period of almost two months. For the first Bill would become payable, in theory, about two weeks following the date that Lothar wrote it in Lyon, i.e., in mid-May. The last one would remain payable in theory as late as the middle of July. It was in his interest to limit our freedom in the matter by having the Bills all payable only during a narrow interval of time shortly after the scheduled date of the invasion. That way, if the invasion came off as scheduled and a stable beach-head were established on English soil, we should have only a few days in which to present the Bill in London and demand that all of the silver be supplied at once. The deal became, in other words, an all-or-nothing proposition to be resolved, one way or the other, quite early. Indeed, Lothar wanted t
o issue one single Bill for half a million livres rather than breaking it up into several smaller ones—this struck me as too risky and I persuaded him to relent. So there are five separate Bills. Four of them bear the same dates—they are 45-day Bills—and the other is a 30-day Bill. All of them were written by Lothar himself; for only he has authority to write Bills of this size. He wrote them in Lyon on the 6th day of May, the Year of our Lord 1692. Postal time from Lyon to London is generally reckoned at about two weeks, so they could be presented there as early as 20 May (by the French calendar). The 30-day Bill is payable on 5 June, the other four on 20 June.

  It is generally to the advantage of the payer (Lothar’s factor in London) if the payee (whomever you endorse these Bills to) presents the Bills well in advance of the expiration of their usance, as this will give the payer more time to make arrangements to deliver the specie. That is particularly true in this case, when the acceptance of these Bills in London may trigger purchase or shipment of silver by Lothar.