But if you are imagining a peaceful winter idyll, it is because I have not rendered the scene faithfully. (1) The entire point of “taking the waters” is to induce violent diarrhœa for days or weeks on end. (2) Peter brings with him a vast entourage of lusty Steppenwolves who do not take well to the genteel boredom of Carlsbad. Such words as “languid,” “leisurely,” and “placid,” common as they may be among the Quality of Europe, who are exhausted by a quarter-century of wars, do not appear to be translatable into any of the languages spoken by Peter’s crowd. They stay on an estate that is loaned to them by the Polish duke who owns it. But I am certain that this fellow does so out of some baser emotion than hospitality, for every year the Russians find it in good repair, and leave it a ruin. I would not even have been able to reach the place if I had not come in my own personal carriage; the local coachmen will not venture near it for any amount of money, for fear that they or their horses will be struck by musket-balls, or—what is more dangerous—be invited to join in the revels.
I was not afforded a choice. When I stepped out of my coach in the carriageway of this estate, I was spied by a dwarf, who saw me thanking God for my safe arrival, and beseeching Him for an expeditious departure, in the Lutheran manner. “Swede! Swede!” he began to cry, and the chant was rapidly taken up by others. I told my driver to make himself scarce and he rattled away promptly. Meanwhile I had been picked up by a pair of Cossacks and thrown into a different sort of vehicle: an ordinary gardener’s wheelbarrow. But it took me several moments to understand this, for it had been decked out with silver candelabras, silk curtains, and embroidered tapestries. To make room for me, they had to expel a marble bust of the King of Prussia, which was already spalled by impacts of musket-balls, and now broke in half on the icy cobblestones. Then the living Leibniz took the place of the carved King. Unlike my predecessor I did not break in two, though I was put in my chariot roughly enough that I was lucky not to have fractured my tailbone. A fragment of a lady’s tiara was stabbed into my periwig to serve as a crown, and without further ceremony I was wheeled into the grand ballroom of this stately house, which was as smoky as any battle-field. By this time I had been engulfed in a motley phalanx of dwarves, Cossacks, Tatars, and diverse ill-looking Europeans who had been milling about in the stable-yard until my arrival. I did not see a single Russian until the smoke, driven by a frigid gust from the open doors, cleared from the far end of the ballroom to reveal a sort of makeshift fortress that had been erected by flipping several dining-tables up on edge, and then lashing those walls of polished wood together with bell-ropes and curtain-pulls. This fortification was supplemented by demilunes and ravelins, fashioned from chairs and cabinets; and it was manned entirely by Russians.
I collected now that Peter’s entourage had been divided into two groups, viz. Muscovites, and Miscellaneous, and that a battle was being enacted. Or re-enacted; for the general arrangement of the redoubt, and the deployment of the Miscellaneous forces, brought to mind the Battle of Poltava. Peter’s antagonist in that great clash was King Charles XII of Sweden, which role had been played by the marble bust until moments ago; but said statue had performed so miserably that his forces had been repulsed, and driven back into the bitter cold of the stable-yard. Little wonder that they had seized on me, a flesh-and-blood Lutheran, as a replacement. But if they were expecting me to display any more martial qualities than the bust, they were sorely let down, for even after I had been wheeled into the van of the Miscellaneous battalions, I comported myself in all ways as a sixty-seven-year-old philosopher. If I pissed myself it was of no account, since the Moravian prostitute who came running toward me with a two-foot-high tankard of beer, tripped on her dirndl and flung the contents into my lap.
After this pause for refreshment, the Miscellaneous forces mounted a charge towards the redoubt. We had got about halfway across the ballroom when some Russian galloped out from behind an overturned armoire and cut the chandelier-rope with a backhand swing of his saber. I looked up to see half a ton of crystal, and a gross of lit tapers, descending toward me like a glittering meteor. The men who were pushing my wheelbarrow flung themselves forward and with a mighty acceleration we shot beneath the chandelier so close that I felt the warmth of the candle-flames moments before being struck by a hail of shattered crystal. We had dodged it; but those behind us were brought up short by this spectacle, and then hindered by its sharp wreckage. So our advance faltered; but my heart stopped, when I saw barrels of muskets reach up over the wooden redoubt, and then shorten as they were leveled at us. Pan-powder flashed up and down the line, and then bolts of white fire sprang towards us. But nothing else came our way save a few chunks of wadding-material. I was struck on the arm by a smoking wine-cork and still bear the bruise on my bicep. The amount of smoke hardly bears description. Most of it came forth in an amorphous cloud, however I saw one or two smoke-rings, about the size of a man’s hat, propagating across the room, and retaining their shape and vis viva for extraordinary distances. These rings are unlike water-waves, which consist of different water at different times, for smoke rings propagate through clear air, proving that they indeed carry their own substance with them, neither diluting it with, nor dispersing it into, the surrounding atmosphere. And yet there is nothing special about the smoke as such—it is the same smoke that hangs over battlefields in shapeless clouds. The identity of a smoke ring would appear to consist, not in the stuff of which it is made, for that is commonplace and indifferent, but rather in a particular set of relationships that is brought into being among its parts. It is this pattern of relationships that coheres in space and persists in time and endows the smoke-ring with an identity. Perhaps some similar observation might be made about other entities that we observe, and credit with uniqueness and identity, including even human beings. For the stuff of which we are made is just the common stuff of the world, viz. ordinary gross matter, so that a materialist might say, we are no different from rocks; and yet our matter is imbued with some organizing principle that endows us with identities, so that I may send a letter to Daniel Waterhouse in London in the full confidence that, like a smoke-ring traversing a battle-field, he has traveled a great distance, and persisted for a long time, and yet is still the same man. The question, as always, is whether the organizing principle is added to the gross matter to animate it, as yeast is thrown into beer, or inheres in the relationships among the parts themselves. As a Natural Philosopher I feel compelled to support the latter view, for if Natural Philosophy is to explain the world, it must do so in terms of the things that make up the world, without recourse to occult intrusions from some external, unknowable Realm Beyond. That is the view I have set forth in my book Monadology, a copy of which is enclosed—you are most welcome—and, right or wrong, I interpreted the smoke-rings flying past me in the ballroom in Carlsbad as a Roman would interpret owls, ravens, &c. before a battle.
The Russians had not fired live musket-balls at us; or if they had, none had struck me. I flattered myself for a moment that we were safe. But then, on the other side of the smoke-bank into which I was being thrust headlong, I heard the scrape and ring of steel blades being whisked from scabbards, and the rumbling roar of deep-chested Russians bellowing war-cries as they vaulted over wrecked furniture. They were mounting a sally from the redoubt! They came out of the haze like apparitions, as if the smoke itself were condensing to solid form, and fell upon the attackers swinging their blades. By this point I had fully convinced myself that I really was caught up in a violent insurrection, and that I would go to my death in a wheelbarrow. Then my attention was commanded by a vast disturbance propagating through the smoke towards me: not so much a single whorl or eddy, as a whole meteorological event unto itself, like the towering whirlwinds of America, and seeming all the higher for my position: as low down in the wheelbarrow as I could slouch.
Glints and gleams, not only of steel, but of diamonds, and cloth-of-gold, shone through the dark turbulence of it; and finally the smoke cleared away, like a
bow-wave parting round the gilded figurehead of a ship, to reveal Peter the Great.
When he recognized me, he laughed, and given my circumstance I could do nothing but accept this humiliation. “Let us go out,” he said in Dutch.
“I am afraid I will be killed!” I returned, quite honestly. He laughed again, then sheathed his saber and stepped forward until he was straddling the wheelbarrow, almost as if he meant to piss on me. Then he bent down, planted his shoulder in my gut, wrapped one arm around my waist, and lifted me up as if I were a sack of coffee-beans being taken from a ship’s hold. In a moment I was upside down over his shoulder, watching his spurs glide above the marble floor as he bore me across the room with immense strides. I expected to see pools of blood and severed limbs, too, but the worst was the occasional burst of beer-vomit. The battle still raged all around, but the shouting was mixed with a good deal of hilarity. Blade still rang against blade, but where sword-blows struck home, they did so with slapping noises; the Russians were beating their foes with the flats of their sabers.
In a few moments Peter had carried me out into a formal garden that had been hewn at great expense from the surrounding forest. He bent over and tossed me onto what I first supposed was a very high bench; but it pivoted beneath me. Looking around, and shaking away my dizziness, and blinking off the brightness of the sun on the snow, I perceived that I was perched on the wheel of a wagon, which had flipped over on its side at the end of a long set of skid-marks. It had plowed to a stop in a topiary hedge shaped like a man-of-war, which was now listing to port as a result of having been rammed by this cart. The hedge served to block the wind; and the cart-wheel, which was as high off the ground as an average man’s shoulder, elevated me to the point where by sitting up straight I could very nearly look the Tsar in the eye.
Now, it was not usual to see him so quickly. In previous years I have been summoned to Carlsbad most urgently, only to languish in the town for days or weeks as I beg his Court officials for the favor of an audience. My first impulse was to be pleased that I had found myself in the Presence so soon; then I had the wit to realize that he would only act in such haste if he were angry with me, or wanted me to do something. As it turned out, I was right about both.
The conversation was direct. Some would say brutal. It is not that Peter is a brute. Extremely violent and dangerous to be sure, but more in the style of a highly effective Roman Emperor than of a cave-bear. It is simply that he likes to accomplish things, preferably with his own hands, and tends to view conversations as impediments. He would rather do something of an essentially stupid and pointless nature, than talk of something beautiful or momentous. He wants his servants to be like his hands, which carry out his will immediately and without the tedium of verbal instructions—so much so that if a conversation extends beyond a few sentences, he will grow intolerably restless, his face will become disfigured by uncontrollable tics, and he will shoulder his interlocutor out of his way and take action himself. Since he and I do not share fluency in any language, he might have summoned an interpreter—but he was content to get along with a few crude sentences in a mixture of Dutch, German, and Russian.
“At St. Petersburg there is a place staked out to build the Academy of Sciences as you have suggested,” he began.
“Most Clement Lord,” I said, “as I have had the honor and privilege of founding such an Academy in Berlin; and as I have made some head-way in persuading the Emperor to found one in Vienna; my joy upon hearing this news, cannot but be commingled with apprehension that that of Russia will one day out-shine those of the Germans, and perhaps even put the Royal Society in the shade.”
You can well imagine his impatience as I croaked this out. Before I was half-way through it, he was stomping back and forth in the frozen garden like a frost-bitten sentry. I looked down to the opposite end of the clearing and noticed several portraits in ornate gilded frames, which had been taken down from the walls of the chateau, leaned against the hedge, and used for musketry practice. The faces of most of those paintings now consisted of fist-sized holes, and stray balls had punched out novel constellations in the dark backgrounds. I decided I had better get to the point. “How can I make this happen?”
This startled him and he spun round to glare at me. “What?”
“You want the Russian Academy to over-awe those of Berlin, Vienna, and London?”
“Yes.”
“How may I be of service to your Tsarish Majesty? Do you want me to recruit savants?”
“Russia is big. I can make savants. Just as I can make soldiers. But a soldier without a gun is only a fire that burns food. I think the same is true of a savant without his tools.”
I shrugged. “Mathematicians do not require tools. But all the other types of savant need something or other to help them do their work.”
“Get those things,” he commanded.
“Yes, Most Clement Lord.”
“We will make that thing you spoke of,” he announced. “The library-that-thinks.”
“The great machine that manipulates knowledge according to a set of logical rules?”
“Yes. That would be a good thing for my Academy of Science to have. No one else has one.”
“On both counts I am in full agreement, your Imperial Majesty.”
“What do you need, to build it?”
“Just as St. Petersburg cannot be built without architects’ drawings, or a ship without plans—”
“Yes, yes, yes, you need the tables of knowledge, written down as binary numbers, and you need the rules of symbolic logic. I have supported this work for many years!”
“With generosity worthy of a Cæsar, sire. And I have developed a logical calculus well adapted to regulate the workings of the machine.”
“What of the tables of knowledge!? You told me a man was working on this in Boston!”
By this point the Tsar had stormed up and put his face quite close to mine and gone into one of his twitching fits, which had spread to involve his arm. To steady himself he had gripped the rim of the wheel upon which I was seated, and was twisting it back and forth, rotating me first this way, then that.
For what I said next, it may help to exonerate me slightly in your eyes, Daniel, if I mention that this Tsar still breaks men on the wheel, and does even worse things to those who have incurred his displeasure; which was impossible for me to put out of my mind in my current circumstance, viz. mounted on a large wheel. Before I could think better of it, I blurted, “Oh, Dr. Waterhouse is on his way across the Atlantic at this very moment, and should, God willing, reach London soon!”
“He is turning over the work I paid for, to the Royal Society!? I knew I should have throttled that Newton when I had the opportunity!” (For when Peter visited London some years ago he met Sir Isaac at the Mint.)
“Not at all, Clement Lord, for indeed, your humble servant and all his works are reviled by the Royal Society, which would never accept anything linked to my name, even if Dr. Waterhouse were to behave so dishonestly, which is inconceivable!”
“I am building up my Navy,” Peter announced.
This, I confess, made little impression on me, for he is never not building up his Navy.
“I have ordered three men-of-war to be constructed in London,” he continued, “and to sail into the Baltic when weather permits in the spring, to join my fleet for a further assault upon the Swedes; for I have not yet fully purged Finland of those vermin. It is my wish that when those ships sail from London, they are to be laden with tools for my savants to use at the Academy of Science, and they are to carry the fruits of the labors of Dr. Waterhouse.”
“It shall be as you say, your Imperial Majesty,” I answered, as it seemed unwise to give any different response.
Then he could not shoo me away fast enough. I was dragged, breakneck, back into the center of Carlsbad on a troika and re-united with my driver. Thence we proceeded to Hanover with only a brief detour to Leipzig, where all of my affairs are in a state of upheaval. Public
ation of Monadology has gone forward with only the normal amount of bickering with printers. Now that the war is over, Prince Eugene, the Duke of Marlborough’s valiant brother-in-arms, has taken an interest in Philosophy—which may or may not be an affectation. At any rate, he asked me to write down some of my ideas in a form that would be readable by people like him, who are literate, and intelligent, but do not make a professional study of Philosophy (and he is not the first. It would be interesting to ask one of these people why they assume it is possible to do this in the case of philosophy when they would never dream of asking Sir Isaac to write a version of Principia Mathematica with all of the mathematicks taken out). I have done the best I can to satisfy Prince Eugene. The tract is called Principles of Nature and of Grace, and its printing moves forward too, attended by a completely different set of distractions and controversies. But most of my time in Leipzig was spent, not on the publication of new work, but on the most tedious re-hashing of what I was doing forty years ago. Since you are in the bosom of the Royal Society, Daniel, you know what I refer to: the dispute with Sir Isaac as to who first invented the calculus. Letters have been flying back and forth like kites over a knacker’s yard ever since this became warm about six years ago, but it has been hot during the last two years, or ever since Sir Isaac began to convene “committees” and, God help us, “tribunals” at the Royal Society to render an impartial verdict. In short, by the time you read this, anything I might say concerning the Priority Dispute will be out of date, and you can get better intelligence by stopping anyone in the hallway and asking him for the latest.
The System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle Page 8