Then he hired a researcher in the SoTF State Library to find out more about Seuss and his works: how many books? how many copies of each book? where had they been located prior to donation to the State Library? how many more copies of each (non-donated) might be in the town? at what rate had they been checked out of libraries before the Ring of Fire? how many had been in the schools? etc. He bought copies of those for sale (damn the cost!) and hired an illustrator to make hand-produced copies of the rare ones, exact in dimensions and colorations. He requested information on reprints, multiple editions, variant editions if any, scholarly studies that had been made of the genre up-time, etc. His researcher had eaten well for several weeks.
****
Both Grand Duke Bernhard and the duc de Rohan had assured Carey that her position as Marguerite's chaperone was temporary. Toward the end of November, Rohan's spinster sister, Marguerite's Tante Anne, would arrive to become the female head of her brother's expanded, no-longer-bachelor, household.
Well, errr. She was supposed to arrive. What actually arrived was a letter. It appeared, according to Marguerite's report, that Uncle Soubise also requested Tante Anne's services and she opted to stay inside the borders of France and help him hold the Rohan banner high. Tante Anne had, in fact, rather ranted about Papa's imprudence in having taken Marguerite to Burgundy, because while her personal safety was one consideration, if the family was to maintain its standing and influence at the court, its members have to be at the court, whichever court it may be, and the family needed to decide which direction they would throw their support to in the matter of Gaston's troubles. This might be the only subject upon which she agreed with her sister-in-law. This had been followed by a dozen questions—had Rohan been in contact with the king in the Low Countries, did he know where Anne of Austria and her son were, had he heard what Mazarin was currently up to and . . .? "Well, also," Marguerite said, "she wrote something unflattering about the Maman and Candale and whatever they are up to. Papa did not read that part to me, but I will find out, I assure you. Then she finished by saying that Papa should rely on his brother and sister, and it was much more important for them both to be in Paris than for her to come here."
Rohan said to Carey, rather ruefully, that his sister was very stubborn – this referencing her willingness to accept imprisonment after the defeat of the Huguenots at La Rochelle rather than be included in the amnesty, and her several years of captivity, along with their equally stubborn mother, at the Château de Niort in the aftermath. Under the circumstances, he requested that she and her family, along with Dominique Bell, remain in his household for longer than the original appointment.
Carey, just as ruefully, agreed. It had dawned on her that refusing the requests of dukes, unless one had a very good reason indeed, simply was not done. Certainly not when one was living this far from Grantville and being paid by a down-timer. Kamala Dunn agreed to keep Ashlyn, who was almost the same age as Kamala's Shaun, along with little Kylie and Joe, who had been born after the Ring of Fire, in what had been (and, she hoped, would again be) their joint household as long as Carey kept paying her half of the rent and three-fourths of the wages of their full-time babysitter. At least Shaun and Ashlyn were in school most of the day or going to individual tutors for music, or dancing, or riding, or all the other miscellaneous stuff that respectable middle-class down-timers taught their kids, and the town was small enough that they could walk.
"I think you would have liked Tante Anne if she had come," Marguerite said. "Just like Grand-mère Rohan was, she is very highly educated and knows several languages, including Latin, of course, and less Greek, but even while she was in prison after La Rochelle, she found some wandering Scotsman to tutor her and used the time to learn English. She is still very strong and healthy, even though during the last weeks of the siege of La Rochelle the inhabitants were reduced to living on four ounces of bread per day or less, and many people there got sick and died. She is talented and brave, a patroness of Mademoiselle Schurman in Utrecht. She writes poetry, too, although in my estimation it is far from being the best poetry in the world. In fact, it is not very good. But some of it is interesting, especially the poems she did for her sister, Tante Henriette, who died about a dozen years ago, back when she was in love with the duchesse of Mantua-Nevers."
"With the duke?" Carey asked cautiously, still a bit uncertain of rapidly-spoken French.
"Oh, no. With the duchesse," Marguerite answered with good cheer. "It is called Sapphic love. Tante Henriette was quite heartbroken when the Duchesse Catherine died."
"I, ah, see."
"When we go back to Paris, because surely we will because Tante Anne is right that I cannot stay in exile permanently if Rohan is to maintain its position in France, I will take you and Shae and Dominique. Then you can come with me to the salons, because I like femmes savantes much better than Maman does, and meet many interesting intellectual ladies."
That evening, Carey commented to Kamala Dunn that she was less than enthralled by any such prospect. "I signed up for Burgundy," she said, "not Paris."
"Ask Marcie Abruzzo and Matt Trelli," was Kamala's answer. "I think they've learned that when you work for Grand Duke Bernhard and Archduchess Claudia, you go where you're sent. It's along the same lines as the up-time proverb that if the army wanted you to have a wife, it would have issued you one. It's probably pretty much the same when you're working for Rohan. They issue the orders and you obey them."
****
"Honestly, Marguerite, I'm surprised you didn't have a crush on Ruvigny," Dominique said.
"Crush?"
"Oh, umm. That you didn't think you were in love with him. Since, you know, he was really the only young guy you actually knew and all that sort of thing."
"Oh, then, I did have a crush, for years and years. He had been wounded when he came to Venice. I was 12 years old. I thought it was very romantic. I thought about him with hearts and flowers in my head, dreamed about him as my hero, and wrote, ‘Mme. de Ruvigny' in the margins of my cahiers when I was studying languages."
"What made you stop? Or have you stopped?"
"Yes, I stopped."
"Did you, umm, find out that there was something wrong about him—something that made him unsuitable to be a hero?" Shae asked.
Marguerite shook her head. "Henri is brave. His wound was from a duel. He fought several duels when he was a young Royal Guardsman, but I do believe that he has outgrown it now. He has good sense and honor; he is upright and prudent. I stopped dreaming that dream the day I became old enough to realize that even if by some improbable constellation of the stars, my father gave permission for me to marry him and the royal court concurred, there would never be a ‘Mme. de Ruvigny'—that anyone who married me would have to become Rohan. And, well…I'm pretty sure that he wants a wife who can be, will be, ‘Mme. de Ruvigny' for him. In many ways, he is very conservative." She smiled slyly. "Does somebody else here have a crush, perhaps?"
"Not me!" Dominique disclaimed in a hurry, pointing a finger at Shae. "Her!"
"Someone else?" Marguerite asked. "Bismarck, maybe?"
"Oh, no, no," Dominique said. "I want to be a doctor. Since I'm too old for school now, I follow Kamala Dunn around when I'm not being your lady-in-waiting and learn as much as I can from her, and the Padua doctors when they will let me. But to become a real physician, I'll have to go back to Grantville, to work some of the time at the Leahy Medical Center while I do the course at the University of Jena, and I'm not sure that I'd have a very warm welcome there."
"It sounds to me," Marguerite proclaimed, "as if Grantville is a very narrow-minded, petit bourgeois, kind of town." She drew a deep breath and looked at Shae. "You can forget about Henri de Ruvigny, too, unless you just want to waste as much time sighing as I did."
"Why?"
"Because, if he's going to make a successful career, he needs a wife with a dowry, and I can just hear your mother now. ‘A dowry? They expect me to bribe some guy to marry my daught
er? If he doesn't value her for herself, he can simply go to hell!' "
Shae winced. "Yeah, I can hear her now, too. But why does he need a dowry?"
"His family are the least of the noble ranks. Petit noblesse, untitled, just as one speaks of petit bourgeoisie, the small shopkeepers and such in towns rather than the wealthy merchants and bankers. His father was Daniel de Massué; he held three estates, from which their designations as seigneur derive. I have read quite a bit in the histories of your up-time world. Together, the three, Ruvigny, Renneval (or Raineval) and Caillemotte, which came to them through Henri's mother, who was a lady-in-waiting to the duchesse de Sully and a widow when she married Daniel de Massué, would not altogether make a single ranch in the beautiful Colorado with all the mountains larger than most of the Alps. He lives on his army pay now, and on it he can barely support the style of life expected of a captain. But because of his sister Rachel's extraordinarily amazing remarriage to the important English Lord Southampton, which is the only real, true, and genuine fabulous love story I know of, Henri can become an officer of higher rank or leave the army and make a career as a diplomat, but only if he has the money to support it, you understand. So he must have a dowry. Preferably a dowry that has a nice girl attached to it, because we all love him, wish him well, and hope that his marriage will bring him happiness. But there simply must be a dowry—a large dowry."
"Okay." Shae rested her chin on the heel of her hand, her face gloomy. "I can see that. To tell the truth, even if Mom didn't freak out at the word ‘dowry,' she'd never be able to come up with one that size. A lot of people think that all the up-timers are rich, but we aren't. The grand duke pays her a really good salary, but there's housing, food, saving for our education—all that. With Dad executed for treason, there's no way I'll ever qualify for a scholarship in Grantville, any more than Dominique will. She's nearly eighteen now and unless Carey can come up with the money to send her to Prague, she's in a bind. My brother Shaun will be ready for university in a few years—some university other than Jena, which is too tightly tied to Grantville now . . ."
"Stop!" Marguerite waved a hand in front of Shae's face. "Tell me, why are the Grantvillers so upset about Suhl and your dad? Or Dominique's father and that money he embezzled? Honestly, there probably isn't a noble family in France that doesn't have at least one member who has been beheaded for treason, or imprisoned for malfeasance, at one time or another. That's just a normal part of participating in politics. Some other member of the lineage will come into the king's favor at the next turn of events. So, explain!"
Shae couldn't even think where to start.
Dominique managed a save. "The grand duke hired my mom to explain American government to his staff," she said. "I think you ought to ask her, since the duke works for the grand duke and you're the duke's daughter and she's temporarily your chaperone. Maybe you should ask her about Bill and Monica and impeachment, too, since we're even younger than Gerry Stone and remember even less about it than he did."
Marguerite nodded solemnly. "Yes, I should make a special appointment with Carey, just for this. I honestly do not understand this ‘impeachment' at all. Especially not for having sex. It's not as if it was your president who was wearing the blue dress and the beret. People have sex all the time and she, this Monique, wasn't even from an important family of the opposition party."
Dominique grinned. "I'll put it on your calendar. And I want to listen in, just to see how Mom gets through this one."
"Me too," Shae said.
****
Carey heaved a deep sigh. Explaining Monica Lewinsky to a seventeenth-century French noblewoman, aged 19, had been easy compared to explaining Dr. Seuss to a seventeenth-century French nobleman, aged 57. Le duc de Rohan, carrying through on his decision, had tackled the challenge of obtaining originals of the more common works and down-time copies of the more obscure works. Every book that Seuss had written, as far as she could figure out, had been in Grantville at the moment of the Ring of Fire, in at least one copy. Most were there in multiple copies and the most popular in multiple, multiple, multiple copies. Once they hired a researcher at the State Library to track the things down systematically, Dr. Seuss outranked even Harlequin romances. The duke had been delighted.
She wasn't proofreading. Her French was nowhere near that good. She was stumbling through Rohan's rather academic French, trying to understand how he thought about the whole matter. He had entitled it Les Futuriens, with a subtitle of A treatise on these people from the future (ces gens du futur) and how their ideas and philosophy of life may be expected to influence our times.
It would not have occurred to her to discuss the Ring of Fire by starting with an introduction on "The Role of Aesop's Fables in the Development of Western Culture." Nonetheless, that was where Rohan had started, so that was what she was reading. The premise upon which he based this was that, "a culture can best be understood by way of the values it inculcates, via incessant repetition, into its youth." Followed by, "Theodore Seuss Geisel, the Aesop of the Futuriens: A Brief Biography."
That was as far as the duke had gotten as of this morning. At the rate she read French, it was more than enough to last her the rest of the week.
****
Rohan waved a letter. "It looks as if this household is about to have uninvited guests."
"Can they just come?" Carey asked. "Without an invitation."
"The letter is from my sister Anne in Paris. It appears that she has invited them on my behalf. Her former English tutor, a man named Robert Traill, is now a most formidable Scots Presbyterian clergyman, a grim Geneva minister. At the time he had already graduated from St. Andrews and was in France to study at our academy in Saumur. Her tutor's brother is also employed as a tutor and is currently shepherding a young Ulster nobleman around Europe on his grand tour – not his first enterprise, since he's already been around the continent a couple of times, once with a son of Lord Brook and again with a son of Lord Carlisle. This boy is a couple of years older than he should be for such an experience: the original intent was that he should come in 1633, but he is an only son and his father delayed his departure because of the troubles with the League of Ostend. They're basically on their way home, now, but the tutor wants to get his charge out of France, so they will detour in our direction and finish their trip through the western USE."
He glanced at the letter again, threw it down, and screamed "Non!"
Carey said nothing.
"The father, the Scotsman, is one of those who defrauded Con MacNiall O'Neill of most of his lands thirty years ago. This is not an accident. The tutor and this . . ." He looked at the letter again. ". . . this Hamilton have been lurking in Paris, waiting until the conclave was over and Owen Roe O'Neill and his associates were well out of Besançon. Anne, also, never does anything without some motive, some reason. I need to know more about these people."
He picked up his newest toy. He had read about "ringing for" a servant or secretary, but one of the up-time mechanical artists had told him that the cost of installing such a system in what was, after all, a rented house would be more expensive than it was worth. As he was frowning, his daughter's young dressmaker had asked, "Why don't you just get a cow bell?" So he had. No one could hear it from more than a room away. Then Ron Stone had sent, from Grantville, a genuine long-handled 19th century brass school bell. The din that arose when he shook it brought a footman into the room at a rapid trot.
Rohan tossed the letter to him, though he was still talking to Carey. "My sister says they are coming so that this young Hamilton can obtain an understanding of what Grand Duke Bernhard is organizing here in Burgundy and a comprehension of the issues in regard to the occupation of Lorraine. I don't believe it for a minute." He turned to the servant. "Take this to my secretary at the Green Lion and tell him to find out what is going on, as fast as you can—what is on their minds and what is on Anne's mind."
The man backed out, holding the letter as if it might catch on fire at any m
oment.
****
"So," Rohan said, "these juvenalia, Madame Calagna. What do you think of them?"
Carey raised her eyebrows. "No Latin here, Your Grace. No Latin at all. Well, maybe a few words, but they all have to do with probate law."
"These books designed for young children just learning to read." He reached under his chair and fished out Fox in Socks, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, and Hop on Pop. "In this last, for example, we have information regarding up-time family structure and the relationship expected to exist between a father and his children. Thus, although normally one would not consider them to provide insight into the up-time culture, I have concluded that they can be useful for understanding the up-time cultural milieu and the up-timers' mentalité. I do believe that there is such a thing as a mentalité of a group, a people, or a nation. If I did not, I would scarcely pursue this project."
He smiled. "Not to say that some will be of considerable utility for Europeans of our own day when faced with the bewildering nature of English pronunciation, both contemporary and du futur. As an appendix, I will include this poem, "English is Tough Stuff," provided by one of the English teachers at Calvert High School along with a copy of Oh, Say Can You Say?, even though that book itself will deserve only a short notice in a footnote. It says something about a culture if its own members can laugh at themselves."
Before she could answer, his secretary called him to a meeting with several members of Grand Duke Bernhard's Kloster. She wasn't surprised. He didn't usually expect her to answer a rhetorical question along the lines of What do you think? as contrasted to very specific questions such as What is this thing? accompanied by a finger pointing to one of the illustrations. For the second kind of question, the duke expected very specific answers indeed.
Grantville Gazette, Volume 65 Page 12