Rossignol rotated back around to gaze at Eliza. There was no point in sitting, as he'd just have to stand up again when the Duchess and the Count arrived.
"Monsieur Rossignol," said Eliza, "every child knows that the juice of a lime, or a bit of diluted milk, may be used to write secret messages in invisible ink, which may later be made to appear by scorching it before hot coals. When you stare at me in this way, it is as if you phant'sy that some message has been writ upon my face in milk, which you may make visible by the heat of your scrutiny. I beg you remember that more often than not the procedure goes awry, and the paper itself catches fire."
"I cannot help that God made me the way I am."
"Granted; but I beg you. Monsieur le comte d'Avaux, and Father Édouard de Gex, have given me enough of such glares, in the last few days, to raise blisters on my brow. From you, monsieur, I should be grateful for a warm, rather than hot, regard."
"It is obvious enough that you are flirting with me."
"Flirtation is customarily more or less obvious, monsieur, but you do not have to mention it!"
"You invited me on a sleigh-ride, and led me to think it would be you and me alone together—‘it shall be never so cold, Bon-bon, and I shall freeze to death if I do not have anyone to share my blanket with'—and then we waited, and waited, and now it is obvious that I shall be sharing my blanket with a Count, or a Dowager. It is a little étude in cruelty. I observe such all the time in people's love-letters. I understand this. But it would be very foolish of you, my lady, to believe that you shall achieve some power over me by playing such girlish games."
Eliza laughed. "Never crossed my mind." She lunged forward, spun around, and took the seat next to Rossignol. He looked down at her, startled. "Why not?" Eliza said, "as long as we are chaperoned."
"Flirting with you without result is more interesting than doing nothing," Rossignol insisted, "but since our adventure, you really have paid me very little attention. I think it is because you got into some trouble you could not get out of by your own wits, and so became indebted to me in a way; which you chafe at."
"We will speak of chafing later," said Eliza, and then actually batted her snow-laden eyelashes at him. She patted the seat next to her.
"I must greet the Count and the—" but he was cut short as Eliza grabbed the back of his breeches and jerked down hard. She had only meant to force him to sit down; but to her shock she all but depantsed him, and would have stripped him naked to the knees had he not sat down violently. Like a bullfighter wielding the cape, she heaved the blanket over his lap just in time to hide all from the Count and the Duchess, who looked their way at the sudden movement.
"You must put some meat on your hips, otherwise what is the point of wearing a belt?" she whispered.
"Mademoiselle! I must stand up for the Count and the—"
"Dowager, is that what you called her? She is no dowager, her husband is alive and well, and tending to the King's affairs in the South. Don't worry, I shall fix it." She leaned against Rossignol's shoulder and raised her voice: "Madame la duchesse, Monsieur le comte, Monsieur Rossignol is mortified, for he would stand up to greet you; but I won't let him move. For his slender frame makes as much heat as a coal-stove, which is the only thing keeping me alive."
"Sit, sit!" insisted the Duchess of Arcachon. "Monsieur, you are like my son, too polite for your own good!" She had reached sleigh-side. Three stable-hands converged, and helped Pontchartrain help her into the sleigh. She was a big woman, and when she threw her weight on the bench, facing Eliza and Rossignol, the runners broke loose on the snow and the sleigh moved backwards a few inches. All three of the occupants whooped: the Duchess because she was alarmed, Eliza because it was amusing, and Bonaventure Rossignol because Eliza, under the blanket, had shoved her cold hand into his drawers and seized hold of his penis as if it were a lifeline. Presently the Count took a seat next to the Duchess. The horses—a team of two matched albinos—nearly bolted, so cold and impatient were they, and there was harsh language from the driver. But then they settled into a trot. The four passengers waved at the crowd inside, who'd been mopping steam off the windowpanes with their handkerchiefs. Eliza waved with one hand only. After an initial shrinkage, Rossignol had come erect so fast that she was worried about his health. He had squirmed and glared, but only until he recognized that the situation was perfectly hopeless; now he sat very still, listening to the Duchess, or pretending to.
She was matronly, decent, and genuinely popular: the living embodiment of the traditional Lavardac virtues of simple sincere loyalty to King and Church, in that order, without all of the scheming. In other words, she was just what a hereditary noble was supposed to be; which made her both an asset and a liability to the King. By supporting him blindly, and always doing the right thing, she made of her family a bulwark to his reign. But by exhibiting genuine nobility, she was implicitly making a strong case for the entire idea of a hereditary peerage with much power and responsibility, and making the new arrivals—Eliza included—seem like conniving arrivistes by comparison. Sitting in the Duchess's sleigh and firmly massaging the erect penis of the King's cryptanalyst, Eliza had to admit the validity of this point; but she admitted it to herself. She had no choice but to make do with what she had—which at the moment was nothing at all, except for a handful of Rossignol. She still did not have more than a few coins to her name.
The sleigh moved briskly on the trail, which had been groomed in advance of the party. In a few moments they passed out of the formal garden and into a huddle of buildings that was concealed from view of La Dunette's windows by adroit landscaping. The scent of manure from the hunting-stable of Louis-François de Lavardac d'Arcachon was driven away suddenly by a cloud of lavender-scented steam, surging from the open side of a shed where a servant was stirring a vat over a great smoky fire.
"You make your own soap here?" Eliza said. "The fragrance is wonderful."
"Of course we do, mademoiselle!" said the Duchess, astonished by the fact that Eliza found this worthy of mention. Then something occurred to her: "You should use it."
"I already impose on your hospitality too much, my lady. Paris is so well-supplied with parfumiers and soap-makers, I am happy to go there and—"
"Oh, no!" exclaimed the Duchess. "You must never buy soap in Paris—from strangers! Especially with the orphan to think of!"
"As you know, my lady, little Jean-Jacques is now in the care of the Jesuit fathers. They make their own soap, probably—"
"As they had better!" said the Duchess. "But you bring clothes to him sometimes. You will have them laundered here, in my soap."
Eliza did not really care, and was happy to give her assent, since the Duchess of Arcachon was so firm on this point; if she hesitated for a moment, it was only because she was a bit nonplussed.
"You should use the Duchess's soap, mademoiselle," said Pontchartrain firmly.
"Indeed!" said Rossignol—who, given the circumstances, would probably be speaking in one-word sentences for a while.
"I accept your soap with all due gratitude, madame," said Eliza.
"My laundresses do not wear gloves!" huffed the Duchess, as if she had been challenged on some point. This rather dampened conversation for some moments. They had passed clear of the out-buildings, and circumvented a paddock where the Duke's hunting-mounts were exercised in better weather, and entered now into a wooded game-park, bony and bare under twilight. Pontchartrain opened the shades on a pair of carriage-lanterns that dangled above the corners of the benches, and presently they were gliding along through the dim woods in a little halo of lamplight. In a few moments they came to a stone wall that cut the forest in twain. It was pierced by a gate, which stood open, and which was guarded, in name anyway, by half a dozen musketeers, who were standing around a fire. The wall was twenty-six miles long. The gate was one of twenty-two. Passing through it, they entered the Grand Parc, the hunting-grounds of the King.
The Duchess seemed to regret the matter of th
e soap, and now suddenly worked herself up into a lather of good cheer.
"Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur has said she will start a salon at La Dunette! I have told her, I do not know how such a thing is done! For I am just a foolish old hen, and not one for clever discourse! But she has assured me, one need only invite a few men who are as clever as Monsieur Rossignol and Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, and then it just—happens!"
Pontchartrain smiled. "Madame la duchesse, you would have me and Monsieur Rossignol believe that when two such ladies as you and the Countess are together in private, you have nothing better to do than talk about us?"
The Duchess was taken aback for a moment, then whooped. "Monsieur, you tease me!"
Eliza gave Rossignol an especially hard squeeze, and he shifted uneasily.
"So far, it does not seem to be happening, for Monsieur Rossignol is so quiet!" observed the Duchess in a rare faux pas; for she should have known that the way to make a quiet person join the conversation is not to point out that he is being quiet.
"Before you joined us, madame, he was telling me that he has been wrestling with a most difficult decypherment—a new code, the most difficult yet, that is being used by the Duke of Savoy to communicate with his confederates in the north. He is distracted—in another world."
"On the contrary," said Rossignol, "I am quite capable of talking, as long as you do not ask me to compute square roots in my head, or something."
"I don't know what that is but it sounds frightfully difficult!" exclaimed the Duchess.
"I'll not ask you to do any such thing, monsieur," said Pontchartrain, "but some day when you are not so engaged—perhaps at the Countess's salon—I should like to speak to you of what I do. You might know that Colbert, some years ago, paid the German savant Leibniz to build a machine that would do arithmetic. He was going to use this machine in the management of the King's finances. Leibniz delivered the machine eventually, but he had in the meantime become distracted by other problems, and now, of course, he serves at the court of Hanover, and so has become an enemy of France. But the precedent is noteworthy: putting mathematical genius to work in the realm of finance."
"Indeed, it is interesting," allowed Rossignol, "though the King keeps me very busy at cyphers."
"What sorts of problems did you have in mind, monsieur?" Eliza asked.
"What I am going to tell you is a secret, and should not leave this sleigh," Pontchartrain began.
"Fear not, monseigneur; is any thought more absurd than that one of us might be a foreign spy?" Rossignol asked, and was rewarded by the sensation of four sharp fingernails closing in around his scrotum.
"Oh, it is not foreign spies I am concerned about in this case, but domestic speculators," said the Count.
"Then it is even more safe; for I've nothing to speculate with," said Eliza.
"I am going to call in all of the gold and silver coins," said Pontchartrain.
"All of them? All of them in the entire country!?" exclaimed the Duchess.
"Indeed, my lady. We will mint new gold and silver louis, and exchange them for the old."
"Heavens! What is the point of doing it, then?"
"The new ones will be worth more, madame."
"You mean that they will contain more gold, or silver?" Eliza asked.
Pontchartrain gave her a patient smile. "No, mademoiselle. They will have precisely the same amount of gold or silver as the ones we use now—but they will be worth more, and so to obtain, say, nine louis d'or of the new coin, one will have to pay the Treasury ten of the old."
"How can you say that the same coin is now worth more?"
"How can we say that it is worth what it is now?" Pontchartrain threw up his hands as if to catch snowflakes. "The coins have a face value, fixed by royal decree. A new decree, a new value."
"I understand. But it sounds like a scheme to make something out of nothing—a perpetual motion machine. Somewhere, somehow, in some unfathomable way, it must have repercussions."
"Quite possibly," said Pontchartrain, "but I cannot make out where and how exactly. You must understand, the King has asked me to double his revenues to pay for the war. Double! The usual taxes and tariffs have already been squeezed dry. I must resort to novel measures."
"Now I understand why you would like the advice of France's greatest savants," said the Duchess. Whereupon all eyes turned to Rossignol. But he had suddenly braced his feet and jerked his head back. For a few moments he stared up at the indigo sky through half-closed eyes, and did not breathe; then he exhaled, and took in a deep draught of the cold air.
"I do believe Monsieur Rossignol has been seized by some sudden mathematical insight," said Pontchartrain in a hushed voice. "It is said that Descartes's great idea came to him in a sort of religious vision. I had been skeptical of it until this moment, for the very thought seemed blasphemous. But the look on Monsieur Rossignol's face, as he cracked that cypher, was unmistakably like that of a saint in a fresco as he is drawn, by the Holy Spirit, into an epiphanic rapture."
"Will we see a lot of this sort of thing, then, at the salon?" asked the Duchess, giving Rossignol a very dubious look.
"Only occasionally," Eliza assured her. "But perhaps we ought to change the subject, and give Monsieur Rossignol an opportunity to gather his wits. Let's talk about…horses!"
"Horses?"
"Those horses," said Eliza, nodding at the two that were drawing the sleigh.
She and Rossignol were facing forward. The Duchess and the Count had to turn around to see what she was looking at. Eliza took advantage of this to wipe her hand on Rossignol's drawers and withdraw it. Rossignol hitched up his breeches weakly.
"Do you fancy them?" asked the Duchess. "Louis-François is inordinately proud of his horses."
"Until now I had only seen them from a distance, and supposed that they were simply white horses. But they are more than that; they are albinos, are they not?"
"Ths distinction is lost on me," the Duchess admitted, "But that is what Louis-François calls them. When he comes back from the south he will be glad to tell you more than you wish to hear!"
"Are they commonly seen? Do many people have them here?" Eliza asked. But they were interrupted by, of all things, a man riding an albino horse: Étienne de Lavardac d'Arcachon, who had ridden out from the château to meet them. "I am mortified to break in on you this way," he said, after greeting each of them individually, in strict order of precedence (Duchess first, then Pontchartrain, Eliza, horses, mathematician, and driver), "but in your absence, Mother, I am the acting host of the party, and must do all in my power to please our guests—one of whom, by the way, happens to be his majesty the King of France—"
"Oooh! When did le Roi arrive?"
"Just after you left, Mother."
"Just my luck. What do his majesty and the other guests desire?"
"To see the masque. Which is ready to begin."
ONE END OF THE GRAND ballroom of La Dunette had been converted into the English Channel. Papier-mâché waves with plaster foam, mounted on eccentric bearings so that they cycled about in a more or less convincing churn, had been arranged in many parallel, independently moving ranks, marching toward the back of the room, and raked upwards so that any spectator on the ballroom floor could get a view of the entire width of the "Channel" from "Dunkerque" (a fortified silhouette downstage) to "Dover" (white cliffs and green fields upstage). To stage left was a little pen where a consort sawed away on viols. To stage right was a royal box where King Louis XIV of France sat on a golden chair, with the Marquise de Maintenon at his right hand, dressed more for a funeral than a Christmas party. A retinue was massed behind them. So close to the front of it that he could have put a hand on Maintenon's shoulder was Father Édouard de Gex—this a way of saying that there had better be no salacious bits. Not that Madame la duchesse d'Arcachon would ever even conceive of such a thing; but she had hired artists and comedians to produce it, and one never knew what such people would come up with
.
The name of the production was La Métamorphose. Leading man and guest of honor was one Lieutenant Jean Bart, who knew as little of what to do on stage, during a masque, as would a comedian in a naval engagement; but never mind, it had all been written around him and his dramaturgickal shortcomings. The opening number took place on the beach at Dunkerque. A mermaid, perched on a rock, looked on as Jean Bart and his men (dancers dressed as Corsairs) attended an impromptu Mass celebrated on the beach. Exit Priest. Jean Bart led his men onto their frigate (which was no larger than a rowboat, but wittily decked out with masts and yards sprouting every which way, and fleur-de-lis banners). The frigate took to the Channel's bobbing waves and headed for England. The mermaid, stranded solus downstage right, sang an aria about her lovesick condition; for she had quite fallen in love with the handsome Lieutenant (in an earlier version, there had been no Mass on the beach; it had opened with Jean Bart spawled on the rock in a state of deshabille and the mermaid feeding grapes to him; but the Duchess had had words with the players, and mended it).
Neptune now arose from the waves and sang a duet with the mermaid, his daughter. He wanted to know why she was so morose. Learning the answer, he became cross with Jean Bart and vowed to take revenge on him in the traditional godly style of subjecting him to an inconvenient metamorphosis.
In the next scene, Jean Bart's frigate did battle with a larger English one, and there was a lot of swinging from ropes and fake swordplay, which Bart did very well. Just as he was about to grasp the laurels of victory, angry Neptune appeared and, with a thrust of his trident and a roar of kettledrums, transformed Bart into a cat (effected by Bart's putting on a mask while everyone was distracted by the histrionics of the sea-god). Because cats cannot give orders and are averse to water, this threw his men into disarray and they were all captured by the English.
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