The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (180 page)

Her attention—and that of almost everyone else in the room—turned to d’Avaux, who had approached the King, and received permission to speak. It was a wonder he had sought permission, for he was in such a rage that he was almost slavering. He kept looking back
at Eliza, which gave Eliza the idea that it might be best for her to draw closer and listen in.

“Your majesty!” cried d’Avaux. “By your majesty’s leave, I say that while the
perpetrator
of this atrocious crime may be far away, the
first cause and inspiration
of it is close by, yea, within the reach of your majesty’s sword almost, so that your majesty may have satisfaction presently—for she, the woman in whose name
L’Emmerdeur
committed this murder, is none other than—” and he raised his hand before his face, index finger extended, like a pistol-duellist in the moment before he levels the weapon at his foe. His gaze was rapt on Eliza. The fatal finger began to descend toward her heart. She reached up and caught that digit, however, while it was still directed toward the magnificent Le Brun ceiling, and bent it back sharply enough to make d’Avaux inhale sharply—which meant he could not finish his sentence.
“Merci beaucoup, monsieur,”
she whispered, and executed a full three-hundred-sixty-degree pirouette that brought her face to face with the King while relegating d’Avaux to the background. Her hand was behind the small of her back now, still gripping d’Avaux’s finger. She had carried it off—or so she hoped—in such a manner that an observer, still in shock over the appearance of the severed head of the birthday boy, might think that d’Avaux had courteously offered her his hand, and she had gratefully accepted it.

“By your leave, your majesty, I have heard it said that the rules of etiquette dictate ladies before gentlemen; was I deceived?”

“In no way, mademoiselle,” said the King.

“I tell you, it was—” began d’Avaux; but the King silenced him with a flick of the eyes, and Eliza reinforced the message with some torque on the finger.

“Moreover, it is said that the laws of Heaven place love before hate, and peace before war; is it true?”

“
Pourquoi non,
mademoiselle?”

“Then as a lady who stands before your majesty on an errand of love, I beg precedence over this gentleman, my dear friend and mentor, Monsieur le comte d’Avaux, whose red and angry visage tells me he is on some errand of hateful retribution.”

“So terrible is the news to-night that it would bring me, if not
pleasure,
then perhaps a few moments’
diversion
from what is so
unpleasant,
to grant you precedence over Monsieur d’Avaux; provided that
his
errand is not of an urgent nature.”

“Oh, not at all, your majesty, what I have to say will be every bit as useful to you in a few minutes’ time as it is now. I insist that Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur go ahead.” D’Avaux finally worried his finger free and backed off a step.

“Your majesty,” said Eliza, “I grieve for
le duc.
I trust he has gone to his reward. I pray that
L’Emmerdeur
will get what he deserves for what he has done. But I cannot, I will not, allow the so-called King of the Vagabonds the additional satisfaction of disrupting the peaceful conduct of your majesty’s household, that is to say
La France;
and so, notwithstanding my feelings of shock and grief at this moment, I beg your leave to accept the proposal of marriage that was tendered to me earlier this evening by Étienne de Lavardac—now, duc d’Arcachon.”

“Then marry him with all the blessings a King can bestow,” the King answered.

And in this moment Eliza was startled by a most unexpected rush of sound from all about her. In any other circumstance she’d have recognized it instantly. But here, given all that had happened, she had to look about and verify it with her eyes: the guests were applauding. It was not, of course, a raucous ovation. Half of them were openly weeping. Many of the ladies had fled the room. Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon was being carried out unconscious, and Eliza’s unwitting fiancé only remained in the room because someone was obliged to greet Madame la marquise de Maintenon. But for all that, the remaining guests produced a spontaneous patter of applause. It was not that they had forgotten the Duke’s head—
that
was unlikely—but that they found something stirring in how this scene of shock and horror had been adroitly reversed. The applause was an expression of defiance. Eliza, understanding this belatedly, acknowledged it with a diffident curtsey. Presently Étienne drifted to her side—someone had explained matters to him—and took her hand, and then the applause welled up again, for just a moment. Then it died abruptly and was replaced by altogether more fitting sounds of sobbing, wailing, and praying. Eliza was distracted for a moment by a glimpse of a rider out in the courtyard wheeling his mount around with great panache, and galloping out into Paris. It was the Earl of Upnor.

Then she attended to the King, who was speaking: “Father Édouard. We came together here for a small celebration. But the only celebration that is fitting, on an evening such as this one, is that of the Mass.”

“Of course, sire.”

“We will observe a funeral Mass for Monsieur le duc d’Arcachon. Following that, a wedding for the new duc and Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur.”

“Yes, sire,” said de Gex. “By your majesty’s leave, the family chapel has already been made ready for a wedding; shall we perform the funeral here, where there is more room, and move to the chapel thereafter?”

King Louis XIV made a tiny nod of assent, and then turned his gaze on d’Avaux, who had not yet been dismissed. “Monsieur le comte,” said the King, “you were about to voice an opinion as to the identity of the woman who inspired the heinous murder of my cousin?”

“By your majesty’s leave,” d’Avaux said, “If we interpret
L’Emmerdeur
’s statement
literally,
it will only amount to something banal. I have no doubt that he was merely trying to impress some
whore
he met once in Paris.” And he could not prevent his eyes from flicking at Eliza for just a moment as he said this; but then he returned his attention to the King. “I was, rather, attempting to make a more
general
statement about
all
the enemies of France, and what moves them.” He backed away one step, turned, and swept his arm up and out towards a corner of the painted ceiling, where Pandora was opening up her Box (in—come to think of it—an odd reminder of the box-opening scene that had just played out on the ballroom floor) to release a flood of demonic Vices. Pandora had been painted, as everyone knew, to resemble Mary, the usurper Queen of England. The foremost of the Vices rushing out of her box was green-eyed Envy, who had been made to resemble Sophie of Hanover. It was to Envy that d’Avaux now drew the King’s attention. “That, your majesty, is the lady love, not only of
L’Emmerdeur
—who is after all a nobody—but also of all the Dutch and English. Envy is what inspires their
chivalrous
acts.”

“You powers of observation are as keen as ever, monsieur,” said the King, “and I have never been more pleased to number you among my subjects.”

At this d’Avaux bowed very deeply. Eliza could not help but think that, for all the frustration and defeat d’Avaux had suffered here, this immense compliment from
le Roi
was more than compensation enough. It made her wonder:
Did the King know everything?

The King continued: “Monsieur le comte d’Avaux has, as usual, spoken wisely. It follows that if we are to baffle Envy’s devotees, we should celebrate all that is magnificent in this Realm: with funerals, the magnificence that has passed, and with weddings, the magnificence that is yet to come. Let it be so.”

And it
was
so.

Most of the guests went home following the funeral in the ballroom, but enough remained to fill the chapel for the wedding. After that, they went directly into a
second
funerary mass; for Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon had not recovered from the sight of her husband’s head pulled from the box. What everyone had taken for a swoon, had in fact been a stroke. One side of her body had already gone lifeless by the time they had carried her to her bedchamber,
and during the subsequent hours, the paralysis had spread to engulf the other side as well, and finally the heart had stopped. And so, by the time the newlyweds emerged from the doors of the Hôtel Arcachon, around midnight, and climbed into a borrowed carriage (for the white seashell-coach was both fouled and broken), both of Étienne’s parents were dead, and being made ready for shipment to consecrated ground at La Dunette. Étienne was duc, and Eliza was duchesse, d’Arcachon.

The new Duke and Duchess consummated their union under many blankets in a carriage en route to Versailles, and arrived at La Dunette in the darkest and coldest hours before dawn. Fresh hoof-prints in the snow on La Dunette’s gravel paths told them that they were not the first to come this way since the snow had ceased to fall. When they reached the château, they found the servants already awake and dressed, and red around the eyes. The doyenne of the maidservants took Eliza to one side, and let her know that she must go down to the Convent of Ste.-Genevieve immediately, for there was dreadful news. Eliza, unwilling to wait for preparations to be made, straddled the first horse she could get to—it was an albino mare—and rode it bareback down to the little convent full of weeping and praying nuns. She went directly to the room where Jean-Jacques slept. She knew already what she would see there, for she had seen it before in nightmares, as every parent does: the shattered window, curtains riven, muddy bootprints on the sill, and the empty cradle. The blankets had been taken; that was a comfort to her, as it suggested that wherever Jean-Jacques might be, he was at least not freezing to death. Left in the little bed was a note, addressed to the Countess de la Zeur; for whoever had penned it had not got the news of her new rank and title. It read:

DECEMBER
1690

T
HE FORMAL INTRODUCTIONS HAD PLAYED
against the backdrop of a fireplace large enough to burn a small village. For half an hour or so, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had inched towards each other as if conjoined by an invisible spring stretched through the middle of the muttering swarm of Freiherren and Freifrauen. When finally they drew within hailing distance of each other they switched over to French and launched into an easy chat about involutes, evolutes, and radial curves. Leibniz moved on into a tutorial about a new notion he had been toying with in his spare time, called parallel curves, which he illustrated by drawing invisible lines on the hearth with the toe of his boot. Petty nobles of Lower Saxony who trespassed on these were politely asked to move, so that Fatio could draw several invisible lines and curves of his own. Then he managed, in a single grammatically correct sentence, to make reference to Apollonius of Perga, the Folium of Descartes, and the Limaçon of Pascal.

The walls of the room were decorated with impossibly optimistic paintings, two to three fathoms on a side, of sowers, reapers, and gleaners plying their respective trades in sun-gilded fields. Fickle light was shed on these by flames burning in bronze baskets carried on the heads of naked, muscle-bound, bronze blackamoors planted on ten-ton pedestals in the corners.

Fatio looked significantly at his watch. “The sun rose—what—two hours ago? At this latitude, we have—say—two hours of daylight remaining?”

“A bit more, sir, by your leave,” answered Leibniz with a wink, or perhaps a cinder had flown into his eye. But that was all that needed to be said. Both men turned their backs to the fire for a last helping of warmth, then marched towards the room’s exit, groping through darkness and smoke for the door.

They were blinded by powerful bluish light. The Schloß’s galleries—which served not only as connecting passages, but also as a sort of perimeter defense against the climate—ran around its exterior wall, and had plenty of windows. The low light of the heavy winter sun ricocheted off the ice-crusted snow that covered the dead gardens, filling these corridors with chilly brilliance. An indignant servant slammed the doors behind them to keep the heat in. Leibniz and Fatio began to match each other’s pace down the length of the gallery, moving just short of a sprint. The cold seemed to have dissolved their stockings. It was imperative to keep the knees and calves working.

“Some family,” Fatio ventured. “One
hears
of them but does not
meet
them.”

“They grow into the interstices left between
other
families,” Leibniz admitted. “You would find the Hanover crowd more interesting.”

“They
do
seem
impossibly
fecund,” Fatio said. “The Winter Queen left children strewn all over the place, and Sophie, at one time or another, has given birth to nearly
everyone.
”

“Sophie married in to
this
lot,” Leibniz said, glancing back.

“And that is how you became her librarian?”

“Privy Councillor,” Leibniz corrected him.

“Sir! I beg you to accept my apologies and my congratulations!” announced Fatio, faltering and reaching for his hat so that he could bow; but Leibniz caught his elbow and pulled him along.

“Never mind, it happened quite recently. In brief, the family of Dukes whose ancestral home is this Schloß put on a tremendous spate of baby-making round the time of the Thirty Years’ War, probably because they were besieged here for æons by Danes, Swedes, and God knows who else, and had nothing to do but fuck. Four brothers were born in an interval of eight years! All survived!”

“Calamity!”

“Indeed. Through the 1650s the lads ran riot through the courts of Christendom, trying to mitigate the unnatural surplus of virgins that had built up during the War. All of them wanted Sophie. One of them was too fat and, in any event, Catholic. One was too drunk and
impotent. One was famously syphilitic. But the youngest—Ernst August—was, as the Færy Tale has it,
just right
! Sophie married him.”

“But my dear Doctor, how did the youngest brother end up in the best position?”

They came to a corner of the Schloß and turned into another endless gallery.

“In 1665 the drunk one died. Ernst August and Georg Wilhelm—the syphilitic—were off sowing their wild oats. So John Frederick—”

“By process of elimination, he would be the obese Catholic?”

“Yes. He appropriated the Duchy and raised an army to defend it. By the time news of this
coup de main
had made its way to the Venetian brothel where Ernst August and Georg Wilhelm had set up their headquarters, ’twas a
fait accompli
. Later, like good brothers, they worked out a settlement. John Frederick got the great prize, and was made Duke of Hanover. Georg Wilhelm became Duke of Celle. Ernst August—despite being a Protestant—remained the Bishop of Osnabrück. The odds and ends of the clan ended up here in Wolfenbüttel—you have just met them. Now, Ernst August and Sophie had already resolved to make their little fiefdom into a Parnassus, a kingdom of Reason—”

“So they hired you, naturally.”

“No, actually, there was a
lot
of that going round at the time. John Frederick wanted to do the same at Hanover.”

“It must have been a good time to be a savant.”

“Indeed, one could name one’s price. John Frederick had more money and a vast library.”

“Right, now I am starting to remember it. Huygens told me that after he taught you everything he knew concerning mathematics—which would have been round about the early 1670s—you had to leave Paris and take a job in some cold bleak place.” Fatio looked significantly out the window.

“’Twas Hanover actually—a distinction without a difference, as to you it would seem very like Wolfenbüttel.”

Leibniz ushered Fatio into an entrance hall dominated by frighteningly massive staircases.

Sounding a bit perplexed, Fatio said, “Rather a lot of people must have died then, for Ernst August to become Duke of Hanover—”

“John Frederick died in ’79. Georg Wilhelm still lives. But it was Ernst August who became Duke of Hanover, by dint of this or that sub-clause in the agreement made between him and his brothers—I’ll spare you details.”

“So Sophie got to merge
her
Parnassus with John Frederick’s—of which you were the crowning glory—”

“Really you do flatter, sir.”

“But why did I have to come down
here
to meet you? I’d expected to find you at Hanover.”

“The Library!” Leibniz answered, surging past the younger man and hurling himself against an immense door. There was a bit of preliminary cracking and tinkling as ice shattered and fell from its hinges. Then it yawned open to afford Fatio a view across several hundred yards of flat snow-covered ground to a dark uneven mountainous structure that was a-building there.

“No fair making comparisons with the one Wren’s building at Trinity College,” Leibniz said cheerfully. “
His
will be an ornament—not that there is anything wrong with that—
mine
will be a tool, an engine of knowledge.”

“Engine?” Fatio, who was well-shod, pranced out into the snow in pursuit of Leibniz, who had given up any hope of preserving his boots and shifted to a sort of plodding, stomping gait.

“Our use of knowledge progresses through successively higher levels of abstraction as we perfect civilization and draw nearer to the mentality of God,” Leibniz said, as if making an off-handed comment about the weather. “Adam named the beasts; meaning, that from casual observations of particular specimens, he moved to the recognition of species, and then devised abstract names for them—a sort of code, if you will. Indeed, if he had not done so, Noah’s task would have been inconceivable. Later, a system of writing was developed: spoken words were abstracted into chains of characters. This became the basis for the Law—it is how God communicated His intentions to Man. The Book was written. Then other books. At Alexandria the many books were brought together into the first Library. More recently came the invention of Gutenberg: a cornucopia that spills books out into specialized markets in Frankfurt and Leipzig. The merchants there have been completely unreceptive to my proposals! There are too many books in the world now for any one mind to comprehend. What does Man do, Fatio, when he is faced with a task that exceeds the physical limits of his body?”

“Harnesses beasts, or makes a tool. And beasts are of no use in a Library. So—”

“So we want tools. Behold!” Leibniz proclaimed, taking his hands from his coat-pockets just long enough to direct a sort of shoveling gesture at the looming Pile. “It must be obvious to you that this was a stable
*
until quite recently. I will stipulate that this is a mean beginning
for a library and that you will be able to elicit howls of laughter from the Royal Society and from any
salon
at Versailles by describing it to them…”

“On the contrary, Doctor! When I bid you
adieu
I shall go straight back to the Hague to resume my studies with Mr. Huygens. ’Twill be a year or more before I address the Royal Society on
any
matter. Wren’s library remains half-built for want of funds.”

“Very well, then,” Leibniz muttered, and led Fatio through a temporary door of rough planks and into the stable. It was unheated, but it got their faces out of the wind, and their feet out of the snow. The foundation and ground-floor walls were made of large blocks of undressed stone. Everything above those was built of timbers. So far, the temporary scaffolding was more substantial than the structure itself, which was only sketched in with a few posts and beams. Fatio was baffled, and soon turned his huge eyes downwards to the several tables arrayed in the center of the main floor.

“One day we shall haul out these rude workbenches and replace them with polished desks where scholars will go to their work, illuminated by sky-light from a high fair cupola above,” Leibniz said, craning his head back so that his wig shifted, and thrusting his index finger up through the cloud of vapor that had veiled his words.

“The cupola is a fine innovation, Doctor. Getting adequate light is ever a problem in libraries. Sometimes I am tempted to burn one page to shed light on the next.”

“It is but one instance of the principle.”

“Which principle?”

“I told you I am trying to build a tool, an engine.” Leibniz sighed out a vast cloud of steam.

The tabletops supported divers forms of industry. Each was a gelid still-life unto itself. About half were given over to the library-building project (drawings weighed down with stones and wood-scraps, ragged quills projecting from frozen ink-wells, half-completed ledgers, clamped timbers surrounded by knee-high piles of wood-shavings) and half to whatever the Doctor was interested in at the moment. Fatio drew up short in front of a table strewn with what appeared to be stones; but as he did not fail to note, each stone was impressed with the skeleton of a leaf, insect, fish, or beast—some of them utterly unfamiliar.

“What—”

“I have laid off of
Dynamics
for the time being and am trying to finish another book
Proto-gaea,
whose subject matter you may know from the title. But let us refrain from digressions,” said Leibniz, shuffling carefully across the cluttered room. He paused to regard a
colossal piece of furniture. “You see I am not the first to contemplate the making of a knowledge engine.”

Fatio closed his eyes, which was the only way to pry his attention from the outlandish skeletons, and stepped back, then maneuvered over to join Leibniz.

“Behold, the Bücherrad!”
*
Leibniz said.

Viewed end-on, the Bücherrad was hexagonal, and nearly as tall as Fatio. When he worked his way round to the front, he saw that it consisted mostly of six massive shelves, each one a couple of fathoms long, bridging the interval between hexagonal end-caps that were mounted on axles so that the whole apparatus could be revolved. But each of the six shelves was free to revolve on an axis of its own. As the Bücherrad spun, each of those shelves counter-rotated in such a way that it maintained a fixed angle with respect to the floor, and did not spill its load of books.

Going round to the other end, Fatio was able to see how it worked: a system of planetary gears, carven from hard wood, spun about the central axle-tree like Ptolemaic epicycles.

Then Fatio turned his attention to the books themselves: curious folio volumes, hand-written, all in the same hand, all in Latin.

“These were written out personally by one Duke August, a forerunner of that lot you just met. He lived to a great age and died some twenty-five years ago. It was he who assembled most of this collection,” Leibniz explained.

Fatio bent slightly at the waist to read one of the pages. It consisted of a series of paragraphs each preceded by a title and a long Roman numeral. “It is a
description
of a book,” he concluded.

“The process of abstraction continues,” Leibniz said. “Duke August could not keep the contents of his library in his memory, so he wrote out catalogs. And when there were too many catalogs for him to use them conveniently, he had woodwrights make Bücherrads—engines to facilitate the use and maintenance of the catalogs.”

“It is very ingenious.”

“Yes—and it is threescore years old,” Leibniz returned. “If you do the arithmetick, as I have, you may easily demonstrate that to hold all the catalogs needed to list all the world’s books would require so many Bücherrads that we would need some Bücherradrads to spin them around, and a Bücherrad-rad-rad to hold all of them—”

“German is a convenient language that way,” Fatio said diplomatically.

“And so on with no end in sight! There are not enough woodwrights to carve all of the gears. New sorts of knowledge-engines will be demanded.”

“I confess you have lost me, Doctor.”

“Observe—each book is identified by a number. The numbers are arbitrary, meaningless—a kind of code, like the names Adam gave to the beasts. Duke August was of the old school, and used Roman numerals, which makes it that much more cryptickal.”