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

by Neal Stephenson

  “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:

  Fräulein!

  You and your Vagabond have something of mine. I have something of yours.

  —L

  Schloß Wolfenbüttel, Lower Saxony

  DECEMBER 1690

  It seems to us indeed that this block of marble brought from Genoa would have been exactly the same if it had been left there, because our senses make us judge only superficially, but at bottom because of the connection of things the whole universe with all of its parts would be entirely different, and would have been another from the beginning, if the least thing in it went otherwise than it does.

  —LEIBNIZ

  THE 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, musc
le-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 l
arge 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.