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

by Neal Stephenson

  “…”

  “Are you only just understanding it now!?”

  “If an idea is terrible enough, the mind is unwilling to swallow it in one go, but regurgitates and chews it like cud many times before it goes down for good. This is one that I have been chewing on for more than a year. It took me several weeks, after Jean-Jacques was abducted, for me to establish his whereabouts. By the time I could formulate even a hasty and ill-conceived plan to go fetch him back, I was pregnant with Lucien. It is only now that Lucien has been born, and I have recovered from it, that I can consider taking any steps in the matter of Jean-Jacques. And now it is too late. There. Done. I have swallowed it.”

  “All right. I could see this coming. Put your head there on my breastbone, madame, I’ll hold you in my arms, so you don’t collapse, or come undone. Sob all you want, I have you, no one’s looking, we have time.”

  “…”

  “…”

  “…”

  “Now that you mention it, my lady, to have the love of my life enslaved and raped by a syphilitic lord does seem quite mild by comparison.”

  “I cannot tell if you are being sarcastic.”

  “Neither can I, madame, I honestly cannot. But tell me this: If you cannot get your boy back without destroying his welfare, then what do you intend?”

  “In pondering this very question I have hesitated, and in hesitating I have only made matters worse. Soon I shall act.”

  “And what is the end you have fixed on?”

  “I mean to end up, in some sense, with my boot on the neck of Lothar von Hacklheber, and him looking up helpless into my eyes.”

  “Well. Well! Let me just say that the last bloke who had me in such a fix was the Earl of Upnor, and—”

  “My powers of organization exceed those of the late Upnor by a significant margin, and so I intend to arrange matters so that I will not end up being beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman.”

  “Ah. That is good news.”

  “Tell me everything about what is being prepared around Cherbourg, Sergeant Shaftoe, whether you intend for it to be relayed to Marlborough, or not.”

  “Very well. But how will this intelligence be of any help to you in your machinations against—oh, never mind. You’re glowering at me.”

  “You speak so knowingly of my machinations, as if I were some ridiculous figure in an Italian opera, who does naught but machinate; yet if you could follow me about, you would observe a tired mother who follows her husband from Versailles to St.-Malo, and suckles her infant, and occasionally throws a dinner party, and perhaps once or twice a year fucks a cryptologist in a carriage, or a sergeant in a haystack.”

  “How will this lead to your boot on Lothar’s throat again? Never mind, never mind. I’m certain I’d never understand it anyway.”

  “You are in good company. If I do it right, not even Lothar will understand it.”

  Château d’Arcachon, St.-Malo, France

  11 APRIL 1692

  “THE ENGLISH HAVE DEVISED an extraordinary scheme for the military defense of their homeland, which is that they have no money,” said Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, contrôleur-général of France and (now) Secretary of State for the Navy.

  This curious gambit was meant for Eliza, for Pontchartrain was gazing directly into her eyes when he came out with it. But others were privy to the conversation. Five were seated around the basset-table in the Petit Salon: besides Eliza and Pontchartrain, there were Étienne d’Arcachon, who was serving as dealer; a Madame de Bearsul, who was the very young wife of a captain of a frigate; and a Monsieur le chevalier d’Erquy, who was from just down the coast. These latter two were, of course, unique souls, precious in the eyes of God, endowed with any number of more or less interesting personal quirks, virtues, vices, &c., but Eliza could scarcely tell them apart from all of the other people who were at this moment seated around card-tables in her Petit Salon, playing at billiards or backgammon in her Grand Salon, bowling outside on her damp lawn, or noodling around on her harpsichord.

  This was St.-Malo in the spring of ’92. An invasion force was massing. It would quite obviously be departing from Cherbourg, which was only half as far from the shore of England as was St.-Malo; but facilities there, at the tip of the peninsula, were not adequate to sustain so many ships and regiments during the weeks it would take for them to gather and draw up into a coherent force. The regiments—ten thousand French and as many Irish, the latter evacuated from Limerick—were obviously not as mobile as the ships, and so they had first claim to the territory, food, fuel, whores, and other military musts in the immediate vicinity of Cherbourg. By process of elimination, then, the ships of the Channel fleet, and the galleys of the Mediterranean fleet that had lately passed the Gates of Hercules and voyaged north to take part in the invasion, were stationed in Channel ports within striking distance: most important, Le Havre and St.-Malo. Of those, Le Havre was twice as close to Paris, and a hundred times easier to reach from there, since the Seine joined them. So, much larger and more fashionable parties must, at this moment, be going on in noble châteaux around Le Havre. St.-Malo, by contrast, was hardly connected to France at all. A doughty pedestrian like Sergeant Bob Shaftoe could get to it, but such a journey was not recommended for normal people; everyone came to St.-Malo by sea. The family de Lavardac had for a long time maintained a château, which looked out over the harbor to one side, and had farms and an excellent potagerie out back. As the fortunes of that family had waxed, this had become the grandest house in St.-Malo, and the former duc d’Arcachon had loved to come here and pace to and fro on the terrace with a golden prospective-glass gazing down upon his privateer-fleet. Eliza had heard much of the place. Having spent most of her married life pregnant at La Dunette, she’d never laid eyes on it until a month ago. But she’d loved it immediately and now wished she could live here year-round.

  The astonishing appearance of Bob Shaftoe—who, along with his regiment of Irish mercenaries, had marched right past, en route to Cherbourg from their winter quarters above Brest—had enlivened her first week’s stay at the place. His return visit last week had forced her to put her rusty scheming-and-intriguing skills to use again, there being no proper, sanctioned way for a French Duchess and nursing mother to meet with an English sergeant and probable spy who just happened to be the brother of the most infamous villain in Christendom.

  Eliza and Étienne, the infant Lucien, and their household had reached St.-Malo a fortnight in advance of the Mediterranean Fleet. More recently, other Ships of Force had come in from Brest, Lorient, and St.-Nazaire. All of these galleys and ships had officers, who quite often were of noble rank. The social obligations placed upon le duc and la duchesse d’Arcachon were correspondingly immense. Another duchesse would have welcomed those obligations in the same way as generals welcomed wars, or architects cathedral-commissions. Eliza delegated all of the work to women who actually enjoyed such things (she had inherited a large household staff from the previous duchesse d’Arcachon). Her old trusted aides, such as Brigitte and Nicole, and a few retired privateers deeded to her by Jean Bart, she kept close. The retinue of social climbers that had arrived in the wake of her marriage to Étienne, she put to work arranging parties, which kept them busy and, though it did not make them happy, infused them with feelings that they were wont to confuse with happiness.

  Eliza, then, merely had to get dressed, show up, try not to forget people’s names, and make conversation. When she became insufferably bored, she would claim she could hear Lucien bawling, and flit off to the private apartments in the other wing of the château.

  And so the only thing the least bit novel about her situation at this moment—viz. seated at a basset-table watching her husband deal out cards to idle nobles—was that the fellow seated directly across the table from her was of titanic importance. At any other of the parties that the Arcachons had hosted in the few weeks just past, it would have been the captain of some Ship of the Line, cringing and servile i
n the presence of his master, the Grand Admiral of France (for Étienne had inherited the title). Today, though, it was Pontchartrain who, technically, ranked Étienne d’Arcachon! Étienne was under no obligation to toady, however, as he and Pontchartrain were both of such lofty stature as to be essentially equals. Pontchartrain had turned up unexpectedly this morning on a jacht that had sailed in from Cherbourg. He had spent all of dinner trying to catch Eliza’s eye, and not because he wanted to flirt with her. She had invited the count to join her and Étienne at basset. Then, to prevent the gentlemen from crossing swords, or the ladies from poisoning each other, for the other seats at the table, Eliza had picked out this Madame de Bearsul and this Monsieur d’Erquy, precisely because they were nobodies who would not interfere too much in the conversation. Or such had been her phant’sy. Of course each of them had turned out (as mentioned) to be fully autonomous souls possessed of free will, intelligence, and an agenda. D’Erquy had heard, through the grapevine, that Eliza had been buying up bad loans from petty nobles like him who had been foolish enough to lend money to the government. De Bearsul was angling for a position in the household of some higher and mightier Court personage. To Pontchartrain, who was accustomed to meeting with the King of France almost every day, they might as well have been ants or lice. And so, about five hands into this basset-game, he had locked his brown eyes on Eliza’s and made this curious remark about the English and their lack of specie.

  Basset was simple, which was why Eliza had chosen it. Each player was dealt thirteen cards face up on the table, and placed money on any or all of them. The dealer then dealt cards from the bottom and the top of the deck alternately, gaining or losing wagers on all cards of matching ranks. As turns went on, the wagers escalated by a factor of as much as sixty. The dealer was kept very busy. Étienne had had to strap on his basset-dealing prosthesis: a cupped hand with spring-loaded fingers, made to grip a deck of cards. The players could be busy or not, depending on how many of their cards they elected to put money on. Eliza and Pontchartrain had laid only token wagers, which was a way of saying that they were more interested in conversation than in gambling. D’Erquy and de Bearsul were more heavily engaged in the game, and their squeals, moans, stifled curses, sudden outbursts of laughter, &c., provided a ragged, bursty continuo-line for this duet between the other two.

  “My English friends have been complaining of this lack of coin for years—especially since the onset of war,” said Eliza, “but only you, monsieur, would have the penetration to see it as a defensive strategy.”

  “That is just the difficulty—I did not penetrate it until rather late,” said Pontchartrain. “When one is planning an invasion, one naturally makes plans to pay the soldiers. It is as important as arming, feeding, and housing them—perhaps more so, as soldiers, paid, can shift for themselves when arms, food, and shelter are wanting. But they must be paid in local money—which is to say the coin of the realm in whatever place is being invaded. It’s easy in the Spanish Netherlands—”

  “Because they are Spanish,” said Eliza, “and so you can pay them in Pieces of Eight—”

  “Which we can get anywhere in the world,” said Pontchartrain. “But English pennies can only be gotten in England. Supposedly they are minted—”

  “At the Tower of London. I know,” said Eliza, “but why do you say supposedly?”

  Pontchartrain threw up his hands. “No one ever sees these coins. They come out of the Mint and they vanish.”

  “But is it not the case that anyone may bring silver bullion to the Tower of London and have it minted into pennies?”

  Pontchartrain was nonplussed for a moment. Then a smile spread over his face and he burst out in laughter and slapped the table hard enough to make money jump and buzz atop the playing-cards. It was a rare outburst for one of Pontchartrain’s dignity, and it stopped the game for a few moments.

  “Monsieur, what an honour and a privilege it is for us to bring you a few moments’ diversion from your cares!” exclaimed Étienne. But this only brought an echo of the first laugh from Pontchartrain.

  “It is precisely of my cares that your magnificent wife is speaking, monsieur,” said Pontchartrain, “and I believe she is getting ready to suggest something cheeky.”

  Étienne’s face pinkened. “I pray it shall not be so cheeky as to create an embarrassment for our guests—”

  “On the contrary, monsieur, ’tis meant to embarrass the English!”

  “Oh, well, that is all right then.”

  “Pray continue, madame!”

  “I shall, monsieur,” said Eliza, “but first you must indulge me as I speculate.”

  “Consider yourself indulged.”

  “The jacht on which you arrived is under conspicuously heavy guard. I speculate that it is laden with specie that is meant to cross the Channel with the invasion force and be used to pay the French and Irish soldiers during their campaign in England.”

  Pontchartrain smiled weakly and shook his head. “So much for my efforts at secrecy. It is said of some that he or she has a nose for money; but I truly believe, madame, that you can smell silver a mile away.”

  “Do not be silly, monsieur, it is, as you said, an obvious necessity of a foreign invasion.”

  For some reason she glanced, for a moment, at D’Erquy, and then regretted it. The poor chevalier was so transfixed that it took all her discipline not to laugh aloud. This poor fellow had melted down the family plate and loaned it to the King in hopes that it would get him invited to a few parties at Versailles. The interest payments had at first been delayed, then insufficient, later nonexistent. The man with the power to make those payments, or not, was seated less than arm’s length away—and now it had been revealed that he had sailed into St.-Malo on top of a king’s ransom in silver, which was locked up on a jacht a few hundred yards down the hill. A word, a flick of the pen, from Pontchartrain would pay back the loan, or at least pay the interest on it—and not just in the form of a written promise to pay, but in actual metal. This was the only thing D’Erquy could think about. And yet there was not a single word he could say, because to do so would have been impolite. Etiquette had rendered him helpless as effectively as the iron collar around a slave’s neck. All he could do was watch and listen.

  “Want of silver is not your difficulty, then,” Eliza continued. “Very well. You must needs translate it across the Channel—very risky. For in the annals of military history, no tale is more tediously familiar than that of the train of pay-wagons, bringing specie to the troops at the front, that is ambushed and lost en route, with disastrous consequences to the campaign.”

  “We have been reading the same books,” Pontchartrain concluded. “Even so, as we laid plans for this operation during the winter, I am afraid I paid more attention to my rôle as Secretary of State for the Navy, than that of contrôleur-général. Which is to say that I placed more emphasis on preparations of a purely military nature than on the attendant financial arrangements. Not until I reached Cherbourg the other day, and was confronted with the invasion in all of its complexity and scale, did I really grasp the difficulty of getting this specie to England. To send it across in an obvious and straightforward manner seems madness. I have considered breaking it up into small shipments and sending them over in the boats of those who smuggle wine and salt to remote ports of Cornwall.”

  “That would distribute the risk, but multiply the difficulties,” said Eliza. “And even if it succeeded, it would not address the great difficulty, which is that if the silver is not accepted on the local—which is to say, English—market, then the troops will not deem themselves to have been paid.”

  “Naturally we should like to pay them in English silver pennies,” said Pontchartrain, “but matters being what they are, we may have to use French coins.”

  “This brings us back to the conversation we had in the sleigh at La Dunette two years and some months ago,” Eliza said; and the answering look on Pontchartrain’s face told her that she had struck h
ome.

  But here Madame Bearsul threw a quizzical look in the direction of the Politest Man in France, who intervened. “On behalf of those of our guests who were not in that sleigh,” Étienne said, “I beg permission to interrupt, so we may hear—”

  “I speak of the recoinage, when all of the old coins were called in and replaced with new,” said Eliza. “By royal decree, the new had the same value, and so to those of us who live in France, it made no difference. But they contained less silver or gold.”

  “Madame la duchesse, who in those days was Mademoiselle la comtesse, said to me, then, that it must have consequences difficult to foretell,” said Pontchartrain.

  “Before Monsieur le comte says a word against himself,” said Eliza, “I would have the honor of being the first to rush to his defense. The favorable consequences of the recoinage were immense: for it raised a fortune for the war.”

  “But Madame la duchesse was a true Cassandra that evening in the sleigh,” said Pontchartrain, “for there have been consequences that I did not foretell, and one of them is that French coins are not likely to be accepted at full value in English market-places.”

  “Monsieur, have you given any thought to minting invasion coin?” asked d’Erquy.

  “Yes, monsieur, and to using Pieces of Eight. But before we take such measures, I am eager to hear more from our hostess concerning the English Mint.”

  “I am simply pointing out to you, monsieur,” said Eliza, “that there already exists a mechanism for importing silver bullion to England, at no risk to France; having it made into good English coin in London; and transferring the coin into the hands of trusted French agents there.”

  “What is this mechanism, madame?” inquired d’Erquy, suspicious that Eliza was having them on.

  “France’s chief connection to the international money market is not here in St.-Malo, or even in Paris, but rather down in Lyon. The King’s moneylender is of course Monsieur Samuel Bernard, and he works hand-in-glove with a Monsieur Castan. I know Castan; he is a pillar of the Dépôt. He can deliver money to any of several merchant banking houses who maintain agencies in Lyon, and get negotiable Bills of Exchange which can be endorsed to French agents who can transport them to London in advance of the invasion. These may be presented well in advance of the expiry of their usance to bankers in London who, upon accepting them, will make whatever arrangements may be necessary to have the coin ready on the date the bills come due—which may mean that they shall have to ship bullion over from Amsterdam or Antwerp and have it minted at the Tower. But that is their concern, not ours, and their risk. The coin shall be delivered to our agents, who need merely transport it to the front to pay the troops.”