The System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  Sophie was as much an imperialist with her gardens as Louis XIV was with his fortresses. If nothing were done to stop them, her hedges and floral borders would someday collide with his barrière de fer somewhere around Osnabrück and conclude a stalemate.

  Caroline’s first stroll in the gardens of Herrenhausen had been ten years ago, when Sophie Charlotte had brought the orphan princess out from Berlin to be flirted with by George Augustus. Young Caroline had known Electress Sophie for a few years, but had never before been granted the honor of being Summoned to Go for a Walk.

  Leibniz had walked with them on that occasion, for he and Sophie Charlotte shared a kind of Platonic infatuation with each other. As for Sophie, she did not mind having the Doctor tag along, as it was often useful to have an ambulatory library in which to look up obscure facts.

  The plan had been of admirable simplicity and, as one would have thought, fool-proof. The garden, which measured five hundred by a thousand yards, was edged by a rectangular riding-path, which in turn was framed in a waterway. Sophie, Sophie Charlotte, and Caroline were to set out from Herrenhausen Palace, which rose up above the northern end, and execute a brisk lap around the path. Leibniz would do his best to keep up with them. The exercise would bring color to Caroline’s cheeks, which normally looked as if they had been sculpted out of library paste. Just before they completed the circuit, they would dodge in to the maze, where they would bump into young George Augustus. He and Caroline would “wander off” and “get lost” in the maze together—though of course Sophie and Sophie Charlotte would never be more than two yards from them, hovering like wasps on the other side of a thin screen of hedge, jabbing away whenever they perceived an opening. At any rate, through some winsome union of George’s level-headedness and Caroline’s cleverness, they would escape from the maze together and part company on blushing terms.

  The Electress, the Queen, the Princess, and the Savant had set out from the palace of Herrenhausen precisely on schedule, and Sophie had put the plan into execution with all the bloody-minded forcefulness of the Duke of Marlborough staving in the French lines at Tirlemont. Or so it had seemed until they got some two-thirds of the way round the garden, and entered into a stretch of the riding-path that was overhung with branches of large trees, seeming wild and isolated. There, they were ambushed by a sort of raiding-party led by Sophie’s son and heir, George Louis.

  It happened near the wreck of the gondola.

  As a fond memento of his young whoring days in Venice, Sophie’s late husband, Ernst August, had imported a gondola, and a gondolier to shove it round the perimeter of the garden, along the waterway that Sophie called a canal and that George Louis insisted on calling a moat. Maintaining a gondola in North German weather had proved difficult, maintaining gondoliers even more so.

  At the time of this, Caroline’s first garden-walk, Ernst August had been dead for seven years. Sophie, who did not share her late husband’s infatuation with the fleshy pleasures of Venice, and who felt no affinity with his phant’sied Guelph relations, had suffered the gondola to run hard aground on a mud-bank. There, ice-storms and earwigs had had their way with it. By chance, or perhaps by some ponderous scheming of George Louis, the mother and her entourage encountered the son and his at a place on the riding-path very near the wrack of the gondola, which rested askew, occasionally shedding a dandruff of gold leaf into the canal, almost as if it had been planted there as a memento mori to make young princes reflect on the fleeting and fickle nature of their youthful passions. If so, George Louis had misread it. “Hullo, Mummy, and to you, Sissy,” he had said to the Electress of Hanover and the Queen of Prussia respectively. And then after a few pleasantries, “Is it not sad to come upon the dingy old ruin of Papa’s gondola here among all of these flowers?”

  “Flowers are beauty that lives and dies,” Sophie had answered. “Does this mean that when the petals begin to fall, I should order my garden plowed under?”

  There followed a complicated silence.

  If this had been Versailles, and if George Louis had been the sort who cared, Sophie’s remark would have fallen into the category of “warning shot fired into the shoulder”: nonfatal, but enough to render the victim hors de combat. But in fact this was George Louis’s back yard, and he was not one who cared—supposing he even noticed. Sophie’s remark had taken the form of a similitude between wilted blossoms and the decaying gondola. George Louis had difficulty with such constructions, as some men could not see the color green. And further he had, for better or worse, the vis inertiae of an ammunition cart. It took more than warning shots to stop him, on those exceptional occasions when he got moving. Sophie, of all persons in the world, knew this. Why, then, did she bother? For by making the analogy to flowers she was in effect speaking in a secret language that her son could not decypher. Perhaps the Electress was thinking out loud; or perhaps the message was intended for others.

  Years later Caroline was to understand that it had been intended for her. Sophie was trying to teach the little Princess how to be a Queen, or at least, how to be a Mother.

  One of George Louis’s companions had worked at least some of this out, and now stepped forward. His motives could only be guessed at. Perhaps he wanted to receive Sophie’s next shot in the breastbone, to show his loyalty. Perhaps he hoped to deflect George Louis. Perhaps he wanted to be noticed by Caroline, who was not, as yet, betrothed. At any rate, he made a courtly bow, letting everyone get a load of his plumage. “If it please your royal highness,” he said in strangely distorted French, “a gardener might be instructed to pinch off the dead blossoms, to give the garden a more pleasing aspect.”

  This was Harold Braithwaite, who had begun coming over from England round about then to escape prosecution in London and to curry favor in Hanover. He had done something reckless, and got lucky, at the Battle of Blenheim. Now he was an earl or something.

  “My English is not good enough for me to understand your French,” Sophie had returned, “but I collect that you were setting in front of me some advice as to how I should manage my garden. Please know that I love my garden as it is: not only the living but also the dying parts of it. It is not meant to be some phantasm of eternal and perfect life. Such a garden did exist once, or so the Bible instructs us; but it was brought to an ill end by a snake who fell out of a tree.” This with a very dubious head-to-toe look at Braithwaite, who turned magenta and backed off.

  George Louis had been a bit unnerved, not by the content of Sophie’s remarks (which seemed to have quite flown past him) but by their tone, which was that of a Queen at war rejecting a proffered treaty. Another man would have sensed danger, recoiled, and made amends. But inertia was all for George Louis. “I don’t care about flowers,” he said. “But if we cleared the gondola out of the moat, there would be room for galleys at Carnival.”

  It was an old family tradition to stage a Venetian-style Carnival in the spring.

  “Galleys,” Sophie had repeated in a distant tone, “aren’t those the Ships of Force that are paddled around the Mediterranean by stinking, wretched slaves?”

  “Such are too large to fit in our little moat, Mummy,” George Louis had returned helpfully, “I had in mind little ones.”

  “Little ones? Does that mean, only a few oar-slaves?”

  “No, no, Mummy. Just as Louis XIV at Versailles stages floating processions and mock sea-battles upon the Canal, for the entertainment of all the persons of consequence who dwell there, so might we enliven our next Carnival with—”

  “If the next is any more lively than the last, it is likely to kill me!”

  “Lively, yes, Mummy, our Carnivals have always been so. And fittingly for a sort of—”

  “A sort of what?”

  “Queer, peculiar family tradition. Delightful to us. Perhaps a bit impenetrable to outsiders.” A tiny glance towards Braithwaite.

  “Perhaps I do not wish to be penetrated by outsiders.”

  The War of the Spanish Succession was at its zeni
th. Marlborough, at the head of mighty Protestant legions, was storming round Europe at will. The Whig Juncto in England was trying to get Sophie to move to London to be a sort of Queen-in-waiting until Anne sputtered out. And so perhaps George Louis could be forgiven for seeming a bit preoccupied with his place in the world. If so, no forgiveness seemed to be coming from Sophie’s direction. George Louis kept at it nonetheless, a breakaway ammo cart plunging down a bank. “This house, these gardens, are soon to become, to Britain, what Versailles is to France. Our home, Mummy, is to be a place of great consequence. What was a place for the femmes to dally in the garden, is to become a site of important conversations.”

  “Oh, but it already is, my little prince,” Sophie had returned, “or I should say it was, until ours was interrupted, and replaced by this one.”

  This had seemed merely funny to Caroline, as in truth they had been discoursing of the tendency of a cousin of theirs to gain weight when her husband was away at the front. But she did not smile for long. It had become apparent to all that Sophie was very angry, and so her words lanced out into a febrile silence. “The blood of the house of Plantagenet flows in these veins,” she said, exposing a milky wrist, “and in yours. The little Princes in the Tower died, the Houses of York and of Lancaster were united, and six perfectly delightful ladies sacrificed themselves on the bed of our ancestor, Henry VIII, to make it possible for us to exist. The Church of Rome was cast out of Britain because it was an impediment to the propagation of our line. For us, the Winter Queen roved across Christendom as a Vagabond through the Thirty Years’ War. All so that I could be born, and so that you could. Now my daughter rules Prussia and Brandenburg. Britain shall be yours. How did it all come about? Why do my children rule over the richest swath of Christendom, not his?” She pointed to a gardener shoving a wheelbarrow of manure, who rolled his eyes and shook his head.

  “B-because of that divine ichor that runs in your veins, Mummy?” answered the Prince, with a nervous glance at the wrist.

  “A shrewd guess, but wrong. Contrary to what your sycophants may have been telling you, there is nothing ichor-like and certainly nothing divine about the contents of our veins. Our line does not endure because of eldritch contaminants in our blood, or anything else hereditary. It endures because I go for walks in my garden every day and talk to your sister and your future daughter-in-law, just as my mother, the Winter Queen, did with me. It endures because even in the fifteenth year of war I exchange letters almost every day with my niece Liselotte at Versailles. You may—if it pleases you—flatter your vanity by phant’sying that riding across the countryside in hot pursuit of vermin is a kingly pastime, and makes you fit to one day rule a dominion that stretches to Shahjahanabad and to Boston. I shall allow you that much folly. But never shall I suffer you to trespass upon what keeps our line alive down through plagues, wars, and revolutions. I say that you are guilty of such a trespass now. Get out of my garden. Never again interrupt us at our work.”

  This, which would have reduced any other man in Europe, except Louis XIV, to a lump of smouldering coal, only elicited a blink from George Louis. “Good day, Mummy, good day, Sissy,” he announced, and trotted away, followed by Braithwaite and the other courtiers, who rode stiff and red-necked, pretending they had not heard it. Caroline and Sophie Charlotte exchanged warm looks behind Sophie’s back, trying not to get the giggles.

  Leibniz had dropped onto a bench like a sack of turnips kicked off a cart, and put his head in his hands. He pulled the wig back to expose his bald skull, glistering with sweat, so that the breeze could stream over it. This had only made Caroline more disposed to giggle, as it seemed that her teacher was being comically faint of heart.

  Later she had come to understand matters more clearly. Sophie would die one day, and George Louis would be Elector of Hanover, King of England, and Leibniz’s boss. On that day Sophie Charlotte would still be the Queen of Prussia, and Caroline might be the Princess of Wales; but Leibniz would be the strange, incomprehensible man who had too much influence with those ladies who had ruled and humilated George Louis all his life.

  Leibniz’s anxiety on that score had increased tenfold a short time later when Sophie Charlotte had suddenly taken sick and died. If he’d been spending a lot of time talking to Russians since then, it might be so that he would have at least one safe harbor in which to live out a future exile.

  But Caroline had no intention of allowing that to happen.

  THE HERRENHÄUSER ALLEE was bedded in a swath of pleasant countryside that had been allowed to grow a bit wild. No one would devote time or money to keeping it up, partly because it was in the flood-plain of the Leine, and partly because it was in obvious jeopardy of being gobbled by any future expansions of Sophie’s garden. So by default it had become a sort of park, shaped liked a folded fan, narrow near the city but broadening toward the Palace of Herrenhausen. The result—intended or not—was that at the outset of the journey Caroline felt pent between a high road on one side, and the Leine on the other. These were equally laden with traffic, fæces, and flies. But as she rode up the Allee, the road and the river insensibly spread away from her. By the time she got to the place where she could see archipelagos of green fruit hanging in the windows of Sophie’s orangerie, she was riding up the center of a cone of silence, smelling nothing but the freshness of growing things.

  A foreign princess paying a call would here swing round the fronts of the Orangerie and other outlying pavilions and enter into a street lined, for some distance, with the summer palaces of diverse noble families. Herrenhausen Palace had started as one of these, and grown. It looked across the road to an older and smaller garden that cushioned the family sepulchre. The visitor would allow some hours to be announced, greeted, introduced, and otherwise processed by the Court before being let into the Presence. Caroline instead nipped in through a side-gate and approached the Palace from the garden side. Her mare knew where to take her, and where to stop, and which of the stable-hands was most likely to have a green apple in his pocket. Caroline was afoot in the northeast corner of Sophie’s garden without suffering her train of thought to be interrupted by anyone. Not for a Princess were idle pleasantries. Caroline could not say hello to some random Countess in a Herrenhausen salon without giving the encounter as much forethought, and as keen attention, as George Augustus would devote to mounting a cavalry charge. If she were to say it in the wrong tone of voice, or give the Countess more or less attention than she deserved, the news would be all over Hanover by sundown, and a fortnight later she could expect a letter from Liselotte in Versailles inquiring whether it was true she was having an affair with Count so-and-so, and another from Eliza in London wanting to know if she had quite recovered from her miscarriage. Better to slip into the place incognito.

  This end of the garden, closest to the Palace, was divided into a grid of squarish parterres, perhaps tennis-court-sized. What drew the eye here was not the plantings but the statuary: the inevitable Hercules, Atlas, &c. The Gods and Heroes of Rome rose out of a sort of fanatically maintained tundra: boxwood cut down into micro-hedges no more than a hand’s span high and wide, and flowered figures crowded with bees maintaining a continual low hum of golden commerce. It was a fine place for high-strung nobles—to use Sophie’s phrase, the sort who took every fart for a thunderclap—to promenade about for a few moments before darting back into the Palace to regale the court with tales of their wilderness adventure. Really it was nothing more than a roofless annex of the Palace. Herrenhausen rose above these parterres in a moderately impressive way, while its wings, only a single storey high, reached out to embrace them. The central structure of the Palace couldn’t have housed Louis XIV’s gardening implements. A mere dozen windows were distributed among its three floors. But Sophie liked it that way. Versailles was a penitentiary for every person of consequence in France, and needed to be large. Herrenhausen was a place for getting things done, and needed to be small and tidy.

  Caroline knew that she had likely bee
n sighted from certain of those windows, and so she turned her back on the Palace and began to march away, following a gravel division between parterres. Shortly she arrived at a high hedge trimmed into a slab-wall, and penetrated it through a square opening. If the garden was a palace built of living things, then the parterres were its formal parlour, whence passageways led off to more private and peculiar spaces beyond. To one side was an outdoor theatre, walled by hedges and guarded by marble cherubs. To the other was the Maze where she had begun her courtship with George Augustus. Caroline, however, went out the back. A row of small reflecting ponds formed a quiet buffer between the front and the back half of the garden. Each was surrounded by a garden plot a little less austere than the parterres. Passing between two of these, she twirled round for a glance back at the Palace. On the parterres she had been exposed to view from any window. Now she was about to lose herself in the garden, and wanted to be certain, first, that she had been noticed. Indeed, a contingent of stable-hands had rushed together with a squadron of porters and footmen at the very head of the garden, where a pair of stairways curved down from the main floor of the Palace to the level of the ground. They were setting the stage for the ritual masque that was played every time Sophie emerged from her dwelling. Caroline only watched it until she noticed herself smiling.

  She turned round again and plunged through a higher and darker barrier: a row of trees trimmed to form a wall as high as a house. In the back half of the garden, plenty of mature trees and dense hedges made it possible for her to phant’sy that she was a day’s ride from the nearest building. This part was loved not only by her and Sophie but even by George Louis, who at fifty-four still went riding along the surrounding path, imagining that he was out patrolling the wild marches of some frontier duchy. Here one’s lines of sight, and vectors of movement, were funneled into narrow clefts between stands of trees. Sounds carried oddly, or not at all. It seemed ten times the size of the front half.