Quicksilver

by Neal Stephenson

  As I write these words I am seated near a window that looks out over a canal, and two gondoliers, who nearly collided a minute ago, are screaming murderous threats at each other. This sort of thing happens all the time here. The Venetians have even given it a name: “Canal Rage.” Some say that it is a new phenomenon—they insist that gondoliers never used to scream at each other in this way. To them it is a symptom of the excessively rapid pace of change in the modern world, and they make an analogy to poisoning by quicksilver, which has turned so many alchemists into shaky, irritable lunatics.

  The view from this window has changed very little in hundreds of years (God knows that my room could use some maintenance), but the letters scattered across my table (all delivered punctually by Venetians) tell of changes the like of which the world has not seen since Rome fell and the Vagabond Emperor moved his court to this city. Not only have William and Mary been crowned at Westminster (as you and several others were so kind as to inform me), but in the same post I received word from Sophie Charlotte in Berlin that there is a new Tsar in Russia, named Peter, and that he is as tall as Goliath, as strong as Samson, and as clever as Solomon. The Russians have signed a treaty with the Emperor of China, fixing their common border along some river that does not even appear on the maps—but from all accounts, Russia now extends all the way to the Pacific, or (depending on which set of maps you credit) to America. Perhaps this Peter could march all the way to Massachusetts without getting his feet wet!

  But Sophie Charlotte says that the new Tsar’s gaze is fixed westwards. She and her incomparable mother are already scheming to invite him to Berlin and Hanover so that they can flirt with him in person. I would not miss that for the world; but Peter has many rivals to crush and Turks to slay before he can even consider such a journey, and so I should have plenty of time to make my way back from Venice.

  Meanwhile this city looks to the east—the Venetians and the other Christian armies allied with them continue to press the Turks back, and no one here will talk about anything else but the news that came in the latest post, or when the next post is expected. For those of us more interested in philosophy, it makes for tedious dinners! The Holy League have taken Lipova, which as you must know is the gateway to Transylvania, and there is hope of driving the Turks all the way to the Black Sea before long. And in a month I’ll be able to write you another letter containing the same sentence with a different set of incomprehensible place names. Woe to the Balkans.

  Pardon me if I seem flippant. Venice seems to have that effect on me. She finances her wars the old-fashioned way, by levying taxes on trade, and this naturally limits their scope. By contrast, the reports I hear from England and from France are most disquieting. First you tell me that (according to your sources at Versailles) Louis XIV is melting down the silver furniture in the Grands Appartements to pay for the raising of an even vaster army (or perhaps he wanted to redecorate). Next, Huygens writes from London that the Government there has hit upon the idea of financing the Army and Navy by creating a national debt—using all of England as collateral, and levying a special tax that is earmarked for paying it back. I can scarcely picture the upheaval that these innovations must have created in Amsterdam! Huygens also mentioned that the ship he took across the North Sea was crowded with Amsterdam Jews who appeared to be bringing their entire households and estates with them to London. No doubt some of the silver that used to be part of Louis’ favorite armchair has by this route made its way via the ghetto of Amsterdam to the Tower of London where it has been minted into new coins bearing the likeness of William and Mary, and then been sent out to pay for the building of new warships at Chatham.

  Thus far, in these parts, Louis’ declaration of war against England seems to have had little effect. The duc d’Arcachon’s navy is dominant in the Mediterranean, and is rumored to have taken many Dutch and English merchantmen around Smyrna and Alexandria, but there have not been any pitched sea-battles that I know of. Likewise, James II is said to have landed in Ireland whence he hopes to launch attacks on England, but I have no news thence.

  My chief concern is for you, Eliza. Huygens gave me a good description of you. He was touched that you and those royals you have befriended—the Princess Eleanor and little Caroline—went to the trouble of seeing him off on his voyage to London, especially given that you were quite enormously pregnant at the time. He used various astronomical metaphors to convey your roundness, your hugeness, your radiance, and your beauty. His affection for you is obvious, and I believe he is a touch saddened that he is not the father (who is, by the way? Remember I am in Venice, you may tell me anything and I cannot be shocked by it).

  At any rate—knowing how strongly you are attracted to the financial markets, I fret that the recent upheavals have drawn you into the furor of the Damplatz, which would be no place for one in a delicate condition.

  But there is little point in my worrying about it now, for by this time you must have entered into your confinement, and you and your baby must have emerged dead or alive, and gone to the nursery or the grave; I pray both of you are in the nursery, and whenever I see a picture of the Madonna and child (which in Venice is about three times a minute) I phant’sy it is a fair portrait of you and yours.

  Likewise I send my prayers and best wishes to the Princesses. Their story was pathetic even before they were made into refugees by the war. It is good that in the Hague they have found a safe harbor, and a friend such as you to keep them company. But the news from the Rhine front—Bonn and Mainz changing hands, &c.—suggests that they shall not soon be able to return to that place where they were living out their exile.

  You ask me a great many questions about Princess Eleanor, and your curiosity has aroused mine; you remind me of a merchant who is considering a momentous transaction with someone she does not know very well, and who is casting about for references.

  I have not met Princess Eleanor, only heard strangely guarded descriptions of her beauty (e.g., “she is the most beautiful German princess”). I did know her late husband, the Margrave John Frederick of Brandenburg-Ansbach. As a matter of fact I was thinking of him the other day, because the new Tsar in Russia is frequently described in the same terms as were once applied to Eleanor’s late husband: forward-thinking, modern-minded, obsessed with securing his country’s position in the new economic order.

  Caroline’s father went out of his way to welcome Huguenots or anyone else he thought had unusual skills, and tried to make Ansbach into a center of what your friend and mine, Daniel Waterhouse, likes to call the Technologickal Arts. But he wrote novels too, did the late John Frederick, and you know of my shameful weakness for those. He loved music and the theatre. It is a shame that smallpox claimed him, and a crime that his own son made Eleanor feel so unwelcome there that she left town with little Caroline.

  Beyond those facts, which are known to all, all I can offer you concerning these two Princesses is gossip. However, my gossip is copious, and of the most excellent quality. For Eleanor figures into the machinations of Sophie and Sophie Charlotte, and so her name is mentioned from time to time in the letters that fly to and fro between Hanover and Berlin. I do believe that Sophie and Sophie Charlotte are trying to organize some sort of North German super-state. Such a thing can never exist without princes; German Protestant princes and princesses are in short supply, and getting shorter as the war goes on; beautiful princesses who lack husbands are, therefore, exceptionally precious.

  If precious Eleanor were rich she could command, or at least influence, her own destiny. But because her falling-out with her stepson has left her penniless, her only assets are her body and her daughter. Because her body has shown the ability to manufacture little princes, it is enfeoffed to larger powers. I shall be surprised if a few years from now, your friend Princess Eleanor is not dwelling in Hanover or Brandenburg, married to some more or less hideous German royal. I would advise her to seek out one of the madly eccentric ones, as this will at least make her life more interesting.


  I hope that I do not sound callous, but these are the facts of the matter. It is not as bad as it sounds. They are in the Hague. They will be safe there from the atrocities being committed against Germans by the army of Louvois. More dazzling cities exist, but the Hague is perfectly serviceable, and a great improvement over the rabbit-hutch in the Thüringer Wald where, according to gossip, Eleanor and Caroline have been holed up for the last few years. Best of all, as long as they remain in the Hague, Princess Caroline is being exposed to you, Eliza, and learning how to be a great woman. Whatever may befall Eleanor at the hands of those two redoubtable match-makers, Sophie and Sophie Charlotte, Caroline will, I believe, learn from you and from them how to manage her affairs in such a way that, when she reaches a marriageable age, she shall be able to choose whatever Prince and whatever Realm are most suitable to her. And this will provide comfort to Eleanor in her old age.

  As for Sophie, she will never be satisfied with Germany alone—her uncle was King of England and she would be its Queen. Did you know she speaks perfect English? So here I am, far away from home, trying to track down every last one of her husband’s ancestors among the Guelphs and the Ghi-bellines. Ah, Venice! Every day I get down on my knees and thank God that Sophie and Ernst August are not descended from people who lived in some place like Lipova.

  At any rate, I hope you, Eleanor, Caroline, and, God willing, your baby are all well, and being looked after by officious Dutch nurses. Do write as soon as you feel up to it.

  Leibniz

  P.S. I am so annoyed by Newton’s mystical approach to force that I am developing a new discipline to study that subject alone. I am thinking of calling it “dynamics,” which derives from the Greek word for force—what do you think of the name? For I may know Greek backwards and forwards, but you have taste.

  The Hague

  AUGUST 1689

  Dear Doctor,

  “Dynamics” makes me think not only of force, but of Dynasties, which use forces, frequently concealed, to maintain themselves—as the Sun uses forces of a mysterious nature to make the planets pay court to him. So I think that the name has a good ring to it, especially since you are becoming such an expert on Dynasties new and old, and are so adept at balancing great forces against each other. And insofar as words are names for things, and naming gives a kind of power to the namer, then you are very clever to make your objections to Newton’s work a part of the very name of your new discipline. I would only warn you that the frontier between “ingenious” (which is held to be a good quality) and “clever” (which is looked at askance) is as ill-defined as most of the boundaries in Christendom are today. Englishmen are particularly distrustful of cleverness, which is odd, because they are so clever, and they are wont to draw the boundary in such a way as to encompass all the works of Newton (or any other Englishman) in the country called “ingenious” while leaving you exiled to “clever.” And the English must be attended to because they seem to be drawing all the maps. Huygens went to be among the Royal Society because he felt it was the only place in the world (outside of whatever room you happen to be in) where he could have a conversation that would not bore him to death. And despite the never-ending abuse from Mr. Hooke, he never wants to leave.

  I have been slow to write about myself. This is partly because the very existence of this letter proves, well enough, that I live. But it is also because I can hardly bring myself to write about the baby—may God have mercy on his little soul. For by now, he is with the angels in Heaven.

  After several false starts my labor began in the evening of the 27th of June, which I think was extremely late—certainly I felt as if I had been pregnant for two years! It was early the next morning that my bag of waters broke and poured out like a flood from a broken dam.* Now things became very busy at the Binnenhof as the apparatus of labor and delivery swung into action. Doctors, nurses, midwives, and clergy were summoned, and every gossip within a radius of five miles went to the highest state of alert.

  As you have guessed, the incredibly tedious descriptions of labors and deliveries that follow are nothing but the vessel for this encrypted message. But you should read them anyway because it took me several drafts and a gallon of ink to put into words one one-hundredth of the agony, the endless rioting in my viscera as my body tried to rip itself open. Imagine swallowing a melon-seed, feeling it grow in your belly to full size, and then trying to vomit it up through the same small orifice. Thank God the baby is finally out. But pray for God to help me, for I love him.

  Yes, I say “love,” not “loved.” Contrary to what is written in the unencrypted text, the baby lives. But I get ahead of myself.

  For reasons that will shortly become obvious, you must destroy this letter.

  That is, if I don’t destroy it first by dissolving the words with my tears. Sorry about the unsightly blotching.

  To the Dutch and the English, I am the Duchess of Qwghlm. To the French, I am the Countess de la Zeur. But neither a Protestant Duchess nor a French Countess can get away with bearing and rearing a child out of wedlock.

  My pregnancy I was able to conceal from all but a few, for once I began to show, I ventured out in public only rarely. For the most part I confined myself to the upper storys of the house of Huygens. So it has been a tedious spring and summer. The Princesses of Ansbach, Eleanor and Caroline, have been staying as honored guests of the Prince of Orange at the Binnenhof, which as you know is separated from the Huygens house by only a short distance. Almost every day they strolled across the square to pay a call on me. Or rather Eleanor strolled, and Caroline sprinted ahead. To give a curious six-year-old the run of such a place, cluttered as it is with Huygens’s clocks, pendulums, lenses, prisms, and other apparatus, is a joy for the little one and a deadly trial for all adults within the sound of her voice. For she can ask a hundred questions about even the least interesting relic that she digs up from some corner. Eleanor, who knows practically nothing of Natural Philosophy, quickly wearied of saying “I don’t know” over and over again, and became reluctant to visit the place. But I had nothing better to do with my time as the baby grew, and was hungry for their company, and so attended closely to Caroline and tried as best I could to give some answer to every one of her questions. Perceiving this, Eleanor got in the habit of withdrawing to a sunny corner to do embroidery or write a letter. Sometimes she would leave Caroline with me and go out riding or attend a soiree. So the arrangement worked out well for all three of us. You mentioned to me, Doctor, that the late Margrave John Frederick, Caroline’s father, had a passion for Natural Philosophy and Technologickal Arts. I can now assure you that Caroline has inherited this trait; or perhaps she has dim memories of her father showing off his fossil collection or his latest pendulum-clock, and so feels some communion with his departed soul when I show her the wonders of Huygens’s house. If so it is a tale that will seem familiar to you, who knew your father only by exploring his library.

  Thus Eliza and Caroline. But too Eliza and Eleanor have been talking, late at night, when Caroline is asleep in her bedchamber in the Binnenhof. We have been talking about Dynamics. Not the dynamics of rolling balls on inclined planes, but the dynamics of royal and noble families. She and I are both a little bit like mice scurrying around on a bowling-green, trying not to be crushed by the rolling and colliding balls. We must understand dynamics in order to survive.

  Only a few months before I became pregnant, I visited London. I was at Whitehall Palace with Daniel Waterhouse when the son of James II—now Pretender to the throne—was supposedly born. Was Mary of Modena really pregnant, or only stuffing pillows under her dress? If she was pregnant, was it really by the syphilitic King James II, or was a healthy stud brought in to the royal apartments to father a robust heir? Supposing she was really pregnant, did the baby survive childbirth? Or was the babe brought forth from that room really an orphan, smuggled into Whitehall in a warming-pan, and triumphantly brought forth so that the Stuart line could continue to reign over England? In o
ne sense it does not matter, since that king is deposed, and that baby is being reared in Paris. But in another sense it matters very much, for the latest news from across the sea is that the father has taken Derry, and is on the march elsewhere in Ireland, trying to win his kingdom back for his son. All because of what did or did not happen in a certain birthing-room at Whitehall.

  But I insult your intelligence by belaboring this point. Have you found any changelings or bastards in Sophie’s line? Probably. Have you made these facts known? Of course not. But burn this anyway, and sift the ashes into that canal you are always writing about, making sure beforehand that there are no ill-tempered gondoliers beneath your window.

  As a Christian noblewoman, never married, I could not be pregnant, and could not have a child. Eleanor knew this as well as I. We talked about it for hours and hours as my belly grew larger and larger.

  My pregnancy was hardly a secret—various servants and women of the household knew—but I could deny it later. Gossips would know I was lying, but in the end, they are of no account. If, God forbid, the baby was stillborn, or died in infancy, then it would be as if it had never happened. But if the baby throve, then matters would be complicated.

  Those complications did not really daunt me. If there was one thing I learned at Versailles, it was that Persons of Quality have as many ways of lying about their affairs, perversions, pregnancies, miscarriages, births, and bastards as sailors have of tying knots. As the months of my pregnancy clunked past, ponderous but inexorable, like one of Huygens’s pendulums, I had some time to consider which lie I would choose to tell when my baby was born.

  Early, when my belly was just a bit swollen, I considered giving the baby away. As you know, there are plenty of well-funded “orphanages” where illegitimate children of the Quality are raised. Or if I searched long enough I might find some decent mother and father who were barren, and would be more than happy to welcome a healthy infant into their house.