Quicksilver (117 page)

AUGUST
1688

Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, to d’Avaux

16 August 1688

Monsieur,

Summer has reached its pinnacle here and for those, such as Madame, who like to hunt wild animals, the best months lie in the future. But for those, such as Monsieur, who prefer to hunt (or be hunted by) highly cultivated humans, this is the very best time of the year. So Madame endures the heat, and sits with her lap-dogs and writes letters, while Monsieur’s only complaint is that the torrid weather causes his makeup to run. St. Cloud is infested with young men, aficionados of fencing, who would give anything to sheathe their blades in his scabbard. To judge from the noises emanating from his bedchamber, his chief lover is the Chevalier de Lorraine. But when the Chevalier is spent, the Marquis d’Effiat is never far behind; and behind him (as it were) is a whole queue of
handsome cavaliers. In other words, here as at Versailles, there is a strict pecking-order (though one must imagine a different sort of pecking), and so most of these young blades can never hope to be anything more than ornaments. Yet they are continually lustful like any other men. Since they cannot satiate themselves on Monsieur inside the château, they practice on one another in the gardens. One cannot go for a stroll or a ride without breaking into the middle of a tryst. And when these young men are interrupted, they do not slink away meekly, but (emboldened by the favor shown them by Monsieur) upbraid one in the most abusive way imaginable. Wherever I go, my nose detects the humour of lust wafted on every draught and breeze, for it is spilled about the place like wine-slops in a tavern.

Liselotte has been putting up with this for seventeen years now, ever since the day when she crossed over the Rhine, never to cross back. And so it’s no wonder that she ventures out into society only rarely, and prefers the company of her dogs and her ink-well. Madame has been known to grow very attached to members of her household—she used to have a lady-in-waiting named Théobon who was a great comfort to her. But the lovers of Monsieur—who are supported by him, and who have nothing to do all day long but hatch plots—began to whisper vile rumors into Monsieur’s ear, and caused him to send this Théobon away. Madame was so angry that she complained to the King himself. The King reprimanded Monsieur’s lovers but balked at intervening in the household affairs of his own brother, and so Théobon has presumably ended up in a convent somewhere, and will never return.

From time to time they entertain guests here, and then, as you know, protocol dictates that everyone dress up in the sort of costume known as
en manteau
, which is even stiffer and less comfortable (if you can imagine it) than dressing
en grand habit
as is done at Versailles. As an ambassador, you see women dressed in that manner all the time, but as a man, you never see machinations that go on in ladies’ private chambers for hours ahead of time, to make them look that way. Dressing
en manteau
is an engineering project at least as complicated as rigging a ship. Neither can even be contemplated without a large and well-trained crew. But Madame’s household has been reduced to a skeleton crew by the ceaseless petty intrigues of the lovers of Monsieur. And in any case she has
no patience with female vanities. She is old enough, and foreign enough, and intelligent enough, to understand that Fashion (which lesser women view as if it were Gravity) was merely an invention, a device. It was devised by Colbert as a way to neutralize those Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who, because of their wealth and independence, posed the greatest threat to the King. But Liselotte, who might have been formidable, has already been neutralized by marrying Monsieur and joining the royal family. The only thing that prevents her country from being annexed to France is a dispute as to whether she, or another descendant of the Winter Queen, should succeed her late brother.

At any rate, Liselotte refuses to play the game that Colbert devised. She has a wardrobe, of course, and it includes several costumes that are worthy of the names
grand habit
and
manteau.
But she has had them made up in a way that is unique. In Madame’s wardrobe, all the layers of lingerie, corsetry, petticoats, and outer garments that normally go on one at a time are sewn together into a single construct, so heavy and stiff that it stands by itself, and slit up the back. When Monsieur throws a grand party, Liselotte plods naked into her closet and walks into one of these and stands for a few moments as a lady-in-waiting fastens it in the back with diverse buttons, hooks, and ties. From there she goes straight to the party, without so much as a glance in the mirror.

I will complete this little portrait of life at St. Cloud with a story about dogs. As I mentioned,
la Palatine,
like Artemis, is never far from her pack of dogs. Of course these are not swift hounds, but tiny lap-dogs that curl up on her feet in the winter to keep her toes warm. She has named them after people and places she remembers from her childhood in the Palatinate. They scurry about her apartments all day long, getting into absurd feuds and controversies, just like so many courtiers. Sometimes she herds them out onto the lawn and they run around in the sunshine interrupting the
amours
of Monsieur’s hangers-on, and then the peace of these exquisite gardens is broken by the angry shouts of the lovers and the yelps of the dogs; the cavaliers, with their breeches down around their ankles, chase them out from their trysting-places, and Monsieur comes out onto his balcony in his dressing-gown and damns them all to hell and wonders aloud why God cursed him to marry Liselotte.

The King has a pair of hunting-dogs named Phobos and
Deimos who are very aptly named, for they have been fed on the King’s own table-scraps and have grown enormous. The King has indulged them terribly and so they want discipline, and feel they are entitled to attack whatever strikes their fancy. Knowing how much Liselotte loves hunting and dogs, and knowing how lonely and isolated she is, the King has tried to interest her in these beasts—he wants Liselotte to think of Phobos and Deimos as her own pets and to look upon them with affection, as the King does, so that they can go hunting for large game in the east when the season comes around. So far this is nothing more than a proposal. Madame is more than a little ambivalent. Phobos and Deimos are too big and unruly to be kept at Versailles any more, and so the King prevailed upon his brother to keep them at St. Cloud, in a paddock where they can run around loose. The beasts have long since killed and eaten all of the rabbits who used to dwell in that enclosure, and now they devote all their energies to searching for weak places in the fence where they might tunnel out or jump over and go marauding in the territory beyond. Recently they broke through the southeast corner and got loose in the yard beyond and killed all the chickens. That hole has been repaired. As I write this I can see Phobos patrolling the northern fence-line, looking for a way to jump over into the neighboring property, which is owned by another nobleman who has never had good relations with my hosts. Meanwhile Deimos is working on an excavation under the eastern wall, hoping to tunnel through and run amok in the yard where Madame exercises her lap-dogs. I have no idea which of them will succeed first.

Now I must lay down my pen, for some months ago I promised Madame that I would one day give her a demonstration of bareback riding, Qwghlmian-style, and now the time is finally at hand. I hope that my little description of life at St. Cloud has not struck you as overly vulgar, but since you, like any sophisticated man, are a student of the human condition, I thought you might be fascinated to learn what peasant-like noise and rancor prevail behind the supremely elegant façade of St. Cloud.

Eliza, Countess de la Zeur

NOVEMBER
1688

Your majesty will already have perceived that Phobos and Deimos are metaphors for the armed might of France; their chicken-killing escapade is the recent campaign in which your majesty brought the rebellious Protestants of Savoy to heel; and the question of where they might attack next, a way of saying that the Countess could not guess whether your majesty intended to strike north into the Dutch Republic or east into the Palatinate. Just as obviously, these sentences were written as much for William of Orange—whose servants would read the letter before it reached d’Avaux—as for the recipient.

Perhaps less transparent is the reference to bareback riding. I would have assumed it signified some erotic practice, except that the Countess is never so vulgar in her letters. In time I came to understand that it was meant literally. As hard as it might be for your majesty to believe, I have it on the authority of several of Monsieur’s friends that Madame and the Countess de la Zeur did indeed go riding that day, and moreover that the latter requested that no saddle be placed on her horse. They rode off into the park thus, escorted by two of Madame’s young male cousins from Hanover. But when they returned, the Countess’s horse was bare, not only of saddle, but of rider, too; for, as the story went, she had fallen off after the horse had been startled, and suffered an injury that made it impossible for her to ride back. This had occurred near the banks of the river. Fortunately they had been able to summon a passing boat, which had taken the injured Countess upriver to a nearby convent that is generously supported by Madame. There, or so the story went, the Countess would be tended to by the nuns until her bones had mended.

Needless to say, no one but the smallest child would believe such a story; everyone assumed the obvious, which is that the Countess had become pregnant and that her period of recuperation in the nunnery was to last only long enough
for her to arrange an abortion, or to deliver the baby. I myself gave it no further thought until I received a communication from d’Avaux several weeks later. This was, of course, encyphered. I enclose the plaintext, shorn of pleasantries, formalities, and other impedimenta.

17
SEPTEMBER
1688

From Jean Antoine de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux

French Embassy, the Hague

To Monsieur Bonaventure Rossignol

Château Juvisy, France

Monsieur Rossignol,

You and I have had occasion to speak of the Countess de la Zeur. I have known for some time that her true allegiance lay with the Prince of Orange. Until today she has been at pains to conceal this. Now she has at last run her true colors up the mast. Everyone believes she is in a nunnery near St. Cloud having a baby. But today, below the very battlements of the Binnenhof, she disembarked from a canal-boat that had just come down from Nijmegen. Most of the heretics who came pouring out of it had originated from much farther upstream, for they are people of the Palatinate who, knowing that an invasion was imminent, have lately fled from that place as rats are said to do from a house in the moments before an earthquake. To give you an idea of their quality, among them were at least two Princesses (Eleanor of Saxe-Eisenach and her daughter Wilhelmina Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach), as well as any number of other persons of rank; though as much could never have been guessed from their degraded and bedraggled appearance. Consequently the Countess de le Zeur—who was even more dishevelled than most—attracted less notice than is her wont. But I know that she was there, for my sources in the Binnenhof inform me that the Prince of Orange ordered a suite to be
made available to her, for a stay of indefinite duration. Previously she has been coy about her dealings with the said Prince; today she lives in his house.

I shall have more to say on this later, but for now I should like to ask the rhetorical question of how this woman was able to get from St. Cloud to the Hague, via the Rhine, in one month, during the preparations for a war, without anyone’s having noticed? That she was working as a spy for the Prince of Orange is too obvious to mention; but where did she go, and what is she now telling William in the Binnenhof ?

Yours in haste, d’Avaux

NOVEMBER
1688

Your majesty will already have understood how fascinated I was by this news from d’Avaux. The letter had reached me after a considerable delay, as, owing to the war, d’Avaux had been forced to show some ingenuity in finding a way to have it delivered to Juvisy. I knew that I could not expect to receive any more, and to attempt to respond in kind would have been a waste of paper. Accordingly, I resolved to travel in person, and
incognito
, to the Hague. For to be of service to your majesty is my last thought as I go to bed in the night-time and my first upon waking in the morning; and it was plain that where this matter was concerned I was useless so long as I remained at home.

Of my journey to the Hague, much could be written in a vulgar and sensational vein, if I felt that I could better serve your majesty by producing an entertainment. But it is all beside the point of this report. And as better men than I have sacrificed their lives in your service with no thought of fame, or of reward beyond a small share in the glory of
la France,
I do not think it is meet for me to relate my tale here; after all, what an Englishman (for example) might fancy to
be a stirring and glorious adventure is, to a gentleman of France, altogether routine and unremarkable.

I arrived in the Hague on the 18th of October and reported to the French embassy, where M. le comte d’Avaux saw to it that what remained of my clothing was burned in the street; that the body of my manservant was given a Christian burial; that my horse was destroyed so that he would not infect the others; and that my pitchfork-wounds and torch-burns were tended to by a French barber-surgeon who dwells in that city. On the following day I began my investigation, which naturally was erected upon the solid foundation that had been laid by d’Avaux during the weeks since his letter to me. As it happened, it was on this very day—the 19th of October,
anno domini
1688—that an unfortunate change in the wind made it possible for the Prince of Orange to set sail for England at the head of five hundred Dutch ships. As distressing as this event was for the small colony of French in the Hague, it militated to our advantage in that the heretics who engulfed us were so beside themselves (for to them, invading other countries is a new thing, and a tremendous adventure) that they paid me little heed as I went about my work.

My first task, as I have suggested, was to familiarize myself with all that d’Avaux had learned of the matter during the previous weeks. The Hofgebied, or diplomatic quarter of the Hague, may not contain as many servants and courtiers as its counterpart in France, but there are more than enough; those who are
venal,
d’Avaux has bought, and those who are
venereal,
he has compromised in one way or another, so that he may know practically anything he wishes to of what goes on in that neighborhood, provided only that he has the diligence to interview his sources, and the wit to combine their fragmentary accounts into a coherent story. Your majesty will in no way be surprised to learn that he had done so by the time of my arrival. D’Avaux imparted to me the following:

First,
that the Countess de la Zeur, unlike all of the other refugees on the canal-ship, had not taken it all the way from Heidelberg. Rather, she had embarked at Nijmegen, filthy and exhausted, and accompanied by two young gentlemen, also much the worse for wear, whose accents marked them as men of the Rhineland.

This in itself told me much. It had already been obvious that on that August day at St. Cloud, Madame had made some arrangement to spirit the Countess aboard a boat on
the Seine. By working its way upstream to Paris, such a vessel could take the left fork at Charenton and go up the Marne deep into the northeastern reaches of your majesty’s realm, within a few days’ overland journey of Madame’s homeland. It is not the purpose of this letter to cast aspersions on the loyalty of your sister-in-law; I suspect that the Countess de la Zeur, so notorious for her cunning, had preyed upon Madame’s natural and humane concern for her subjects across the Rhine, and somehow induced her to believe that it would be beneficial to despatch the Countess on a sightseeing expedition to that part of the world. Of course this would take the Countess into just that part of France where preparations for war would be most obvious to a foreign spy.

Your majesty during his innumerable glorious campaigns has devoted many hours to studying maps, and contemplating all matters of logistics, from grand strategy down to the smallest detail, and will recollect that there is no direct connection by water from the Marne to any of the rivers that flow down into the Low Countries. The Argonne Forest, however, nurses the headwaters, not only of the Marne, but also of the Meuse, which indeed passes to within a few miles of Nijmegen. And so, just as d’Avaux had already done before me, I settled upon the working hypothesis that after taking a boat from St. Cloud up the Marne, the Countess had disembarked in the vicinity of the Argonne—which as your majesty well knows was an active theatre of military operations during these weeks—and made some sort of overland journey that had eventually taken her to the Meuse, and via the Meuse to Nijmegen where we have our first report of her from d’Avaux’s informants.

Second
, all who saw her on the Nijmegen-Hague route agree that she had practically nothing with her. She had no luggage. Her personal effects, such as they were, were stored in the saddlebag of one of her German companions. Everything was soaked through, for in the days before her appearance at Nijmegen the weather had been rainy. During the voyage on the canal-ship, she and the two Germans emptied the saddlebags and spread out their contents on the deck to dry. At no time were any books, papers, or documents of any kind observed, and no quills or ink. In her hands she carried a small bag and an embroidery frame with a piece of crewel-work mounted on it. There was nothing else. All of this is confirmed by d’Avaux’s informants in the Binnenhof. The
servants who furnished the Countess’s suite there insist that nothing came off the canal-boat save:

(Item) The dress on the Countess’s back. Mildewed and creased from (one assumes) a lengthy journey in the bottom of a saddlebag, this was torn up for rags as soon as she peeled it off. Nothing was hidden beneath.

(Item) A set of boy’s clothing approximately the Countess’s size, badly worn and filthy.

(Item) The embroidery frame and crewel-work, which had been ruined by repeated soakings and dryings (the colors of the thread had run into the fabric).

(Item) Her handbag, which turned out to contain nothing but a scrap of soap, a comb, an assortment of rags, a sewing-kit, and a nearly empty coin-purse.

Of the items mentioned, all were removed or destroyed save the coins, the sewing-kit, and the embroidery project. The Countess showed a curiously strong attachment to the latter, mentioning to the servants that they were not to touch it, be it never so badly damaged, and even keeping it under her pillow when she slept, for fear that it might be taken away by mistake and used as a rag.

Third
, after she had recuperated for a day, and been supplied with presentable clothing, she went to the forest-hut of the Prince of Orange that is out in the wilderness nearby, and met with him and his advisors on three consecutive days. Immediately thereafter the Prince withdrew his regiments from the south and set in motion his invasion of England. It is said that the Countess produced, as if by sorcery, a voluminous report filled with names, facts, figures, maps, and other details difficult to retain in the memory.

So much for d’Avaux’s work. He had given me all that I could have asked for as a cryptologist. It remained only for me to apply Occam’s Razor to the facts that d’Avaux had amassed. My conclusion was that the Countess had made her notes, not with ink on paper, but with needle and thread on a work of embroidery. The technique, though extraordinary, had certain advantages. A woman who is forever writing things down on paper makes herself extremely conspicuous, but no one pays any notice to a woman doing needle-work. If a person is suspected of being a spy, and their possessions searched, paper is the first thing an investigator looks for. Crewel-work will be ignored. Finally, paper-and-ink
documents fare poorly in damp conditions, but a textile document would have to be unraveled thread by thread before its information was destroyed.

By the time of my arrival in the Hague, the Countess had vacated her chambers in the Binnenhof and moved across the Plein to the house of the heretic “philosopher” Christiaan Huygens, who is her friend. On the day of my arrival she departed for Amsterdam to pay a call on her business associates there. I paid a cat-burglar, who has done many such jobs for d’Avaux in the past, to enter the house of Huygens, find the embroidery, and bring it to me without disturbing anything else in the room. Three days later, after I had conducted an analysis detailed below, I arranged for the same thief to put the embroidery back just where he had found it. The Countess did not return from her sojourn to Amsterdam until several days afterwards.

It is a piece of coarsely woven linen, square, one Flemish ell on a side. She has left a margin all round the edges of about a hand’s breadth. The area in the center, then, is a square perhaps eighteen inches on a side: suitable for an
opus pulvinarium
or cushion-cover. This area has been almost entirely covered in crewel-work. The style is called gros-point, a technique that is popular among English peasants, overseas colonists, and other rustics who amuse themselves sewing naïve designs upon the crude textiles they know how to produce. As it has been superseded, in France, by petit-point, it may be unfamiliar to your majesty, and so I will permit myself the indulgence of a brief description. The fabric or matrix is always of a coarse weave, so that the warp and weft may be seen by the naked eye, forming a regular square grid à la Descartes. Each of the tiny squares in this grid is covered, during the course of the work, by a stitch in the shape of a letter
x,
forming a square of color that, seen from a distance, becomes one tiny element of the picture being fashioned. Pictures formed in this manner necessarily have a jagged-edged appearance, particularly where an effort has been made to approximate a curve; which explains why such pieces have been all but banished from Versailles and other places where taste and discrimination have vanquished sentimentality. In spite of which your majesty may easily envision the appearance of one of these minute
x
-shaped stitches when viewed closely: one leg running from northwest to southeast, as it were, and the other southwest to northeast.
The two legs cross in the center. One must lie over the other. Which lies on top is a simple matter of the order in which they were laid down. Some embroiderers are creatures of habit, always performing the stitches in the same sequence, so that one of the legs invariably lies atop the other. Others are not so regular. As I examined the Countess’s work through a magnifying lens, I saw that she was one of the latter—which I found noteworthy, as she is in other respects a person of the most regular and disciplined habits. It occurred to me to wonder whether the orientations of the overlying legs might be a hidden vector of information.

The pitch of the canvas’s weave was about twenty threads per inch. A quick calculation showed that the total number of threads along each side would be around 360, forming nearly 130,000 squares.

A single square by itself could only convey a scintilla of information, as it can only possess one of two possible states: either the northwest-southeast leg is on top, or the southwest-northeast. This might seem useless; as how can one write a message in an alphabet of only two letters?

Mirabile dictu,
there is a way to do just that, which I had recently heard about because of the loose tongue of a gentleman who has already been mentioned: Fatio de Duilliers. This Fatio fled to England after the Continent became a hostile place for him, and befriended a prominent English Alchemist by the name of Newton. He has become a sort of Ganymede to Newton’s Zeus, and follows him wherever he can; when they are perforce separated, he prates to anyone who will listen about his close relationship to the great man. I know this from Signore Vigani, an Alchemist who is at the same college with Newton and so is often forced to break bread with Fatio. Fatio is prone to irrational jealousy, and he endlessly schemes to damage the reputation of anyone he imagines may be a rival for Newton’s affections. One such is a Dr. Waterhouse, who shared a room with Newton when they were boys, and for all I know buggered him; but the facts do not matter, only Fatio’s imaginings. In the library of the Royal Society, Fatio recently happened upon Dr. Water-house sleeping over some papers on which he had been working out a calculation consisting entirely of ones and zeroes—a mathematical curiosity much studied by Leibniz. Dr. Waterhouse woke up before Fatio could get a closer look
at what he had been doing; but as the document in question appeared to be a letter from abroad, he inferred that it might be some sort of cryptographic scheme. Not long after, he went to Cambridge with Newton and let this story drop at High Table so that all could know how clever he was, and that Waterhouse was certainly a dolt and probably a spy.

From my records of the
cabinet noir
I knew that the Countess de la Zeur had sent a letter to the Royal Society at the same time, and that she has had business contacts with the brother of Dr. Waterhouse. And I have already mentioned her suspiciously voluminous and inane correspondence with Leibniz. And so once again applying Occam’s Razor I formulated the hypothesis that the Countess uses a cypher, probably invented by Leibniz, based upon binary arithmetic, which is to say consisting of ones and zeroes: an alphabet of two letters, perfectly suited to representation in cross-stitch embroidery, as I have explained.

I enlisted a clerk from the Embassy, who had keen eyesight, to go over the embroidery stitch by stitch, marking down a numeral 1 for each square in which the northwest-to-southeast leg lay on top, and a 0 otherwise. I then applied myself to the problem of breaking the cypher.