Andrey, a little breathless, bowed to express both apologies and congratulations.
“Nettle it was, Your Excellency. Your palate remains unsurpassed.”
Though the Count was not a man to gloat, he could not repress a smile of satisfaction.
Knowing that the Count had a sweet tooth, Andrey gestured toward the dessert cart.
“May I bring you a slice of plum tart with our compliments . . . ?”
“Thank you for the thought, Andrey. Normally, I would leap at the chance. But tonight, I am otherwise committed.”
Having acknowledged that a man must master his circumstances or otherwise be mastered by them, the Count thought it worth considering how one was most likely to achieve this aim when one had been sentenced to a life of confinement.
For Edmond Dantès in the Chateau d’If, it was thoughts of revenge that kept him clear minded. Unjustly imprisoned, he sustained himself by plotting the systematic undoing of his personal agents of villainy. For Cervantes, enslaved by pirates in Algiers, it was the promise of pages as yet unwritten that spurred him on. While for Napoleon on Elba, strolling among chickens, fending off flies, and sidestepping puddles of mud, it was visions of a triumphal return to Paris that galvanized his will to persevere.
But the Count hadn’t the temperament for revenge; he hadn’t the imagination for epics; and he certainly hadn’t the fanciful ego to dream of empires restored. No. His model for mastering his circumstances would be a different sort of captive altogether: an Anglican washed ashore. Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on the Isle of Despair, the Count would maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities. Having dispensed with dreams of quick discovery, the world’s Crusoes seek shelter and a source of fresh water; they teach themselves to make fire from flint; they study their island’s topography, its climate, its flora and fauna, all the while keeping their eyes trained for sails on the horizon and footprints in the sand.
It was to this end that the Count had given the old Greek three notes to deliver. Within a matter of hours, the Count had been visited by two messengers: a young lad from Muir & Mirrielees bearing fine linens and a suitable pillow; and another from Petrovsky Passage with four bars of the Count’s favorite soap.
And the third respondent? She must have arrived while the Count was at dinner. For waiting on his bed was a light blue box with a single mille-feuille.
An Appointment
Never had the chime of twelve been so welcome. Not in Russia. Not in Europe. Not in all the world. Had Romeo been told by Juliet that she would appear at her window at noon, the young Veronan’s rapture at the appointed hour could not have matched the Count’s. Had Dr. Stahlbaum’s children—Fritz and Clara—been told on Christmas morning that the drawing-room doors would be opened at midday, their elation could not have rivaled the Count’s upon the sounding of the first toll.
For having successfully fended off thoughts of Tverskaya Street (and chance encounters with young ladies of fashion), having bathed, dressed, and finished his coffee and fruit (today a fig), shortly after ten the Count had eagerly taken up Montaigne’s masterpiece only to discover that at every fifteenth line, his gaze was drifting toward the clock . . .
Admittedly, the Count had felt a touch of concern when he’d first lifted the book from the desk the day before. For as a single volume, it had the density of a dictionary or Bible—those books that one expects to consult, or possibly peruse, but never read. But it was the Count’s review of the Contents—a list of 107 essays on the likes of Constancy, Moderation, Solitude, and Sleep—that confirmed his initial suspicion that the book had been written with winter nights in mind. Without a doubt, it was a book for when the birds had flown south, the wood was stacked by the fireplace, and the fields were white with snow; that is, for when one had no desire to venture out and one’s friends had no desire to venture in.
Nonetheless, with a resolute glance at the time, much as a seasoned sea captain when setting out on an extended journey will log the exact hour he sets sail from port, the Count plowed once again into the waves of the first meditation: “By Diverse Means We Arrive at the Same End.”
In this opening essay—in which examples were expertly drawn from the annals of history—the author provided a most convincing argument that when one is at another’s mercy one should plead for one’s life.
Or remain proud and unbent.
At any rate, having firmly established that either approach might be the right one, the author proceeded to his second meditation: “Of Sadness.”
Here, Montaigne quoted an array of unimpeachable authorities from the Golden Age who confirmed conclusively that sadness is an emotion best shared.
Or kept to oneself.
It was somewhere in the middle of the third essay that the Count found himself glancing at the clock for the fourth or fifth time. Or was it the sixth? While the exact number of glances could not be determined, the evidence did seem to suggest that the Count’s attention had been drawn to the clock more than once.
But then, what a chronometer it was!
Made to order for the Count’s father by the venerable firm of Breguet, the twice-tolling clock was a masterpiece in its own right. Its white enamel face had the circumference of a grapefruit and its lapis lazuli body sloped asymptotically from its top to its base, while its jeweled inner workings had been cut by craftsmen known the world over for an unwavering commitment to precision. And their reputation was certainly well founded. For as he progressed through the third essay (in which Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero had been crowded onto the couch with the Emperor Maximilian), the Count could hear every tick.
Ten twenty and fifty-six seconds, the clock said.
Ten twenty and fifty-seven.
Fifty-eight.
Fifty-nine.
Why, this clock accounted the seconds as flawlessly as Homer accounted his dactyls and Peter the sins of the sinners.
But where were we?
Ah, yes: Essay Three.
The Count shifted his chair a little leftward in order to put the clock out of view, then he searched for the passage he’d been reading. He was almost certain it was in the fifth paragraph on the fifteenth page. But as he delved back into that paragraph’s prose, the context seemed utterly unfamiliar; as did the paragraphs that immediately preceded it. In fact, he had to turn back three whole pages before he found a passage that he recalled well enough to resume his progress in good faith.
“Is that how it is with you?” the Count demanded of Montaigne. “One step forward and two steps back?”
Intent upon showing who was master of whom, the Count vowed that he would not look up from the book again until he had reached the twenty-fifth essay. Spurred by his own resolve, the Count made quick work of Essays Four, Five, and Six. And when he dispatched Seven and Eight with even more alacrity, the twenty-fifth essay seemed as close at hand as a pitcher of water on a dining room table.
But as the Count advanced through Essays Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen, his goal seemed to recede into the distance. It was suddenly as if the book were not a dining room table at all, but a sort of Sahara. And having emptied his canteen, the Count would soon be crawling across its sentences with the peak of each hard-won page revealing but another page beyond. . . .
Well then, so be it. Onward crawled the Count.
On past the hour of eleven.
On past the sixteenth essay.