By arranging the meeting in a coffee-house in the town, as opposed to a salon in a chateau, Eliza had already obviated several days’ invitation-passing and preliminary maneuvers. Not satisfied even with this level of efficiency, Bernard had now lopped off half an hour’s introductory persiflage by jumping into the middle of the conversation before he had even reached her table. He came on as if he meant to place her under arrest. Heads turned towards him, froze, and then turned away; those who wished to gawk, looked out the windows and gawked at his carriage and his squadron of musket-brandishing bodyguards.
Bernard scooped up Eliza’s hand as if it were a thrown gauntlet. He thrust out a leg to steady himself, bowed low, planted a firm dry smack on her knuckles, and gleamed. Gleamed because threads of gold were worked into the dark fabric of his vest. “You thought I was a Jew,” he said, and sat down.
“And what did you think I was, monsieur?”
“Oh, come now! You already know the answer. You just aren’t thinking! I shall assist you. Why did you phant’sy I was a Jew?”
“Because everyone says so.”
“But why?”
“They are mistaken.”
“But when otherwise well-informed persons are mistaken it is because they wish to be mistaken, no?”
“I suppose that’s logical.”
“Why would they wish to be mistaken about me—or you?”
“Monsieur Bernard, it has been so long since I began a conversation so briskly! Allow me a moment to catch my breath. Would you care to order something? Not that you are in need of further stimulation.”
“I shall have coffee!” Bernard called out to an Armenian boy with a peach-fuzz moustache, dressed like a Turk, who had been edging toward them, impelled by significant glares and subtile finger-flicks from the proprietor, Christopher Esphahnian, but intimidated by Bernard. The gar?on sped into the back, relieved to have been given orders. Bernard glanced about the coffee-house. “I could almost believe I was in Amsterdam,” he remarked.
“From the lips of a financier, that is flattery,” Eliza said. “But I believe that the intent of the decorator was to make you believe you were in Turkey.”
Bernard snorted. “Does it work for you, madame?”
“No, for I have been in the coffee-houses of Amsterdam, and I share your opinion.”
“You do not say that you have been in Turkey.”
“Do I need to? Or have others been saying it for me?”
Bernard smiled. “We return to our subject! People say of me that I am a Jew, and of you that you are an odalisque, sent here by the Grand Turk as a spy—”
“They do!?”
“Yes. Why?”
The good thing about Bernard was that when he said something jarring he would quickly move on to something else. Eliza decided ’twere better to keep pace with him than to dwell on this matter of her and the Grand Turk. “The only thing I can think of that you and I have in common, monsieur, is a predilection for finance.”
Bernard let it be seen that he was not fully satisfied with this attempt. He had a long, complicated French nose, close-set eyes, and a mouth turned up tight, like a recurved bow, at the corners. The look on his face might have been one of frustration, or intense concentration; perhaps both. He was trying to get her to see something. “Why do I wear cloth of gold? Because I am some kind of a fop? No! I dress well, but I am not a fop. I wear this to remind me of something.”
“I supposed it was to remind others that—”
“That I am the richest man in France? Is that what you were going to say?”
“No, but it is what I was thinking.”
“Another rumor—like that I am a Jew. No, madame, I wear this because it used to be my trade.”
“Did you say trade!?”
“My family were Huguenots. I was baptized in the Protestant church of Charenton. You can’t see it any more, it was pulled down by a Catholic mob a few years ago. My grandfather was a painter of portraits for the Court. My father, a miniaturist and an engraver. But God did not bestow on me any artistic talent, and so I was apprenticed to a seller of cloth-of-gold.”
“Did you serve out your whole apprenticeship, monsieur?”
“Pourquoi non, madame, for then as now, I always fulfill my contracts. My formal métier is ma?tre mercier grossiste pour draps d’or, d’argent, et de soie de Paris.”
“I think I finally begin to understand your point, Monsieur Bernard. You are saying that you and I have in common that we do not belong.”
“We make no sense!” Bernard exclaimed, throwing up both hands and raising his eyebrows in dismay, mocking a certain type of courtier. “To these people—” and he shoveled his hands across the Rue de l’Orangerie at Versailles—”we are what meteors, comets, sunspots are to astronomers: monstrous deviations, fell portents of undesired change, proof that something is wrong in a system that was supposedly framed by the hand of God.”
“I have heard some in this vein, too, from Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir—”