Of late I wonder: Do you really ken the devastation of Trade? You might scoff at such a question, as you do naught but trade. But to us earthbound mortals, it seems that you float about in a golden nimbus of prosperity, like the halo about a saint. And the company you keep can only enhance this illusion. Besides you, the only people in France who are not prostrate from Famine and Want of Money are your friends Jean Bart and Samuel Bernard. Bernard because he has taken over St.-Malo, driven out what was left of the old Compagnie des Indes, and fitted out his own fleet. Bart because the Navy ran out of money and had to be sold off to private investors. What does it say about our commerce, when the most attractive investment in France is a fleet of buccaneers preying on the commerce of other Realms?
And so I have every confidence that Captain Bart has conveyed you in safety, and even in comfort, to Hamburg; for what Navy in Christendom could stand against a fleet so well financed, so richly supplied with Baltic timber, and so brilliantly led? (Though I do hope he hurries back, as the British Navy is bombarding Dieppe.) I worry, though, that the posts will fail somewhere between Paris and Hamburg. For all is bankrupt. The spring breezes are redolent, not of tilled earth and burgeoning wildflowers, but the rotting flesh of all the livestock that froze to death during the winter. Rice—rice!—is coming in to Marseille from Alexandria, but no one has the means to buy it, for the wellsprings of our coinage have quite dried up. Our Army’s commanders slouch despondently around Versailles, wishing they’d had the foresight to join the Navy—as, owing to a want of specie, and even of credit, they cannot fight this year, but only squat in their fortresses, succumbing to disease, and beating back whatever assaults the English may mount against them, supposing that England has two pennies to rub together.
At any rate, my lady, do let me know if this has reached you, and of your itinerary. I know you would be informed of the latest exchanges between Vrej Esphahnian and his family. It will take me a long time to encrypt the report. If my late father’s map collection is to be credited, three hundred miles of winding Elbe lie between you and your destination; this should give you time sufficient to accomplish the decipherment. Perhaps I can arrange for it to catch up with your river-boat at Hitzacker or Schnackenburg or Fischbeck or one of the other euphoniously named villages that, according to my father’s maps, are soon to be adorned with the grace and beauty of the duchesse d’Arcachon and her baby girl Adelaide.
Bon. Ross.
Eliza to Rossignol
MARCH 1694
Bon-bon,
Yours reached me in Hamburg, where we have been interviewing river-captains and buying provisions for the journey inland. What a grim petulant mood you were in when you let this dribble from your quill! A few remarks:
—Adelaide is no baby, but a toddler of fourteen months, careering around the deck pursued by a squadron of stooping and waddling nurses who are all terrified she’ll go over the side.
—Hitzacker is said to be a perfectly lovely village; I’m sorry you don’t favor the name of it.
—The parlous condition of Trade is well known to me; who do you suppose arranged for the rice to be shipped from Egypt? Do you think it is a bad thing that there shall be no great battles this year? And have you forgotten that my son Lucien sickened and died over the winter just past? Where was my golden halo of prosperity when the Angel of Death came for him in St.-Malo? Really, you quite forget yourself.
But I forgive you. The grimness of your discourse tells me much that is useful of the mood among the Quality of Paris and Versailles. If it eases your mind, know that the confusion of which you complain is the death-throes of an old system--as when a man’s heart stops beating but his limbs continue to twitch for some time afterwards. The English, being a small and disorderly country, understood this a few years earlier than the French. Or perhaps that is giving them too much credit. They did not understand, but sensed, it. The tide of quicksilver that rose up in that country around the time of Plague and Fire produced a generation of more than normally acute minds--some, such as Newton, almost too tight-strung to endure the world. These men had power before, but knew not what to do with it, and lost it. In exile they formed the Juncto, which with the recent elections has taken over the government. The things that the Juncto does during the coming year--the Bank of England, the Recoinage, &c.--are the beginnings of the new way of things that shall replace the old one that has died, or is dying. France lags, having more of lead and less of quicksilver in her constitution, and lacking a Juncto; but the same forces are at work there.