“These distinctions that you draw ’tween noble and common, what is proper and what is not, seem as arbitrary and senseless to me, as the castes and customs of Hindoos would to you,” Eliza returned.
“It is in their very irrationality, their arbitrariness, that they are refined,” d’Avaux corrected her. “If the customs of the nobility made sense, anyone could figure them out, and become noble. But because they are incoherent and meaningless, not to mention ever-changing, the only way to know them is to be inculcated with them, to absorb them through the skin. This makes them a coin that is almost impossible to counterfeit.”
“’Tis like gold, then?”
“Very much so, mademoiselle. Gold is gold everywhere, fungible and indifferent. But when a disk of gold is stamped by a coiner with certain pompous words and the picture of a King, it takes on added value—seigneurage. It has that value only in that people believe that it does—it is a shared phant’sy. You, mademoiselle, came to me as a blank disk of gold—”
“And you, sir, tried to stamp nobility ’pon me, to enhance my value—”
“But then—” he said, gesturing to the letter, “to steal from my house, shows you up as a counterfeit.”
“Which do you suppose is a worse thing to be? A spy for the Prince of Orange, or a counterfeit Countess?”
“Unquestionably the latter, mademoiselle, for spying is rampant everywhere. Loyalty to one’s class—which means, to one’s family—is far more important than loyalty to a particular country.”
“I believe that on the other side of yonder straits are many who would take the opposite view.”
“But you are on this side of those straits, mademoiselle, and will be for a long time.”
“In what estate?”
“That is for you to decide. If you wish to continue in your common ways, then you will have a common fate. I cannot send you to the galleys, as much as that would please me, but I can arrange for you to have a life as miserable in some work-house. I believe that ten or twenty years spent gutting fish would re-awaken in you a respect for noble things. Or, if your recent behavior is a mere aberration perhaps brought about by the stresses of childbirth, I can put you back at Versailles, in much the same capacity as before. When you vanished from St. Cloud everyone assumed you had gotten pregnant and had gone off somewhere to bear your child in secrecy and give it away to someone; now a year has gone by, and it has all come to pass, and you are expected back.”
“I must correct you, monsieur. It has not all come to pass. I have not given the child away to anyone.”
“You have adopted a heretick orphan from the Palatinate,” d’Avaux explained with grim patience, “that you may see him raised in the True Faith.”
“See him raised? Is it envisioned, then, that I am to be a mere spectator?”
“As you are not his mother,” d’Avaux reminded her, “it is difficult to envision any other possibility. The world is full of orphans, mademoiselle, and the Church in her mercy has erected many orphanages for them—some in remote parts of the Alps, others only a few minutes’ stroll from Versailles.”
Thus d’Avaux let her know the stakes of the game. She might end up in a work-house, or as a countess at Versailles. And her baby might be raised a thousand miles away from her, or a thousand yards.
Or so d’Avaux wished her to believe. But though she did not gamble, Eliza understood games. She knew what it was to bluff, and that sometimes it was nothing more than a sign of a weak hand.