The Confusion

“I thought I felt one coming on yesterday. Had no idea they’d spread so rapidly.” Eliza flipped the blanket down to expose her face. Earlier she’d counted twenty bumps, there, by feel, then lost interest. Eleanor gave her only the briefest glance before turning her face aside, and adopting a pose in the corner of the room like a schoolgirl who is being punished.

“So this is why you insisted Caroline and Adelaide be sent away to Leipzig!”

“You do a sick woman an injustice there. You yourself told me that the Elector could not take his eyes off Caroline. You mentioned it half a dozen times unbidden. She has only bloomed the more since he last raped her with his eyes. That alone was reason sufficient to get her out of the house.”

“Does the Elector know?”

“Know that I have smallpox? Not yet.”

“How could he have missed it?”

“First, most of these vesicles have broken out in the last few hours. Second, we did it in the dark. Third, many persons-including some who were not hit on the head as boys-are unclear as to the distinction between smallpox, and the great pox, or syphilis. Given the company he keeps, I cannot but think that Johann Georg has seen much of the latter!”

“What you have done is horrible!” Eleanor said, turning around, and, when she saw Eliza’s face, thinking better of it.

“Oh, I’ve had worse.”

“No! I mean, trying to get someone sick.”

“You could have guessed yesterday that I had smallpox. You could have warned them off. You chose not to. So your outrage at this moment is very tiresome.”

Eleanor could not frame any response to this.

“I don’t know a single man at Versailles who has not killed someone, at least once in his life, directly or indirectly, by omission or commission. It is done commonly, and on the slightest pretexts. I might not have done what I did last night, had you not told me that the Elector desires Caroline. But knowing what I did of his lust for the girl, and his power over you, and knowing how it was likely to come out-well, I did what I did. Now, Eleanor, that is enough of talking about it. I really am spent. Last night took too much out of me at a time when I ought to have been conserving my strength. Now I’ll pay the penalty. I wrote out instructions-in case of my death. It’s under my pillow. I’m sleepy. Good-bye.”

Jean Bart to Eliza MAY 1694

My lady,

I take the liberty of sending you a first draft, only because the English Navy is massing in the Channel to lob more bombs on to French soil, a most tiresome practice of which they have lately become quite fond. They would prefer, of course, to destroy the many ships of our fleet (which all ought to be named Eliza, as we owe their existence to you). But these are moving targets, which their vessels are too slow to pursue, and their gunners too inept to hit, and so instead they have have taken to shooting at buildings. One is reminded of some old Baron who phant’sies himself a brave hunter, but is too shaky, senile, and blind to hit anything, and so stands in his garden blasting away at stuffed animals that his servants have propped up against the hedge.

But life, and this letter, are both too short to be wasted on the English and so I shall go straight to the point and pray you’ll forgive my bald way of speaking.