The Confusion

Our heart oft times wakes when we sleep, and God can speak to that, either by words, by proverbs, by signs, and similitudes, as well as if one was awake.

–JOHN BUNYAN,

The Pilgrim’s Progress

She chose an ancient desk that had been dragged out into the court and left to die. Rain had fallen on it, and its planks had warped and split, and its drawers were stuck. But the sun shone on it, which felt good on her skin. From another banca she fetched a sheet of foolscap, and in a recess of this one she quarried out a glass inkwell whose cork was cemented in place by a rime of hardened ink. In the end the only way to get it open was to take that stiletto out of her waist-sash and scrape off the crust, then pry the cork loose. The ink had become sludge. She thinned it with saliva and gathered some of it up into a quill.

Leibniz and Caroline were sitting on crates, doing lessons: “Tactics,” said the Doctor, “are what the Duchess of Arcachon has been pursuing; Baron von Hacklheber has quite neglected tactics for strategy.”

“Who won?” Caroline asked.

“Neither,” said the Doctor, “for neither pure tactics nor pure strategy constitutes a wise course for a Prince, or a Princess. Perhaps the winner shall be Johann Jean-Jacques von Hacklheber.”

“Let us hope so,” said Caroline, “for he has been saddled with the most ungainly name I have ever heard.”

Eliza to Jean Bart MAY 1694

Captain Bart,

My dear friend Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, being the controleur-general of France, has, and shall have, numberless opportunities to channel the flow of the King’s revenues in those ways that are most satisfactory to him, and so I feel I do him no great disfavor by suggesting that you sail your treasure-ship to the port of Dieppe, so that the King’s loan to the House of Hacklheber may at last be repaid. France is helpless to defend her interests on foreign soil, so long as her credit, in foreign eyes, is bad; and repayment of even a single loan shall go far towards repairing the damage done in recent years. The German and Swiss bankers have already abandoned Lyon, but this need not prevent the payment from being sent through more modern channels, perhaps in Paris. It might help if you could suggest as much to the gentleman in Dieppe.

I thank you for having consulted me before taking action in this matter. Please know that one of the beneficiaries shall be your long-lost godson, who, as I write these words, is creeping up on me from behind with a bow and arrow, like a dirty little Cupid.

Eliza

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MADAME?”

“Finishing up a letter.” She scattered sand across the page to blot it.

“To whom?”

“The most famous and daring pirate-captain in the world,” Eliza said matter-of-factly. She let the sand slide off onto the ground, folded the letter up, and began ransacking the old desk’s drawers for a bit of sealing-wax.

“Do you know him?”

Using a scrap of paper as a spatula, Eliza scraped some beads of sealing-wax out of a drawer-bottom. “Yes-and he knows you. He held you when you were baptized!”

Johann von Hacklheber quite naturally wanted to know more-which was how Eliza wanted it. He pursued her like an Indian tracker through the dusty rooms of the House of Hacklheber, pelting her not with arrows but with questions, as she scared up a melting-spoon, a candle, and fire. Presently she had a flame going under the blackened belly of the spoon. Into it she poured the crumbs of wax that she had looted from the desk: mostly scarlet, but a few black, and some the natural color of beeswax. Those on the bottom quickly succumbed to the heat. Those above stubbornly maintained their shapes. The similarity of these to smallpox-vesicles was very obvious to her. “When a thing such as wax, or gold, or silver, turns liquid from heat, we say that it has fused,” Eliza said to her son, “and when such liquids run together and mix, we say they are con-fused.”

“Papa says I am confused sometimes.”

“As are we all,” said Eliza. “For confusion is a kind of bewitchment-a moment when what we supposed we understood loses its form and runs together and becomes one with other things that, though they might have had different outward forms, shared the same inward nature.” She gave the melting-spoon a little shake, and the beads of wax that had been floating on its top-which had become sacs of liquid wax, held together by surface tension-burst and collapsed into the pool of molten wax below, giving off a puff of sweet fragrance, vestiges of the flowers visited long ago by the bees that had made this stuff. It was sweeter by far than the telltale fragrance of smallpox, which she hoped never to smell again, though she caught a whiff of it from time to time as she moved about the town.