The Confusion

“I am sticking to monads, Majesty, I work on the monadology every day. But I am also working on this other thing-”

“You used to call it something else, didn’t you? This is the ‘I need an infinite amount of money’ project,” said Sophie distractedly, and made a rush down the table.

Leibniz ambled out into the center of the room, where it was a geometric impossibility for the tip of the blade to reach him. “The only sense in which it requires an infinite amount of money,” he said with great dignity, “is that it requires some money every year, and I hope it shall go on forever. Now, I tried to fix up your silver mines-that didn’t work because of sabotage, and because we had to compete against Indian slave labor in Mexico. I am sorry it failed. So then I went to Italy and set everything up so that you might, Parliament willing, become the next Queen of England. According to the Tories who are running the Land Bank, the value of that country is 600 million livres tournoises. They are selling grain and importing gold at a terrific clip. There is money there, in other words-not an infinite amount, but enough to pay for a few arithmetickal engines.”

“Not only does Parliament have to vote on it, but also lots of people have to die in the right order, before I can be Queen of England. First William, and then Princess Anne (who would be Queen Anne by that point) and then that little Duke of Gloucester, and any other children she might have in the meantime. I am sixty-seven years old. You need to seek support elsewhere-eeeYAHH! There you are! Invade my dining room, will you! Doctor Leibniz, how do you like my cooking?”

The sword was no longer moving. Leibniz ventured closer, keeping his eyes fixed on Sophie’s powdered face, then traced a line from her soft, plump white shoulder, down the sleeve of her dress, across a rubble of jewelry encrusting her wrist and fingers, down the rusty rapier-blade, to a Dresden china plate where a deceased bat lay, wings arranged artfully as if it had been put there as a garnish by a French chef. “The comet has come to earth!” she proclaimed.

“Oh, how very poetickal you are, Mummy!” exclaimed a voice from behind Leibniz.

Leibniz turned around to face the door and discovered a large bloke, nearing forty, but with the face and manner of a somewhat younger man. George Louis, or Georg Ludwig as he was called in the vernacular, seemed to have only just realized that his mother was standing on a table. He blinked slowly a few times, froglike.

“The comet is approaching, er, the tree,” he said uncomfortably.

“The tree!? Comets don’t approach trees!”

“He has been ensnared, as it were, by the net cast by the falcon.”

“Falcons don’t cast nets,” Leibniz blurted, unable to stop himself. The look he got in return from George Louis made him wish that he hadn’t handed his only means of self-defense to Sophie.

“What does it matter, since it’s all nonsense to begin with!? Once you’ve made up your mind to speak in ridiculous figures, instead of saying things straight out, why bother with making it all consistent?”

“George, my firstborn, my pride, my love. What are you trying to say to us?” Sophie asked indulgently.

“That the Tsar is approaching the Herrenhausen!”

“So the Tsar is the comet?”

“Of course!”

“We were using ‘comet’ to mean this bat.”

The corners of George’s mouth now drew back and downwards so far that his lips ceased to exist and the slit between them took on the appearance of a garrotte. He threw a dark look at Leibniz, blaming him for something.

“Who is the falcon, your royal highness?” Leibniz asked him.

“Your fawning disciple-and my little sister-Sophie Charlotte, Electress of Brandenburg, Dr. Leibniz.”

“Splendid! So the metaphor of the net was to say that she had ensnared Peter by her charm and wiles.”

“He passed through Berlin like a cannonball-didn’t even slow down-she had to hunt him down like a fox at Koppenbrugge-”

“Do you mean, Sophie Charlotte was like a fox, in that she was so clever to hunt down the cannonball? Or that the Tsar was foxlike in his evasions?” Sophie asked patiently.

“I mean they are coming right now.”

“Go to your father’s bedchamber. Send the embalmers away,” Sophie commanded, meaning the physicians. “Get your father to understand that someone very tall, and frightfully important, may swim into his vision, and that he should try to mumble a pleasantry or two if he is feeling up to it.”

“Yes, Mummy,” said the obedient son. With a parting bow for his mother, and a momentary eye-narrowing at Leibniz, George Louis took his leave.