The Confusion

“My laundresses do not wear gloves!” huffed the Duchess, as if she had been challenged on some point. This rather dampened conversation for some moments. They had passed clear of the out-buildings, and circumvented a paddock where the Duke’s hunting-mounts were exercised in better weather, and entered now into a wooded game-park, bony and bare under twilight. Pontchartrain opened the shades on a pair of carriage-lanterns that dangled above the corners of the benches, and presently they were gliding along through the dim woods in a little halo of lamplight. In a few moments they came to a stone wall that cut the forest in twain. It was pierced by a gate, which stood open, and which was guarded, in name anyway, by half a dozen musketeers, who were standing around a fire. The wall was twenty-six miles long. The gate was one of twenty-two. Passing through it, they entered the Grand Parc, the hunting-grounds of the King.

The Duchess seemed to regret the matter of the soap, and now suddenly worked herself up into a lather of good cheer.

“Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur has said she will start a salon at La Dunette! I have told her, I do not know how such a thing is done! For I am just a foolish old hen, and not one for clever discourse! But she has assured me, one need only invite a few men who are as clever as Monsieur Rossignol and Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, and then it just-happens!”

Pontchartrain smiled. “Madame la duchesse, you would have me and Monsieur Rossignol believe that when two such ladies as you and the Countess are together in private, you have nothing better to do than talk about us?”

The Duchess was taken aback for a moment, then whooped. “Monsieur, you tease me!”

Eliza gave Rossignol an especially hard squeeze, and he shifted uneasily.

“So far, it does not seem to be happening, for Monsieur Rossignol is so quiet!” observed the Duchess in a rare faux pas; for she should have known that the way to make a quiet person join the conversation is not to point out that he is being quiet.

“Before you joined us, madame, he was telling me that he has been wrestling with a most difficult decypherment-a new code, the most difficult yet, that is being used by the Duke of Savoy to communicate with his confederates in the north. He is distracted-in another world.”

“On the contrary,” said Rossignol, “I am quite capable of talking, as long as you do not ask me to compute square roots in my head, or something.”

“I don’t know what that is but it sounds frightfully difficult!” exclaimed the Duchess.

“I’ll not ask you to do any such thing, monsieur,” said Pontchartrain, “but some day when you are not so engaged-perhaps at the Countess’s salon-I should like to speak to you of what I do. You might know that Colbert, some years ago, paid the German savant Leibniz to build a machine that would do arithmetic. He was going to use this machine in the management of the King’s finances. Leibniz delivered the machine eventually, but he had in the meantime become distracted by other problems, and now, of course, he serves at the court of Hanover, and so has become an enemy of France. But the precedent is noteworthy: putting mathematical genius to work in the realm of finance.”

“Indeed, it is interesting,” allowed Rossignol, “though the King keeps me very busy at cyphers.”

“What sorts of problems did you have in mind, monsieur?” Eliza asked.

“What I am going to tell you is a secret, and should not leave this sleigh,” Pontchartrain began.

“Fear not, monseigneur; is any thought more absurd than that one of us might be a foreign spy?” Rossignol asked, and was rewarded by the sensation of four sharp fingernails closing in around his scrotum.

“Oh, it is not foreign spies I am concerned about in this case, but domestic speculators,” said the Count.

“Then it is even more safe; for I’ve nothing to speculate with,” said Eliza.

“I am going to call in all of the gold and silver coins,” said Pontchartrain.

“All of them? All of them in the entire country!?” exclaimed the Duchess.

“Indeed, my lady. We will mint new gold and silver louis, and exchange them for the old.”

“Heavens! What is the point of doing it, then?”

“The new ones will be worth more, madame.”

“You mean that they will contain more gold, or silver?” Eliza asked.

Pontchartrain gave her a patient smile. “No, mademoiselle. They will have precisely the same amount of gold or silver as the ones we use now-but they will be worth more, and so to obtain, say, nine louis d’or of the new coin, one will have to pay the Treasury ten of the old.”

“How can you say that the same coin is now worth more?”

“How can we say that it is worth what it is now?” Pontchartrain threw up his hands as if to catch snowflakes. “The coins have a face value, fixed by royal decree. A new decree, a new value.”

“I understand. But it sounds like a scheme to make something out of nothing-a perpetual motion machine. Somewhere, somehow, in some unfathomable way, it must have repercussions.”