The Confusion

“Quite possibly,” said Pontchartrain, “but I cannot make out where and how exactly. You must understand, the King has asked me to double his revenues to pay for the war. Double! The usual taxes and tariffs have already been squeezed dry. I must resort to novel measures.”

“Now I understand why you would like the advice of France’s greatest savants,” said the Duchess. Whereupon all eyes turned to Rossignol. But he had suddenly braced his feet and jerked his head back. For a few moments he stared up at the indigo sky through half-closed eyes, and did not breathe; then he exhaled, and took in a deep draught of the cold air.

“I do believe Monsieur Rossignol has been seized by some sudden mathematical insight,” said Pontchartrain in a hushed voice. “It is said that Descartes’s great idea came to him in a sort of religious vision. I had been skeptical of it until this moment, for the very thought seemed blasphemous. But the look on Monsieur Rossignol’s face, as he cracked that cypher, was unmistakably like that of a saint in a fresco as he is drawn, by the Holy Spirit, into an epiphanic rapture.”

“Will we see a lot of this sort of thing, then, at the salon?” asked the Duchess, giving Rossignol a very dubious look.

“Only occasionally,” Eliza assured her. “But perhaps we ought to change the subject, and give Monsieur Rossignol an opportunity to gather his wits. Let’s talk about…horses!”

“Horses?”

“Those horses,” said Eliza, nodding at the two that were drawing the sleigh.

She and Rossignol were facing forward. The Duchess and the Count had to turn around to see what she was looking at. Eliza took advantage of this to wipe her hand on Rossignol’s drawers and withdraw it. Rossignol hitched up his breeches weakly.

“Do you fancy them?” asked the Duchess. “Louis-Francois is inordinately proud of his horses.”

“Until now I had only seen them from a distance, and supposed that they were simply white horses. But they are more than that; they are albinos, are they not?”

“Ths distinction is lost on me,” the Duchess admitted, “But that is what Louis-Francois calls them. When he comes back from the south he will be glad to tell you more than you wish to hear!”

“Are they commonly seen? Do many people have them here?” Eliza asked. But they were interrupted by, of all things, a man riding an albino horse: Etienne de Lavardac d’Arcachon, who had ridden out from the chateau to meet them. “I am mortified to break in on you this way,” he said, after greeting each of them individually, in strict order of precedence (Duchess first, then Pontchartrain, Eliza, horses, mathematician, and driver), “but in your absence, Mother, I am the acting host of the party, and must do all in my power to please our guests-one of whom, by the way, happens to be his majesty the King of France-”

“Oooh! When did le Roi arrive?”

“Just after you left, Mother.”

“Just my luck. What do his majesty and the other guests desire?”

“To see the masque. Which is ready to begin.”

ONE END OF THE GRAND ballroom of La Dunette had been converted into the English Channel. Papier-mache waves with plaster foam, mounted on eccentric bearings so that they cycled about in a more or less convincing churn, had been arranged in many parallel, independently moving ranks, marching toward the back of the room, and raked upwards so that any spectator on the ballroom floor could get a view of the entire width of the “Channel” from “Dunkerque” (a fortified silhouette downstage) to “Dover” (white cliffs and green fields upstage). To stage left was a little pen where a consort sawed away on viols. To stage right was a royal box where King Louis XIV of France sat on a golden chair, with the Marquise de Maintenon at his right hand, dressed more for a funeral than a Christmas party. A retinue was massed behind them. So close to the front of it that he could have put a hand on Maintenon’s shoulder was Father Edouard de Gex-this a way of saying that there had better be no salacious bits. Not that Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon would ever even conceive of such a thing; but she had hired artists and comedians to produce it, and one never knew what such people would come up with.