The Confusion

Eliza to Rossignol
MARCH 1694

Bon-bon,

Yours reached me in Hamburg, where we have been interviewing river-captains and buying provisions for the journey inland. What a grim petulant mood you were in when you let this dribble from your quill! A few remarks:

–Adelaide is no baby, but a toddler of fourteen months, careering around the deck pursued by a squadron of stooping and waddling nurses who are all terrified she’ll go over the side.

–Hitzacker is said to be a perfectly lovely village; I’m sorry you don’t favor the name of it.

–The parlous condition of Trade is well known to me; who do you suppose arranged for the rice to be shipped from Egypt? Do you think it is a bad thing that there shall be no great battles this year? And have you forgotten that my son Lucien sickened and died over the winter just past? Where was my golden halo of prosperity when the Angel of Death came for him in St.-Malo? Really, you quite forget yourself.

But I forgive you. The grimness of your discourse tells me much that is useful of the mood among the Quality of Paris and Versailles. If it eases your mind, know that the confusion of which you complain is the death-throes of an old system-as when a man’s heart stops beating but his limbs continue to twitch for some time afterwards. The English, being a small and disorderly country, understood this a few years earlier than the French. Or perhaps that is giving them too much credit. They did not understand, but sensed, it. The tide of quicksilver that rose up in that country around the time of Plague and Fire produced a generation of more than normally acute minds-some, such as Newton, almost too tight-strung to endure the world. These men had power before, but knew not what to do with it, and lost it. In exile they formed the Juncto, which with the recent elections has taken over the government. The things that the Juncto does during the coming year-the Bank of England, the Recoinage, amp;c.-are the beginnings of the new way of things that shall replace the old one that has died, or is dying. France lags, having more of lead and less of quicksilver in her constitution, and lacking a Juncto; but the same forces are at work there.

You need only look to Lyon for an example. When Lothar von Hacklheber journeyed to Lyon in April of 1692 and accepted, from M. Castan, half a million livres tournoises of French government obligations in exchange for silver deliverable at London, no one thought twice about it. It was a large transaction, to be sure, but altogether routine. If you had gone to him, or to any of the other German or Swiss bankers in Lyon, at that time, and said, “This is the last such loan that shall ever be made in Lyon, and it shall never be repaid,” they’d have thought you a madman.

Yet all through 1692 Castan temporized, and promised to pay interest, and sought alternatives to paying it back. The bad harvest that autumn rendered payment quite out of the question, and the lines of galeriens marching through Lyon en route to Marseille-mostly ordinary Parisians who had been caught looting bakeries-served to place the “sufferings” of Lothar in perspective. The immense military operation of last year consumed what money the Treasury had. The French victories (costly though they were) at Heidelberg, at sea, at Landen, and in Piedmont might have given Lothar some hope of seeing his money again. If so, that hope died in the winter just past, along with so many other things. The bankers of Lyon now look upon Lothar’s April 1692 loan as the moment it all went wrong; the end of an epoch. My correspondents there tell me that real estate in that city is to be had for nothing now, because the Swiss and German bankers are all turning their backs on it, cutting their losses, packing their coffers, and moving out. One day France will have its equivalent of the Bank of England, and it will probably be in Paris; but not for a long time, and until then, her finances will be in perpetual confusion.

It is for all of these reasons that I have resolved to descend on Leipzig now. But in order for me to know how best to set my pieces on the board, as it were, vis-a-vis Lothar, I must have the very latest on the Esphahnians, and the machinations of Father Edouard de Gex. For I know that hardly a day passes without his pestering you for the latest news concerning Vrej and his movements about Hindoostan.

Here, we are still shopping for a conveyance. Boats in every country are as various as breeds of dogs. In Bohemia, in the forests that surround the headwaters of the Vltava, they fashion barges of oak, and float them down to be finished around Prague. These carry Silesian coal down to places like Magdeburg and Hamburg, where local boatmen buy them and fix them up for their own uses. So though they may have all looked the same as they were being wrought in Bohemia, where the waters of the Elbe began as raindrops dripping from pine-needles, by the time I inspect them in Hamburg, where the Elbe is a mile wide, each has become as unique as its owner. The notion of conveying a Duchess, her daughter, and her household three hundred miles up the Elbe is extraordinary to these boatmen, who as a rule do not venture more than one or two days’ journey upriver; but some of the more adventurous spirits among them are warming to the idea, and I don’t suppose it shall be long before we have come to terms with one of them, and set out. The spring thaws shall place an abundance of water under the flat bottom of our Zille (as these barge-boats are called), so that we shall not have to be so concerned with shoals; but by the same token, the vigorous flow of the river will make it impossible to sail upstream on any but the windiest of spring days, and so we shall progress only as fast as an ox-team on the river-bank can draw us. Figure ten miles a day, on average; from this and from your father’s maps, you may put your mathematical acumen to use in guessing whither to post your reply. I guess Magdeburg; if you are slow, Wittenberg.

Eliza