The Confusion

The Dower-house of Pretzsch
APRIL AND MAY 1694

To suffer, as to doe,

Our strength is equal, nor the Law unjust

That so ordains.

–MILTON,

Paradise Lost

LIKE A GUINEA WORM, Eleanor’s story had to be drawn out of her inch by inch. Its telling extended over a week, and was broken into a dozen installments, each of which was preceded by exhausting maneuvers and manipulations from Eliza and brought to a premature end by Eleanor’s changing the subject or breaking down in tears. But the tiredness that Eliza had felt on the last day of the river-journey had developed into an influenza that kept her in bed for some days with aches and chills. So there was nothing else to pass the hours, and time favored Eliza.

The telling began when Eliza, sick, sore, woozy from mildew-smell and irritable because damp plaster kept falling from the ceiling onto her bed, asked: “A dower-house is where a dowager goes to live out her days after her husband has passed on; but yours still lives. So why are you in a dower-house?”

The answer-when all of the bits were spliced together and the preliminaries and digressions trimmed-was: The Elector Johann Georg IV belonged to a sort of fraternity whose members were to be found in every country in the world, and among every class of society: Men Who Had Been Hit on the Head as Boys. As MWHBHHB went, Johann Georg was a beauty. For some, the insult to the brain led to defects of the body, viz. wasting, unsightly curling of the fingers, twitches, spasms, drooling, amp;c. Johann Georg was not one of those; now in his late twenties, he could easily have found employment in Versailles as a gigolo for male or female clients-or both at the same time, as he was a great strapping stallion of a man, and who knew the limits of his body?

But everyone knew the limits of his mind. Eleanor might have known better than to marry him; but she had wanted to do her bit for the Brandenburgs, and to find a home for Caroline. He was rich and handsome; and though everyone knew he was a MWHBHHB, she had been assured, by many who knew him (Ministers of the Saxon court who in retrospect might not have been the most reliable sources) that he had not been hit all that hard. They pointed to his physical perfection as evidence of this. And (again, so easy to see in retrospect) they’d presented him to her, during their first few encounters, in settings ingeniously devised so that those aspects of his character attributable to his having been hit on the head as a boy had not been obvious. The wedding had been set for a certain date in Leipzig, a city easily reached from either capital (Berlin or Dresden) and large enough to accommodate two Electoral courts and a wedding party of noble men and women from all parts of Protestant Europe. Eleanor had gone there in the train of the Brandenburgs, and they had paid a call on her betrothed. The Elector of Saxony had received his bride-to-be in the company of a ravishing, expensively dressed young woman, and introduced her as Magdalen Sybil von Roohlitz.

Eleanor had heard the name before, always in a context of tawdry gossip. This woman had been Johann Georg’s mistress for some years. Indeed they were said to be admirably matched, for though there was no evidence, visible or anecdotal, of her having been hit on the head as a girl, she might as well have been; despite lengthy and expensive efforts of her noble family to educate her, she could not read or write. And yet she was as perfect, as desirable a specimen of female beauty as Johann Georg was of male. The union made sense, in its way. There was a notable lack of brain power, but (a) the Doctors of Saxony were as one in saying that the imbecility of the Elector and of Fraulein von Roohlitz were not of the sort that is passed down to children, i.e., their offspring might be of sound mind, provided he were not hit on the head as a boy, and (b) the Countess’s mother was said to be a clever one. Too clever; for she was in the pay of the Court of Austria, and doing all that she could to make Saxony into a fiefdom of that Realm. The Fraulein von Roohlitz had been Johann Georg’s wife in all but name for some years and he’d given her a fortune, a Schlo?, and a Court to go with it. Yet she was not of a rank to wed an Elector, or so insisted the old wise heads of the Saxon court, who were anti-Austria and pro-Brandenburg to a man. What Eleanor had seen and heard of these Saxons, from her distant and imperfect vantage-point in Berlin, had been only the faint noises off of a titanic struggle that had been carried out, over several years, in Dresden, between the pro-Brandenburg ministers of Saxony and the pro-Austria von Roohlitz faction. That Johann Georg had come to Brandenburg to woo her was evidence only that those ministers had, for a few months, got the upper hand. That her fiance had now chosen to receive her, on the eve of their wedding, with his mistress draped all over him, and her draped in jewels that ought to have been gifts to Eleanor, proved that the struggle had lately swung the other way. Another prince, in such a circumstance, would have kept the mistress hidden away in her Schlo?. The reality would have been no different but the presentation would have been comelier. But Johann Georg was a MWHBHHB and did not do things as other men. As Frederick, Elector of Brandenburg, looked on incredulously, and von Roohlitz watched in obvious delight, Johann Georg openly spurned Eleanor. And yet he had come to Leipzig with every apparent intention of going through with the wedding!

Frederick by now was acting in much the same role as Father of the Bride-though it was combined with that of one head of state negotiating an alliance with another, as well as that of a Doctor ministering to a village idiot. The meeting broke off. Most of those on the Brandenburg side of it were too nonplussed to be angry.

She married him. Eleanor Erdmuthe Louisa married Johann Georg IV, Elector of Saxony, albeit a few days later than planned, as everything had to be re-jiggered at the last minute. They moved to Dresden. The Elector promoted Magdalen Sybil von Roohlitz to the rank of Countess and kept her around. Libels began to circulate in the streets of Dresden in which it was argued that bigamy was no bad thing, having been practiced by any number of Biblical kings, and ought to be revived in Saxony. At about the same time, the Elector openly promised to marry the Countess von Roohlitz-at the same time as he was still married to Eleanor. The good Lutherans of Saxony pushed back against the idea of making bigamy the new law of the land, and even Johann Georg’s impaired mind came to understand that he would never be able to marry two women at once.

Attempts to poison Eleanor’s food commenced not long after. She might have been an easy victim in some other courts-a court, let us say, in which she had more enemies, and in which the enemies were not all mental defectives. But poisoning was a difficult and exacting business even for persons who had never been hit on the head, and the attempts of Johann Georg and Magdalen Sybil von Roohlitz were obvious, and were failures. Eleanor took as many clothes as she could pack in a hurry, and as many servants (three) as Johann Georg would allow her, and departed without taking another meal. This was how she and Caroline had landed at the dower-house of Pretzsch. Her sojourn here had hardened into a sort of exile, or imprisonment. As she had no money of her own, there was little practical difference. She and Caroline slept in the same room and barricaded the door at night in case Johann Georg should conceive some hare-brained plan to send assassins. Caroline, despite being an abnormally acute young lady when it came to squirrels and logarithms, had no idea that any of this was happening.

AT THE END OF TELLING THIS TALE, Eleanor looked better, albeit puffy around the eyes. She looked more like the dogged young Princess that Eliza had known at the Hague five years ago.

But any ground that she had gained by unburdening herself thus to Eliza, she gave back again in a few moments when, on the eighth day of Eliza’s visit, she opened and read an ornate document that had been brought to the dower-house by a galloping courier. “Whatever is the matter?” Eliza asked. For she could not phant’sy what, to a woman in Eleanor’s estate, could possibly be accounted Bad News; any conceivable change, it seemed, would be a step up.

“It is from the Elector,” she announced.

“The Elector of-?”

“Saxony.”

“Your husband?”

“Yes.”

“What says it?”

“He has got word that I am entertaining a visitor, whose beauty and charm are renowned in all the courts of Christendom. He is pleased to learn that his Realm is graced by such a distinguished personage as the Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm, and announces that he and the Countess shall arrive tomorrow to pay their respects to the Duchess, and to stay for a few days.”

Eliza had summoned the strength to move to a chair by the sick-room’s sole window. Cramped and dingy the dower-house of Pretzsch might be, but open fields surrounded it, with good climbing-trees. For some days Eliza had been too drained and listless even to read books; but she’d spent many hours in this chair, doing what she was doing now: watching Caroline and Adelaide play. The sheer number of hours that they could put into playing were a prodigy to Eliza, especially given that she felt a hundred years old. This had been her only form of contact with either of the girls since the day she’d arrived, for all had agreed it were best if Eliza were quarantined until she got better.

Eliza, draped in blankets like a statue for shipment, was rubbing the palms of her hands together. “Has the Elector ever had smallpox?” she asked.

“He does not bear scars of it, as far as I know. But as the marriage was never consummated, I have seen little of him. Why do you ask?”

“We have journeyed a great distance,” Eliza said, “and called at more towns along the Elbe than I can remember. Given that, and given the sheer size of my entourage, there is always the possibility of someone’s having picked up a disease en route. That is why travelers from abroad are frequently quarantined. Now, having heard so many lovely stories about the Elector of Saxony and the Countess von Roohlitz, I should be crestfallen if I missed the opportunity to make their acquaintances. But it would be most unfortunate if one of them were to fall ill of some malady that we brought up the Elbe. You will apprise them of this-?”

“I shall throw words in their general direction, to that effect,” Eleanor said, “whether any shall stick I cannot say.”

“BY A LONG SHOT, however, the most sophisticated practice of the Turks is the institution of polygamy,” Eliza said.

The Elector of Saxony, who really was a great penis of a man, all purple-red, and laced about with throbbing veins, and crowned with a tremendous curling black wig, sat up just a bit straighter. One eye, then the other, strayed in the direction of the Countess von Roohlitz. She was everything that Eliza could have anticipated from Eleanor’s narration. Stuffed into a bag and smuggled a thousand miles to the southeast, she’d have sold, in a Constantinople slave-mart, for a whole stable of Arab race-horses. To ask her to make conversation, however, was a little bit like expecting a dog to cook his meat before eating it. Eliza had talked herself hoarse rather than shut up and listen to what these two would attempt to say to her. And like groundlings in a theatre, they were more than content simply to watch with open eyes, and, most of the time, open mouths.

“You don’t say,” said the Elector, after a while. “How do they… do it?”

Eliza let a beat or two pass in silence before letting go with a titter. She was not a great titterer by and large. This was a titter she had borrowed from a certain Duchess she had sat next to once at Versailles. She did not duplicate it very precisely, but here in the dower-house of Pretzsch it would serve. “Oh, monsieur,” she went on, “your double entendre almost got by me.”

“I beg your pardon-?”

“At first I supposed you meant, ‘How did they institute the practice of polygamy?’ but of course now I perceive you were really asking, ‘How does the Sultan make love to two women, or more, at the same time?’ I should be pleased to let you in on the secret, but I fear some of a more prudish disposition might object.” And she kicked Eleanor in the shin under the table, and jerked her head toward the room’s exit: which Eleanor had been pining for, as a prisoner regards a high window in the wall of his cell.

“I am exhausted,” Eleanor announced.

“You look it,” said the Countess, “or perhaps that is just age.”

“Exhaustion or age-who can guess? I shall let it remain my little secret,” Eleanor said equably. “I am sorry to leave the party so early, and when it appears that the conversation is about to take such a fascinating turn-”

“Or,” said Eliza, catching the eye of Johann Georg, “to turn into something else.”

“Pray, don’t get up!” Eleanor said to her husband, who had shown not the slightest intention of doing so. “I’ll to my bed, and shall see you all, I suppose, whenever you crawl out of yours. I do apologize once more for the miserable state of the accommodations.” This last was aimed at her husband, who did not penetrate its meaning.

“Right,” said Eliza, once the staircase, and the floorboards overhead, had let off creaking under the movements of Eleanor. She was in the salon now with the Elector of Saxony and his mistress, and she had their undivided attention. She brushed a bit of damp plaster out of her hair. “Where were we? Oh yes, the Chariot.”

“Chariot?”

“I’m sorry, it is the name given to the technique that-in those countries that are enlightened enough to sanction the ancient Biblical practice of polygamy-is used by a Sultan when he is at a numerical disadvantage to his wives. I could try to describe it. A picture would be ever so much more effective, but I can’t draw to save my life. Perhaps I should demonstrate it. Why, yes! That would be best. Would you be a dear, my good Elector, and flip yonder table upside down? I’ll fetch an ottoman from the other room-”

“A what!?” barked Johann Georg, and his hand shifted to the hilt of his sword.

“As in a piece of furniture. We’ll want something in lieu of reins-my dear Countess, if you’d care to unwind that silk sash from about your waist, ’twould serve.”

“But the sash is holding up my-”

“-?”

“-ah, j’ai compris, madame.”

“I knew you would, Fraulein.”

“I HAD TO FUCK SOMEONE,” Eliza mumbled through the hem of her blanket. “I suppose you’ll think me a whore. But my son-I refer to the legitimate one-Lucien-died. Adelaide is a gem, but she was foolhardy enough to have been born female. My husband requires a legitimate boy.”

“But-with him!?”

“You said yourself that his imbecility was not congenital.”

“But how will you explain the timing of it!?”

“There is nothing that can’t be explained away, if Etienne is willing to play along, and not ask difficult questions. And I think he is willing. None of it matters, probably.”

“What do you mean by that?”

By way of an answer, Eliza-who was lying flat on her back in bed with a blanket over most of her face-thrust out a hand.

Eleanor screamed.

“Be quiet! They’ll hear you,” said Eliza.

“They-they have already left,” said Eleanor from the uttermost corner of the room, whence she’d fled, quick as a sparrow.

“Oh. Then go ahead and scream all you like.”

“When did the bumps appear?”

“I thought I felt one coming on yesterday. Had no idea they’d spread so rapidly.” Eliza flipped the blanket down to expose her face. Earlier she’d counted twenty bumps, there, by feel, then lost interest. Eleanor gave her only the briefest glance before turning her face aside, and adopting a pose in the corner of the room like a schoolgirl who is being punished.

“So this is why you insisted Caroline and Adelaide be sent away to Leipzig!”

“You do a sick woman an injustice there. You yourself told me that the Elector could not take his eyes off Caroline. You mentioned it half a dozen times unbidden. She has only bloomed the more since he last raped her with his eyes. That alone was reason sufficient to get her out of the house.”

“Does the Elector know?”

“Know that I have smallpox? Not yet.”

“How could he have missed it?”

“First, most of these vesicles have broken out in the last few hours. Second, we did it in the dark. Third, many persons-including some who were not hit on the head as boys-are unclear as to the distinction between smallpox, and the great pox, or syphilis. Given the company he keeps, I cannot but think that Johann Georg has seen much of the latter!”

“What you have done is horrible!” Eleanor said, turning around, and, when she saw Eliza’s face, thinking better of it.

“Oh, I’ve had worse.”

“No! I mean, trying to get someone sick.”

“You could have guessed yesterday that I had smallpox. You could have warned them off. You chose not to. So your outrage at this moment is very tiresome.”

Eleanor could not frame any response to this.

“I don’t know a single man at Versailles who has not killed someone, at least once in his life, directly or indirectly, by omission or commission. It is done commonly, and on the slightest pretexts. I might not have done what I did last night, had you not told me that the Elector desires Caroline. But knowing what I did of his lust for the girl, and his power over you, and knowing how it was likely to come out-well, I did what I did. Now, Eleanor, that is enough of talking about it. I really am spent. Last night took too much out of me at a time when I ought to have been conserving my strength. Now I’ll pay the penalty. I wrote out instructions-in case of my death. It’s under my pillow. I’m sleepy. Good-bye.”