“You will spoil me, mademoiselle,” d’Avaux said, “for how can I return to the common sort of female-stupid and ignorant-after I have conversed with you? Yes, normally Sluys’s box would be stuffed with that sort of French nobleman. But tonight he is entertaining a young man who came by his endowment properly. ”

“Meaning-?”

“Inherited it-or is going to-from his father, the Duc d’Arcachon.”

“Would it be vulgar for me to ask how the Duc d’Arcachon got it?”

“Colbert built our Navy from twenty vessels to three hundred. The Duc d’Arcachon is Admiral of that Navy-and was responsible for much of the building.”

The floor around Mr. Sluys’s chair was strewn with wadded scraps. Eliza would have loved to smooth some out and read them, but his hard jollity, and the way he was pouring champagne, told her that the evening’s trading was going well for him, or so he imagined. “Jews don’t go to the Opera-it is against their religion! What a show de la Vega has missed tonight!”

“’Thou shalt not attend the Opera… ‘ Is that in Exodus, or Deuteronomy?” Eliza inquired.

D’Avaux-who seemed uncharacteristically nervous, all of a sudden-took Eliza’s remark as a witticism, and produced a smile as thin and dry as parchment. Mr. Sluys took it as stupidity, and got sexually aroused. “De la Vega is still selling V.O.C. stock short! He’ll be doing it all night long-until he hears the news tomorrow morning, and gets word to his brokers to stop!” Sluys seemed almost outraged to be making money so easily.

Now Mr. Sluys looked as if he would’ve been content to drink champagne and gaze ‘pon Eliza’s navel until any number of fat ladies sang (which actually would not have been long in coming), but some sort of very rude commotion, originating from this very box, forced him to glance aside. Eliza turned to see that young French nobleman-the son of the Duc d’Arcachon-at the railing of the box, where he was being hugged, passionately and perhaps even a little violently, by a bald man with a bloody nose.

Eliza’s dear Mum had always taught her that it wasn’t polite to stare, but she couldn’t help herself. Thus, she took in that the young Arcachon had actually flung one of his legs over the railing, as if he were trying to vault out into empty space. A large and rather good wig balanced precariously on the same rail. Eliza stepped forward and snatched it. It was unmistakably the periwig of Jean Antoine de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux, who must, therefore, be the bald fellow wrestling young Arcachon back from the brink of suicide.

D’Avaux-demonstrating a weird strength for such a refined man-finally slammed the other back into a chair, and had the good grace to so choreograph it that he ended up down on both knees. He pulled a lace hanky from a pocket and stuffed it up under his nose to stanch the blood, then spoke through it, heatedly but respectfully, to the young nobleman, who had covered his face with his hands. From time to time he darted a look at Eliza.

“Has the young Arcachon been selling V.O.C. stock short?” she inquired of Mr. Sluys.

“On the contrary, mademoiselle-”

“Oh, I forgot. He’s not the sort who dabbles in markets. But why else would a French duke’s son visit Amsterdam?”

Sluys got a look as if something were lodged in his throat.

“Never mind,” Eliza said airily, “I’m sure it is frightfully complicated-and I’m no good at such things.”

Sluys relaxed.

“I was only wondering why he tried to kill himself-assuming that’s what he was doing?”

“Etienne d’Arcachon is the politest man in France,” Sluys said ominously.

“Hmmph. You’d never know!”

“Sssh!” Sluys made frantic tiny motions with the flesh shovels of his hands.

“Mr. Sluys! Do you mean to imply that this spectacle has something to do with my presence in your box?”

Finally Sluys was on his feet. He was rather drunk and very heavy, and stood bent over with one hand gripping the box’s railing. “It would help if you’d confide in me that, if Etienne d’Arcachon slays himself in your presence, you’ll take offense.”

“Mr. Sluys, watching him commit suicide would ruin my evening!”

“Very well. Thank you, mademoiselle. I am in your debt enormously. ”

“Mr. Sluys-you have no idea.”

IT LED TO HUSHED INTRIGUESin dim corners, palmed messages, raised eyebrows, and subtle gestures by candle-light, continuing all through the final acts of the opera-which was fortunate, because the opera was very dull.

Then, somehow, d’Avaux arranged to share a coach with Eliza and Monmouth. As they jounced, heaved, and clattered down various dark canal-edges and over diverse draw-bridges, he explained: “It was Sluys’s box. Therefore, he was the host. Therefore, it was his responsibility to make a formal introduction of Etienne d’Arcachon to you, mademoiselle. But he was too Dutch, drunk, and distracted to perform his proper role. I never cleared my throat so many times-but to no avail. Monsieur d’Arcachon was placed in an impossible situation!”

“So he tried to take his own life?”

“It was the only honourable course,” d’Avaux said simply.

“He is the politest man in France,” Monmouth added.

“You saved the day,” d’Avaux said.

“Oh, that-’twas Mr. Sluys’s suggestion.”

D’Avaux looked vaguely nauseated at the mere mention of Sluys. “He has much to answer for. This soiree had better be charmante.”

AARON DE LAVEGA,who was assuredly not going to a party tonight, treated balance-sheets and V.O.C. shares as a scholar would old books and parchments-which is to say that Eliza found him sober and serious to a fault. But he could be merry about a few things, and one of them was Mr. Sluys’s house-or rather his widening collection of them. For as the first one had pulled its neighbors downwards, skewing them into parallelograms, popping window-panes out of their frames, and imprisoning doors in their jambs, Mr. Sluys had been forced to buy them out. He owned five houses in a row now, and could afford to, as long as he was managing the assets of half the population of Versailles. The one in the middle, where Mr. Sluys kept his secret hoard of lead and guilt, was at least a foot lower than it had been in 1672, and Aaron de la Vega liked to pun about it in his native language, saying it was “ embarazada,” which meant “pregnant.”

As the Duke of Monmouth handed Eliza down from the carriage in front of that house, she thought it was apt. For-especially when Mr. Sluys was burning thousands of candles at once, as he was tonight, and the light was blazing from all those conspicuously skewed window-frames-hiding the secret was like a woman seven months pregnant trying to conceal her condition with clever tailoring.

Men and women in Parisian fashions were entering the pregnant house in what almost amounted to a continuous queue. Mr. Sluys-belatedly warming to his role as host-was stationed just inside the door, mopping sweat from his brow every few seconds, as if secretly terrified that the added weight of so many guests would finally drive his house straight down into the mud, like a stake struck with a maul.

But when Eliza got into the place, and suffered Mr. Sluys to kiss her hand, and made a turn round the floor, gaily ignoring the venomous stares of pudgy Dutch churchwives and overdressed Frenchwomen-she could see clear signs that Mr. Sluys had brought in mining-engineers, or something, to shore the house up. For the beams that crisscrossed the ceiling, though hidden under festoons and garlands of Barock plasterwork, were uncommonly huge, and the pillars that rose up to support the ends of those beams, though fluted and capitalled like those of a Roman temple, were the size of mainmasts. Still she thought she could detect a pregnant convexity about the ceiling…

“Don’t come out and say you want to buy lead-tell him only that you want to lighten his burdens-better yet, that you wish to transfer them, forcefully, onto the shoulders of the Turks. Or something along those lines,” she said, distractedly, into Monmouth’s ear as the first galliard was drawing to a close. He stalked away in a bit of a huff-but he was moving towards Sluys, anyway. Eliza regretted-briefly-that she’d insulted his intelligence, or at least his breeding. But she was too beset by sudden worries to consider his feelings. The house, for all its plaster and candles, reminded her of nothing so much as the Doctor’s mine, deep beneath the Harz: a hole in the earth, full of metal, prevented from collapsing in on itself solely by cleverness and continual shoring-up.