Perhaps two years ago, M. le comte d’Avaux, on one of his visits to your majesty’s court, sought me out, and, knowing of my position in the cabinet noir, asked many pointed questions about the Countess’s epistolary habits. From this it was plain enough that he shared some of my suspicions. Later he told me that he had witnessed with his own eyes an incident in which it was made obvious that this woman was an agent of the Prince of Orange. D’Avaux at this time mentioned a Swiss gentleman of the name of Fatio de Duilliers, and intimated that he and the Countess de la Zeur were in some way linked.

D’Avaux seemed confident that he knew enough to crush this woman. Instead of doing so outright, he had decided that he could better serve your majesty by pursuing a more complex and, by your majesty’s leave, risky strategy. As is well known, she makes money for many of your majesty’s vassals, including d’Avaux, by managing their investments. The price of liquidating her outright would be high; not a consideration that would ever confound your majesty’s judgment, but telling among men of weak minds and light purses. Moreover, d’Avaux shared my suspicion that she was communicating over some encrypted channel with Sophie and, through Sophie, with William, and hoped that if I were to achieve a cryptological break of this channel the cabinet noir might thereafter read her despatches without her being aware of it; which would be altogether more beneficial to France and pleasing to your majesty than locking the woman up in a nunnery and keeping her incommunicado to the end of her days, as she deserves.

There had been during the first part of this year a sort of flirtation between the Countess de la Zeur and la Palatine, which appeared to culminate in August when the Countess accepted an invitation from Madame to join her (and your majesty’s brother) at St. Cloud. Everyone who knew of this assumed that it was a common, albeit Sapphic, love affair: an interpretation so obvious that it ought by its nature to have engendered more skepticism among those who pride themselves on their sophistication. But it was summer, the weather was warm, and no one paid it any heed. Not long after her arrival at St. Cloud, the Countess sent a letter to d’Avaux in the Hague, which has subsequently found its way back to my writing desk. Here it is.

Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, to d’Avaux

16 August 1688

Monsieur,

Summer has reached its pinnacle here and for those, such as Madame, who like to hunt wild animals, the best months lie in the future. But for those, such as Monsieur, who prefer to hunt (or be hunted by) highly cultivated humans, this is the very best time of the year. So Madame endures the heat, and sits with her lap-dogs and writes letters, while Monsieur’s only complaint is that the torrid weather causes his makeup to run. St. Cloud is infested with young men, aficionados of fencing, who would give anything to sheathe their blades in his scabbard. To judge from the noises emanating from his bedchamber, his chief lover is the Chevalier de Lorraine. But when the Chevalier is spent, the Marquis d’Effiat is never far behind; and behind him (as it were) is a whole queue of handsome cavaliers. In other words, here as at Versailles, there is a strict pecking-order (though one must imagine a different sort of pecking), and so most of these young blades can never hope to be anything more than ornaments. Yet they are continually lustful like any other men. Since they cannot satiate themselves on Monsieur inside the chateau, they practice on one another in the gardens. One cannot go for a stroll or a ride without breaking into the middle of a tryst. And when these young men are interrupted, they do not slink away meekly, but (emboldened by the favor shown them by Monsieur) upbraid one in the most abusive way imaginable. Wherever I go, my nose detects the humour of lust wafted on every draught and breeze, for it is spilled about the place like wine-slops in a tavern.

Liselotte has been putting up with this for seventeen years now, ever since the day when she crossed over the Rhine, never to cross back. And so it’s no wonder that she ventures out into society only rarely, and prefers the company of her dogs and her ink-well. Madame has been known to grow very attached to members of her household-she used to have a lady-in-waiting named Theobon who was a great comfort to her. But the lovers of Monsieur-who are supported by him, and who have nothing to do all day long but hatch plots-began to whisper vile rumors into Monsieur’s ear, and caused him to send this Theobon away. Madame was so angry that she complained to the King himself. The King reprimanded Monsieur’s lovers but balked at intervening in the household affairs of his own brother, and so Theobon has presumably ended up in a convent somewhere, and will never return.

From time to time they entertain guests here, and then, as you know, protocol dictates that everyone dress up in the sort of costume known as en manteau, which is even stiffer and less comfortable (if you can imagine it) than dressing en grand habit as is done at Versailles. As an ambassador, you see women dressed in that manner all the time, but as a man, you never see machinations that go on in ladies’ private chambers for hours ahead of time, to make them look that way. Dressing en manteau is an engineering project at least as complicated as rigging a ship. Neither can even be contemplated without a large and well-trained crew. But Madame’s household has been reduced to a skeleton crew by the ceaseless petty intrigues of the lovers of Monsieur. And in any case she has no patience with female vanities. She is old enough, and foreign enough, and intelligent enough, to understand that Fashion (which lesser women view as if it were Gravity) was merely an invention, a device. It was devised by Colbert as a way to neutralize those Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who, because of their wealth and independence, posed the greatest threat to the King. But Liselotte, who might have been formidable, has already been neutralized by marrying Monsieur and joining the royal family. The only thing that prevents her country from being annexed to France is a dispute as to whether she, or another descendant of the Winter Queen, should succeed her late brother.

At any rate, Liselotte refuses to play the game that Colbert devised. She has a wardrobe, of course, and it includes several costumes that are worthy of the names grand habit and manteau. But she has had them made up in a way that is unique. In Madame’s wardrobe, all the layers of lingerie, corsetry, petticoats, and outer garments that normally go on one at a time are sewn together into a single construct, so heavy and stiff that it stands by itself, and slit up the back. When Monsieur throws a grand party, Liselotte plods naked into her closet and walks into one of these and stands for a few moments as a lady-in-waiting fastens it in the back with diverse buttons, hooks, and ties. From there she goes straight to the party, without so much as a glance in the mirror.

I will complete this little portrait of life at St. Cloud with a story about dogs. As I mentioned, la Palatine, like Artemis, is never far from her pack of dogs. Of course these are not swift hounds, but tiny lap-dogs that curl up on her feet in the winter to keep her toes warm. She has named them after people and places she remembers from her childhood in the Palatinate. They scurry about her apartments all day long, getting into absurd feuds and controversies, just like so many courtiers. Sometimes she herds them out onto the lawn and they run around in the sunshine interrupting the amours of Monsieur’s hangers-on, and then the peace of these exquisite gardens is broken by the angry shouts of the lovers and the yelps of the dogs; the cavaliers, with their breeches down around their ankles, chase them out from their trysting-places, and Monsieur comes out onto his balcony in his dressing-gown and damns them all to hell and wonders aloud why God cursed him to marry Liselotte.