The King has a pair of hunting-dogs named Phobos and Deimos who are very aptly named, for they have been fed on the King’s own table-scraps and have grown enormous. The King has indulged them terribly and so they want discipline, and feel they are entitled to attack whatever strikes their fancy. Knowing how much Liselotte loves hunting and dogs, and knowing how lonely and isolated she is, the King has tried to interest her in these beasts-he wants Liselotte to think of Phobos and Deimos as her own pets and to look upon them with affection, as the King does, so that they can go hunting for large game in the east when the season comes around. So far this is nothing more than a proposal. Madame is more than a little ambivalent. Phobos and Deimos are too big and unruly to be kept at Versailles any more, and so the King prevailed upon his brother to keep them at St. Cloud, in a paddock where they can run around loose. The beasts have long since killed and eaten all of the rabbits who used to dwell in that enclosure, and now they devote all their energies to searching for weak places in the fence where they might tunnel out or jump over and go marauding in the territory beyond. Recently they broke through the southeast corner and got loose in the yard beyond and killed all the chickens. That hole has been repaired. As I write this I can see Phobos patrolling the northern fence-line, looking for a way to jump over into the neighboring property, which is owned by another nobleman who has never had good relations with my hosts. Meanwhile Deimos is working on an excavation under the eastern wall, hoping to tunnel through and run amok in the yard where Madame exercises her lap-dogs. I have no idea which of them will succeed first.

Now I must lay down my pen, for some months ago I promised Madame that I would one day give her a demonstration of bareback riding, Qwghlmian-style, and now the time is finally at hand. I hope that my little description of life at St. Cloud has not struck you as overly vulgar, but since you, like any sophisticated man, are a student of the human condition, I thought you might be fascinated to learn what peasant-like noise and rancor prevail behind the supremely elegant facade of St. Cloud.

Eliza, Countess de la Zeur

Your majesty will already have perceived that Phobos and Deimos are metaphors for the armed might of France; their chicken-killing escapade is the recent campaign in which your majesty brought the rebellious Protestants of Savoy to heel; and the question of where they might attack next, a way of saying that the Countess could not guess whether your majesty intended to strike north into the Dutch Republic or east into the Palatinate. Just as obviously, these sentences were written as much for William of Orange-whose servants would read the letter before it reached d’Avaux-as for the recipient.

Perhaps less transparent is the reference to bareback riding. I would have assumed it signified some erotic practice, except that the Countess is never so vulgar in her letters. In time I came to understand that it was meant literally. As hard as it might be for your majesty to believe, I have it on the authority of several of Monsieur’s friends that Madame and the Countess de la Zeur did indeed go riding that day, and moreover that the latter requested that no saddle be placed on her horse. They rode off into the park thus, escorted by two of Madame’s young male cousins from Hanover. But when they returned, the Countess’s horse was bare, not only of saddle, but of rider, too; for, as the story went, she had fallen off after the horse had been startled, and suffered an injury that made it impossible for her to ride back. This had occurred near the banks of the river. Fortunately they had been able to summon a passing boat, which had taken the injured Countess upriver to a nearby convent that is generously supported by Madame. There, or so the story went, the Countess would be tended to by the nuns until her bones had mended.

Needless to say, no one but the smallest child would believe such a story; everyone assumed the obvious, which is that the Countess had become pregnant and that her period of recuperation in the nunnery was to last only long enough for her to arrange an abortion, or to deliver the baby. I myself gave it no further thought until I received a communication from d’Avaux several weeks later. This was, of course, encyphered. I enclose the plaintext, shorn of pleasantries, formalities, and other impedimenta.

From Jean Antoine de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux

French Embassy, the Hague

To Monsieur Bonaventure Rossignol

Chateau Juvisy, France

Monsieur Rossignol,

You and I have had occasion to speak of the Countess de la Zeur. I have known for some time that her true allegiance lay with the Prince of Orange. Until today she has been at pains to conceal this. Now she has at last run her true colors up the mast. Everyone believes she is in a nunnery near St. Cloud having a baby. But today, below the very battlements of the Binnenhof, she disembarked from a canal-boat that had just come down from Nijmegen. Most of the heretics who came pouring out of it had originated from much farther upstream, for they are people of the Palatinate who, knowing that an invasion was imminent, have lately fled from that place as rats are said to do from a house in the moments before an earthquake. To give you an idea of their quality, among them were at least two Princesses (Eleanor of Saxe-Eisenach and her daughter Wilhelmina Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach), as well as any number of other persons of rank; though as much could never have been guessed from their degraded and bedraggled appearance. Consequently the Countess de le Zeur-who was even more dishevelled than most-attracted less notice than is her wont. But I know that she was there, for my sources in the Binnenhof inform me that the Prince of Orange ordered a suite to be made available to her, for a stay of indefinite duration. Previously she has been coy about her dealings with the said Prince; today she lives in his house.

I shall have more to say on this later, but for now I should like to ask the rhetorical question of how this woman was able to get from St. Cloud to the Hague, via the Rhine, in one month, during the preparations for a war, without anyone’s having noticed? That she was working as a spy for the Prince of Orange is too obvious to mention; but where did she go, and what is she now telling William in the Binnenhof?

Yours in haste,

d’Avaux

Your majesty will already have understood how fascinated I was by this news from d’Avaux. The letter had reached me after a considerable delay, as, owing to the war, d’Avaux had been forced to show some ingenuity in finding a way to have it delivered to Juvisy. I knew that I could not expect to receive any more, and to attempt to respond in kind would have been a waste of paper. Accordingly, I resolved to travel in person, and incognito, to the Hague. For to be of service to your majesty is my last thought as I go to bed in the night-time and my first upon waking in the morning; and it was plain that where this matter was concerned I was useless so long as I remained at home.

Of my journey to the Hague, much could be written in a vulgar and sensational vein, if I felt that I could better serve your majesty by producing an entertainment. But it is all beside the point of this report. And as better men than I have sacrificed their lives in your service with no thought of fame, or of reward beyond a small share in the glory of la France, I do not think it is meet for me to relate my tale here; after all, what an Englishman (for example) might fancy to be a stirring and glorious adventure is, to a gentleman of France, altogether routine and unremarkable.