After hearing this news I did not sleep for the rest of the night. If my recollection of the maps was right, Haguenau is on a tributary of the Rhine, and is part of the barriere de fer that Vauban built to protect France from the Germans, Dutch, Spanish, and other foes. Supposing that I was right in thinking that the cargo was lead; then the meaning of what I’d just been told was that it was being melted down at Haguenau and made into musket- and cannon-balls. This would explain the demand for firewood. But why did they also require lumber? I guessed it was to build barges that could carry the ammunition down to the Rhine. The current would then take them downstream into the Palatinate in a day or two.

Certain things I had noticed at Court now became imbued with new meanings. The Chevalier de Lorraine-lord of the lands over which the ox-carts passed en route to Haguenau-has long been the most senior of Monsieur’s lovers, and the most cruel and implacable of Madame’s tormentors. In theory he is a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor, of which Lorraine is still a tributary state, but in practice he has become completely surrounded by France-one cannot enter or leave Lorraine without traveling over territory that is ruled from Versailles. This explains why he spends all his time in the French Court instead of Vienna.

Conventional wisdom has it that the duc d’Orleans was raised to be effeminate and passive so that he would never pose a threat to his older brother’s kingship. One might suppose that the Chevalier de Lorraine, who routinely penetrates Monsieur, and who rules his affections, has thereby exploited a vulnerability in the ruling dynasty of France. That, again, is the conventional wisdom at Court. But now I was seeing it in a different light. One cannot penetrate without being encompassed, and the Chevalier de Lorraine is encompassed by Monsieur just as his territory has been encompassed by France. Louis invades and penetrates, his brother seduces and surrounds, they share a common will, they complement each other as brothers should. I see a homosexual who makes a sham marriage and spurns his wife for the love of a man. But Louis sees a brother who will fight a sham war in the Palatinate, supposedly to defend his wife’s claim on that territory, while using his lover’s fiefdom as a highway to transport materiel to the front.

When these three-Monsieur, Madame, and the Chevalier-were packed off to St. Cloud on short notice a few weeks ago, I assumed it was because the King had grown sick of their squabbling. But now I perceive that the King thinks in metaphors, and that he had to put them all together, like animals in a baiting-ring, to bring their conflict to a head, before undertaking his military campaign. Just as the domestic squabbles of Jupiter and Juno were thought by the Romans to be manifested in thunderstorms, so the squalid triangle of St. Cloud will be manifested as war in the Palatinate. Louis’ empire, which now is interrupted in the Argonne, will be extended across and down the Rhine, as far as Mannheim and Heidelberg, and when domestic tranquillity is finally restored to St. Cloud, France will be two hundred miles wider, and the barriere de fer will run across burnt territory where German-speaking Protestants used to dwell.

All of this came together in my head in an instant, but then I lay awake until dawn fretting over what I should do. Weeks before, I had made up a little metaphor of my own, concerning two dogs named Phobos and Deimos, and put it in a letter to d’Avaux in the hopes that the Prince of Orange’s spies would read it, and understand its message. At the time I’d thought myself very clever. But now my metaphor seemed childish and inane compared to that of Louis. Worse, its message was ambiguous-for its entire point was that I could not be sure, yet, whether Louvois intended to attack northwards into the Dutch Republic, or draw back, wheel round to the east, and launch himself across the Rhine. Now I felt sure I knew the answer, and needed to get word to the Prince of Orange. But I was stuck in a convent in St.-Dizier and had nothing to base my report on, save Vagabond hearsay, as well as a conviction in my own mind that I had understood the mentality of the King. And even this might evaporate like dew in a few hours, as the fears of the night-time so often do in the morning.

I was on the verge of becoming a Vagabond myself, and striking out on the eastern road, when a spattered and dusty carriage pulled up in front of the convent, just before morning Mass, and a gentleman knocked on the door and asked for me under the false name I’d adopted.

That gentleman and I were on our way as soon as his team could be fed and watered. He is Dr. Ernst von Pfung, a long-suffering gentleman scholar of Heidelberg. When he was a boy, his homeland was occupied and ravaged by the Emperor’s armies; at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, when the Palatinate was handed over to the Winter Queen in the peace settlement, his family helped them establish their royal household in what remained of Heidelberg Castle. So he has known Sophie and her siblings for a long time. He got all of his education, including a doctorate of jurisprudence, at Heidelberg. He served as an advisor to Charles Louis (the brother of Sophie, and father of Liselotte) when he was Elector Palatinate, and later tried to exert some sort of steadying influence on Liselotte’s elder brother Charles when he succeeded to the Electoral throne. But this Charles was daft, and only wanted to conduct mock-sieges at his Rhine castles, using rabble like Jack as his “soldiers.” At one of these, he caught a fever and died, precipitating the succession dispute on which the King of France now hopes to capitalize.

Dr. von Pfung, whose earliest and worst memories are of Catholic armies burning, raping, and pillaging his homeland, is beside himself with worry that the same thing is about to happen all over again, this time with French instead of Imperial troops. The events of the last few days have done nothing to reassure him.

Between Heidelberg and the Duchy of Luxembourg, the Holy Roman Empire forms a hundred-mile-wide salient that protrudes southwards into France, almost as far as the River Moselle. It is called the Saarland and Dr. von Pfung, as a petty noble of the Empire, is accustomed to being able to travel across it freely and safely. As it gets closer to Lorraine, this territory becomes fragmented into tiny principalities. By threading his way between them Dr. von Pfung had intended to make safe passage to Lorraine, which is technically part of the Empire. A brief transit across Lorraine would have brought him across the French border very close to St.-Dizier.

Fortunately Dr. von Pfung has the wisdom and foresight one would expect in a man of his maturity and erudition. He had not simply assumed that his plan would work out, but had sent riders out a few days in advance to scout the territory. When they had not returned, he had set out anyway, hoping for the best; but very shortly he had met one of them on the road, returning with gloomy tidings. Certain obstacles had been discovered, of a complicated nature that Dr. von Pfung declined to explain. He had ordered a volte-face and ridden south down the east bank of the Rhine as far as the city of Strasbourg, where he had crossed over into Alsace, and from there he made his way as fast as he could. As a gentleman he is entitled to bear arms, and he has not been slow to take advantage of that right, for in addition to the rapier on his hip he has a pair of pistols and a musket inside the carriage. We are accompanied by two out-riders: young gentlemen similarly armed. At every inn and river-crossing they have had to force their way through by bluff and bluster, and the strain is showing on Dr. von Pfung’s face; after we left the precincts of St.-Dizier he very courteously excused himself, removed his wig to reveal a bald pate fringed with gray, leaned back next to an open window, and rested his eyes for a quarter of an hour.