'I was by birth a gentleman, born as I was in the lowlands of Baden in Germania, to a landowning gentleman like myself and his wife. My childhood was spent generally in the lull of pastoral countryside, but at eight I was moved first to the court of the Lords Brunswick at Hamburg, and employed under Lord Louis Ernest, now a Comte in Paris, enjoying the same rank as I find myself now placed, as his page and knight, as was the fashion at the time to have, in the style of the medieval knights of Germania.'
"That is where I stopped, I am afraid. My writing skills are poor, I concede it."
"But, my Lord, your stories are legendary-"
"Ah, my son! You have mistaken storytelling for writing. Writing is a fickle skill, and not nearly the same as storytelling, which pours forth from my open mouth to the ears of my companions like water from a fountain. Writing requires thought and deliberation, whilst storytelling requires merely a good memory. It is why novels shock not nearly as much as the spoken-word fables from the hills of my youth."
"You speak with much thought and deliberation it seems, however."
"It is a skill I learnt in the court of the late King, before all the elders were flung out from the Palace, and when the talk flowed freely, or freer atleast than it does now. We needed to be careful, we jesters brought of gentle stock, who had nought but a mind to their name, and certainly no property or titles. At this dinner tonight you will most definitely, I am sure, experience the best that particular Court had to offer by way of speakers and storytellers. They offer far more engaging stories than I, and speak with far more forethought and fervour than I, and you will probably wish to embark upon a biography of them! Stay with me, I beg! My life must live on in posterity, at least as a point of hope: I, by birth a gentleman, and by death a nobleman - a King of Myself."
We continued to joke and jeer in the same manner, waiting expectantly for the guests to arrive.
The Comte's footman, Msr. de Becke ('Becke' I shall hereafter refer to him as) was an old friend of the Comte's; a man who spoke French with a bizarre accent; a man with suspiciously dark skin but an affably light countenance. He was well read but shied from conversation, instead performing his menial duties with vigour. The first of the guests he introduced was the Baron d'Holbach, that famed salonkeeper and diplomat. He arrived at half past three and was seated with us in the lounge not a long time after.
Introducing himself to the Comte, I was struck by his complete unsubtlety, his large frame that seemed to occupy even more space than it physically did, and wondered how this man had risen so to the heights of ambassadorship, as they were - representative of the whole of France in the courts of foreign kings and princes, in particular Istanbul and later Philadelphia. One couldn't help but laugh at the presumption that there were entire nations assuming Frenchmen all to be as large, as boisterous as him.
I stood up upon his entrance, and waited until the proper greeting was had between him and the Comte, until his eyes darted to me and appraised me from my side. I must have been wide-eyed for he laughed in a forced manner, and held out his hand and we kissed. I knew him by sight (how could one not know someone so grotesque a caricature?), but we had never spoken. We were sat in the Recieving Room, in armchairs arranged around a table, and he took the one directly opposite to me. The Comte started the pleasantries.
"Paul, my old friend; this is my newest, Msr. R-----. A young upstart, whippersnapper, and so."
"A pleasure to make your acquaintance." the Baron said.
"And you, my Grace. I have heard so much in such a short time in Paris."
"I'm sure you have."
"You met the Comte in Paris, at Versailles?"
"Indeed, in that shining land and time. It was in the summer... the summer of... Lauffeld, yes. I apologise; I am old and slow."
We laughed, as is the appropriate reaction for any invasion by the truth into polite conversation. It was early, and the wine cellar still was full.
"The year we won Lauffeld, yes.. I remember it well, though in a golden view. There was much jubilation at Court; the King, God rest his soul, was returned, and the days were hot and fresh. I was a young courtier, and my nights were spent with others, and there we met, the Comte and I. I suppose we were a bit like yourself. It was easier to announce yourself, easier to aspire. Our Majesty the King is a righteous prince and loving ruler, but he guards too jealously his status and that of his courtiers. One sometimes wishes there was less of that."
Comments like these were daring. I turned to the Comte, to ask him his thoughts, but his smile was steadfast and he seemed to think nothing out of the ordinary had been said at all.
"Those are daring thoughts from an ambassador of the realm."
The Baron laughed.
"An Ambassador! By God, if I still were an ambassador I would have driven myself to the rocks."
"You did not enjoy it?"
"Enjoy it! To accept an ambassadorship is an act of great fealty to your King and Country, not a privilege. It is to be watched intently all your days, all your nights; to be spied upon by suspicious hosts, and unable to protest; to be held responsible, accountable - personally - for the acts of a nation. To be so far from home... you yearn for France, or Europe, at least, for Europe. For green hills and cultured conversation!"
"And you do not find any joy or satisfaction in these foreign lands?"
"None, not now. I dare say you might still, in your youthful inquisitiveness, but in my old age I grow unaccepting of those who don't conform to my limited views. I have nothing to offer Paris but a salon."
Becke entered with another man not long after this, a man whom I had spoken to, briefly, at the salon of Mme. Geoffrin (to where I had almost certainly been accidentally invited.)
"Msr. Marmontel."
With all the greetings we had just shared extended, the Comte again started the conversation.
"On what are you working now, Jean? What can I hope to educate myself on soon?"
"You flatter me, Jérôme. It is a history of the American nations."
"A dramatic subject, and one so new... Is a work of history on a nation not yet born not precocious? Is there any history there to compile and comment upon?" said the Comte.
"You shall be surprised upon reading, though I shouldn't expect it to be finished for a long time now. I intend to cross the Atlantic some time in the next few years. My days, alas - they are too full, too busy."
"You would be better put waiting those years, with all the restless change in those parts." said Holbach to Marmontel. Holbach, having been stationed as emissary of France in Philadelphia for eight years from 1764, and having dealt with the perils of both the ending of the Great War and the beginnings of the Revolution, was widely respected as one of the eminent américanistes in Paris, and so his opinion on these matters elicited much conversation between the four of us. What was incredibly interesting to observe was the opinion of these distinguished fellows on that subject, unquestionably the most divisive in contemporary society - we were, after all, in a state of undeclared war.
It was almost five o' clock before the last guest arrived; a timid man, hair a brown-grey, dressed not in the fashionable suit with stockings, but in a deep blue turban and cloak. This man was unmistakable for any other - no other would arrive so late; no other would wear clothes so unconventional; no other certainly would have espoused such controversial views so freely and openly in the following hours, and without even the prodding of wine. This man was a philosopher, a spirit free of the chains of society, and in those days when the classes of France grew ever rigid and the salons ever closeminded that was something I greatly admired.
"My good friend, my good friend! Jean!" came the cries. It seemed that the company had hardly expected him to arrive. We moved swiftly to the dinner table after his arrival, for the hunger in our stomachs was getting to be unbearable.
Becke took our cups from us and we seated ourselves around the long table, with the Comte at the head. I was sat two seats down, to the left, next to Holbech, and opposite me was Marmontel, with Rousseau at the right hand of the master.
The food was good, and the wine was better, and the conversation was the best I had had in my life. Though perhaps since surpassed by that of the distinguished company I have enjoyed since, nothing could compare to the way my mind was opened - addled - by this drug of intellectualism, by this talk I could not hope to keep up with! Our topics ranged from the mundane to the epic; our minds passed over Japon (a land most notable in that time of knowledge for how little we knew of it, and how much we knew that), through China and India (where recent advances in discovery had made uneasy in the minds of Europeans anything they had thought they knew about the Orient, or indeed the entirety of the world), through Persia (where the entirety of the recent French Mission had been murdered, presenting particular problems for those many Persian apologists in the French court), through Africa (where insurgents in Algeria and Tunisia had been threatening French rule in those parts, and where the naval Berber threat of bygone years had been replaced by the raiding of the desert wanderers), and across the Atlantic to the Americas (where the American nation, young even now, was establishing itself as a concept and the dream of that age seemed to be being fulfilled - a land of free thinkers, and where the natives of that continent were ever subjugated and ever unhappy with such subjugation, and where the French and British colonies which remained in colonial stupor were growing larger and the anxieties in London and even Paris were exacerbated by the revolutionaries who had succeeded in their battles, and where in the South the misfortunes of Iberia were played out tenfold in riots and revolts - although all, up to then, had been suppressed with surprising effectiveness, and where still in the advanced age of technology, our modern ships were dashed upon the rocks by Cape Horn). Where the talk sparkled, however, was in my fellows judgments about the nations of our own continent, and in the societal issues that pressed here; education, the military, censorship and the perpetual unease on the streets that perpetrated, inevitably, all we could discuss and all we could think.
What made, I now know, all this heavy talk of politics and philosophy possible, and alleviated any tension in the room on differing views, were the stories of the Comte; wild and fanciful though they were, always they seemed to progress the conversation, and always the guests listened wide-eyed like children. To give just one example of the stories he shared; the topic was the defeat of France in India by a local kingdom, who had not only beseiged our factory in Mahe but had razed it to the ground and in doing so had reduced our country to just three factories in those parts of the world; Chandernagar, Pondichery and Yanam (having lost all previous to the English, in years past, and the Dutch in the unequal treaty ending the Great War.) How could such a nation as France, as ancient and motherly as it was, have been attacked and defeated by such savages? The Comte, then, registered the change in mood this discussion would bring and would counter: "When I was stationed in India, in that time when I was in all but name a servant of the Caliph-Emperor, the journey to my station was quite extraordinary. With the war with Persia at its height, and my duties there relieved for a time, we found it necessary to travel around, through Arabia. Setting off from Constantinople, we made our way through the mountains of Cappodocia on horses. There were a hundred men, armed, but those passes were the most dangerous in the world, and by the time we had made it through we had been victims of ten bandit raids. Always I was spared - say what you will about the Ottoman threat, diplomatic immunity was respected, even by criminals - but this hindered, as you might imagine, our expedition by a considerable degree. By the time we had arrived in Alep, there were but fifty of us, and though this was not desirable, we did not have to spend as much on the camels, and so much the better, for all my life and whereever I travel, I have seemed to invoke the ire of camels through no fault of my own. On the road to Jerusalem, I had stopped and dismounted mine so that fallen supplies could be redistributed to each steed, and with speed I could not hope to describe it galloped off over the mountains, and trampled over me. I need not describe to you, my friends, how heavy the bones of a camel are, how rough its knees, spiked with horns and hooks as they are, and how hot its hooves! The heat of the Levantine sun reflects so off the ground that those feet are hotter than even a branding iron! So, in essence, in effect, I was buckled, burned, and branded by that beast of the desert. Stupid humpy horses. And if that misfortune was not great enough; my camel was the one carrying the treaty to India, the very same that had that spring been described as the most important in Osman history. There I was: a Frenchman on the Jericho road, surrounded by seventy tired and passionate Arab soldiers who had been promised an end to the war with Persia, burned, ill with shock! Could you think of a misfortune I was yet to suffer? There was no choice - I rested til Jericho and there in that holy city took my trumpet and confessed all. My companion in the leadership, a Turk of noble heritage who spoke French better than me, was forgiving. He assured me that it was no fault of mine, that the blame was to be laid with the evil spirits that have infested that region since the first man. He was acutely aware of their presence. They were the lingering stares of the mountains, the cold deep dark of the caves, the black hooded figures at the back of every bandit raid. There was no path to recover what had been lost to them, except in verbal trickery. We took by night the seedy backroads of Jericho to a house made of canvas and camelskin, and backed by solid rock, and inside were welcomed by a rotting skeleton, a man clinging onto life by some arcane practice. I asked his age, and he didn't know; though from what he remembered in his life, vast and varied, we concluded he must have been a thousand years old - he was young when those lands were the most Christian, and remembered the entrance of Mahometism, and remembered the sacking of Rome by the Saracens, and the triumphant return of the soldiers. This man was not a spirit - a jin - but a representative on our plane. The jin of Arabia have power beyond what can be comprehended, and yet curiously their chosen temples are not stone buildings but the pots and pans of the house. With my skeleton guide, we advanced through the rock to the back of his abode, and to a single spoon lying among the dust.
'For all their power,' he explained, 'they are dim creatures. It shouldn't take much to outwit it, or to please it.'
Advancing to the spoon I dropped to my knees.
'Oh, Jin of Jericho - you have stolen what is mine. A page or two of dusty paper. No use to you. I have come to beg you to return it, for it has deep sentimental value.'
The spoon rattled and fled across the floor. I crawled after it.
'Jin, wise Jin. I beg you.'
The spoon lifted itself off the dusty ground and flew to my face and tapped it. A spoon!
'Jin, wise Jin. If you return these papers to me, I will in gratitude give you back fivefold the paper, and fivefold the ink on them.'
The spoon shook and paused, and looked as though it were interested, and began to start upright.
'Jin, wise Jin. Tenfold! Tenfold the ink and tenfold the paper! It would be so like you to invest in my scheme - something as wise as you would never miss such a chance. You would be the envy of all the paper merchants of the city.'
The spoon grew straighter and longer, until it was fully erect.
'Jin, wise Jin. I was in Acre not last week, and the Jin there... he has raided the reedbanks of the docks, and thinks himself important for owning three pieces of paper! How you will show him!'
The spoon fell to the ground and produced like a bud flowering two pages stained by dust and sand. Leaving the dwelling and the skeletal man behind us, with twenty blank pages for him to appease the spoon spirit, we advanced quickly and without incidence to Ayla, and thence to Aden, and thence to the Indian kingdoms, where now the French have been defeated. This does not mean the end, though, surely, of French ambition. If a spoon, I say, can harbour a spirit so powerful, then why cannot India? And should a spirit so powerful be decieved by wit, and consumed so by false jealousy of its own kind, then why cannot these Indians similarly be consumed? What does a writer think about such a proposal, Marmontel?" and so the talk would fly on from its pillowed rest.
Munchausen was a brilliant ambassador, who seemed to be able to defuse any situation he found himself in. In the red midst of an angry debate on education between Rousseau and Holbech that threatened to disturb the grand house's structure with all the shaking and the shouting, the Comte tapped on his wine glass, and started upon his tale of education on the Elbe, by the local lepers. The shouters became sulkers, and then the sulkers laughed, and then the Comte asked me what I thought of what was then colloquially known as 'the Dutch question' - those same revolutionaries whose cause had, with French support, failed twice before in 1760 and 1768 had risen up again in defiance of the Stadtholder, William V. His position seemed untenable; all around him rebellion and intrigue even with the success he, or his Government, had delivered to the United Provinces. This insurrection, I replied, is clearly the work of some foreign power or else educated nobles in the centre of the Court. There would be no peasants uprising against a king so loved, and especially not thrice in fifteen years.
"The intrigue in the Netherlands puts the spiders of Versailles to shame - this King is a facade for those two men who served as regents in his youth and still serve now, Blieswijk and van Haren - kings in all but name."
"They have capitalised upon their situation, Holbach, and increased the Provinces' power on the continent and in the colonies, and for that they are to be admired and learned from."
"Learned from, perhaps, in this age of cowardice, but never to be admired - tactics as vulgar as swimming calmly behind the wake of a British line-of-battle, and darting beneath to catch the slower fish when all around a tempest was raging. This way might be modern, but there is no pride in it, no honour."
Rousseau was a man who made surprisingly little contribution to the conversation, though whenever he did we all invariably were enlightened. Here, he replied that there was no honour in the ways of war at all - that killing fellow man is vulgar a tactic as could ever be thought to progress your aims. This truth stunted our minds for a while, and in them the moving lines and waves of red and blue across the map became human, or humans - each with thoughts, each with feeling.
Recovering, Marmontel said, "And is it true, that the revolution in the Netherlands is once again financed from Versailles?"
We all had heard these whispers, even I, and I was not subject to half that which these other men where - the Comte and the Baron in particular. I replied that upon hearing the whispers I was sure of misunderstanding. When last involving herself in the political wars and revolutions of the Orangists and Patriots, France had been forced to retreat back to her borders and allow the occupation of Austrian Flanders by the Orangist Government under William V, while at the end of the war they were celebrated for this and recieved compensation for their temporary losses to the hungry French Army: rewarded with four French colonies.
"It is true!" said Holbach, "Right and just - the Netherlands has caused for too long a time too many a problem for France."
"Perhaps so, but is supporting revolutionaries twice defeated within not yet twenty years the appropriate course of action? Especially so close to our own borders in the north, and with the unrest in our provinces there." I said.
"The revolution will succeed, I am confident."
"Does not every revolutionary think theirs will be the one to succeed?"
"I am impartial, my young friend. Think of me as a mountain, impervious to persuasion or bribery. I stand only for the interests of France."
"But you do support the revolution, and for what, and why?"
"The Dutch do not deserve our sympathies - whatever historical bond we shared in mutual contempt of England is long gone - they dart to the whims and wants of Britain like a showhorse through hoops. They present a threat to us now as large as that of Britain and Prussia - their power is projected tenfold through their control of the seas which with Britain is universal - you may be too young to remember the Great War, but I am not, and I remember too their arrogance at the Treaty in Paris."
"The Treaty of Paris was not as great a defeat for France as you suggest. The loss of Canada was without a doubt a loss, and our Indian factories inspire the same feeling and thought, but we remained intact on the Continent and still we held Louisiana, for that time."
"Bah! Louisiana - two thousand miles of mud and grass!"
"You would prefer two thousand miles of snow?"
"Unquestionably - Canadian snow has the remarkable property of being almost half comprised of beaver, otter, ermine, skunk, bear, deer. Louisianan mud, meanwhile, has the remarkable property of washing away every year all viable farmland in the valleys of that river. In any case, it is no matter - that went to Spain for safe-keeping. France is better off away from that accursed place, which has inspired naught but fear. We should leave it to the Americans, who will surely succeed in their plight against tyranny. Let us drink to that."
The wine had inebriated him far quicker than I had guessed based on his size, and he was far past jovialty. He seemed almost angry at the Mississippi, distant and awful though it was, and larger even than him, though why I did not know.
"That reminds me," said the Comte, as though it really had, "of the time I travelled to Louisiana. It was during my time in London, not ten years back, and I was walking with my great friend Hume through the gardens of Hampton Court, which in those times was inhabited by a great tiger. So it was that as we were walking through the ornamental gardens we heard a soft purr from behind us, and as I turned I saw that tiger in front of us. I had dealt with tigers before on my forays through the jungles of India, but for one to materialise in front of us in an English Palace I thought particularly odd.
My friend Hume upon seeing it seized my arm, and did shout so that, miles downriver, the working of London could hear, 'A tiger! A tiger!'
I turned then to my good friend Hume and said, with kindness, 'Must you think and scream like that, my dear friend Hume? Shall we bend like this to the force of irrationality and fear, or should we instead seek sanctity in the arms of Reason?'
The man, Hume, looked at your Comte's face as though it were saying a deeply disagreeable thing, and so I knew he mustn't have understood my musings. The tiger had prowled closer and with skulking shoulders it circled us.
'Really, Hume, what do we see here? We see not a tiger, not a predator, but in fact just this: fangs, white and long, deep and evil eyes, a majestic structure, an awful pattern stretching through its skin, a tail perfectly poised and stretched. The tiger is merely a bundle, a grouping of these qualities. Once you can accept this, you can no longer accept fear - learn to think thus, and you can think much more.'
'Those are wise words, my Lord, though surely you can accept that an aggressive tiger in front of us is cause for fear, for after all is done it ought to eat us, or else his stalking will have been unnecessary.'
'My good friend Hume, we have taught each other many things. Here I must teach you again: it is not for any man to say what ought to be from what is, nor is it possible, and nor even is it desirable. Why, you say this tiger ought to eat us, but perhaps it is merely looking for advice and unsure as to how to approach two such distinguished fellows as you and I.'
At this point, the tiger stopped its approach and stood with such sudden temerity we were quite taken aback, and what that beast of the Orient did next I found most peculiar indeed. The tiger walked towards us and offered his hands - or paws - with an air so princely we considered it an honour to meet him, and then he spoke.
He was not a beast of the Orient, but in fact one of the Occident; born to a shipwrecked Queen of Tigers on the seacoasts of Louisiana, he had set about rallying the native cats so as to launch a party to return to his native Asia, but upon gathering of all the cats of the land he had discovered there were only bobcats, lynxes, cougars and pardine wildcats. He had come to London in order to ask my services, for he needed to persuade the men of New Orleans to assist him in building his ship, and my skills in persuasion were known across continents and oceans. I agreed, of course, and that is how I came to be in Louisiana - surfing across the Atlantic on the back of the Prince of Tigers."
This story seemed to content the Baron, who smiled and appeared to have drifted to sleep. The talk then was quieter, and more dignified, and certainly less charged, though without the loss of charm or interest. Then, with our sweetmeats and pastries consumed, we each took leave of the chateau one by one.