I hope that I do not sound callous, but these are the facts of the matter. It is not as bad as it sounds. They are in the Hague. They will be safe there from the atrocities being committed against Germans by the army of Louvois. More dazzling cities exist, but the Hague is perfectly serviceable, and a great improvement over the rabbit-hutch in the Thuringer Wald where, according to gossip, Eleanor and Caroline have been holed up for the last few years. Best of all, as long as they remain in the Hague, Princess Caroline is being exposed to you, Eliza, and learning how to be a great woman. Whatever may befall Eleanor at the hands of those two redoubtable match-makers, Sophie and Sophie Charlotte, Caroline will, I believe, learn from you and from them how to manage her affairs in such a way that, when she reaches a marriageable age, she shall be able to choose whatever Prince and whatever Realm are most suitable to her. And this will provide comfort to Eleanor in her old age.
As for Sophie, she will never be satisfied with Germany alone-her uncle was King of England and she would be its Queen. Did you know she speaks perfect English? So here I am, far away from home, trying to track down every last one of her husband’s ancestors among the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Ah, Venice! Every day I get down on my knees and thank God that Sophie and Ernst August are not descended from people who lived in some place like Lipova.
At any rate, I hope you, Eleanor, Caroline, and, God willing, your baby are all well, and being looked after by officious Dutch nurses. Do write as soon as you feel up to it.
Leibniz
P.S. I am so annoyed by Newton’s mystical approach to force that I am developing a new discipline to study that subject alone. I am thinking of calling it “dynamics,” which derives from the Greek word for force-what do you think of the name? For I may know Greek backwards and forwards, but you have taste.
Dear Doctor,
“Dynamics” makes me think not only of force, but of Dynasties, which use forces, frequently concealed, to maintain themselves-as the Sun uses forces of a mysterious nature to make the planets pay court to him. So I think that the name has a good ring to it, especially since you are becoming such an expert on Dynasties new and old, and are so adept at balancing great forces against each other. And insofar as words are names for things, and naming gives a kind of power to the namer, then you are very clever to make your objections to Newton’s work a part of the very name of your new discipline. I would only warn you that the frontier between “ingenious” (which is held to be a good quality) and “clever” (which is looked at a-skance) is as ill-defined as most of the boundaries in Christendom are today. Englishmen are particularly distrustful of cleverness, which is odd, because they are so clever, and they are wont to draw the boundary in such a way as to encompass all the works of Newton (or any other Englishman) in the country called “ingenious” while leaving you exiled to “clever.” And the English must be attended to because they seem to be drawing all the maps. Huygens went to be among the Royal Society because he felt it was the only place in the world (outside of whatever room you happen to be in) where he could have a conversation that would not bore him to death. And despite the never-ending abuse from Mr. Hooke, he never wants to leave.
I have been slow to write about myself. This is partly because the very existence of this letter proves, well enough, that I live. But it is also because I can hardly bring myself to write about the baby-may God have mercy on his little soul. For by now, he is with the angels in Heaven.
After several false starts my labor began in the evening of the 27th of June, which I think was extremely late-certainly I felt as if I had been pregnant for two years! It was early the next morning that my bag of waters broke and poured out like a flood from a broken dam.*Now things became very busy at the Binnenhof as the apparatus of labor and delivery swung into action. Doctors, nurses, midwives, and clergy were summoned, and every gossip within a radius of five miles went to the highest state of alert.
As you have guessed, the incredibly tedious descriptions of labors and deliveries that follow are nothing but the vessel for this encrypted message. But you should read them anyway because it took me several drafts and a gallon of ink to put into words one one-hundredth of the agony, the endless rioting in my viscera as my body tried to rip itself open. Imagine swallowing a melon-seed, feeling it grow in your belly to full size, and then trying to vomit it up through the same small orifice. Thank God the baby is finally out. But pray for God to help me, for I love him.
Yes, I say “love,” not “loved.” Contrary to what is written in the unencrypted text, the baby lives. But I get ahead of myself.
For reasons that will shortly become obvious, you must destroy this letter.
That is, if I don’t destroy it first by dissolving the words with my tears. Sorry about the unsightly blotching.
To the Dutch and the English, I am the Duchess of Qwghlm. To the French, I am the Countess de la Zeur. But neither a Protestant Duchess nor a French Countess can get away with bearing and rearing a child out of wedlock.
My pregnancy I was able to conceal from all but a few, for once I began to show, I ventured out in public only rarely. For the most part I confined myself to the upper storys of the house of Huygens. So it has been a tedious spring and summer. The Princesses of Ansbach, Eleanor and Caroline, have been staying as honored guests of the Prince of Orange at the Binnenhof, which as you know is separated from the Huygens house by only a short distance. Almost every day they strolled across the square to pay a call on me. Or rather Eleanor strolled, and Caroline sprinted ahead. To give a curious six-year-old the run of such a place, cluttered as it is with Huygens’s clocks, pendulums, lenses, prisms, and other apparatus, is a joy for the little one and a deadly trial for all adults within the sound of her voice. For she can ask a hundred questions about even the least interesting relic that she digs up from some corner. Eleanor, who knows practically nothing of Natural Philosophy, quickly wearied of saying “I don’t know” over and over again, and became reluctant to visit the place. But I had nothing better to do with my time as the baby grew, and was hungry for their company, and so attended closely to Caroline and tried as best I could to give some answer to every one of her questions. Perceiving this, Eleanor got in the habit of withdrawing to a sunny corner to do embroidery or write a letter. Sometimes she would leave Caroline with me and go out riding or attend a soiree. So the arrangement worked out well for all three of us. You mentioned to me, Doctor, that the late Margrave John Frederick, Caroline’s father, had a passion for Natural Philosophy and Technologickal Arts. I can now assure you that Caroline has inherited this trait; or perhaps she has dim memories of her father showing off his fossil collection or his latest pendulum-clock, and so feels some communion with his departed soul when I show her the wonders of Huygens’s house. If so it is a tale that will seem familiar to you, who knew your father only by exploring his library.
Thus Eliza and Caroline. But too Eliza and Eleanor have been talking, late at night, when Caroline is asleep in her bedchamber in the Binnenhof. We have been talking about Dynamics. Not the dynamics of rolling balls on inclined planes, but the dynamics of royal and noble families. She and I are both a little bit like mice scurrying around on a bowling-green, trying not to be crushed by the rolling and colliding balls. We must understand dynamics in order to survive.