Eliza
MARCH 1694
Monsieur,
A man of your erudition, a scholar as well as a nobleman, must know that the office of contrôleur-général comes with certain perquisites. If you have been slow to avail yourself of the same, it is not out of ignorance, but because your only thought is to be of service to the Most Christian King. I have long noted, but never mentioned this, for it was obvious that you were satisfied. But the latest letters from my friends in France are of a very grim cast, which has caused me to wonder whether you have, as you lay in bed in the dark hours of the night, regretted that you had not been more forward in looking after your own interests during those early years when France's prosperity was the envy of the world, and her credit as good as gold.
I would be remiss if I did not let you know of a certain opportunity. As you know, France has since ancient times owed money to any number of different creditors at any given time. Part of the job of the contrôleur-général is to see that these obligations are discharged by assigning them to sources of revenue; for example, if France owes such-and-such number of livres to Signore Fiorentino, the contrôleur-général might go to some French count and say, "This year, when you collect the taxes on your lands, send the proceeds to Signore Fiorentino, as we owe him a debt." A consequence of this is that not all French government debts are of equal value; for if the count, in the example above, was honnête, his lands bountiful, and the weather good, why, Signore Fiorentino would be repaid promptly and in full, while some other creditor, whose loan had been assigned to a less reliable source of revenue, might come up short-handed. It is this variability that makes the work of the contrôleur-général so endlessly absorbing. Not to mention profitable; for nothing in law or custom prevents the contrôleur-général himself from purchasing some loans that have gone bad, and then re-assigning them to more reliable sources of revenue, so that they are suddenly worth more. It is a perquisite of the office, and no one would give it a second thought if you were to avail yourself of it.
As it happens, for several years I have been purchasing underperforming loans from diverse petty nobles who did their parts to be of service to the King when the present war broke out. The total number of such transactions now numbers in the hundreds. The principals of all of these loans, summed, come to rather more than half a million livres, though I acquired them for less than a quarter of that amount. I will now sell them to you, Monsieur, for just what I paid for them, plus a soupçon of five percent. If, as I suspect, you lack the liquid assets necessary to close such a transaction, I will accept your word as a nobleman, and not think of being repaid until after you have had the leisure to plumb all of these obligations into adequate sources of revenue. Once you have accomplished that, you should be able to see that each of these loans is repaid in full, which means that you could in theory get back quadruple what you shall owe me.
No gratitude is expected, or desired; my only wish, as ever, is to be of service.
Eliza, duchesse d'Arcachon My lady,
APRIL 1694
My lady,
I hope this finds you on a tidy and well-skippered Zille halfway up the Elbe. Please forgive me for the intemperate remarks contained in my previous letter. The situation in all places has become so bizarre, so suddenly, that I know not what to make of it. Half of London—the better half—is said to have been abandoned. Because there is no silver, Persons of Quality have no means of conveying rents from their lands in the country, to town; so they have no choice but to board up their town-houses and move to the country, where they can live on barter. It seems the worst possible moment for the Whigs to have taken power, and to have put in the Marquis of Ravenscar at the Exchequer; but perhaps it is the case that he, like you, perceives some opportunity where others see only confusion, and has chosen this moment to strike.
To business. You asked for the latest on the Esphahnians. I will tell you what I know.
You'll recall that after the severed head of your father-in-law turned up at his own birthday party on the evening of 14 October 1690, we heard little that was of any use on this channel for several years. Vrej Esphahnian had contrived to get a letter out from Egypt a few days before the duc d'Arcachon's demise, and several months later he posted a brief note from Mocha in which he directed his family not to make any effort to reply, as he could not predict where the currents of trade would next take him.
In the meantime I had not been idle. It was clear to me that the Esphahnians used some form of steganography in their letters, but I could not make out how they did it. The family was scattered among several hovels, entresols, and prisons around Paris. I hired thieves to rifle through their possessions, and at length found some letters that Vrej had sent to them from Spain and Barbary beginning in 1685. In the margins and interlinear spaces of these, I saw an inscription writ in letters of vermilion. It was plain enough that this was some sort of invisible ink, which had been made visible by some secret art known to the Esphahnians. By reading these, I was able to learn more of Vrej's story.
He had been sent to Spain early in 1685 to establish a family trading circuit there. But he had been taken by the Barbary Corsairs and enslaved. Yet his owner soon recognized that he had talents beyond pulling oars, and put him to work in a port city near Morocco, whence he was able to correspond with his family. From them, he learned of the disaster that had befallen the Paris Esphahnians after they had made the mistake of sub-letting their entresol to Jack Shaftoe. By this time they had been released from the Bastille, but one of them had died in prison, and their business was of course destroyed, so that in coming years many would drift in and out of debtors' prisons.
In 1688 Vrej's owner traded him to Algiers. There he became acquainted with another literate slave, a Jew of great intelligence, and over the course of several conversations with this Jew learned that Jack Shaftoe was still alive, as a galley-slave in the same city. During the winter of 1688–89, Vrej wrote to his family in Paris apprising them of this and proposing to find Jack and cut his throat, or arrange for it to be done, as revenge. Of course I do not have a copy of what was sent back in response; but it is easy enough to infer, from what Vrej wrote in his next letter, that older and wiser heads in Paris had prevailed. Jack Shaftoe was looked on as a sort of madman, a victim of possession, not responsible for his actions (though Vrej questions this, and suspects it is all an act), and no advantage to the family, temporal or spiritual, is seen in killing the poor man. Rather, it is suggested that Vrej seek some advantage in his dealings with the Jew.