It was a mistake to mention this, for now Rossignol's eyes drifted from Eliza's face down to her left breast. Earlier she had wrapped herself in a sheet, but this had slipped down as she wrestled with him.
"The de la Vegas invited me to visit them at the beeswax-warehouse where they were lodging."
Rossignol scoffed, and rolled his eyes.
"It would have seemed a very odd invitation to my ears before I had gotten to know Lyon," Eliza admitted, "but when I reached the place, I found it to be perfectly congenial. It is on a meadow that rises up above the Rhône to the east of the trading district. They have more land than they need, and let it out to an adjacent vineyard. The growing season was over and so the vines were not much to look at, but the weather was fine, and we sat under a bower on the terrace of this stone building full of wax and drank Russian tea sweetened with Lithuanian honey. The daughters of the wax-magnate played with Jean-Jacques and sang him nursery-rhymes in Yiddish.
"To Samuel and Abraham de la Vega and Jacob Gold, I said that Lyon struck me as a very strange town."
"I could have told you that, mademoiselle," said Rossignol.
"But you and I think it is strange for different reasons, Bon-bon," said Eliza. "Listen, and let me explain."
"What of these Jews? What did they think?"
"They felt likewise, but had been reluctant to say anything. And so what I was trying to do, Bon-bon, was to get them talking."
"And so were these Jews responsive to your gambit, mademoiselle?" Rossignol asked.
"You are impossible," Eliza said.
SAMUEL DE LA VEGA, at twenty-four, was the senior man present—for the elders of the clan had more important things to do. He shrugged and said: "We are here to learn. Please say more."
"I phant'sied you were here to make money," Eliza said.
"That is always the object in the long run. Whether we make a profit on this matter of the timber remains to be seen; but we have heard of this place and want to know more of its peculiarities."
Eliza laughed. "Why should I say more, when you have said so much? You come here not knowing whether it is possible to make money. It is a place you have heard of, which is no great testimony to its importance, and you approach it as a sort of curiosity. Would you speak thus of Antwerp?"
"Let me explain," Samuel said. "In our family we do not recognize a profit—we do not put it on the books—until we have a bill of exchange payable in Amsterdam or (now) London, drawn on a house that maintains a well-reputed agency in one or both of those cities."
"To put it succinctly: hard money," Eliza said.
"If you will. Now, as we rode down here with Jacob Gold, he told us of the system in Lyon, and how it works."
Jacob Gold looked so nervous, now, that Eliza felt she must make some little joke to put him at ease. "If only I could have eavesdropped on you!" she exclaimed. "For yesterday at dinner at the home of Monsieur Castan, I was treated to a description of that same system—a description so flattering that I asked him why it was not used everywhere else."
They found this amusing. "What was Monsieur Castan's reaction to that?" asked Jacob Gold.
"Oh, that other places were cold, distrustful, that the people there did not know one another so well as they did in Lyon, had not built up the same web of trust and old relationships. That they were afflicted by a petty, literal-minded obsession with specie, and could not believe that real business was being transacted unless they saw coins being physically moved from place to place."
The others looked relieved; for they knew, now, that they would not have to break this news to Eliza. "So you are aware that when accounts are settled in Lyon, it is all done on the books. A man seated at a banca will write in his book, ‘Signore Capponi owes me 10,000 ecus au soleil'—a currency that is used only in Lyon, by the way—and this, to him, is as good as having bullion in his lock-box. Then when the next fair comes around, perhaps he finds himself needing to transfer 15,000 ecus to Signore Capponi, and so he will strike that entry from his ledger, and Signore Capponi will write that he is owed 5,000 ecus by this chap, and so on."
"Some money must change hands though!" insisted Abraham, who had heard all of this before but still could not quite bring himself to believe it. He was fourteen years old.
"Yes—a tiny amount," said Jacob Gold. "But only after they have exhausted every conceivable way of settling it on paper, by arranging multilateral transfers among the different houses."
"Wouldn't it be simpler just to use money?" Abraham asked doggedly.
"Perhaps—if they had any!" Eliza said. Which was meant as a jest, but it stilled them for a few moments.
"Why don't they?" Abraham demanded.
"It depends on whom you ask," Eliza said. "The most common answer is that they do not need it because the system works so smoothly. Others will tell you that when any bullion does become available here, it is immediately smuggled out to Geneva."
"Why?"
"In Geneva are banks that, in exchange for bullion, will write you a bill of exchange payable in Amsterdam."
Abraham's eyes blossomed. "So we are not the only ones who are worried about how to extract hard money profits from Lyon!"
"Of course not! For that, we are competing against every other foreign merchant in Lyon who does not share the belief, common here, that entries in a ledger are the same as money," said Samuel.
"What kind of person would believe such a thing, though?" Abraham asked.
Jacob Gold answered, "The kinds of people who have been here for so long and who make a comfortable living off of those ledgers."
Eliza said, "But the only reason this system works is that these people know and trust each other so well. Which is fine for them. But if you are on the outside, as we are, you can't take part in the Dépôt, as this system is called, and it is difficult to realize profits."
Jacob Gold added, "It is fine for those who have the houses here, the land, the servants. They transact an enormous amount of business and they find ways to live well. The lack of hard money is only felt when one wants to cash out and move somewhere else. But if that is the kind of person you are—"
"Then you don't live in Lyon and you are not a member of the Dépôt," Eliza said.
"We can talk about this all day, going in circles like the Uroburos," said Samuel, clapping his hands, "but the fact is that we're here and we want to buy some timber for the King. And we don't have any money. But we have credit from Monsieur Castan who in turn has credit because he lives here and is very much a member of the Dépôt."
"Thank you, Samuel," Eliza said. "You are correct: people trust Monsieur Castan; when one of the other members of this Dépôt writes in his ledger ‘M. Castan owes me such-and-such number of ecus,' to them that's as good as gold. And what we need to do is turn that ‘gold' into some timber arriving at Nantes."
"Thanks to Monsieur Wachsmann," said Jacob Gold, referring to our host, "we have some ideas as to where we might go and make inquiries about who has timber, and might be willing to sell it to us; but how do we actually transfer the money to them from the King's Treasury?"