and hydraulic engineer. He was on intimate terms with Inigo Jones..."
Fine rain had begun to fall. She took from her bag a collapsible umbrella, pointed it like an épée, and pressed a button; the umbrella opened as it lengthened. Pierce held it over the two of them, for she hardly reached his shoulder. She told him how de Caus had blasted away the mountain with gunpowder to level it for his gardens, how he constructed grottoes where musical fountains played, and a water organ based on a design in Vitruvius, and a statue of Memnon that sang when the sun struck it, “as in the classical story,” which Pierce couldn't remember.
Nothing of what she described—geometrical beds, obelisks, an airy palace, a maze, another maze—could now be seen; only a mossy and almost illegible river god at the entrance to a grotto. A cave. Empty. The dumpling-shaped tourist with umbrella and walking shoes who had reminded him of Dame Frances stared with him into the dark echoey silence, and withdrew.
It was a ruin, more even than a ruin, a quasi-natural object, vine grown and shapeless, devolving from its status as a work of hands and minds to a complex lump of stone, disorganizing every day a little further in the entropy of hope and desire, which proceeds only one way. What had destroyed it? Lightning, said the guidebook, striking not once but twice, and a dynastic dispute with a French king in the following century. But Dame Frances said it was the two of them, Frederick and his Elizabeth, the might-be-happy couple blessed by Shakespeare's ambivalent mage. The two who in 1619 reigned for a winter as king and queen of Bohemia, a reign as brief and illusory as a masque: and who brought down upon their magic kingdom on the Rhine the tercios and the pikemen and the musketeers and the sappers and the end of everything.
7
She called him Celadon, after the shepherd-knight in d'Urfé's L'Astrée , that vastly popular romance about the Golden Age and the return of Astræa, goddess of Justice and Peace, ears of corn wound in her hair. Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna . He wrote his love letters to her in French; she never learned German. The marriage had been the work of the nobleman Christian of Anhalt, a ferocious little man with wild red hair, tireless bearer of a heavy destiny (so he believed), and the counselor closest to Frederick. Frederick called him Mon père .
Anhalt was there to receive the Princess Palatine when she first arrived at Oppenheim in the Palatinate, and he brought her to Heidelberg, her new seat, by means of a series of masques and processions designed by wise workers to assure her and her spouse's health, happiness, and success, drawing down upon them the best astral and divine influences by the right arrangement of signs, persons, geometries, and words. She passed through arches covered with roses, with images of Church Fathers, Ancestors, Deities. A pretty boy gave her a basket of fruit in the name of Flora and Pomona—Spring and then Autumn, flower and then fruit—for Fertility; and she ate hungrily, and everyone laughed and rejoiced in her. Her husband came out to meet her in a wagon made like Jason's ship, sailing with the Argonauts to recover the Golden Fleece. Music, in Venus's mode (the Hypolydian) and generous Jupiter's (the Lydian) and smiling Sol's (the Dorian), but not the melancholic Hypodorian; there would be time enough for Saturnine music later.
She brought with her a troupe of English actors, for she loved plays and shows and let's-pretend above all things. They performed old plays and new, Love's Labour's Lost and Love's Labour's Won, The Merrie Divil of Edmonton, A Game at Chesse , which mocked the Spanish. Her Celadon delighted to see her laugh, delighted to see her delighted, and if plays delighted her there would be plays. No matter that his family was not only Calvinist but fiercely Calvinist: his father had once held up a consecrated host before the congregation and ripped it
Fine rain had begun to fall. She took from her bag a collapsible umbrella, pointed it like an épée, and pressed a button; the umbrella opened as it lengthened. Pierce held it over the two of them, for she hardly reached his shoulder. She told him how de Caus had blasted away the mountain with gunpowder to level it for his gardens, how he constructed grottoes where musical fountains played, and a water organ based on a design in Vitruvius, and a statue of Memnon that sang when the sun struck it, “as in the classical story,” which Pierce couldn't remember.
Nothing of what she described—geometrical beds, obelisks, an airy palace, a maze, another maze—could now be seen; only a mossy and almost illegible river god at the entrance to a grotto. A cave. Empty. The dumpling-shaped tourist with umbrella and walking shoes who had reminded him of Dame Frances stared with him into the dark echoey silence, and withdrew.
It was a ruin, more even than a ruin, a quasi-natural object, vine grown and shapeless, devolving from its status as a work of hands and minds to a complex lump of stone, disorganizing every day a little further in the entropy of hope and desire, which proceeds only one way. What had destroyed it? Lightning, said the guidebook, striking not once but twice, and a dynastic dispute with a French king in the following century. But Dame Frances said it was the two of them, Frederick and his Elizabeth, the might-be-happy couple blessed by Shakespeare's ambivalent mage. The two who in 1619 reigned for a winter as king and queen of Bohemia, a reign as brief and illusory as a masque: and who brought down upon their magic kingdom on the Rhine the tercios and the pikemen and the musketeers and the sappers and the end of everything.
7
She called him Celadon, after the shepherd-knight in d'Urfé's L'Astrée , that vastly popular romance about the Golden Age and the return of Astræa, goddess of Justice and Peace, ears of corn wound in her hair. Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna . He wrote his love letters to her in French; she never learned German. The marriage had been the work of the nobleman Christian of Anhalt, a ferocious little man with wild red hair, tireless bearer of a heavy destiny (so he believed), and the counselor closest to Frederick. Frederick called him Mon père .
Anhalt was there to receive the Princess Palatine when she first arrived at Oppenheim in the Palatinate, and he brought her to Heidelberg, her new seat, by means of a series of masques and processions designed by wise workers to assure her and her spouse's health, happiness, and success, drawing down upon them the best astral and divine influences by the right arrangement of signs, persons, geometries, and words. She passed through arches covered with roses, with images of Church Fathers, Ancestors, Deities. A pretty boy gave her a basket of fruit in the name of Flora and Pomona—Spring and then Autumn, flower and then fruit—for Fertility; and she ate hungrily, and everyone laughed and rejoiced in her. Her husband came out to meet her in a wagon made like Jason's ship, sailing with the Argonauts to recover the Golden Fleece. Music, in Venus's mode (the Hypolydian) and generous Jupiter's (the Lydian) and smiling Sol's (the Dorian), but not the melancholic Hypodorian; there would be time enough for Saturnine music later.
She brought with her a troupe of English actors, for she loved plays and shows and let's-pretend above all things. They performed old plays and new, Love's Labour's Lost and Love's Labour's Won, The Merrie Divil of Edmonton, A Game at Chesse , which mocked the Spanish. Her Celadon delighted to see her laugh, delighted to see her delighted, and if plays delighted her there would be plays. No matter that his family was not only Calvinist but fiercely Calvinist: his father had once held up a consecrated host before the congregation and ripped it
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