Oyonnax, in a strangely girlish gesture, put a gloved hand to her lips, suppressing a laugh. "You still do not understand. Versailles is like this window." She swept her arm out, directing Eliza’s eye to a scene in stained glass. "Beautiful, but thin, and brittle." She opened the casement below to reveal the street beyond: a wood-carrier, looking like a wild man, had dropped his load to have a fist-fight with a young Vagabond who had taken offense because the wood-carrier had bumped into a whore that the Vagabond was escorting into an alley. A man blinded by smallpox was squatting against a wall releasing a bloody phlux from his bowels. "Beneath the lovely glaze, a sea of desperation. When people are desperate, and praying to God has failed, they begin to look elsewhere. The famous Satanists that Maintenon is so worried about wouldn’t recognize the Prince of Darkness if they went down to Hell and held a candle at his levée! Those necromancers are just like the mountebanks on the Pont-Neuf. You can’t make a living as a mountebank by offering to trim people’s fingernails, because the clientele is not desperate enough. But you can make a living as a tooth-puller. Have you ever had a tooth go bad, mademoiselle?"