King Louis XIV of France had found it convenient to make Eliza a Countess. Among other privileges, this had granted her admittance to the Salon of Diana in the royal château at Versailles. There she had noticed this bored and lonesome man studying her. She had been every bit as bored. As it had turned out, they had been bored for the same reason: They both knew the odds of these games, and saw little point in staking money on them. But to talk about the odds, and to speculate as to ways of systematically beating such games, was absorbing. It had seemed unwise, or at least impolite, to hold such conversations around the gaming-tables, and so Eliza and Rossignol had strolled in the gardens, and had moved quickly from the odds of card-games to more elevated talk of Leibniz, Newton, Huygens, and other Natural Philosophers. Of course they had been noticed by gossips looking out the windows; but those foolish Court girls, who mistook fashion for taste, had not considered Rossignol desirable, had not understood that he was a genius, unrecognized as such by the savants of Europe.