Orrery

In the mean time I have another trouble to give you, if you will oblige me in it; and that is to get me a sight of the famous Orrery, which I have heard you and others so often speak of; and which I think was made by Mr. Rowley, the famous Mathematical Instrument-Maker.

To conclude; the Candor and Forgiveness of the Reader is here entreated for Errors or Imperfections he possibly may discover in the following pages, as they are the production of one, whose engagements in business will admit but a small portion of time for an endeavor to explain the most conspicuous, and interesting phenomena of the Heavenly Bodies, by his new portable Orrey.

To which his answer was: why, that God is eternal motion, Lacy. This is his first orrery.

Ethelmer for a split second is gazing straight up into her nostrils, one of which now flares into pink illumination as Pitt’s Taper sets alight the central Lanthorn of the Orrery, representing the Sun. The other Planets wait, all but humming, taut within their spidery Linkages back to the Crank-Shaft and the Crank, held in the didactic Grasp of the Revd Cherrycoke.

This book is the result of fourteen thousand miles in the saddle and four years in the library. It describes the lives of the inhabitants of France – wherever possible, through their own eyes – and the exploration and colonization of their land by foreigners and natives, from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth. It follows a roughly chronological route, from the end of the reign of Louis XIV to the outbreak of the First World War, with occasional detours through pre-Roman Gaul and present-day France. Part One describes the populations of France, their languages, beliefs and daily lives, their travels and discoveries, and the other creatures with whom they shared the land. In Part Two, the land is mapped, colonized by rulers and tourists, refashioned politically and physically, and turned into a modern state. The difference between the two parts, broadly speaking, is the difference between ethnology and history: the world that was always the same and the world that was always changing. I have tried to give a sense of the orrery of disparate, concurrent spheres, to show a land in which mule trains coincided with railway trains, and where witches and explorers were still gainfully employed when Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris.