Jeux de Partie Partisan
C’est tout amusement et jeux jusqu’à ce que quelqu’un perde un architecte. (It’s all fun and games until someone loses an architect.)
Or so my new character, Marie-Veronique Gabrielle Thaïs, the Marquise de Bois du Grenouille Chantant, wrote to her contact in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Special Services Section.
Our Sunday gaming group recently finished up “The Red Hand of Doom,” and our GM of the past 2 years or so is taking a break. In the mean time, we’re playing a Seven Seas campaign, in which my character and another player’s are a seventeenth century French-analogue Mr. and Mrs. Smith. (Both of them appear to be charming, ornamental, and so lacking in intellect that the two of them together could not fill a demitasse spoon with gray matter.) For reasons I can’t begin to explain, I cannot help but channel a bit of Edina Monsoon into the Marquise.
So far, it’s been more Get Smart than Scarlet Pimpernel.
The game is set in an Italy-analogue, where the Marquis and Marquise have been sent on a minor diplomatic posting. They have rented a modest palazzo in a tasteful-but-fashionable quarter, and moved in a large amount of heirloom furniture, matching, monogrammed luggage, a small army of servants, and a very small, yappy dog. The Marquise’s cousin is the main diplomatic representative in the area, and it was he who invited them to their first official function.
In honor of the occasion, the Marquis permitted his wife to wear more lace than he himself had donned.
One of the prominent Italian-analogue aristocratic families was having a soirée to celebrate the opening of a new temple that they had sponsored. Said edifice was built by one of the most talented and fashionable architects of the day. Coincidentally enough, a very similar party was being given by a very similar host for very similar reasons, right across the piazza.
Quel rivalité!
Naturally, the only diplomatic course was to circulate through both parties, so as to avoid a show of favoritism. Unfortunately, the evening only got more gauche as it progressed. The hostess of one of the parties, who had recently been sculpted by the very same architect who had designed her family’s temple, was mortally insulted by her thoroughly unrefined intended…an individual who had previously mistaken the Marquise for his own fiancée. Having had the dubious pleasure of his acquaintance, the Marquise was quite willing to feign ignorance as to the hostess’s true whereabouts, despite the fact that she had been conversing with the young lady mere moments before.
The Marquis, oddly enough, was also mistaken for another individual, and was able to avoid both a duel and the unfortunate effects of the accuser’s overindulgence. Trés interessant, eh? One wonders if it could possibly be a coincidence.
As the hour grew later, unabashed displays conspicuous consumption (although, one must say, delightful and lavish ones ) and curious confusion descended into undisguised brutality when a band of hired ruffians crashed one of the parties, seized the architect, and stuffed him into a nondescript waiting carriage. During the upheaval, the Marquis valiantly defended—well, himself, mostly,—with a degree of skilled swordplay that one would not normally expect from a gentleman of his reputation. This did not escape the Marquise’s notice, either, though she has chosen not to comment for now. Furthermore, she was fortunate enough to have her contributions to the melée pass unobserved. (A gentlemen may indeed be lucky in a swordfight on occasion, but how often is a petite, ineffectual lady so favored by fortune as to fling a large, heavy, ornamental urn with deadly accuracy?)
And so, we have an unsolved kidnapping, blood on the floor, fuel on the fire of an already-bitter rivalry, the displeasure of at least one ecclesiastical Eminence, and the unfortunate loss of the Marquis’s fine linen shirt, which I am sad to report did not survive the brawl.
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