The Hypogean Forum

Exchange the Seventh, in the matter of the wager held by Miss Olivia, and — I regret to inform the commons — very probably the last.

Sir,

I confess I have prepared this exchange five times. The first four were magnificent. I have burned them, which, for a man of my professional history, you will appreciate is very nearly a moral act.

The proposition before us these seven seasons has been: is a thing true that is not real? I affirmed it, and I affirmed it by the crudest method available, which is that I am the evidence. I made a preface for a book that never was, and men wept over it, and their weeping was not counterfeit merely because my paper was. You answered that a thing which is not real cannot be true, only useful, and that I had mistaken the warmth of a fire for the honesty of the man who set it.

Here is my seventh. It is not an epigram, and I should like the room to notice that I am not reaching for one.

You were right.

Not about the proposition. You were nowhere near the proposition and have not been since March. You have been arguing a different and better question for four months and neither of us noticed. You have been arguing that a made thing requires a witness who knows it was made and stays anyway. That is not the same claim. That is a claim about a person, and I did not want it to be about a person, because I have arranged my entire life so that nothing ever has to be.

You stayed. You knew about the preface before the accusation — I have understood this for some weeks and have been unable to say it in any register I own — you knew, and you posted the accusation regardless, in public, in that ridiculous voice of yours, and then wrote to me privately the same evening about a cat.

I decline the seventh exchange. I do not concede it. I decline it. There is a difference and I intend to be insufferable about it for years.

One would settle, at present, for being read correctly by one person. I appear to have managed it, and I am not at all sure that I like it.

Dearest Jesse,

No — no, wait, you cannot simply—

Forgive me. I shall begin again, properly, as I was taught, and as I have insisted upon these seven seasons in the face of a great deal of encouragement to do otherwise.

Regarding the matter of the Seventh. I had mine written. It ran to nine hundred words and contained, I am not ashamed to say, an extended figure comparing your prefaces to the false relics of the medieval trade, in which I was to concede at the last that a false relic still gets a man upon his knees, and that I have never once cared what was in the box. It was the best thing I have written in this Principality. I have set it aside, and it will not now be posted, and I find that I mind this a great deal less than I should have told you yesterday.

As for what I did witness: I knew. Hence the accusation, and hence its being public. A thing pronounced in the dark is a rumor and a thing pronounced in the light is an occasion, and I wished you to have an occasion. You were owed a trial. This room does not give trials, it gives whispering, and I would not have you whispered about.

Concerning the cat. Her name is Perpetua, she is eldest of the five, she was unwell that week, and you were the only person in the Principality I could think of to tell. I did not consider it a stratagem. I keep a tracker of my schemes and I have this evening gone and looked, and you are not in it, and you have never been in it, and I am obliged to conclude that I have been a friend to you by accident for the better part of a year.

You decline the exchange. Very well. I decline to concede it. Let the record show that two men refused the same fight and called it a draw, that neither has said the plain thing, and that I am not going to say it now, in front of the Eparch and the census.

Slugabed. Answer your correspondence.

RULING OF THE HOLDER OF THE WAGER.

Seven exchanges were promised. Six were fought. The Seventh has been declined by both parties in successive posts, in prose so nearly identical in structure that had either of you shown me these anonymously I could not have told you which was which — and I have been footnoting the pair of you since March.

The wager is void. Not forfeit. Void. There is nothing to award because there was nothing at stake, and there has been nothing at stake since roughly the Third, at which point this stopped being a duel and became a correspondence conducted in front of witnesses, for reasons that are frankly none of my business and have been my entire business for five months.

Footnote, and then I am going to bed.

Jesse burned four drafts. Jules set aside nine hundred words containing his best figure. Between them they have destroyed more prose this week than the Silentiarios has expunged all year, and they did it for the same reason: the good version would have won, and winning had become the wrong shape.

I have spent three years arguing that rigor is a form of love, and being told it is a form of avoidance. I withdraw nothing. I do note that the two most rigorous men on this site have just spent seven seasons proving my thesis at me while I sat here taking minutes.

Citation or it didn't happen. Consider it cited.

The jar goes back on the shelf and it stays there. I give it four months. When one of you starts something over a dead poet or a mislabelled folio, I will be here, with the jar, saying I told you so in a considerably better register than cassandra_complex manages.