MCristo by LaceW: Monte-Cristan Characters

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Monte-Cristan Characters

(last update: O1.08."14)

These four ladies are, albeit the fact is not of common knowledge, among the POPP's 366 wives-cum-secret agents.

First an Aristocrat, the 'Top Centerfold' of the SPIDER web.

An experimented
and efficient 'Centerfold': Proserpine d'Orque, with great curiosity about all things related to the sea.

A 'bunny'.

A young novice:
in mission would
appear as the
'maidservant'
of a wife with
experience.

- - - - -

This one... currently the best field Agent of the Web, and probably the most dangerous woman alive. Very, very few were authorized to survive the discovery of her true nature...

"Satan l'habite!"

And then, there is the mysterious "Aunt" Sally (Isabelle de Frissac) though she is probably retired, by now: she was active when Louys was young...

The Leap Years Wife, with a propitious calendar, can be continuously absent from Monte-

Cristo for up to four years. This designates her for very special missions, and appropriately the current one is a *very, very special* person. No accurate portrait of her will be published here, for her security -she is presently 'immersed' within an extremely dangerous, uncannily perceptive odd bunch, bizarre in several aspects. Besides, she shows a curious revulsion to be portrayed.
Not a Monte-Cristan by birth, she once confided she came first to discover the Presipality after been told by an old Gypsy woman that the Gardes de l'Etrier there still knew in full (and sang) the mysterious, almost one-thousand-year-old Brueder Woelfe epic song.

She and Mouillenbese Clito, veuve Poignet, the Archiviste en Second of the Presipapal Private Library, are very close friends sharing uncommon main interests. Not surprisingly thus, she volunteered to go and investigate at their very sources the crazy rumors of 'weird' encounters in two areas of Eastern Europe. To her, and to the strike team who joined her

later, the help of the Gypsies was invaluable. After a short halt at Schloss Falkenstein to renew old contacts she, leaving to her junior colleagues the 'inquiry' there, followed the trail (a 'chaude piste' she called it) South, South-East (?) -toward the general area traditionally associated with Anculathor {'et a travers'} the Impaler: whether she is currently strictly carrying on her initial mission, turned it into some 'seek and destroy' errand or is acting on her own initiative undertaking a totally new self-assigned task, is unclear. Louys is not worried - it would not be the first time she would follow her own agenda, always beneficial to the Presipality in the end, and she is a terrific chess player, preparing a totally unexpected checkmate with a foultitude (or is it a tetrachiee?) of convoluted moves, as if time did not matter for her.
(Unexpectedly, she reappeared at the Presipapal Palace a single night during the sojourn of Direktorix Katarin Lahmia in Monte-Cristo.)

_.-.-._

Of course, the Wives know how to adapt their dress and equipment to the circumstances!

Is she intercepting a letter, or discreetly sending an useful counsel and the means to follow it?

Far more dangerous than she is cute and innocent-looking...

She looks as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth... who would believe she is a -potentially murderous- spy?

A pert kid at worst?

Of guns and roses...

A flower among flowers...
with lethal thorns.

Clytorisse
de LaMothe-Fentise
in Court man-hunting dress

While Monte-Cristan 'wives' are far from being mere cunning swashbucklers with a cause, even among them the duo Lucrece de Saint-Clair and Augustine Aimeroy is a little extreme. Like many members of the Service they were not born Monte-Cristan: these two came to study at the Ecole des Demoiselles and started to work as a team in their early school days, having discovered a common curiosity about automatons. One more a practical engineer and the other a mathematician, they build first, as personal toys of a kind, a simple musical box and a copy of the Pascaline. Then, on Lucrece's initiative, reversing the principle of the pins on the music box cylinder they combined the punched cards of the just improved Falcon's loom with Vaucanson's drums to create a fully automated orchestra of mechanical harpsichords, pump organs and percussions (and also a fully automated loom: a prototype works in the State Villa in Monte-Cristo, but is kept secret not to deprive the Canuts, the silk weavers of Lyon, from their livelihood). Augustine on the other hand wished to improve on Pascal's mechanical calculator: together they devised and built a simple (!) Arithmometre. But it was merely a first step and they are now designing and building

a Machine 'Analytique' fully programmable through punched cards: they plan to test it with the computation and printing of a sequence of Bernoulli numbers. As personal pet projects, Lucrece is building a mechanical nightingale 'fitting for an Emperor' while Augustine explores new mathematical territories and occasionally gives courses of 'speculative mathematics' to extremely gifted students of the Ecole des Demoiselles and prestigious foreign visitors. Already, they are planning to combine an automaton and a cerveau mecanique in an Automate joueur d'echecs.

Yet their combined talents are awfully diverse: together they wrote and *brilliantly* illustrated a set of fairy tales for children, Les Tapuscrits de la Mère Marthe.

They are now designing a 'Lanterne Magique Animée' to project short fairy tales but also more... 'adult' animations; just 'for the fun of it' they'll even build a steam-powered version for the Musée des Sciences et Techniques.

Officially, they are now junior associates of the Academie des Sciences and nothing more [though most probably members of the Korai O4.07."11 commentS], widely known outside the Presipality for their 'machines' (all patented in their name and sold by the Palace): the various evolved versions (all the rage in the upper classes of whole Europe) of the music box, and (mainly bought by bankers and great merchant families) their Arithmometre. But in the Ecole they had also discovered common tastes for fencing, for martial arts taught to girls nowhere else in the 'civilized world' and for adventure. So....

Never seasick!
(re. last § of O3.12"09 comment)

Agent PIDER117Marion 'green beret' du Faouët at the head of her locally recruited guerilla.

This one did not bother to remove her (typically Monte-Cristan) Pitchoun,

while here the tale-telling Pitchounis concealed in a piece of jewelry

Expert in Oriental martial arts (Pekipu and the like)... a nasty surprise for most Westerners!

Impressive assets

Holy Sister of Sainte Jezebel

Pitchoun artfully concealed while on errand in the Orient

Draghixa Lovrena

portraited in some European Court (left)

and in Monte-Cristo relaxing between two missions (right).

Angel face

Our current agent in Transyldavia

Training and real action?

(The reddish leather skinsuits are worn for sessions of advanced hand-to-hand training;
matt black ones, complete with hood, are sometimes used in night actions.)

No wonder most people seeing any one of them think she walks with the grace of a dancer
-only fellow top-level predators see that she moves like an Assassin.

Dorothee Chevreuille
"I know my waist is slender and my fingers they are small,
But it would not make me tremble for to see ten thousand fall."

...

'Usual suspects'
(expert in Keyser Sözeing their 'opposition)

...
A gallery of officially 'retired' wives -still active in other fields
(ladies don't wear a tricorne to stay indoors)

_.-.-._

A man?
Yes: as Head of the
dreaded Bureau de
la Surete Nationale,
Louis-Ferdinand
Celine de Saint-Gobain
indicates their
'target' to wives
acting on
Monte-Cristan
territory.

°°°°

Not all female Presipapal agents are members of the 'Service': Claire Baizanville, sous-lieutenant aux Gardes de l’Etrier, ex 'privateer' then professional duelist, is the most lethal (comments) of BSN Opératifs.

° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° °
...French colleagues
.

Elisabeth du Val ["Babette" for her friends] (left) is a top field operative of Louis XV's Secret du Roy.
The word "Babette s'en va-t-en guerre" always provokes a shiver of excitation in the Monte-Cristan Service.

Anne de Breuil, comtesse de la Fere, baronne de Clarique,
for some reason affectionately called Carmilla by her very numerous female friends, (right) is a free lancer -a remarkably gifted amateur, actually.
She 'acts' when the fancy and whim take her, but, closely associated with Mme de Pompadour, generally following 'suggestions' of the French King.
Outside the 'underground community' of secret 'active diplomacy' she is mainly known as
the author of the tender poems Les Chansons de Bilitis.

Both discovered Monte-Cristo as students of our Ecole des Demoiselles and are warmly welcome regular visitors of the Presipality.

some with personal secrets
(besides the fact that they are agents of the mysterious Cabinet Esotérique)

Isabelle de Joiry
She prefers to wear her hair loose
very peculiar reason.
Her grand-grand-mother came from some tropical island.

Desmonde Mauricette Skovfreux
also has a hidden peculiarity
Her grand-mother fled Norway during the Great Northern War.

... and supports

Brilliant, joyful and witty Duchesse de Chevreuse(*) and Marechale de Belle-Isle, having studied in the Monte-Cristan Ecole des Demoiselles (and reputed in the Presipality to be members of the Korai) enthusiastically support the 'Service', offering cover and shelter to the agents in France, using their rich socializing to introduce them, collect gossip and information, relay the 'strategical' and 'tactical' rumors forged in the Presipapal Palace...

*: Le Duc de Chevreuse ayant déclaré

que tous les cocus devraient être noyés,
Madame de Chevreuse lui a demandé
s'il était certain de savoir bien nager.

°°°°
Another French ally
Geneviève Sylvie d'Isle Dieudonné