Note G

There is a labour the eye can never witness — the raising of a great vaulted thing not in stone but in sequence, where every course must bear the one set above it, or the whole comes down in a rubble of error. A mason may stand back of an evening and watch his arch hang against the sky. I was granted no such mercy. What I built that summer of 1843 stood only in the mind and upon the page, and could be tried by nothing but its own remorseless internal honesty — did the operations, taken in their appointed order, arrive? I am lying now in a darkened room where the laudanum will not let the figures hold still; and of all the work of my hands there is one thing I would have laid before me on the coverlet, could I but hold it once more — not a child's curl, God forgive me, but a sheet of paper ruled into columns: the last and largest of my Notes, the one I marked with the letter G.

It was the crown of the whole edifice, and I knew it even in the making. The seven Notes had grown beneath my pen until they stood at near three times the length of the Frenchman's article they were meant only to attend — Signor Menabrea had written his graceful Sketch from Mr. Babbage's Turin lectures, and I had undertaken to carry it into our tongue; and then the carrying became a building of my own. In the earlier Notes I had let myself fly: I had written that the engine wove algebraical patterns as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves, and that if only the relations of pitched sounds could be expressed in its terms, it might compose elaborate and scientific music of any degree of complexity. Those were the wings of the thing. Note G was the skeleton — and the skeleton is the harder labour by far, for it alone must bear the weight.

I had resolved that the Note should not merely assert what the engine could do, but show it — fully worked, in a case no idle reader might wave away. We fixed upon the numbers of Bernoulli: those curious quantities that rise in the analysis like a recurring motif, each one entangled with all that came before it. To compute them the engine could not march straight forward; it must turn back upon its own results, take what it had already found and feed it once more into the Mill, looping through the same operations with the variables altered at each turn. I laid the whole of it out as a table — a great ruled chart of operations, every step numbered, every column naming what was acted upon, what it was combined with, and where in the Store the result should be set down to wait. To follow it, had I it before me, one would go down the page as one follows the voices of a fugue, each entering upon its appointed beat. I believe it to be the most elaborate demonstration any had then made of what such an engine might be ordered to perform.

Here I must be exact — for I have never been able to abide a muddled accounting, and least of all of myself. The engine was Mr. Babbage's, root and branch: the Mill, the Store, the governance of the cards, all the deep architecture of it sprang from his genius and from years of his solitary toil. In the making of the Notes he assisted me throughout — he supplied figures, he furnished by his own hand much of the working for the Bernoulli computation, and we passed papers back and forth across London by the post like two players at a long game of correspondence chess. I will not pretend the whole was spun out of my own substance. But — and I set the word down with the same firmness I felt then — the shaping was mine: the resolve to attempt so hard a case, the casting of it into the table, the exposition that made the dumb columns speak to a stranger. And there came a morning when, going over the figures he had sent, I found among them a mistake — a true error, not a slip of the pen but a fault in the working — and I sent it back to him corrected. The pleasure of it I am not ashamed to confess: not triumph over him, but the clean satisfaction of the apprentice who discovers she has become, in this one corner, the master's equal in vigilance. He did not bridle. He owned it. And that is the truest thing I can say of our friendship in its best season — that he could be caught, and bear it.

It was in those weeks, the work very nearly done and my whole being strung to it like a wire, that he wrote me the letter I have kept beyond all the others. He named me in it the Enchantress of Number — not numbers in the common heap, but Number, the thing itself, as one might say the Enchantress of Music — and called me his dear and much admired Interpreter. I had it by me on the ninth of September. I will not dress up what it did to me. I had passed my girlhood being watched against my own inheritance, made to feel that the fire in me was a contagion to be cooled by reason; and here was the first man of his age in these pursuits naming that very fire a kind of sorcery, and calling me — not his pupil, nor his amanuensis, but his interpreter, the one who renders the oracle intelligible. In those same months I wrote to Mr. Babbage, in something near to defiance, that my mind was made for more than its allotted span. I believed it. I believe it still, lying here where the span has all but run out; and I do not repent the immodesty — for it was not vanity, but testimony.

And then, with the thing all but in the press, it nearly came to nothing.

Mr. Babbage had long carried a wound that had festered into a grievance — the Government had abandoned his engines, had let his great Difference Engine lie a half-finished orphan, had given him neither the means to complete his work nor the grace of a plain refusal. The bitterness was not unjust; I have never thought it unjust. But he conceived that our publication should carry, at its head, a preface — unsigned, and therefore wearing the look of the editor's own voice, or of some impartial party — wherein his quarrel with the Government should be set out in full heat. He wished, in short, to make my Notes the carriage in which his anger should ride into the world.

I would not have it. I told him so, and I told him plainly; and it was the hardest plainness I had yet been called upon to speak — for I loved the man, and owed him much, and he had but lately laid at my feet the most generous tribute of my life. Yet the work was mine to the degree that my name, such as it was — those three initials, A.A.L., behind which a Countess might shelter and yet be known to all who mattered — stood at the foot of it. I would not let it go before the public veiled and ventriloquising a complaint I had not made, in a quarrel that, however righteous, was not the subject. The engine deserved to be met upon its own ground, in the clear light of the analysis, unencumbered by the failures of ministers. To bind the two together was to let the one drag the other down.

He pressed. I refused. For some days the whole publication hung over the abyss — he would withdraw the entire paper, he gave me to understand, rather than see it go without his preface; and I, who had poured the better part of a year and a great part of my health into those pages, faced the prospect of watching them suppressed on the very eve of their appearing. I cannot tell, even now, how near to the edge we came. I wrote to him in those days as one writes who is resolved to keep both the friendship and the principle, and finds the two pulling apart in her hands like wet cloth. I would do, I told him, almost anything he asked of me in the substance of the work; I would not surrender it to a purpose not its own.

In the end the Notes went out as I had made them — the preface withdrawn, my initials at the foot, the table of Note G standing where I had placed it. The breach between us did not heal cleanly, and that grieved me longer than the quarrel itself had cost; a friendship that has been the chief intellectual companionship of one's life does not knit back to its former seamlessness once it has been so wrenched. I count it among the prices I have paid.

But I would pay it again. I have lain here long enough now to have learned which of my deeds I can look upon without flinching, and that is one of them. A woman of my rank and my century is offered a thousand soft ways to let her work become the appendage of a man's name, or a man's grievance, and to call the surrender modesty. I declined the surrender. The Notes are mine because I insisted, at real cost, that they should be. The engine was never built; it stands yet only in Mr. Babbage's drawings and in my columns of operations, a cathedral in the air. But the method is set down — true, and entire; and a thing truly set down does not perish merely because the age that received it could not yet raise the scaffolding. That, I think, is what it was worth.