Isacq fights a fatal duel in Swedish Wismar, flees to London, enters the English secret service under the spymaster-novelist Daniel Defoe, is sent as a secret agent to Herrenhausen, the palace at Hannover of the Elector Georg Ludwig (the future King George I of England), where he is employed by the philosopher Leibniz and imagines himself foiling a Jacobite plot to murder the Elector and his son. He falls in love, ships out on a Dutch vessel in the War of the Spanish Succession, is captured by Algerine pirates in the Mediterranean, escapes when their xebec is sunk, and travels across Sardinia to the Catalan city of Alghero, which has become an Allied base supplying the troops fighting in Spain.