Bolivar: American Liberator (78 page)

Epigraph:
“I was suddenly made to understand”:
SB to Fanny du Villars, Paris, 1804, SBO, I, 22–24.

laid to rest in an open coffin:
Lecuna,
Catálogo
, I, 126.

richly decorated gown, etc.:
Mijares,
The Liberator
, 87.

Simón’s grief was so extreme:
O’L, I, 18.

“I had thought of my wife”:
Mosquera, 11.

“May God grant me a son”:
SB to Pedro Palacios, Sept. 30, 1800, SBC, I, 38.

“Had I not become a widower”:
Perú de Lacroix,
Diario
, 98–100.

in a legal dispute:
SB to the Captain-General, Caracas, Jan. 31, 1803, SB,
Escritos
, II, 13, 111.

letter scolding his uncle Carlos Palacios:
SB to Carlos Palacios, Oct. 13, 1803, SBO, I, 20. Also SB to Pedro Palacios, Aug. 28, 1803, SBO, I, 20.

bored beyond imagining:
SB to Déhollain, March 10, 1803, in Polanco Alcántara, 82–83.

books by Plutarch, Montesquieu:
Mancini,
Bolívar y la emancipación
, 81.

detailed instructions to his agent:
SB to Jaén, Cádiz, Jan. 29, 1804, SBO, I, 21.

still in mourning clothes:
Larrazábal,
Vida
, I, 11.

weeping with Don Bernardo:
Mosquera, 7.

the crown issued a decree:
Bando (official order), Madrid, March 25, 1804, JCBL.

the violet fields:
J. S. M., “Spring Flowers of the South of Europe,”
Phytologist
, IV (Oct. 1860), 289–96.

They arrived in Paris:
Lecuna,
Catálogo
, I, 144.

Napoleon . . . review:
Boussingault,
Memorias
, III, 11. Perú de Lacroix relates the same story, except that in his version it occurs in 1805 in Montechiaro, after Napoleon is crowned in Italy.

“I worshiped him as the hero”:
O’Leary,
Bolívar y la emancipación
, 80–83.

Duvernoy’s virtuosic horn, etc.:
Aexandre Dratwicki, “La réorganisation de l’orchestre de l’Opéra de Paris en 1799,”
Revue de Musicologie
, 88 (Paris, 2002), 297–326.

one of Bolívar’s favorite haunts:
Trend,
Bolívar and the Independence
, 40.

With Simón Rodríguez:
O’LB, 16.

lit by newfangled gas lamps, etc.:
Paris in 1804, as described by Madame de Rémusat,
Mémoires
, II (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1880), 83ff.

“He was another man entirely”:
Flora Tristan, “Cartas de Bolívar,” in Marcos Falcón Briceño,
Teresa: La confidante de Bolívar
(Caracas: Imprenta Nacional, 1955) 44.

Legend has it:
From material on the descendancy of Jean Elie, the first Denis, Lord of Trobriand-en-Plougasnou:
rootsweb.ancestry.com
.

Fanny was frankly promiscuous:
Liévano Aguirre, 38.

She was golden-haired, vivacious:
Luis A. Sucre, “Bolívar y Fanny du Villars,”
BOLANH
, XVII, no. 68 (Oct.–Dec. 1934), 345–48.

“His spirit, his heart, his tastes”:
Tristan, Ibid.

Dancing with Fanny:
Liévano Aguirre, 71.

call one another “cousin”:
Sucre, “Bolívar y Fanny du Villais.”

The old count, believing, etc.:
Ibid., 348.

soon became lovers:
Lecuna,
Catálogo
, I, 146.

She was Therèse Laisney, etc.:
SB and Therèse (Teresa) Laisney’s affair is recorded in three letters preserved by Flora Tristan and published eight years after SB’s death. Tristan’s account is riddled with errors of detail, compounded by the fact that she wrote in French and mistakes obviously were made in translation or orthography. Clearly, she was also relying on her mother’s memory. One of SB’s most respected biographers, the Venezuelan historian Vicente Lecuna, assumed that those three letters, which were published in an unsigned article in Peru’s
El Faro Militar
in 1845, actually were written by SB to Fanny du Villars, and that SB, out of grief, called Fanny by his dead wife’s name, Teresa. That assumption has no basis in fact, but, because its author was a great Bolívarian scholar, the fantasy was repeated in many works and created an endless string of misinformation. In 1955, a year after Lecuna’s death, Marcos Falcón Briceño identified an earlier publication of Tristan’s article in the French newspaper
Le Voleur
(July 31, 1838) that clearly identified her as the author and included references to her father, Mariano Tristan, and her uncle, Pío Tristan. The Peruvian publication
El Faro Militar
had suppressed these details. Falcón Briceño, 26, 53.

“Eight months after my father left Bilbao”:
Tristan, “Cartas de Bolívar,” 43.

“Turning onto the Rue Richelieu”:
Ibid., 44.

“All in all”:
Gil Fortoul,
Historia constitucional
, III, 332.

“I loved my wife very much”:
Mosquera, 10.

“With his keen appreciation for pleasure”:
Quoted in Liévano Aguirre, 70, taken from Serviez’s memoirs, issued anonymously as
L’aide de camp ou l’auteur inconnu. Souvenirs de deux mondes
, published in Paris in 1832.

in Fanny du Villars’s house:
du Villars to SB, April 6, 1826, BANH, no. 52, 581–82.

met him through Carlos Montúfar:
Humboldt to Zaccheus Collins, May 20, 1804, Archives, 129; Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia.

from Jefferson’s White House:
Margaret B. Smith,
The First Forty Years of Washington Society
, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: Scribner’s, 1906), 395–96.

He had advised the president:
Ulrike Moheit,
Alexander von Humboldt: 1799–1804
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 296.

“We have lately had a great treat”:
Letter from Mrs. James (Dolley) Madison, June 5, 1804, quoted in Hermann R. Friis, “Baron Alexander von Humboldt’s Visit to Washington,”
Records of the Columbia Historical Society
, 44 (1963), 23–24.

he had met Bolívar’s sisters:
Lecuna,
Catálogo
, I, 160.

lodged with his in-laws:
R. A. Palacio,
Documentos para los anales de Venezuela
, IV (Caracas: Imprenta del Gobierno Nacional, 1890), 336.

a frequent guest at Humboldt’s:
Larrazábal,
Vida
, I, 13.

collection of sixty thousand botanical specimens:
Humboldt to Hermann Karsten, Paris, March 10, 1805, in Karl Bruhns, ed.,
Alexander von Humboldt
, I (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1872), 408.

part Spanish, part English, part French:
Charles Willson Peale, in Lillian Miller,
The
Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 683.

Although Humboldt and Bonpland cannot:
du Villars to SB, April 6, 1826, BANH, no. 52, 581–82.

became warm friends:
SB to Humboldt, April 28, 1823, BANH, no. 52, 659.

Bolívar made a passionate case:
O’LB, 17.

“On that day, so notable”:
Fabio Puyo Vasco,
Muy cerca de Bolívar
(Bogotá: FMC, 1988), 18.

Hiram Paulding confirms this story:
Paulding,
Un rasgo de Bolívar
, 201.

“He made himself emperor”:
O’L, I, 15.

“a sad reverse for all mankind”:
Wordsworth, quoted in
The Cambridge History of English and American Literature
(Cambridge: Putnam’s, 1907–21), XI, v, 7.

“I regarded the crown”:
Perú de Lacroix, 64.

his temper erupted at a banquet:
Tristan, “Cartas de Bolívar,” 49.

“Colonel, I have known you”:
SB to Mariano Tristan, Paris, 1804, SB,
Escritos
, Doc. 25, 141, 153.

He was not well:
O’LB, 17.

He had lost a fortune:
O’L, I, 19.

Having fled during the Gual-España:
Rodríguez admitted he was “president of a secret society of conspirators,” Manuel Uribe Angel, “El Libertador, su ayo y su capellán,”
Homenaje de Colombia al Libertador Simón Bolívar en su primer centenario
(Bogotá: Medardo Rivas, 1884). But he is not listed in the official litany of suspects and convicted conspirators.

“I don’t want to be like trees”:
Simón Rodríguez, quoted in Cazaldilla Arreaza, J.A.,
El libro de Robinson
(Caracas: Siembraviva Ediciones, 2005), 7.

a noted Austrian chemist:
Waldo Frank,
Birth of a World
(Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1951), 32.

where Rousseau purportedly:
Maurice Cranston,
Jean-Jacques
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 119.

an inveterate gambler:
Madariaga, 57.

Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante, etc.:
O’L, I, 18.

Fanny was there:
du Villars to SB, June 18, 1820, and Feb. 5, 1821, in Aníbal Noguera,
Bolívar: Epistolarios, Bolívar y las damas, las damas y Bolívar
(Caracas: Ediciones de la Presidencia de la República, 1983), 124–27. In the second letter, Fanny states that she was pregnant when she saw him in Italy, although her child (Eugène, whose official godfather was Prince Eugène de Beauharnais) was conceived in late July, long after the coronation festivities.

Napoleon stared back:
Perú de Lacroix, 45.

“Perhaps he will think”:
Ibid.

Eugène de Beauharnais, viceroy:
Larrazábal,
Vida
, I, 12.

Florence is said to have delighted, etc.:
O’L, 18–19.

on the Piazza di Spagna:
Lecuna,
Catálogo
, I, 152.

“I found Rome brick”:
Suetonius,
Augustus
, 28.

filled Bolívar with purpose:
O’L, I, 19.

saw Alexander von Humboldt again, etc.:
O’L, XII, 234; SBC, III, 264; V, 212.

his brother, Wilhelm, etc.:
Gabriele von Bülow,
Gabriele von Bülow, Daughter of Wilhelm von Humboldt
(London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1897), 19.

a gathering place:
Ibid., 30.

a number of European intellectuals:
These included the German poet August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the Swiss historian Jean Charles de Sismondi, and the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, whose eloquent stone tribute to Pope Pius VII resides in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Humboldt maintained a strict objectivity:
A. P. Whitaker, “Alexander von Humboldt and Spanish America,” in
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
, 104, no. 3 (June 15, 1960), 317.

“How could a minority”:
Humboldt,
Personal Narrative
, II, 472–76.

complacent, indolent, etc.:
Humboldt-Lettres
, Aug. 12, 1804, quoted in Madariaga, 62.

“During my time in America”:
Humboldt to O’Leary, Berlin, 1853, in Charles Minguet,
Las relaciones entre Alexander von Humboldt y Simón Bolívar
(Caracas: A. Filippi, 1986–92), 746.

Vargas Laguna, Spain’s ambassador, etc.:
O’LN, I, 68.

On August 15—a hot, etc.:
Manuel Uribe, “El Libertador, su ayo y su capellán,” in
Homenaje de Colombia al Libertador
(Bogotá: M. Rivas, 1884), 72–74; also Simón Rodríguez,
El Libertador al mediodía de América
(Arequipa, 1830); also SB,
Escritos
, IV, 16.

“I will not rest until”:
Uribe. Also de la Cruz Herrera, 325.

“Do you remember when”:
SB to Rodríguez, Pativilca, Jan. 19, 1824, Simón Rodríguez,
Cartas
, 109.

“From boyhood I thought of little else”:
Paulding, 71.

Paris lodge of the Freemasons:
Perú de Lacroix, 73. The author recounts that SB mentioned having joined the Freemasons in Paris out of curiosity, but that his fleeting association with it was enough to judge it as a “ridiculous institution” of “large children.” This aligns with SB’s later prohibition of all secret societies in 1827.

lists him as being inducted:
Miriam Blanco-Fombona de Hood, “La masonería en nuestra independencia,”
Reportorio Americano
, I (1979), 59–70, quoted in Polanco Alcántara, 145. Also Américo Carnicelli,
La masonería en la independencia de América
, I (Bogotá: Lozano & Cía., 1970), 123. Some sources give the precise induction date in Paris as Nov. 11, 1805.

she was pregnant with her son Eugène:
Lecuna,
Catalogo
, I, 152. The birth notice is recorded in
www.guebwiller.net/fr/index
, listed under Dervieu du Villars, No. 26362.

listed on the child’s birth certificate:
www.guebwiller.net
.

might have been his:
du Villars to SB, Lyon, Feb. 5, 1821, and Paris, April, 28, 1823, SB,
Epistolarios
, 126, 129.