Letters (117 page)

He remains in New Orleans (in the Conti Street lodgings) until May, “consoling” himself (the term is his) as best he can while awaiting his family’s appearance. “Uncle Renato,” grateful, keeps him employed forging false bills of lading and other useful documents. With Jean Lafitte, Andrew’s relations grow even closer (except with Consuelo, he resumes the name André Castine). Whereas Beluche is interested in the rebel Simón Bolivar and the Mexican revolt against Spain, Lafitte is actively supporting the colony of Bonapartist exiles at Champ d’Asile. Andrew harmonizes their interests by encouraging a French and Mexican alliance against Spain; if it should succeed, Bolivar might head a federation of republics comprising most of Central and South America, while his French or Creole counterpart might found a nation from western Louisiana to the Pacific!

Consuelo, weary of America and homesick for Andalusia, even for Algiers, is not interested. Lafitte is, and proposes rescuing Napoleon from Elba to lead the campaign. As mentioned in the postscript to his “Washington” letter, Andrew doubts the feasibility of that scheme—until early April, when news reaches Louisiana that the emperor has already escaped, landed at the Gulf of Juan, and struck out for Paris! Beluche shrugs and sets about the commissioning of a ship and the assembling of a crew to begin taking Spanish prizes under license from Bolivar; Lafitte presses “André” to join him in establishing another Barataria somewhere west of New Orleans. Andrée does not appear, or reply to his letter.

In May, despairing of your coming here, & doubting my welcome at Castines Hundred, we sail’d for France,
writes Andrew. His errand is to interest Napoleon—whose reascendancy in Europe Lafitte never doubts—in the “Louisiana Project,” to the extent of sending French ships and men “to aid the cause of Mexican independence” once the military situation in Europe is in hand. On the advice of Jean Blanque he carries by way of credentials a forged letter from Mayor Girod of New Orleans (who had in fact been as interested as Lafitte in the Elba mission), appealing to the emperor “on behalf of all French Creoles.” The voyage is financed jointly by Lafitte and Beluche, the latter on condition that Andrew see to Consuelo’s safe return to her homeland.

As they traverse these waters (where Mrs. M. and I now reenact together certain separate youthful passions), Consuelo endeavors, we cannot know how successfully, to reenact
their
earlier shipboard affairs. She has decided that the novel is a worn-out fad; she adduces as evidence the fact that she herself has ceased reading anything in that kind. Andrew’s information that Samuel Richardson himself, the father of the epistolary novel, had said essentially the same thing (quoting his booksellers, in letters dated 1758 and 1759), she takes as validation of her stand. The true
romanticismo,
she now believes with Mme de Staël, is the active life; despite her weariness with America, she is prepared to exchange both literary fame and the domestic joys of wife- and motherhood to hazard the world at the side of a lover in the advance guard of history, so to speak.

Andrew gently reminds her that Mme de Staël, at last report, seemed to have put by both fiction and action for reflection. And, “transported by longing for [his] own family,” he permits himself “a panegyric on parenthood, conjugal fidelity, & domestical bliss,” for all which, he declares to Consuelo, she is in his opinion more admirably suited by temperament than for literary, political, or sexual adventuring. His friend mistakes his meaning, agrees at once, and “flinging herself upon [his] neck, with tears of joy accept[s his] proposal!”

We must surmise what followed. When their ship reaches British-held Bordeaux at the end of June and they learn of Waterloo, of Napoleon’s second abdication and his flight from Paris to nearby Rochefort, Andrew offers
either to dispatch her to Mme de Staël in Leghorn, Italy (whither I learn’d Germaine had fled with her guardsman-husband for the sake of his health, & to wait out the Hundred Days); or to introduce her, as one former novelist to another, to Joseph Bonaparte, presently in Bordeaux & about to flee aboard a charter’d American schooner to New York. But she declined both offers, coldly informing me she would set & sail her own course thro life, without my or any other man’s aid. That she had, she believed, found her true vocation. Finally, that the real defect in “that business of Don Escarpio’s poison’d snuffbox” was not that it wanted re-working in fiction, but that it had not workt in fact!

On this discordant note they part. After learning all he can about the emperor’s situation from Joseph’s entourage and from the U.S. consul in Bordeaux (a Mr. Lee, to whom he attaches himself long enough to observe his signature and appropriate some consulate stationery, and for whom he volunteers to act as unofficial liaison with Napoleon’s party), Andrew hurries to Rochefort to reconnoiter and to revise his plan.

Napoleon, he learns, is being uncharacteristically indecisive, to the growing desperation of his suite. Having offered his services in vain to the provisional government in Paris as a mere general of the army (he had noted on his maps a vulnerable gap between the armies of Wellington and Blücher, both marching toward Paris), he has announced his decision to take refuge in America. But as if in hope of some marvelous re-reversal of fortune, he has put off his flight aboard the French frigates at his disposal and given the British time to reinforce their blockade of the harbor. Captain Ponée of the
Méduse
still )believes it possible to run the blockade: he will engage the chief blockading vessel, H.M.S.
Bellerophon,
a 74-gunner but old and slow; he estimates he can survive for two hours, enough time for Napoleon to slip through on the
Saale
and outrun the lesser blockaders. Napoleon has approved the audacity of the plan, but declined to sacrifice the
Méduse.
Another loyal frigate stands ready farther south, at the mouth af the Gironde; and there is Joseph’s charter boat at Bordeaux. The French master of a Danish sloop in the Aix Roads has even offered to smuggle the emperor out in an empty wine cask rigged with breathing tubes. Every passing day makes escape less feasible; the options narrow to capture and possible execution by Blücher’s Prussians, arrest by the Bourbons, surrender to the British, or suicide (it is an open secret that he carries a vial of cyanide always on his person). But Napoleon will not act.

Delighted by this unanticipated turn of fortune—which of course revives at once his original hope that Bonaparte himself might lead the “Louisiana Project”—“André Castine” attaches himself to the emperor’s party on the strength of a letter “from Mr. Consul Lee” authorizing him to oversee and facilitate Napoleon’s “American arrangements,” should the emperor choose to go to that country. He urgently advances Jean Lafitte’s Champ d’Asile/New Orleans/Barataria connection, flourishing his letter “from Mayor Girod”; the proposal finds favor with many of the party, but the emperor himself (through intermediaries: Andrew does not see him personally until the last minute) is dilatory. On July 4, our ancestor’s 39th birthday, Joseph sails aboard the U.S.S.
Pike,
afraid to delay longer. Andrew begins to share the desperation of Napoleon’s aides.

Legality
was the official sticking-point,
he writes:
Bonaparte had long since requested of the Paris government passports to America, & had renew’d that request thro Commander Maitland of
Bellerophon,
without reply. He had, he declared, been condemn’d an outlaw by the Congress of Vienna since his escape from Elba; moreover, he had been defeated on the field of battle & forced to abdicate. To flee now like a common fugitive was in his eyes but a further ignominy. But some said privately he fear’d life in America, so remote from the terrain of his career. Others, that he had fallen ill, slipt his hold on reality, & half believed a way would yet show itself, to make another Elba of Rochefort.

On July 8, on orders from Paris, the party boards the French frigates anchored in the harbor. On the 10th a letter arrives from
Bellerophon,
in reply to Napoleon’s query: Maitland does not mention the passports (he has been secretly instructed to intercept and take custody of the emperor if he attempts to flee, and deliver him to Tor Bay), but politely forbids Napoleon passage out of the harbor on any but his own vessel, and that to England. On the 11th they learn of Louis XVIII’s re-restoration. The circle is closing. On the 13th Napoleon drafts his famous letter of surrender to the prince regent:

But before delivering it, and himself, to
Bellerophon,
he decides to make a final inquiry concerning the passports, at the same time testing the air on the subject of his second choice: asylum in England, where his brother Lucien already resides, and the likely nature of his reception there. On the morning of Bastille Day, therefore, he sends emissaries under a flag of truce to
Bellerophon.
Commander Maitland again declares (what is technically correct) that he has had no word yet from his admiral concerning the passports; that he cannot permit Napoleon passage to America without them; and that he is not empowered to enter into any agreement concerning the emperor’s reception in England—which, however, he cannot personally imagine will be other than hospitable. The embassy returns; there is no alternative, Napoleon decides, to surrendering to Maitland and taking his chances with the prince regent. A new letter is drafted to that effect, enclosing a copy of the “Themistocles” letter, re-requesting passports and passage to America, but accepting in lieu of them passage to England “as a private individual, there to enjoy the protection of the laws of your country.” He will deliver himself and his entourage to
Bellerophon,
he declares, on the morrow’s ebb tide.

Andrew sees here a long chance to salvage his mission, which Napoleon’s refusal to escape has rendered all but hopeless: he volunteers to rush overland to London “in [his] capacity as a U.S. diplomatic attaché,” discover if he can what the British cabinet plan to do with their prisoner, and, if that news is not good, do what he can to arrange Bonaparte’s escape before he is landed and taken into custody. In return he stipulates (to the Count de Las Cases, Napoleon’s acting counselor of state and second-ranking aide, whom Andrew has befriended) that any such escape be to Champ d’Asile, and that Las Cases urge Napoleon to lead the “Louisiana Project.”

A fan of Chateaubriand’s redskin romances, Las Cases declares himself ready without hesitation to hazard “the naked but noble savages” rather than the elegant but perfidious Bourbons or what he fears may be the implacable English. He is impressed by Andrew’s showing him, on a map of America, the territory he has in mind, three times the size of France. He inquires as to the quality of Indian wine. Before dawn the next morning he reports that the emperor has approved and will finance Andrew’s London mission, and has regarded that same map with interest but no further comment. News has reached them that Louis XVIII has ordered the commander of the
Saale
frigate to hold them all under arrest on that vessel; the officer has loyally passed word of his order along, but cannot indefinitely delay executing it. They are leaving at once.

Andrew asks and is given permission to accompany them to
Bellerophon. ’Twas no reason of strategy at all, only to see, perhaps for the last time, that man Joel Barlow had come justly so to loathe, but who had play’d as none before him the Game of Governments, & convinced a whole century, for good or ill, that one man can turn the tide of history.
The emperor speaks to—or of—him once, and briefly, not recognizing him as the man he’d dispatched years before to oversee young Jérôme in America. “So this is the fellow who would crown me king of the Corsairs,” he remarks, and turns his attention to the choreography of boarding the British warship with most impressive effect.

That day and the following morning Andrew spends aboard the “Billy Ruffian,” as her crew call
Bellerophon.
He watches Napoleon display his talent for ingratiating himself with those useful to him, intuitively exploiting every circumstance to best advantage. So far from abject, the man turns his surrender into a diplomatic and theatrical coup, and receives, without having to ask, every royal prerogative—except the passports. Andrew also completes the letter to Andrée begun in Fort Bowyer and put aside in New Orleans, describing the sack of Washington and the siege of Fort McHenry: he will leave it with Consul Lee to dispatch to Canada via Washington by diplomatic pouch, having reported “officially” to that gentleman the details of Bonaparte’s surrender. In his satisfaction at having got hold of the emperor before his superiors could snatch that plum for themselves (the sails of Admiral Hotham’s
Superb
are visible all through the morning of the 15th, standing in for Rochefort), Maitland accepts Las Cases’s voucher that “M. Castine” is the party’s “American liaison,” and both permits him aboard and allows him to leave at his pleasure on the 16th.

By noon of when, the emperor having breakfasted aboard the
Superb
with Hotham, Maitland, and his own aides—and been given a second royal reception, and returned without either the passports or any word of them, but encouraged that his reception in England will not be hostile—it is clear to Andrew that he must commence his next move at once. As the crew of
Bellerophon
man the yards and weigh anchor to beat out into the Bay of Biscay, Napoleon complimenting them on their quiet efficiency, Andrew returns by longboat to
Méduse
and thence to Rochefort, bearing in his ear the whispered last charge of the Count de Las Cases, who does not share his master’s optimism:
“Sauvez-nous la peau!”