Letters (59 page)

Midshipman Cooper, then eighteen & freshly expell’d from Yale for insubordination, had the story from me in the Hustler Tavern in Lewiston, New York, next door to Fort Niagara, one night in 1807. That was the year of “Burr’s conspiracy” to separate the western territories & Mexico from the Union; also of Barlow’s publication of the first full edition of his
Columbiad
(including my impromptu on “Glad Chesapeake”) and Mme de Staël’s of her
Corinne;
of Fulton’s steamship
Clermont’s
going into regular service on the Hudson; and of my fateful meeting with Tecumseh & his brother the Prophet. Cooper was on shore leave from the brig
Oneida,
the U. States Navy’s total Lake Ontario fleet. I was en route to Castines Hundred to rejoin
cousine
Andrée & recover from the shock of “Aaron Burr’s” failure. We were sampling a drink called “cocktail,” just invented at that tavern (a mixture of brandy with some flavoring such as curacao & sugar, shaken with ice chopt from the lake), singing Yale songs I’d learnt from Barlow, & discussing Indians, a subject of interest to us both. I retail’d to Cooper what I knew of “Joseph Brant” & the destruction of the Mohawk Valley Iroquois, with whom he was especially preoccupied. He made copious notes, declaring he had a friend who aspired to write novels about Indians; he heard out with interest my enthusiasm for the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, whom Andrée had grown fond of & taught English to when she was sixteen, & whom I regarded as the red man’s last hope to found a sovereign state east of the Mississippi. It was in the course of explaining my half-belief that Tecumseh was Jewish that the subject of my Algerine adventure came up. I had pointed out the singularity of the Shawnees’ myth of their own origin: that unlike other tribes (who all reckon’d their emergence from the center of the earth), they traced their descent from twelve original clans who migrated from the east across the bottom of the sea, which parted to let them pass. This myth I related to the notion of my ancestor Ebenezer Cooke, who supposed in his
Sot-Weed Factor
poem that all Indians are descended from the lost tribes of Israel; and I remarkt to my young drinking companion the peculiar ubiquitousness of the Shawnee, bands of whom, like Jews after the Diaspora, were to be found everywhere: from Florida, Georgia, & the Carolinas to Pennsylvania, the Indiana territory, & Lake Erie. True, they were hunters rather than merchants (the ancient Hebrews had not been merchants either). But they were famously abstemious, and regarded themselves as the elect of the earth. Tecumseh in particular had a fine Semitic nose, a Jewish distaste for drunkenness, rape, firearms, & torture (but not for tomahawks & hand-to-hand combat), a good legal-political mind, a talent for sharp bargaining in his treaty dealings, & a loyalty to his family—especially to his visionary brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet—which might prove his most vulnerable aspect. My persuasion was that one of his ancestors had been, not a colonial governor of South Carolina as the Prophet maintain’d, but an early Jewish settler’s child captured & adopted by the Shawnee.

Cooper order’d another round of cocktails, observed that Jews were not admitted to the new U. States Military Academy at West Point or to the naval officer corps, & ask’d whence my familiarity with things Hebrew. Thus we got to the remarkable Joseph Bacri, to Joel Barlow’s finally successful Algerine mission, & to my adventure with Consuelo “del Consulado.” He was full of questions, but not of the skeptical sort, and made note of my replies for his unnamed friend. Of the matter of our protracted coupling in the carriage—first feign’d & then not—whilst Consuelo disclosed her written “exposition” (as he call’d it), Cooper observed: “That will have to be toned down.” He applauded my test both of her “innocence” (by obliging her to scratch herself) and of her sincerity (by taking her directly aboard the
Fortune,
sans papers, baggage, or interview with Barlow; I prevail’d upon the Captain—with a bribe from my travelling-funds & a quickly forged sailing order from “Barlow”—to accept her as a passenger & get under way at once instead of waiting till morning, as we believed the Dey plann’d to intercept the ship outside the harbor). Cooper question’d, not the verity, but the verisimilitude—that is, the plausibility as
fiction
—of my account of all this: the sailing order forged in my cabin in the ten minutes I’d requested to indite a “farewell” (& warning) letter to Barlow, whom I would not see again till mid-September; my inditing, in the same ten minutes, that farewell & warning, in which I enclosed Consuelo’s account of the Spanish plot; our bribing the Algerine harbor-master to agree that it was the current high tide, not the next, we were clear’d to sail on; our weighing anchor, making sail, & standing out of the harbor for Leghorn, Marseilles, & Philadelphia even as the carriage—which I’d first approacht not three hours since!—climb’d up from the quay in the direction of Barlow’s villa, my horse still tether’d behind.

“That too would all have to be reworkt,” said Midshipman Cooper. “The coachman, for example: How could you know he wasn’t an agent of that chap…” He consulted his notes. “Escarpio?” Lifetime servant of Consuelo’s family, I replied; had known her from her birth, & cet. But how was it Don Escarpio hadn’t put his own man on the carriage, to ensure against Consuelo’s defection? Couldn’t account for that myself, I admitted: bit of good luck, I supposed. That would have to be reworkt. And did the fellow not fear for his life when he should return to the Spanish consulate minus his passenger?

“Ah, well,” Barlow himself explain’d in Paris just five months ago (December 1811, my last meeting with him) to the bright 12-year-old whom Mme de Staël (herself 45 now, ill, pregnant by her young Swiss lover Rocca, & exiled to Coppet by Napoleon, who had confiscated the first press run of her book
De l’Allemagne
and order’d her to leave Paris at once) had taken an interest in: “Poor Enrique never return’d to the
consulado,
you see. When he deliver’d Andy’s letter he was trembling from head to toe. I thot ’twas fright, especially when I’d read the letter—but ’twas chills & fever. The servants would not let him into the house, but bedded him down in his own carriage. Sure enough, the 1st bubo appear’d next day in his groin, and by the time Senor El Consulado came ’round to fetch the horse & carriage, the wretch was dead.”

Young Honoré, who loved the story even more than had Fenimore Cooper & King George, would not have it that the coachman’s infection was coincidental, even tho Barlow’s favorite manservant had succumb’d to the plague just a day or two earlier. No, he insisted: Don Escarpio had infected the man deliberately, to cover his tracks, for “Enrique” was actually Henry Burlingame IV in disguise, seeing to the safety of his long-lost son; and Consuelo had not disembarkt at Málaga after our tearful farewells at Marseilles, but been kidnapt by the lusty sailors & fetcht to Philadelphia, where she escaped & tried to rejoin me at Castines Hundred, but was captured by the Shawnee but spared by Tecumseh because her then pseudonym, Rebecca, together with her raven hair & olive skin, reminded him of his great-grandmother, a Spanish Jewess captured & adopted by the Creeks in Florida…

“Too romantical by half, Master Balzac,” I advised my 3rd uncritical auditor, who, unlike Midshipman Cooper, frankly aspired to literature & was already scribbling vaudevilles at a great rate. He promist to rework it & show me an amended draught by New Year’s Day. But on the darkest night of the year a courier from the office of the Duc de Bassano, drest in the particular shade of brown fashionable that season in Napoleon’s court
(“Caca du roi de Rome,”
after the stools of the Emperor’s infant son), deliver’d to me an urgent letter from Andrée. It had been written at Castines Hundred only 30 days past & sent via Quebec & the secret French-Canadian diplomatic pouch: “Cato” (our code name for Tecumseh, who deplored the white man’s influence on the red as had Cato the Greek influence on the Romans) had suffer’d such a defeat on the Tippecanoe River that he was inclined to make peace with the U. States & remain neutral in the coming war. Furthermore, my man John Henry (of whom more presently), frustrated in his attempt to get from the British Foreign Office what he felt was owed him for his espionage in New England, was rumor’d to be leaving London in disgust & returning to Lower Canada. As for the author of the letter herself, she was gratified to report that in consequence of our close cooperation in July, when we had successfully “torpedo’d” (Robert Fulton’s word) the negotiations between William Henry Harrison & our friend “Cato,” she found herself in the family way. Would I please see to the completion of my current torpedo-work (on Barlow’s negotiations with the Duc de Bassano) in time to marry her before April 1812, when our baby was expected? And by the by, in case we should decide to assassinate either William Henry Harrison or Tecumseh’s Prophet: Whatever happen’d to my friend Consuelo’s dandy little potion? Was I so certain that it had contain’d what she described?

I was not, never had been, never would be certain. For, as I explain’d to your mother when I first met her in 1804 (and told her a version of this adventure suitable for the ears of a lady of fifteen), and re-explain’d when I remet & fell in love with her in 1807, and reminded her upon our marriage three months ago, Consuelo had flung her singular snuffbox straight into the Mediterranean when the
Fortune
clear’d Algiers. For all I knew & know
for certain,
“Don Escarpio” might have been tricking her for some complicated reason into an
unsuccessful
attempt on Barlow’s life, or she me into her rescue—tho she needed no such risky stratagem. I was
certain
only that it was good to be out of Algiers & to have such ardent company en route to Leghorn (where I was able to confirm the transfer of “our” letter of credit to Bacri’s Italian office) & Marseilles, where I left the ship. Consuelo wisht to come with me—to Paris, to anywhere—but I was too uncertain of my plans to undertake that responsibility. The Captain offer’d to carry me on, to Málaga or to Philadelphia: I return’d to Paris, & to a different uncertainty: one that persisted another half-dozen years.

Indeed, it was not until 1805, one Saturnian revolution since my birth, that I addrest myself clearly to what I thot of as “the American question.” I was
de trop
in Barlow’s household after “Toot” Fulton join’d it, tho Joel was glad of my assistance in the “XYZ Affair” & the revision of his
Columbiad
for the press. I was no less so in Mme de Staël’s: still Constant’s mistress and (in 1797) mother of his child, she turn’d her disappointment with Napoleon’s lack of interest in her into formidable political opposition to his 1st Consulship, & a fever of literary activity. I was able to help with the research for her essay
De la Littérature (considéréé dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales);
but after 1800 it was the autobiographical novel that most appeal’d to her, and such adventures as mine with Consuelo she found insufficiently
“esthétique”
(her new favorite adjective) for her
Delphine, Corinne
, & the rest. She was kind, but no longer interested, & frankly bored with my hatred of my father, which she declared had become mere wrongheadedness. “Henry Burlingame IV,” she confest, had assisted her in the purchase of 23,000 acres of former Iroquois land in upstate New York, as well as investments in the munitions firm of E. I. Du Pont in Delaware, for which assistance she was his debtor. Her comparison of him to me was in terms borrow’d from “Monsieur Ful
ton
“: I was all
vapeur,
still in quest of a proper instrument of propulsion (Fulton was tinkering on the Seine with oars, paddle wheels, screw propellers); my father, more subtle, was a
sous-marin,
quietly applying
torpilles
to what he opposed. She thot I might well take a leaf from his book. Richard Alsop’s rhymed attack on Barlow in the Hartford
Courant
(after publication of Barlow’s letter criticizing President Adams’s French policy) characterized my own inconstancy:

This “Proteus mind” permitted Barlow in 1800 to help Fulton persuade Napoleon to finance his submarine project against the British navy, and then in 1804 to encourage him to build torpedo-rafts for the Admiralty to use against Napoleon’s channel fleet—whilst at the same time projecting a four-volume opus in verse to be called
The Canal: A Poem on the Application of Physical Science to Political Economy,
and drafting liberal pamphlets on the incompatibility of large standing military establishments & political liberty!

My own mind was less protean than protoplasmic; less a “shifter of shapes” than a maker of shifts. On errands for Barlow & Fulton I went to London as aforemention’d & met the King (& Mrs. Burney, & the beautiful Juliette Récamier). On errands for Mme de Staël I came to meet & be befriended by Napoleon’s young brother Jérôme, eight years my junior; on account of this connection, & my “American origins,” in 1803 I was sent on an errand by a minister of Napoleon himself, to warn Jérôme against contracting “permanent personal alliances” during his tour of the U. States (a naval officer at the moment, he had left his ship in the West Indies and was carousing his way north towards Philadelphia and New York). I arrived in Baltimore on Christmas, 1803, one day after his marriage to Betsy Patterson of that city. It was my task to inform Jérôme privately that his brother—having banisht Mme de Staël from Paris in order to intimidate the anti-Bonapartist
salons,
& having arranged several unsuccessful assassination attempts against himself to cement his popularity with the masses, all in preparation for having Pope Pius VII crown him Emperor of France in the coming year—would never acknowledge Jérôme’s marriage to a commoner. The bride, a wealthy Baltimore merchant’s daughter, was indignant. Jérôme merely shrug’d & invited me to tour America at the First Consul’s expense, on pretext of dissuading him from the marriage he had already consummated.