Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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I was much toucht, & much confused in my own heart – but enough surfeited with pestiferous Algiers to delight in putting it behind me. I went, not to Philadelphia, but to Leghorn & thence back to dear Paris. But to appease my conscience both for leaving good Joel as the Dey’s sole American hostage, in effect, & for declining that invitation to be his son (I didn’t want a father, I began with some excitement to understand), I perform’d him one final service ere I went, as important in my history as in his.

Our diplomatic successes in the cause of the U. States, remember, like most successes in international affairs, were at the expense of other governments, inasmuch as the Dey’s chief revenue was still the prizes taken by his corsairs. What game our treaty pledged him to forgo, he bagg’d elsewhere. In consequence, while Barlow was currently the envy of the Algerine consular community, he was also the prime target of their cabals. Nothing would have more pleased the Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, & Venetian consuls than the default of our treaty payments & a resumption of Algerine piracy against U. States merchantmen. Thus far they had been content to asperse privily, to the Dey, Barlow’s character & intentions: he was a sodomite, they insinuated; a Christian cleric; a closet poet. But on the eve of the Fortune’s departure, when my belongings were already packt & shipt aboard, Barlow came to my chambers much concern’d that a graver move against him might be afoot.

His profession of fidelity to Ruthy, I repeat, had been a shade disingenuous. Joel loved & misst her, no question, & wisht himself in her arms in the rue du Bac; she had no rivals amongst the veil’d Algerines. But he had for some weeks been enjoying a flirtation with the young wife of a man attacht to the Spanish consulate (we call’d her “Consuelo del Consulado”), and had left off her pursuit out of delicacy only when the husband, a gambler & general libertine, had perisht of the plague a few days since. Not once had this Consuelo responded to Barlow’s gallantries by more than a flash of her Andalusian eyes; now, suddenly, a message purportedly in her hand was deliver’d from the Spanish consulate: Could her carísimo Senor B. arrange discreetly to meet her carriage – alone, in person, at once – at a certain headland not far hence, on business of a most urgent but confidential nature?

He suspected a trap, of course. The note could have been forged, or written under duress; the woman or someone acting in her stead could be baiting him into a compromising position, to the end of either embarrassing or blackmailing him. Worse, some hired ruffian might be waiting in the carriage to knock him on the head & toss him into the sea, on pretext of defending the young widow’s honor. Even supposing the message genuine, he had misgivings: what if his little flirtation should lead to something more consequential & less extricable? On the other hand, if the lady truly needed his aid or craved his company, and he injured or insulted her by not responding, he would make a considerable enemy in the consular community: a fresh widow so ready to go to’t (let us suppose) would just as readily look to her revenge if scorn’d. And what if she did innocently need his help, or crave a bit of extra-consular consolation? He’d be a knave & fool not to provide it! & cetera.

Amused as I was by his embarrassment & excitement, I quite shared his apprehensions, & proposed at once to meet the carriage in his stead. I would declare he had been summon’d to an unexpected private audience with the Dey (no consular person could fail to acknowledge such priority), but would be honor’d to meet her at her convenience in our villa. If she seem’d offended, I would improvise, confess I had intercepted her message & taken it upon myself to investigate. If she seem’d sincere – whether sincerely distrest or sincerely amorous – I would endeavor to pacify her & either fetch her to the villa or arrange another assignation in less vulnerable circumstances, for Barlow to pursue at his own discretion. If I smelt a rat, he would be forewarn’d. And if it should prove an outright ambuscade? Why, then I would make shift to extricate myself as best I could: I had learnt a thing or two in the streets of Paris.

But she had specified Barlow himself: trap or no trap, would her carriage not take flight at my approach?

I had come to know my knack for counterfeiting hands (and assignats). Earlier, in Mme de Staël’s house at the time of the Septembrist massacre, I had discover’d a sudden facility for improvising histories; and more recently, in Algiers, a gift for devising stratagems. Now, almost to my own surprise, I found myself a ready hand at counterfeiting certain actual personages. Then & there, impromptu, I walkt like Barlow, talkt & laught & gestured in his way, even improvised aloud a passage from his Vision of Columbus! Where his had read (with characteristic lack-lustre):

Glad Chesapeake unfolds a passage wide,

And leads their streamers up the freshening tide;

Where a mild region and delightful soil

And groves and streams allure the steps of toil…

“mine” extravagantly declaim’d:

Borne up my Chesapeake, [Columbus] hails

The flowery banks that scent his slackening sails;

Descending twilight mellows down the gleam

That spreads far forward on the broad blue stream;

The moonbeam dancing, as the pendants glide,

Silvers with trembling tints the rippling tide;

The sand-sown beach, the rocky bluff repays

The faint effulgence with their amber’d rays;

O’er greenwood glens a browner lustre flies

And bright-hair’d hills walk shadowy round the skies…

I meant a gentle parody – but Barlow was enraptured, as much by the verses as by my impersonation. I was my father’s & cet.! Laughing & weeping, roused & reluctant, he gave me leave to make free with his cape (his coat was too large for me; I regretted he wore neither periwig nor eyeglasses; our features were not similar; voice & manner must serve) & a fine horse presented him by the Dey. We embraced a final time, and off I rode, to the oddest assignation I hope ever to be party to.

The moon was bright, the night warm & windy. The dark carriage waited with a single coachman at the designated spot, above a rocky beach outside the city. Très “romantique”: Germaine de Staël would have fancied it, the more for its spice of diplomatic intrigue. But I was all misgivings: surely the coachman was a Spanish thug, the carriage full of his cohorts. Why had I not come in our own carriage, her stipulations be damn’d, with Barlow drest as coachman, & demanded she change conveyances to prove her goodwill before proceeding farther? Too late for such hindsight: moreover, tho my disposition was & is not reckless, some intuition (I have learnt to recognize & honor it since) urged me, in this instance, not to reck. I took a large breath & walkt the horse forward, my hand on the pistol Barlow had lent me with his cape & the rest…

In the 15 years since, only three people have heard without scoffing the full tale of what ensued. I have ceased to recount it even to my friends, not to try their confidence unnecessarily. Andrée herself I have declined till now to test the faith of in detail, as (witness my faltering pen) I hesitate to test yours, child, when you shall scan these pages in time to come. What matters, after all, is not the business in the carriage, but the sparing of Barlow’s life (he himself was able to verify later, thro Bacri’s informants in Madrid, that the Spanish consul in Algiers had indeed got cipher’d instructions to assassinate him if the job could be done for $50,000) and the demonstration, to myself, of my little knack for impersonation.

That knack was call’d for only at the opening of the adventure, when the coachman cried me to a halt & uncover’d his lantern to inspect me. I saw the carriage window-curtain drawn aside; then I screen’d my face with Barlow’s hat and call’d back in Barlow’s voice that I was he whom a certain Senora del Consulado had sought aid of. If she was within, let her show herself, otherwise I would back to my own affairs – and, I added, I could see nothing with that lantern shining in my face. The carriage door open’d partway: a woman’s voice instructed the coachman in Spanish to put out the light, and me in soft accented English to secure my horse & enter without fear. I did so, keeping my visage lower’d, muttering in Barlow’s way about the lateness of the hour, & cet., and glancing up under my brim as I climb’d the step to make certain the lady was alone inside. She was barely illuminated by a tiny cover’d lamp fixt to the carriage wall. I stept in quickly & turn’d away from her to close the door & draw its curtain.

Even Germaine de Staël & the Barlows, back in Paris, accepted this much without question. Ruthy Barlow & Germaine defended somewhat further – against the skepticism of Joel & of the Barlows’ new American friend, Robert Fulton, whom they more or less adopted in my stead when he left off painting with Benjamin West in London and came to Paris with his schemes for canalways & submarine vessels – the possibility of what happen’d next: Consuelo’s calling to the coachman to ride on even as she flung herself ardently upon me; my struggle to keep her mouth cover’d when she realized, at once, that I was not the man she’d summon’d; my urgent whisper’d assurances that I had no dishonorable intentions, & wisht only to ascertain, for the gentleman whose person I feign’d, that the Spanish consulate had none either. No one seriously doubted – especially given Barlow’s subsequent verification – the essentials of Consuelo’s story: that she had at one time briefly been the mistress of the political attaché of the Spanish consulate, a dashing, unscrupulous fellow named Don Escarpio; that her worthless husband, who encouraged the affair in hopes of advancing his own fortunes, was smitten with jealousy upon its consummation & challenged Don Escarpio just when that fellow (who had better been named Don Juan), having made his conquest, began promptly to tire of her. It was Consuelo’s conviction, in view of what follow’d, that Don Escarpio then arranged her husband’s death by plague in order to rid himself of the nuisance without risking a duel, & to put her the more at his mercy. Her profligate spouse had left large debts in the consular community, which she had no means of paying; Don Escarpio proposed to liquidate those debts & return her safely to her family in Málaga with a $10,000 secret bonus from the Spanish government if she would seduce & see to the death of Senor Barlow, the too successful American diplomat who had so clearly been captivated by her beauty. Consuelo had protested that she could not kill, unless perhaps in a passion of anger. Her ex-lover, of whom she was now terrified, had replied with a cold smile (“una sonrisa fría”) that no anger was required, only the sort of passion of which none knew better than he her breast was full. He then disclosed to her—& she to me – the singular means she was to employ.

For Fulton, more engineer than artist, the question was not whether one could in fact prepare a snuffboxful of infected matter from the buboes of a plague victim, apply that poison to one’s fingernails as to a quiver of savage arrowheads, & infect the victim by raking his back or arms with those same nails in the throes of passion, so that he would perish miserably three days later & be counted simply one more casualty of the pestilence. Fulton had heard enough from Barlow & me (who had it from my father) of Lord Amherst’s successful employment of smallpox against the Indian besiegers of Fort Pitt to credit that possibility. What he doubted was that all this information – together with Consuelo’s conviction that Don Escarpio would surely see to her own death too, whether she refused or complied, & her decision therefore to agree to the plan but plead with Barlow instead to smuggle her aboard the Fortune & look to his own safety – could feasibly have been convey’d to me whilst we shook the carriage, first in our struggle with each other (she to call alarums to the coachman, I to prevent her & win her confidence) & then in pretended passion, punctuated with cries of delight in two languages.

I would smile here at Germaine, who declared that while she thot the whole Don Escarpio business smackt more of Italian opera than of Spanish diplomacy, she knew from experience that much ground could be cover’d in a bouncing carriage. She allow’d, moreover, that it was my modesty to call the passion & attendant noises merely feign’d, as I had been a notable gallant even before improving my skills in naughty Barbary. She would even grant that Consuelo had messaged out the business beforehand in her fetching skew’d English (I show’d the messages as proof) for “Barlow” to read as she moan’d & thrasht & annotated in whispers: Germaine herself permitted no drawing-room conversation at Coppet whilst she composed; her staff & houseguests communicated by messages written & replied to on the spot – what we call’d “la petite poste.” She cited Prince Hamlet’s scribbling in the grip of his emotions, “A man may smile and smile,” & cet. What she found hardest to believe was my trusting Consuelo not to poison me by the same device.

I did not quite so trust her, I would admit: as I happen’d to have been gripping both her wrists in one hand from the start (& covering her mouth with the other until I was assured it was no longer necessary), when she discover’d to me her stratagem I obliged her to rake her own flesh at once, to prove her assertion that she had not tapt the dread snuffbox (she declared it was in her reticule) in advance.

And how could I be sure, demanded Ruthy Barlow, that the woman was not up to suicide as well as the seduction & murder of flirtatious diplomats? Trop romantique, her husband scoft, who had taken up that term from Germaine upon his belated return to Paris. (Faithful to my word, I had written him in Algiers of Ruthy’s new friendship with young Fulton, which I judged harmless; it was not until 1800, after the “XYZ Affair,” that Fulton moved in to make their ménage à trois.) Trop or non troppo, I replied, I could not take measures against every eventuality, especially in the heat of the moment. Consuelo had claw’d thro her skin unhesitatingly at my order: once on the inside of her thighs, again on the underside of her bosoms. I took the rest on faith.

“As ought we,” George III is wont to put in at this point. So reports the author Madame d’Arblay (“Fanny Burney,” whom I met thro Mme de Staël) from Windsor. The King had the story originally from her after his seizure of 1808, when in his blindness he took a sudden fancy to novels & insisted that his daughters & Mrs. Burney read him long passages from Fielding “and those like him.” At my own single audience with the King, in 1803, I had not brot the subject up, inasmuch as I was posing as Robert Fulton at the time, and in any case did not then know of His Majesty’s interest in erotic narrative. We spoke of the submarine boat, which George argued was militarily more important than the steamboat; also of Don Quixote & King Lear, both of which characters interested him greatly. It is on Mrs. Burney’s authority that I list the King as my 2nd uncritical auditor. He still calls for the story, I understand; rather fancies that Consuelo might be his eldest son’s discarded wife the Princess of Wales, & particularly applauds my having accepted this piquant demonstration of her good faith.

“But you want us also to accept these messages as Consuelo’s,” Joel & Ruthy & Germaine protested good-heartedly, “when we know at 1st hand what an accomplisht forger of letters you are.” (At 1st hand because, most recently, I had forged certain messages over the signature of M. Talleyrand to “Messieurs X, Y, & Z,” the anonymous intermediaries in Talleyrand’s dealings with President Adams.) I take it as a measure of Germaine de Staël’s limitations as a novelist, compared with such an untried, even unwilling imagination as that of my first uncritical auditor, that she did not observe what Midshipman James Fenimore Cooper remarkt at once: that the acceptation of “historical” documents as authentic is also an act of faith – a provisional suspension of incredulity not dissimilar, at bottom, to our complicity with Rabelais, Cervantes, or George III’s beloved Fielding.

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 Fulton“: 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:

What eye can trace this Wisdom’s son,—

This “Jack-at-all-trades, good at none,”

This ever-changing, Proteus mind,—

In all his turns, thro’ every wind;

From telling sinners where they go to,

To speculations in Scioto, …

From morals pure, and manners plain,

To herding with Monroe and Paine,

From feeding on his country’s bread,

To aping X, and Y, and Z,

From preaching Christ, to Age of Reason,

From writing psalms, to writing treason.

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.