Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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He would have been further encouraged, could he have seen them, by editorials in the Times and the Morning Chronicle next day, expressing their writers’ conviction that the captive would have been securer from rescue in Stirling Castle, say, than on St. Helena, where “an American vessel will always be ready to take him off…”

Nevertheless, throughout that morning and early afternoon (154 years ago today), as they rendezvous with Cockburn’s squadron between Start Point and Bolt Head, exchange cannon salutes and visits between the admirals’ flagships, then move together to the calmer waters of Tor Bay in preparation for the transfer, Napoleon gives no public sign of acquiescence. Keith and Cockburn are moved to the extraordinary precaution of impounding the French officers’ swords and pistols, lest they attempt to resist the transfer with arms. Only when Bellerophon’s doctor reports to Commander Maitland that “General Buonaparte” has invited him to serve as his personal physician on St. Helena do the English – and Andrew – have reason to imagine that Napoleon has at last accepted his fate. Even then they fear a ruse (they have just learned that Las Cases, who has affected since Rochefort not to understand English, reads and speaks their language easily). Guard boats are posted to patrol the anchorage all night lest Mr. Mackenrot, or the habeas corpus people, or the Bonapartists, or the Americans, attempt rescue or obstruction, or the emperor fling himself from his cabin into Tor Bay.

At eight-thirty that evening Admirals Cockburn and Keith come aboard to read to Napoleon their instructions from the cabinet and work out the details of his transfer to Northumberland next morning; Andrew retires out of sight down to the orlop deck, where he had completed the “Washington” letter, and spends the evening drafting this one.

Rather (as I have done here on the first-class deck of the Statendam, where it is not to be supposed I have deciphered, transcribed, and summarized all these pages at one sitting, simultaneously wooing your future stepmother!), he extends toward completion the chronicle he has been drafting in fits and starts since Rochefort, as I have drafted this over the three weeks past. And as I expect any moment now this loving labor to be set aside for one equally loving but more pressing (Jane is in our stateroom, preparing for bed and wondering why I linger here on deck), so my namesake’s is interrupted, near midnight, by good news from the Count de Las Cases. Not only has the emperor agreed at last, under formal protest, to be shifted with his party to Northumberland after breakfast next morning; he has made long speeches to History, to both the admirals and, separately, to Commander Maitland, from whom also he has exacted a letter attesting that his removal from Bellerophon is contrary to his own wishes. Moreover, he has prevailed (over Maitland’s objections) in his insistence that Las Cases be added to the number of his party, to serve as his personal secretary; and he has clapped the count himself on the shoulder and said, “Cheer up, my friend! The world has not heard the last from us; we shall write our memoirs!”

Even as I, Andrew concludes, am writing mine, in these encipher’d pages, my hope once more renew’d. Tomorrow Admiral Cockburn, “Scourge of the C’s,” will weigh anchor for St. Helena with the Scourge of Mankind: a voyage of two months, during which I shall make my own way back from England to New Orleans, hoping against hope, my darling Andrée, to find you there. Where, if all goes well, you & I & Jean Lafitte will devise a plan to spirit Napoleon from under George Cockburn’s nose before he has unpackt his writing-tools!

And even as I, dear Henry, hope against hope that upon my return to “Barataria” next week I shall find you there: the present point of my pen overtaken, the future ours to harvest together!

I go now to Mrs. Mack, to fertilize and cultivate that future. A fellow passenger remarks, in nervous jest, upon the “secret of the Bermuda Triangle”: the hijacking of cruising yachts by narcotics smugglers to run their merchandise into U.S. harbors. I pretend to know nothing of that scandal. Small wonder, my companion replies: the Coast Guard and the tourist industry are keeping it quiet, inasmuch as they cannot possibly search every pleasure boat entering every creek and cove from Key West to Maine. Very interesting, I agree, thinking of the gift from Jane that awaits me in Annapolis.

A word to the wise, my son? From

Your loving father

R: A. B. Cook VI to his son. The fourth posthumous letter of A. B. Cook IV: plans for the rescue of Napoleon from St. Helena.

Yacht Baratarian

St. Helena Island, Little Round Bay

Severn River, Md.

August 13, 1969

Dear Henry,

Round Bay is a handsome widening of the Severn five nautical miles above Annapolis, itself some 125 up the Chesapeake from the Virginia Capes. Off Round Bay, on the river’s southwest shore, is Little Round Bay, in the center whereof lies a small high wooded pleasant island named after Napoleon’s exile place in the South Atlantic, some 7,000 sea miles hence.

This local St. Helena Jane Mack is of a mind to buy for our weekend exiles, as more comfortable and convenient than my Bloodsworth Island, and more private and spacious than my cottage on Chautaugua Road, not far away. Imagine an island of some dozen acres within twenty miles of both Washington and Baltimore! It is presently owned by acquaintances of Jane’s, with whom she is negotiating purchase, and who have kindly permitted me to tie up at their dock for the night. As a honeymoon house and vacation retreat it will quite do, though it is too much in view of the mainland (half a mile off all around, and thickly peopled) to serve your and my other purposes. We shall hold onto our marshy, inconvenient “Barataria.”

From a week of dolce far niente aboard the Statendam—a sort of final trial honeymoon itself, altogether successful – we flew home yesterday, Jane to return to her métier and truest passion, Mack Enterprises; I to take delivery in Annapolis of her birthday gift to me: the sturdy diesel yacht from whose air-conditioned main cabin I write this. All day the builders and I put Baratarian through its sea trials, as successful as Jane’s and mine; tomorrow or next day I shall return it to the boatyard for certain adjustments and modifications (I feign a sudden addiction to deep-sea fishing) to be made while I check out our human Baratarians. On the ides of August, Napoleon’s birthday, I shall fly briefly north to see how things go at Lily Dale and Fort Erie. I had considered a side trip to Chautauqua as well, to confer with my quondam collaborator there; but I now believe he knows nothing of you and is without interest in the Second Revolution. On or about St. Helena’s Day (the 18th) I shall go up to Castines Hundred (our ancient caretakers have retired; I have engaged new ones through the post), whence I shall return, ere the sun enters Virgo, for a more considerable trial run: the first real test of our operations for the coming academic year. Will I find you there, Henry, poring through our library like your ancestors, determining for yourself what I have been at such futile pains to learn, to teach?

Andrew IV never did return there, except in dreams and letters. The next to last of his lettres posthumes was written aboard Lafitte’s schooner Jean Blanque in “Galvez-Town, or New Barataria,” on August 13, 1820—five years and a week since its predecessor. Like yours truly, he is about to commence on the ides of August another journey: one by his own admission “more considerable but less significant” than the one he ought to make instead, to Castines Hundred. Still curst by what I had thot long exorcised, he confesses to Andrée, I shall sail 9,500 miles in the wrong direction, from Cancer down to Capricorn, to “rescue” against his will a man the world had better not seen in the 1st place, rather than fly north to the seat & bosom of my family, beg your pardon for my errancy, put by for good & all my vain dream of 2nd Revolution & Western Empire, and spend content in your arms what years remain to me.

He refers, of course, to Jean Lafitte’s expedition to spirit Napoleon from St. Helena – the expedition which, in his last, he had hoped to expedite before the island’s defense could be organized. What has he been at for half a decade?

Rushing to Plymouth from Tor Bay [so he begins this letter, with a 4)?(, a HSUR, a rush, as if no more than a page-turn separated Bellerophon from Jean Blanque, 1815 from 1820], I found a fast brig just departing for Bermuda, where I took a yet faster packet to New Orleans. By mid-September, a full month ere Cockburn reacht St. Helena with his prisoner, I was back in Conti Street with Jean Lafitte, asking for news of you & the twins.

There is, we know, none. I could only conclude my letters & entreaties were unwelcome at Castines Hundred; else the Mississippi, whose navigation from Great Lakes to Gulf of Mexico was secured now to the U. States, had borne you long since hither.

And why does he not straightway bear himself thither, to make certain those “letters & entreaties” ever reached their address? ’Twas not the current of the Father of Waters I shy’d from breasting, he declares, not quite convincingly, but the current of your disfavor, both of my long absence [three years by then, eight by “now”!] and of what I had accomplisht. Where was our free nation of Indians, Habitants, & liberated slaves? Even New Orleans I found more “American” than I had left it, and with the Union at last secured & at peace – tho set fast forever, as wise men had fear’d, with a standing Army & Navy – I could feel the country catching its breath, as ’twere, before plunging to the western ocean. There was no time to lose, or all would be lost.

But the Baratarians have more practical business on their minds. The Italian captains – Vincent Gamble, Julius Caesar Amigoni, Louis Chighizola – ever more barbaric and less “political” than their French counterparts, have openly returned to buccaneering and are already embroiled with U.S. gunboats and Federal Grand Jury indictments. “Uncle Renato” Beluche, covertly supported by the New Orleans Mexican Association (merchants and lawyers in favor of Mexican independence from Spain for reasons of trade), is running the Spanish blockade of Cartagena with provisions for Bolivar’s patriots; his new mistress is rumored to be pregnant by the Liberator himself. And the brothers Lafitte, while still interested in the St. Helena venture, are too busy with “Louisiana Projects” of their own to pursue it immediately: the reorganization of the French-Creole Baratarians at Galveston and the assistance of the new wave of Bonapartist refugees pouring into New Orleans and Champ d’Asile. One look at their charts of the island persuades even Jean and Pierre that while St. Helena’s precipitous sea cliffs, limited anchorages, and existing fortifications make it all but impregnable to armed assault, even to covert approach, it can be readily infiltrated under some pretext or other, regardless of the defenses. Wherever there are local fishermen, Jean declares, there is “local knowledge” of ways to land and take off items, for a fee, without the inconvenience of passing through customs. Let the emperor have a taste of confinement while his place is prepared; it will dispose him the more toward America.

Most immediately interested in Andrew’s plan (to rescue Napoleon; he does not mention the Louisiana Project) are Nicholas Girod, the mayor of New Orleans; Jean Blanque, the state legislator; and a curious fellow named Joseph Lakanal – former regicide, defrocked priest, Bonapartist refugee, and newly appointed president of the University of Louisiana. Andrew spends the next year and a half employed jointly by them and by Jean Lafitte as a kind of liaison, project manager, and investigator of rival schemes – of which, he comes to learn, there are a great many.

Napoleon and his party reach St. Helena and are established temporarily at The Briars and then permanently at Longwood; the amiable George Cockburn is replaced in 1816 with a stricter warden, Sir Hudson Lowe, who sees rescue plots even in the planting of green beans instead of white in the kitchen garden (white being the color of the Bourbon livery, green the Bonapartist); the emperor begins his memoirs. James Madison is replaced in the presidency by his protégé Monroe; Beluche and Bolivar sail from Haiti with seven little vessels to commence the liberation of South America; Mine de Staël, back at Coppet, tries to mend a marital quarrel between her guests Lord and Lady Byron, and is charmed (as are-Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, von Humboldt, and the Duke of Wellington) by Jérôme’s cast-off American wife, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, now 31 and touring Europe while her son “Bo” attends school in Maryland – especially when, “out of loyalty to her name,” Betsy declines an invitation from Louis XVIII himself. News of this gesture precedes her return to Baltimore late in the year and disposes Joseph Bonaparte in her favor. Having experimented with rented estates on the Hudson palisades and in Philadelphia, Joseph has built elaborately at Point Breeze, on the Delaware near Bordentown, New Jersey, and is buying vast tracts of upstate New York to house his newest mistress, a young Pennsylvania Quaker. He invites Betsy and Bo to visit; there, early in 1817, she remeets the man who’d been dispatched too late by Napoleon to dissuade Jérôme from contracting any “entangling amorous alliances” in America, and who later had agreeably shown the young bride and groom around Niagara Falls.

Andrew is there on business (so to be sure is Betsy, whose regnant passion is to establish the legitimacy of her son): General Lallemand – one of Napoleon’s party aboard Bellerophon who was exiled to Malta instead of St. Helena – freed from his detainment, has lately arrived at Champ d’Asile with the news that Andrew’s “Tor Bay” plan may have succeeded too well: according to reports reaching Malta from St. Helena, the emperor is so taken with the publicity value of his “martyrdom” that he would now refuse rescue if offered it! Girod and Blanque want Joseph’s opinion on this subject, as well as his blessing upon their scheme: to design a vessel especially for the rescue, commission “a suitable captain and crew” to man it, and raise a house in New Orleans for Napoleon’s residence. They also suspect their colleague Lakanal of unreliability, and want Joseph’s estimation of him.

On the first matter the ex-king of Spain has no opinion, though he reports with pride (and, it seems to Andrew, relief) his brother’s refusal of his own offer to join him on St. Helena. But on the character of Lakanal he is vehement: the man is as desperate a charlatan as the “Comte de Crillon”; very possibly in the pay of Metternich or the Bourbons to implicate Joseph in a rescue scheme that will make his presence embarrassing to the U.S. government. As Andrew reads Joseph’s character, the man is truly but mildly sympathetic to his brother’s situation and does not object to its ameliorating, but has no political ambitions himself: he is primarily concerned with his enormous private pleasures and fearful of anything that may imperil them. His brother Lucien’s suggestion, for example, that the three of them conquer Mexico, appalls him; he wishes he were not the focus of every harebrained scheme to exploit his famous name and Napoleon’s exile. Betsy thinks him a coward, like her ex-husband. If she were a man, she declares privately to Andrew, she would have had the emperor in America long since; it wants only a bit of audacity! To Joseph, Andrew offers to expose and discredit Monsieur Lakanal in a way that will publicly absolve Joseph of any connection with the rescue plan. He volunteers further, if the business is executed to Joseph’s satisfaction, to serve him as he is serving Girod and Blanque (he does not mention Lafitte): as monitor, evaluator, and coordinator of all rescue proposals, encouraging whichever seem likeliest and seeing to it that the others come to nothing. For not only will ill-managed attempts increase the difficulty of a well-managed one, but the emperor may as likely be kidnapped by some exploiter or well-meaning crank as rescued by his friends or (what Betsy fears, having heard such rumors at Mme de Staël’s) secretly poisoned by the British to end the expense of confining him and the risk of his returning to power in Europe.

Joseph agrees, and authorizes Andrew in this capacity; their conversation turns to lighter matters. Did Mr. Cook know, Joseph asks with amusement, that while his brother was on Elba, the aforementioned Mme de Staël had descended upon himself in Geneva with information of a plot on Napoleon’s life? He had been breakfasting with Talma, the tragedian; to punish Germaine for the interruption he had had the would-be assassins arrested by the local police instead of authorizing her, as she wished, to carry her warning directly to the emperor. Magnificent lady! Who also was reported to be in fast-failing health.

Andrew notes that each mention of Mme de Staël brings a blush to Betsy Bonaparte’s cheeks. He tests the observation: does the Comte de Survilliers (so Joseph has named himself in New Jersey) happen to recall meeting in Bordeaux a fellow novelist named Consuelo del Consulado, whom Andrew had recommended also to Mme de Staël? Joseph does not; Betsy’s face is aflame.

In the following months he sees her several times more, at her or his instigation, in Bordentown or Baltimore, and both confirms this curious connection and improves his acquaintance. He had imagined Mme B. might be having or planning an affair with Joseph, if only to further her son’s interests; now he perceives her to be, despite her beauty, quite devoid of sexuality. Or almost so: she reddens so astonishingly when, in August, he reports to her the news of Germaine de Staël’s death on Bastille Day last, that he is moved to exclaim: “Madame, one could believe that you have either un secret suisse or un suisse secret!” “If I do, sir,” Betsy replies, “it shall remain, like Swiss bank accounts, a secret.”

But she is not offended; on the contrary, in “this slough, this sink, this barbarous democratical Baltimore,” she is entertained by Andrew’s tales of the Revolution, of his intrigues with John Henry and Joel Barlow. And she is so pleased, as is Joseph Bonaparte, by his handling of “l’affaire Lakanal” that when Joseph engages him in the fall to serve as his clearing agent for all rescue proposals, Betsy volunteers her assistance as well “in any noncompromising way.”

Lakanal had had to be managed in three stages. Joseph’s opinion of him, which Andrew promoted from hearsay to firsthand knowledge, was enough to persuade the embarrassed trustees of the university to ease him out of office, and Girod and Blanque to ease him out of their plan. Andrew then advised Lakanal to petition Joseph Bonaparte directly, and, “as one close to that worthy,” told him how best to couch his appeal: the ex-king, he declared, is still secretly flattered to be addressed by his former title, and even enjoys conferring Spanish distinctions upon his favorites, though he cannot legitimately do so; at the same time, his two new passions are the Indians of his adopted country – even his “wilderness mistress” is named Annette Savage – and cryptology. If Lakanal could appeal to all these interests at once (every one of which, excepting Miss Savage, is in fact foreign to Joseph), while specifying that the emperor’s brother was not himself to have anything to do with the rescue, he could be assured of a favorable reading and an invitation to Point Breeze.

Lakanal dutifully prepares and mails a packet to Bordentown, which the U.S. Secret Service – tipped off by Andrew Cook “on behalf of [his] employer, Joseph Bonaparte”—promptly intercepts and passes on to President Monroe. It contains a cipher designed to make French and English messages look like prayers in Latin, a vocabulary of the Caddo language, a request for 65,000 francs for expenses to bring Napoleon to Louisiana and a Spanish marquisate if he succeeds, a catalogue of north Louisiana Indian tribes, and a vow that “le roi luimême” shall have nothing to do with rescuing the emperor. Monroe transmits his thanks to Point Breeze for Joseph’s loyal cooperation; for a time there is consternation in both the American and the French ministries of state; then the President dismisses the “Lakanal Packet” as the work of an utter and impotent madman. The secret service and Andrew agree to exchange information on other rescue attempts so that appropriate measures may be taken, and Andrew turns Lakanal off with a scolding for having been “so vulgarly beforehand” with that request for money, “as who should demand a boon ere it can be freely given.” The would-be conspirator is reduced to dirt farming.

With Girod and Blanque’s blessing then – and Jean Lafitte’s, who with a thousand followers is now established in Galveston and back to large-scale privateering – Andrew moves for the next two years between Louisiana and New Jersey. More bad news comes from St. Helena: convinced that Napoleon will dictate memoirs forever, Count de Las Cases has arranged his own deportation from the island, smuggling out with him the manuscript of his Memorial de Sainte Hélène; he quotes the emperor as declaring, “If Christ had not died upon the Cross, He would not have become the Son of God.”

Nevertheless, a dozen rescue plans go forward. Two freebooters of Philadelphia, Captains Jesse Hawkins and Joshua Wilder, propose to fit out a brace of clippers and a landing craft, register them for a tea voyage to Canton, and make for St. Helena instead. Stephen Decatur, the hero of Tripoli, together with Napoleon’s exiled General Bertrand Clauzel, proposes a similar scheme, worked out in knowledgeable military detail: the general has his eye on Mexico. In Britain, a certain Mr. Johnstone, admirer of both Napoleon and the late Robert Fulton, is testing a submarine for the purpose; and a Mme Fourès in Rio de Janeiro, who had been the emperor’s mistress in Egypt in 1798, is devoting her fortune to a plan involving several large sailing ships each carrying a small steamboat for fast night landings. The wealthy Philadelphian Stephen Girard, formerly a sea captain from Bordeaux, who helped Madison finance the War of 1812, is interested; so again is Jean Lafitte, who now proposes a quick operation by the whole New Baratarian navy. Girod and Blanque, impatient, have ordered construction of their ship in Charleston, South Carolina, safely away from their base, and are raising the imperial dwelling. Even Betsy Bonaparte acknowledges privately to Andrew that she has on her own authority approved an offer from the King family of Somerset County, old friends of hers and Jérôme’s, of the use of their remote mansion in the Eastern Shore marshes as a temporary hideout for the emperor until the excitement of his rescue shall have died down. She herself plans another extended visit with her son to Europe, where in course of frankly ingratiating herself with the other Bonapartes, she intends to enlist their aid in the project.

Andrew has his hands full. Joseph cautiously inclines to some combination of the Girod-Blanque scheme (as the most practical of the nonmilitary ones) and that of his friend Stephen Girard, whom he seeks not to disoblige, and who like Mayor Girod aspires merely to relieve Napoleon from so isolated and humiliating a confinement. But he will permit no expedition actually to sail until he is assured that his brother wants rescuing. He wonders vaguely whether their mother and their sister Pauline, both now luxuriously established in Rome, have better information on that score. In January of 1820, however, his Point Breeze mansion inconveniently burns to the ground, and he is too busy rebuilding it (on an even larger scale) to make inquiries of them.

Most of the proposals Andrew can deal with by simply refusing Joseph’s subsidy: thus the Hawkins-Wilder and the Decatur-Clauzel projects. A few he scotches by tips to the appropriate governments (Mr. Johnstone is arrested in the Thames and his vessel confiscated for examination by the Admiralty) or the planting of exploiters-by-delay, who like medieval alchemists turn the credulity of their patrons into gold (Mme Fourès’s steamboats need repeated and expensive redesigning). Bad luck and bad management take care of some others: a tornado destroys half a dozen of Jean and Pierre Lafitte’s vessels; Commodore Decatur is killed in a duel with a fellow officer at Bladensburg; the Champ d’Asile colonists are too busy saving themselves from crocodiles and dysentery to save their fallen emperor from St. Helena.

There remain the schemes that Joseph favors. Andrew delays them with overpreparation and cross-purpose (it is his idea to have Nicholas Girod’s Séraphim built inconveniently in Charleston, and to send Stephen Girard’s Philadelphia vessel to New Orleans to await sailing orders) until his own plan is ready, which his dealings with all these others have convinced him is likeliest to his purpose: at an appropriate moment, he will disappear from Bordentown, slip off secretly with Jean Lafitte on the fastest of the Baratarian vessels (the schooner named, as it happens, Jean Blanque), and do the job himself.

What job, exactly? Nota bene, my son: to no one more than to the author of a long-term project does the double edge of Heraclitus’s famous dictum apply: he cannot step into the same stream twice because not only the stream flows, but the man. The Andrew Cook who writes these lines, Henry, is not the same you last graced with your company in February; nor is the Andrew Cook who wrote on this date in 1820 the Cook of 1815. Events have at least thrice modified his original ends and means.

At first he wants merely to snatch Napoleon from the Allies and fetch him to Louisiana, let the international chips fall where they may. Then, in the spring of 1819 (Mississippi and Illinois have joined the Union; Alabama is about to; Monroe is buying Florida from Spain; Ruthy Barlow has joined her husband and Toot Fulton in the hereafter; the Atlantic has been crossed by steamship; the U.S.Canadian border is established at the 49th parallel), Betsy Bonaparte makes a curious report from Baltimore: she has it from friends in Rome that a German-Swiss clairvoyant, one Madame Kleinmüller, has become spiritual advisor to Napoleon’s mother (“Madame Mère”) in the Palazzo Rinuccini and has gained increasing influence over both the old woman and her brother, Cardinal Fesch. On January 15 last, according to Betsy’s sources, no less an authority than the Virgin Mary disclosed to Mme Kleinmüller, in a vision, that the British have secretly removed Napoleon from St. Helena and replaced him with an impostor; his jailers oblige his aides to write as if their master were still among them, but in fact he has been spirited by angels to another country, where he is safe and content! Mme Mère and Cardinal Fesch are altogether convinced. Napoleon’s sister Pauline Borghese is not: in a letter to Joseph soon after, she confirms Betsy’s report, deplores their mother’s gullibility, and declares her suspicion that Mme Kleinmüller is a spy for Metternich. Andrew himself dismisses the vision but changes his plan to include the planting of just such an impostor, to facilitate Napoleon’s removal, delay the search for him, and forestall international turmoil until the Louisiana Project is ready.

And he is interested in Betsy’s sources; the more so when, a few months later, she follows this report with another, also subsequently verified by Pauline: so entirely are Napoleon’s mother and uncle under that clairvoyant’s sway, they reject as forgeries letters from the emperor himself, in his own hand, complaining of his failing health and requesting a new doctor and a better cook! Persuaded that Napoleon is no longer on St. Helena, they have sent out a party of incompetents as a blind; Fesch has taken to discarding the emperor’s letters, and Mme Kleinmüller to forging happy ones from “some other island.” Pauline is furious. Andrew, still wondering about Betsy’s information, asks disingenuously whether she knows that a penitential procession by this same Cardinal Fesch was described ironically by Mme de Staël in her novel Corinne. Mme B. duly blushes.

Andrew then inquires, on a sudden impulse: has she considered remarrying? Crimson, she asks him why he asks; it is her son she cares about, not herself. Perhaps Andrew has his employer in mind? If so, forget him: Joseph is a sot, a lecher, and a coward, like Jérôme; the only male Bonaparte with spirit is the one on St. Helena. And does she know, Andrew next wonders aloud, that in some quarters there is doubt as to the validity of Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise, who in any case has no wish ever to see her husband again and would welcome a divorce? I do, replies Betsy, and Andrew divines with excitement that she has anticipated the next modification of his scheme, of which therefore he prudently says no more on this occasion. What better way for her to secure young Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte’s legitimacy – even his possible accession! – than to marry the emperor himself, as a condition of rescuing him? And how better for Andrew to finance the Louisiana Project than with the combined fortunes of the Bonapartes and one of the wealthiest families in Maryland?

In my mind & in my cyphers, Andrew writes, I had for convenience number’d these alternatives A-1, A-2, & A-3, as they all involved rescuing Napoleon & fetching him 1st to the Maryland marshes, thence to New Orleans, & thence west to our future empire. Two obstacles remain’d: the difficulty of finding someone able enough at mimicking the Emperor to fool his own wardens, at least for a time; and the possibility, reconfirm’d in June of this year (1820) by Mme B., that Bonaparte preferr’d to consummate his “martyrdom” on St. Helena. A letter from Baron Gourgaud, intercepted by Metternich’s agents, declared that the Emperor “could escape to America whenever he pleased,” but preferr’d confinement like Andromeda on that lonely but very public rock. His young son loom’d large in these considerations. “’Twere better for my son,” Betsy quoted Metternich quoting Napoleon from Gourgaud’s letter. “If I die on the cross—& he is still alive – my martyrdom will win him a crown.”