Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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Desperate improvisation! He expects many questions, whether anxious or suspicious: Lafitte merely embraces him with a light smile, wishes him bonne chance, promises to be in the appointed place at the appointed hour on the morrow.

Throughout the 21st Cook conjures “shift after desperate shift,” and can hit upon nothing even remotely likely. He has not got through to the invalid prisoner. He has no confidence in Rousseau, Chauvin, Ortini; barely knows them. Beyond bribing a suit of Napoleon’s clothes from a laundry girl (the loss causes little stir; souvenir pilfering and counterfeiting are an industry on the island), he has been able to make no arrangements whatever. In a lifetime of stratagems and ruses he has never been so nonplussed.

At moondown he dons those clothes, assumes his “private,” “true” imposture of Napoleon, modified by what little he has seen and learned on the island. He conceals himself in the Longwood gardens, in the vague hope that Rousseau or Chauvin might wander by and be impressed into service. The hour arrives; no one is about except the regular British sentries. Feeling more nakedly foolhardy than at any moment since that night a quarter-century past when he donned Joel Barlow’s clothes and rode out to a certain Algerian headland, to enter a certain dark carriage, Andrew works through the cypresses and privet, past the sentries, toward where le Maure and Lafitte await. Can he perhaps feign detection, mimic several alarmed voices, simulate the thrash of two servants fleeing, bring the sentries running, and then stumble as if dazed into the rendezvous? Faute de mieux, he gathers himself to it…

And somewhile later woke half-tranced, knowing neither where I was nor how I came there! Bloodsworth Island? 1812? Husht urgent voices all about, in a medley of accents: French, Corsican, Italian, German, English, St. Helenish, even Yankee! A thunder of surf, & the damp rock under me, bespoke that ledge we had barely fetcht up on two months past. I guesst I had either swoon’d again, as at New Orleans & Fort Bowyer, or been knockt senseless by “friend” or “foe,” & carry’d down that terrific cliff. I heard Jean’s voice, unalarm’d, giving orders to le Maure & the fishermen. Who was that German? That New Englander? Was that a British female whisper’d?

He conceals regaining consciousness in hopes of making out his situation; permits himself to be rowed like a dead man for hours out to sea, hoisted easily over a shoulder he recognizes as le Maure’s, and put to bed in a familiar aft cabin of the Jean Blanque—but nothing he can overhear tells him what he craves to know. Now there is a lantern-light to peek by: he sees Lafitte tête-à-tête with a cloaked stranger; whispers are exchanged, papers, a small pouch or box? They examine a map. They agree. The stranger leaves; Lafitte also; one can hear orders given on deck, sail made. The schooner swings about and settles under way.

Andrew considers the possibilities. His ruse has perhaps been anticipated by Lafitte, by the U.S. Secret Service, by Metternich, the British, the French. They know he is Andrew Cook, but see fit to support his imposture? Or they don’t know; the imposture has for the moment succeeded! In the first case he must be candid with Lafitte or lose what trust after all remains; in the second, such candor might be fatal – and both suppositions could be incorrect. Should he pretend to be a willing Napoleon? An outraged, resentful one? An unperturbed Andrew Cook?

He feels his way carefully: “wakes” as if uncertain himself who and where he is; is greeted politely but ambiguously by Jean’s body-servant, by Lafitte himself, whose ironical courtesies fit either hypothesis. On deck the Baratarians receive him as the ailing Bonaparte he pretends to be, but are under obvious and sensible orders not to address him by any name. With Jean, in private, he hazards maintaining that imposture, and is puzzled: the man’s half-mocking deference suits neither the belief that he has rescued his emperor nor the knowledge that his erstwhile comrade has deceived him. He begins to suspect that Lafitte believes him to be neither Napoleon Bonaparte nor Andrew Cook, but the impostor alleged to have been substituted for Napoleon in January 1820—and that this state of affairs is for some reason acceptable to him!

But he cannot be certain, and so the voyage proceeds in an extraordinary equivocality, every gesture and remark a potential test, or sign. Where are they bound? “To America.” And to where in America? “To that place arranged for Your Majesty by his friends there.” Andrew is greatly encouraged to be presented after all, however ironically, with the agreed-upon ultimatum: to live incognito under Joseph’s protection (Lafitte does not say “your brother’s”) or, as General Bonaparte (Lafitte says neither “as yourself” nor “as the Emperor Napoleon I”), to lead a movement organized by American Bonapartists “both exiled and native, of great wealth and influence.”

He will choose, Andrew declares, when he has spoken to Joseph and the movement’s leaders and heard more details. Meanwhile it is surely best to remain incognito, if only officially, even between themselves.

Jean smiles. “I shall call you Baron Castine.”

Andrew smiles the same smile. “That is a name I know. It will quite do.”

Then he takes a great gamble. In a tone he hopes appropriate to whatever might be Lafitte’s understanding of him, he observes that no matter what fate awaits him in America, it is unlikely he will see again the land of his birth or, as it were, the theater of his life’s first cycle (the phrase is Andrew’s). Though he has a brother in America, the rest of his family are elsewhere. He does not expect to see his wife again; as for his son, that is too delicate a matter to venture upon at present. And his brothers and sisters are too various, either in their loyalty or in their good judgment, to place overmuch faith in just now. (Andrew speaks in these epithets rather than in proper names, watching Jean’s face.) But his mother, he declares, while less ill than himself, is old and cannot be expected either to live a great while longer or to undertake a transatlantic voyage. He would therefore like to pay her a call – incognito, if necessary – and bid her a last farewell before commencing his new career.

Lafiite seem’d genuinely astonisht, & without apparent guile demanded, Did I really propose a voyage into European waters under the flag of Cartagena? I took heart & breath, & told him (with just enough smile to cover my tracks), I was sure that a vessel & captain able to spirit Napoleon Bonaparte from St. Helena were able to sail him thro the Pillars of Hercules, pass him within sight of Corsica, whisk him straight up the Tiber, and land him on the steps of the Palazzo Rinuccini. That he could, if he did not trust me, keep me every moment in his view, & impose what conditions and disguises seem’d to him advisable. But that I was resolved to have a last word with my mother ere I was fetcht to my next destiny. He appear’d to consider. I made bold to enquire at once whether he was under someone’s orders to the contrary, or regarded my proposal as too audacious…

The fact is, Lafitte then acknowledges, his men have been at sea for above half a year without shore liberty, and a vessel in the Jean Blanque’s trade never lacks for alternative colors, name boards, and registry papers. But can it be true that “Baron Castine” has nothing in mind beyond bidding his mother adieu?

Not quite, I reply’d, in as level a tone as I could manage: I hoped also to have a word with her confessor. I heard him mutter: Nom de Dieu!

No more is said. Their watering stop in the Cape Verde Islands is noncommittal, a reasonable jumping-off place to either the Caribbean or the Mediterranean. But their course thence, to Andrew’s great joy, is north, not west; before long they raise the Canaries, then Madeira. By April’s end they have traversed the Strait of Bonifacio between Sardinia and Corsica (“I dofft my hat, & look’d toward Ajaccio, & said nothing…”) and are anchored in the marshy mouth of the Tiber, off ancient Ostia. Only then, writes Andrew, I went to Lafitte & thankt him. He responded, as quizzical as ever, I was welcome, for the excursion & for his company. Which latter he trusted I would not object to, as his life depended upon my safe delivery to America. This was the 1st clear acknowledgment that he was not his own man – tho he may have invoked it by way of excusing his close surveillance.

Thus it occurred, as all biographies of the Bonapartes attest, that on the morning of May 5, 1821 (by coincidence the day, though not the hour, of Napoleon’s death on St. Helena), a “well-dressed Napoleonic stranger” invaded the Palazzo Rinuccini, made his way by sheer authority of mien past guards and attendants into the presence of Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte, “Madame Mère,” and (as his equally elegant companion, unmentioned in the chronicles, stood by, dabbing at his tears with a fine linen handkerchief) bowed and kissed that matron’s hand, touched a crucifix to her lips, and assured her that her famous son was “free from his sufferings, and happy”; that she would one day surely see him again; and that by mid-century the nations of the world would be racked by such civil strife and conflagration as to make St. Helena seem a paradise.

He bows again and leaves. Devoted son and good Roman Catholic that he is, Jean Lafitte embraces him outside the palace, begs his pardon for having doubted his motives, and declares that scene to have been the noblest he has ever been witness to (his words, Andrew notes, would apply as well to a loyal Bonapartist as to Bonaparte). An attendant overtakes them with a gift of gold Napoleons from Mme Mère. Andrew at once bestows it upon Lafitte for the trouble and expense of this diversion, reserving only two coins: one he gives the servant, in exchange for information concerning the whereabouts of his lady’s spiritual advisor, Mme Kleinmüller, with whom he has business. They are informed with a smile that that worthy has been exposed (by Pauline) and dismissed from the household as a fraud: she was not even Swiss! But she is said to be living in the northern outskirts of the city, at an address near the Villa Ada, and to be awaiting the arrival from Geneva of her wealthy American lover, whose influence she hopes will restore her to favor in the Palazzo Rinuccini.

To Lafitte, Andrew declares that he must deal alone with this woman who so egregiously imposed upon Mme Mère, to his own detriment, for so long – though his guardian may if he wishes not only accompany him to the Via Chiana but surround the address with Baratarians to assure his not “escaping.” The proposition involves a calculated risk: that Lafitte might be, as Mme Kleinmüller reportedly was, in the service of Metternich. But Jean declares himself satisfied with “the baron’s” honor: he will of course escort him to the house and back to their ship, but the interview will be as private and as lengthy as monsieur desires. He even offers a knife, which Andrew accepts only when Lafitte assures him, with a small smile, that he carries others, and a pistol as well.

They find the quarter, the street, the number, an unimpressive pensione, and are told by the landlord that no Mme Kleinmüller lives there, only a vedova spagnuola of the highest respectability. Would he be so gracious, Andrew inquires, as to deliver to that same widow a note of his respects? He presents it for Lafitte’s inspection, declaring it to be “in the family cipher”: it reads VS DRYEJRI G.G. Lafitte shrugs. Very well, thinks Andrew: if he is in Betsy Patterson Bonaparte’s pay, he is at least not privy to her cipher. With a tip of one gold Napoleon for his trouble, the landlord goes off with the message. Andrew winks, shakes Lafitte’s hand, taps the dagger in his waistcoat, and steps quickly inside the house, “praying to the Muse of Imposture” that Jean will not follow.

For all my assurances, that he was welcome to follow me & cet., were merest bluff, he now acknowledges. Had he lay’d eyes upon “G.G.” of the familiar flourish, he had surely known her face at once, as off Tobago I had finally known her hand. And knowing her, he would have known me, and all been lost. But he stopt there on the threshold, even as a cry of female joy was heard upstairs. I winkt again, closed the door betwixt us, was directed above by Signor the concierge, & was met at the door of her chamber by VS (& Betsy Bonaparte’s) DRYEJRI G.G.: Consuelo del Consulado.

An alarmed, handsome forty, “C.C.” draws back – she had expected either Betsy’s footman or Mme B. herself, come down at last from Geneva. Then in an instant she sees through Andrew’s disguise and dashes with a cry to her dressing table.

But my hand at her mouth, & my knife at her throat, prevented her [from availing herself of the little pistol Andrew now espies there and confiscates]. I vow’d to her I meant her no harm, nor was of any mind to publish her identity. That my life was forfeit if she should publish mine. That I knew her to have got intimate by some wise with Mme B., & to have posed as the Swiss clairvoyant Kleinmüller, to what end and in whose service I could not say. That I was come thither, thousands of miles out of my way, not to trouble her life but to save my own, to which end I sought no more from her than her story since our parting in Bordeaux half a dozen years past. In return wherefor, I would tell her mine or not, as she wisht, and be on my parlous way.

He now takes his final risk. His difficulty in recognizing Consuelo’s penmanship – after reading so many hundreds of pages of her manuscript fiction! – had been owing to the cipher, its unfamiliarity and noncursive letters. The identification made (nearly eight months since!) he had understood not only that Betsy Bonaparte’s Roman informant was, of all people on the planet, his erstwhile lover, but that she was very possibly, by some series of chances, that lady’s secret suisse—and that therefore Mme B. knew more about him than he had supposed, and from a particularly disaffected source, his last farewell to whom had been a bitter business. Nevertheless he now releases her, compliments her appearance, and (though retaining the pistol) resumes the manner and mien of Andrew Cook IV.

Consuelo sat; I too. She lookt me up & down; lookt away; lookt back; shook her head; reacht for her reticule. Another pistol, I wonder’d? Or the famous poison’d snuffbox? But she fetcht forth a mere silk handkerchief (gift from me in Halifax), wherewith to wipe her eyes as she rehearst her tale.

She has, she tells him, embarked since their last parting on a “Second Cycle” of her own, inspired by his rejection of her and by a certain subsequent humiliation. Against Renato Beluche she bore no grudge: he had made clear from the first the terms of their connection, and though she had hoped he might change his mind, she remained grateful for his protection. Nor could she blame Andrew for not loving her more, in Algiers, in Halifax, in New Orleans. Who can command love? Of the men in her life, only three had truly victimized her: Don Escarpio, of whom more presently; a certain ensign aboard that dispatch boat from Halifax to Bermuda in 1814, who upon a certain Gulf Stream night when she was downcast by Andrew’s teasing criticisms of her novel, had sworn to withdraw before ejaculating and had then, with a laugh, forsworn; and Joseph Bonaparte, whose patronage she had sought after all, for want of better, at Andrew’s suggestion, in Bordeaux in 1815, and who had not only neglected to give her the letter of introduction to Mme de Staël which he had promised in exchange for an hour in his bedchamber (he was summoned out by an urgent message from Napoleon in Rochefort, and never got back to either his coitus interruptus or to his payment therefor), but had neglected as well to advise her that he was enjoying a mild gonorrhea.

(I broke in to protest that I had offer’d her just such a letter, with no clapp attacht! She reply’d, ’Twas not from me she wanted it, or anything, not then…)

Disgusted, she had made her way to Leghorn, sought out Mme de Staël there on her own, been generously received by that lady on the strength of what she acknowledges having pled, in tears: her past connection with Andrew Cook; and while being cured of her venereal infection, had helped nurse Germaine’s ailing husband back toward health. Indeed she had made herself so useful to her heroine (who did not share Consuelo’s weariness with men, but sympathized with it and introduced her to the idea, but not to the practice, of le saphisme) that Mme de Staël had brought her back in her retinue to Coppet and Paris. In that city, chez Germaine, she had met a truly sister spirit, the aggrieved but undaunted Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, with whom, on the strength of their common ill-handling by Napoleon’s brothers, she had become friends. More exactly, with Germaine’s fascinated encouragement, the two women had become first friends, then quite close friends, then finally and briefly (the first such experience for either) more than friends.

Unsettled by that adventure, Betsy had returned to Baltimore, where she put by her disposition against Joseph Bonaparte and sought him out, in her son’s interest, at Point Breeze. Consuelo had remained behind to attend Mme de Staël, whose own health was failing. For a time the two refrained from correspondence – the very time, as it happens, when Andrew had made Betsy’s reacquaintance and interested her in his project of rescuing the chief of the Bonapartes. Mme de Staël died, with her last breath encouraging Consuelo, should she ever take pen again in hand, to “rework that little business of the poison’d snuffbox,” a device she could wish to have employed in her own life against more men than one.

Her words inspire Consuelo not to literature but to that aforementioned “Second Cycle.” She is 37, without husband, children, lovers, or further wish for them. She considers writing to Betsy; decides not to. Recalling Andrew’s program of “correcting his life’s first half,” she conceives a project of revenge against the man “who had 1st corrupted her, & whose life was a catalogue of such corruptions”: Don Escarpio! She goes to Rome, where she understands him to have made an infamous reputation as agent of the anti-Bonapartist secret police; she intends by some means – perhaps a poisoned letter opener! – to end his wicked life, at whatever risk to herself. But she has been prevented: a certain opera singer of that city, whose sexual favors Don Escarpio had demanded as payment for her lover’s release from the political prison at Castel Sant’ Angelo, has availed herself of an unpoisoned letter opener to stab him through the heart.

At once thus gratified and thwarted – and nearly out of funds – Consuelo is reduced to two equally disagreeable options: appealing to her friend Mme B. for money on the strength of their brief but extraordinary connection, or attempting another novel, perhaps on the subject of Don Escarpio. But the former smacks of blackmail, and for the second, despite a promising title (whose promise is perhaps diminished in literal translation: The Woman before Whom the Man before Whom All Rome Trembled Trembled), she has come to understand she has not the talent. Her investigations, however, and her credentials from Mme de Staël, have led her into Roman anti-Bonapartist circles from the early years of the century, in which there is concern that the habitation in that city of Napoleon’s mother, uncle, sister, and two brothers (Lucien and Louis), will generate schemes for his rescue and return to Europe. Consuelo herself is nonpolitical – and lonely, and at loose ends. She is befriended by, and for a modest stipend becomes the assistant of, a fellow lodger in her pensione, one Mme Kleinmüller, who is in the service of these anti-Bonapartists…

Andrew interrupts: she was not herself this Mme Kleinmüller? She has no gift for imposture, Consuelo replies – nor for dissembling, nor for fiction. She was Mme K.‘s assistant. The spiritualist herself was now returned in discredit to her ultimate employer, Prince Metternich, whose object it was to discover and forestall all rescue attempts. Consuelo’s own object, in the beginning, had been merely to survive; a remarkable letter from Betsy Bonaparte, received fortuitously at just this time (1817, when Andrew was busy with the Lakanal affair), gives her a new purpose. So far from having forgotten their brief affair, Betsy confesses that it has changed her life: ambitious as ever for her son, for herself she now craves “something more,” which she dares not spell out in plain English. She encloses the Patterson family cipher, begs Consuelo to set forth in it her own feelings…

An impassioned correspondence follows. Betsy vows to return with Bo to Europe, and to her “sweetest consolation,” as soon as the boy’s schooling permits, perhaps 1820. Meanwhile she is delighted to learn of her friend’s connections in Rome, so useful to her plans, which she now presumes to call theirs. While pretending to support Joseph Bonaparte’s schemes to retrieve his brother from St. Helena, she has hatched a scheme of her own, which Consuelo can immeasurably abet from her position in the Palazzo Rinuccini. It is Metternich’s policy with a difference: to deter all rescue operations except her own! From past acquaintance Betsy knows Mme Mère to be gullible; Mme Kleinmüller’s imposition on her will be justified by the fact of her son’s rescue. Consuelo accepts another retainer; their correspondence through 1818 and 1819 is an excited mixture of love, plans for their future, and present business. Consuelo is able to serve her American friend without really betraying Mme Kleinmüller, given the partial congruence of their interests. What is more, she believes in the spirit voices, table rapping, and the rest, which her efforts assist Mme K. in conjuring.

It is not until early in 1820 that Betsy mentions by name her “principal American agent” in the St. Helena scheme: a “handsome, worldly, & agreeable fellow” who, if he were but of the gentry and she not done for ever and all with men, she could even imagine as a lover: one Andrew Cook, of Maryland and Canada. Consuelo’s urgent, appalled reply, warning Betsy not to trust of all men that one, comes too late: Andrew has already disappeared, to Betsy and Joseph’s consternation. Mme B. wonders whether he has not been all along an agent of the U.S. Secret Service; whether Metternich might not in fact have arranged for Napoleon’s covert assassination or removal, and his replacement with an impostor. She urges Consuelo to extricate herself from Mme Kleinmüller, and makes hasty preparations to leave Baltimore. For appearances’ sake she will settle with Bo in Geneva; her father’s friend John Jacob Astor is there, and will surely urge her to visit the Roman Bonapartes, with whom he is close. Thus she will discreetly rejoin Consuelo, and they can assess both the St. Helena situation and their own.

The letter arrives just when Pauline Borghese finally persuades Mme Mère that the clairvoyant is a fraud; that Napoleon is ill, perhaps dying, perhaps dead. Mme Kleinmüller vanishes; Consuelo withdraws to her pensione and anxiously awaits her friend, fearing daily she will be done violence to by Pauline’s hirelings, or Metternich’s, or the late unlamented Don Escarpio’s.

She concludes her tale. Her friend “Dona Betsy” has put aside her ambition to rescue and marry Napoleon for her son’s sake; it is Consuelo she now desires, and Consuelo her. She is in Geneva already, and on the advice of Señor Astor will soon come to Rome. In the fall, her son will return to America to enter Harvard, perhaps also to marry Joseph Bonaparte’s daughter; Betsy and Consuelo will retire to Switzerland, officially traveling companions, in fact a couple.

She then implored me, writes Andrew, by whatever love I had once felt for her, not to obstruct this innocent aim. That she cared not whether I kill’d or saved Napoleon, or how I might re-draught the map of the world or the script of History, so I left her & her friend in peace. That the sole grudge she bore me was for having encouraged a talent she never possest, for writing novels. For the rest, she felt only gratitude: for my having more than once helpt her out of a parlous corner, & for what affection we had shared. That whatever my present danger, she wisht me safely out of it, & would aid me any way I ask’d. And that she hoped, once I was free of it, I would beg pardon of the woman I had abused long & sorely, by my absence: yourself, whom she bid me make amends to even if, as might be, I found you to have follow’d in your disappointment her & Betsy Bonaparte’s path, to el safismo!

Much moved (“& by this last not a little alarm’d”), Andrew tells Consuelo the truth about Napoleon as he knows it: that the man on St. Helena is dying, has no wish to be rescued, and thinks only of his son, “l’Aiglon,” a virtual prisoner in Augsburg. (“They will poison him too,” declares Consuelo.) His own tentative plan for “Dona Betsy” Andrew does not mention, and now quietly discards; but he reminds Consuelo of his original high ideals vis-à-vis the Louisiana Project, and the Indian Free State before it, in which good cause he hopes she will enlist Mme B.’s aid. Why should such a sovereign general sanctuary as he envisioned not extend also to such as her newly discovered self? Why not “a vast New Switzerland, or New New World to the opprest, where not only black & red & white, but women & men, may abide as equals”? And he will, he pledges – if Jean Lafitte does not discover and dispatch him to the sharks – make amends to Andrée upon his return. Herself he wishes success in her life’s Second Cycle, with which he pledges not to interfere – but he cannot leave without knowing whether her disconcerting speculation about his wife was based upon more than just her own experience. Has Consuelo somehow had news from Castines Hundred?

She reply’d, I could take her life before she would reply – shrewd insurance that I would make good my pledge! But tho she doubted so bold a creature as my “New New World” would come to light in our century, she promist to speak favorably to Betsy B. of the Louisiana Project. She then bid me adios (not hasta la vista) with words that dizzy’d me almost into a “Bloodsworth Island Swoon,” to wit: that she fear’d I was become the counterfeit, not of Napoleon, but of Andrew Cook. And that the cypher whose key I had yet to hit upon, was my own self.

They kiss farewell (“after a fashion,” Andrew says unkindly – but he is writing to Andrée); he draws a breath, resumes the mien of Napoleon disguised as “Baron Castine,” and steps outside. Jean Lafitte waits patiently, to all appearances indifferent to both the length and the issue of this interlude; Andrew returns the knife without comment. Nor does his cautious conversation, as they make their way back across the city and down the Tiber to their ship, give him any clue to how much Jean understands, or what his purpose is. (Their way takes them through the Piazza di Spagna. One wants to call across the fifteen decades, “Stay! Put by a moment these vague intrigues, this nonsense of Napoleon: young John Keats has just died here!”)

A hard suspense, he remarks, which lasted thro our crossing, & is not yet resolved. They stop three weeks in Genoa to reprovision Jean Blanque and give the crew shore liberty (Lafitte “firmly requests” his passenger to remain aboard), then set out westward at the end of May. Neither killed nor challenged nor put at his ease, our ancestor finds it no problem to maintain with Lafitte a tentative attitude concerning the Louisiana Project, for he has begun to question it himself. Jean’s sustained ironic solicitude makes Andrew reckless: he asks directly, Is that daring fellow who arranged his rescue himself to be rescued, or left languishing on St. Helena? He no longer languishes there, Lafitte replies with a smile, adding that he is not at liberty to say more.

Thus we arrived, early in July, at what I knew to be the Virginia Capes, & sail’d on up the Chesapeake, leaving Tangier & Smith Islands to port, till we came within sight of fateful Bloodsworth! I feign’d not to know the waters, and asking, was told no more than that they were full of sharks and alligators, to keep strangers off. We enter’d the marshy Manokin – where neither shark nor ’gator ever swum – and anchor’d off the King plantation, which too Jean said he could not name: only that I was to be sequester’d there in safety & comfort till my brother came for me, a fortnight or less. I was fetcht ashore, found the owners “off on the Grand Tour,” & the house in charge of a well-manner’d staff who lookt neither Baratarian nor Eastern Shore. They show’d me my quarters, comfortable indeed, & inform’d us wryly that news had just reacht the U. States of Napoleon’s death on St. Helena on May 5. Le roi est mort, shrugg’d Jean: vive le roi. Next morning he bade me adieu (not au revoir) & sail’d off, “to take the good news to Louisiana, & to rescue André Castine.” And here I have languisht full six weeks since.

His attendants are as polite and noncommittal as Lafitte. When the promised fortnight extends to a month with no word from anyone, they apologize. Andrew stages imperial tantrums at the restriction on his movements: he is free to stroll the grounds of Beverly without (apparent) surveillance, but forbidden “for his own protection” to leave the estate. They regret but have no authority to relax their orders. He suspects the secret service, Joseph Bonaparte, Betsy Patterson; perhaps all of them in concert; perhaps – long delayed and skillfully managed retribution – at Andrée’s direction!

By mid-August, convinced that he has been transported “from one St. Helena to another” and afraid for his sanity, he resolves to escape to nearby Bloodsworth, to “regain [his] bearings at the spot where 1st [he] lost them,” and then make his way to Castines Hundred, to whatever he might find there. His long, ambiguous confinement – extending really from his swoon on St. Helena – and Consuelo’s parting words have now persuaded him that the Louisiana Project, indeed his whole original conception of a Second Revolution, has been misconceived; that the true Revolution, while it might well end in politics, does not begin there…