I fell in love with her at once, and remain’d so for the next five years, during most of which I served in her household as a sort of English-language amanuensis & library clerk. Because my politics were more radical & sanguinary than Germaine’s (I was to cheer—& witness — the King’s beheading, & many another’s), I was able to render her a signal service on 2 September 1792. The King & Queen had been arrested, the Revolutionary Tribunal establisht; Robespierre & Danton had led the insurrection of the Paris Communards, who were now inspired to slaughter all the Royalists they could lay hands on. They broke into Mme de Staël’s house and demanded of me that I deliver my mistress up to them as a prisoner & join them in the morrow’s executions. But I had known of their coming from my friends in the Hôtel de Ville, and had bid Germaine disguise herself as one of her own servants, whom I now introduced as my mistress in the tenderer sense, & who was in a delicate condition besides. Our employer, we declared, had fled that day to Switzerland.
Thither (that very night) she flew, in her plainest closed carriage, rewarding me en route with what she knew I had long desired. The carriage pitcht & bounced over the cobbles; round about us were the shouts & torches of the sans-culottes. I was 16 & virginal; she 26 & seven months gone with her 2nd child by Narbonne. I had no clear idea how to proceed, especially in such circumstances. But no initiative of mine was wanted: for all her experience of love, Mme de Staël had never been “taken” as a serving girl; the situation excited her to such a pitch of “romantic” emotion that, so far from returning as I had intended to join my friends in the September Massacre, I found myself — your pardon, Andrée — a-humping la baronne over Brie, Champagne, Bourgogne; up her Seine, down her Saône, over her Jura, to the home-most peaks & pools of her beloved Coppet, in Switzerland.
Where arriving, she turn’d her full attention to establishing a salon for her fellow refugees, & to her own lying-in. Tho she never forgot my service to her, it was clear her heart belong’d to Narbonne. Our remarkable journey was not mention’d, far less repeated. In the spring, son Albert safely deliver’d, she moved with her ménage to England, to join her lover & M. Talleyrand. I return’d to Paris & the Terror, which now shockt even liberal Barlow out of the city & across the Channel — where he forwarded me the last letter I was ever to receive from “Henry Burlingame IV.”
It was written, purportedly, from Castines Hundred. Its author declared himself in midst of the proudest feat of his career: the reorganization, this time with British aid, of Pontiac’s old Confederacy of the Iroquois, Miamis, Ottawas, & Shawnees, under Chief Little Turtle (a Miami), to succeed against the Americans where Pontiac had fail’d against the British. Already “we” had won a great victory over General St. Clair on the Wabash River; the author was confident we would turn back the “American Legion” being recruited & train’d by General Anthony Wayne to suppress us. Our objective then, the writer asserted, was, in his words, “to call our enemy to our aid”: to form a strong independent colony of Indians, Africans, French habitants, & Spanish Floridians in the politically confused territory west of North Carolina & south of the Ohio, in the valley of the Tennessee, which from time immemorial had been a common Indian hunting ground. There John Sevier had organized in 1785 a new state called Frankland (later Franklin), which had been more or less dissolved. But the situation was still fluid enough to permit the hope of its reestablishment, if not as a sovereign state, at least as “the first non-Anglo-Saxon child of the Union.” He urged me to join him at Castines Hundred for the coming offensive & the great move south. I had a new little cousin there, he reported, born since I’d left: a charming 4-year-old, named Andrée…
I assumed the letter, & the strategy, to be duplicitous. Barlow himself thot it a tactic to the opposite end — the establishment of more & more American “defensive” fortifications in the western territories, to protect the settlers flooding illegally onto Indian lands — and did not even report it to the American minister. General Wayne’s rout of the Indian “confederacy” at Fallen Timbers the following year (and the admission of “Tennessee” into the Union in ’96 as one more slave state) confirm’d my assumptions. I liked to imagine, as I watcht King Louis & then Marie Antoinette go under the guillotine—& then the Girondists, & then the Hébertists, & then the democratic republic, & finally Robespierre himself — that the author of that letter had been relieved at least of his scalp by the surviving Iroquois; for I was certain the cause of Indian sovereignty (about which, at the time, I had no deep feeling one way or the other) was lost as long as he lived to pretend to champion it.
The end of Robespierre & the Terror on the 9th Thermidor of Year II (27 July 1794), ended also my interest in the revolution, which — even before Bonaparte came to the fore — we saw to be increasingly in the hands of the generals rather than those of the sansculottes. Barlow was in Hamburg, recouping his fortune as a shipping agent after the collapse of the Scioto real-estate swindle. Mme de Staël was back at Coppet, writing her Réflexions sur le procès de la reine, which had disturb’d her as the execution of the King had not. Both were eager to return to Paris; both sought my opinion of their safety there in Year III, under the new Directory. For some reason, Germaine’s letters to me were uncommonly confidential (I later learnt she was using them as trial draughts for her more serious epistles). Her affair with Narbonne, she confest, was ending: for one thing, he remain’d in England when she return’d to Coppet in ’94, and she suspected he had taken another mistress. Apparently, she wrote to me in the spring of that year, everything I believed I meant to him was a dream, and only my letters were real. For another, she had met & been fascinated by Benjamin Constant in Lausanne, who in turn was fascinated by the audacious young Corsican, Bonaparte.
The city, I regretfully reported, now that the Committee of Public Safety had been guillotined, was safe. I myself was penniless, & unemploy’d except as an occasional counterfeiter of assignats, the nearly worthless paper currency of the moment. I had discover’d in myself an unsuspected gift for forgery, and was being courted by minor agents of both the left & the right, equally interested in bankrupting the Directoire. I was nineteen, no longer a novice in matters of the heart. My politics were little more than an alternation of impassion’d populism & fastidious revulsion from the mob; the two extremes met like Jacobins & Royalists, not so much in my cynical expediency as in the psychological expedient that was my cynicism: a makeshift as precarious as the Directory itself. I dared to hope Germaine might find all this, and me… romantique.
And so she did, for the 1st décade of Brumaire, An IV, whilst reopening her Paris salon with Constant & the Baron de Staël. When the spirit took her, she would revert to her waiting-maid or sans-culotte costume & fetch me, in that famous plain carriage, thro some working-class faubourg to reenact “our” escape of ’92. But her heart was Constant’s; her mind was on the composition of an essay, De l’Influence des passions; the serving-girl whose clothes she borrow’d for the escapade was a secret Jacobin infested with crab lice, who thus spread the vermin not only to her mistress & to M. Constant, but also to me & thence to the bona fide (& thitherto uninfested) working girl whose bed I’d shared thro the Terror. Germaine found the episode piquant; the rest of us did not. Moreover, tho I still admired her range, I no longer found her physically appealing. When Barlow — horrified by the dangerous game I had been playing with my assignats—urged me to accompany him on a diplomatic mission to Algiers at the year’s end (I mean Gregorian 1795), I accepted with relief.