To accomplish the 2nd objective I sadly bid my bride au revoir immediately after, struck out eastwards down the Mohawk & Hudson to New York City, and took ship for France to try whether I could “torpedo” good Joel’s negotiations with the Duc de Bassano, described above. In October I reacht Imperial Paris (much changed), where everyone but the Barlows, so it seem’d, went about drest in “Caca du roi de Rome” & reenacting the age of the Caesars. I found Aaron Burr (much changed) so sunk in Baroque vice as to seem more than ever the descendant of Henry Burlingame III, were he not equally sunk in despair & alcohol. I found Germaine (much changed) newly pregnant by her sturdy guardsman — now secretly her husband — whom the household call’d Caliban behind her back: she was become nervous, insomniac, a touch dropsical to boot, & much given to laudanum in consequence; yet no less busy & brilliant than when I had first met her.
She scolded me for not bringing with me my belle sauvage, & insisted that I rehearse to her new young protégé the story of the original Baron Castine’s romance with Madocawanda, & my own with “Consuelo del Consulado.” She was certain her needling letters to Napoleon, on the occasion of De l’Allemagne’s French publication, still rankled the Emperor; he had banisht her beautiful friend Juliette Récamier for the crime of visiting her in Switzerland; if his secret police continued to harass her at Coppet, she would have to flee to Vienna, to Russia, to God knows where, since she had no wish to lose her scalp in America. If only she could resist writing letters! All the same, she believed the Emperor to be fascinated with her: let her set out for Russia, she bet he’d not be far behind. Had I read M. Chateaubriand’s silly Indian novels, Atala and René? Really, she thot her precious romantisme could be carried too far, and no doubt the worst was yet to come; if she were as young as young Master Balzac, she would set about to invent whatever was to follow it. Someday soon she meant to write her own version of la révolution: perhaps I would assist her with the chapters on the Commune & the Terror? Or was I back to my Pocahontas? In any case, I look’d more like my father every day. The Duc de Bassano? No wilier or more dishonest than the run of foreign ministers, she reckon’d, Napoleonic or Bourbon: he would promise Barlow everything, & (wise man!) put nothing in writing. But she would not advise me on how to thwart my friend Barlow’s mission, for while she approved the idea of an Indian free state, & agreed that another war with England would distract the Americans from westward expansion — just as Britain’s war with France kept both countries from expanding their influence in America — she believed it more imperative to curb Napoleon than to curb the pioneers. Better the Indians be lost than the British! Now: what was it I said happen’d to that famous plagued snuffbox?
Only stout Joel and Ruthy, it seem’d to me, were not much changed, simply mellow’d into middle age. Resign’d now to childlessness, they had replaced me & Fulton with a nephew of Joel’s from Yale. Resign’d also to less-than-Homerhood after the mocking critical reception of his huge Columbiad & his ode to Captains Lewis & Clark (ably parodied by John Quincy Adams), he regretted not having stuck to satire as my father had advised, and doubted he would go to the Muse again. He agreed now with his former tutor that History is your grandest fiction, tho he had not yet come to my father’s modest corollary (which I heard now for the 1st time): that its eloquentest authors, like those of the ancient ballads & Eastern tales, are anonymous, their subtlest “works” known only to the elect. Our deals & double-deals with Joseph Bacri & Hassan Bashaw, for example, were surely works of art, which gave him more pleasure than the whole Columbiad. He hoped his work in progress would equal it.
But he cordially declined to make me privy to his strategy with the Duc de Bassano, beyond acknowledging that he was not imprest with that gentleman’s verbal assurances that the Berlin & Milan decrees had been effectively revoked. The Duke was a regular Burlingame, he said, even whose written word could not be assumed to be authentic; and I was grown too much my father, & my interests too far from his own, for him to confide in me as he had used to, now he’d re-met me. My Tecumseh sounded like a splendid fellow, my “wife” a splendid woman; he hoped that the red men would not be hounded from the continent to become, like the black slaves, an indelible stain on the conscience of white America. But even as we spoke, the 12th Congress would be debating a war with England which Madison did not want yet must surely yield to if Prime Minister Perceval fail’d to rescind the Orders in Council, & Tecumseh’s confederacy did not disband. He Barlow would be pleased to be remember’d as a diplomatist instrumental in avoiding that war; if he should fail, he bade me seriously consider what I seem’d to him to have given no thot to: that with the cream of the British military engaged against Napoleon in Spain, the U. States might very well win the war, in the process destroying Tecumseh, annexing Canada, the Floridas, & Mexico, & sweeping uncheckt across the entire continent of North America as Napoleon was sweeping across Europe. Patriotic as he was, Barlow did not believe American destiny to be quite that manifest: he urged me to turn my energies to the course of peace.
I was moved by what he said, not to believe that the Indians’ cause would be better aided by peace than by war, but to see more clearly than ever, from the perspective of Paris, what Tecumseh knew: that their cause was lost in any case; that their future lay not in history but, as it were, in myth, & that therefore their only victory would be in valiant tho futile resistance. I wisht Andrée there to advise me. My plan had been to reestablish my acquaintance with Jérôme Bonaparte, now divorced from his American wife & restored to his brother’s good graces, & thro that avenue assure Napoleon that even half a year’s dallying with Barlow should suffice to see war declared betwixt the U. States & G. Britain, especially given the slowness of transatlantic communications. Only keep Britain from revoking her Orders in Council before Congress adjourn’d for the summer; Tecumseh’s confederacy would do the rest.
But before I could begin to put this strategy into action, your mother’s urgent letter reacht me: our stratagem with Harrison had misfired, not because he had attackt the Prophet’s town, but because, incredibly, Tenskwatawa had tried to win a military victory in his brother’s absence by attacking Harrison! Losses had been high on both sides, but the victory was unquestionably Harrison’s: the Indians were disperst from the Tippecanoe, the Prophet had fled, the town was burnt to the ground; the army had return’d triumphant to Vincennes with British rifles taken from the Indians; Harrison was everywhere acclaim’d a great hero. “Cato” would be furious: with his brother for having launcht so premature an attack; with us if he learnt we’d advised Harrison to make his threatening move. Andrée was the more distrest because, to console herself in my absence, she had pursued her research into our family’s history, particularly the activities of our namesakes in Pontiac’s rebellion, and was horrified at what she saw as a pattern of deadly reenactment, too mattersome for her to put in a hasty letter. Finally, our labors of the summer had, if not borne other fruit, at least sown other & sweeter seed: she was expecting! I was to forget Napoleon, Joel Barlow, & the Game of Governments, & come posthaste to make an honest woman of her; then together we must examine History, our family’s & our own, to the end of making honest people of ourselves.
But (she could not help adding, out of self-confest habit) it would not much delay me to return to her by way of London, where “our coney J[ohn] H[enry] was ripe for catching.” That was a trap too shrewdly set to go unsprung, & should provide our baby with a handsome & much-needed nest egg.