John Barth - Letters

Good Joel Barlow: if only his poetical talents had been capacious as his heart! For the next five years I stay’d in Paris, completing my schooling in the Lycée, in the avenues of the Terror, on the margins of Mme de Staël’s salon, and — he being, as always, good as his word— chez Barlow, once “Ruthy” had settled in.

Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne de Staël-Holstein, ten years my senior, was 24 when I first met her, that afternoon. She was no beauty, excepting her great brown eyes & her bosoms creamy as ripe Brie; but she was possest of wondrous energy, knowledgeability, & wit, and seem’d to me the embodiment of what was most appealing in the French liberal aristocracy. Her father (who had arranged the French financing of the American war) was unendingly wealthy. Her mother had been young Gibbon’s mistress and might have been his wife, had not Rousseau disapproved of Gibbon’s early literary style. At 20 Germaine had married the Swedish minister to France, Baron de Staël, & publisht anonymously her 1st novel, Sophie. By the time I met her she had brot out in addition her Lettres sur les écrits et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau & an unfortunate tragedy, Jeanne Grey. The Revolution at that point (that is, the reforms imposed upon Louis XVI by the National Assembly) was much to her liking, as it was to Barlow’s: liberal, atheistic, constitutionary, at once “enlighten’d” &—a term I heard for the 1st time that afternoon in this particular usage— romantique. She was thick with the Moderates: Talleyrand, Joucourt, Narbonne. This last (the Baron was complaisant) had become her 1st serious lover, who by year’s end would get her with her 2nd child, the 1st to live.

She liked my father — I mean the man who had represented himself to her, to her own father, & to Barlow as Henry Burlingame IV. She call’d him, & me, américain… Indeed, she spoke of him in the same breath with the late “Monsieur Franklin,” as entrepreneurs de la révolution! “We” were, she declared, l’avant-garde du genre humain.

My protest — restrain’d indeed, considering my feelings — that I did not regard myself as a citizen of anyplace, much pleased her: To be sure, she said, “our kind” are citizens of the world: but the new idea of political nationality, much in vogue since “our revolution,” was in her opinion the wave of the future, & not to be snift at. For my observation that, whatever his talents as diplomatist or spy, my father had been less than exemplary as a husband & parent, she took me spiritedly to task. Quite aside from such possibilities as that my father’s secret & dangerous work might truly have made a proper family life out of the question, despite his best efforts; that he himself might have been heartbroken at the deceptions & disguises he was forced to; that he might have been acting in our best interests, given for example our value as hostages to his adversaries — had I not consider’d the possibility that he had simply outgrown his wife? Or that his enemies had forged those cruel letters of invitation & promist reunion? In any case, was I still child enough not to forgive parental negligence in one whose gifts were, of their kind, comparable to Gibbon’s or Rousseau’s?

She urged me to go to him, in Baltimore. I bid her bonsoir. She complimented my independence & my unaccented French, and hoped I would call on her again: I was the first américain she had met both very young & civilized. If I would discuss our revolution with her — whose differences from the French she thot more significant than their celebrated similarity — she would discuss with me another sort of revolution already under way, tho scarcely yet acknowledged, in all the arts. Its inspirers were her old family friend Rousseau & his German counterparts. Its values were sentiment & sensation as against conscious intellection; it aspired to the rejection or transcension of conventional forms, including the conventional categories of art & social class; its spirit was manifest equally in the assault on the Bastille, in the musical innovations of certain pupils of Joseph Haydn, in the plays & essays of Schiller, above all in Goethe’s novel-in-letters, The Sorrows of Werther, even in the investigations of natural historians. Had I read, for example, Herr Goethe’s botanical treatise Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, just publisht? She would lend it me: if I had my father’s (& the author’s) eye for the connexions betwixt apparently disparate things, perhaps I would discover that an essay on the forms of plants can illumine the storm & stress, so to speak, betwixt certain parents & their children, or innovative artists & the conventions of their arts. I did read German?

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…