John Barth - Letters

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.