Letters

In May, despairing of your coming here, & doubting my welcome at Castines Hundred, we sail’d for France, writes Andrew. His errand is to interest Napoleon — whose reascendancy in Europe Lafitte never doubts — in the “Louisiana Project,” to the extent of sending French ships and men “to aid the cause of Mexican independence” once the military situation in Europe is in hand. On the advice of Jean Blanque he carries by way of credentials a forged letter from Mayor Girod of New Orleans (who had in fact been as interested as Lafitte in the Elba mission), appealing to the emperor “on behalf of all French Creoles.” The voyage is financed jointly by Lafitte and Beluche, the latter on condition that Andrew see to Consuelo’s safe return to her homeland.

As they traverse these waters (where Mrs. M. and I now reenact together certain separate youthful passions), Consuelo endeavors, we ca

Andrew gently reminds her that Mme de Staël, at last report, seemed to have put by both fiction and action for reflection. And, “transported by longing for [his] own family,” he permits himself “a panegyric on parenthood, conjugal fidelity, & domestical bliss,” for all which, he declares to Consuelo, she is in his opinion more admirably suited by temperament than for literary, political, or sexual adventuring. His friend mistakes his meaning, agrees at once, and “flinging herself upon [his] neck, with tears of joy accept[s his] proposal!”

We must surmise what followed. When their ship reaches British-held Bordeaux at the end of June and they learn of Waterloo, of Napoleon’s second abdication and his flight from Paris to nearby Rochefort, Andrew offers either to dispatch her to Mme de Staël in Leghorn, Italy (whither I learn’d Germaine had fled with her guardsman-husband for the sake of his health, & to wait out the Hundred Days); or to introduce her, as one former novelist to another, to Joseph Bonaparte, presently in Bordeaux & about to flee aboard a charter’d American schooner to New York. But she declined both offers, coldly informing me she would set & sail her own course thro life, without my or any other man’s aid. That she had, she believed, found her true vocation. Finally, that the real defect in “that business of Don Escarpio’s poison’d snuffbox” was not that it wanted re-working in fiction, but that it had not workt in fact!

On this discordant note they part. After learning all he can about the emperor’s situation from Joseph’s entourage and from the U.S. consul in Bordeaux (a Mr. Lee, to whom he attaches himself long enough to observe his signature and appropriate some consulate stationery, and for whom he volunteers to act as unofficial liaison with Napoleon’s party), Andrew hurries to Rochefort to reco

Napoleon, he learns, is being uncharacteristically indecisive, to the growing desperation of his suite. Having offered his services in vain to the provisional government in Paris as a mere general of the army (he had noted on his maps a vulnerable gap between the armies of Wellington and Blücher, both marching toward Paris), he has a

Delighted by this unanticipated turn of fortune — which of course revives at once his original hope that Bonaparte himself might lead the “Louisiana Project”—“André Castine” attaches himself to the emperor’s party on the strength of a letter “from Mr. Consul Lee” authorizing him to oversee and facilitate Napoleon’s “American arrangements,” should the emperor choose to go to that country. He urgently advances Jean Lafitte’s Champ d’Asile/New Orleans/Barataria co

Legality was the official sticking-point, he writes: Bonaparte had long since requested of the Paris government passports to America, & had renew’d that request thro Commander Maitland of Bellerophon, without reply. He had, he declared, been condemn’d an outlaw by the Congress of Vie