Letters

It is not, he acknowledges now, the begi

But the fact is (Andrew now declares to “my dear, my darling wife”) our ancestor has had for several years no intention of rescuing Napoleon in the first place! They have all been a blind, those elaborate schemes and counterschemes! Andrew has not forgotten Joel Barlow’s Advice to a Raven in Russia: the Corsican is a beast, an opportunistic megalomaniac whose newly invented “Bonapartism” is but the sentimental rationalization, after the fact, of a grandiose military dictatorship. Andrew has never truly imagined that his Louisiana Project would appeal to the man who sold that vast territory to Jefferson in part from lack of interest in it; in any case he would not want the butcher of Europe at the head of his (and Andrée’s) liberal free state!

And there is, in the second place, that aforementioned lapse of faith that Jean Lafitte or Dominique You will actually risk returning for him. It would be so easy not to, their main object once attained, and so perilous and expensive to do it! Jean endlessly complains of the Revenue Marine’s harassment of his New Barataria; might not the secret service offer to end or mitigate this harassment in return for his cooperation in foiling all rescue schemes, including Andrew’s? We were still to all appearances brothers, he writes; but some Gascon intuition warn’d me to trust this Gascon no longer. And warn’d me further, that that Gascon entertain’d a like suspicion of me.

What he had for some while been privately pla

Concerning whom, as Jean Blanque stands out of the gulf in August 1820, there remains a tantalizing mystery. When he last queried her in Baltimore concerning the source of her information about the Roman Bonapartes, Betsy had teased him with sight of a letter from Rome written in the Pattersons’ own family cipher. Knowing him to be “a clever hand at such things,” she scarcely more than flashed the letter; even so, she underestimated Andrew’s capacity. The forger’s trained eye and memory caught only the salutation and the close, but those he retained as if transcribed, and in fact transcribed them at his first opportunity: Vs Dryejri D., it began, and ended Nyy vs Yejr, G. Like most ciphers, it was written letter by letter, not cursively; yet the handwriting seemed half-familiar. I could almost have believed it yours! he exclaims to Andrée.

En route from Baltimore to New Orleans, New Orleans to “Galvez-Town,” he studies his transcription, but is unable either to recognize or to decipher it. Throughout the long voyage to St. Helena — normally a two-month sail, but extended to five by privateering excursions at Isla Mujeres and Curaçao, and by hurricane damage off Tobago — he studies the cipher while perfecting two separate impostures of Napoleon: a public, “false” one on deck for the benefit of Lafitte and the Baratarian crew, based on popular portraits by Isabey and Ducis (short-cropped hair, bemused mouth, right hand tucked between waistcoat buttons); and in his cabin a private, “true” one based on his last sight of the fallen emperor aboard Bellerophon—paunchy, jowly, slower of gait and speech — which he means to use to deceive his rescuers when the time comes.

Vs Dryejri D… Nyy vs Yejr, G. It looks vaguely Slavic, Croatian, Fi

The actual words he works out, within reasonable limits, later. Most conspicuous are the repeated sequences vs and yejr; given that y is the only character to appear four times, he anticipates Edgar Poe and calls it e, but can make nothing likely in either French or English of the result: _ _ _ _e_ _ _ _ _. . _ee _ _ e _ _ _, _. The character r, which appears three times (no other appears more than twice, but in a text so short the table of frequencies is unreliable) makes a more promising e (_ _ _e_ _ _e_ _. . ._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _e, _), especially given the conventions of epistolary salutation and close. Assuming the final character in each phrase to be the first or last initial respectively of addressee and author, and remembering Mme B.‘s first and last to be the same, we have: _ _Be_ _ _e_B. . _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _e, _.), the repeated yejr is then surely love (_ _ Belove_ B. . _ _ _ _ _ Love, _.); which gives us _ _ Belove_ B. . _ ll _ _ Love, _.; which is surely My Beloved B. . All my Love, _. Only the mysterious terminal blank (G in the cipher) remains to be filled.

But the real key is not Andrew’s sorting of frequencies and correspondences, which leads after all but to that crucial lacuna. It is in the calligraphy of that very G, as it were an aborted or miscarried flourish from its final serif: the first thing that struck him as familiar, but which he ca