by Max Byrd
“We’ll sneak up on them,” Trist told Hahr, and started to cross the big room by way of the opposite wall.
“You remember the trouble he had with his speech,” Hahr said, trotting beside him, hand diplomatically covering his mouth.
Trist nodded and pushed on through the crowd to the place on the left-hand side where the exposition began its chronological march: photographs of Fort Sumter; a young, raven-haired Lincoln; rows and rows of bloated Union corpses on the grassy fields of the First Bull Run, when Trist was still a student in New Haven, wondering what his duty was. At the opening of the exhibit Whitelaw Reid had attempted to give a speech in French, but had gotten so tangled in mispronunciations and stammers that he’d finally switched in desperation to English. Just as well. The French rather liked Grant, or their memory of him when he had visited Paris in 1877, after his second presidential term. But Reid had gone out of his way to describe the Union victory as the triumph of Northern manufacturing and numbers over Southern agriculture. Grant’s role was merely incidental, he informed them. General Grant was nothing but a lucky blunderer.
They passed a map of Vicksburg, a picture of a Mississippi gunboat, more corpses; then a long stretch of photographs of the Army of the Potomac at Antietam and Gettysburg—all the illustrations for the battlefields book he should have written, Trist thought, long ago, but never had.
“He sees you,” Hahr said with evident relief. And indeed Reid had made a half-turn with his glass and raised one eyebrow to signal, evidently, that Trist should stand close by. “His French really isn’t very good, I’m afraid.”
Trist took a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and remembered Mark Twain’s description of his own bad French. He had hardly ever been taken for a Frenchman, Twain declared, except by horses.
“Mr. Adams seems to know you.”
Trist nodded briefly and coolly to Henry Adams, whom he had already encountered two days ago, by accident, on the boulevard Haussmann.
“I hear,” Hahr said, happily scandalized, “his wife committed suicide.”
“I wouldn’t say that to his face either,” Trist said. The face in question was in fact rather sunburned—Adams had recently travelled all the way from Tahiti—but decades older, sharply creased and fixed in what seemed to be a perpetual melancholy. As far as Trist knew, since the day of Clover’s funeral six years ago Adams had never mentioned her name or referred to her in any way whatsoever. He had commissioned the sculptor Saint-Gaudens to make an enigmatic yet strangely moving statue for her grave in Rock Creek Cemetery. People whispered he ought to have sought medical help for Clover when she first grew depressed, ought never to have left her alone in a house full of dangerous chemicals. The secret of Esther was still a secret—Trist’s promise to Clover still a promise—but to his mind the book had always seemed as terrible and deadly to her in the end as cyanide.
“There is a question here about—Shiloh?” Henry Adams had strolled away to another corner of the hall, and Whitelaw Reid was holding his arm out rather helplessly to Trist.
“Qui l’a posée?” Trist asked, coming forward.
A Belgian consul, as it turned out, a whiskery little man bristling with notebooks and pencils and moustaches. Hadn’t Monsieur the Ambassador actually been present at the Battle of Shiloh? Hadn’t he himself seen the General Grant in one of his worst defeats?
When the question was translated for him, Reid smiled, hitched his shoulders, and led his group of attentive listeners to the right, toward a photograph of Union artillery units at Shiloh, and next to the photograph, framed under glass as a compliment to him, a copy of the article the Ambassador himself had written almost thirty years ago as a young reporter for the Cincinnati Gazette. Slowly, carefully, he began to read the article for his audience, pausing after every few sentences for Trist to translate. It was a famous article, Trist knew, and Reid was notoriously proud of it—Fresh from the field of the great battle, it began, with its pounding and roaring of artillery and its keener voiced rattle of musketry still sounding in my wearied ears, I sit down to write my story.… And the story thus begun was in fact one of the earliest and most widely reprinted attacks of the whole war on Grant—a lazy, stupid general, cruelly wasteful of human life, probably drunk on the first day of the battle. Reid wrote so well, Sylvanus Cadwallader had told Trist once, the “Butcher Grant” legend had started right there.
The little Belgian had another question. Trist translated automatically, scarcely paying attention. The truth was, when military historians, not newspapermen, had looked again, virtually every fact in Reid’s story was wrong. Grant hadn’t been beaten, he hadn’t been drunk, he had actually done a superlative job of rallying his men and turning back the enemy, and if two of his subordinates had followed his orders, the Confederates would have probably been annihilated on the spot.
At the far end of the hall Henry Adams suddenly reappeared, with Elizabeth Cameron at his side.
“What do you think of the Ambassador’s little speech?” Hahr whispered.
At the same moment someone asked Reid a question in English and Trist stepped back from the circle. “It reminds me,” he told Hahr, “of Cuvier’s remark about the French Academy’s definition of a crab—brilliant, but not correct.”
Hahr looked momentarily disconcerted. Then he followed Trist’s gaze. Beside the ceremonial flag, Adams and Elizabeth Cameron were standing, two or three feet apart, watching the French President receive his guests. Even at this distance both seemed weary and sad. Neither of them spoke. Madame Ledoiné crossed in front of them and bowed to Adams, who didn’t respond.
“They say,” Hahr said, like all diplomats part feline, “Mrs. Cameron used to be Adams’s mistress, but now she’s thrown him over.”
Trist’s shoulder ached. He glanced at Reid, firmly back in English. Elizabeth Cameron had come to Paris a year ago, he had heard, without her husband, and promptly fallen into a minor scandal with a second-rate portrait painter named Helleu. Trist had seen her once or twice, they had talked, smiled, passed on. Life was like rocks and pebbles in a creek bed, he thought, time and feelings flowed ceaselessly over them into the past.
“She’s very beautiful,” Hahr said.
“She looks very fine in black and white.”
Hahr touched his good sleeve. “Shall I introduce you? Or do you already know the lady?”
Trist shook his head. From around the corner, behind some potted palms, a string quartet began to play American Civil War tunes, in honor of the exposition. “If we had met,” Trist said to Hahr, but the music was too close and Hahr probably didn’t hear him, “I would certainly remember.”
NOTE
NICHOLAS TRIST IS AN INVENTED CHARACTER AND HIS RELATIONSHIPS with historical figures are, of course, fictitious, though his romance with Elizabeth Cameron is loosely based on her real-life affair with the poet Joseph Trumbull Stickney. Otherwise, historical characters do and say here pretty much what they actually did and said. I have, however, moved John Sherman and the Camerons about a little in 1880 and brought the Adamses home early from Europe; for clarity I have modified the phrasing in one of Henry Adams’s letters, but not changed the meaning. Whenever possible I have taken dialogue verbatim from letters, books, diaries, etc. Clover Adams did commit suicide in the manner described here. Scholars generally assert that she knew all along about the authorship of Esther; as far as I know, there is no evidence whatsoever for that view. My version of her discovery is speculative, but not inconsistent with the facts. Sylvanus Cadwallader was a real person, but little is known of his life after the Civil War; I have used his Three Years with Grant, not published until 1955, as the basis for his character.
Professor John Y. Simon, editor of the great Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, published by the University of Southern Illinois Press, was most kind and helpful to a perfect stranger. Professor Brooks D. Simpson of Arizona State University has been similarly generous and good-natured. Celeste Walker and Richard Ryerson of the Massachusetts
Historical Society were unfailingly thoughtful, learned, and patient.
Clover Adams’s letters to her father were published in 1936, but somewhat expurgated; the complete letters can be found in the microfilm edition of the Adams Papers, reels 595–599. There is a definitive three-volume life of Grant through 1865 by Lloyd Lewis and Bruce Catton. The best one-volume complete life is by Geoffrey Perret. Otto Friedrich’s Clover is an outstanding biography, as is Arline Tehan’s Henry Adams in Love. Adams’s Letters are edited by J. C. Levenson and Ernest Samuels, et al., and published by Harvard University Press.
My wife Brookes has seen me through every page. I thank her with love. My friend John Lescroart, a wonderful writer (and reader) gave crucial help at the start. Diana Essert has typed my manuscript with skill and good humor. Virginia Barber is a literary agent sans pareil. And as for Kate Miciak—there just could not be a more brilliant and supportive editor than Kate Miciak.
For my daughter Kate
and my son David
With Love
A CONVERSATION WITH MAX BYRD
We asked Max Byrd to imagine what it would be like if Thomas Jefferson somehow interviewed Ulysses S. Grant, out in the timeless Valhalla of early American history.
Ulysses S. Grant: You know, Mr. Jefferson, I requested permission to reverse our roles and be the person interviewing you. The original idea was that you would put the questions to me.
Thomas Jefferson: But because you are a General, you like to be in charge. That would be human nature.
Grant: Well, it is mostly because you remind me of the President.
Jefferson: I don’t understand. When you say “the President”—do you mean yourself, myself? We were both Presidents.
Grant: (Smiling) In my time, Mr. Jefferson, speaking with all due respect to you, whenever any of us referred to “the President,” there was never any doubt who was meant. Even long after his death, there was always only the one. The President was Mr. Lincoln. And when I say you remind me of him, it’s partly your impressive height—as you see, I am a very short man myself—and partly your remarkable way with the English language. But mostly it’s because, as far as an old soldier can tell, you always led the people around you indirectly, by—I’m going to choose the wrong word, I know—by insinuation rather than commands.
Jefferson: And you’re correct. I don’t much like the word.
Grant: Mr. Lincoln had two secretaries, Johnny Hay and Johnny Nicolay. They had special names for him—the “Tycoon,” when he was asserting his considerable power—that was after that awesome Japanese tyrant. And they called him the “Ancient” when he was leading people by suggestions, artful questions, and subtlety of language, and that is what I meant by insinuation in your case. I guess you were a Tycoon yourself when you just sat down and bought Louisiana, without so much as a glance at the Constitution. But you were like the Ancient when you talked Jamie Madison into inserting a Bill of Rights into that same document, or when you were leading Hamilton around to sign onto your District of Columbia bargain. Or especially when you claimed to despise political parties, but behind the scenes led your Republicans to twenty-four straight years of power. That was, I consider, pretty French of you. But then you loved your time in France; you thrived over there in the ladies’ salons and the painting galleries and the sculptors’ studios. I can’t imagine the President—Lincoln—sitting down in a Paris salon, speaking French all night. I can’t imagine him ever speaking anything but English. You both have high-pitched voices, by the way.
Jefferson: I haven’t met him.
Grant: No, you keep to yourself. I asked a few people what you were like, and they all used the same word. They said you were “feline.”
Jefferson: You are extremely sensitive to language, General Grant.
Grant: I would like to talk about race.
Jefferson: [Silent]
Grant: Here is where that indirectness of yours puzzles me. As a younger man you were firmly against the institution of slavery. You took steps toward an actual campaign for abolition. In your Notes on Virginia you wrote possibly the most extraordinary passage in all American politics about what slavery meant for the future.
Jefferson: [Eyes closed, recites] “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever. The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.”
Grant: But later in life, you abandoned that apocalyptic view, or at least you ceased to speak out against slavery. I’ve never understood that.
Jefferson: John Adams once remarked, sardonically, that I had no spirit for martyrdom. Is that a sufficient answer for you, General Grant?
Grant: No.
Jefferson: Well, there are several entwined truths here, General Grant. First, I acknowledge that I came to depend on my family—
Grant: Your slaves.
Jefferson: Leave off tinkering with my words, Sir. I came to depend on my family of servants for my own comfort and for the financial support I owed my daughters. Second, I never overcame my suspicion—though not proof—that the African was inferior in mind and body to the European. And third, having stated a general proposition—that chattel slavery is an unspeakable injustice—I saw no way to make a peaceful, practical end to it, to bring my theory down to earth. I left it to the next generation, because no amount of logic, prophecy, or “insinuation” on my part was going to change the mind of the South on the matter of slavery. You well know what it required.
Grant: [Quoting Lincoln] “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword …”
Jefferson: If I have an intellectual weakness, it is that I see the problems of the world as they are, but I incline to let the future deal with them.
Grant: The President says we could get along without the Constitution, which of course you didn’t write—you were in France—but we couldn’t get along without the Declaration of Independence. He says the whole American idea lies in a single sentence you did write.
Jefferson: Another intellectual weakness was common to my time. We often spoke of the “Head versus the Heart,” reason versus feeling. In Paris I wrote a dialogue for a lady with that very title. I don’t remember which side prevailed. Perhaps neither. Perhaps it ended with inaction, indecision.
Grant: The sentence was, “All men are created equal.”
Jefferson: Which I have very nearly come to believe.
Novels By Max Byrd
SHOOTING THE SUN
GRANT
JACKSON
JEFFERSON
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MAX BYRD is the author of the acclaimed historical novels Jefferson, Jackson, and Grant. An authority on eighteenth-century literature, Byrd makes his home in Davis, California, where he is at work on his next novel.
