The Square Pegs

by Irving Wallace

  Many who read these novels must have been confused by their unevenness. On the one hand, the plots were naive and the characters stereotyped, and the French was fluent but flat. On the other, there was an occasional flash of wit, and sometimes an idea or situation so extravagant as to take the breath away. To some readers, the novels must have appeared to have been written by a two-headed man: one head conventional, the other eccentric; one head mediocre, the other utterly mad. “You begin to wonder,” a librarian at the Bibliothéque Nationale remarked recently, “what manner of a person did all this.”

  Among the people who wondered about Harden-Hickey at the time was a small group of French Royalists. They were less interested in the literary style of Harden-Hickey’s novels than in their political content. They delighted in his thrusts at the new Republic, as in A Love in Vendée, when he accused the “noble propagandists of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” of having written “a blood-stained page in the annals of this country, so quiet and peaceful before.”

  The Royalists, followers of Henri, Count de Chambord, grandson of Charles X of France, approached Harden-Hickey. The Third Republic was eight years old. Among other things, it had turned financial surpluses into deficits and conscripted the educated classes, accomplishments which particularly offended the good taste of the Royalists. The Royalists wanted to place the fifty-eight-year-old Count de Chambord on the throne. The Count stood for parliamentary government and universal suffrage, though he had remarked: “Either I am King by Right Divine or a lame old man with no business in politics.” Would Harden-Hickey lend his flair, his invective, to the Count’s cause? The Royalists had in mind an illustrated weekly, with a scepter to grind, something along the lines of Punch. The Count de Chambord would put up the money; a dozen Royalist writers would help contribute the copy. The project needed only an editor.

  Under Napoleon III there were nine hundred daily newspapers, weeklies, and monthly magazines in Paris alone. These were filled with the screened produce of journalists like Villemessant, who founded Figaro, Taine, and Edmond About, and with the cartoons of Nadar, Daumier, Cham, and Andre Gill (whose name, punned, became the Montmartre tavern, Lapin Agile). The opposition press, Republicans, was handcuffed by the severest censorship.

  By 1872, with the Emperor in his English exile at Chislehurst (where he joined Eugénie, who had earlier escaped France by yacht with the help of her American dentist, a millionaire Philadelphian in Paris named Thomas W. Evans), and with France for the third time undergoing the preliminary spasms that attend the birth of representative government, the press found itself liberated from censorship. Editors, determined to take full advantage of the new democracy, went berserk. “To write of ministers,” complained one Minister, “editors comb the slang of convicts for their most shocking expressions.” The scandalous gossip, the mounting insults and lies, forced the government to apply its libel laws vigorously. In a single year, writers and editors were sentenced to 2,319 days’ imprisonment for the offense of pornography alone.

  It was in this free but highly combative climate of the common man that Baron Harden-Hickey undertook to edit, on behalf of a pretender to an unpopular throne, a satirical weekly called Le Triboulet, named after the favorite jester of Louis XII. The first issue appeared on November 10, 1878. The masthead promised an issue every Sunday at fifty centimes and listed Saint-Patrice as editor. The cartoon cover depicted Triboulet, club in hand, representing royalty, belaboring Marianne and other puppets, symbolizing the young republic.

  Harden-Hickey left the “Chronicles of High Life” to Gramadock, the “Fashions” to Stella, the “Chronicle of the Boulevards” to Trick, the “Sports” to Count de Mirabel, and himself concentrated on the invective. When he accused the Minister of the Interior of consorting with a syndicate of Spanish swindlers, the Minister’s attorney railed at Harden-Hickey and his staff: “You are working for money only. You are journalists deprived of ideas, talent, wit; living from scandal, and acting the same though in another direction as the pornographic papers, addressing yourselves to unhealthy and overexcited passions.”

  Harden-Hickey’s editorial policy was endorsed at the kiosks. Buying was brisk; circulation zoomed to 25,000. But, within twelve months, overenthusiasm landed the manager, M. Lampre, in Sainte-Pelagie Prison, and forced the periodical to attempt to fend off eleven lawsuits that cost the staff a total of six months’ confinement and 3,000 francs in fines. Despite persistent legal ambushes, Le Triboulet continued to expand. By the end of its second year it had grown from a weekly to a daily publication. Harden-Hickey heralded the promise of more prose with a signed editorial: “Our readers must know today that Triboulet stands for courage, loyalty; they will therefore understand that our sole aim in starting this new paper is simply the desire to continue with more strength the campaign for royalty and religion. Instead of beating Marianne once a week, Triboulet’s club will caress the back of the shrew every day.”

  For the greater part of nine years, Harden-Hickey edited Le Triboulet from headquarters at 35 Boulevard Haussmann. His office was “painted azure-blue, strewn with gold fleursde-lys, each panel trimmed with the weapons of France.” His exuberance over his task never diminished; he was kingstruck. And those radicals who believed in such outrageous lunacy as plebiscites had nothing but his very vocal contempt. When Republican journalists and politicians protested against his insults, Harden-Hickey would usually offer his choice of weapons: “Would you prefer to meet me upon the editorial page or in the Bois de Boulogne?” At least twelve met him with swords in the Bois, among them H. Lavertujon, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, Aurelien Scholl, a celebrated wit, and M. De Cyon, a journalist. Others sought less physical means to repair their honor. Harden-Hickey was sued forty-two times, fined 300,000 francs, and once expelled from France (for cruelly caricaturing the Presidents of the Republic, the Senate, and the Chamber dancing a jig while attired in bathing suits).

  In 1884 the sponsor of all the fuss and fury, the Count de Chambord, inconsiderately expired in Austria. Harden-Hickey remained at his desk and in the Bois three more years, valiantly trying to rally the Royalist movement, until, as he later informed the New York press, “he finally grew weary of the long fight against heavy odds and the inaction of the Royalists, and he withdrew from his connection with the paper in 1887.” Within a year, Le Triboulet had ceased pummeling Marianne. In London, Harden-Hickey announced that the paper had been suppressed by the government and he himself exiled. More likely, with Count de Chambord’s death, Saint-Patrice had lost his angel.

  At the age of thirty-four, Baron Harden-Hickey had divorced himself from the French Royalists and from his French wife. Now he proceeded to divorce himself from the Catholic Church, though he could not resist retaining the title of nobility that the church had conferred upon him. It is not clear if Harden-Hickey became an undiluted Buddhist, or a Theosophist, or precisely in what manner and on what date this conversion occurred. But occur it most certainly did.

  At the time, Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, the Russian-born spiritualist, founder of a new mystic faith called Theosophy, was the lioness of London. In 1873 Madame Blavatsky had made her way from Cairo to New York, where she swiftly graduated from producing artificial flowers in a sweatshop to reigning as High Priestess over an apartment-salon at 302 West Forth-seventh Street (called by the press, somewhat irreverently, The Lamasery). During this period she acquired a sponsor in Colonel Henry Olcott, a Manhattan lawyer who composed occasional feature stories on spiritualism and farming for the New York Tribune. The Colonel left his wife and three sons to follow the Madame on a holy pilgrimage to India. After becoming a Buddhist in Ceylon, she founded the Theosophical Society, which borrowed heavily from Hinduism and Buddhism and advocated the doctrine of reincarnation.

  When Harden-Hickey arrived in London, Madame Blavatsky, a great pudding of a woman who cursed like a trooper and rolled her own, was installed at 18 Lansdowne Road, Notting Hill, W. “Peers and belted earls and their ladies, scient
ists, savants, and explorers thronged her drawing room,” reported Gertrude Marvin Williams in Priestess of the Occult. “Even the Church of England, thundering against her on Sunday, peeked at her on Monday. Leaning back against the cushions at one of her soirees, Madame watched the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury sitting primly on a front row chair… .” Alfred Russel Wallace became a member of the Madame’s Theosophical Society, Gladstone penned an essay about her, and Lord Tennyson perused her poetry. In America, Colonel Abner Doubleday, sometimes said to have invented baseball, and Thomas A. Edison, inventor of almost everything else, led the list of her followers.

  Baron Harden-Hickey seems to have been equally enamored. After meeting her, he threw off Catholicism, and after traveling halfway around the earth to visit the land of her Masters (“During a fairly long stay I made in India, I have been able to personally ascertain the occult power of the Tibetan adepts”), he returned to France to put his new ideas on religion to paper. In 1890 L. Sauvaitre of Paris published Theosophy, by Saint-Patrice. Harden-Hickey’s soul-searching foreword, addressed to his French Catholic public, advises readers to emulate him in forsaking the Church of Rome. “You were born in France, from an aristocratic or bourgeois family, and you were most certainly Catholic. The influences that presided over your education have no doubt been created by this double origin. So far, you have perhaps been right in following your faith. But now it is your duty to educate yourself and submit to a cold-blooded analysis, free of foregone conclusions, of the creed which composes your intellectual baggage. I believe, to start with, that the highest aim in life should not be possession of faith, but comprehension of truth.”

  In the first six chapters of Theosophy, Harden-Hickey lashes Christianity with the new Darwinism. “The considerable amount of good achieved in the Occident by Christianity has been offset by its evil and by the infamous doctrine that claims that honest disbelief in dogmas is a moral offense, a deadly sin.” From this, Harden-Hickey goes into his last six chapters, explaining Buddhism and Theosophy and examining them also in the light of Evolution. He concludes by quoting heavily from a house organ called The Theosophist and enthusiastically praising Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society.

  Less than one year later, a volume called Bible Plagiarisms, by Saint-Patrice, appeared in the Paris book-stalls. In its pages Harden-Hickey argues: “As to being a historical work, the Bible is inferior to Perrault’s fairy tales; as a literary work, it is inferior to Ohnet; as to obscenity, it is worse than the Marquis de Sade.” He adds that Genesis is a plagiarism of the Indian Vedas, the Old Testament a steal from Brahmanisrn, and Christianity a weak copy of Buddhism.

  This conversion, however, was not the main product of Harden-Hickey ‘s twenty-four-month journey around the world. Early during this trip occurred the accident that was to provide him with his raison d’être. Before departing he arranged that his young son and daughter, both of whom he controlled under the antiquated French divorce laws, be placed under the guardianship of his closest Parisian friend, Count de la Boissière, who had supported himself as a clerk in the Colonial Office, as a curbstone broker, and as a wine merchant, and who had in common with him a love for affaires d’honneur and the Bourbon way of life.

  Harden-Hickey sailed on a British merchant ship, the Astoria, commanded by a Captain Jackson, which was bound west for Cape Horn en route to India. About seven hundred miles off Brazil a storm drove the Astoria into refuge behind a small mountainous island called Trinidad. This was not the larger British West Indian island of Trinidad, six miles off Venezuela, populated by a half-million, and renowned for its asphalt lake. What Harden-Hickey saw from his rolling merchantman was a coral-ridged, barren, uninhabited thumb of land isolated from and almost forgotten by the rest of the world. “One of the most uncanny and dispiriting spots on earth,” E. F. Knight of the London Times had remarked in 1881, after observing the heavy vapors and mists that hung shroudlike over Trinidad’s ravines, cliffs, and lava deposits.

  Harden-Hickey requested permission of Captain Jackson to go ashore. From the Captain and crew he had heard the standard romantic stories of burried treasure on the island. In 1821, when General San Martin was liberating Peru, the wealthy Spanish families of Lima had fled to sea with their gold and jewels, estimated to be worth several millions. Some of the Spanish vessels were intercepted by Benito de Soto, a merciless pirate leader, and his crew of ex-slavers. The Spanish were deprived of their lives and their wealth. It is thought that de Soto, hard pressed, secreted his loot on bleak Trinidad before his final capture and execution in Gibraltar. His colleagues in crime were also brought to justice and the rope that is, all except one. The lone fugitive escaped to serve on a British merchantman. When he died in Bombay, his trunk disclosed his former occupation as well as a canvas map of Trinidad. The merchantman Captain did not take the map seriously until years later when, in retirement at Newcastle, he realized that it might hold the secret to Lima’s missing treasure. The map indicated that de Soto had hidden his gold and jewels in a cave near the top of a ravine on Trinidad. In 1880 the Captain’s son visited the island, located the treasure site, but found that landslides had covered the cave under tons of earth. Lacking equipment, the heir could do little. He retired from the hunt. But the fascinating map survived to inspire four more treasure expeditions to Trinidad before Baron James Harden-Hickey himself waded ashore.

  In his lonely hike across the island, Harden-Hickey found no signs of human life except for some stone huts left by the Brazilian Portuguese who had discovered Trinidad around 1700, and debris of earlier treasure-hunting expeditions. Though the island was desolate and wind-swept, and though there was no evidence of the treasure site, Harden-Hickey was, nevertheless, strangely stimulated. “I explored the island thoroughly,” he told a New York reporter five years later, when the passage of time had cast a romantic aura over the visit. “It is about twenty-three miles long and two or three miles wide. It is on a rock foundation, but has a plateau on which there is abundant vegetation. A river of pure, fresh water runs through it. It has all the essential qualifications for supporting several hundred people. Great quantities of wild fowl make it their breeding place, and it is visited periodically by thousands of turtles, which deposit their eggs there.”

  Before the storm abated and the Astoria was able to continue on its way, Harden-Hickey apparently revisited the island, solemnly claimed it in his own name, and “planted a flag of his own design.” As he did nothing more about the island at once, this seemed to be merely a momentary romantic gesture. He spent the entire following year in India, listening to holy men and learning Sanskrit, after which he went for brief visits to China and Japan. At last, in 1890, he returned to Republican France, where his earlier offenses seem to have been forgotten.

  In Paris, which was just then becoming a shopping center for American heiresses who did their sightseeing from the Almanach de Gotha instead of Baedeker, Baron Harden-Hickey met Anna H. Flagler, daughter of John Haldane Flagler, a man whom newspapers referred to as “the Standard Oil magnate,” but who had actually made his fortune in the manufacture of iron (some of which was used to construct the $275,000 ironclad Monitor in 1861). In 1891, at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York City, Harden-Hickey and Miss Flagler were married by the Reverend John Hall.

  During the next, few years, while residing in the Flagler home in New York, Harden-Hickey unnerved his family by devoting his energies to several highly original projects, among them translating a book on Buddhism, completing his volume Bible Plagiarisms, perfecting a plan for missionary work to convert Americans to Buddha, and developing means of extracting money from his disapproving father-in-law.

  Flagler had powerfully opposed the marriage. He regarded Harden-Hickey as a foreign fortune-seeker. In a temper, Harden-Hickey married Anna Flagler “without settlements” and supported her out of his own dwindling savings. When his money was gone, Harden-Hickey tried to obtain his wife’s money, left her by her mother, with her
father as executor. Flagler, not unexpectedly, refused to turn over the money. He said he had it soundly invested, whereas Harden-Hickey might do something foolish with it. Harden-Hickey was soon reduced to seeking funds from Flagler, whom he hated with mounting intensity, through his friend, Count de la Boissière, who, as a former stockbroker, got on well with Flagler, and who himself was now an American citizen after having married a Virginia heiress.

  With this painfully acquired cash, Harden-Hickey not only supported his wife, but also purchased, ranches and mines in Texas, California, and Mexico. This involvement in commercialism seemed to have a discouraging effect on the Baron. He was a nonentity without a future, and his mind was filled with the delights of self-extinction. “While he was in New York, I was a reporter on the Evening Sun,” wrote Richard Harding Davis in 1912, “but I cannot recall ever having read his name in the newspapers of that day, and I heard of him only twice; once as giving an exhibition of his water-colors at the American Art Galleries, and again as the author of a book I found in a store in Twenty-second Street, just east of Broadway, then the home of the Truth Seeker Publishing Company.”

  This slender, 167-page volume, entitled Euthanasia; the Aesthetics of Suicide, by Baron Harden-Hickey, published by the Truth Seeker Company in 1894, is perhaps one of the most depressing documents in the history of literary eccentricity. Copies have become extremely rare. I was able to find one in the New York Public Library and one in the Library of Congress. Recently, I visited the Truth Seeker bookstore, at 38 Park Row, New York, on the chance that they might still stock one of their old authors. The store was on the tenth floor of an office building, and the glazed-glass entrance bore the names of three organizations: “Truth Seeker Company … National Liberal League … American Association For The Advancement of Atheism, Inc.” The Truth Seeker people were somewhat suspicious of my request for a volume on self-destruction by an American Buddhist. Their latest catalogue, while listing such titles as What Would Christ Do About Syphilis? and Bible Myths and recent volumes on free thought, made no mention of Euthanasia; the Aesthetics of Suicide. One of the clerks in the office telephoned his father, Dr. Charles F. Potter, who had been the first president of the Euthanasia Society. I repeated the title and the name of the author to Dr. Potter, and he thought he remembered it. “If I remember correctly,” he said, “there was a brief flurry of sales, and then the authorities suppressed it. They never seem to like books condoning suicide.”