Letters

by John Barth

  Andrew then inquires, on a sudden impulse: has she considered remarrying? Crimson, she asks him why he asks; it is her son she cares about, not herself. Perhaps Andrew has his employer in mind? If so, forget him: Joseph is a sot, a lecher, and a coward, like Jérôme; the only male Bonaparte with spirit is the one on St. Helena. And does she know, Andrew next wonders aloud, that in some quarters there is doubt as to the validity of Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise, who in any case has no wish ever to see her husband again and would welcome a divorce? I do, replies Betsy, and Andrew divines with excitement that she has anticipated the next modification of his scheme, of which therefore he prudently says no more on this occasion. What better way for her to secure young Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte’s legitimacy—even his possible accession!—than to marry the emperor himself, as a condition of rescuing him? And how better for Andrew to finance the Louisiana Project than with the combined fortunes of the Bonapartes and one of the wealthiest families in Maryland?

  In my mind & in my cyphers, Andrew writes, I had for convenience number’d these alternatives A-1, A-2, & A-3, as they all involved rescuing Napoleon & fetching him 1st to the Maryland marshes, thence to New Orleans, & thence west to our future empire. Two obstacles remain’d: the difficulty of finding someone able enough at mimicking the Emperor to fool his own wardens, at least for a time; and the possibility, reconfirm’d in June of this year (1820) by Mme B., that Bonaparte preferr’d to consummate his “martyrdom” on St. Helena. A letter from Baron Gourgaud, intercepted by Metternich’s agents, declared that the Emperor “could escape to America whenever he pleased,” but preferr’d confinement like Andromeda on that lonely but very public rock. His young son loom’d large in these considerations. “’Twere better for my son,” Betsy quoted Metternich quoting Napoleon from Gourgaud’s letter. “If I die on the cross—& he is still alive—my martyrdom will win him a crown.”

  To deal with these obstacles Andrew devises Plan A-4, with which he ends this letter. But first, nothing having come of his indirect inquiries, he asks Betsy frankly how she hears of these things before Napoleon’s own family, especially now that Mme de Staël—who had always been au courant on such privy matters and might imaginably have been in correspondence with Mme Bonaparte—is dead.

  She blusht & reply’d, She supposed I had meant to say “before the rest of Napoleon’s own family,” whereof she consider’d herself as rightful a member as any not of the Corsican’s very blood. As for her sources, she would say only that I might rely upon their veracity, & that I was not the only American player at the Game of Governments.

  She then apprised me of her intended move to Europe in the Autumn, to reacquaint her son, now 15, with his relatives. While there she would determine & report to me the truth of Napoleon’s circumstances & desires—for no one need tell her that Metternich might have fabricated that “intercepted letter” to discourage rescue attempts. And she would advise me then whether to proceed with the Girod/Girard plan or bid Joseph order it cancel’d, as against his brother’s wishes.

  Much imprest by her determination & her canny sense of the world, very rare in so handsome & handsomely fixt a woman, I thankt her. But privately I thot of any such report from her, what she thot of Metternich’s; & so I determined Jean & I should make ready & sail as early as possible, not apprising Mme B. or Joseph or any soul else of our journey until its object was attain’d, when they would surely put their houses & other facilities at our disposal. On the Solstice, therefore, I vanisht from Point Breeze; on my 44th birthday I was in Galvez-Town, where I found Jean bored with his New Barataria & ready for adventure. The more so when I described & demonstrated to him what, after much soul-searching, I had resolved upon: Plan A-4.

  It is, briefly, to determine Napoleon’s sentiments regarding rescue, not in Rome or Paris or London, but on St. Helena itself, by sailing directly to that island, slipping ashore with the aid of that “local knowledge” Lafitte is so confident the fishermen will sell him, and infiltrating Longwood. Then, if the emperor should in fact prove more interested in inventing le bonapartisme on St. Helena than in forging a new empire in the American southwest, to drug and abduct him secretly from the island, leaving an impostor in his place. Once whisked to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he could not return to St. Helena without publicly pleading for reincarceration, which would reveal the inauthenticity of his “martyrdom.” They would offer him either a life of anonymous freedom or the directorship of the 2nd Revolution, with or without Betsy Patterson Bonaparte as his consort.

  But what impostor?

  That was the question that had most vext me since A-2, our ancestor writes. Napoleon was 7 years my senior, several inches shorter than I, and gone rather potbelly’d, but the fact was I could take him off to a T, down to his Corsican accent, his walk, & his table-manners. I could not hope to fool his aides, whose consent & cooperation therefore I would have to enlist (I had a plan for doing so); but I was reasonably confident I could fool the British, whom Bonaparte had rarely dealt with in person even before his health declined—which last circumstance I could also employ to aid the imposture. And so, having searcht in vain for alternatives, and daring wait no longer lest Mme B.‘s people or someone else’s get to St. Helena before me, I shall sail with Jean two days hence, on the Emperor’s name-day, to take his place in captivity until (the final article of A-4) I can with the assistance of Napoleon’s suite feign illness & death, and then disappear among the fishermen till Jean comes back to fetch me from a disarm’d St. Helena.

  ’Tis a considerable risk: if I am found out, either before or after N.‘s removal, the British will clap me in jail forever; and my rescue depends on Jean’s good seamanship, good faith, & good luck. But if all goes per plan, by the time the meteors next shower out from Perseus (which are showering over Jean Blanque’s yards as I pen this letter), I shall have died again & been re-resurrected, to take my place beside the man whose place I took, at the head of our 2nd Revolution.

  Will you be there with me, long-lost wife? Whether or no, may you hear from me next August of the success of another plan, whereof I have spoken not even to Jean Lafitte, & cannot yet speak to you: I mean Plan B, and bid you adieu.

  He closes and, on August 15, sails. I likewise, Henry, and on 8/15 will fly in pursuit of an “A-1” of my own: not without a “B” up my sleeve, or in my bonnet, learned from our forebear’s final lettre posthume. And when I take my place, dear son, at the head of our etc., will you be with me?

  Whether or no, this time next week you shall hear again from

  Your father

  E: A. B. Cook VI to his son. The fifth and final posthumous letter of A. B. Cook IV: Napoleon “rescued.”

  Castines Hundred

  Ontario, Canada

  August 20, 1969

  My dear Henry,

  Except that you are not here, all is as it should be (i.e., as it ever has been) at Castines Hundred. A grand hatch of “American soldiers” fills the air—in which already one feels a premonitory autumn chill—as they have done every latter August since the species, and Lake Ontario, evolved. I write this by paraffin lantern in the library, not to attract them to the windows; took dinner by candlelight for the same reason, as our ancestors have done since that species evolved. A fit and pleasing mise en scène for retailing the last of my namesake’s lettres posthumes: dated August 20, 1821, addressed to “My dear, my darling wife,” and delivered here at that year’s close.

  Be assured of my proper disappointment not to find you here; a disappointment for which, however, I was prepared. Be even more so of my proper tantalization by the report (from our new caretakers, who seem satisfactory) that you apparently stopped by—even spent a few days here?—in the interval between caretakers! Were here as I was writing to you off Bermuda! Left only upon the Bertrands’ assuming their duties, as I was writing to you from my Baratarian! Indicated that you would “be back,” but did not say when, or whence you came, or whither vanished!

  Heartless H
enry! True and only son! But so be it: I have been as heartless in my time, as have all our line. I restrained my urge to badger the Bertrands with questions—How does he appear? Did he speak of his father?—lest they think their new employer’s relation with his son as odd as in fact it is. I shall leave sealed copies here, against your return, of both the “prenatal” and the “posthumous” letters of Andrew Cook IV, as well as that one of mine reviewing our history from him to myself. And I shall hope, no longer quite against hope!

  But how I wish I could report to you, Henry, confer with you, solicit your opinion now. So many opportunities lie at hand; so many large decisions must be made quite soon, affecting our future and the Revolution’s! Last night, for example, I drove up here from the Fort Erie establishment, where I had stopped to assess Joseph Morgan’s resalvageability. I am satisfied that he is too gone in his “repetition compulsion” to be of future use to us. What I advanced as a kind of lure when I first rescued him for our cause has become an obsession; he is now addicted to his medication, as it were; the only obstacle to disestablishing him altogether is that he happens to be related, through the Patterson line, to Jane Mack. But we must think of something; he is a liability.

  So too, I more and more suspect, is Jerome Bray of Lily Dale—more exactly, of “Comalot,” as he has without irony renamed his strange habitation—on whom I paid a call before crossing to Canada. Even to me that man is an enigma: certainly mad, but as certainly not simply mad. His extraordinary machine, or simulacrum of a machine—you really must see it. And his “honey dust,” of whose peculiar narcotic virtue there can be no question… ! He is doing us the service, unwittingly, of removing Jane’s daughter from the number of competitors for Harrison Mack’s fortune, while however adding himself to the number of our problems. For him too I have certain plans, and have urged him down to Bloodsworth Island for the “Burning of Washington” four days hence—but how surer I would feel of that strategy if I could review it with you, and you ratify it!

  I have, moreover, two further problems of the most intimate and urgent sort, Henry, on which your consultation is of such importance to me that I must, insofar as I can, compel it.

  Mrs. Harrison Mack now proposes to become Mrs. André Castine on September 30. (She specified “the end of the month,” leaving the precise date to me. Still amused by the Anniversary View of History, I considered the equinox, when at 9 A.M. in 4004 B.C. the world is said to have begun; but I chose at last the 30th, anniversary of our ancestor Ebenezer Cooke’s inadvertent loss of his Maryland estate in 1694 and, rather earlier, of the legendary loss of another prime piece of real estate: Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden.) For convenience’ sake, I have in mind to kill off “Andrew Cook VI” by some accident before that date. I am, you know, under that name, also in some second-cousinly relation to my fiancée: I propose therefore—unless as prime beneficiary you appear within 30 days of the date of your father’s death—to bequeath to Jane Mack my properties on Bloodsworth Island and Chautaugua Road. I shall cause obituary notices to be published promptly in the leading Quebec and Ontario newspapers as well as those of Maryland and the District of Columbia: the next move will be yours. “André Castine” looks forward to welcoming you (either here or at “Barataria”) as his own son!

  On the other hand—for reasons that I shan’t set forth in writing but will be relieved to share with you at last in person, as they pertain to you intimately indeed—my coming forth publicly as André Castine to marry Jane raises problems of its own concerning that historian I’ve mentioned before: Professor Germaine Pitt, Lady Amherst, who was to have edited, annotated, and published this series of letters. It will scarcely be enough to see to her reappointment to the post about to be vacated by Andrew Cook’s death; something further is called for. We must discuss it!

  And Baratarian, that fleet and sturdy fellow, who when I fetch him from the Annapolis yard this weekend will have tankage enough to run from Bloodsworth Island to Yucatan with but one pit stop, and enough secret stowage in his teak and holly joinery to fetch back a high-profit cargo along with the marlin and wahoo we are officially after. One trip, at current prices, will come near to financing us for half a year, and not even the crew need know (indeed ought not, for it is paid informants, not adroit law officers, who precipitate arrests in this line of work). But I cannot navigate both Baratarian and Barataria, or manage to our cause both Jane and Mary Jane. Come, son, and let us to Isla Mujeres, the Isle of Women!

  There Jean Lafitte—alias “Jean Lafflin” or “Laffin”—is reported to have come in November 1821 to la fin du chemin, ambushed by Mexican soldiers not impossibly informed of his coming by Andrew Cook IV. So at least speculated my grandfather, Andrew V, on what grounds he did not say. It is by no means established beyond doubt that Lafitte died then and there; other legends extend his pseudonymous life to 1854. What is known is that in latter 1821, pressed by the U.S. Revenue Marine, he boarded his schooner Pride (possibly the Jean Blanque under alias of its own), abandoned “Galvez-Town,” and disappeared. Moreover, that his connection with Andrew IV, once so brotherly, had long since deteriorated into mutual suspicion and distrust.

  What a falling off, between that P.S. to the first of these letters (where his fondest wish is to unite his “darling wife” with his “true brother”) and the opening of this last!

  3*64;:(8¶8);*‡76‡;:905:5(;82

  GNIHTYREVESTNIOPOTYMLAYARTEB

  Everything points to my betrayal

  —whether by Lafitte, Joseph Bonaparte, Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, the U.S. Secret Service, or some combination thereof, he is uncertain. He cannot say for sure even that he is in fact a prisoner in “Beverly,” the King mansion on the Manokin River not far from Bloodsworth Island; perhaps all is going well, but unaccountably slowly! Yet it is August 20, 1821, insufferably hot, damp, and buggy in the Eastern Shore marshes; he has been there above six weeks, since his 45th birthday, under anonymous guard “for his own security”; the owners of Beverly, at the urging of their friend Mme B., are off on an extended visit to Europe, as is Betsy herself; Lafitte has delivered him and is long gone: possibly back to St. Helena to rescue “André Castine” per plan, more likely back to privateering in the Gulf of Mexico. Everything points etc.

  It is not, he acknowledges now, the beginning of his mistrust. Their official plan, upon setting out the year before to spirit Napoleon from St. Helena, had been that upon the emperor’s safe and secret installation at Beverly, Lafitte would send word posthaste to New Orleans for Dominique You to sail in the Séraphine to rescue Andrew, under pretext of executing Mayor Girod’s scheme to rescue Napoleon. Such was also their “backup” plan in case things went awry: the Séraphine would sail on August 15, 1821, if nothing had been heard by then from the Jean Blanque. Moreover—in view of those rumors that Napoleon was being poisoned by the Bourbons, by the English, by the Fesch/Kleinmüller/Metternich conspiracy, even by disaffected members of his own entourage; and other rumors that he was dying of the stomach cancer common in his family; and yet others that he was already dead or elsewhere sequestered and replaced by an impostor—Cook and Lafitte had agreed on a contingency plan: if the man they rescue is either an impostor or a dying Napoleon, Lafitte will bury him quietly at sea and then retrieve his surrogate to lead the Louisiana Project.

  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 s
tate!

  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 planning, therefore, he now confides: a multiple or serial imposture. He would go ashore at St. Helena and by some means arrange to have himself doped and smuggled out as Napoleon, and Napoleon left behind as himself (whose rescue he would then, as Napoleon, forestall, forbid, or thwart). Deceiving even Jean Lafitte, he would continue to counterfeit the aging, ailing emperor long enough to mobilize the French Creoles, the free Negroes, and the “Five Civilized Tribes” of Southern Indians for the Louisiana Project. Moreover, as Napoleon Bonaparte he will (“forgive me, dear dear Andrée! I had a hundred times rather it had been you, that have rightly forsaken your forsaker…”) marry Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, and turn her family’s fortune to his purpose! If he divines that Betsy might not disapprove, he will perhaps then reveal his true identity to her, “die” again as Napoleon, and carry on the 2nd Revolution as André Castine, Bonaparte’s successor to the Louisiana Project and to herself. Otherwise, he will do the same things without ever revealing the imposture. For it is not Mme B. herself he desires—vivacious, handsome, wealthy, and managerially gifted as she is—only her fortune, until he can salvage Bonaparte’s or make his own. He is not blind to her obsessiveness (“as profound as mine, but private: her son was her 2nd Revolution”), or to the sexless miser inside the Belle of Baltimore.