How is it, I wonder, Prinz gets so much said when I’m not there to hear him? In any case, my own variation, proposed at once, was that this time around I stay home in bed. Ambrose’s idea — which, along with my menstruation and the completing of his Perseus-Medusa story in first draft, kept him from me most of the week since my last letter — was to reply to Prinz’s triumphantly Unwritable Scene (on the beach of Ocean City back on 12 May) with a victoriously Unfilmable Sequence.
He was in a high state of excitement; didn’t even remark upon the fact, if he noticed it, that since the full moon I’d ceased to wear my teenybopper costumes, too depressed to give a damn what he thought. Did I not agree, he demanded to know, that we were amid a truly extraordinary coming together of omens, echoes, prefigurations? Item: On the Tuesday noon, 1 July, the midpoint of the year, he was in midst of a fiction about the classical midpoint of man’s life, and felt himself personally altogether nel mezzo del cammin etc. Item: Our sacking from Marshyhope U. had occurred (so said his desk calendar) on the anniversary of the end of Napoleon’s 100 Days. Item: Wednesday the 2nd, when Prinz began preparing his reenactment of the Gadfly’s grounding and Ambrose all but wound up his tale of Perseus and Medusa, was the date on which in 1816 the French frigate Méduse ran aground off the Cape Verde Islands and put out the raft that inspired Géricault’s famous painting; the frigate itself had just the year before — and at just this same time of year — been involved in Napoleon’s postabdication scheme to run the British blockade at Rochefort and escape to America. And — get this, now — he had just that day (i.e., midday Thursday, 3 July) been informed by Todd Andrews, whom he’d happened to meet in the Cambridge Hospital and with whom he’d had a chat about the strange Mr Bray, that that gentleman had once represented himself to the Tidewater Foundation as the Emperor Bonaparte, and had even mentioned, in one of his mad money-begging letters, his abdication, his flight to Rochefort, the plan to run him through the British blockade, his final decision to surrender and plead for passport to America: where (Bray is alleged to have alleged) he lives in hiding to this day, making ready his return from his 2nd Exile!
But we are not done. Item: Among the American friends of the emperor’s brother Jérôme Bonaparte was the King family of “Beverly,” in nearby Somerset County; and among the several plans to rescue Napoleon from St Helena, one of the more serious was that of Mayor Girod of New Orleans, who built a fast ship in Charleston to run the emperor across the Atlantic and into the trackless Maryland marshes, where he would hide in a secret room in the Beverly estate until the coast was clear enough for him to remove to New Orleans. Only the news of Bonaparte’s death in 1821 kept the Séraphine from sailing. And who are these Kings of Somerset if not the ancestors of Ambrose’s mother Andrea King, from whom he had both this story as a child and his adult nom de plume?
