Letters полностью

We must surmise what followed. When their ship reaches British-held Bordeaux at the end of June and they learn of Waterloo, of Napoleon’s second abdication and his flight from Paris to nearby Rochefort, Andrew offers either to dispatch her to Mme de Staël in Leghorn, Italy (whither I learn’d Germaine had fled with her guardsman-husband for the sake of his health, & to wait out the Hundred Days); or to introduce her, as one former novelist to another, to Joseph Bonaparte, presently in Bordeaux & about to flee aboard a charter’d American schooner to New York. But she declined both offers, coldly informing me she would set & sail her own course thro life, without my or any other man’s aid. That she had, she believed, found her true vocation. Finally, that the real defect in “that business of Don Escarpio’s poison’d snuffbox” was not that it wanted re-working in fiction, but that it had not workt in fact!

On this discordant note they part. After learning all he can about the emperor’s situation from Joseph’s entourage and from the U.S. consul in Bordeaux (a Mr. Lee, to whom he attaches himself long enough to observe his signature and appropriate some consulate stationery, and for whom he volunteers to act as unofficial liaison with Napoleon’s party), Andrew hurries to Rochefort to reconnoiter and to revise his plan.

Napoleon, he learns, is being uncharacteristically indecisive, to the growing desperation of his suite. Having offered his services in vain to the provisional government in Paris as a mere general of the army (he had noted on his maps a vulnerable gap between the armies of Wellington and Blücher, both marching toward Paris), he has announced his decision to take refuge in America. But as if in hope of some marvelous re-reversal of fortune, he has put off his flight aboard the French frigates at his disposal and given the British time to reinforce their blockade of the harbor. Captain Ponée of the Méduse still)believes it possible to run the blockade: he will engage the chief blockading vessel, H.M.S. Bellerophon, a 74-gunner but old and slow; he estimates he can survive for two hours, enough time for Napoleon to slip through on the Saale and outrun the lesser blockaders. Napoleon has approved the audacity of the plan, but declined to sacrifice the Méduse. Another loyal frigate stands ready farther south, at the mouth af the Gironde; and there is Joseph’s charter boat at Bordeaux. The French master of a Danish sloop in the Aix Roads has even offered to smuggle the emperor out in an empty wine cask rigged with breathing tubes. Every passing day makes escape less feasible; the options narrow to capture and possible execution by Blücher’s Prussians, arrest by the Bourbons, surrender to the British, or suicide (it is an open secret that he carries a vial of cyanide always on his person). But Napoleon will not act.

Delighted by this unanticipated turn of fortune — which of course revives at once his original hope that Bonaparte himself might lead the “Louisiana Project”—“André Castine” attaches himself to the emperor’s party on the strength of a letter “from Mr. Consul Lee” authorizing him to oversee and facilitate Napoleon’s “American arrangements,” should the emperor choose to go to that country. He urgently advances Jean Lafitte’s Champ d’Asile/New Orleans/Barataria connection, flourishing his letter “from Mayor Girod”; the proposal finds favor with many of the party, but the emperor himself (through intermediaries: Andrew does not see him personally until the last minute) is dilatory. On July 4, our ancestor’s 39th birthday, Joseph sails aboard the U.S.S. Pike, afraid to delay longer. Andrew begins to share the desperation of Napoleon’s aides.