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.
Concerning whom, as Jean Blanque stands out of the gulf in August 1820, there remains a tantalizing mystery. When he last queried her in Baltimore concerning the source of her information about the Roman Bonapartes, Betsy had teased him with sight of a letter from Rome written in the Pattersons’ own family cipher. Knowing him to be “a clever hand at such things,” she scarcely more than flashed the letter; even so, she underestimated Andrew’s capacity. The forger’s trained eye and memory caught only the salutation and the close, but those he retained as if transcribed, and in fact transcribed them at his first opportunity: Vs Dryejri D., it began, and ended Nyy vs Yejr, G. Like most ciphers, it was written letter by letter, not cursively; yet the handwriting seemed half-familiar. I could almost have believed it yours! he exclaims to Andrée.
En route from Baltimore to New Orleans, New Orleans to “Galvez-Town,” he studies his transcription, but is unable either to recognize or to decipher it. Throughout the long voyage to St. Helena — normally a two-month sail, but extended to five by privateering excursions at Isla Mujeres and Curaçao, and by hurricane damage off Tobago — he studies the cipher while perfecting two separate impostures of Napoleon: a public, “false” one on deck for the benefit of Lafitte and the Baratarian crew, based on popular portraits by Isabey and Ducis (short-cropped hair, bemused mouth, right hand tucked between waistcoat buttons); and in his cabin a private, “true” one based on his last sight of the fallen emperor aboard Bellerophon—paunchy, jowly, slower of gait and speech — which he means to use to deceive his rescuers when the time comes.
Vs Dryejri D… Nyy vs Yejr, G. It looks vaguely Slavic, Croatian, Finnish. He remembers pondering the hieroglyphics in the British Museum in 1811, en route to his rendezvous with John Henry: the stone discovered at the village of Rosetta on the Nile by Napoleon’s soldiers in 1799 and taken by the British, with those soldiers, in 1801. The recollection reminds him of Napoleon’s Egyptian affair with Mme Fourès, the French counterpart of “Mrs. Mullens,” and of his own amorous North African escapade in 1797… Suddenly (it is September 14, seventh anniversary of his “death” at Fort McHenry; in Paris the “father of Egyptology,” Champollion, is deciphering those hieroglyphics with that stone) he has the key to Betsy Bonaparte’s cipher, and to both her “Swiss secret” and her “secret Swiss.”
