“Too romantical by half, Master Balzac,” I advised my 3rd uncritical auditor, who, unlike Midshipman Cooper, frankly aspired to literature & was already scribbling vaudevilles at a great rate. He promist to rework it & show me an amended draught by New Year’s Day. But on the darkest night of the year a courier from the office of the Duc de Bassano, drest in the particular shade of brown fashionable that season in Napoleon’s court (“Caca du roi de Rome,” after the stools of the Emperor’s infant son), deliver’d to me an urgent letter from Andrée. It had been written at Castines Hundred only 30 days past & sent via Quebec & the secret French-Canadian diplomatic pouch: “Cato” (our code name for Tecumseh, who deplored the white man’s influence on the red as had Cato the Greek influence on the Romans) had suffer’d such a defeat on the Tippecanoe River that he was inclined to make peace with the U. States & remain neutral in the coming war. Furthermore, my man John Henry (of whom more presently), frustrated in his attempt to get from the British Foreign Office what he felt was owed him for his espionage in New England, was rumor’d to be leaving London in disgust & returning to Lower Canada. As for the author of the letter herself, she was gratified to report that in consequence of our close cooperation in July, when we had successfully “torpedo’d” (Robert Fulton’s word) the negotiations between William Henry Harrison & our friend “Cato,” she found herself in the family way. Would I please see to the completion of my current torpedo-work (on Barlow’s negotiations with the Duc de Bassano) in time to marry her before April 1812, when our baby was expected? And by the by, in case we should decide to assassinate either William Henry Harrison or Tecumseh’s Prophet: Whatever happen’d to my friend Consuelo’s dandy little potion? Was I so certain that it had contain’d what she described?

I was not, never had been, never would be certain. For, as I explain’d to your mother when I first met her in 1804 (and told her a version of this adventure suitable for the ears of a lady of fifteen), and re-explain’d when I remet & fell in love with her in 1807, and reminded her upon our marriage three months ago, Consuelo had flung her singular snuffbox straight into the Mediterranean when the Fortune clear’d Algiers. For all I knew & know for certain, “Don Escarpio” might have been tricking her for some complicated reason into an unsuccessful attempt on Barlow’s life, or she me into her rescue — tho she needed no such risky stratagem. I was certain only that it was good to be out of Algiers & to have such ardent company en route to Leghorn (where I was able to confirm the transfer of “our” letter of credit to Bacri’s Italian office) & Marseilles, where I left the ship. Consuelo wisht to come with me — to Paris, to anywhere — but I was too uncertain of my plans to undertake that responsibility. The Captain offer’d to carry me on, to Málaga or to Philadelphia: I return’d to Paris, & to a different uncertainty: one that persisted another half-dozen years.

Indeed, it was not until 1805, one Saturnian revolution since my birth, that I addrest myself clearly to what I thot of as “the American question.” I was de trop in Barlow’s household after “Toot” Fulton join’d it, tho Joel was glad of my assistance in the “XYZ Affair” & the revision of his Columbiad for the press. I was no less so in Mme de Staël’s: still Constant’s mistress and (in 1797) mother of his child, she turn’d her disappointment with Napoleon’s lack of interest in her into formidable political opposition to his 1st Consulship, & a fever of literary activity. I was able to help with the research for her essay De la Littérature (considéréé dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales); but after 1800 it was the autobiographical novel that most appeal’d to her, and such adventures as mine with Consuelo she found insufficiently “esthétique” (her new favorite adjective) for her Delphine, Corinne, & the rest. She was kind, but no longer interested, & frankly bored with my hatred of my father, which she declared had become mere wrongheadedness. “Henry Burlingame IV,” she confest, had assisted her in the purchase of 23,000 acres of former Iroquois land in upstate New York, as well as investments in the munitions firm of E. I. Du Pont in Delaware, for which assistance she was his debtor. Her comparison of him to me was in terms borrow’d from “Monsieur Fulton“: I was all vapeur, still in quest of a proper instrument of propulsion (Fulton was tinkering on the Seine with oars, paddle wheels, screw propellers); my father, more subtle, was a sous-marin, quietly applying torpilles to what he opposed. She thot I might well take a leaf from his book. Richard Alsop’s rhymed attack on Barlow in the Hartford Courant (after publication of Barlow’s letter criticizing President Adams’s French policy) characterized my own inconstancy:

What eye can trace this Wisdom’s son,—

This “Jack-at-all-trades, good at none,”

This ever-changing, Proteus mind,—

In all his turns, thro’ every wind;

From telling sinners where they go to,

To speculations in Scioto, …

From morals pure, and manners plain,

To herding with Monroe and Paine,

From feeding on his country’s bread,

To aping X, and Y, and Z,

From preaching Christ, to Age of Reason,

From writing psalms, to writing treason.

This “Proteus mind” permitted Barlow in 1800 to help Fulton persuade Napoleon to finance his submarine project against the British navy, and then in 1804 to encourage him to build torpedo-rafts for the Admiralty to use against Napoleon’s channel fleet — whilst at the same time projecting a four-volume opus in verse to be called The Canal: A Poem on the Application of Physical Science to Political Economy, and drafting liberal pamphlets on the incompatibility of large standing military establishments & political liberty!

My own mind was less protean than protoplasmic; less a “shifter of shapes” than a maker of shifts. On errands for Barlow & Fulton I went to London as aforemention’d & met the King (& Mrs. Burney, & the beautiful Juliette Récamier). On errands for Mme de Staël I came to meet & be befriended by Napoleon’s young brother Jérôme, eight years my junior; on account of this connection, & my “American origins,” in 1803 I was sent on an errand by a minister of Napoleon himself, to warn Jérôme against contracting “permanent personal alliances” during his tour of the U. States (a naval officer at the moment, he had left his ship in the West Indies and was carousing his way north towards Philadelphia and New York). I arrived in Baltimore on Christmas, 1803, one day after his marriage to Betsy Patterson of that city. It was my task to inform Jérôme privately that his brother — having banisht Mme de Staël from Paris in order to intimidate the anti-Bonapartist salons, & having arranged several unsuccessful assassination attempts against himself to cement his popularity with the masses, all in preparation for having Pope Pius VII crown him Emperor of France in the coming year — would never acknowledge Jérôme’s marriage to a commoner. The bride, a wealthy Baltimore merchant’s daughter, was indignant. Jérôme merely shrug’d & invited me to tour America at the First Consul’s expense, on pretext of dissuading him from the marriage he had already consummated.

Thus I found myself, full of misgivings, in the country & state of my birth, for the 1st time since Mother & I had left them in 1783, when I was seven. I crost “glad Chesapeake” to the broad Choptank & Cooke’s Point, half expecting to be greeted by some version of “Henry Burlingame IV.” There were the frozen marshes of my childhood, the geese flown down from Canada to winter, the graves of good Maggie Mungummory & divers ancient Cookes, the tall-topt pines, the house of my ancestors (long since sold out of the family, & in need of repairs), the ice-blue water lapping chillily at the beach. The scene spoke to me of my namesake’s journey north to where those geese came from (I mean my grandfather’s, A.C. III’s), to learn the truth about his derivation & then to deal with it. ’Twas a tale I’d had in mythic outline, so to speak, from Mother, and from “Father” in the opprobrious detail rehearst in my 2nd letter (I had not yet seen all the diaries & other documents). I was nearing 30, sans course or cause or calling; I had not been to Castines Hundred myself since my 10th year. It was time.