’Twas with no advice from me he advised that raven, Andrew declares, whose image must haunt me evermore, till I find another poet to exorcise me of it. Now is the time, he nonetheless believes, to take best advantage of the Duc de Bassano, when Napoleon needs all the goodwill he can buy. On the 18th they leave Warsaw, hoping to overtake that gentleman before the Cossacks do. On the 19th, in the valley of the Vistula, Barlow himself is overtaken, by a cold to which a fever is added on the 20th. His condition worsens rapidly: at the little Jewish stetl of Zarnowiec, “the bitter end of the alphabet,” on “the shortest, darkest, meanest day of 1812,” half a year exactly since Andrew’s imperious dream, Joel declares he can travel no farther. The mayor and postmaster of the village, one John Blaski, is sympathetic: “Petry” overcomes the man’s fear of Cossack reprisal and persuades him to take the American minister in. Doctors are summoned, to no avail beyond the diagnosis of pneumonia. On the day after Christmas, which out of respect for their host the visitors do not observe, the Plenipotens Minister a Statibus unitis America, as Joel Barlow’s burial tablet in the Zarnowiec Christian churchyard denominates him, Itinerando hicce obiit.

Tom Barlow and Andrew bury him at once, thank John Blaski for his courageous charity, and flee: the Cossacks need no particular excuse for ravaging a Jewish settlement. The two will reach Paris three weeks later, no longer friends. Indeed, while he charges no one by name of slandering him, and specifically “absolves” Ruthy (of what, we must infer) by reason of her “inconsolable grief,” Andrew concludes this portion of his letter with the meaning observations that, as Ruthy’s favorite and Joel’s nearest relative, nephew Tom will surely inherit the Barlow estate upon Ruthy’s death; that “of all the calumnies ever suffer’d silently by those whose profession does not permit reply, none stings me so sore as that ‘J. B. Petry’ saw to it Joel’s treaty was never sign’d! As well accuse me of his pneumonia, who gave up my own pelisse to warm him at the end!”

Be that as it may — and I for one, Henry, do not credit for a moment the insinuation that Andrew derived “the blanket trick” from Jeffrey Amherst’s bacteriological tactic against the Indian besiegers of Fort Pitt during Pontiac’s conspiracy — he acknowledges frankly that the death of his “father” liberates as well as grieves him. Negotiations with the Duc de Bassano cannot now be resumed until a new minister arrives from Washington: late spring at the earliest. Though Napoleon executes General Malet for treason and welcomes the declarations of war on France by Prussia and Austria as his excuse to raise yet another army and atone for the Russian debacle, he has little interest in the British-American diversion. For one thing, the Americans seem to be holding their own without assistance: though Tecumseh’s Indians have been victorious around the western Great Lakes, and Admiral Cockburn has blockaded the Chesapeake to play off the mid-Atlantic states against New York and New England, the new U.S. invasion of Canada bids to be successful. General Prevost is repulsed at Sackett’s Harbor on Lake Ontario, and the Americans loot and burn the Canadian capital at York (Toronto). The British virtually evacuate the Niagara Frontier from Fort George at the mouth to Fort Erie at the head of the Niagara River; only the timidity of old General Dearborn keeps the Americans from pressing their advantage and seizing Canada. The U.S. Navy, too, is flexing its new muscle: though of insufficient force simply to destroy the British blockade (which however generates in Baltimore an enormously profitable fleet of privateers and blockade-runners), American captains are distinguishing themselves in individual engagements. One brig alone, the Argus, after delivering Joel Barlow’s successor to Paris, wreaks such havoc with British merchant shipping in the English Channel that marine insurance rates shoot up like a Congreve rocket — a mode of economic warfare so effective that the prince regent now considers seriously Czar Alexander’s offer to negotiate a settlement of the war.

Non grata in the rue de Vaugirard, Andrew follows these developments attentively from across the Channel, where he has gone in March to test the British political weather before returning to Andrée and the twins. The Americans, he concludes, are doing altogether too well to consider yielding to the British demand for an Indian Free State, especially while Napoleon remains a threat in Europe. Cockburn’s depredations in the Chesapeake are little more than a nuisance; only Tecumseh (and Dearborn’s pusillanimity) is keeping Canada in the British Empire. But word has it that young Oliver Perry is building an American fleet from scratch at Presque Isle on Lake Erie, to help William Henry Harrison defeat Tecumseh finally and for keeps. It is time, Andrew decides, the scales were tipped a bit the other way.

Before leaving London he pays one call on Mme de Staël, who with her entourage is enjoying great success in the city. He finds her in good spirits but indifferent health: the last pregnancy, her fifth, took its toll on her, and its issue proved unfortunate. “Petit Nous” is imbecilic; they have named him Giles, invented an American parentage for him, and left him at Coppet with wet nurses. Germaine is tired and no longer attractive; her young guardsman-husband, though devoted, is crude and given to jealousy; she is using far too much laudanum, can’t manage without it. She is not displeased to see that Andrew too has aged considerably. She introduces him to young Lord Byron, whose company she enjoys despite his unflattering compliment that she should have been born male. At her request, for Byron’s amusement and by way of homage to the memory of Joel Barlow, Andrew for the last time recounts the tale of “Consuelo del Consulado.” The poet attends, applauds politely, suggests that “with some reworking” it might appeal to Walter Scott, but believes that Gioacchino Rossini may have already made use of it in his new opéra bouffe L’Italiana in Algeri. Germaine herself, this time around, declares the tale palpable rubbish. The truth is (she announces pointedly to Byron) she is surfeited with Romanticism, almost with literature. She prefers Jane Austen to Walter Scott, Alexander Pope to Wordsworth and Shelley, and would rather read Malthus and Ricardo and Laplace than the lot of them. Her own novels have begun to bore her: so much so that she is writing a quite 18th-Century essay against suicide to counter the “Wertherism” so morbidly in fashion, from which her own Delphine, for example, suffers. Oh that she were Byron’s age! She would devise an art that saw through such improbable flamboyances as Napoleon and “Consuelo” to those complex realities which (as her financier father knew) truly affect the lives of men and nations: the commodity market, currency speculation, the mysteries of patent law and debenture bonding.

Byron is bored. Andrew has heard the argument before; he coins the terms “post-Romantic” and “neo-Realist” and, begging their pardons, wonders casually whether Germaine’s new passion for economic and political history as against belles-lettres is not as romantical in its way as Byron’s fascination with “action” as against “contemplation.” He also wonders whether (this fancy much pleases both Byron and de Staël) “romantic” unlikelihoods such as his interlude with Consuelo not more likely to occur in reality, even to abound, in the present Age of Romanticism than in other ages, just as visions and miracles no doubt occurred more regularly in the Age of Faith than in the Enlightenment. The most practical strategists in the Admiralty, for example, have been unable to deal with the American Argus nuisance in the Channel, whereas any romantical novelist deserving of the adjective would recall at once how Mercury slew the original “hundred-eyed Argus” by first charming the monster to sleep (some say with fiction). Suppose, instead of wool and timber and wheat, the Argus were to capture a ship loaded to the gunwales with good Oporto wine, whilst over the horizon a British man-o’-war stood ready to close when the Yankees were in their cups…