In May, despairing of your coming here, & doubting my welcome at Castines Hundred, we sail’d for France, writes Andrew. His errand is to interest Napoleon — whose reascendancy in Europe Lafitte never doubts — in the “Louisiana Project,” to the extent of sending French ships and men “to aid the cause of Mexican independence” once the military situation in Europe is in hand. On the advice of Jean Blanque he carries by way of credentials a forged letter from Mayor Girod of New Orleans (who had in fact been as interested as Lafitte in the Elba mission), appealing to the emperor “on behalf of all French Creoles.” The voyage is financed jointly by Lafitte and Beluche, the latter on condition that Andrew see to Consuelo’s safe return to her homeland.
As they traverse these waters (where Mrs. M. and I now reenact together certain separate youthful passions), Consuelo endeavors, we cannot know how successfully, to reenact their earlier shipboard affairs. She has decided that the novel is a worn-out fad; she adduces as evidence the fact that she herself has ceased reading anything in that kind. Andrew’s information that Samuel Richardson himself, the father of the epistolary novel, had said essentially the same thing (quoting his booksellers, in letters dated 1758 and 1759), she takes as validation of her stand. The true romanticismo, she now believes with Mme de Staël, is the active life; despite her weariness with America, she is prepared to exchange both literary fame and the domestic joys of wife- and motherhood to hazard the world at the side of a lover in the advance guard of history, so to speak.
Andrew gently reminds her that Mme de Staël, at last report, seemed to have put by both fiction and action for reflection. And, “transported by longing for [his] own family,” he permits himself “a panegyric on parenthood, conjugal fidelity, & domestical bliss,” for all which, he declares to Consuelo, she is in his opinion more admirably suited by temperament than for literary, political, or sexual adventuring. His friend mistakes his meaning, agrees at once, and “flinging herself upon [his] neck, with tears of joy accept[s his] proposal!”
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.
Legality was the official sticking-point, he writes: Bonaparte had long since requested of the Paris government passports to America, & had renew’d that request thro Commander Maitland of Bellerophon, without reply. He had, he declared, been condemn’d an outlaw by the Congress of Vienna since his escape from Elba; moreover, he had been defeated on the field of battle & forced to abdicate. To flee now like a common fugitive was in his eyes but a further ignominy. But some said privately he fear’d life in America, so remote from the terrain of his career. Others, that he had fallen ill, slipt his hold on reality, & half believed a way would yet show itself, to make another Elba of Rochefort.
On July 8, on orders from Paris, the party boards the French frigates anchored in the harbor. On the 10th a letter arrives from Bellerophon, in reply to Napoleon’s query: Maitland does not mention the passports (he has been secretly instructed to intercept and take custody of the emperor if he attempts to flee, and deliver him to Tor Bay), but politely forbids Napoleon passage out of the harbor on any but his own vessel, and that to England. On the 11th they learn of Louis XVIII’s re-restoration. The circle is closing. On the 13th Napoleon drafts his famous letter of surrender to the prince regent:
Your Royal Highness,
A victim to the factions which distract my country, and to the enmity of the greatest powers of Europe, I have terminated my political career, and I come, like Themistocles, to throw myself upon the hospitality of the British people. I put myself under the protection of their laws; which I claim from your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most constant, and the most generous of my enemies.
Rochefort, 13 July, 1815,
Napoleon
But before delivering it, and himself, to Bellerophon, he decides to make a final inquiry concerning the passports, at the same time testing the air on the subject of his second choice: asylum in England, where his brother Lucien already resides, and the likely nature of his reception there. On the morning of Bastille Day, therefore, he sends emissaries under a flag of truce to Bellerophon. Commander Maitland again declares (what is technically correct) that he has had no word yet from his admiral concerning the passports; that he cannot permit Napoleon passage to America without them; and that he is not empowered to enter into any agreement concerning the emperor’s reception in England — which, however, he cannot personally imagine will be other than hospitable. The embassy returns; there is no alternative, Napoleon decides, to surrendering to Maitland and taking his chances with the prince regent. A new letter is drafted to that effect, enclosing a copy of the “Themistocles” letter, re-requesting passports and passage to America, but accepting in lieu of them passage to England “as a private individual, there to enjoy the protection of the laws of your country.” He will deliver himself and his entourage to Bellerophon, he declares, on the morrow’s ebb tide.