But she is not offended; on the contrary, in “this slough, this sink, this barbarous democratical Baltimore,” she is entertained by Andrew’s tales of the Revolution, of his intrigues with John Henry and Joel Barlow. And she is so pleased, as is Joseph Bonaparte, by his handling of “l’affaire Lakanal” that when Joseph engages him in the fall to serve as his clearing agent for all rescue proposals, Betsy volunteers her assistance as well “in any noncompromising way.”

Lakanal had had to be managed in three stages. Joseph’s opinion of him, which Andrew promoted from hearsay to firsthand knowledge, was enough to persuade the embarrassed trustees of the university to ease him out of office, and Girod and Blanque to ease him out of their plan. Andrew then advised Lakanal to petition Joseph Bonaparte directly, and, “as one close to that worthy,” told him how best to couch his appeal: the ex-king, he declared, is still secretly flattered to be addressed by his former title, and even enjoys conferring Spanish distinctions upon his favorites, though he cannot legitimately do so; at the same time, his two new passions are the Indians of his adopted country — even his “wilderness mistress” is named Annette Savage — and cryptology. If Lakanal could appeal to all these interests at once (every one of which, excepting Miss Savage, is in fact foreign to Joseph), while specifying that the emperor’s brother was not himself to have anything to do with the rescue, he could be assured of a favorable reading and an invitation to Point Breeze.

Lakanal dutifully prepares and mails a packet to Bordentown, which the U.S. Secret Service — tipped off by Andrew Cook “on behalf of [his] employer, Joseph Bonaparte”—promptly intercepts and passes on to President Monroe. It contains a cipher designed to make French and English messages look like prayers in Latin, a vocabulary of the Caddo language, a request for 65,000 francs for expenses to bring Napoleon to Louisiana and a Spanish marquisate if he succeeds, a catalogue of north Louisiana Indian tribes, and a vow that “le roi luimême” shall have nothing to do with rescuing the emperor. Monroe transmits his thanks to Point Breeze for Joseph’s loyal cooperation; for a time there is consternation in both the American and the French ministries of state; then the President dismisses the “Lakanal Packet” as the work of an utter and impotent madman. The secret service and Andrew agree to exchange information on other rescue attempts so that appropriate measures may be taken, and Andrew turns Lakanal off with a scolding for having been “so vulgarly beforehand” with that request for money, “as who should demand a boon ere it can be freely given.” The would-be conspirator is reduced to dirt farming.

With Girod and Blanque’s blessing then — and Jean Lafitte’s, who with a thousand followers is now established in Galveston and back to large-scale privateering — Andrew moves for the next two years between Louisiana and New Jersey. More bad news comes from St. Helena: convinced that Napoleon will dictate memoirs forever, Count de Las Cases has arranged his own deportation from the island, smuggling out with him the manuscript of his Memorial de Sainte Hélène; he quotes the emperor as declaring, “If Christ had not died upon the Cross, He would not have become the Son of God.”

Nevertheless, a dozen rescue plans go forward. Two freebooters of Philadelphia, Captains Jesse Hawkins and Joshua Wilder, propose to fit out a brace of clippers and a landing craft, register them for a tea voyage to Canton, and make for St. Helena instead. Stephen Decatur, the hero of Tripoli, together with Napoleon’s exiled General Bertrand Clauzel, proposes a similar scheme, worked out in knowledgeable military detail: the general has his eye on Mexico. In Britain, a certain Mr. Johnstone, admirer of both Napoleon and the late Robert Fulton, is testing a submarine for the purpose; and a Mme Fourès in Rio de Janeiro, who had been the emperor’s mistress in Egypt in 1798, is devoting her fortune to a plan involving several large sailing ships each carrying a small steamboat for fast night landings. The wealthy Philadelphian Stephen Girard, formerly a sea captain from Bordeaux, who helped Madison finance the War of 1812, is interested; so again is Jean Lafitte, who now proposes a quick operation by the whole New Baratarian navy. Girod and Blanque, impatient, have ordered construction of their ship in Charleston, South Carolina, safely away from their base, and are raising the imperial dwelling. Even Betsy Bonaparte acknowledges privately to Andrew that she has on her own authority approved an offer from the King family of Somerset County, old friends of hers and Jérôme’s, of the use of their remote mansion in the Eastern Shore marshes as a temporary hideout for the emperor until the excitement of his rescue shall have died down. She herself plans another extended visit with her son to Europe, where in course of frankly ingratiating herself with the other Bonapartes, she intends to enlist their aid in the project.

Andrew has his hands full. Joseph cautiously inclines to some combination of the Girod-Blanque scheme (as the most practical of the nonmilitary ones) and that of his friend Stephen Girard, whom he seeks not to disoblige, and who like Mayor Girod aspires merely to relieve Napoleon from so isolated and humiliating a confinement. But he will permit no expedition actually to sail until he is assured that his brother wants rescuing. He wonders vaguely whether their mother and their sister Pauline, both now luxuriously established in Rome, have better information on that score. In January of 1820, however, his Point Breeze mansion inconveniently burns to the ground, and he is too busy rebuilding it (on an even larger scale) to make inquiries of them.

Most of the proposals Andrew can deal with by simply refusing Joseph’s subsidy: thus the Hawkins-Wilder and the Decatur-Clauzel projects. A few he scotches by tips to the appropriate governments (Mr. Johnstone is arrested in the Thames and his vessel confiscated for examination by the Admiralty) or the planting of exploiters-by-delay, who like medieval alchemists turn the credulity of their patrons into gold (Mme Fourès’s steamboats need repeated and expensive redesigning). Bad luck and bad management take care of some others: a tornado destroys half a dozen of Jean and Pierre Lafitte’s vessels; Commodore Decatur is killed in a duel with a fellow officer at Bladensburg; the Champ d’Asile colonists are too busy saving themselves from crocodiles and dysentery to save their fallen emperor from St. Helena.

There remain the schemes that Joseph favors. Andrew delays them with overpreparation and cross-purpose (it is his idea to have Nicholas Girod’s Séraphim built inconveniently in Charleston, and to send Stephen Girard’s Philadelphia vessel to New Orleans to await sailing orders) until his own plan is ready, which his dealings with all these others have convinced him is likeliest to his purpose: at an appropriate moment, he will disappear from Bordentown, slip off secretly with Jean Lafitte on the fastest of the Baratarian vessels (the schooner named, as it happens, Jean Blanque), and do the job himself.

What job, exactly? Nota bene, my son: to no one more than to the author of a long-term project does the double edge of Heraclitus’s famous dictum apply: he cannot step into the same stream twice because not only the stream flows, but the man. The Andrew Cook who writes these lines, Henry, is not the same you last graced with your company in February; nor is the Andrew Cook who wrote on this date in 1820 the Cook of 1815. Events have at least thrice modified his original ends and means.

At first he wants merely to snatch Napoleon from the Allies and fetch him to Louisiana, let the international chips fall where they may. Then, in the spring of 1819 (Mississippi and Illinois have joined the Union; Alabama is about to; Monroe is buying Florida from Spain; Ruthy Barlow has joined her husband and Toot Fulton in the hereafter; the Atlantic has been crossed by steamship; the U.S.Canadian border is established at the 49th parallel), Betsy Bonaparte makes a curious report from Baltimore: she has it from friends in Rome that a German-Swiss clairvoyant, one Madame Kleinmüller, has become spiritual advisor to Napoleon’s mother (“Madame Mère”) in the Palazzo Rinuccini and has gained increasing influence over both the old woman and her brother, Cardinal Fesch. On January 15 last, according to Betsy’s sources, no less an authority than the Virgin Mary disclosed to Mme Kleinmüller, in a vision, that the British have secretly removed Napoleon from St. Helena and replaced him with an impostor; his jailers oblige his aides to write as if their master were still among them, but in fact he has been spirited by angels to another country, where he is safe and content! Mme Mère and Cardinal Fesch are altogether convinced. Napoleon’s sister Pauline Borghese is not: in a letter to Joseph soon after, she confirms Betsy’s report, deplores their mother’s gullibility, and declares her suspicion that Mme Kleinmüller is a spy for Metternich. Andrew himself dismisses the vision but changes his plan to include the planting of just such an impostor, to facilitate Napoleon’s removal, delay the search for him, and forestall international turmoil until the Louisiana Project is ready.