A dozen years and one miscarriage later, in 1961, upon our second visit to the States, the Macks chastely returned our hospitality. Jane had already, after her fashion, entirely repressed her romance with Jeffrey, not because (as with him) it was of no importance, but rather because it was too uncharacteristic of her to be agreeably recalled. I had by this time published my more serious articles on Constant, Gibbon, Rousseau, Schlegel, and Byron — their connexion with Mme de Staël — and brought out my edition of her letters (which had served as my entrée to Katia and Thomas Mann upon their removing from California to Switzerland during the McCarthy witch-hunts. Huxley had tried unsuccessfully to introduce us in 1947… but on this subject, too, I shall not speak). I was acquiring a small reputation as a scholar of the French Revolutionary period. Then Harrison Mack put me in touch with your Joseph Morgan of the Maryland Historical Society, on whom he already had his eye as a likely president for his college-in-the-works; and my conversation with that knowledgeable young man — so I had come to think of anyone my age! — led to my subsequent essays on de Staël and the Americans: Jefferson, Albert Gallatin, Gouverneur Morris.

In the fall of that year, marvellous to relate, I also made the acquaintance — may he not remember it! — of a literary figure of an altogether different order. Morgan had fortuitously recollected, from some transactions between his office and its counterpart in the state of Delaware, that Germaine de Staël was among the original investors in E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co. in the first decade of the 19th Century. She had of course known Éleuthère Irénée’s father, Pierre Samuel Du Pont, before the Revolution: the “Rousseau” in her sympathised with the romantic economics of Du Pont père, Turgot, and the other physiocrats, while the “Jane Mack” in her — would that I’d inherited a touch of it! — recognised that munitions were a golden investment no matter whose cannons carried the day. Morgan himself arranged to have the microfilm records of those stock transactions, and her letters of enquiry about them after her father’s death in 1804, sent down from Wilmington to Baltimore for my examination. As I perused them with the society’s projector, the only other visitor in the place — a heavyset, not unhandsome gentleman in his latter forties, with curly thick pepper-and-salt hair and suit to match — began making a fuss to the young woman on desk-duty because his books, of which he’d presented autographed copies to the society, were to be found neither on display nor among the shelves of Maryland poets.

He grew louder. It was a thinly disguised political reprisal, he declared; Morgan and his ilk could expect to hear from the governor’s office. Too long had the society been a haven and sinecure for left-wing iconoclasts, self-styled intellectuals, outside agitators with no respect for the red, white, and blue, much less the red, white, black, and orange of “The Old Line State, long may she wave / O’er her detractors’ wretched grave,” et cetera.

I thought the man drunk, or mad. The desk clerk was intimidated, almost in tears. As I moved to defend her, Morgan appeared from his office, rolled his eyes, and levelly explained, when he could get a word in between tetrameters, that inasmuch as the books in question had been duly catalogued (among Miscellaneous Marylandia), their absence from the shelves must be testament of their popularity. The library was noncirculating, but given the small staff his budget permitted, some attrition by theft was inevitable. As they were none of them in print, perhaps Mr Cook would spare another set of copies from his apparently inexhaustible supply? In any case, he must cease his disturbance at once or leave the premises; others were at work.

The two clearly knew each other; their contretemps had the air of a reenactment. At Morgan’s last remark the fellow seemed to notice me for the first time: elaborately he begged my pardon (he had better begged the clerk’s) and insisted that “Joseph”—“a flaming Commie, don’t you know, but an able chap all the same”—introduce us. Even as Morgan dryly did so, the man pressed upon me broadsides and flyers from his inside pockets, advertising himself and his poetical effusions. Morgan withdrew with a sigh — it seemed they were long-standing acquaintances; the outburst had been half a joke — and I was left with Mr A. B. Cook, self-designated Poet Laureate of “Maryland! Faerie-Land! / Tidal estuary-land!”—as odd a mixture of boorishness and cultivation as I’d encountered.

He knew of Mme de Staël, though he claimed to have read neither her nor Schlegel nor any other non-Anglo-Saxon. He had read Gibbon, and retailed to me the story of Gibbon’s youthful courtship of Suzanne Curchod, later Mme de Staël’s mother. Gibbon’s father had disapproved of the match; Mlle Curchod (then eighteen) appealed to her pastor, who consulted Jean Jacques Rousseau, who advised against the marriage on the grounds that young Gibbon’s Essai sur l’étude de la littérature, which he’d read in manuscript, “wanted genius.” I replied with the postscript to that anecdote: that in 1776 “my” Germaine, then a girl of ten, had offered to marry Gibbon, then near forty and grown famous with the appearance of his Decline and Fall, so that her mother and father might continue to enjoy his conversation.

But I did not continue to enjoy ours, for having learned who my husband was, Cook now launched into a fulsome panegyric for Jeffrey’s famous ancestor, commander of British forces in America during the French and Indian War, whose notorious manner of dealing with the Indians during Pontiac’s conspiracy he lauded as “the earliest recorded example of bacteriological warfare.” Today I see that turn of the conversation in a different light, as shall be recorded on some future Saturday; at the time I thought it simply in offensive taste, and I curtly turned him off. We met again in November at the Macks’ farewell party for Jeffrey and me at Tidewater Farms, to which they’d just returned: in Jeffrey’s presence Cook did not bring up the subject of those infected blankets from the Fort Pitt smallpox hospital, but he gave me a great wink as he mused loudly upon the question, Whether our poetical attitudes might be to some extent determined by available rhymes, e.g. wife/life/strife, or savage/ravage…

A strange man; a dangerous man; a buffoon who is no fool. I have seen him since but once, at Harrison’s funeral, an encounter that leaves me troubled yet. It is unimaginable that he does not know who sits on Schott’s nominating committee for the M.U. Litt.D., and what my position is. Even Morgan, who did not fear him, regarded Cook as dangerous; could not quite account for the man’s enmity and alliance with Schott against him; considered him at once less and more serious than his manner implied. The Tow’r of Truth demagoguery and ideological name-calling, even the horrendous doggerel and self-advertising broadsides, he knew Cook himself to be ironic about, as Schott for example was never; and like me, Morgan had met the unpredictable sophistication under the bumptiousness and posturing. But he believed Cook perfectly capable of destroying people in that “unseriousness,” beneath which lay motives more serious than any of Schott’s own.

This apprehension of course proved true: where is Morgan now? As I intimated in my first letter, the hysterical tenor of which I shall not bother to blush at or apologise for…

No matter.

To end this history: back again in England, in the fall of 1962 and ’63 I received from André, not cryptic postcards, but full letters, the substance of which will keep till another letter of my own. The first prompted my essay “The Inconstant Constant,” on de Staël’s ill-treatment by Benjamin Constant and the beautiful Juliette Récamier, with whom both (and everyone) were in love: Constant had borrowed 80,000 francs from Germaine over the years, and now refused to repay the mere half of it which she wanted, not for herself, but as dowry for Albertine — her daughter by Constant seventeen years earlier! When she pressed, he threatened to make public her old (and heartbreaking) letters to him. I weep. The second prompted my sole excursion from my chosen field: the foreword to a new edition of the seven letters exchanged between Héloïse and Peter Abelard. I weep, and can say no more.