An Embarrassment of Riches (19 page)

“Of course, these idiots were spending France into a penury. The handwriting was on the wall as far back as '83, a horror of deficit propped up by flimsy ‘royal loans.' Ha! Like quenching a fire by throwing on melted fat! By '87, the nation totters on the brink of ruin. Louis, in the majestic vacuum of his absolutism, appoints a savior finance minister: the nincompoop Cardinal Brienne, dissolute, with the brains of a duck.

“The result: collapse of the royal treasury. But, somehow, like a great gilt carriage flying out of control downhill, monarchy rolls on—to its doom! The States-General convenes at Versailles. A joke, if the fate of one's country did not hang in the balance. The doors to the assembly are soon nailed shut. Oaths are made upon a tennis court. Bread is as scarce among the people as diamonds and rubies. All France ignites as the Bastille falls. Somehow, the pretense of kingship persists a few months longer, as twilight will linger after the sun is down. His Majesty is ignominiously routed from Versailles by ten thousand screaming harridans and paraded with great mocking pomp back to Paris. This is, of course, the memorable October Fifth. The royal family are installed, ghostlike, in the long-deserted, cobweb-draped Tuilleries—”

At this point, the fish plates were removed and the saddle of venison served. Lou-Lou wore a misty, faraway look on his face, the tongue lolling stupidly on his lower lip.

“It was no less than house arrest,” LeBoeuf continued. “He knew it. All France, all Europe knew. That fall and winter, the
émigrés
flee in droves. Hope for a constitution wanes with the Feast of Pikes. Finally, on August 31, of '90,
catastrophe!
The affair at Nancy. Affair!
Merde!
Massacre! I was there, on the general staff of the brave Bouillé. Nancy was an armed lunatic asylum—how you say, a bedlam—every military faction exploding like so many powder kegs, in directionless fury. The National Guard in a mutiny; royalism wielding its sabers; sansculottism bristling its pikes; and newly hatched Jacobinism rising from its egg full-blown on flaming hell-wings with dragon's breath. Plots are born like flies on corpses. It is not a civil war but an utter chaos. The crackle of musketry, thunder of cannon, clank of cold steel against steel, against bone, blood everywhere, miserable madness! Three thousand lay slain in the hot twilight when it is over.

“Three days later, monsieurs, while Necker skulked home to Switzerland, I, my dear wife Marie, and little son, Honoré—then a babe of four—stole across the dreary channel to England in an oyster catcher's boat, all my chattels and heirlooms reduced to a bagful of gold sovereigns. We waited on tenterhooks in London the rest of that terrible year. One hope yet flickered in the darkness enveloping France, and that flame resided in the brain of Count Mirabeau. When it burnt out in April of '91, I knew all was lost.

“How we envied the revolution you Americans made against the British. Such a clear-cut conflict: New World against the Old, daughter against motherland, democracy against the dictates of a distant parliament and a demented king. Our hopes now turned across the sea to your new nation, to this rich continent, as big as seven Frances, and empty! We sailed from Plymouth for New York on May 1 aboard the royal brigantine
Disdain
, and touched these shores at June's sweet acme—
le plus haut point!
It was two weeks later that I visited your renowned garden outside Philadelphia, monsieur.
Magnifique!
”

“I was off Cape Porcupine, Labrador, amidst the barking seals,” Uncle recalled nostalgically. The servants brought on the pear tartlets and coffee.

“When did you come here?” I inquired, meaning to the Tennessee River.

“A decade ago almost to the month,” LeBoeuf replied. “We sojourned among, uh, sympathetic friends up and down the seaboard. New England was too cold for our blood.
Brrrr
. Carolina too tropical. Foo! The soil of Virginia was leached unto sand. The West beckoned. Unspoilt eden! Wealth fabulous beyond the imagination!
N'est-ce pas?
In Pittsburgh, the news reached us of His Majesty's execution—”

“More dessert, please!” Lou-Lou interrupted his guardian and held out his plate for a servant to refill.

“Where is thy son, my friend?” Uncle was now prompted to ask. “Back east in one of our academies?”

“Dead,” LeBoeuf said simply. A tear pooled in the corner of his right eye and slid off his bony cheek onto the tablecloth.

“Yellow fever,” Madame added. “Not a week after we came here.”

“I'm sorry.”

“How tragic!”

“I miss him dreadfully,” LeBoeuf said, casting his red-rimmed eyes upon Lou-Lou, who had finished the last morsel of his second pear tartlet and now picked at the crumbs on his plate.

“To conquer my grief, I was determined to subdue this rich wilderness. Chateau Félicité was begun the hour after we lowered my little Honoré into the earth. Give a good man the right tools, messieurs, and he can build a stairway to the stars!”

“Urrrp,” Lou-Lou gave forth a belch.
“Pardonnez moi,”
he said. Madame's nose wrinkled in a look of distaste. Yago's lip curled in an apparent sneer.

“Art aware how thy revolution ended?” Uncle asked the Frenchman delicately.

“O, yes,” he affirmed. “Though we dwell somewhat out of town, so to speak, heh-heh, news of the world does dribble our way. Would it surprise you, messieurs, to learn that I was personally acquainted with he who now rules France?
Oui
. Little Napoleon Bonaparte was no less than my student at
L'Ecole Militaire
, Paris, in '84. I was then thirty-four, a captain, stymied in my career by the sons of wealthier fathers. In this respect, we had a lot in common, myself and this tiny, olive-skinned Corsican boy. All around me rich imbeciles rose to generalships. At my age, I was almost—how do you say?—washed up, relegated to teaching trigonometry to cadets while other men ten years younger commanded divisions of brave men in the field.
L'ignominie!

“We became close, Napoleon and I, almost a filial attachment. His father was dead, you know. He was so serious, so imbued with responsibility for that enormous, noisy family of his, in which he was but the second son, and barely five feet tall in his boots, a near midget thinking himself Atlas! In one year he completed a course of study that took other cadets two or three, was commissioned a second lieutenant, and sent off to Valence in the south. That was the last I heard of him for many years. His rise must have been like a meteor's! One of my few regrets at leaving France forever was not to be able to witness his ascent: the little Corsican boy, with his knitted brow and far-seeing eyes.”

LeBoeuf gazed abstractedly into his coffee cup and chuckled, but with what seemed genuine warm remembrance.

“So, monsieur,” he looked back up at Uncle. “I was not surprised to hear that Napoleon Bonaparte had stepped into the vacuum of power and seized France. So young! His life must be like a fairy tale. Still the little Atlas. The world upon his shoulders.”

“Are you also aware,” said I, “how Atlas's burden has been lightened by some million square miles?”

LeBoeuf pursed his lips and squinted as though trying to solve some riddle of trigonometry.

“I admit, I am puzzled, Sammy,” he replied.

“Your little Corsican boy has sold Louisiana to the United States.”

LeBoeuf and Madame turned and glanced sharply at each other. All the color seemed to drain from the Frenchman's face.

“Where did you hear this?” he asked in a small, dry voice.

“Many places,” I said. “Pittsburgh, Wash—”

“Then it is a rumor,” Madame asserted in a hopeful vein.

“No, 'tis a fact,” Uncle declared. “I myself doubted it till I saw the newspaper in Louisville. 'Twas consummated this spring at Paris by Secretary Monroe—art feeling well, sir? Madame?”

“Brandy,” LeBoeuf croaked. The Choctaw servant did not move quickly enough to suit him.
“Tout de suite!”

The decanter was brought in from the library. With trembling hands, our host filled his glass nearly halfway and downed it. In a little while, the color returned to his face.

“What a shock,” he said, and motioned for our snifters to be filled as well. “It is a brilliant move, of course, but … so unexpected.”

“It took me by surprise, sir,” Uncle avouched.

“Not so much myself,” said I. “Especially after coming down the Ohio. Why, every day hundreds of settlers are discharged into the Mississippi and thence west. Already St. Louis is three-quarters American, they say. Bonaparte had as much hope of controlling Louisiana as we might hope to control Poland. The move was inevitable.”

“Of course,” LeBoeuf agreed. “It was only logical. Well, then, a toast to Louisiana.” He raised his glass and smiled, but it was a wan, unconvincing smile. The toast made, he stood up at his place and cleared his throat. “Shall we move along to the evening's entertainment? What do you say, my darling wife? Gentlemen?”

We left our seats. Madame still looked very pale.

“May I come too, Uncle Fernand?” Lou-Lou asked.

LeBoeuf closed his eyes and shook his head.

“O, please, please,” Lou-Lou begged.

“No.”

“Let him come,” I sued in the poor booby's behalf. “Wherever it is we are going,” I added.

“I don't think so, Sammy. He always laughs in the wrong places.”

“I won't. I promise. O, please, please, Uncle Fer—”

“No, I say!” LeBoeuf retorted with startling vehemence. For such a frail man he could shout admirably.

“I shall go whether you like it or not,” Lou-Lou muttered.

“What was that?” LeBoeuf said, bristling.

“I said, I shall go to the place if you like it or not,” Lou-Lou repeated sullenly.

“
Quelle impertinence!
Do I believe my ears?”

“I am a man! I can do as I please!”

“Mon dieu!”
LeBoeuf appealed to the rest of us with a look of incredulity. “Who put this idea into your head?”

“I did,” said I, and all eyes fastened instantly on me.

“
You
did?” LeBoeuf said as though he were scandalized.

“Did you not tell him last night at table to act like a man?” I said.

“Did I say that?” LeBoeuf seemed surprised.

“You did, monsieur,” I assured him.

“Is he right,” LeBoeuf turned to inquire of his ward. “Is this how the idea got into your head?”

“I don't know,” Lou-Lou answered timidly, his eyes downcast. “Perhaps.”

“So, Sammy, you are a revolutionary, eh?” LeBoeuf said, his eyes glinting with the same contempt that he reserved for those madmen who tore his beloved France to pieces.

“Let the lad come, Fernand,” Uncle now sued, as much to end the quarrel as to accommodate Lou-Lou.

“Very well,” LeBoeuf gave in with a sigh, a thin smile returning to his lips. “Come along, everybody, to the theater.”

We trooped upstairs and down a long corridor, past the conservatory where
Puya robusta
silently formed her precious seed pods in the darkness, thence round a corner. Ahead came a roistering noise, as of a crowd of people. We came to a set of double doors. They were flung open. Once again, LeBoeuf's ingenuity left me awestruck. Inside was a gorgeous theater, its scale about one third the size of, say, the Park Theatre in New York, but nonetheless a complete and exquisitely adorned playhouse.

Within stood a crowd of about an hundred half-naked savages, all men, but all comporting themselves with the lively decorum of an equal number of New Yorkers or Philadelphians, some standing in groups along the aisle, gabbing and gossiping. The scene was perfectly astounding. Some of the Indians quit their chatting to acknowledge us with a polite bow, and in every way they behaved like any group of theatergoers back in the accultured states. LeBoeuf nodded back at those who acknowledged us, but there was no display of fawning deference. One sensed that LeBoeuf enjoyed the illusion of being back in a theater in a civilized country. And I own that, when I closed my eyes for a moment, the illusion was a powerful one.

“This way, my friends,” LeBoeuf said. We followed him down the left-hand aisle to an arched portal near the proscenium. Within it was a narrow, walnut-paneled spiral staircase. Madame LeBoeuf climbed directly ahead of me, the shape of her hindquarters revealed by the intervening light of a sconce candle on the wall of a passage.

A moment later we arrived in LeBoeuf's personal box. It contained an half-dozen luxurious armchairs. To the right of this box extended a small balcony all the way across the upper portion of the theater, upon which were seated several dozen more Indians. Hanging from center was a magnificent chandelier holding hundreds of candles. The ceiling was painted so as to represent a blue sky dotted with fleecy clouds, as on a fair summer's day. Toward the front, that is, toward the top of the proscenium arch, trumpeting cherubs gamboled amidst these clouds. The main curtain was also painted: a depiction of Chateau Félicité floating against its background of water and verdure, and at the top, painted as though on an unfurled scroll, LeBoeuf's motto:
le travail vous libérera
.