Letters

I fell in love with her at once, and remain’d so for the next five years, during most of which I served in her household as a sort of English-language amanuensis & library clerk. Because my politics were more radical & sanguinary than Germaine’s (I was to cheer—& witness — the King’s beheading, & many another’s), I was able to render her a signal service on 2 September 1792. The King & Queen had been arrested, the Revolutionary Tribunal establisht; Robespierre & Danton had led the insurrection of the Paris Communards, who were now inspired to slaughter all the Royalists they could lay hands on. They broke into Mme de Staël’s house and demanded of me that I deliver my mistress up to them as a prisoner & join them in the morrow’s executions. But I had known of their coming from my friends in the Hôtel de Ville, and had bid Germaine disguise herself as one of her own servants, whom I now introduced as my mistress in the tenderer sense, & who was in a delicate condition besides. Our employer, we declared, had fled that day to Switzerland.

Thither (that very night) she flew, in her plainest closed carriage, rewarding me en route with what she knew I had long desired. The carriage pitcht & bounced over the cobbles; round about us were the shouts & torches of the sans-culottes. I was 16 & virginal; she 26 & seven months gone with her 2nd child by Narbonne. I had no clear idea how to proceed, especially in such circumstances. But no initiative of mine was wanted: for all her experience of love, Mme de Staël had never been “taken” as a serving girl; the situation excited her to such a pitch of “romantic” emotion that, so far from returning as I had intended to join my friends in the September Massacre, I found myself — your pardon, Andrée — a-humping la baronne over Brie, Champagne, Bourgogne; up her Seine, down her Saône, over her Jura, to the home-most peaks & pools of her beloved Coppet, in Switzerland.

Where arriving, she turn’d her full attention to establishing a salon for her fellow refugees, & to her own lying-in. Tho she never forgot my service to her, it was clear her heart belong’d to Narbonne. Our remarkable journey was not mention’d, far less repeated. In the spring, son Albert safely deliver’d, she moved with her ménage to England, to join her lover & M. Talleyrand. I return’d to Paris & the Terror, which now shockt even liberal Barlow out of the city & across the Channel — where he forwarded me the last letter I was ever to receive from “Henry Burlingame IV.”

It was written, purportedly, from Castines Hundred. Its author declared himself in midst of the proudest feat of his career: the reorganization, this time with British aid, of Pontiac’s old Confederacy of the Iroquois, Miamis, Ottawas, & Shawnees, under Chief Little Turtle (a Miami), to succeed against the Americans where Pontiac had fail’d against the British. Already “we” had won a great victory over General St. Clair on the Wabash River; the author was confident we would turn back the “American Legion” being recruited & train’d by General Anthony Wayne to suppress us. Our objective then, the writer asserted, was, in his words, “to call our enemy to our aid”: to form a strong independent colony of Indians, Africans, French habitants, & Spanish Floridians in the politically confused territory west of North Carolina & south of the Ohio, in the valley of the Tennessee, which from time immemorial had been a common Indian hunting ground. There John Sevier had organized in 1785 a new state called Frankland (later Franklin), which had been more or less dissolved. But the situation was still fluid enough to permit the hope of its reestablishment, if not as a sovereign state, at least as “the first non-Anglo-Saxon child of the Union.” He urged me to join him at Castines Hundred for the coming offensive & the great move south. I had a new little cousin there, he reported, born since I’d left: a charming 4-year-old, named Andrée…

I assumed the letter, & the strategy, to be duplicitous. Barlow himself thot it a tactic to the opposite end — the establishment of more & more American “defensive” fortifications in the western territories, to protect the settlers flooding illegally onto Indian lands — and did not even report it to the American minister. General Wayne’s rout of the Indian “confederacy” at Fallen Timbers the following year (and the admission of “Tennessee” into the Union in ’96 as one more slave state) confirm’d my assumptions. I liked to imagine, as I watcht King Louis & then Marie Antoinette go under the guillotine—& then the Girondists, & then the Hébertists, & then the democratic republic, & finally Robespierre himself — that the author of that letter had been relieved at least of his scalp by the surviving Iroquois; for I was certain the cause of Indian sovereignty (about which, at the time, I had no deep feeling one way or the other) was lost as long as he lived to pretend to champion it.