Letters

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.

In 1965, my husband died of a bowel cancer. The estate was depleted by taxes, creditors, and anonymous bequests to his known natural children. He was not ungenerous to me, proportionately, but there was much less than I’d imagined: neither of us had done a day’s work for wages in our lives, and Jeffrey had neglected to tell me that it was the principal of his inheritance we were living on, not the income. Good Joseph Morgan got wind of my plight and himself invited me to lecture (upon the French Revolution!) at Tidewater Technical College. I declined — he was only being very kind — but was inspired by his invitation to accept others which suddenly appeared from the University of Manitoba, Simon Fraser University, Sir George Williams, McMaster: André’s doing, no question, and I went to Canada both in order to survive and in the hope that there might happen — what did happen, though it didn’t end as I had dreamed.