A NEW WORLD AND NEW OLD ACQUAINTANCE.
The captain of the vessel kindly took me to a small inn, not very far from the port; where I got tolerable accommodation. My first task was to seek for a warm bath; for my long voyage of more than five weeks duration, made me feel as if I had been pickled. It was with considerable difficulty that I procured what I wanted; for Boston was not famous for baths in those days. I succeeded at length, indeed, and then dined very well, though with less appetite than had savored the coarser provisions at sea. No one can tell with what satisfaction I looked forward to resting in the good, steady bed which my room contained; but the sea had not done with me yet, and for two whole nights, as soon as I lay down, every thing began to move with me and swim about just as if I was still upon the ocean. I could hardly persuade myself that the house was not afloat. The next morning, while at breakfast, one of the black waiters came in and told me that a gentleman had called to see me, and on ordering him to be admitted, a tall, good-looking man, of about thirty-five was ushered in. His face was familiar to me, though I could not recollect where I had seen it before, and he was dressed with great neatness and precision, partly in black, partly in drab, with a thick cravat round his neck, and a pair of Hessian boots drawn up to his knees.
“Monsieur De Lacy,” he said, taking my hand, “I am glad to see you in America. Allow me to congratulate you on your safe arrival.”
I thanked him, told him that he had the advantage of me in knowing my name, and begged to be told whom I had the honor of addressing.
The waiter had, by this time, quitted the room; but my visitor still took the precaution of putting his lips close to my ear, while he said, “Madame Du Four—at present Monsieur Du Four, if you please.”
“Good Heaven!” I exclaimed, “what could have induced you to adopt so strange a travestie?”
“The very simple motive of concealing myself as best I might,” he replied. “In regard to yourself, and many of the other emigrants, the good people of Hamburgh had the choice given them by their tyrannical masters, either to arrest or to expel. In my case the order was simply to arrest, and send me off to France as a prisoner. They were ready to wink at any evasion, however, and to the eyes of French spies my great-grandmother’s petticoats, like charity, covered a multitude of sins. Now, Monsieur De Lacy, I think I can be of assistance to you; for I have had a great deal to do with emigrants, am in continual communication with them in various parts of the world, and probably can obtain for you information regarding the friends you are so anxious to hear of. Some of them, I think, are now in Russia, where I have passed a good deal of my time, under the favor and protection of that mild and excellent potentate, the Emperor Paul. As it is well known, however, that he is not long for this life, I thought it might be as well to be absent at the accession of a new sovereign, and therefore betook myself to Hamburgh. However, I have still friends and connections in Russia, as well as in many other parts of the world, and I think if you will let me know where you are to be found, I can obtain for you information which may be satisfactory.”
My plans were all unsettled, and I knew not where I might go, or what I might do. I was at this time richer than I had ever been in my life before, but I knew that my little store was not inexhaustible, and I resolved to seek speedily for some employment. Without telling my new friend, then, the exact state of my finances, I consulted him where I should go, and what I should do.
“You can stay here in Boston,” he replied, “as long as the weather is warm, and probably may find some employment; for you have a rich, active and intelligent population; but don’t remain in the winter; for it is the coldest city in the universe. In point of temperature, St. Petersburg is comparatively a terrestrial paradise. However you can receive letters wherever you may be by having them directed here, if you will take the precaution of always sending your address to the post-office. I do not mean to say that they will come to you rapidly; because of course every thing goes on with less regularity and certainty, under a republican than under a monarchical government. In republics, where place and power depends upon mere popular favor, the greater part of the business of the State is carried on by inexperienced men, for, generally speaking, each public officer is kicked out before he can gain the experience necessary for his office—just as a tradesman, without capital, does all his work by apprentices. There are exceptions of course—men who get such hold of public confidence, that even faction cannot shake them—but these are rare, and to have work half done and ill done is part of the compensation to be paid for great rapidity of progress and general diffusion of comfort. But I am digressing. You have nothing to do, Monsieur De Lacy, but to leave your address at the post-office, and you shall hear from me as soon as I obtain intelligence.”
He added a good many of very judicious instructions as to my conduct in Boston, where he certainly must have been before, although he did not say so; and he left me, I confess, with a much more pleasant impression of his male than his female character.
I did not anticipate much, it is true, from his promises, and perhaps did not feel quite so sure of his sincerity as I ought to have done. I suppose there are some professions and some occasions in which charlatanism is absolutely necessary; but I think we rarely respect the people who practice it; and the impression produced by his appearance in the character of Madame Du Four, was never, and never will be effaced from my memory. I could not get rid of the ludicrous recollections, and we rarely expect much service from people who make us laugh.
Letters of introduction to persons in Boston, I had none; and I suffered for several days all the inconveniences which a stranger, without personal friends in a city, feels at his first residence. The solitariness, as it were, pressed upon me, and the more people I met in the crooked and narrow streets, made me only feel the more solitary. Of Monsieur Du Four I saw no more at that time, and I began to think of removing to some other town, where the people were not so cold and repulsive, when I suddenly made an acquaintance which greatly changed the current of affairs.
One day as I was walking along the streets, I thought I might as well purchase some French books, of which I had only one with me, in order that I might not quite forget my own language. I entered therefore a great bookseller’s shop—dingy and dull enough it was, in all conscience—and asked for one or two works which I named.
Although it may seem to have no connection with this part of my history, yet I must say something of my personal appearance at this time, as I am convinced it had some effect upon the events that followed. I was now within quarter of an inch of six feet high, robust in frame, from much exercise, tanned almost a mahogany color by exposure to the sea air, and with a moustache long and thick for my age. My hair had been suffered to grow very long, and floated wildly in its unshorn curls, and I was dressed in deep and new mourning of a foreign cut. Thus in the streets of Boston, I had something at least to distinguish me from the citizens of the place, where no one wore moustaches at all, and most of them had their hair still thickly powdered, and tied in queue, while those who had not, wore it as closely cut as the ears of a terrier dog.
In asking for the books, I spoke in a grave, and perhaps somewhat abrupt manner; for the death of my poor Louise, had left upon me a sort of carelessness of men’s opinions, and a lack of the desire to please, which is rare in youth.
The shopman answered at once in a somewhat flippant manner that he guessed they had none of them; and I replied in the same cold and imperative tone in which I had first spoken, that I would trouble him to do something more than guess—to make sure; whether the books were there or not, and if not, whether they could be procured for me.
“I reckon you are from the old country,” said the man, with the most good humored impertinence.
“That is nothing to you, my friend,” I replied. “We will reckon when I have got the books.”
“Then I calculate you had better speak to our boss,” said the shopman.
“A very good calculation,” I replied, “if you mean your master.”
“I h’aint got a master,” rejoined the man, with a look of considerable indignation.
“Well then,” I said, “let me speak with any one who supplies the place of a master, and who is master at all events of the shop, if he is not of the shopman.”
“I think you might have called it store, stranger,” said my friend; but as by this time I had taken up a book from the counter and begun to read, he went away to call his “boss,” as he termed him.
A moment after, from a little dingy den behind, came out a neat, dapper little man, with a very straight-cut, snuff colored coat, fastened with a hook and eye high up upon the chest, in order to permit the liberal extension of a very smart flowered waistcoat, and a stomach, somewhat too large in its proportions, shaped like the back of a mandolin. Energy, activity, and acuteness, were in all his movements and sparkled in his bright black eye; and, roused by his step, I could perceive that as he approached, he scanned me from head to foot with a rapidity truly marvelous. Before I knew what I was about he was shaking hands with me, and before I could ask for my books, he was asking me innumerable questions—who I was—where I came from—what my name was—what was my profession—how old I was—whether I intended to stay long in Boston, and—what I thought of America.
I was strongly inclined to laugh, but I was out of the habit of laughing now, and I answered gravely:
“Order in all things, if you please, sir. Are you what this person calls the ‘boss,’ or what I should call the master of this shop—or store?”
“Oh, never mind him,” replied the new comer. “He is from another state, and doesn’t half understand English. It’s only in Bost’n I guess that there’s any thing like English to be found in all the universal world. I’m the master of this store, sir, and a very pretty little considerable quantity of literature you will find therein, I guess.”
“Well then, to reply to your questions,” I said, “I am a stranger in this city. I come from a distant part of the world. My name is my own, for any thing I know to the contrary. I am of any profession that suits me at the moment. I am somewhere between twenty and thirty, I have no notion how long I shall stay in Boston, and having only seen two square miles of America, I do not think the taster is decisive of the cheese.—Now, sir, will you have the goodness to tell me about the books I want.”
“Capital, capital, capital!” cried my new friend. “I guess such answers would pose half the men in Congress. We Yankees are terrible question askers it must be acknowledged. It’s a way we have, and not a bad way either; for if we get an answer, we are all the better for it, and if we get none, we can do very well without it. Now, sir, you’re just the man we want: I can see that in a minute. We haven’t had any thing new in Bost’n for six months—that is, since the giantess, and the horse with three tails. They did very well, but we want something literary now, and if you chose to come out with a lecture, or a book, or a pamphlet, or a sermon against the Trinity, or something very racy upon democracy and federalism—take which side you will; it’s all the same to me—or even in defense of the old country, showing that we are all rebels and traitors and ought to have been hanged long ago, it’s sure to answer—it will sell, sir,—it will pay—it will bring in the dollars.”
There was something so perfectly good-humored in my new friend, that I could not be at all cross, even though I might not quite enter into his notions. I was obliged to inform him, however, that I had never given lectures, written books, pamphlets, or sermons. That I was not an Englishman. That I was not well acquainted with American history, and had no idea whether his friends and himself deserved to be hanged or not—though I confessed I rather thought not.
He was very pertinacious, however, and suggested a dozen different courses of acting for me, being in truth at that moment in desperate need himself of a stranger to supply the place of a literary man who had absconded, and knowing the dire need in which the city of Boston stood of some “new thing,” to fill the yawning void left by the giantess and the horse with three tails. I began to fancy, as he went on, that amongst all the pearls he was throwing before me, I might find one which suited my own purpose, and at length it was determined that I should write a little book for him, which he would immediately bring out in what he guessed was the very best possible style. Our arrangements were soon made, though, as I found afterward, he agreed to pay me about one-third of the sum which I ought to have received. That book, however, not only served to put a small sum into my pocket, but also to spread my fame, and to occupy my thoughts. I was very glad of the latter; for the moment I sat down by myself in my inn, I fell into sad reveries, and I wished very much to let time do his work of consoling by those slow and almost insensible steps through which he best effects his objects. The subject, the treatment, was all discussed in less than half an hour; for my friend, the bookseller, had very definite ideas, and knew to a nicety what would sell, and what would not. While we were still talking over these things, several gentlemen entered the shop, to whom the bookseller—now in possession of my name—introduced me as the celebrated Monsieur De Lacy. Thus I obtained occupation for the next six weeks, and acquaintance with some of the pleasantest persons I ever met with in my life; and the next morning I saw announcement in the public prints that Monsieur De Lacy, the well known Vendeean chief had arrived in Boston, followed by an apocripha twice as long as the book of Tobit, regarding the bloody battles I had fought, and the victories I had obtained in a district within which I had never set my foot. All this was based upon a deep scar on my cheek, which I had received from the heel of an Austrian soldier, as I lay upon the ground in the streets of Zurich.
Although I smiled, while reading this account, the idea of being or having been, one of the actors in the great and extraordinary struggle in La Vendee was very pleasant to me. I thought of it a good deal, and although I had fancied some weeks before that America was the country, of all others, to afford me a peaceful and happy refuge, I now began to long for a return to Europe, to take part in the active scenes which were going on in my native land.
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