Besides the teaching of English to the emigrants, there was some translating done for the booksellers. The first of any importance, and which Cobbett alludes to somewhere as his “coup d’essai in the authoring way,” was the work of Von Martens on the “Law of Nations;” at that date a book of considerable authority:—
“Soon after I was married, I translated, for a bookseller in Philadelphia, a book on the Law of Nations. A member of Congress had given the original to the bookseller, wishing for him to publish a translation. The book was the work of a Mr. Martens, a German jurist, though it was written in French. I called it Martens’s Law of Nations.… I translated it for a quarter of a dollar (thirteenpence halfpenny) a page; and, as my chief business was to go out in the city to teach French people English, I made it a rule to earn a dollar while my wife was getting the breakfast in the morning, and another dollar after I came home at night, be the hour what it might; and I have earned many a dollar in this way, sitting writing in the same room where my wife and only child were in bed and asleep.”
Another task of similar character was the translation of “A Topographical and Political Description of the Spanish part of St. Domingo,” the author of which was Moreau de St. Méry,[7] one of the more distinguished of the French emigrants. This worthy man’s shop, at No. 84, South Front Street, was probably a favourite resort of the literati, as he was a person of considerable attainments, and a member of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia; whilst the bulk of his expatriated fellow-countrymen consisted, without doubt, of a cultivated class of men. Louis Philippe and his brothers were there. Talleyrand was there for a time,[8] and Cobbett recalls the fact, many years after, of having met him in St. Méry’s house.
Several of Cobbett’s best anecdotes of Philadelphian life are associated with Frenchmen; here is one:—
“A Frenchman, who had been driven from St. Domingo to Philadelphia, by the Wilberforces of France, went to church along with me one Sunday. He had never been in a Protestant place of worship before. Upon looking round him, and seeing everybody comfortably seated, while a couple of good stoves were keeping the place as warm as a slack oven, he exclaimed, ‘Pardi! on se sert Dieu bien à son aise ici!’”
It need not be imagined, however, that he had no American friends. On the contrary, as we shall see in the sequel, he made some friendships that lasted through life.