Perhaps there were times when the returned wanderer grew homesick for Paris. At last the chance to return to the land that had adopted him came—a chance for notable service in an honorable capacity. War was again in the air and in 1811 Barlow went back to France as minister plenipotentiary, charged with the duty of again averting conflict and negotiating a treaty embodying a settlement of the differences.
In the French capital he took his old house. His old servants came back to him with tears of joy. Old friends gathered about him. It was not easy, however, to clinch the treaty. The Emperor was involved in momentous affairs. The Russian expedition was on foot. The ministers procrastinated. There is an intimation in the record that the poet and political theorist was out-maneuvered in the negotiations by players of a game that had nothing to do with poetry or abstract questions but that concerned itself, persistently and relentlessly, with very definite but not entirely obvious purposes. Yet it does not seem that this inference is conclusively supported by the evidence. However that may be, it was given out that Barlow had secured, and he unquestionably believed that he had secured, an agreement as to the provisions of the proposed treaty. At any rate the Emperor consented to meet the American envoy if he would come to Vilna in West Russia.
So in that dreary winter he set out with a high hope of achieving his greatest service to his country, but what would have happened at Vilna we shall never know, for on Barlow's approach to that town an incredible and stupendous piece of news awaited him. The invincible Grand Army was retreating, apparently in some demoralization. Everything was in confusion. Where the Emperor was, no one knew. Obviously nothing could now be done and the American minister started to return.
Somewhere on those frozen roads the Emperor passed him, racing for Paris to save his dynasty and himself. In the exposure and hardship Barlow fell ill. At the little village of Zarnovich, near Cracow, it became evident that he could travel no further and there, in the midst of that historic cataclysm, he died.
It was a strange ending for one of the old Hartford coterie. In the clairvoyance said sometimes to accompany the supreme moment did he realize that if his great epic might not live forever he had at least given form in his day to a dream of which civilization would never let go? Did any intimation come to him that his "Ode to Hasty Pudding," written off-hand at a Savoyard inn, held more real emotion than all the balanced cadences of his monumental work? No doubt his delirious fancies sometimes went back to the old days. Perhaps he saw once more the faces of his old companions of the friendly club, not clouded now with misunderstanding or disapproval. From beyond the frosted panes came intermittently the confused noises of the great retreat, with all their implications of selfish ambition, human suffering and the continual warfare of the world. Was his belief in the final triumph of the fraternity of mankind shaken by that sinister monotone? It is idle to conjecture, but let us hope that he was comforted by a lingering faith, revived in this hour of his extremity from the days of his youth, that he would soon learn as to the truth of his vision and that he would find as well the answers to the other riddles that had puzzled him all his life.
II: The Mystery of the Bell Tavern
THE investigator of early American fiction will find that a peculiar interest attaches to two novels, both published in the last decade of the eighteenth century, both following Richardson in their epistolary form and both founded on fact.
One of these was called "Charlotte Temple, or a Tale of Truth." In the graveyard of Trinity Church in New York, at the head of Wall Street, is a large stone, flush with the ground, bearing the name of the heroine of this now forgotten story which in its day attained an astonishing popularity. The tale is of a young girl who during the War of the American Revolution eloped from an English school with a British officer who abandoned her in New York where she died soon after the birth of a daughter. The tradition runs that more than a century ago the daughter, grown to womanhood, caused her mother's body to be removed to an English churchyard, but the stone still marks the first resting place and when the writer last saw it two wreaths lay upon it.