“At the news of a possible rupture with Russia, the blood of M. de Crillon, always so boiling, has become hotter than ever, and he has decided to return to France without waiting an answer from your Excellency; he wants to throw himself at the Emperor’s feet, tell him what he has done, invoke pardon for his errors, and go to expiate them in the advance guard of his armies.”
April 1 Crillon left Washington bearing despatches from Monroe to Barlow, and from Serurier to Bassano. Neither he nor John Henry is known to have ever again visited the United States, and their names would have been forgotten had not stories soon arrived that caused the Federalists great amusement, and made President Madison very uncomfortable. Barlow wrote to the President that Count Edward de Crillon was an impostor; that no such person was known to the Crillon family or to the French service. Private letters confirmed the report, and added that the estate of St. Martial had no existence, and that Crillon’s draughts in Henry’s favor were drawn on a person who had been five years dead.
“The President, with whom he has often dined,” continued Serurier,[140] “and all the secretaries, whose reception, joined with the political considerations known to your Excellency, decided his admittance to my house, are a little ashamed of the eagerness (empressement) they showed him, and all the money they gave him. For my own part, Monseigneur, I have little to regret. I have constantly refused to connect myself with his affairs; I sent him to the Secretary of State for his documents; the papers have been published, and have produced an effect injurious to England without my having bought this good fortune by a single denier from the Imperial treasury; and I have escaped at the cost of some civilities, preceded by those of the President, the motive of which I declared from the first to be the services which the Administration told me had been rendered it by this traveller.”
Serurier continued to declare that he had honestly believed Crillon to be “something like what he represented himself;” but he could not reasonably expect the world to accept these protestations. He had aided this person to obtain fifty thousand dollars from the United States Treasury for papers not his own, and instead of warning the President against an adventurer whose true character he admitted himself to have suspected, the French minister abetted the impostor. Although the truth was revealed only at a much later time that Crillon was an agent of Napoleon’s secret police,[141] no Frenchman, who had enjoyed the advantages of a diplomatic education, could have been wholly deceived in regard to the character of a person so evidently suspicious.
That the President should be mortified was natural, but still more natural that he should be angry. He could not resent the introduction of a foreign impostor to his confidence, since he was himself chiefly responsible for the social success of the Count Edward de Crillon; but deception was a part of the French system, and Madison felt the Crillon affair sink into insignificance beside the other deceptions practised upon him by the government of France. He was as nearly furious as his temperament allowed, at the manner in which the Emperor treated him. Before Crillon appeared on the scene, Madison used language to Serurier that betrayed his extreme dissatisfaction at being paraded before the public as a dupe or tool of France. At Savannah a riot took place between French privateersmen and American or English sailors; several men on both sides were killed; the privateers were burned; and Serurier complained in language such as Napoleon might be supposed to expect from his minister in regard to a violent outrage on the French flag. At the White House on New Year’s day, 1812, the French minister renewed his complaints, and the President lost patience.
“The President,” wrote Serurier,[142] “answered me with vivacity, that doubtless such indignities were subject for much regret; but it was not less distressing to learn what was passing every day in the Baltic and on the routes from America to England, where some American ships were burned, while others were captured and taken into European ports under French influence and condemned; that such proceedings were in his eyes hostilities as pronounced as were those of England, against whom the Republic was at that moment taking up arms.... Mr. Madison ended by telling me that he wished always to flatter himself that Mr. Barlow would send immediate explanation of these strange measures, and notice that they had ceased; but that for the moment, very certainly, matters could not be in a worse situation.”
Disconcerted by this sharp rebuff from the President, Serurier went to Monroe, who was usually good-humored when Madison was irritable, and irritable when Madison became mild. This process of alternate coaxing and scolding seemed to affect Serurier more than it affected his master. Monroe made no reproaches, but defended the President’s position by an argument which the Republican party did not use in public:—
“He urged that the captures of these ships, though perhaps inconsiderable in themselves, had the unfortunate effect of giving arms to the English party, which obstinately maintains that the repeal of the Berlin and Milan Decrees has not taken place; ‘that repeal,’ he added, ‘on which nevertheless the whole actual system of the Administration is founded, and which, if it be not really absolute, would render the war we are undertaking with England very imprudent and without reasonable object.’”
This admission, although made in private, seemed humiliating enough; but as weeks passed, Monroe’s complaints became stronger. March 2 Serurier reported him as avowing that he considered Barlow’s mission fruitless;[143]—
“After delays that have lasted three months beyond what we feared, we have as yet received only projects of arrangements, but nothing finished that we can publish.... You are witness to our embarrassment. Our position is painful. We will treat with England on no other ground than that of withdrawing the Orders in Council, and nothing promises this withdrawal. We are then decided for war. You see us every day making our preparations. If these meet with obstacles, if they suffer some delay, if Congress seems to grow weak and to hesitate, this slackening is due to the fact that we come to no conclusion with France.”