For me those children were a challenging experience. Three years had made the youngsters keen observers, and I found them appraising me in the fashion of natural unspoiled children. Launched on one of the long narrative monologues to which I am addicted with intimates I would suddenly be checked by the cool impersonal stare of nieces or nephew. They did not know they were doing it, but I knew they were taking my measure. They were not only an unending interest and joy to me but a salutary correction, as they have continued to be to this day.
But before I was really sure of my standing with them, though quite reassured as to that with their elders, and just as I had put the finishing touches to my Madame Roland, I was snatched away from Titusville by a hurried letter from Mr. McClure. I must come at once to New York and write a life of Napoleon Bonaparte.
8
THE NAPOLEON MOVEMENT OF THE NINETIES
When I reached New York I found that the situation behind the hasty call to come on and write a life of Napoleon was pressing. The Napoleon Movement, which I had been following in Paris for two years, had reached the editorial desk of McClure’s Magazine in the form of a permission to reproduce a large and choice collection of Napoleon portraits, the property of a distinguished citizen of Washington, D.C.—Gardiner Green Hubbard. Mr. Hubbard was popularly known as the father-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. He was as well the father-in-law of the telephone since it was largely through his faith in the invention before it was recognized as a practical utility, and his shrewd and indefatigable work in securing patents, in enlisting supporters, and in fighting rival claimants, that the telephone had been developed and secured for Mr. Bell and his family.
Mr. Hubbard had long been a Napoleon collector. The revival of interest in the man in the early nineties had made him feel that his collection ought to be reproduced for the public. But he insisted a suitable text—that is, one he liked—must go with the pictures. Mr. McClure had secured something well written from an able Englishman, Robert Sherard, a great-grandson of Wordsworth; but it was so contemptuously anti-Napoleon that Mr. Hubbard would not allow his pictures to go with it. And here it was August, and Mr. McClure with the headlong speed in which he conducted affairs had announced the first installment for November.
I was both amazed and amused by the idea that a popular American magazine would think of such an undertaking. Why? I asked myself. I had seen the Napoleon Movement start and grow in Paris in 1892 and 1893. I had read everything that came along in the way of fresh reminiscences, of brilliant journalism, particularly that of Figaro, and I had tucked away in my clippings a full set of the Caran d’Ache cartoons which so captivated Paris; but I looked on the Movement as political, an effort of the Bonapartists to revive the popular admiration for the country’s most spectacular figure. If the revulsion against the Panama brand of republicanism could be kept alive, fed, might there not be a turning to Bonaparte? Just as the anarchists took advantage of the situation by hurling bombs, so the Bonapartists turned to blazoning France with the stories of the glory that had been hers under the Little Corporal. It is an amazing record of achievement, and one had to be a poor Frenchman, or poor human being for that matter, not to feel his blood stir at its magnificence.
But write a life of Napoleon Bonaparte? It was laughable. And yet how could I refuse to try?
In passing through New York in June I had given Mr. McClure the right to call upon me, promising to join his staff after my vacation. He would give me forty dollars a week—more money than I had ever expected to earn. With care I could save enough to carry me back to Paris, and at the same time I could learn more of the needs of the McClure organization.
The forty dollars a week was a powerful argument. Moreover, I had been talking largely about devoting myself to French Revolutionary history. If this wasn’t that, what was? But there was something else. This man had pulled France out of the slough where she lay when Madame Roland lost her head. I had a terrific need of seeing the thing through, France on her feet. Napoleon had for a time set her there and brought back decency, order, common sense.
I would try, I told Mr. McClure, at his expense, but I should have to go back at once to Paris. Where else could I get sufficient material? That idea of getting to Paris encouraged me to try, but first we all agreed I must go to Washington and talk with Mr. Hubbard, look over the collection. Promptly an invitation came from Mrs. Hubbard to come at once to their summer home out Chevy Chase way on Woodley Lane not far from the Rock Creek Zoo. President and Mrs. Cleveland had their summer home on the Lane, and the Maclean place, where Admiral Dewey was to go when he returned the conquering hero from the Philippines, was across the way. Twin Oaks, as the Hubbard place was called from two big oaks just in front of the house, was the finest country estate in the Washington district, as well as the most beautiful home into which I had ever been admitted. Mrs. Hubbard herself was a woman of rare taste and cultivation, a really great lady, and what she was showed from end to end of that lovely sunny house. Maids, butler, gardener, all took on something of her dignity and gentleness.