Six months later, Jay, in a letter to Benjamin Lewis, said of the seventeen-year-old lad:
“I am much pleased with your nephew, Lewis Littlepage, whom I regard as a man of undoubted genius, and a person of unusual culture.”
And a few months after this we discover that the well-known traveler, Mr. Elekiah Watson, has an entry in his diary which reads:
“At Nantes I became acquainted with Lewis Littlepage, and although he is but eighteen years of age, I believe him to be the most remarkable character of the age. I esteem him a prodigy of genius.”
The Poet Takes The Sword
In Madrid, Littlepage got into financial straits, owing to the fact that his allowance did not reach him, and the next glimpse we get of him is through the smoke of battle at Fort Mahon, where in 1781, as a member of the force under the Duke de Crillion, he was painfully wounded while charging the Turks.
In 1872, en route to Madrid to join Mr. Jay, he heard that de Crillion was preparing to storm Gibraltar, and, believing himself in honor bound to follow the fortunes of his chief, he wrote Mr. Jay that he must turn again to arms.
From that day forward he was a soldier, a diplomat, a courtier—the elected friend of Kings and Princes.
He aided in storming Gibraltar and left his ship only when it had burned to the water’s edge. He was highly recommended to the King for his gallantry, and went back to Paris with de Crillion to become a brilliant figure at court and in the salons.
Europe knew him, but America refused him even a small commission, though Kings wrote to our Congress in his behalf.