The chief partner of the mercantile house into whose employment Mr Nolte now entered, was a younger brother of the late P. C. Labouchere, of the celebrated house of Hope of Amsterdam. Mr A. M. Labouchere was very desirous to extend his connection and business with the United States, but did not seem fully to appreciate the facilities for so doing afforded him by his close alliance with the Hopes and Barings, whose names appeared as references in the circulars of the Nantes house. Nolte, whose energy and talent early earned him a considerable share of his employer’s confidence, urged Mr Labouchere to send an agent to the States to carry out his wishes, and offered to go himself, if no better was to be found. He was told to put upon paper his ideas concerning America, and concerning the advantages to be derived from a journey thither. This statement he executed in a manner to excite the warm approval of Mr Labouchere, who desired him to forward it to his brother in Amsterdam. The reply was a summons to the Dutch capital. There the elder Labouchere, who had formed a high opinion of Nolte from his correspondence, unfolded to him a gigantic project, the mere sketch of which bewildered him; and although not diffident of his own powers, he declared that he did not hold himself sufficiently experienced to undertake such responsibility, and felt that he should not be able to come up to his employer’s expectations. “That is my business, and not yours,” Mr Labouchere replied. “I have but one thing to recommend to you, and that is, never to do aught that shall give you cause to blush before me or before yourself.” This was lightening the load of responsibility from which the young man shrank, and giving him fresh confidence by showing him that others appreciated him more highly than he did himself, and he no longer made objections. He was to go to the United States, and for a few months merely to look around him and acquire a knowledge of the country. Before entering, however, which he does at great length, into an account of the important business about to be confided to him, and into whose details he was not initiated until some time afterwards, he gives an amusing chapter to a sketch of the celebrated banker and contractor Ouvrard, from whose combinations the proposed operation issued, and with whom Mr Nolte was well acquainted, and had frequent intercourse at several periods of his life. The chapter includes some curious traits and anecdotes of Napoleon, who, it is well known, detested Ouvrard, and tyrannised over him, although he was more than once obliged to seek his aid. Napoleon notoriously hated and despised traders and bankers. “I do not like merchants!” he is reported to have said—with that brusquerie which, in a less man, would have been designated as brutal ill-breeding—to the deputation from the merchants of Antwerp that went to welcome him to the town; “a merchant is a man who would sell his country for a three-franc piece!” He was jealous of, or at least indignant at, Ouvrard’s enormous wealth, and the influence it gave him—both of which he considered too great for any private person to possess; but, according to Mr Nolte, who seems quite conversant with the scandalous chronicles of any day during the last half-century, there were other private causes of irritation, which most of Napoleon’s biographers either were ignorant of, or thought it unnecessary to mention, and which certainly are less out of place in the present author’s far from prudish pages than they would be in a grave biography. Ouvrard’s own Memoirs, published nearly thirty years ago,[[11]] are now little remembered; and Mr Nolte is evidently indebted to them for the outline of his sketch, as well as for several incidents and anecdotes, but he has filled up details which the great speculator thought proper to omit. The relative positions of Ouvrard and Napoleon, at different periods of their lives, present the strangest contrasts. When the former, quitting the army in which he had for a short time served, applied himself with skill and success to commercial and speculative operations, and quickly realised a fortune of several millions of francs, Napoleon was so needy as to be desirous to avail himself of a decree of the Committee of Public Safety, by which officers were entitled to receive as much cloth as would make them a uniform. The anecdote is well known. Napoleon’s application was rejected because he was not just then employed, and he was very glad when Ouvrard, with whom he had become acquainted at the house of the Director Barras, induced Madame Tallien, whose lover the capitalist then was, to give him a letter of recommendation to the commissary of the 17th military division; a letter which procured young Buonaparte what he had great need of—a new uniform. Subsequently, in Napoleon’s days of power and magnificence, when he began to spite and squeeze Ouvrard, the latter loved to tell this anecdote—a contrast with Talma, who had been Napoleon’s intimate, and had often lent him money in his days of penury, and who became ever more reserved in his communications and behaviour the higher his friend ascended upon fortune’s ladder. To Ouvrard Napoleon was unquestionably harsh, cruel, and unjust. His dislike to him seemed to augment in a direct ratio with the magnitude of the gains which the capitalist owed to the circumstances of the times, to his great financial capacity, and to the vastness of his operations. Of the extent of these and of his profits, we may form some idea from a passage in Mr Nolte’s book, where he states positively that Ouvrard cleared six hundred thousand pounds sterling by his contract for victualling the Spanish fleet under Mazaredo when it lay at Brest, and afterwards at Cadiz. But if his gains were large, his losses, arising chiefly from Napoleon’s ill-will and despotic acts, were also heavy. During the Egyptian campaign, the Directory borrowed ten millions of francs from him, which he produced with the greatest ease. After Buonaparte’s return and the fall of the Directory, the First Consul asked him for twelve millions more. Ouvrard declined. The other Paris bankers were applied to; they either could not or would not. The First Consul was furious—doubly so when Ouvrard claimed repayment of the ten millions lent to the Directory. He had him paid in assignments on the revenue of the past year, which had all been expended. It was equivalent to a repudiation of the debt. Soon afterwards, Ouvrard was arrested, under pretext of fraud in his dealings with the government and supply of the French navy. He was kept in strict confinement, his papers were sealed up, and a committee of councillors of state was appointed to investigate his affairs. Nothing could be substantiated against him, but it was ascertained that his fortune, in landed property, money and French rentes, (then worth but 15 per cent) amounted to twenty-seven millions of francs. “On this occasion,” says Mr Nolte, quoting almost the words of Ouvrard, “a discovery was made which deeply wounded the First Consul—namely, that, during his absence in Egypt, Ouvrard had supplied Josephine, who was an old friend of his, and who had remained at Malmaison, with money. She had become his debtor to a considerable amount. This circumstance, combined with the refusal of the twelve millions, inspired Buonaparte with the most violent antipathy to Ouvrard, at whose arrest all Paris (especially the bankers) was indignant and loud in complaint. Collot, afterwards director of the mint, who was one of the First Consul’s most intimate advisers, did not scruple to tell him that it was beginning badly, thus to let all apprehend that they might in their turn be the victims of such arbitrary measures. ‘A man,’ replied Buonaparte ‘who possesses thirty millions, and sets no value on them, is much too dangerous for my position.’” Josephine and other influential personages interceded for Ouvrard, who escaped the military tribunal with which Napoleon threatened him, and was set at liberty, but remained under the surveillance of gens-d’armes. This in no way prevented his continuing to receive with princely hospitality at his château of Raincy (afterwards the Duchess of Berry’s) the best society of Paris, and the most distinguished foreigners who visited that capital—amongst others, Fox and Lord Erskine, who were his guests after the peace of Amiens.

But we must take Mr Nolte away from Paris—which seems his favourite city, but where he can never linger without getting scandalous—and across the Atlantic. He sailed in July 1805, and reached New York in forty-two days, then a marvellously rapid passage. The astonished owner of the American ship “Flora” could hardly believe his eyes when he saw her come into port before he had received advice of her arrival at Amsterdam. Mr Nolte found the yellow fever in New York, and left the place for a few weeks, but returned thither in time to witness the arrival in the bay of a vessel from Cadiz, with General Moreau on board. The drums beat, and the militia turned out and formed up in Broadway. As each company had a different uniform—sometimes a very odd one—the effect of the whole display was a good deal like that produced by a harlequin’s jacket, which did not prevent the commander of the motley corps from being prodigiously proud of his warriors, and asking Moreau—when he landed, plainly dressed in a blue coat, and rode into the town, upon a horse in waiting for him, amidst cheers and music, and surrounded by the variegated staff of the militia—what he thought of the American troops? Moreau replied that he had never in his life seen such soldiers—which he probably never had. A similar reply has been since attributed to General Bertrand, when he landed in the States some years ago, and a review was held in his honour. The speculative spirit of the Yankees, who love to combine business with pleasure, and to turn an honest dollar whilst admiring a hero or listening to a Lind, slumbered not in 1805 any more than in 1850. The same genius for advertisement which made a hatter pay some hundred dollars for the best place at the Swedish Nightingale’s concert, stimulated the promoters of one that was to be given, on the night of General Moreau’s arrival, in the great hall of the City Hotel—then the first in New York—to beseech his presence, and, as soon as he had promised it, to placard his name. The crowd was tremendous. Moreau, it was on all hands agreed, looked very little like a French general, in his simple dress, without cocked hat, feather, or embroidery—whereas General Morton, chief of the militia, had a most martial aspect in his Washington uniform. He introduced to the French leader all who chose, and there was a prodigious shaking of hands. Mr Nolte was standing near the two generals when a Quaker was presented, who shook Moreau’s hand heartily. “Glad to see you safe in America,” quoth Broadbrim. “Pray, general, do you remember what was the price of cochineal when you left Cadiz?” The hero of Hohenlinden shrugged his shoulders and confessed his ignorance. It was not until some time afterwards, in Philadelphia, that Mr Nolte became personally acquainted with Moreau, whom he found, he says, “a mild, agreeable, but, in an intellectual point of view, upon the whole, an insignificant and uninteresting man. His manners were simple, and possessed a certain naturalness which was attractive, but his conversation, or rather his monologue—for we seldom had long dialogues—fettered the attention only when its subject was that of his certainly highly remarkable and distinguished military exploits. Then there was pleasure in listening to him. Of Napoleon he scarcely ever spoke but as ‘the tyrant.’” The best portrait—indeed, the only good one we are acquainted with—of Moreau, that by Gérard, conveys quite the same idea here given of him by Mr Nolte—that of a mild, amiable, but by no means a highly intellectual man, with less of the military air and look about the head than perhaps in any other distinguished general of the French republic or empire.

We do not purpose going into the details of Mr Nolte’s commercial proceedings as one of Hope’s agents in America. They were connected with Ouvrard’s well-known colossal plan for drawing specie from Mexico, in whose treasury—owing to the interruption, by the war with England, of intercourse between Spain and her colonies—seventy millions of dollars had accumulated. The duties assigned to Mr Nolte compelled him to take up his quarters at New Orleans, then in its infancy as a commercial city, and in the worst possible repute. Louisiana, after belonging alternately to France and Spain, and then to France again, had been but recently sold to the United States, and three-fifths of the white population of its capital were French by birth or extraction. New Orleans then had about sixteen thousand inhabitants, one-third of whom were slaves and coloured people. The character its citizens enjoyed in the Northern States may be judged of by the following anecdote: A friend of Mr Nolte’s, who had just formed an establishment at New Orleans, finding himself at Boston, and seeing a vessel advertised to sail thence for the former city, called upon the owner to ask him to consign the ship to his house. Whereupon the owner told him in strict confidence that he had just as much intention of sending his vessel to the moon as to New Orleans, and that he had inserted the advertisement merely in the expectation that amongst the persons applying for a passage he should find a rascal who had defrauded one of his friends of a considerable sum. “It is probable,” he added, “that he will try to get to New Orleans, that being the natural rendezvous of all rogues and scoundrels.” Not one of the eighteen or twenty commercial houses existing at New Orleans when Mr Nolte first went there possessed capital worth the naming, and a respectable character was nearly as great a rarity as ready cash. Roguery, disguised under the polite name of “cleverness,” was commonly practised and indulgently viewed. Juries and authorities were corrupt, false witnesses easily purchased, and justice was hard to obtain. In illustration of this state of things Mr Nolte tells some curious stories, one in particular, in which the celebrated American jurist Edward Livingston figures. “I well remember,” he says, “the remarkable trial of a certain Beleurgey, the editor of one of the first American newspapers which appeared in New Orleans, in 1806 and 1807, in French and English, under the name of Le Telegraphe. To obtain money he had forged the signature of a rich planter, to whom, when his crime was discovered, he wrote, confessing his guilt, and earnestly entreating him not to prosecute him. The planter seemed disposed to accede to his prayer, but the letter was already in the hands of justice. How then did Livingston contrive, as Beleurgey’s counsel and defender, to obtain his acquittal in spite of that damning proof of his guilt? Davezac (Livingston’s brother-in-law and factotum) brought forward witnesses who swore that they knew Beleurgey to be such a liar that no word of truth had ever issued from his lips. ‘See here,’ then said Livingston to his French jury—‘it is proved that the man is incapable of speaking the truth; the very confession is a lie, for none but a madman would accuse himself. So that Beleurgey either has lied or is out of his senses; in either case he knew not what he did, and cannot be found guilty!’ And the jury acquitted him!” New Orleans was evidently not a tempting place to settle in, for an honest man, with money to be robbed of; but then, with conduct and judgment, there was money to be made, and moreover Mr Nolte, as a mere agent for others, had no choice but to abide there. Presently the arrival, in quick succession, of three fast-sailing schooners from Vera Cruz, bringing half a million of Mexican dollars to the address of Vincent Nolte, drew attention to the young man whom previously few had heeded—save the French planters, to whom his knowledge of their language was a recommendation. But now boundless hospitality was shown him, no party was complete without him, and for three months he passed a pleasant enough life, when suddenly the yellow fever laid him on his back. Upon the morning of the third day there appeared at his bedside one Zachary, the cashier of the Louisiana bank, and one of the very limited number of honourable men in the city, and gravely asked him if he had made his will. To this ominous inquiry Mr Nolte replied by a negative and an interrogative. “No! Why?”—“Well,” continued Zachary, “I suppose I need not tell you that you have got the yellow fever, and that it is more than possible you will die tomorrow, for the fourth is the critical day, which one does not generally get over. You have large sums lying at the bank—larger sums than have ever before been seen here—and, if you die, the capital will fall into very unsafe hands. The persons appointed by the State to take charge of the property of foreigners dying intestate, are not only undeserving of confidence, but, to speak plainly, are downright rascals.” The sick man’s reply was that he neither felt inclined nor intended to die. “And as I am sure not to die,” he concluded, “I see no use in bothering my head about my will.” Zachary looked hard at him. “Well, my dear Mr Nolte,” he at last said, “since that is your mood, I too am certain you will not die,”—a prognostic justified by the patient’s speedy recovery. In the yellow fever, as in other maladies, a faint heart kills many.

We pass over several chapters and some years. They include a good deal of interesting matter, and, of course, abundance of travelling;—a return to Europe, and brief residences in various cities of the United States, in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Hamburg. On a voyage from the Havana to Baltimore, Mr Nolte was wrecked upon the Carysford reef, which owes its name to the total loss of the frigate Carysford in 1774; and he gives a capital account of his sufferings and those of his ten companions on a raft composed of three small spars, six oars, and a hencoop, half immersed, and neglected by passing vessels, who took them for shipwrecked Spaniards, and feared to succour them, lest, when rescued, they should rise against their deliverers and take the ship into Cuba, an act of ingratitude that had been recently perpetrated under similar circumstances. A woodcut of the frail and curiously-constructed raft is the only illustration the book contains. At Philadelphia, Mr Nolte, who, it is to be observed, has been all his life an unlucky man, was run away with in his tandem, and, jumping out, broke his leg, which, badly set by two ignorant American Sawbones, occasioned him terrible suffering and long confinement. His agency for Hope’s house at an end, and after declining two advantageous offers of partnerships in Europe, one of which he would perhaps have done wisely in accepting, he determined to apply the very liberal sum he had received for his services to the establishment of a commercial firm at New Orleans, in aid of which the houses of Hope and Baring advanced him funds, opened him a credit, and allowed him to put their names in his circular as his friends and supporters. This brings us to the most interesting portion of his book.

Mr Nolte has a habit of interlarding his German, especially the scraps of dialogue scattered through his volumes, with a great deal of English and French, both of which languages he evidently understands as well as his mother-tongue. To readers in the same case, this practice gives to the book additional character and pungency; but to those to whom German alone is familiar it will prove troublesome, since he does not subjoin translations. As an instance of this, we will give his account of a casual meeting with a man who has since become universally celebrated. It was during his journey on horseback from Philadelphia to Pittsburg, where he was to join a friend with whom he had entered into partnership, and whence they were to proceed, with a couple of flat boats laden with flour, two thousand miles down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, there to form their mercantile establishment. Steam had not at that date annihilated distance in America; there were no boilers bursting on the rivers, or trains on railroads rattling through the States, and travelling was slow work, particularly with goods. The voyage by flat boats from Pittsburg to New Orleans was a forty or fifty days’ business. On a cold December morning, after a solitary ride over Laurel Hill, the highest of the Alleghanies, Mr Nolte halted, towards ten o’clock, at a small tavern by the falls of the Juniata river, and asked for a solid breakfast.

“The hostess showed me into a room, and said I might just take my food with a strange gentleman who was seated there already. ‘He is quite a stranger,’ she said. On stepping in, the man at once struck me as being what is commonly called an odd fellow. He sat at a table, in front of the fire, with a Madras handkerchief round his head, after the fashion of a French sailor, or of labourers in a French seaport. I courteously approached him, with the words: ‘I hope I don’t incommode you, by coming to take my breakfast with you?’ The reply was: ‘No, sir!’ spoken with a strong French accent, and sounding like ‘No, serre.’ ‘Ah!’ I continued, ‘vous êtes Français, Monsieur?’ ‘No, serre!’ was the reply; ‘ai em en Henglieshmen’ (I am an Englishman). ‘Why,’ I continued, ‘how do you make that out? You look like a Frenchman, and you speak like one.’ ‘I am an Englishman, because I got an English wife,’ replied he, with the same accent. Without further investigation of the matter, we agreed, over our breakfast, to ride together to Pittsburg. He showed himself more and more of an oddity, but at last admitted that he was a born Frenchman, from La Rochelle, had been brought to Louisiana when a child, had grown up in the sea-service, but had gradually become a real American. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘but how do you reconcile that with your quality of an Englishman?’ To which he replied, in French at last: ‘Au bout du compte, je suis un peu cosmopolite; j’appartiens à tous les pays.’”

When we mention that all the dialogue in the above extract, with the exception of one sentence, is, in the original, in the same languages in which we here give it, and that such polyglot passages are of constant occurrence throughout these volumes, it becomes evident that Mr Nolte will sorely puzzle and tantalise such of his German readers as are unacquainted with French, and with that composite Anglo-Saxon tongue for which the learned German has declared his preference over all other modern languages. The eccentric traveller was Audubon, the famous ornithologist, who was also bound for New Orleans. On reaching Pittsburg, no means of conveyance offered except Mr Nolte’s boat, and as he had by this time discovered that the naturalist was not only an accomplished draughtsman, but a good and amiable man, he offered him a cot in his little cabin, a service which Audubon afterwards thankfully recorded and acknowledged in the third volume of the text to his great work on “American Ornithology.” Mr Nolte knew nothing of the object of his guest’s journey until they reached Limestone, a small place in the north-western corner of Ohio State. There they landed their horses, intending to visit Lexington, and thence proceed to Louisville, where Audubon expected to find his wife—the daughter of an Englishman named Bakewell. “At Limestone,” says Mr Nolte, “we had hardly finished our breakfast, when Audubon suddenly sprang up. ‘Now, then,’ he cried to me, in French, ‘I must begin to lay the foundations of my establishment!’ Thereupon he took from his pocket a parcel of address-cards, a hammer, and some small nails, and began nailing one of the cards upon the door of the little tavern. It contained the words:

Audubon & Bakewell,

Commission Merchants.

Pork, Lard, and Flour.