me. As the weeks went on, the intimacy grew greater. Whatever occurred
to them that might help me in my work, they suggested. It was through
their introduction that I was given every opportunity in the manuscript
room of the National Library to work over the large collection of Roland
manuscripts which had just been catalogued. Indeed, I was the first
person to work on them in the Library.
Delightful as well as important to my enterprise was the invitation
Madame gave me in the spring of 1893 to go with her for a fortnight to
Le Clos, a country estate which had been in the Roland family for at
least a hundred years before the Revolution. After the death of Monsieur
and Madame Roland in 1793 Le Clos had passed to their daughter. It now
belonged to Madame Marillier, who managed it, giving special care to its
chief yield, grapes—made into wine on the place.
Le Clos lay in the Beaujolais, some thirty miles north of the city of
Lyons and close to a hamlet called Theizé. Here Madame Roland had spent
some four years while her husband served as inspector of manufactures at
Lyons. The château was little changed, so Madame Marillier told me. The
activities were what they had been a hundred years ago. It was a rare
chance to see my heroine in a different role, busy with other duties
than those of student, tuft-hunter, political diplomat, Providence to a
Nation. I needed to see her in a more natural and helpful environment,
for I was beginning to mistrust her.
The journey to Le Clos with Madame Marillier, taken in May, was an
adventure for both of us. How much she had jeopardized her position in
her own family by traveling with a foreigner and a Protestant, I did not
realize until the day we spent sightseeing at Dijon. She left me for an
hour to visit an important and ancient aunt. “I should not dare take you
with me,” she said, “my aunt would cast me out if she knew I was
traveling with a heretic.”
To reach Le Clos we left the railroad at Villefranche and climbed in a
horse-cart for an hour and more, steadily up hills, across valleys, a
high broad country, striped by many colored ribbonlike farms, dotted by
stout buildings of dull yellow, the stone of the country, sprinkled with
splendid trees, vineyards and orchards. Theizé, the hamlet we sought,
lay high. We drove between its walls, turned into a lane, and stopped
before a big gate in a yellow wall. Behind it lay Le Clos, a little
white château of Louis XIV’s time with corner towers and red-tiled
roofs, a court on one side, a garden on the other. From this garden one
looked out over a magnificent panorama of hills, mountains, valleys,
stretching to the Swiss Alps in the east. On clear evenings the snowcaps
were visible and now and then the round crown of Mount Blanc glowed on
the sky line like an immense opal.
Within the château there had been little outward change from Madame
Roland’s time. There was the same great dark kitchen, with its stone
floor, its huge fireplace (although now a stove helped out), the same
shining copper vessels on the walls. There was the same brick floor in
the billiard room with its ancient table, its guns and caps of
successive generations of soldiers on the walls. The brightest place
within the house was the salon, done in yellow plush, family portraits
on the walls, a piano, books.
I had an apartment to myself looking out on the garden and beyond to the
mountains: a bedroom, toilet and workroom, severe as a nun’s cell with
its uncovered floor, its unadorned walls, but containing every necessary
comfort and a wealth of books—five hundred or more in my workroom,
including several magnificent sets. Among them, Voltaire complete in
seventy volumes. They nearly all bore eighteenth century dates, and some
of them the name of Roland himself. Indeed, the home was rich in books
of value. In Madame Marillier’s library there were two thousand or more;
but these were only “what was left.” From the collection she had
inherited she had given Léon Marillier complete early sets of Voltaire,
Rousseau, Diderot; she had made a collection of scientific books for
Louis Lapique, one of the members of her Paris household, and another of
historical books for Charles Seignobos, and still there were all these
hundreds, many of which I had the right to believe Madame Roland herself
had handled. We ransacked them for marginal notes and hunted through the
drawers of old desks and bureaus for papers, finding not a few small
bits which were grist for my mill.
Books were about all the original possessions of Le Clos that the
Revolutionists of the seventeen-nineties had not made away with. The
château itself had not suffered seriously, though there were still some
slight scars; but, books aside, it had been completely stripped of
furnishings. Even today, so Madame Marillier told me, it was not unusual
when inquiry was made about the origin of some interesting old piece in
a Beaujolais farmhouse to be told, “Oh, that came from Le Clos a hundred
years ago.”
The Revolution stripped Le Clos of its possessions and all but ended the
family. But it did not succeed in convincing all the Beaujolais of its
beneficence. There was not a little outspoken antirevolutionary feeling
still abroad. The Marseillaise was never played in Theizé, I was told.
The curé and the municipal council would not permit it, nor would they
allow the 14th of July to be celebrated. While I was at Le Clos there
was a sharp dispute in a neighboring hamlet on the playing of the
“Marseillaise.” The bandmaster refused to lead when it was asked. It was
put up to the band who voted yes. Thereupon the master laid down his
baton and went off in a huff. Madame Roland’s Revolution was not ended.
But I did not think much of such dark matters at Le Clos. They did not
belong to the years I had come there to relive. Those were only gay,
happy, useful years. I knew from her letters before me she could and did
fill the role of a local Providence, adjusting her activities and
reforms to what her constituency understood and was willing to accept.
She filled her time as I saw my friend Madame Marillier filling hers,
busy from morning until night with the affairs of the estate, visiting
the people, prescribing remedies for man and beast, vegetables and
vines, arranging a marriage for this pair, making an invalid more
comfortable, taking care of some peasant’s wayward son, climbing up the
steep hillside to early mass to set a good example, discharging
naturally and intelligently that responsibility to the family, the
estate, the dependent countryside, which the Frenchwoman seems to accept
as her contribution to the state. It makes her something steady, wise,
superior, a strong factor in the economic, social, and religious
stability of France.
I had never seen anything which seemed to me more useful than what
Madame Marillier was doing, and I had opportunity to judge, for
everywhere she went she took me with her. Her invariable card of
introduction to these natural-born skeptics of the value of all persons
not born and raised in France was, “Mademoiselle comes from the same
country as your vines.” That was enough for them. Their vines had been
devastated by repeated visitations of the phylloxera, and it was not
until the introduction of American roots that the vineyards had
recovered. They were looking well now. I was welcome at once; they
treated me as if I were the benefactor, yet I doubt if any of them knew
where America was. Most of them with whom I talked placed it somewhere
in Africa. Africa they did know, as a name at least, because many of
their sons went there for military service. One of the most surprising
things to me among the French, high and low, was their utter
indifference to the geography of the rest of the world. Why should they
bother about the rest of the world? There was only one land about which
they should know: that was France, and that they should know to the last
corner. Even many educated people I met did not distinguish North from
South America. In Madame Darmesteter’s drawing room I met cultivated
people who believed that all Americans carried weapons in their pockets,
and that Indians walked the streets of Chicago. When I protested that it
was against the law to carry a revolver, and that the only Indians in
Chicago were those that were imported as they imported the Dahomans,
they smiled incredulously.
Many of them, I concluded, got their notions of what America was like
from the exhibits in a certain public hall on the Grand Boulevards. Here
you paid a sou or two to look through stereoscopes at amusing and
sometimes very improper pictures. Here the walls were decorated with
illustrated newspapers from different countries, and among them were
always copies of the _Police Gazette_. As a matter of fact it was in
this hall of the Grand Boulevard of Paris that I saw the first copy of
the _Police Gazette_ that I had seen since those days back in Rouseville
when my friend and I carefully studied the underworld in the sheets that
we could slip away from the bunkhouse of my father’s workmen.
The visit to Le Clos with its grist of impressions, the conviction that
I had seen Madame Roland herself, in her happiest as well as her most
useful days, completed the study of source material for her life on
which I had been working as I found time through the twenty months I had
been in Paris. It rounded out the woman she was, softened the asperity
which I was beginning to feel for her; also it strengthened my suspicion
that while a woman frequently was a success as the Providence of a
countryside she did no better than a man when she attempted to fill that
function for a nation.
Now I was ready to write my book. Of course while I was doing this I
must keep the wolf from the door, and it was not so easy in the year
1893 for a stray journalist in Paris to get out of the distracted
American market orders or pay for orders. The depression of the
nineties, now in its third year with five years more to go, was working
havoc everywhere. It was hard to get your money even if your debtors
consented you had earned it. I was depending at the moment largely upon
the new magazine, _McClure’s_. It had started in the summer of 1893, an
undertaking which only the young and innocent and the hopelessly
optimistic would ever have dared. It has always been a marvel to me that
Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips were able to hold on through that dreadful
year; but they did, and with a resourcefulness, even gaiety, that nobody
but those who saw it can appreciate.
I knew perfectly well that if the magazine lived I should get all the
money I earned, but in the summer of 1893 they did not have it. It came
to a serious pass with me, a point where I did not have a sou or anybody
to whom I could confide my predicament. Not for the world would I have
told my devoted Madame Marillier that there was no money in my purse;
not for the world would I have confided it to Madame A; and, as for the
Americans on the scene, I was bent on impressing them with the fact I
was really getting on. At all events it must not go back to Titusville
or Meadville, Pennsylvania, that this questionable venture of mine had
brought me so low.
And so one warm summer day I took my sealskin coat, which really was a
very good one quite out of keeping with the rest of my wardrobe—by this
time close to scandalous—I took the coat and marched over town to the
Mont de Piété. They were polite to me; but I was a foreigner, that coat
might be stolen, probably was. What credentials did I have, whom could I
give as reference? There was nobody in the town that I was willing to
have know what I was doing. But did I have documents to prove my
identity?
Yes, I said, I had; and I would bring them. So I left my coat and raced
back to the Left Bank for my credentials. And what were they? What did I
have? There were letters from my publishers; there was my
checkbook—exhausted but nevertheless a checkbook. Without thinking it
would be of any particular use I took my Allegheny College diploma. The
inspector passed lightly over the letters of editors, the stubs in my
checkbook, but the diploma impressed him; and so it was on my Allegheny
College diploma I made the loan which helped me over the bad months of
1893 while I was waiting for a check from a land in the grip of one of
the most serious money famines that it had ever known.
Although there might be anxious moments over money I was freer to work
on my book than I had ever been. And work I did, as hard as I could, all
that terrifically hot summer. My friend Madame Marillier had gone to
Brittany. She begged me to come along; but I had used up all my vacation
money in my trip to Le Clos—a trip I had extended to Switzerland and to
a chain of French towns where there were beautiful things I wanted to
see, to Bourg, Mâcon, Cluny, Autun. There was nothing that I wanted to
do more except finish up and go home.
But the finishing up was not so easy. I had undertaken the study of this
woman in order to clear up my mind about the quality of service that
women could give and had given in public life, particularly in times of
stress. I had hoped to come out with some definite conclusions, to be
able to say: “The woman at this point will be a steady, intuitive,
dependable force. She will never lend herself to purely emotional or
political approaches to great social problems; she knows too much of
human beings. Her business has always been handling human beings.
Building families has been her job in society. You can depend upon her
to tell you whom to trust, whom to follow, whom to discard. These
intuitions of hers about people are born of centuries of intimate
first-hand dealing with human beings from babyhood on—they are among the
world’s greatest values. And she will be no party to violence. She knows
that solutions are only worked out by patient cooperation, and that
cooperation must be kindly. She knows the danger of violence in the
group as she knows the danger of selfishness. She has been the world’s
greatest sufferer from these things, and she has suffered them in order
that she might protect that thing which is her business in the world,
the bearing and the rearing of children. She has a great inarticulate
wisdom born of her experience in the world. That is the thing women will
give.”
That was what I had hoped to find Madame Roland giving; and I had found
a politician with a Providence complex. I had also found what I had been
trying to shove aside, as women do, new proof of that eternal and
necessary natural law that the woman backs up her man. Madame Roland had
been Royalist, Republican, Revolutionist, according to the man she
loved. She had served her man with unyielding conviction, would not
temper or cooperate, intolerant, inflexible.
But what woman in America seeking the vote as a sure cure for injustice
and corruption would listen to such a message? That, of course, was no
affair of mine. My affair was clearing my own mind. So far I had only
succeeded in adding to its confusion, even in destroying faiths I had
held. There was the ancient faith that you could depend upon the woman
to oppose violence. This woman had been one of the steadiest influences
to violence, willing, even eager, to use this terrible revolutionary
force, so bewildering and terrifying to me, to accomplish her ends,
childishly believing herself and her friends strong enough to control it
when they needed it no longer.
The heaviest blow to my self-confidence so far was my loss of faith in
revolution as a divine weapon. Not since I discovered the world not to
have been made in six days of twenty-four hours each, had I been so
intellectually and spiritually upset. I had held a revolution as a noble
and sacred instrument, destroying evil and leaving men free to be wise
and good and just. Now it seemed to me not something that men used, but
something that used men for its own mysterious end and left behind the
same relative proportion of good and evil as it started with.
Never did I so realize my ignorance of life and men and society as in
the summer of 1894, when I packed up the manuscript of my life of Madame
Roland to take it back to America for its final revision in the peace of
my home.
Of course, I told myself, I would go through with it. I would put down
what I had found as nearly as I could, even if I had not got what I came
for. And then came the question, Can I get what I came for? Is it to be
found—the real answer to my question about woman in society, the point
or position where she can best serve it? Can I find an answer to this
other question that has so disturbed me—the nature of revolution?
Apparently, I told myself, as I packed my bag finally to go back to
America, you have only begun; but at least you have a new starting
point. Cheer up, make a new plan. And I was making a new plan. I had
been making one for some time. It was laid down economically,
professionally, and socially with as much precision as the plan with
which I had come to Paris in 1891. It was a plan for my return to Paris.
I would go home, get my book into shape, try to convince the Scribners
that it was worth their publishing. I would get a good long visit with
my family, the only thing I felt now to be worth while in life. I wanted
to be sure they were there, that the house was there, that my father’s
chair stood by the living-room center table under the drop gas reading
light, that the family Sunday dinner was what it had always been. I
wanted to hear my father ask the blessing at the table, to sit with my
sister and mother afternoons out on the shady side of the lawn. I wanted
all the home flowers I could gather—and it was queer what a big place
flowers took in my dreams of home. My mother was one of those women for
whom, they say, “anything will grow.” And she had had flowers, summer
and winter. One of the deprivations of not having money in Paris had
been that I could not buy flowers. I had to content myself with lounging
around the flower markets on the Square of Notre Dame. I lingered there
almost as much as I did over the bookstalls along the Seine. But at home
I could gather all I wanted.
I would come back to France on different terms. My friendly publishers
would give me work. I had schemes for books and articles which I felt
sure would interest the Scribners, that history of women, for instance.
Then there was this lively, friendly, aggressive, delightful
_McClure’s_. There were plenty of things I could write for them.
I would take an apartment in the Latin Quarter up high where I could
look over the roofs, see the sky. I would have a salon like Madame
Marillier’s. She would find me a _bonne à tout faire_, and I could have
people in to dinner—Madame Marillier, Seignobos, and perhaps Lucien Herr
and Louis Lapique and Charles Borgeaud would come. The summer would
bring over my precious American friends—the Vincents, Emerys, Hazens,
and my sister must join me. Life would be full and satisfying while I
cleared up my mind on women and revolution and continued my search for
God in the great cathedrals.
It was with this baggage and a terrible thirst for a long drink of
family life that in June, 1894, I said “Au revoir” to my friends. I felt
so sure it was Au revoir.
The first two months after I reached America I spent at home convincing
myself that my family in spite of the trials it had been suffering was
unchanged in its ways, its loyalties, and its philosophy. If life was
not as easy materially for my father and mother as their long years of
labor and self-denial gave them the right to hope, I found that they
were enjoying that most precious experience, the evidence of the
continuity of their lives. My brother and his fine wife with their
children, two girls and a boy, lived only a few doors away, and the
grandchildren were as much in one home as in the other. They gave, I
found, a continual fresh zest to the household and its doings. My father
again had the legitimate excuse for going to the circus which our
growing up had taken from him: “The children want to go.” My mother had
as strong a justification for family picnics and birthday celebrations
on which she tired herself out: “The children enjoy them so.”
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.