Part 14

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.

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.

Mr. Hubbard was a man of some seventy years then, wiry, energetic, putting in every moment of his time serving his friends and family and in worshiping Mrs. Hubbard. I think he tried her preference for quiet and dignity and for people of her own kind. It must have made her a little uneasy to have a strange woman with a meager wardrobe and a preoccupied mind drop into her carefree, gaily bedecked society; but she took it all in the best nature and with unvarying kindness and understanding. I liked her particularly for the way she accepted Mr. McClure in the days to come. He would burst unexpectedly into the house at any moment which suited his convenience, his bag loaded with proofs of the Napoleon prints, and almost before he had made his greeting the bag was open and the proofs spread helter-skelter over the carpet. Being very much on my good behavior I was a little horrified myself, and then I did so want them to like and appreciate Mr. McClure. When I tried to apologize for the dishevelment he wrought Mrs. Hubbard laughed. “That eagerness of his is beautiful,” she said, “I am accustomed to geniuses.” And so she was, as I was to find.

It did not take me long to discover that there was plenty of material in Washington for the Napoleon sketch. Mr. Hubbard had the latest books and pamphlets. It was easy to arrange that I have proofs from Paris of two or three volumes of reminiscences that had been announced. In the State Department I found the full Napoleonic correspondence published by the order of the French Government. Files of all the leading French newspapers of the period were in one library or another. In the Congressional Library there was a remarkable collection of books gathered by Andrew D. White when he was minister to Germany from 1879 to 1881, the bulk of them in German, French, and English. An item of this collection not to be duplicated was some fifty volumes of pamphlets in several different languages made in Germany during the Revolution and covering the Napoleonic era. They were for the most part the hasty agitated outbreaks of _vox populi_—protests, arguments, prophecies, curious personal adventures—but among them were rare bits. Taken as a whole they reflected the contemporary state of mind of the people of Europe as did nothing I had ever seen.

Convinced of the adequacy of material, I reluctantly gave up Paris and settled down to work in the Congressional Library. It was not so easy to find a writing table there in the early nineties, and it took some persuasion to convince the ruler of the place, Ainsworth Spofford, that I was worth the effort, that is that I was there to use his books day in and day out until my task was done. Certain of that, he tucked me in, though stacks of books rising from floor to ceiling had to be moved to find room.

I wonder if students in the United States know how much they owe to this man. He gave his life to making a library first to serve Congress, for he held the firm conviction that Congressmen generally needed educating, and that books handy in which he could find materials for their committee work and their speeches would contribute to the process. He made it his first business to provide them as near on the instant as possible with what he thought they needed. In return for this service he used every opportunity to wheedle, shame, beg money from them, money for books, equipment, an increased staff, and always for better accommodations; for Mr. Spofford had a great vision of a national library, educating not only Congress but the people. To realize that vision he had become what he was when I knew him, a devoted, domineering, crabbed czar of his realm. He worked incessantly, doing everything, knowing everything. He paid little attention to the irritated criticisms of those who saw only the inconveniences and dust and overcrowding of the old rooms, and who charged him with inefficiency and tyranny. His mind was on the arrangement and administration of the marble pile already under way across the square. This was what he had been working for—a worthy place for books. His sharp, irritated, “There, maybe you can find something in that,” banging a dusty volume on my table, has often sounded in my ears as in later years I worked at the commodious desks of the library he had dreamed, and which to my mind is a monument to him more than to any other man—naturally enough since he was the only man I ever knew who had anything to do with its existence.

Six weeks, and I had my first installment ready. I had done it with my tongue in my cheek. Impudence, it seemed to me, to write biography on the gallop. I had kept myself to it by repeating in moments of disgust: “Well, a cat may look at a king. I’ll sketch it in, and they can take or leave it.” But Mr. Hubbard liked what I had done, and that meant Mr. McClure hurried it to the printers while I in hot haste went ahead with my sketching.

I expected nothing for myself from it more than the forty dollars a week, and the inner satisfaction of following the thrilling drama from the terror of ’93 down to St. Helena. That satisfied me. But to my surprise I did get the last thing in the world I had expected, the approval of a few people who knew the field. John C. Ropes wrote me he liked the treatment: “Come and lunch with me when you are in Boston and see my Napoleon collection.” I couldn’t believe my eyes. Of course I went.

Charles Bonaparte, the grandson of Jerome Bonaparte, and Mrs. Bonaparte invited Mr. Hubbard and me to lunch with them in Baltimore to see their collection. Curious the little things one remembers of long-ago experiences! Out of that visit I recall only that Mrs. Bonaparte told me that in the garret when she came into the house where Jerome and his American wife, Elizabeth Patterson, had lived, there were literally barrels of string, short lengths neatly rolled, accumulated by the sister-in-law of Napoleon. Why remember that when the home was full of treasures on my subject? Probably because I have never been able to throw away a string without a pang.

Something better worth remembering was the startling resemblance to Napoleon in a certain pose of Charles Bonaparte. As he stood talking unconsciously, hands behind his back, slightly stooped, he was the counterpart of Raffet’s Napoleon, the most natural of them all.

A bit of consolation for my hasty work came from the last source I would have expected: William Milligan Sloane, the author of an elaborate study, the outcome of years of research, recently published by the _Century Magazine_. That was the way biography should be written, I told myself: years of research, of note-taking, of simmering and saturation. Then you had a ripened result. I said something of this once to Mr. Sloane.

“I am not so sure,” he replied, “that all the time you want to take, all the opportunity to indulge your curiosity and run here and there on bypaths, to amuse yourself, to speculate and doubt, contribute to the soundness or value of a biography. I have often wished that I had had, as you did, the prod of necessity behind me, the obligation to get it out at a fixed time, to put it through, no time to idle, to weigh, only to set down. You got something that way—a living sketch.”

I couldn’t have listened to more consoling comment. There must have been something in his characterization of “living,” for now, over forty years since it first appeared in book form, I still receive annually a small royalty check for my “pot-boiling” Napoleon!

What really startled me about that sketch was the way it settled things for me, knocked over my former determinations, and went about shaping my outward life in spite of me. It weakened my resolve never again to tie myself to a position, to keep myself entirely footloose; it shoved Paris into the future and substituted Washington. It was certainly not alone a return to the security of a monthly wage, with the possibility that the wage would soon grow, that turned my plans topsy-turvy, though that had its influence. Chiefly it was the sense of vitality, of adventure, of excitement, that I was getting from being admitted on terms of equality and good comradeship into the McClure crowd.

The “Napoleon” had given the magazine, now in its second year, the circulation boost it needed. My part in it was not exaggerated by the office or by me. We all agreed that it was the pictures that had done it, but the text had framed the pictures, helped bring out their value, and it had been done at a critical moment.

The success of the “Napoleon” sketch did me a good turn with the Scribners, who had had my manuscript of “Madame Roland” for some time. They were hesitating about publishing it. There was no popular appeal. I was entirely unknown, but the “Napoleon” work gave me sufficient backing to persuade them. At least that was the explanation the literary head of the concern, William C. Brownell, gave me. Thus my first book was my second to appear. My reward for writing it came from my interest in doing it, what I learned about how to go at a serious biographical study, certainly not in royalties. My first check was for forty-eight cents. I had used up my share of the small sales in corrections of the proofs and gift copies.

I must stay with them, declared Mr. McClure. And the more I saw of Mr. McClure and his colleagues, the more I wanted to stay. Of my first impression of S. S. McClure in Paris I have spoken. Closer views emphasized and enlarged that impression. He was as eager as a dog on the hunt—never satisfied, never quiet. Creative editing, he insisted, was not to be done by sitting at a desk in a comfortable office. It was only done in the field following scents, hunts. An omnivorous reader of newspapers, magazines, books, he came to his office primed with ideas, possibilities, and there was always a chance that among them was a stroke of genius. He hated nothing so much in the office as settled routine, wanted to feel stir from the door to the inner sanctum. And he had great power to stir excitement by his suggestions, his endless searching after something new, alive, startling, and particularly by his reporting.

He stood in awe of no man, but dashed back and forth over the country, back and forth to Europe interviewing the great and mighty. He brought back from his forays contracts with Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Kipling. It was something to find yourself between the covers of a book printing a Jungle story. They all came out in _McClure’s_ in those years and were followed by “Captains Courageous” and “Stalky” as well as many of the greatest of the short stories and poems—“The Ship That Found Herself,” “The Destroyers,” the “Recessional”—things that left you breathless and gave to a number the touch of genius for which the office searched and sweated.

Mr. McClure was always peering over the Edge of the Future. It was this search for what was on the way that brought to _McClure’s_ the first article in an American magazine on radium, the X-ray, Marconi’s wireless, Lilienthal’s and Octave Chanute’s gliders, Langley’s steam-driven air-runner and in time the first article on the Wrights’ flying machine.