Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  Had I not become a widower, my life might have been very different. I would never have become General Bolívar, nor the Liberator, although I have to admit that my temperament would hardly have predisposed me to become mayor of San Mateo. . . . When I was with my wife, my head was filled only with the most ardent love, not with political ideas. Those thoughts hadn’t yet captured my imagination. . . . The death of my wife placed me early in the road of politics, and caused me to follow the chariot of Mars.

  If Bolívar went on to develop a remarkable capacity to rebound from setbacks, it started here in his twentieth year of life. From the depths of despondency he found a survivor’s grit. He became aggressive, combative, blunt. Soon he was involved in a legal dispute with Antonio Nicolás Briceño, a neighbor who, he claimed, had trespassed on one of his haciendas—building houses and planting fields on his land in the valley of Tuy. Not long after, he wrote a letter scolding his uncle Carlos Palacios for not keeping him properly informed about his finances. Eventually, he assigned the management of his properties to another person entirely, José Manuel Jaén. But none of this held his interest or counted as any kind of life for a young man. By his twentieth birthday, he was planning a return trip to Europe. He was bored beyond imagining, eager to get away.

  He commissioned a ship to transport his cacao, coffee, and indigo to Spain and set sail on it from La Guaira in October of 1803. Armed with a stack of books by Plutarch, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, he settled down for the hard journey across the Atlantic. Two months later he arrived in Cádiz after a turbulent passage.

  He stayed in that port long enough to sell his haciendas’ crops and send detailed instructions to his agent Jaén. But Cádiz in January was a rainy, windy city, and he was anxious to move on. In February, he headed north to Madrid to console his father-in-law, Don Bernardo del Toro, and to give him a few melancholy keepsakes that had once belonged to María Teresa. Bolívar spent two chilly months in Madrid, a city that could only depress him, filled as it was with countless reminders of his dead wife and the evidence of a decaying empire. He was still in mourning clothes, which decency and custom demanded that he wear for a least a year. He found some comfort in weeping with Don Bernardo, but seeing old friends and trying to renew past ties proved as unbearable as it had been in Caracas. In March, when the crown issued a decree demanding that all transients evacuate the capital because of an acute bread shortage, Bolívar was almost relieved. Come April, when the violet fields bloomed, sending their sweet fragrance into the warming air of the Pyrenees, he made his way across those mountains into France with his childhood friend, Teresa’s cousin Fernando del Toro.

  They arrived in Paris just before the French Senate proclaimed Napoleon emperor, on May 18. The capital was filled with high spirits, trembling with possibility. It seemed there was no limit to what France could achieve. Its Enlightenment philosophers had shaped a new era; the Revolution, for all its atrocities, had reinvented a nation; and Napoleon’s striking military successes in Europe and the Middle East suggested that France could become the dominant world power.

  Bolívar had watched Napoleon’s star rise with fascination. Now, as he walked the streets of Paris, he could not fail to see the man’s accomplishments: there was a new air of prosperity that contrasted starkly with the mold and ruin of Spain. Napoleon was undertaking a redefinition of all public institutions—education, banking, civil laws, even transportation and sewage—and the improvements were bold and evident. A larger global strategy also seemed to be at work. By then, Napoleon had sold Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson; months before, he had conceded defeat in the bloody insurrection that had birthed the Republic of Haiti. But even as France appeared to be shrinking in the New World, in the Old it was emerging as a muscular nation. No ruler in the world could claim more admiration at that moment than the newly proclaimed emperor. Seeing Napoleon, in a modest coat and cap, review his splendidly arrayed troops in the court of the Tuileries, Bolívar, too, was filled with awe. “I worshiped him as the hero of the republic,” Bolívar was later to say, “as the bright star of glory, the genius of liberty”—and, perhaps most of all, as a humble servant of his people. But that was soon to change.

  BOLÍVAR AND FERNANDO DEL TORO found an apartment at the Hotel for Foreigners on the Rue Vivienne, only a few blocks from the Palais du Louvre. There they established a comfortable gathering place for friends, among them Carlos Montúfar of Quito and Vicente Rocafuerte of Guayaquil, young Creoles who would reappear many years later to play radically different roles in Bolívar’s life. In time, Bolívar’s teacher Simón Rodríguez—in exile and little more than thirty years old—joined their ranks and, in the company of these spirited men, the widower finally shed his mourning clothes and embraced all the restorative pleasures Paris could offer.

  It was a sybarite’s city, riotously liberal, filled with every sort of entertainment, from glittering opera houses to smoke-filled gambling halls. Theaters, which had been emptied during the Revolution, were now scenes of nightly brilliance where tout Paris gathered to hear Frédéric Duvernoy’s virtuosic horn, or Cousineau’s harp, or Kreutzer’s violin. The ballet was in full flourish, dazzling audiences with performances of La Fille mal gardée or Dansomanie. In the Palais-Royal, a magnificent complex of arcades and public gardens that became one of Bolívar’s favorite haunts, he frequented the Comédie-Française and a veritable profusion of restaurants and shops, bookstores and cabinets de curiosités, gaming houses and celebrated maisons d’amour. With Simón Rodríguez, he read Helvetius, Holbach, and Hume, and spent hours in smoke-choked cafés, arguing about Spinoza. By day, Paris was swarming with horse-drawn carriages—wiskis, demifortunes, cabriolets, boguets—clattering over the mud and ruts of the streets. The commerce of pastry vendors, cat peddlers, shoe menders filled the air with raucous cries. By night, the city was a shimmering miracle, lit by newfangled gas lamps that allowed the revelry to continue unabated until dawn.

  It was in this polestar of splendid modernity that Bolívar got to know “Fanny” Denis de Trobriand, the Countess of Dervieu du Villars, one of the Parisians he had met during his visit to Bilbao. The pretty socialite hardly recognized him as the serious youngster she had known three years before, but she was delighted by what she saw. “He was another man entirely,” the writer Flora Tristan later recounted. “Bolívar had grown at least four inches; he had acquired a certain grace and strength, and a lustrous black moustache that set off his brilliant white teeth, giving him a wonderfully masculine air.”

  Fanny was almost a decade older than Bolívar. At sixteen, she had married the Count Dervieu du Villars, the commanding general of Lyon, who was twenty-five years her senior. Legend has it that when the count was arrested by agents of the Revolution and sentenced to death, the fearless Fanny surprised the revolutionary prosecutor late one night in his quarters and, with a pistol to his head, forced him to sign her husband’s pardon. Count du Villars went on to become a colonel in Napoleon’s army and, once the Revolution was over, a senator in his government. By the mid-1790s, he had acquired a luxurious mansion on the Rue Basse de Saint Pierre, where Fanny established herself as one of the grandes dames of high society. The old count, preferring his country home in Lyon, often left Paris for long stretches at a time, and so his gregarious young wife was left to her own devices. She became a regular at Parisian soirees, sought after in the emperor’s court, and an intimate friend of the famously beautiful Mme de Récamier.

  Like many Frenchwomen who had won a different sort of liberty in that defiant age, Fanny was frankly promiscuous. Her coquettishness and vivacity led to countless romances, and she was said to have had children by at least three lovers, among them Empress Josephine’s son Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, whom Napoleon later made viceroy of Italy. She was golden-haired, vivacious, with deep blue, beguiling eyes. Alabaster-skinned, fresh-faced, with a melodious voice and a languid, feline grace, she was a beautiful woman, all the more so for her sly wit and intelligence. The salon she host
ed drew some of the great minds of the day, including Baron Alexander von Humboldt, the botanist Aimé Bonpland, minister of police Pierre Denis-Lagarde, the writer-philosopher Benjamin Constant, and the extravagant Mme de Staël.

  Fanny welcomed Bolívar into this whirling social milieu, attracted by the young man’s cleverness and the startling change he had made since his moody youth in Bilbao. As a contemporary noted:

  His spirit, his heart, his tastes, his character had changed completely. He was renting an apartment for 500 francs at the Hotel for Foreigners; he had servants in elegant uniforms, a coach, magnificent horses, a box at the Opera. It was known that he kept a ballerina. Finally, his wardrobe, which was extravagantly luxurious, contrasted sharply with everyone else’s miserable, outdated attire.

  Dancing with Fanny at one of her elegant parties, he learned that an ancestor of hers was an Aristiguieta—a name in his own family tree, indeed, the name of the priest who had bequeathed him a fortune—and, although a genealogical connection was never proven, they proceeded to call one another “cousin.” The appellation had its conveniences. From that day forward, Bolívar became one of Madame du Villars’s most assiduous visitors. The old count, believing that the young Venezuelan was his wife’s relative, received him warmly. Bolívar and Fanny soon became lovers, spending long, pleasurable afternoons together at the house on Basse de Saint Pierre, or riding horses into the nearby countryside.

  But Fanny and the unnamed ballerina were by no means the only Frenchwomen with whom Bolívar tried to erase his unhappy past. Yet another young matron he had met in Bilbao had reemerged to help him forget his widowhood. She was Therèse Laisney, the common-law wife of a retired colonel of Peruvian extraction, Mariano de Tristan y Moscoso. Their daughter, Flora Tristan, who went on to become a renowned socialist activist and grandmother of the painter Paul Gauguin, recorded something of her parents’ relationship with Bolívar:

  Eight months after my father left Bilbao, he saw a notice in a Paris newspaper that said someone was trying to reach him. My father immediately went to the posted address . . . climbed to the third floor, and saw Bolívar lying in bed. He was emaciated, pale, and deathly sick. His first love, his lovely wife, had died. . . .

  Though he would go on to be a great warrior, a political genius, he was virtually drowning in misery at the time and needed the lifeline of a compassionate woman’s heart. For six weeks in Paris, he visited no house but ours. He spoke with no one but my mother.

  Bolívar appears again in Tristan’s account after Paris had applied its salve. According to her (and her chronology cannot be trusted), Bolívar left the city for a short time. When he returned, he checked into the Hotel for Foreigners, where her mother hastened to see him:

  Turning onto the Rue Richelieu, my mother was almost run over by a splendid coach, whose horses were racing around the corner. She drew back against the wall, but to her surprise the coach suddenly stopped, and the rider threw open the door and flung himself on her, clasping her in his arms, practically suffocating her. “It is I! It is I! Don’t you recognize me? Oh, it’s probably better that you don’t! It’s proof that I’ve changed completely.”

  If he hadn’t known it before, Bolívar learned in his scant year and a half in Paris how much—and how little—women now meant to him. For the rest of his life, he would be irresistibly attracted to them, but would find them surprisingly easy to win and discard. Bored, he would move on, far more interested in the ambit of men. And yet, he was an incurable romantic, incapable of living without female companionship. As the historian Gil Fortoul said of Bolívar’s unbridled appetite, “All in all, one can say that he never lived alone.” One could also say that he never again wanted a wife. Much later, Bolívar was to admit, “I loved my wife very much and at her death I took an oath never again to marry. As you can see, I have kept my word.”

  Paris had taught him about the consoling powers of sex. Many years later, in the fields of revolution, Bolívar would relive those heady, Parisian days with his soldiers. One of his generals, Manuel Roergas de Serviez, recalled:

  With his keen appreciation for pleasure and especially for carnal pleasure, it was truly extraordinary to hear the Liberator enumerate all the female beauties he had known in France with a meticulousness and precision that gave credit to his fine memory. He would recite the puns of Brunet, sing all the songs that were in vogue at the time, and he would roar at his own past indiscretions, making fun of his naïveté.

  IT MAY HAVE BEEN IN Fanny du Villar’s house that Bolívar met Baron Alexander von Humboldt, for the great naturalist was said to frequent her salon. But it is equally possible that he met him through Carlos Montúfar, who had arrived in Paris as part of Humboldt’s retinue. Montúfar, a botanist from Quito and a member of Bolívar’s intimate circle of young Latin Americans in Paris, had accompanied Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland on the last leg of their much celebrated “New Continent” expedition. In a remarkable voyage, undertaken between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt and Bonpland traveled the length of Latin America, recording their observations and collecting plant and animal specimens from the Amazon basin to the heights of Mount Chimborazo. The trip, which Humboldt later described in thirty volumes, transformed Western science and marked the foundation of modern geography. But in the course of publishing his findings, Humboldt, a strikingly handsome man, also became enormously popular in society circles, having met many of the great eminences of his time. He had come to Paris in August 1804 almost directly from Jefferson’s White House. He had advised the president on the Louisiana Purchase, conferred with him about the Lewis and Clark expedition, had his portrait painted by the artist of presidents, Charles Willson Peale. After a pleasant spring evening with Humboldt in Washington, Dolley Madison had written, “We have lately had a great treat in the company of a charming Prussian Baron. . . . All the ladies say they are in love with him.”

  Little wonder, then, that Humboldt was sought out in the salons of Paris and fussed over by Fanny du Villars. It may even have been Bolívar who introduced Fanny to him. In any case, Bolívar had many reasons to visit with Humboldt, having learned that, during the baron’s visit to Caracas, he had met Bolívar’s sisters as well as the Palacios, and even lodged with his in-laws, the del Toros. In conversation, Bolívar learned that Humboldt had great respect for the learned scholar Padre Andújar, the very priest who had taught him mathematics as a child.

  So it was that Bolívar became a frequent guest at Humboldt’s elegant apartments on Rue du Faubourg Saint Germain, where visitors from all over Europe gathered to inspect the baron’s extraordinary collection of sixty thousand botanical specimens from subequatorial America. In his quirky jumble of languages—part Spanish, part English, part French—Humboldt praised South America’s physical beauty, its people, and its promise. Bonpland, too, expressed wonder at the natural riches he had seen. Bolívar was enchanted. Although Humboldt and Bonpland cannot have been entirely convinced of the young man’s seriousness, they could not doubt his energy and enthusiasm. They became warm friends.

  On one occasion, as the three of them discussed colonial politics, Bolívar made a passionate case for a liberated continent, free from the yoke of the Spanish crown. He asked Humboldt whether he thought America had what it took to govern itself. The scientist ventured that the colonies might indeed be ready for freedom, but he added that he knew of no leader who was capable of winning it for them. Bonpland better understood the spirit of the question: a revolution makes its leaders, he replied.

  Whether Bolívar thought of himself as that leader at that precise moment we cannot know. He was a chrysalis of what he would become, a mere twenty-one years old. But during that visit to Paris a germ of a political idea grew: a man could change the course of history. There was no better example for that than Napoleon. And South America was a land ripe with possibility; Bolívar had been told so by the greatest scientist of his time.

  Bolívar’s admiration for Napoleon was tested, however, when the emperor crowned him
self at the Cathedral of Notre Dame later that year. It isn’t clear whether Bolívar saw that spectacle on December 2, 1804, or witnessed the triumphant parade, the splendid coaches, the ermine robes, the roar of adoring multitudes. Simón Rodríguez recalls, “On that day, so notable and happy for the French, Bolívar and I decided to stay in at our hotel.” According to Rodríguez, the two of them shuttered the windows and drew the drapes, stubbornly ignoring the festivities, while the rest of Paris rejoiced. American naval officer Hiram Paulding confirms this story, having heard it from Bolívar himself when he visited him twenty years later in Peru. In any case, Bolívar’s aide-de-camp, Daniel O’Leary, recorded the Liberator’s feelings about the coronation in strong and unequivocal terms:

  He made himself emperor, and from that day on, I looked upon him as a hypocritical tyrant, an insult to liberty and an obstacle to the progress of civilization. . . . What terrible feelings of indignation this sad spectacle produced in my soul, possessed as it was by a fanatical love of liberty and glory! From then on I could not abide Napoleon, his very glory seemed to glow from hell. France, too, surprised me: a great republic covering itself with trophies and monuments, flaunting its armies and institutions, casting aside its cap of liberty for a crown.

  Bolívar was not alone in thinking Napoleon had gone too far when he took the crown from Pope Pius VII’s hands and placed it on his own head. Ludwig von Beethoven, who had composed the “Eroica” in Napoleon’s honor, decided to strip out the emperor’s name. William Wordsworth called the coronation “a sad reverse for all mankind.” For the rest of his life, however, Bolívar would prove ambivalent about Napoleon, his feelings vacillating wildly from admiration to aversion. He would say to one of his biographers: