The Condor's Head

by Ferdinand Mount

  France had not lost her enchantments – the little Corsican could not take those away. In fact, in his quick greedy way he wanted to make them his own. But Paris was sadly changed. It was a brash, trumpery sort of town now. William’s friends from before the Revolution seemed like fish gasping for air. He supposed that conquerors always wanted to leave their mark, but there was an unutterable crudity about the monuments that Bonaparte was erecting to celebrate his victories, that heavy great triumphal arch with the bronze horses he had stolen from Venice stuck on top of it, and that half-finished Temple of Glory, which was to have been a church until a greater Saviour came along, and then, as if the message still needed rubbing in, the even bigger triumphal arch he was building at the top of the Champs-Elysées, still only finished up to knee height. The little Emperor flew into a rage when he heard that it could not be made ready in time for the procession through it to welcome the new Empress. To placate him they were hurriedly throwing up a painted canvas replica on the site, though as yet only the wooden scaffolding for the replica was in place. Paint and canvas – that was all it was, the entire mad adventure. In a couple of years it would all be broken down and Europe would be left to mourn her dead. He had no wish to be there to see it.

  William became impatient to be off to Moscow, though he did not dream of admitting it. He waited in a fever for each day’s post, but when the blow fell he was quite unprepared for it. In fact, he was flabbergasted.

  ‘They’ve refused to confirm me.’

  ‘Refused? How can that be? If the President says—’

  ‘Rosalie, you understand nothing of American politics. But then nor, I am coming to suspect, does Mr Jefferson. If the President hatches a secret plan, the Senate will do its damnedest to frustrate it.’

  ‘How spiteful.’

  ‘Not one of them voted for me, not a single one. If only the President had gone about his business openly I might have made a better showing. As it is, I am the biggest fool in Christendom.’

  He had thought himself past the age of disappointment. He had put behind him the humiliations of his earlier diplomatic career. But then it had still seemed the springtime of his life and he had Rosalie to look forward to. Now he had no prospect, only retrospect. Once again TJ had failed him and the rest was bitterness. It turned out to be Jefferson’s last act as President and his successor Mr Madison was never one to lift a finger on Wm’s behalf. A month later the new President nominated John Quincy Adams in Wm’s place and after an initial rebuff (and that not half as humiliating as Wm’s) Mr Adams was confirmed by a handsome majority of nineteen to seven. Madison cruelly told Adams that the unanimous vote against Wm’s nomination had been not against the mission but against the man.

  After a decent interval to show that he was not leaving with his tail between his legs, Wm left Paris and took a boat to England from Dieppe because there was no boat due to sail to America until later in the year. He did not warn Rosalie he was going.

  At Dieppe he found a letter from her waiting for him.

  It is hard to express what I felt this morning at five o’clock when I received your note. I have been unable to stop crying for the past two days. Oh, my dear friend, how unfair you would be if you ever doubted my total devotion to you. Do not leave me without hope of seeing you return to a country where you have so many friends and one in particular who will be a friend to her last day and will be the same in all the different situations of life. Never stop loving someone who loves you to the bottom of her heart.

  Well, he thought, can any man ever have received so many love letters while waiting to board ship?

  Six days later she married the widowed Monsieur de Castellane.

  He did not move back to Philadelphia directly but put up until the autumn across the river at Morrisville, New Jersey, to avoid the sickly season in the metropolis. When he crossed back after the first frost, he took rooms at the United States Hotel, but he soon found that the new boarding houses springing up along Walnut and Locust Streets suited him better. He switched from one to the next as soon as he began to weary of the company at table. He still possessed seven hundred acres out at Indian Camp, down the road from Monticello, but he found the rents hard to collect. At least that was what he said, but the truth was that he did not care to live too near Mr Jefferson or his household. In the end he was happy to sell Indian Camp for a small profit. ‘I like city life,’ he told Daniel Ludlow, who had now become his man of business. ‘I like to see things moving, so you see I am becoming a true American again.’

  He had been an early enthusiast for canals, but he went and talked to the few qualified civil engineers then to be found in the US, and he decided that canals had had their day, so he sold most of his stock, apart from the Chesapeake. He had great hopes of a young engineer, Moncure Robinson, and he took a slice of the railroad Robinson was building, the Pittsville and Dansville, which he wagered was only the foretaste of things to come. By the time Robinson had built the Petersburg and Richmond and, after that, the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac lines, Mr Short was drawing ten per cent a year from them, and that was before he started raising capital from some of his London friends to build steam locomotives. He had every confidence in steam because he had already done pretty well out of Robert Fulton’s steamboat company down at Natchez.

  But property was the sure-fire thing. It took him fifteen years to build up his stake in the Macomb tract on the Niagara but by the end he had the lion’s share, sixteen thousand acres out of twenty-five thousand, more than his partners had put together. Still they all made a packet that time. In those years any American who kept his wits about him could pile up a tolerable fortune. And the satisfactions were not to be reckoned in dollars only. There was gratification to be found in carving farmland out of virgin forest and transforming swamp and scrub into homes and villages. William relished nothing more than his journeys upstate to visit that electric German, George Scriba, who had taken a small tribe of Dutchmen to settle on land he had bought from the Holland Land Company (William had shares in that too). He lent Scriba money secured on the tracts of land that were soon to be adorned with settlements bearing homely names like Rotterdam and Harlem, but were then known only as Number Seventeen or Number Twenty. William smiled to think how much time he had spent in France viewing the artificial wildernesses that the ancien régime had delighted in, and how he liked nothing better now than to see the loggers and the road builders carving their way through the real wildernesses of his native land.

  One morning as he was setting out on his promenade down Walnut Street, he was hailed by a woman in her later years, on the stout side but with a bright look about her. ‘Mr Short, I can see that you do not recognise me.’ She had a French accent but spoke in quick, confident English.

  ‘Ah, yes, of course, madam …’ he said vaguely, raising his hat to her.

  ‘It was a long time ago. Condorcet’s grand banquet at the Mint. We drank confusion to all kings, but we met quite often after that.’

  ‘My goodness me, Madame Suard, you must forgive me, my memory has gone.’

  ‘Amélie,’ she corrected him.

  ‘How amazing.’ He looked at her with delight, remembering how sportive she had been and he could see that she had not lost her malicious twinkle. ‘And your English is so perfect.’

  ‘Ah well, we made our living as translators, you must remember. When my husband died I could not stand Paris a moment longer, not with that little man there, so I came to Philadelphia. And voilà, I am a landlady.’

  ‘A landlady? ‘ He was not sure she had the right word.

  ‘I have a French boarding house at 70 Walnut Street. The Inquirer was good enough to describe it as the finest in the city.’

  ‘You must forgive me again. I have been away travelling in New York State.’

  ‘I know, because naturally I sought you out as soon as I was established here.’

  They stood chatting on the sidewalk in the bright sunlight and William was enchanted.
He dined with her at No. 70 and found the company agreeable, by Philadelphia standards almost sparkling. It was a matter of days only before he decamped there as a permanent resident, securing the suite of rooms on the second floor front, lately vacated by a Mr Frost who had been called away to Boston.

  He must have been at Mrs Suard’s about a year when he had a letter from Rosalie, the first in a long time:

  I am taking advantage of an opportunity offered by my dear friend Mr Worden to send you the famous bust of Condorcet, which has so long lain addressed to you and which was even sent seven years ago to Cherbourg from where it could not continue the journey and was ultimately sent back to me until a better means of transport could be found. I hope that this shipment will be more fortunate.

  As to the bust, I value it less than I am sure your compatriots will. I am far from regarding the subject as a great man. He is no doubt celebrated in the eyes of the public. For those who knew him as I did, he remains a mean spirit whose heart was never animated by any generous impulse and who was moved only by resentment and vengeance. In spite of my justifiable dislike of this man, I believe that you will appreciate possessing a marble bust of a famous person whom you have known and who will surely be viewed with great curiosity by your fellow countrymen. I am delighted to present it to you, my dear friend.

  He read the rest of her letter with only half an eye, partly because it was full of the comings and goings of her numerous relatives, but also because his mind was seized by the sad fate of the noble bust that he remembered so well thirty years earlier occupying pride of place in the salon at the rue de Seine: first smothered in straw and exiled to the attic for a decade and more, then stuffed into a crate and sent off to Cherbourg, only to be returned in ignominy to the attic still muffled in its crate, and now at last being buffeted on the high seas, no doubt sliding from side to side in some greasy hold, rejected by its own people. How like the last days of Condorcet himself, confined to a dismal attic in a backstreet for months, then wandering the streets out into the country rejected at every port of call, or every port of call but one.

  Several times that day after they had unwrapped the bust his thoughts returned to Condorcet. He had come to a dismal end and had nobody to blame but himself. Those who ran with the mob must expect to be trampled by the mob. He had less common sense than a sparrow and at tight moments he had scarcely shown exemplary courage. William could not blame Rosalie for her indignation. She had every right never to forgive him for his cowardly failure to defend her husband and her brother.

  And yet. Was she right to say that he had never shown a generous impulse? And was he so incapable of love? He had surely loved Sophie with all his heart, and he had stood up for liberty and the poor, and for the rights of women and even of the blacks at a time when Mr Jefferson, for example, preferred to lie low. The day might yet come when that silly, squawking condor might be remembered better than any of them.

  After all, they had all been in it together at the start, the first great conspiracy to make men happy. They had dreamed of a world irradiated by le bonheur. They had dreamed too much, of course, and expected too much – he himself had seen that soon enough, sooner than most. He had always been pretty good at telling how things would pan out. People didn’t necessarily want to know, though, that was the trouble. But even he could not help being caught up in the pursuit of love, happiness, call it what you like. Yet the chase could not last for ever. What was that line he had just read somewhere – ‘the heart must pause to breathe and love itself have rest’.

  He had been right about one thing at least, the thing he had told his first girl, Louisa, that sticky afternoon in the back bedroom on 4th Street: that he would end his days a rich frontier bachelor with a broken heart.

  That evening just before supper there was a knock at the door of his sitting room.

  ‘Amélie, I am glad to see you up and about. I heard you were taken poorly. To tell the truth, you still look mortal pale. The shock of seeing our old friend again after so long, even clad in marble, so to speak …’

  ‘You are always so quick to understand things, William.’

  ‘Much good it has done me,’ he said with that little moue of his downturned mouth which had become a habit with him.

  ‘It is a very fine bust,’ she said.

  ‘So it is indeed. They say Houdon idealises his subjects but to my eye that is the Condor to the life.’

  ‘I could not agree more. And that is precisely why I must ask you a favour.’

  ‘Anything, anything, my dear.’

  ‘Would you be very much distressed if you found some other resting place for it? I must confess – it is a weakness I freely admit – that I am not entirely comfortable with it in my house. Its presence stirs sad memories. I am too old to see ghosts in my parlour.’

  ‘Oh, my dear, I could have saved you any anxiety on that score, but I did not wish to disturb you while you were not well. The moment I saw it I knew it was too big for an ordinary house, not that your house is ordinary in anything but size. It is purely a question of size, you understand. The Philosophical Society will be very glad to have it. As soon as I have made the necessary arrangements, Simmon can take it over in the cart. I instructed him to keep the crate so that we may use it again.’

  ‘You are so kind as always. The bust will be much appreciated over there, I am sure.’ She began to recover her colour. ‘What a terrible thought it is that if only he had come back to me that night, he might be with us here today.’

  ‘An honoured guest of the President, I dare say,’ William hazarded.

  ‘The Terror had only another three months to run. If he could have found shelter somewhere …’

  ‘Yes, yes, quite so.’ He was imagining the Condor in Washington, talking in his harsh quavery voice to Mr Monroe, Wm’s old friend from William and Mary days. Who would have guessed when they were in the Flat Hat Society together that it would be Jimmy Monroe who would … but there was no use going down that track.

  ‘I opened the garden door, you know.’

  ‘Yes, so you told me. It was all a great pity.’

  Gilligan’s Hotel

  We stopped for gas. There was nothing between the gas station and the desert except a straggly hedge of aloes. The other side of the gas station there was a motel with a sign that flashed ‘Rooms’ and ‘Casino’ alternately in red-and-green lights. There was no other building in sight.

  ‘Stayed there one time,’ the big man said. ‘Dropped a bundle. Didn’t have a cent left, limped into Vegas with the gauge on empty.’

  Behind the motel you could see the mountains, mauve and golden in the afternoon light. It was strange to feel the desert under your feet, like crunching lumps of sugar.

  The big man was not fat, just burly, an athlete who had thickened up. He had been a quarterback for Michigan State before he did his knee in. He came out West to work for Boeing, but they let him go in the recession, which he didn’t resent at all, he preferred the nomadic life. He had made a study of the Native American culture and he reckoned some of it had sunk in. There was a wife in Phoenix and a daughter in Salt Lake but he was on the road most of the year delivering Winnebagos.

  ‘So what brings you on this bus?’

  ‘Got a pick-up in Gilligan. There’s hundreds of ’em there. They come down from Wisconsin in the fall, after the first snow, and spend the winter in the desert. Gilligan folk call them the Snow Geese.’

  ‘But don’t they need the Winnebago to go back to Canada in?’

  ‘Sure they do, if they go back. But some of the girl croupiers are darned pretty and anyway, did you ever spend six months in a stationary Winnebago with your partner? They say the divorce rate in that mobile-home park is the highest in the USA.’

  He cackled at the thought, and so did the woman with the fair ponytail.

  ‘I seen plenty of them,’ she said. ‘When they’re winning they think every woman is the answer to their prayers. I roomed with a girl once, when I was firs
t working at the Bellagio, she regularly got engaged to one of the players, about once a week on average. None of ’em ever stuck, though.’

  The driver beckoned us back on to the bus and the woman with the ponytail scrunched out her cigarette with her heel. It was a shock to come in out of the stifling heat.

  ‘Las Vegas here we come,’ the woman said as the driver started the engine.

  ‘I’m getting off at Gilligan,’ I said.

  ‘Never heard of English folks stopping at Gilligan. They mostly go on to Vegas.’

  ‘I’m going to a wedding. My god-daughter.’

  ‘How cute. They’ve got such a darling wedding chapel, the Little Chapel in the Moonlight, you’ll just love it. They have these beautiful painted statues.’

  I had not thought much about the ceremony. I assumed that Jane would be one for a civil wedding. Certainly her mother never had any truck with God, and the same went for Franco, not that he deserved much say, seeing that he had left Polly when Jane was less than a year old. Well, ‘left’ was an old-fashioned way of putting it. The only vow they had taken seriously was the vow not to stand in the way if either of them wanted to be with someone else. They had to remain on friendly terms and this rule they kept to religiously. Franco was paying for the wedding.

  ‘She a Catholic, your god-daughter?’ the woman with the ponytail asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think she’s religious at all. In fact, I’m not a proper godfather, just a friend of her parents. When she was at school, the other girls all had godfathers, so they asked me.’

  ‘How cute,’ the woman said doubtfully. ‘What she do for a living?’