An Embarrassment of Riches

by James Howard Kunstler

  “Three days later, monsieurs, while Necker skulked home to Switzerland, I, my dear wife Marie, and little son, Honoré—then a babe of four—stole across the dreary channel to England in an oyster catcher’s boat, all my chattels and heirlooms reduced to a bagful of gold sovereigns. We waited on tenterhooks in London the rest of that terrible year. One hope yet flickered in the darkness enveloping France, and that flame resided in the brain of Count Mirabeau. When it burnt out in April of ’91, I knew all was lost.

  “How we envied the revolution you Americans made against the British. Such a clear-cut conflict: New World against the Old, daughter against motherland, democracy against the dictates of a distant parliament and a demented king. Our hopes now turned across the sea to your new nation, to this rich continent, as big as seven Frances, and empty! We sailed from Plymouth for New York on May 1 aboard the royal brigantine Disdain, and touched these shores at June’s sweet acme—le plus haut point! It was two weeks later that I visited your renowned garden outside Philadelphia, monsieur. Magnifique!”

  “I was off Cape Porcupine, Labrador, amidst the barking seals,” Uncle recalled nostalgically. The servants brought on the pear tartlets and coffee.

  “When did you come here?” I inquired, meaning to the Tennessee River.

  “A decade ago almost to the month,” LeBoeuf replied. “We sojourned among, uh, sympathetic friends up and down the seaboard. New England was too cold for our blood. Brrrr. Carolina too tropical. Foo! The soil of Virginia was leached unto sand. The West beckoned. Unspoilt eden! Wealth fabulous beyond the imagination! N’est-ce pas? In Pittsburgh, the news reached us of His Majesty’s execution—”

  “More dessert, please!” Lou-Lou interrupted his guardian and held out his plate for a servant to refill.

  “Where is thy son, my friend?” Uncle was now prompted to ask. “Back east in one of our academies?”

  “Dead,” LeBoeuf said simply. A tear pooled in the corner of his right eye and slid off his bony cheek onto the tablecloth.

  “Yellow fever,” Madame added. “Not a week after we came here.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “How tragic!”

  “I miss him dreadfully,” LeBoeuf said, casting his red-rimmed eyes upon Lou-Lou, who had finished the last morsel of his second pear tartlet and now picked at the crumbs on his plate.

  “To conquer my grief, I was determined to subdue this rich wilderness. Chateau Félicité was begun the hour after we lowered my little Honoré into the earth. Give a good man the right tools, messieurs, and he can build a stairway to the stars!”

  “Urrrp,” Lou-Lou gave forth a belch. “Pardonnez moi,” he said. Madame’s nose wrinkled in a look of distaste. Yago’s lip curled in an apparent sneer.

  “Art aware how thy revolution ended?” Uncle asked the Frenchman delicately.

  “O, yes,” he affirmed. “Though we dwell somewhat out of town, so to speak, heh-heh, news of the world does dribble our way. Would it surprise you, messieurs, to learn that I was personally acquainted with he who now rules France? Oui. Little Napoleon Bonaparte was no less than my student at L’Ecole Militaire, Paris, in ’84. I was then thirty-four, a captain, stymied in my career by the sons of wealthier fathers. In this respect, we had a lot in common, myself and this tiny, olive-skinned Corsican boy. All around me rich imbeciles rose to generalships. At my age, I was almost—how do you say?—washed up, relegated to teaching trigonometry to cadets while other men ten years younger commanded divisions of brave men in the field. L’ignominie!

  “We became close, Napoleon and I, almost a filial attachment. His father was dead, you know. He was so serious, so imbued with responsibility for that enormous, noisy family of his, in which he was but the second son, and barely five feet tall in his boots, a near midget thinking himself Atlas! In one year he completed a course of study that took other cadets two or three, was commissioned a second lieutenant, and sent off to Valence in the south. That was the last I heard of him for many years. His rise must have been like a meteor’s! One of my few regrets at leaving France forever was not to be able to witness his ascent: the little Corsican boy, with his knitted brow and far-seeing eyes.”

  LeBoeuf gazed abstractedly into his coffee cup and chuckled, but with what seemed genuine warm remembrance.

  “So, monsieur,” he looked back up at Uncle. “I was not surprised to hear that Napoleon Bonaparte had stepped into the vacuum of power and seized France. So young! His life must be like a fairy tale. Still the little Atlas. The world upon his shoulders.”

  “Are you also aware,” said I, “how Atlas’s burden has been lightened by some million square miles?”

  LeBoeuf pursed his lips and squinted as though trying to solve some riddle of trigonometry.

  “I admit, I am puzzled, Sammy,” he replied.

  “Your little Corsican boy has sold Louisiana to the United States.”

  LeBoeuf and Madame turned and glanced sharply at each other. All the color seemed to drain from the Frenchman’s face.

  “Where did you hear this?” he asked in a small, dry voice.

  “Many places,” I said. “Pittsburgh, Wash—”

  “Then it is a rumor,” Madame asserted in a hopeful vein.

  “No, ’tis a fact,” Uncle declared. “I myself doubted it till I saw the newspaper in Louisville. ’Twas consummated this spring at Paris by Secretary Monroe—art feeling well, sir? Madame?”

  “Brandy,” LeBoeuf croaked. The Choctaw servant did not move quickly enough to suit him. “Tout de suite!”

  The decanter was brought in from the library. With trembling hands, our host filled his glass nearly halfway and downed it. In a little while, the color returned to his face.

  “What a shock,” he said, and motioned for our snifters to be filled as well. “It is a brilliant move, of course, but … so unexpected.”

  “It took me by surprise, sir,” Uncle avouched.

  “Not so much myself,” said I. “Especially after coming down the Ohio. Why, every day hundreds of settlers are discharged into the Mississippi and thence west. Already St. Louis is three-quarters American, they say. Bonaparte had as much hope of controlling Louisiana as we might hope to control Poland. The move was inevitable.”

  “Of course,” LeBoeuf agreed. “It was only logical. Well, then, a toast to Louisiana.” He raised his glass and smiled, but it was a wan, unconvincing smile. The toast made, he stood up at his place and cleared his throat. “Shall we move along to the evening’s entertainment? What do you say, my darling wife? Gentlemen?”

  We left our seats. Madame still looked very pale.

  “May I come too, Uncle Fernand?” Lou-Lou asked.

  LeBoeuf closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “O, please, please,” Lou-Lou begged.

  “No.”

  “Let him come,” I sued in the poor booby’s behalf. “Wherever it is we are going,” I added.

  “I don’t think so, Sammy. He always laughs in the wrong places.”

  “I won’t. I promise. O, please, please, Uncle Fer—”

  “No, I say!” LeBoeuf retorted with startling vehemence. For such a frail man he could shout admirably.

  “I shall go whether you like it or not,” Lou-Lou muttered.

  “What was that?” LeBoeuf said, bristling.

  “I said, I shall go to the place if you like it or not,” Lou-Lou repeated sullenly.

  “Quelle impertinence! Do I believe my ears?”

  “I am a man! I can do as I please!”

  “Mon dieu!” LeBoeuf appealed to the rest of us with a look of incredulity. “Who put this idea into your head?”

  “I did,” said I, and all eyes fastened instantly on me.

  “You did?” LeBoeuf said as though he were scandalized.

  “Did you not tell him last night at table to act like a man?” I said.

  “Did I say that?” LeBoeuf seemed surprised.

  “You did, monsieur,” I assured him.

  “Is he right,�
� LeBoeuf turned to inquire of his ward. “Is this how the idea got into your head?”

  “I don’t know,” Lou-Lou answered timidly, his eyes downcast. “Perhaps.”

  “So, Sammy, you are a revolutionary, eh?” LeBoeuf said, his eyes glinting with the same contempt that he reserved for those madmen who tore his beloved France to pieces.

  “Let the lad come, Fernand,” Uncle now sued, as much to end the quarrel as to accommodate Lou-Lou.

  “Very well,” LeBoeuf gave in with a sigh, a thin smile returning to his lips. “Come along, everybody, to the theater.”

  We trooped upstairs and down a long corridor, past the conservatory where Puya robusta silently formed her precious seed pods in the darkness, thence round a corner. Ahead came a roistering noise, as of a crowd of people. We came to a set of double doors. They were flung open. Once again, LeBoeuf’s ingenuity left me awestruck. Inside was a gorgeous theater, its scale about one third the size of, say, the Park Theatre in New York, but nonetheless a complete and exquisitely adorned playhouse.

  Within stood a crowd of about an hundred half-naked savages, all men, but all comporting themselves with the lively decorum of an equal number of New Yorkers or Philadelphians, some standing in groups along the aisle, gabbing and gossiping. The scene was perfectly astounding. Some of the Indians quit their chatting to acknowledge us with a polite bow, and in every way they behaved like any group of theatergoers back in the accultured states. LeBoeuf nodded back at those who acknowledged us, but there was no display of fawning deference. One sensed that LeBoeuf enjoyed the illusion of being back in a theater in a civilized country. And I own that, when I closed my eyes for a moment, the illusion was a powerful one.

  “This way, my friends,” LeBoeuf said. We followed him down the left-hand aisle to an arched portal near the proscenium. Within it was a narrow, walnut-paneled spiral staircase. Madame LeBoeuf climbed directly ahead of me, the shape of her hindquarters revealed by the intervening light of a sconce candle on the wall of a passage.

  A moment later we arrived in LeBoeuf’s personal box. It contained an half-dozen luxurious armchairs. To the right of this box extended a small balcony all the way across the upper portion of the theater, upon which were seated several dozen more Indians. Hanging from center was a magnificent chandelier holding hundreds of candles. The ceiling was painted so as to represent a blue sky dotted with fleecy clouds, as on a fair summer’s day. Toward the front, that is, toward the top of the proscenium arch, trumpeting cherubs gamboled amidst these clouds. The main curtain was also painted: a depiction of Chateau Félicité floating against its background of water and verdure, and at the top, painted as though on an unfurled scroll, LeBoeuf’s motto: le travail vous libérera.

  Our host directed us to our seats. I was shown a chair between Lou-Lou and Madame.

  “I saw a wonderful Othello at Philadelphia not four months ago,” I remarked in an attempt to make conversation. But Madame seemed ill at ease and preoccupied, a different person from the one who had ministered to my wounds so tenderly in the afternoon.

  “How nice for you,” she replied politely, with an abstracted look upon her face.

  “Uncle Fernand! Uncle Fernand!”

  “What is it?”

  “I have to make water.”

  “Why didn’t you think of that before?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That will teach you to think ahead.”

  “I cannot hold it much longer.”

  “O, for goodness’ sake!” LeBoeuf surrendered. “Mercure! Take Lou-Lou to the water closet.”

  One of the Indians escorted him from the box. Uncle and I shared a glance, both of us startled at the antipathy LeBoeuf had shown his ward, as though we were seeing a previously undisclosed side of his character, and not a pretty side at that. Then again, we had not endured the boy’s foolish behavior for years on end, as he had.

  “Shakespeare is my favorite playwright,” I remarked afresh to Madame in another attempt to strike up conversation.

  “Ah, but we are French, monsieur,” she answered with a trace of a knowing smile. Her jasmine perfume wafted into my nostrils.

  “Yes, of course—”

  “I do enjoy your Shakespeare. But for rapture, give me Corneille.”

  “You like the simple heroic?”

  “You might say so,” she replied and looked searchingly into my eyes, then turned away so as to foreclose our discussion.

  In a similar box across the theater a group of Negroes, in cream-colored house livery and turbans, entered bearing musical instruments—nine pieces in all. They took their stools and began tuning. Slowly, the chandelier was lowered from the ceiling, its candles blown out by the audience, and then raised back up. A few tapers remained burning in their wall fixtures. The Indians all settled into their seats, and an expectant hush fell over the audience. Lou-Lou could be heard clambering back up the stairway to the box.

  “Wait! Wait for me!” he bellowed.

  “Sit down and shut your mouth,” LeBoeuf told him, with ill-disguised annoyance.

  The orchestra played an Italianate air. The curtain rose on a perfectly ingenious set piece of a Venetian street in vivid moonlight. The audience applauded.

  “Monsieur LeBoeuf!” I could not help exclaiming. “What brilliant stagecraft! The atmosphere is marvelous!”

  “We employ the new Argand patent lamps,” he whispered.

  Two actors now entered the street scene, Roderigo and the scheming villain, Iago. It was several moments before I realized that they were Negroes painted in whiteface. They declaimed their lines in a very odd, wooden manner. When the two characters started that business of crying, “Awake … thieves! Thieves! Thieves!” under the window of Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, Lou-Lou burst out in a fit of riotous laughter. A score of red faces turned indignantly up to us from the seats below.

  “Silence!” LeBoeuf said. Mocking laughter rippled across the audience. Even the actors seemed momentarily distracted. Lou-Lou managed to regain control of himself. The play resumed. Brabantio and his servants entered with torches. These too were Negroes daubed in white paint. Shortly, the title character made his entrance, a Negro, of course, but the sole member of the cast permitted to act in his natural color. This was indeed as droll a version of the tragedy as any I had met with before. And of all the cast, this Othello spoke his lines with the truest conviction. Physically, he towered over the other actors, being a giant of a man in the prime of life and as strong-looking as an ox, with such great twitching slabs of muscles ’neath his costume robes as would put to shame even a strapping savage like Yago.

  It was in thinking of this comparison, as a matter of fact, that the irony struck me: LeBoeuf’s Yago seemed every inch the scheming knave as Othello’s “ancient” of the same name. Yago, or Iago, is a Spanish name. For centuries the very word “Spaniard” had been synonymous with cruelty, so infamous was their barbarism. Thus, the Bard’s dubbing of this arch-villain Iago with a Spanish name was no accident.

  Could LeBoeuf’s Yago have come by his name from the Spaniards, whose dominance of the wilderness to the south had only recently fallen into eclipse? Perhaps “Yago” had some unrelated meaning in his own savage tongue.

  I was pondering these ironies when Lou-Lou erupted in another fit of braying hilarity seeing Roderigo and Cassio come to blows in Act II.

  “Idiot! Bouffon! Crétin!” LeBoeuf exploded volcanically. “Vous êtes impossible! Mercure! Oedipe! Venez ici tout de suite! Enlevez ce nicaise!”

  Two Indians rushed into the box and seized Lou-Lou.

  “No! Please! I’m sorry! Uncle Fernand—”

  “Silence!”

  One of the Indians clamped a hand over Lou-Lou’s mouth. His resistance was unavailing. They hoisted him out of his chair and dragged him from the box. We could hear his feet bouncing down the treads of the stairway. On stage, the action had stopped dead and all the players were gazing up at our box. Down below, the Indians stirred irritably,
like any audience whose pleasure has been interrupted. There were even a few whistles, hisses, and catcalls. Though I was mortified at the indignity Lou-Lou was subjected to, one could not deny that he had been given ample warning about behaving himself and had failed to do so, poor booby.

  “Please excuse this regrettable incident,” LeBoeuf addressed both the cast on stage and the audience below. “Resume the play, if you will be so kind.”

  The actors cleared their throats, brandished their swords, and recommenced the action. And so it went for another hour or more until the curtain fell on the Moor’s tragedy.

  Afterward, our host led us backstage while the audience noisily filed out through the doors at the rear. Madame excused herself, citing a headache. Indeed, LeBoeuf’s stage equipment was of the very latest design. The aforementioned Argand lamps were arrayed both as footlights at the apron and hung on “ladders,” as they are called, behind scene blinds at each wing. The lamp chimneys were tinted in some cases. Others used transparent silk screens to produce magical atmospheric effects.

  “We are experimenting still,” LeBoeuf remarked.

  “What kind of fuel do these lamps burn?” I asked.

  “Buffalo hump oil. Spermacetti is the best, but là! somewhat hard to come by here.”

  “May we meet the actors?”

  LeBoeuf hesitated, then looked to Yago, who shrugged his shoulders. “Very well,” the Frenchman said. “This way. Come.”

  The stagehands, I noticed, were Indians. At the deepest corner backstage was another spiral staircase. We followed LeBoeuf down. It led to a dank, poorly lighted corridor with walls of rough planking and a slatted floor. A familiar, acrid smell rose sourly out of the slats and it took me a moment to recognize what it was: the odor of bilges. We were below the waterline of the floating palace. It smelled like the hold of a ship.

  We continued to follow LeBoeuf a short way down the rank, forbidding corridor until we came to a doorless portal. Two strapping Indian guards, armed with pistols, glowered in stark yellow light that flickered from the portal. Inside were the Negroes.