Without Precedent
Page 15
While the Americans tried to wheedle their way into a meeting with Talleyrand, the French newspapers kicked off a campaign—clearly directly by Talleyrand—to embarrass and criticize the American envoys for the lack of progress in their negotiations.5 In November 1797, Talleyrand sent a new parade of visitors to Marshall’s door to charm—or bludgeon—the American envoys into compliance.
Around the same time, Marshall received a note from Beaumarchais, the playwright and arms dealer Marshall was representing in his claim against Virginia. They had not met previously, but Beaumarchais had heard that there was an American by the name of Marshall visiting Paris, and Beaumarchais wondered if this was his attorney. In fact, Beaumarchais was acting at the direction of Talleyrand, which Marshall may have suspected. Beaumarchais was desperate for funds at this time and may have been working for Talleyrand. When Marshall and Beaumarchais met, they hit it off immediately, and Beaumarchais reported back to Talleyrand that the Americans were not inclined to pay the bribe Talleyrand demanded.6
The next stranger to appear at Marshall’s flat was Joseph Pitcairn, a New York businessman living in Paris. Pitcairn lived next door to Talleyrand and had business dealings with Pinckney. Talleyrand had asked him to help facilitate negotiations with the Americans. Pitcairn suggested an alternative arrangement whereby the United States could purchase Dutch bonds from the French government at a premium. In other words, the United States could disguise a loan to France from both the U.S. public and the British government by overpaying the French for Dutch securities. Pinckney and Marshall firmly opposed this scheme as well.7
“I counted on being at home in March,” Marshall wrote to Polly at the end of November. “I now apprehend that it will not be in my power to reach America until April or May.” He had not heard from her since his departure from Philadelphia in July, and he knew she would be disappointed by the news that his return might be delayed until the late spring. He wanted her to know that the situation was beyond his control. “Oh God how much time & how much happiness have I thrown away!”8 But perhaps Marshall was feeling a bit guilty about the fact that he was beginning to enjoy Paris for the first time now that he had changed residences.
In mid-November, Marshall and Gerry moved from their cramped quarters “in the style of a miserable old batchelor without any mixture of female society,” to l’hôtel d’Elbeuf, located at 70 rue de Vaugirard (now number 54). Marshall had three elegant rooms on the ground floor across the street from the Luxembourg Palace for five guineas less per month than he had paid for his inferior accommodations.9 On the rare days when it was not raining, he could cross the street and stroll for hours in the Luxembourg Garden. He wrote to Polly that this was “the house of a very accomplishd a very sensible & I believe a very amiable lady whose temper, very contrary to the general character of her country women, is domestic & who generally sets with us two or three hours in the afternoon.” Polly could not have been comforted to read the next line: “This renders my situation less unpleasant than it has been.”10
* * *
—
THE “VERY AMIABLE LADY” was Reine Philiberte Rouph de Varicourt, the marquise de Villette. Reine was an intelligent, piquant, and attractive widow with thick black curls and dancing dark eyes who looked a decade younger than her forty-two years.
Reine had a storied past. She was the daughter of an impoverished nobleman. Without a dowry, she was consigned by her father to a cloister. When she was nineteen, Reine met the elderly Voltaire, who was a friend of her parents’. Voltaire decided to rescue her from the nunnery. He invited her to live with him in his country home at Ferney as his “adopted” daughter—though it was rumored that she was, in fact, Voltaire’s illegitimate daughter.11
At Ferney, Reine became a combination nurse, confidante, and assistant to the famous author. Voltaire in his eighties was a mercurial tyrant subject to violent fits of rage. He was also wildly unconventional. He kept a vicious pet monkey named Luc that Voltaire joked was like the Prussian king “because he bites everyone.” Reine, who loved animals, impressed Voltaire by taming the beast.12 Reine became his favorite, and in his writings, he called her La Belle et Bonne because her heart was as lovely as her countenance. Reine was constantly by Voltaire’s side during his last years. He taught her to dance and prepared her for a life as an aristocrat. She, in turn, bewitched the savage poet with the same charm that she used to domesticate his monkey.13
Before he died, Voltaire hoped to marry Reine off to a wealthy nobleman. He found a convenient match in Charles Michel, the marquis de Villette. Charles had a staggering fortune, which he inherited at a young age from his father. His mother was an especially intimate friend of Voltaire’s, and it may have been more than a coincidence that Charles bore a salient resemblance to Voltaire.14 Charles’s ambition was to be a great writer like Voltaire. All he lacked was talent. Charles was a vicious drunk, a wild spendthrift, and a mediocre scribbler. True, he had shown some promise as a law student, and he published something that passed as poetry, but he had long since abandoned any serious literary pursuits for carnal pleasures.
In fairness, Charles had distinguished himself in one respect—as the most notorious homosexual of his day. Eighteenth-century French society generally winked at homosexuality as long as a man was merely being unfaithful to his wife. Charles, however, did not have even the pretext of a spouse. For this, he was ostracized as a “degenerate” and a devotee of the “Italian vice.” His homosexual male friends slyly called him Alcibiades, the pretty youth who tried to seduce Socrates.15 Charles’s licentious behavior often led to encounters with the Paris police, who otherwise avoided arresting nobility for soliciting sex in the Tuileries. He was lampooned and libeled as the leader of the “sodomites,” but to his credit, he was largely indifferent to society’s censure.16
None of this deterred Voltaire from wanting Reine to marry Charles. She was a twenty-year-old virgin without a dowry, and he was a wealthy, if profligate, homosexual more than twice her age. Marriage was, after all, a matter of convenience: De Villette needed a wife to produce an heir and stay out of jail, and the beautiful Reine needed a wealthy husband to support her when Voltaire was gone.
The ideal opportunity to introduce the couple presented itself when Charles was challenged to a duel over the honor of a dancer he had insulted at the Paris Opera. Terrified of swordfights, Charles fled to Ferney to hide out at Voltaire’s. That night, Voltaire hosted a dinner in honor of Saint Francis, the Italian mystic who had preached to the birds. Reine had raised and trained a pair of doves to perform for this occasion. Things went awry when the doves were “mistakenly” roasted and served on a platter to the horrified Reine. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Voltaire may have orchestrated this calamity as a pretext for bringing together Charles and Reine. Though Saint Francis would not have approved, the plan succeeded. Reine ran off, and Charles chased after her. Voltaire could not have written it better. He had killed two birds with one stone. Reine and Charles were married soon after. To celebrate their unconventional marriage, they ascended in a hot-air balloon, making Madame de Villette perhaps the first woman ever to fly.17
Charles may have hoped that marriage would restore his social standing, but, in fact, it nearly destroyed his young wife. Reine knew about Charles’s past, but presumably the wise Voltaire had assured the alluring young Reine that she could “fix” Charles. Even after the marriage and the births of their daughter and son, Charles continued to prefer men to his wife. He humiliated and tormented Madame de Villette with his debauchery, arrests, and cruelty. In their palatial château on the rue de Beaune, he kept two of his male lovers, the marquis de Thibouville and the prosecutor Clos, so there was no need for her companionship.18
By the time Charles died in 1793, he had squandered most of his fortune, and his estate teetered on insolvency. To make matters worse, Madame de Villette was jailed as a royalist by the Directory shortly after Charles’s death. The Fre
nch government expropriated some of the houses she had inherited from her husband and redistributed them to the working class. When she was released, Madame de Villette was evicted from their lavish home on rue de Beaune. She relocated to their more modest though still-spacious l’hôtel d’Elbeuf. She now lived with her twelve-year-old daughter and her four-year-old son, whom she called Voltaire though his given name was Charles. To supplement her income, she leased rooms to foreign envoys.
For all of Madame de Villette’s refinement, her tastes ran from the peculiar to the macabre. She furnished the house as if it were a shrine to Voltaire. In the sitting room, she displayed his marble bust with burning incense and one of his faded robes. Most bizarre of all, she kept Voltaire’s heart preserved in a silver case in the center of the drawing room as if it were a saint’s reliquary.19
Even after her torturous marriage, Madame de Villette remained youthful. She captivated the hearts of many men in the American expatriate community in Paris. Gerry gushed that she was “one of the finest women in Paris: on account of the goodness of her heart, her excellent morals, & the richness of her mind.” But he reassured his wife that “she is not handsome, but such a woman as you would like.”20 That line must have aroused Mrs. Gerry’s suspicion.21 Even Mrs. Pinckney noted that she was “an agreeable pleasing woman,” whom she thought looked about thirty.22
Marshall could not have been happier with his new accommodations. He described to Polly his spending hours sitting with de Villette. Since she spoke only French and he spoke only English, they must have found some other means to communicate. It’s likely that de Villette tutored Marshall in French because he developed a rudimentary knowledge of the language over the next few months. In any case, there is no question that Marshall completely trusted de Villette, and when he eventually left Paris, she was the one person he seemed truly sad to leave behind. All of which is to say that Marshall had no reason to suspect that she, too, might be an agent of Talleyrand’s.23
* * *
—
GERRY CONTINUED TO MEET secretly with Talleyrand’s agents, and this had become a source of friction between the commissioners. On December 17, Marshall knocked on Gerry’s door and was surprised to see him meeting privately with Bellamy. Reiterating Pitcairn’s earlier suggestion, Bellamy proposed that in lieu of giving France a loan outright, the United States should purchase sixteen million Dutch notes from France for about 1.3 million pounds sterling (about $169 million today)—which was double their market value.24 Bellamy reported that Beaumarchais even offered to pay fifty thousand pounds of “private gratification” to Talleyrand out of whatever he recovered from Virginia in the suit that Marshall was handling.25
Marshall was stunned by the audacity of this plan. Bellamy’s proposal threatened to compromise Marshall and entangle his professional representation of Beaumarchais with his public duties. But he seemed to equivocate at first. Marshall might be willing to have Beaumarchais pay a gratuity to the foreign minister, but only if France first recognized American claims for captured vessels. That was all Bellamy needed to hear. He left thinking that Marshall had opened the door for further discussion of the bribe.26
By speaking with Bellamy, Marshall had unwittingly reengaged the process of informal negotiation. Pinckney reminded his colleagues that they had agreed not to enter into informal negotiations but insist on direct negotiations with the foreign minister. Accordingly, the three prepared another letter to Talleyrand restating their position and requesting that he either open negotiations or grant them their passports to return to America.27
Marshall expected Pinckney to drop by his room that evening for dinner. He answered a knock and was surprised to see Madame de Villette dressed to go out. She had reserved a box at the Odeon for a one-night-only performance of Voltaire’s controversial tragedy, Mahomet. The play was an allegory that attacked organized religion. She invited Marshall join her. It would be hard to refuse an evening alone with de Villette. She was not just another theater enthusiast; she was Voltaire’s “adopted” daughter. And Marshall may have had other motives for accompanying her. Five months had passed since he had seen his wife. Marshall appreciated female companionship. De Villette’s sudden invitation delighted him, and in his excitement, he completely forgot that Pinckney was coming for dinner. He rushed out the door without sending a note to Pinckney explaining his change of plans. Marshall was chagrined to find Pinckney’s card when he returned late that evening, but he was also embarrassed by the implication of his accompanying de Villette alone, her tiny gloved hand in his.28 We do not know what transpired that evening, but it set in motion events that Marshall could not control.
On Christmas Eve 1797, Marshall faced a dilemma. Marshall and Pinckney agreed that there was no chance of moving forward with negotiations, but Gerry wanted to keep trying. Marshall was convinced that Talleyrand was dragging his feet so that once France conquered Britain, the French could turn their predatory eyes on North America. Marshall wanted to return to Philadelphia and sound the alarm in Congress to prepare for war with France. However, if Marshall and Pinckney left, it would give France a pretext for blaming a rupture in their relations on the two envoys and divide public opinion in the United States. Marshall thought that the nation would unite against France, but he could not be sure. He and Pinckney decided that if no progress was made by January they would leave for England and wait there until the spring when it was safer to travel.29
Marshall and Pinckney recognized that they were in personal danger. Talleyrand’s agents hinted darkly that if the Americans did not accede to its demands, the Directory might detain them—or worse. The Directory had never accorded them diplomatic recognition, and therefore the commissioners had no immunity from arrest or prosecution. In reality, it would hardly have mattered if France had accepted their credentials, as the Directory had arrested four foreign diplomats that fall. Mrs. Pinckney worried that the envoys could be seized at any time.30 She did not want to leave her house, fearing “the risk strangers run of being imprisoned without knowing why or wherefore.”31
Marshall spent the first two weeks of January preparing a memo to Talleyrand arguing that the United States had complied with the 1778 Treaty of Alliance. Marshall’s memorandum has been called “one of the ablest state papers ever produced by American diplomacy.”32 It was surely among the most eloquent. “Openly and repeatedly have France & America interchanged unequivocal testimonials of reciprocal regard,” he began. “These testimonials were given by the United States with all the ardor and sincerity of Youth.”33 Then the tone darkened.
The United States, Marshall argued, had considered its treaty obligations and concluded that “her engagements by no means bound her to take part in the war, but left her so far the mistress of her own Conduct as to be at perfect liberty to observe a system of real neutrality.” Not only was the United States not legally bound to intervene, Marshall argued, it was bound by the “Laws of nature” to refrain. Beyond moral considerations, national interests “forbid the Government of the United States to plunge them unnecessarily into the miseries of the bloody conflict then commencing.”34
Marshall set out two starkly different views of world politics. First, he described the contemporary state of European politics.
The great nations of Europe, either impelled by ambition, or by existing or supposed political interests peculiar to themselves, have consumed more than a third of the present century in war. Whatever causes may have produced so afflicting an evil, they cannot be supposed to have been entirely extinguished, and humanity can scarcely indulge the hope that the temper or condition of man is so altered as to exempt the next century from the ills of the past. Strong fortifications, powerful navies, immense Armies, the accumulated wealth of ages and a full population enable the nations of Europe to support those wars in which they are induced to engage by motives which they deem adequate and by interests exclusively their own.35
He contrasted this with
the very different circumstances of the United States.
Possessed of an extensive unsettled territory, on which bountiful nature has bestowed with a lavish hand all the capacities for future legitimate greatness, they indulge no thirst for conquest, no ambition for the extension of their limits. Encircled by no dangerous powers, they neither fear or are jealous of their neighbours, and are not, on that account, obliged to arm for their own safety. Separated far from Europe by a vast & friendly ocean, they are but remotely, if at all, affected by those interests, which agitate & influence this portion of the world. Thus circumstanced, they have no motives for voluntary war.36
* * *
—
MARSHALL POSITED THAT American geography shaped American exceptionalism since it would have been tactless to assert the superiority of the American character. Instead, Marshall rested his argument on the unique geographical circumstances that insulated America from foreign influences. Geography also made the United States dependent on foreign trade and therefore dictated the necessity to avoid war.
An extensive undefended commerce, peculiarly necessary to a nation, which does not manufacture for itself, which is and for a long time to come will be almost exclusively agricultural, would have been its immediate and certain victim . . . Great as are the means & resources of the United States for self defence, ’tis only in self defence that those resources can be completely displayed. Neither the genius of the nation, or the state of its finances admit of calling its citizens from the plough, but to defend their own liberty and their own firesides.37