world. Louisiana is a first step. This is an opportunity as significant as our revolutionary victory at Yorktown. I’ll fire every American dollar I receive at the English from the mouth of my cannons, and all of us can enjoy the spectacle.”
“Agreed. But after this service I’m determined to retire.”
“On what pension?”
“I acquired something of value in Tripoli I intend to sell.”
He eyed me with shrewd curiosity. “What is it?”
“No concern of the French government. A trifle, but enough to set my family for life.”
“That’s a remarkable trifle.”
“I’ve finally had remarkable luck.”
“You’ve been quite valuable at times, Gage, if annoying at others.” Napoleon had almost had me shot two or three times. “Realize that one doesn’t resign from destiny at will. Yes, you’re American, but when your interests coincide with France’s, then you become French. Do you understand?”
“I understand that’s exactly what I wish to retire from. I’m working very hard at being useless. Except for Louisiana, of course.”
“It’s important we complete this sale, Gage. You must stay in Paris until it’s concluded.”
“I understand. But given that I haven’t actually sold my trifle yet, I wonder if an appointment could come from all my hard work? Especially if you’re about to gain fifty million francs.” It’s always smart to look for crumbs from the diplomatic table. “A salary will convince American negotiators I truly represent your thinking.”
“Ha! If you wish to pretend partnership with me, you should adopt the habit of my most trusted agents.”
“Which is?”
“A discreet tattoo, signifying their loyalty.”
“A tattoo of what?”
“The initial N, surrounded by a laurel wreath.”
“You must be joking.”
“Life is filled with enemies. There has to be some way to tell friends.”
“Not by wearing another man’s brand.”
“It’s a secret legion.” He was annoyed that I wasn’t flattered. “Or you can have a more temporary badge, but you must give it back should you ever displease me.”
“What’s that?”
He opened a drawer in his desk and drew out a small medal on a chain. It was the same design as the tattoo but in gold, an ornament to wear around the neck. “Only a handful of agents are so favored.”
It would give me credibility, I supposed. I took it in my palm. Small, light, unobtrusive, and removable. “Not very much metal.”
“There are a million men who would pledge their lives for such favor.”
“I appreciate the honor.” I didn’t, but wanted to avoid insult.
“And your discoveries, when on missions for me, belong to France.”
“A last mission on Louisiana, in Paris, and then home. Something to buy bread would help in the meantime,” I persisted.
When it came to money, he could be evasive as a loan officer. “Get Louisiana for your president, Gage, and they’ll make you a congressman.”
Chapter 4
So I worked to double the size of my homeland, arranging a meeting with Livingston to plant the idea of buying every savage-infested acre. We actually had something in common. Robert Livingston had been the grand master of Freemasonry’s Grand Lodge in New York before traveling to France. I was a Mason as well, although I didn’t tell him it was of the most casual and disreputable kind.
“It was Benjamin Franklin himself who introduced me to the precepts of your fraternity,” I said to ingratiate myself. “I’ve striven to live up to them ever since.” Striven, but not succeeded. “If my government could afford a modest salary, I might be able to linger in Paris to see the bargaining through. I’m a confidant of Napoleon, you know.” I showed him the pendant.
It helped that Livingston had struck up a friendship with my American colleague Robert Fulton after meeting the inventor at one of his “panoramas,” or huge circular paintings on such lurid themes as “city conflagrations.” Fulton charged admission to earn a living while designing unnecessary machines. We’d lost the tinkerer’s submarine Nautilus when rescuing Astiza and Harry from Tripoli, but now Fulton had a grander scheme for a contraption called a steamboat. It was to be two and a half times as long as his submersible, and painted bright as a carnival. It would be captained by a man called a mechanician and would go three miles an hour against the current, cutting the time for freight to go from Nantes to Paris from four months to two weeks.
Such speed seemed unlikely, but Livingston (a steam engine enthusiast who’d written to the inventor of that device, James Watt, in London) had joined Fulton’s project. The eccentrics were as happy as boys with a play fort, so to keep their favor, I quit pointing out that machines are expensive, heavy, and deafening. Like all men, the pair liked things that made noise, be it a lusty wench at full gallop, the crack of a cannon, or the headache-inducing thump of boiler and crank.
“I guess we could spare you a small stipend,” Livingston said.
Bonaparte also gave me a letter of introduction to his minister Francois Barbe-Marbois, the French negotiator. I got on famously with him as well, because we were both victims of the unpredictability of fortune. Francois had actually served as intendant of Saint-Domingue in 1785 before the slave revolt began, and was well aware the colony was swallowing Napoleon’s army. After the revolution, his moderation made him suspect by royalist and revolutionary alike, since reasonable men like us are always threatening to the ambitious and fanatic. For a while he was imprisoned in hellish French Guiana. Now that Bonaparte was firmly in power, his common sense was deemed useful again.
I confided that I’d had my own ups and downs. “I’ve had a pharaoh’s hoard and a book of magic slip through my fingers, and until I got married I had the devil’s own time with women. But I remain ambitious. I’ll try to get the Americans to raise their sights. If you could advance me a French salary for my expenses, I can afford to wait to bend the ear of James Monroe.”
“You really think your countrymen will pay to take this wasteland off our hands?” Barbe-Marbois could scarcely believe we Americans were so gullible.
“I had companions who thought Louisiana was the Garden of Eden. One killed, the other wounded, but they were optimists.”
So my chance to draw pay from both America and France, and to encourage the greatest real estate deal in history, caused us to linger in Paris into the spring of 1803.
It was a pleasant interlude. We strolled the Tivoli Gardens, where fireworks and acrobats delighted my son. There was a tethered elephant, two rather bored and ratty-looking lions in iron cages, and an ostrich that Napoleon’s troops had brought back from Egypt. It displayed considerably more ferocity than the cats.
At the competing Frascati amusement park (only a franc a day per person) there was a miniature village of mills and bridges that absorbed my boy like a Gulliver. “Look, a real castle!” he’d cry at fortifications three feet high.
The balloon ascents we watched at the Tuileries brought powerful emotions to Astiza and me, given our history in Egypt. The exotic costumes of street performers brought to mind perilous times in the Holy Land.
I found married life altogether different from our frequently interrupted courtship. We were no longer allied by danger and didn’t have the flush that comes from novelty and infatuation. Instead, there was deepening affection and security. Like many great men, my mentor Benjamin Franklin had been a poor husband who hadn’t hesitated to expound on what makes a good one. Marriage was an investment in time, commitment, and compromise, he told me, a work for which the profit was contentment and even, “at times,” bright happiness. “The most natural state of man,” he’d counseled.
