Paradise bronx, p.16
Paradise Bronx, page 16
In his spare time, Morris pursued Mme. de Flahaut. She questioned him on the subject of respect. He confided to his diary that he told her, “I never lost my Respect for those who consented to make me happy on the Principles of Affection” (i.e., “Of course, I’ll respect you after!”). On July 14 a mob attacked and overwhelmed the Bastille and freed the prisoners. Lafayette commemorated this exciting event by giving the keys of the Bastille to Thomas Paine for him to take to America and deliver in person to freedom’s hero, George Washington. At Mme. de Flahaut’s apartment, Morris insisted to her that he could never be “only a Friend.” He said he knew himself too well for that and felt too strongly. She replied that she could not be unfaithful to Talleyrand (no mention of Flahaut, the husband).
On an outing in the city, Gouverneur and Adèle made a visit to the ruined Bastille. The architect in charge of completing its demolition gave them a tour; one can hardly imagine a more memorable first date. In his diary Morris wrote that the ancient prison “stinks horribly.” Scenes of chaos now appeared with nightmare luridness on the Paris streets—Morris was waiting for his carriage at the Palais Royal when a crowd went by, holding the head of a government official on a pike and dragging the rest of the body behind. Morris had recently met and chatted with the man to whom these parts belonged. In the midst of all the excitement, Morris recorded on July 27 that he and Adèle finally became lovers.
What he did next would not have surprised anyone who knew him well (a category that included nobody). His new friend must have been at least bemused when, after five months of bestowing upon her his almost daily attentions, witty poems, and romantic importunities, he disappeared. At the end of July, just a few days after they’d become intimate, Morris went to England and stayed gone for six weeks. He did have real business there. Washington had asked him to be his unofficial emissary, because the British had so far sent no ambassador to the United States, and vice versa. The new government wanted the British to shut down their forts in the frontier backcountry, leave U.S. ships and shipping alone, and stop impressing American seamen into their navy (as stipulated by previous treaty). In England, Morris also hoped to sell lands he had acquired in upstate New York and talk to bankers about buying up some of the war debt the United States owed to France, among other projects.
A question Washington particularly wanted Morris to look into seems unrealistic, even ridiculous today. The British Army had freed tens of thousands of enslaved people during the war, and the American government believed that their former owners deserved reimbursement. The chance that the British government would ever have followed through on these agreed-to payments seems vanishingly small, but Morris made inquiries anyway, without success. Washington himself had returned after the war to find seventeen of Mount Vernon’s slaves no longer on the premises. Maybe that was why the question kept troubling him.
Morris’s business dealings and backstairs diplomacy, sketchily referred to in the diary, are complicated to understand. Why he decided he had to take care of them just then, no one can tell. If he intended to make Mme. de Flahaut miss him and demonstrate the magic he had (the power to be Everybody and Nobody, the power to be gone), he succeeded. When he returned to Paris, she was out of town. He sent a letter to her, which, when she received it, caused her to fly immediately to him. On the morning of September 22, he got a note from her and went to see her at her Louvre apartment. She had left wherever she’d been and traveled ninety miles by stagecoach, with eighteen changes of horses, and much of the way over bad roads, in fifteen hours. Going to such effort, Morris wrote, “merely to see one’s friend is Proof of Sincerity … charming Sex [i.e., the female sex], you are capable of every Thing!”
So began for him a giddy period of passion and kibbitzing in somebody else’s revolution. He saw Mme. de Flahaut constantly, and his diary is filled with euphemisms: “After Dinner we join in Adoration to the Cyprian Queen, which with Energy repeated conveys to my kind of Votary all of mortal Bliss which can be enjoyed. I leave her reclined in the sweet Tranquility of Nature well satisfied.” He found all kinds of ways to say the same thing. “We laugh and chat till the Servants are gone to their Dinner and then perform the usual Rites.” On various occasions in her apartment, they “do the whole Duty of Man,” they “taste the genial Joy,” they “perform the genial Act,” and so on. He describes her as very happy, and despite the frequent coldness of his observations it is clear that, in his fashion, he is, too.
She pledges fidelity to him and forswears sleeping with Talleyrand; but the subtle bishop remains present in her life. He is the father of her son, and she has long been his sounding board and collaborator. Talleyrand’s ability to survive, often in high positions of power, unguillotined, from the days of Louis XVI through the deadly writhings of the Revolution and the ascent and descent of Napoleon, has amazed history. In some ways he and Morris resembled each other. Both used their brilliance to keep a distance from whatever situation they were in, and both walked unevenly—Morris on his wooden leg, Talleyrand on a club foot. Morris took his rival’s measure with his usual clarity; soon after they first met, but before Morris was involved with Mme. de Flahaut, he described the bishop as “a sly, cool, cunning, ambitious, and malicious Man.” Napoleon’s epithet for Talleyrand—“merde in a silk stocking”—remains the gold standard. Though this description owes a lot to the delicacy of a nineteenth-century translator, it somehow captures him better than if all the words were in the one language or the other.
In the headiness of the Revolution during its early stages, Morris remained a skeptic. He predicted that when the government became a constitutional monarchy, Louis would soon lose his crown, violently or otherwise. Jefferson, an ardent booster of the Revolution, thought it would be bloodless after a constitution was in place; Morris saw chaos and mayhem waiting up ahead. At a dinner with the Lafayettes and others at Jefferson’s house, he said (according to his diary), “The Current is setting so strong against the Noblesse that I apprehend their Destruction, in which will I fear be involved Consequences most pernicious, tho little attended to in the present Moment.” Nobody wanted to hear that. What he foresaw was still a few years over the horizon. For these and similar sentiments, newspaper stories characterized him as a friend of the aristocracy. Later, Jefferson would accuse Morris of poisoning Washington’s mind against the Revolution. Jefferson believed the Revolution’s real problem was that too many women got involved in it. He blamed it all on Marie Antoinette.
In connection with Jefferson and his Paris household, Morris does not mention Sally Hemings, one of its enslaved people, who was sixteen at the time. Of course, he wouldn’t be likely to. The only context in which the lowest class came up might be in an anecdote about the governor of the Leeward Islands, who had his slaves rubbed with butter until they glistened. Sally Hemings had arrived in Paris, accompanying Jefferson’s younger daughter, two years before, so presumably she was somewhere nearby the dinner party, maybe elsewhere in the house. This essential and opaque person in American history would bear Jefferson six children and may have become pregnant by him for the first time while in France.
Lafayette, like his wife, argued righteously with Morris. He told him that Morris’s opinions were being quoted against “the good Party,” i.e., Lafayette and his followers. Morris replied, in so many words, that the mob was leading Lafayette rather than the other way around. He finally got Lafayette to concede that “he is sensible his party are mad … but he is not the less determined to die with them.” The young marquis seems to have gone a bit nuts himself. With Jefferson’s help, and that of others, he wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which the National Constituent Assembly adopted in August 1789. At one point he said he was tired of power, then told Morris that in two weeks he would be “generalissimo with all authority.” Morris went on, “This man’s mind is so elated by power, already too great for the measure of his abilities, that he looks into the clouds and grasps at the supreme.” Jefferson, though a close friend of his, said that Lafayette had a “canine appetite” for fame.
Gouverneur and Adèle took their affair to the brink of trashiness. They made love when one of her nieces was in the next room with the door open playing the harpsichord, seized quick interludes in Morris’s carriage, and seem hardly to have disguised what they were up to, sometimes waiting not a moment after her husband had departed. Morris wrote satirical verses about Flahaut to entertain her that were not only mean but unworthy of Morris. Like thieves without honor the lovers also inflicted some of the hardest blows on each other. She still received Talleyrand in her apartment and worked with him on his projects and schemes as before. The bishop had moved on from her to an affair with Mme. de Staël, the famed diarist and all-around force of nature, but when Morris left Mme. de Flahaut and Talleyrand together of an evening, he wondered if he was being cuckolded himself.
Offhandedly Morris reported in his diary that one day he told her he did not love her, which surprised her, and “wounded [her] to the Soul.” With the future looking shakier every day, she was worried about the safety of herself and her son. She asked Gouverneur if he would promise to marry her, if it came to that. He said no. With Flahaut in the picture the idea was not possible anyway, he pointed out. He said they could discuss this again “when we are both free.” The refusal hurt her even more grievously and opened her eyes. He described her weeping and pleading: “A Countenance of Anguish, broken Expressions and all other due accompaniments of an agonizing Spirit are well exhibited.”
Jefferson and his household left Paris on their way back to America at the end of September 1789. With the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen safely approved by the Assembly, he could congratulate himself on having birthed another triumph for liberty. Sally Hemings could have stayed in Paris and been free herself—the new French government would abolish slavery in France—but she chose to return with him, on the condition that her children would one day be free. Evidently, the enslaved sixteen-year-old and the forty-four-year-old Founder-enslaver were a de facto couple by this point. Jefferson kept his promise; years later, he did free his children by Sally Hemings.
With Jefferson having resigned the ambassadorship and left, no American of stature able to represent the government remained. Morris filled in unofficially. He offered to counsel Lafayette as Jefferson had done, but the marquis demurred, perhaps finding Morris too realistic and depressing. Shortages of flour had produced a lack of bread, and mobs shouted for it, attacked bakeries, and beheaded bakers. Morris worked on a plan for importing flour, and met with Jacques Necker, the recently reappointed finance minister whose July firing had sparked the riots that destroyed the Bastille. The public kept expecting Necker’s brilliance to save the country, and he kept not saving it and being reappointed and refired. Madame de Staël was Necker’s daughter. She invited Morris to evenings at which the level of repartee exhausted him, and he wasn’t witty, a dispiriting change for a man who usually was. Mme. de Staël let him know she would sleep with him anyway, bestowing upon him a look similar to “what Sir John Falstaff calls the Leer of Invitation,” Morris wrote. Apparently, the invitation was declined.
Plans to buy up America’s debt, which could have helped stabilize flat-broke, deeply indebted France with an infusion of cash (and make money for Morris and his partners), turned his attention to the bankers of Amsterdam. In March 1790, he set out for that city, from which he would continue to England. Once again, he was disappearing on his friend, and this time he would be gone for more than eight months.
* * *
Back at Morrisania, Gouverneur’s half brother Lewis Morris had an inspiration. This year, 1790, was when the United States would choose the site for its permanent capital. Some citizens of Philadelphia wanted it to be on the Delaware River near that city; Gouverneur’s associate Robert Morris happened to own a large parcel of land there. Other places were in the running. Southern interests argued for a capital on the Potomac River in Virginia. Jefferson and Madison strongly inclined to this view. When Lewis Morris learned that Congress, then meeting in New York City, had been discussing the question, he wrote the legislators a letter suggesting that the nation build its new capital in what is now the Bronx.
Specifically, in Morrisania, on land he would be willing to part with. He described the place’s many attractions. He said it had a good climate free of agues and fevers (this jab aimed at champions of the Potomac site, much of which was swamp). Travelers could get to Morrisania easily by water (true, if one disregarded the shipwrecking rocks of Hell Gate, nearby in the East River). The anchorage remained ice-free all year (possibly also true, though inland waters all around the city had frozen solid in the winter of 1780–1781). A sturdy local population existed in Westchester County and environs to defend the capital (if they all could be persuaded to take the same side, which they certainly had not done during the days of the Neutral Ground). And, finally, he said, Negroes in the area were relatively few, removing the danger of a slave uprising in wartime (a supposed drawback for any capital located in the South).
Lewis Morris knew he lived in a prime location, one of the most strategic in the country. He just did a muddled job of selling it. What was great and indispensable about the future Bronx would be revealed only with time and had little to do with the reasons he gave. In any case, Lewis Morris’s proposal would carry no weight in the decision. Bigger forces, and familiar ones, worked it out. Southerners wanted the capital closer to them for reasons of power and convenience. Federalists—Hamilton, especially—were pushing for the new government to assume the individual states’ Revolutionary War debts, because if Congress could pay them off that would strengthen federal power.
The two sides compromised: Several southern representatives went along on the issue of the state debts, and the Potomac River site became the capital. (A song based on this compromise is in Hamilton, the musical.) Had Gouverneur Morris been home, and not wandering on the other side of the Atlantic, he could not have changed the outcome. It was just as well. Eventually the Bronx, like the rest of New York City, would have too much going on to be merely the capital of a country; now of the world, maybe …
13
IN ENGLAND, Morris saw his half brother Staats; ate oysters with James Boswell; and made money and mischief. He had become involved in the shipping business, in association with the New York firm of his friend John Constable, who was depositing a share of the proceeds from successful voyages into his account. Soon he would be a wealthy man, and he would remain so for the rest of his life. Morris bought a 550-ton ship in England, the Goliah, which set out on a voyage to India. (Goliah, we recall, was also the name of Colonel James DeLancey’s horse.) In the mischief department, Morris tried to start a war between Britain and France. A complicated incident between Spain and Britain in the Pacific Northwest of North America showed potential for blowing up into something bigger, and he urged the French foreign minister to dispatch the French navy on the side of Spain. He thought France would unify behind the king if a war started. The foreign minister seems to have decided that his country had enough to worry about; even without Morris’s help, war would come to the French soon enough.
Morris returned to Paris in early November 1790, and when he called on Mme. de Flahaut, he met a disagreeable surprise: Now he had competition. He found her with a visitor, Earl Henry Wycombe, son of the Earl of Shelburne, who had been a British prime minister. Just what her relationship with Wycombe was she did not make clear, but she let Morris know that as far as he, Morris, was concerned, she had determined to be sage, or chaste. They could continue as friends, she said. Worse news soon followed—on the next day Morris again stopped by, and was denied admittance! That was a first. When he recorded this fact in his diary, he underlined it.
A few days later he went back, and the weather had changed. He found his friend seule and no longer sage. His pride had been wounded, and he told her this would be the last time. She laughed at him; by now she knew him well. Indeed, their affair continued, even after he understood that she had also been with Talleyrand while he was gone. (To be sure, he had brief affairs himself on his travels, occasionally even in Paris.) In his diary Morris observed that he now had two rivals to contend with, and she held the advantage over him. When her husband, old Flahaut, fell ill, Morris hoped he would die. Perhaps Morris had rethought his refusal to marry her.
The political situation kept changing and the king’s position grew more perilous. As the people’s anger against Marie Antoinette rose higher, eligible noblewomen feared to be her ladies-in-waiting. But when she asked Mme. de Flahaut to serve in her court, the countess said yes. From this point, Morris communicated with the king and queen regularly, advised them, and even wrote speeches for the king. In July 1791, he took part in arranging an escape attempt that ended with the royals being caught, brought back, and put under house arrest in the Tuileries Palace in Paris. They would remain in increasingly close confinement until their executions. Morris told his partners in America that turmoil in France was good for land sales, because aristocrats were looking for safe places to flee to. Unfortunately, the king’s escape attempt was followed by a clampdown on emigration.
