But All This
Must, In Nautical Phrase, "Go By The Board," Including The Novel
Founded Upon The Episode.
Nor can we linger over Crevecoeur's entry
into polite society, both in the Norman capital and at Paris.
Fancy
the returned prodigal - if one may so describe him - in the salon of
Madame d'Houdetot, Rousseau's former mistress! He was fairly
launched, this American Farmer, in the society of the lettres.
"Twice a week," he wrote, some years after, "I went with M. de
Turgot to see the Duchesse de Beauvilliers, his sister; and another
twice-a-week I went with him to the Comte de Buffon's. ... It was at
the table of M. de Buffon, it was in his salon, during long winter
evenings, that I was awakened once more to the graces, the beauties,
the timid purity of our tongue, which, during my long sojourn in
North America, had become foreign to me, and of which I had almost
lost command - though not the memory."
Madame d'Houdetot presented Crevecoeur to the families of La
Rochefoucauld, Liancourt, d'Estissac, Breteuil, Rohan-Chabot,
Beauvau, Necker; to the academicians d'Alembert, La Harpe, Grimm,
Suard, Rulbriere; to the poet-academician Delille. We have in the
Memoires of Brissot an allusion to his entrance into this society,
under the wing of his elderly protectress: -
"Proud of possessing an American savage, she wished to form him, and
to launch him in society. He had the good sense to refuse and to
confine himself to the picked society of men of letters."
It was at a later period that Brissot and Crevecoeur were to meet;
their quarrel, naturally, came later still.
Madame d'Houdetot did more than entertain the Farmer, whose father
had been one of her oldest friends. She secured his nomination as
Consul-General to the United States, now recognised by France; it
was at New York that he took up residence. Through the influence of
Madame d'Houdetot and her friends, he retained the appointment
through the stormy years that followed, though in the end he was
obliged to make way for a successor more in sympathy with the
violent republicanism of the age. Throughout the years of the French
Revolution, the ex-farmer lived a life of retirement, and, if never
of conspicuous danger, of embarrassment enough, and of humiliation.
We need not discuss those years spent at Paris; or the visits paid,
after the close of the Revolution, to his son-in-law and daughter,
for his daughter Frances-America was married to a French Secretary
of Legation, who became a Count of the Empire. Now he was in Paris
or the suburbs; now in London, or Munich. Five years of the Farmer's
later life were spent at the Bavarian capital; Maximilian
entertained him there, and told him that he had read his book with
the keenest pleasure and great profit too. He busied himself in
preparing his three-volume Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie (sic) et
dans l'Etat de New York, and in adding to his paper on potato
culture,[Footnote:
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