London, April to September 1822
BALTIMORE, like every other metropolis in the United States, was not then as large as it is today: it was a pretty little Catholic town, very clean and lively, where the mores and manners still bore a close resemblance to the mores and manners of Europe. I paid the captain for my passage and bought him a farewell dinner. I reserved a seat in the stagecoach that made the journey to Pennsylvania three times a week. At four o’clock in the morning I climbed in, and there I was, rolling along the highways of the New World.
The route that we followed, more marked out than made, took us across a rather flat stretch of country: almost no trees at all, scant few farms, and some scattered villages. The climate was French, and the swallows skimmed over the waters as they did over the pond at Combourg.
As we approached Philadelphia, we crossed paths with peasants on their way to market, public cabs, and private carriages. Philadelphia struck me as a fine town, with wide streets, some of which were planted with trees, and all of which intersected with one another at right angles and in a regular pattern, north and south, east and west. The Delaware River runs parallel to the street that follows the city’s western bank.[17] In Europe, this river would be considered tremendous; in America, no one mentions it. Its banks are low and not very picturesque.
At the time of my journey (1791), Philadelphia did not yet extend as far as the Schuylkill River, but the ground over toward that tributary had already been divided into lots, and on these lots several houses were under construction.
Philadelphia has a monotonous look. In general, what is missing from the Protestant cities of the United States are any great works of architecture: the Reformation, young in years, sacrifices nothing to the imagination and has rarely raised those domes, those airy naves, or those twin spires with which the ancient Catholic religion has crowned Europe. Not one monument in Philadelphia, New York, or Boston pyramids above the mass of walls and roofs. The eye is saddened to behold such an even level.
First I alighted at an inn, but soon I found an apartment in a boarding house occupied by planters from Santo Domingo and French émigrés with ideas quite different from mine. A land of liberty was offering asylum to people fleeing from liberty.[18] Nothing better proves the high value of generous institutions than these partisans of absolute power voluntarily exiling themselves in a pure democracy.
A man who landed in the United States as I did, full of enthusiasm for the classical world, a settler looking everywhere for the regularity of early Roman life, was bound to be shocked at finding the luxuriousness of the carriages, the frivolity of the conversations, the inequality of wealth, the immorality of banks and gaming houses, and the noise of dancehalls and theaters. In Philadelphia, I might easily have thought myself in Liverpool or Bristol. The people there were attractive: the Quaker girls, with their gray dresses, their identical little bonnets, and their pale faces, looked lovely.
At that time in my life, I greatly admired Republics, although I did not believe them possible at the stage of world history that we had reached: I understood Liberty as the ancients did, as the daughter of a nascent society’s ways; but I knew nothing of Liberty as the daughter of enlightenment and an old civilization, Liberty of the kind that the representative republic has proved to be a reality: God grant that it may be durable! No longer does one have to till his own little field, grumble about the arts and sciences, or grow long fingernails and a dirty beard to be free.
When I arrived in Philadelphia, George Washington was not there.[19] I was obliged to wait eight or so days to meet him. One morning, I saw him pass in a carriage drawn by a team of spirited horses, driven four-in-hand. Washington, according to my ideas at the time, had to be a sort of Cincinnatus; Cincinnatus in a chariot was a bit out of keeping with my notion of the Roman Republic, year 296. Could Washington the Dictator be anything other than a rustic, prodding his oxen with a goad and steadily gripping the handle of his plow? But when I did go to him with my letter of introduction, I discovered the simplicity of an old Roman.
A small house, which looked just the same as the neighboring houses, was the palace of the President of the United States. There were no guards, and not even footmen. I knocked, and a young maid opened the door. I asked her if the General was at home, and she replied that he was. I told her that I had a letter to present him. The maid asked me my name, which is difficult to pronounce in English and which she could not keep in her mind. She then said to me softly, “Walk in, sir,” and she went before me down one of those narrow hallways that serve as foyers in English houses. She showed me into a parlor, where she asked me to wait for the General.
I was unmoved. Great souls and great fortunes do not impress me at all: I admire the former without being overawed, and the latter inspire in me more pity than respect. No man’s face will ever disturb me.
After a few minutes, the General came in: a tall man, with a cold and calm rather than a noble demeanor, he resembled his portraits. I presented him with my letter in silence. He opened it and his eyes went straight to the signature, which he read aloud, exclaiming, “Colonel Armand!” This was the name by which he knew the Marquis de La Rouërie and with which the Marquis had signed.
We sat. I explained to him as best I could the reason for my journey. He replied to me in English and French monosyllables, listening to me with a sort of amazement. I noticed this and said to him somewhat heatedly, “But it is less difficult to discover the Northwest Passage than to create a nation, as you have done!”
“Well, well, young man!” he cried, taking me by the hand. He invited me to dinner the next day, and we said good night.
I took care not to be late. There were only five or six of us at table. The conversation turned on the French Revolution, and the General showed us a key from the Bastille. These keys, as I have already remarked, were rather silly trinkets then widely distributed. The same exporters of locksmith-wares, three years later, might have sent the President of the United States the bolt that sealed the cell of the monarch who gave liberty to France and America alike. If Washington had seen the “conquerors of the Bastille” in the gutters of Paris, he would have had less respect for his relic. The gravity and the force of the Revolution did not spring from those blood-smeared orgies. When the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685, the same populace from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine demolished the Protestant church at Charenton with as much zeal as they laid waste to the cathedral of Saint-Denis in 1793.
I left my host at ten o’clock in the evening and never saw him again. He departed the next day, and I continued on my journey.
Such was my encounter with the soldier-citizen, the liberator of a world. Washington went to his grave before even the smallest bit of fame attached itself to my footsteps; I passed before him as the most anonymous entity. He was in all his glory, I in all my obscurity, and I doubt whether my name stayed more than a day in his memory. I am nevertheless happy that his gaze once fell upon me. I would feel warmed by it for the rest of my life. There is a virtue in the gaze of a great man.