Henry Adams and the Adams Family—John Hay and Frank Mason—The Three Mousquetaires of Culture—Paris—“The Frenchman”—The South of France

I

I have been of late reading The Education of Henry Adams, and it recalls many persons and incidents belonging to the period about which I am now writing. I knew Henry Adams well; first in London, then in Boston and finally throughout his prolonged residence in Washington City. He was an Adams; very definitely an Adams, but, though his ghost may revisit the glimpses of the moon and chide me for saying so, with an English “cut to his jib.”

No three brothers could be more unlike than Charles Francis, John Quincy and Henry Adams. Brooks Adams I did not know. They represented the fourth generation of the brainiest pedigree—that is in continuous line—known to our family history. Henry thought he was a philosopher and tried to be one. He thought he was a man of the world and wanted to be one. He was, in spite of himself, a provincial.

Provincialism is not necessarily rustic, even suburban. There is no provincial quite so provincial as he who has passed his life in great cities. The Parisian boulevardier taken away from the asphalt, the cockney a little off Clapham Common and the Strand, is lost. Henry Adams knew his London and his Paris, his Boston and his Quincy—we must not forget Quincy—well. But he had been born, and had grown up, between the lids of history, and for all his learning and travel he never got very far outside them.

In manner and manners, tone and cast of thought he was English—delightfully English—though he cultivated the cosmopolite. His house in the national capital, facing the Executive Mansion across Lafayette Square—especially during the life of his wife, an adorable woman, who made up in sweetness and tact for some of the qualities lacking in her husband—was an intellectual and high-bred center, a rendezvous for the best ton and the most accepted people. The Adamses may be said to have succeeded the Eameses as leaders in semi-social, semi-literary and semi-political society.

There was a trio—I used to call them the Three Musketeers of Culture—John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge and Henry Adams. They made an interesting and inseparable trinity—Caleb Cushing, Robert J. Walker and Charles Sumner not more so—and it was worth while to let them have the floor and to hear them talk; Lodge, cool and wary as a politician should be; Hay, helterskelter, the real man of the world crossed on a Western stock; and Adams, something of a litÉratteur, a statesman and a cynic.

John Randolph Tucker, who when he was in Congress often met Henry at dinners and the like, said to him on the appearance of the early volumes of his History of the United States: “I am not disappointed, for how could an Adams be expected to do justice to a Randolph?”

While he was writing this history Adams said to me: “There is an old villain—next to Andrew Jackson the greatest villain of his time—a Kentuckian—don’t say he was a kinsman of yours!—whose papers, if he left any, I want to see.”

“To whom are you referring?” I asked with mock dignity.

“To John Adair,” he answered.

“Well,” said I, “John Adair married my grandmother’s sister and I can put you in the way of getting whatever you require.”

I have spoken of John Hay as Master of the Revels in the old Sutherland-Delmonico days. Even earlier than that—in London and Paris—an intimacy had been established between us. He married in Cleveland, Ohio, and many years passed before I came up with him again. One day in Whitelaw Reid’s den in the Tribune Building he reappeared, strangely changed—no longer the rosy-cheeked, buoyant boy—an overserious, prematurely old man. I was shocked, and when he had gone Reid, observing this, said: “Oh, Hay will come round all right. He is just now in one of his moods. I picked him up in Piccadilly the other day and by sheer force brought him over.”

When we recall the story of Hay’s life—one weird tragedy after another, from the murder of Lincoln to the murder of McKinley, including the tragic end of two members of his immediate family—there rises in spite of the grandeur that pursued him a single exclamation: “The pity of it!”

This is accentuated by Henry Adams’ Education. Yet the silent courage with which Hay met disaster after disaster must increase both the sympathy and the respect of those who peruse the melancholy pages of that vivid narrative. Toward the end, meeting him on a public occasion, I said: “You work too hard—you are not looking well.”

“I am dying,” said he.

“Yes,” I replied in the way of banter, “you are dying of fame and fortune.”

But I went no further. He was in no mood for the old verbal horseplay.

He looked wan and wizened. Yet there were still several years before him. When he came from Mannheim to Paris it was clear that the end was nigh. I did not see him—he was too ill to see any one—but Frank Mason kept me advised from day to day, and when, a month or two later, having reached home, the news came to us that he was dead we were nowise surprised, and almost consoled by the thought that rest had come at last.

Frank Mason and his wife—“the Masons,” they were commonly called, for Mrs. Mason made a wondrous second to her husband—were from Cleveland, Ohio, she a daughter of Judge Birchard—Jennie Birchard—he a rising young journalist caught in the late seventies by the glitter of a foreign appointment. They ran the gamut of the consular service, beginning with Basel and Marseilles and ending with Frankfurt, Berlin and Paris. Wherever they were their house was a very home—a kind of Yankee shrine—of visiting Americans and militant Americanism.

Years before he was made consul general—in point of fact when he was plain consul at Marseilles—he ran over to Paris for a lark. One day he said to me, “A rich old hayseed uncle of mine has come to town. He has money to burn and he wants to meet you. I have arranged for us to dine with him at the Anglaise to-night and we are to order the dinner—carte blanche.” The rich old uncle to whom I was presented did not have the appearance of a hayseed. On the contrary he was a most distinguished-looking old gentleman. The dinner we ordered was “stunning”—especially the wines. When the bill was presented our host scanned it carefully, scrutinizing each item and making his own addition, altogether “like a thoroughbred.” Frank and I watched him not without a bit of anxiety mixed with contrition. When he had paid the score he said with a smile: “That was rather a steep bill, but we have had rather a good dinner, and now, if you boys know of as good a dance hall we’ll go there and I’ll buy the outfit.”

II

First and last I have lived much in the erstwhile gay capital of France. It was gayest when the Duke de Morny flourished as King of the Bourse. He was reputed the Emperor’s natural half-brother. The breakdown of the Mexican adventure, which was mostly his, contributed not a little to the final Napoleonic fall. He died of dissipation and disappointment, and under the pseudonym of the Duke de Morra, Daudet celebrated him in “The Nabob.”

De Morny did not live to see the tumble of the house of cards he had built. Next after I saw Paris it was a pitiful wreck indeed; the Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries in flames; the Column gone from the Place VendÔme; but later the rise of the Third Republic saw the revival of the unquenchable spirit of the irrepressible French.

Nevertheless I should scarcely be taken for a Parisian. Once, when wandering aimlessly, as one so often does through the Paris streets, one of the touts hanging round the Cafe de la Paix to catch the unwary stranger being a little more importunate than usual, I ordered him to go about his business. “This is my business,” he impudently answered.

“Get away, I tell you!” I thundered, “I am a Parisian myself!”

He drew a little out of reach of the umbrella I held in my hand, and with a drawl of supreme and very American contempt, exclaimed, “Well, you don’t look it,” and scampered off.

Paris, however, is not all of France. Sometimes I have thought not the best part of it. There is the south of France, with Avignon, the heart of Provence, seat of the French papacy six hundred years ago, the metropolis of Christendom before the Midi was a region—Paris yet a village, and Rome struggling out of the debris of the ages—with Arles and NÎmes, and, above all, Tarascon, the home of the immortal Tartarin, for next-door neighbors. They are all hard by Marseilles. But Avignon ever most caught my fancy, for there the nights seem peopled with the ghosts of warriors and cardinals, and there on festal mornings the spirits of Petrarch and his Laura walk abroad, the ramparts, which bade defiance to Goth and Vandal and Saracen hordes, now giving shelter to bats and owls, but the atmosphere laden with legend

“...tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance and ProvenÇal song and sun-burnt mirth.”

Something too much of this! Let me not yield to the spell of the picturesque. To recur to matters of fact and get down to prose and the times we live in let us halt a moment on this southerly journey and have a look in upon Lyons, the industrial capital of France, which is directly on the way.

The idiosyncrasy of Lyons is silk. There are two schools of introduction in the art of silk weaving, one of them free to any lad in the city, the other requiring a trifle of matriculation. The first of these witnesses the whole process of fabrication from the reeling of threads to the finishing of dress goods, and the loom painting of pictures. It is most interesting of course, the painstaking its most obvious feature, the individual weaver living with his family upon a wage representing the cost of the barest necessities of life. Again, and ever and ever again, the inequalities of fortune! Where will it end?

The world has tried revolution and it has tried anarchy. Always the survival of the strong, nicknamed by Spencer and his ilk the “fittest.” Ten thousand heads were chopped off during the Terror in France to make room for whom? Not for the many, but the few; though it must be allowed that in some ways the conditions were improved.

Yet here after a hundred years, here in Lyons, faithful, intelligent men struggle for sixty, for forty cents a day, with never a hope beyond! What is to be done about it? Suppose the wealth of the universe were divided per capita, how long would it remain out of the clutches of the Napoleons of finance, only a percentage of whom find ultimately their Waterloo, little to the profit of the poor who spin and delve, who fight and die, in the Grand Army of the Wretched!

III

We read a deal that is amusing about the southerly Frenchman. He is indeed sui generis. Some five and twenty years ago there appeared in Louisville a dapper gentleman, who declared himself a Marseillais, and who subsequently came to be known variously as The Major and The Frenchman. I shall not mention him otherwise in this veracious chronicle, but, looking through the city directory of Marseilles I found an entire page devoted to his name, though all the entries may not have been members of his family. There is no doubt that he was a Marseillais.

Wandering through the streets of the old city, now in a cafÉ of La CannebiÈre and now along a quay of the Old Port, his ghost has often crossed my path and dogged my footsteps, though he has lain in his grave this many a day. I grew to know him very well, to be first amused by him, then to be interested, and in the end to entertain an affection for him.

The Major was a delightful composite of Tartarin of Tarascon and the Brigadier Gerard, with a dash of the Count of Monte Cristo; for when he was flush—which by some odd coincidence happened exactly four times a year—he was as liberal a spendthrift as one could wish to meet anywhere between the little principality of Monaco and the headwaters of the Nile; transparent as a child; idiosyncratic to a degree. I understand Marseilles better and it has always seemed nearer to me since he was born there and lived there when a boy, and, I much fear me, was driven away, the scapegrace of excellent and wealthy people; not, I feel sure, for any offense that touched the essential parts of his manhood. A gentler, a more upright and harmless creature I never knew in all my life.

I very well recall when he first arrived in the Kentucky metropolis. His attire and raiment were faultless. He wore a rose in his coat, he carried a delicate cane, and a most beautiful woman hung upon his arm. She was his wife. It was a circumstance connected with this lady which led to the after intimacy between him and me. She fell dangerously ill. I had casually met her husband as an all-round man-about-town, and by this token, seeking sympathy on lines of least resistance, he came to me with his sorrow.

I have never seen grief more real and fervid. He swore, on his knees and with tears in his eyes, that if she recovered, if God would give her back to him, he would never again touch a card; for gambling was his passion, and even among amateurs he would have been accounted the softest of soft things. His prayer was answered, she did recover, and he proceeded to fulfill his vow.

But what was he to do? He had been taught, or at least he had learned, to do nothing, not even to play poker! I suggested that as running a restaurant was a French prerogative and that as he knew less about cooking than about anything else—we had had a contest or two over the mysteries of a pair of chafing dishes—and as there was not a really good eating place in Louisville, he should set up a restaurant. It was said rather in jest than in earnest; but I was prepared to lend him the money. The next thing I knew, and without asking for a dollar, he had opened The Brunswick.

In those days I saw the Courier-Journal to press, turning night into day, and during a dozen years I took my twelve o’clock supper there. It was thus and from these beginnings that the casual acquaintance between us ripened into intimacy, and that I gradually came into a knowledge of the reserves behind The Major’s buoyant optimism and occasional gasconnade.

He ate and drank sparingly; but he was not proof against the seduction of good company, and he had plenty of it, from William Preston to Joseph Jefferson, with such side lights as Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester, Isaac Caldwell and Proctor Knott, of the Home Guard—very nearly all the celebrities of the day among the outsiders—myself the humble witness and chronicler. He secured an excellent chef, and of course we lived exceedingly well.

The Major’s most obvious peculiarity was that he knew everything and had been everywhere. If pirates were mentioned he flowered out at once into an adventure upon the sea; if bandits, on the land. If it was Wall Street he had a reminiscence and a scheme; if gambling, a hard-luck story and a system. There was no quarter of the globe of which he had not been an inhabitant.

Once the timbered riches of Africa being mentioned, at once the Major gave us a most graphic account of how “the old house”—for thus he designated some commercial establishment, which either had no existence or which he had some reason for not more particularly indicating—had sent him in charge of a rosewood saw mill on the Ganges, and, after many ups and downs, of how the floods had come and swept the plant away; and Rudolph Fink, who was of the party, immediately said, “I can attest the truth of The Major’s story, because my brother Albert and I were in charge of some fishing camps at the mouth of the Ganges at the exact date of the floods, and we caught many of those rosewood logs in our nets as they floated out to sea.”

Augustine’s Terrapin came to be for a while the rage in Philadelphia, and even got as far as New York and Washington, and straightway, The Major declared he could and would make Augustine and his terrapin look “like a monkey.” He proposed to give a dinner.

There were great preparations and expectancy. None of us ate much at luncheon that day. At the appointed hour, we assembled at The Brunswick. I will dismiss the decorations and the preludes except to say that they were Parisian. After a while in full regalia The Major appeared, a train of servants following with a silver tureen. The lid was lifted.

“VoilÀ!” says he.

The vision disclosed to our startled eyes was an ocean that looked like bean soup flecked by a few strands of black crape!

The explosion duly arrived from the assembled gourmets, I, myself, I am sorry to say, leading the rebellion.

“I put seeks terrapin in zat soup!” exclaimed The Frenchman, quite losing his usual good English in his excitement.

We reproached him. We denounced him. He was driven from the field. But he bore us no malice. Ten days later he invited us again, and this time Sam Ward himself could have found no fault with the terrapin.

Next afternoon, when I knew The Major was asleep, I slipped back into the kitchen and said to Louis Garnier, the chef: “Is there any of that terrapin left over from last night?”

All unconscious of his treason Louis took me into the pantry and triumphantly showed me three jars bearing the Augustine label and the Philadelphia express tags!

On another occasion a friend of The Major’s, passing The Brunswick and observing some diamond-back shells in the window said, “Major, have you any real live terrapins?”

Henry Woodfire Grady—One of Mr. Watterson’s “Boys”

“Live!” cried The Frenchman. “Only this morning I open the ice box and they were all dancing the cancan.”

“Major,” persisted the friend, “I’ll go you a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, you cannot show me an actual living terrapin.”

“What do you take me for—confidence man?” The Major retorted. “How you expect an old sport like me to bet upon a certainty?”

“Never mind your ethics. The wager is drink, not money. In any event we shall have the wine.”

“Oh, well,” says The Frenchman, with a shrug and a droll grimace, “if you insist on paying for a bottle of wine come with me.”

He took a lighted candle, and together they went back to the ice box. It was literally filled with diamond backs, and my friend thought he was gone for sure.

“LÀ!” says The Major with triumph, rummaging among the mass of shells with his cane as he held the candle aloft.

“But,” says my friend, ready to surrender, yet taking a last chance, “you told me they were dancing the cancan!”

The Major picked up a terrapin and turned it over in his hand. Quite numb and frozen, the animal within made no sign. Then he stirred the shells about in the box with his cane. Still not a show of life. Of a sudden he stopped, reflected a moment, then looked at his watch.

“Ah,” he murmured. “I quite forget. The terrapin, they are asleep. It is ten-thirty, and the terrapin he regularly go to sleep at ten o’clock by the watch every night.” And without another word he reached for the Veuve Cliquot!

For all his volubility in matters of romance and sentiment The Major was exceeding reticent about his immediate self and his own affairs. His legends referred to the distant of time and place. A certain dignity could not be denied him, and, on occasion, a proper reserve; he rarely mentioned his business—though he worked like a slave, and could not have been making much or any profit—so that there rose the query how he contrived to make both ends meet. Little by little I came into the knowledge that there was a money supply from somewhere; finally, it matters not how, that he had an annuity of forty thousand francs, paid in quarterly installments of ten thousand francs each.

Occasionally he mentioned “the Old House,” and in relating the famous Sophonisba episode late at night, and only in the very fastnesses of the wine cellar, as it were, at the most lachrymose passage he spoke of “l’Oncle CÉlestin,” with the deepest feeling.

“Did you ever hear The Frenchman tell that story about Sophonisba?” Doctor Stoic, whom on account of his affectation of insensibility we were wont to call Old Adamant, once asked me. “Well, sir, the other night he told it to me, and he was drunk, and he cried, sir; and I was drunk, and I cried too!”

I had known The Frenchman now ten or a dozen years. That he came from Marseilles, that he had served on the Confederate side in the Trans-Mississippi, that he possessed an annuity, that he must have been well-born and reared, that he was simple, yet canny, and in his money dealings scrupulously honest—was all I could be sure of. What had he done to be ashamed about or wish to conceal? In what was he a black sheep, for that he had been one seemed certain? Had the beautiful woman, his wife—a tireless church and charity worker, who lived the life of a recluse and a saint—had she reclaimed him from his former self? I knew that she had been the immediate occasion of his turning over a new leaf. But before her time what had he been, what had he done?

Late one night, when the rain was falling and the streets were empty, I entered The Brunswick. It was empty too. In the farthest corner of the little dining room The Major, his face buried in his hands, laid upon the table in front of him, sat silently weeping. He did not observe my entrance and I seated myself on the opposite side of the table. Presently he looked up, and seeing me, without a word passed me a letter which, all blistered with tears, had brought him to this distressful state. It was a formal French burial summons, with its long list of family names—his among the rest—the envelope, addressed in a lady’s hand—his sister’s, the wife of a nobleman in high military command—the postmark “Lyon.” Uncle Celestin was dead.

Thereafter The Frenchman told me much which I may not recall and must not repeat; for, included in that funeral list were some of the best names in France, Uncle CÉlestin himself not the least of them.

At last he died, and as mysteriously as he had come his body was taken away, nobody knew when, nobody where, and with it went the beautiful woman, his wife, of whom from that day to this I have never heard a word.