Chapter 2: The Courtesy of Evasion

The fire smoked again. The wind had backed into the east sometime before dawn, and now the chimney drew badly, laying a thin grey haze across the upper half of the room like a ceiling pressed down by six inches. Livingston pressed two fingers against his eyes, pushed his chair from the desk, and stood. His knees complained. He had been at this since six, and the dispatch was seven pages, and the seventh page contained a sentence he could not send and could not improve upon.

He crossed to the window and forced the sash up three inches. The morning on the rue de Bourbon was the colour of a pewter dish, but the air that entered was May air — carrying the cries of street vendors, the clatter of a cart on cobblestones, the green smell of the Tuileries gardens warming in weak sun. Paris moved. Its ministers did not.

He returned to the desk and pulled the page back.

Having submitted to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, in the latter days of March, a memorial of some length upon the subject of New Orleans and the navigation of the Mississippi, I have since that date received no communication that addresses the memorial's substance, nor any indication that the matter has been received with the seriousness its importance demands. I have obtained nothing.

Five months. One memorial. No reply. He ran his thumb along the edge of the page, feeling where the quill's pressure had scored the paper on the word nothing, as though even the nib had wished to mark it. The interval had yielded three dinner invitations, two notes of ceremonious courtesy on unrelated matters of consular procedure, and a brief exchange with a secretary whose name he had already forgotten — Talleyrand himself pleasant at every encounter, exquisitely absent from every matter of consequence, a feat of social engineering that Livingston was beginning to regard with the grudging admiration one extends to a particularly elegant species of fraud.

He set down the quill.

The clock on the mantel read half past nine. The courier left at noon. The dispatch would require ciphering, and ciphering required a fair copy, and the fair copy required him to decide, in the next hour, whether to tell Madison the truth or something more useful. If he sent that sentence — I have obtained nothing — what followed was not difficult to foresee. Jefferson would not recall him; not immediately, not publicly. But there would be a special envoy before the summer was out. Some man of visible political standing, dispatched with fanfare, arriving in Paris to find Livingston already occupying the legation like furniture that had come with the rooms. He had seen it done to other men. He had, on one occasion, been the instrument of it. The studied courtesy of a staff that now answered to another; the dispatches that would pass through his hands for form's sake and carry none of his counsel; the long Atlantic crossing home aboard a vessel whose name he would spend the voyage trying to forget. If the right of deposit at New Orleans was suspended a second time while he sat composing dispatches about his own irrelevance, the western country would choke — and the man who had failed to prevent it would be Robert R. Livingston, late of Clermont, presently of a leased apartment whose chimney smoked when the wind was in the east.

Noon was not an abstraction. That was the clock on the mantel, and the clock did not care what the dispatch said.

Madison's last communication had pressed for intelligence, specifically. The Secretary trusts that the Minister will have found occasion, in the months since his arrival, to form some estimate of French intentions regarding the cession. The language was courteous. The implication was that Livingston had been in Paris long enough to produce something other than dinner invitations. Madison wanted names, positions, the substance of conversations held in confidence. What Livingston possessed was a memorial dropped into a silence so complete it might have been cast into the Seine.

He drew a single ruled line through the sentence. The ink of the cancellation was darker than the text beneath, and the words remained legible through their own erasure — I have obtained nothing persisting like a bruise beneath linen — but that was a matter for the fire later. What mattered now was what came next.

He dipped the quill and wrote.

My approach to the present difficulty has been guided by the conviction that the Foreign Ministry, whatever its formal posture, is not the principal locus of decision on this subject. Accordingly, I have directed my principal attentions toward those persons whose connexion to the inner circle of the Consulate may afford a more direct avenue of communication. In this connexion, I have had occasion to cultivate the acquaintance of the elder Bonaparte brother, whose expressed interest in American affairs and whose known standing among the First Consul's intimate counsellors recommends him as a promising avenue. I expect this cultivation to bear fruit in the coming weeks.

He read it back. Every clause was technically defensible — which was another way of saying that every clause was a lie wearing a cravat. Joseph Bonaparte had been in the same room as Livingston on two occasions. They had exchanged perhaps forty words in total, most of them about the weather. He touched the fresh ink with the back of a fingernail — not quite dry — and withdrew his hand before it smeared.

A gust came down the chimney and pushed a billow of smoke directly into the room. Livingston turned his face aside, coughing, and when he turned back his eyes were streaming. He blinked the room clear and looked at what he had written: the cancelled sentence beneath its dark stroke, the new paragraph above it in a hand somewhat less steady than his best. The true account crossed out, the serviceable fiction inscribed above it, the whole assembly to be ciphered and sealed before noon so that Madison might read it in six weeks and believe his minister in Paris was conducting a campaign of strategic patience rather than accumulating dinner invitations in a room that smelled of wet soot.

He straightened the pages against the desk, squaring their edges with both palms, and reached for a clean sheet.

---

The reception had been arranged, as all Talleyrand's receptions were arranged, so that the minister appeared simultaneously available to every person in the room and genuinely accessible to none. The salon was hot — two hundred bodies and God knew how many candles contesting for the same air — and the smell was the smell of such occasions everywhere: melted wax, rosewater, the sharper note of sweat beneath powder, and, from the direction of the supper tables, something involving truffles that had been sitting too long. Talleyrand moved through this atmosphere with the measured economy of a lame man who had learned, decades ago, to spend no motion unnecessarily — pausing here to receive a bow, there to bestow three words upon a Prussian attaché, never lingering long enough for any single interlocutor to believe himself distinguished. The torchères threw his shadow in multiple directions at once. Livingston, stationed near the second pilaster from the east wall where the acoustics were tolerably less murderous, watched him work.

Lord Whitworth stood near the tall windows, candlelight finding the silver at his temples. Talleyrand had been with him for a quarter-hour — long enough to constitute a conference, not merely a courtesy — and Livingston had observed the conversation narrow, at its end, to something that produced a short, shared laugh from both men before the minister disengaged. Whitworth, left standing, wore the expression of a man who has received confirmation of something he already suspected and is not pleased to have been right.

Livingston noted this. He noted also that Talleyrand, in disengaging from the British ambassador, had not glanced toward the American minister — which was itself a species of communication, and not a flattering one.

He accepted a glass of wine from a passing servant. The wine was a white Burgundy, thin and faintly mineral, already warm from the room. He held it without drinking.

The approach came from his left — the side where his hearing was the lesser — and Talleyrand was already within arm's reach before Livingston caught the soft percussion of his cane against the parquet. A petty advantage, and the minister had taken it with the ease of long practice: arrive on the deaf side, begin speaking before the other man has oriented himself, establish the rhythm of the exchange before the first word of substance is uttered.

'Minister Livingston.' The voice was unhurried, as though this meeting had been neither sought nor avoided, merely arrived at by the natural current of the evening. 'I have been neglecting you most shamefully. You must permit me a moment's private conversation, if the word "private" can be applied to any corner of this room.'

Livingston set his glass on the nearest flat surface — the base of a candelabrum — and turned to face him squarely. 'Citizen Minister. I had begun to think the word "conversation" might be the more elusive term.'

Talleyrand's smile did not alter by a fraction. He indicated, by a slight inclination of his head, a space between the last pilaster and the window embrasure — not quite secluded, but sufficiently removed from the nearest cluster of guests that their words would carry no further than intended. Livingston followed.

'Your memorial,' Talleyrand began, 'has been received and read with the greatest attention. I wish to say so plainly, because I am sensible that the absence of a formal reply has been a discourtesy to a minister of your distinction, and one for which I must offer my apology without reservation.'

The apology was delivered with such precision that it foreclosed every avenue of complaint. Livingston let it hang in the overheated air for a beat, then two.

'The difficulty—' and here the minister paused, as though the difficulty were a regrettable feature of the landscape rather than a construction of his own devising — 'the difficulty is that the question you raise, touching upon the territory of Louisiana and the arrangements pertaining to the navigation of the Mississippi, does not, as that question is presently constituted, fall within the competence of this ministry to address.'

The room's noise swelled briefly — a woman laughed somewhere behind the violins, bright and carrying. Livingston caught perhaps three words in four of what followed — something about the cabinet particulier, something about compétence exclusive — and was forced to do what he most despised doing in public.

'Your pardon, Citizen Minister. The room—'

'Of course.' Talleyrand repeated the phrase without alteration of tone or expression, as though repetition were a natural feature of conversation rather than a concession extracted by infirmity. 'The question belongs, in its present form, to a cabinet that is not mine. It is not within my authority to receive or to answer it.' A pause of one precise beat. 'I regret this more than I am able to express.'

Livingston stepped closer — one deliberate half-step, close enough to smell the lavender on the minister's coat and the faint sourness of the coffee beneath it. 'Then let me put a simpler question, Citizen Minister — one that may fall more squarely within your competence. Does France possess Louisiana, or does she not?'

The minister's eyes, which had been drifting toward the next group of guests, returned. For an interval no longer than a heartbeat, something moved behind the courtesy — not alarm, nothing so crude, but a recalculation, the brief flicker of a man reassessing whether the instrument before him was as blunt as he had supposed.

'The question of what France possesses,' Talleyrand said softly, 'is a question I would advise you to put to the cabinet, where such questions are decided.' He smiled. 'As I have said.'

'Then I will address myself to whatever quarter you designate. I trust the Foreign Ministry will be good enough to communicate the appropriate channel.'

Talleyrand received this with a warmth so serene and so impenetrable that it constituted, in itself, a complete refusal. He said nothing. He turned, with the careful economy of his gait, to receive a Spanish grandee who had been hovering at a respectful distance, and as he turned he spoke a word to his secretary — audible, unhurried, pitched to carry precisely as far as Livingston's good ear.

'Inform the duty clerk that the American minister's memorial is to be held at the outer office until the question of competence is resolved.'

Livingston went still.

Not destroyed. Not returned. Held. In the outer office. He understood the construction immediately, the way one understands a sentence whose grammar is unfamiliar but whose meaning is plain: the memorial would sit in an anteroom accumulating dust while the ministry that had produced the anteroom contemplated whether it possessed the authority to open the door. There was no complaint to be lodged, no procedural failure Madison could cite in a formal remonstrance. The resolution of the question of competence rested with the very body that had just disclaimed competence to resolve it — a lock with no keyhole.

'Citizen Minister.' His voice came out level. 'If the memorial cannot be received, it ought to be returned. A document that belongs neither to its author nor to its recipient belongs, in law, to no one.'

Talleyrand paused — one hand already extended toward the Spaniard, his body half-turned. He looked back at Livingston with an expression of mild, genuine surprise, as though a piece of furniture had addressed him.

'The question of its disposition,' he said pleasantly, 'is precisely what the outer office will determine, when the question of competence is resolved.' He completed his turn. 'Good evening, Minister.'

Livingston adjusted his coat — two precise tugs at the lapels — and turned toward the windows where Whitworth still stood, no longer laughing.

---

The antechamber was twelve feet across, no more, and someone had left the window imperfectly latched. The draught found the back of his neck where the cravat did not cover, thin and persistent, carrying the smell of rain on stone from the courtyard below. After the salon's heat the chill was welcome. He did not sit. The two chairs were servants' chairs, spindle-legged, not made for what he needed to do.

Thirty-eight minutes before the carriages collected. He had spent two in here already.

The ministry had disclaimed the memorial. The memorial could not be received. It could not be refused. It would sit in an anteroom accumulating dust while the question of competence remained unresolved — and the question of competence would remain unresolved for precisely as long as Talleyrand found that arrangement useful. If Madison learned the memorial had been neither answered nor returned, the special envoy would be commissioned before the ink was dry on the dispatch. Livingston would be superseded by August, and the right of deposit — the question on which six American states hung their commerce and their loyalty — would remain suspended while his replacement made his ceremonious arrival and began the whole elaborate pantomime from the beginning.

He could not permit that. Which meant he needed a door that Talleyrand had not thought to lock.

He crossed to the half-open door and looked into the salon.

There — thirty yards distant, near the far wall where the candles had burned low. The grey coat. Joseph Bonaparte stood in conversation with an official Livingston recognised from the Ministry of the Interior — Chaptal's department, he thought. Joseph's posture was easy, unhurried, his head inclined at the angle of performing attention rather than giving it. The official was talking at length.

The route was not direct. He would need to go left, along the near wall, past the musicians — who were packing their instruments, the scrape of a violin case loud against the thinning conversation — then cut across the far end of the room behind the supper tables, approaching Joseph from the opposite direction. It would look like a man wandering toward the doors.

But he had perhaps two minutes before Joseph disengaged and either found new company or moved toward the vestibule. Two minutes in which to cross the salon at a pace that appeared purposeless, to arrive in that quarter of the room by the natural drift of a man stretching his legs after a warm evening, to be present and available when Joseph turned — and to do all of this without passing through Talleyrand's line of sight. If the minister saw Livingston approach the elder Bonaparte within ten minutes of being told that Louisiana belonged to the personal cabinet, every subsequent conversation with Joseph would be shadowed, managed, and eventually closed.

He straightened his cravat once and stepped through the door.

---

Joseph Bonaparte was shorter than his brother's reputation and rounder, with a face that invited confidence rather than commanded it. He was laughing at something the Interior official had said — or performing laughter, which in this family amounted to the same thing. The air at this end of the salon was cooler, the candles guttering in their sconces, and the smell had shifted: less rosewater, more guttered wax and the dregs of wine left standing in abandoned glasses.

Livingston arrived at the near edge of the conversation just as the official, sensing the approach of someone whose rank would require him to efface himself, excused himself with a bow. Joseph turned. His expression performed the practised welcome of a man who had been the First Consul's brother long enough to understand that everyone who sought his company was seeking something other than his company.

'Mr. Livingston.' The French was correct, unaccented. 'I had not expected to find you still among us at this hour.'

'The evening has been instructive,' Livingston said. His French was adequate to the sentence, if not to what lay behind it. 'I confess I find Citizen Talleyrand's hospitality somewhat more forthcoming than his correspondence.'

Joseph's mouth twitched — not quite a smile, but an acknowledgment that the remark had landed. He gestured toward two chairs abandoned against the wall by guests already collecting their cloaks. They moved toward them without it being quite decided that they would.

'Your minister,' Joseph said, settling into the chair with the ease of long practice in rooms that belonged to other people, 'has been in Paris how long now? Five months? Six?'

'Since November last.'

'And you find our city—'

'Inexhaustible,' Livingston said. 'In every particular.'

Joseph smiled — a more genuine expression than the room had been producing all evening. 'You are diplomatic.'

'I am a minister. It is an occupational condition — though I begin to suspect the condition may be terminal.'

That produced a short laugh. Joseph crossed one leg over the other and appeared to consider the far wall. 'I have been reading,' he said, 'a work of your President's. The Notes on the State of Virginia. You are perhaps familiar with it.'

Livingston turned more fully toward him. 'I am. Which passages engaged you most?'

'The natural history, principally.' Joseph's tone was that of a careful reader rather than a collector of fashionable volumes. 'His observations on the Mammoth. The dispute with Buffon regarding the vigour of American species — there is something almost polemical in his enthusiasm, which I confess I found charming. A statesman who will argue the superior size of the American panther.' He spread his hands. 'One takes note.'

'The President holds that the deficiency Buffon attributed to the New World's nature is a slander without foundation. He does not conduct that argument as a philosopher performing an exercise — he conducts it as a man who has walked those mountains and measured those bones with his own hands.'

'Just so.' Joseph's gaze moved briefly toward the far doors, then settled again on Livingston with something that was not quite calculation and not quite warmth. 'The western territories — he describes them with something beyond administrative interest. There is in his writing the impression of a vindication sought, and perhaps found.'

'Of the republican proposition,' Livingston said. 'That a free people, given sufficient land and sufficient latitude, will order themselves without the apparatus of princes. The western settlements are the experiment. The Mississippi is its essential condition.'

He said it evenly, as a man discussing natural philosophy. The word Mississippi fell into the sentence and lay there between them like a card turned face-up on a table.

Joseph was quiet for a moment. The candle in the nearest sconce guttered — a hard gust through some gap in the shutters — and both men glanced at it. It recovered.

'Your President,' Joseph said at last, 'is perhaps fortunate that his experiment has so large a theatre.'

'Fortunate,' Livingston agreed. 'And attentive to the conditions under which the experiment may continue — or may not.' He leaned forward, forearms on his knees, and dropped his voice. 'I will speak plainly, Citizen Bonaparte, since the hour is late and the room is emptying and plain speech costs less now than it did an hour ago. There are three points. The first: the right of deposit at New Orleans — the right by which the produce of six American states reaches the sea — has been suspended once already under the Spanish administration. The second: there are men in Washington, men of considerable influence, who believe the French acquisition of Louisiana signals a second suspension, permanent in character. The third — and you will observe that this is not a threat but an arithmetic — if those men are correct, the western settlers do not remain Americans who happen to be inconvenienced. They become a separate people seeking a separate arrangement, and the arrangement they will find is with whatever power controls the river's mouth.' He sat back. 'I do not imagine your brother is unaware of this reckoning.'

Joseph's right hand, resting on his knee, closed into a loose fist and opened again.

'You are direct,' he said.

'I have been otherwise for five months. The results were uniform.'

Joseph looked at him then — a measuring look, steady, unhurried, the kind that precedes either a door closing or a door opening, and which resembles the other so closely that only the next few seconds would distinguish them. Then, very quietly: 'My brother keeps his own counsel on Louisiana. You understand that I am not able to speak for him.'

'I am not asking you to speak for him. I am asking whether you will speak to him.'

The silence that followed was the silence of a man weighing a commitment he had not expected to be asked for this evening. From the far end of the salon came the sound of servants stacking chairs, the scrape of wood on parquet, the small domestic industry that begins when the evening's performance has ended.

Then Joseph said: 'There are matters on which my brother's mind is not fixed. Louisiana may be among them. I cannot say with certainty.'

It was more than Livingston had expected. He kept his expression even, his posture unchanged, as though the remark were merely a continuation of the same mild exchange.

'I would ask nothing more than the opportunity to make the American position plain to those whose counsel he values.'

A servant appeared at Joseph's shoulder — sent, not arriving by chance; the interruption had the quiet precision of an instruction being executed. Joseph rose, and Livingston rose with him.

'You must call upon me,' Joseph said. 'Informally. I should value the conversation.'

'As should I. At your convenience — though I would ask that your convenience not be measured in the same units as your brother's ministry.'

Joseph held his gaze for a moment. Something in his expression shifted — not quite amusement, not quite discomfort, but something that contained both. Then he inclined his head, once, and crossed toward the doors.

---

Livingston stood in the emptying room. The servants moved through the debris of the evening — collecting glasses, snuffing candles, sweeping the crumbs of a reception that had cost, he estimated, more than his legation's quarterly budget. The smell of guttered wax thickened as the last flames died, and the chill from the tall windows pressed inward as the bodies thinned.

Somewhere in the building, a door closed with the heavy finality of iron on stone.

He turned it over in his mind: Talleyrand's evasion, the memorial consigned to its anteroom, and then Joseph's admission — matters on which my brother's mind is not fixed — a sentence that could mean everything or nothing, depending on what Joseph chose to do with the evening's conversation. Three possibilities, and the evidence did not yet distinguish among them. Joseph would carry the question forward, or set it quietly aside, or find it taken from him by the minister whose secretary was even now filing the American memorial in an anteroom designed for its interment.

What Livingston could not afford was to wait on the distinction.

He retrieved his hat from the servant near the door and stepped into the vestibule.

The night air struck his face — cold, damp, carrying the particular smell of the Seine after dark, river mud and stone and the faint iron tang of the water itself. Above the rooflines the sky had cleared to a hard black, and the stars were sharp and indifferent, winter stars in a May sky, as though the season itself had not yet decided what it intended.

His right hand moved to the side of his head — pressing against his ear for a moment, the old habit, the deaf man's reflex — before he caught himself and lowered it.

His carriage was not yet called. He stood on the steps and listened to the city — the distant rattle of wheels on the Pont Royal, a dog barking somewhere along the quai, the river moving beneath it all, invisible and constant — and let the evening's arithmetic complete itself. The next courier departed in eleven days. The dispatch he had composed that morning contained a fiction about Joseph Bonaparte that the coming days would either confirm or expose. If Joseph did nothing — if the remark about his brother's unfixed mind was nothing more than the polite evasion of one who wished to end a conversation gracefully — then the fiction would remain a fiction, and Madison would eventually see through it, and the special envoy would be commissioned, and Livingston would cross the Atlantic in the wrong direction.

He needed Joseph to move. He had given him reason. Whether reason was sufficient for a man living in the shadow of a brother who kept his own counsel on Louisiana — that he could not know from a single evening's exchange.

The hooves came. He descended the steps into the dark, and behind him the lights of the reception went out one by one, and the building returned to its ordinary silence, and the memorial sat in its anteroom, and the river ran on toward the sea.