Chapter 5: The Whole of Louisiana

Scene 1

The antechamber of the Hôtel de Galliffet had been furnished to produce a precise effect: gilt chairs arranged at intervals that discouraged conversation between petitioners, maps on the walls old enough to show territories belonging to governments that no longer existed, the marble floor cold enough, even in April, to communicate without words that this was not a room designed for a visitor's comfort. Livingston had sat in it before. He knew its instruments.

The secretary—a young man of perhaps twenty-five, with the careful blankness of someone recently elevated beyond his experience—acknowledged the arrival with a slight inclination of the head and returned to his papers without speaking. This was the first instrument. Livingston settled into the nearest chair, set his hat on his knee, and kept it there.

From somewhere deeper in the building came the sound of a door closing—not forcefully, but with the definitive click of a room sealed against intrusion. Then silence, except for the scratch of the secretary's pen and, faint through the tall windows, the cry of a vendor in the street below, selling something he could not make out.

He had three points. First: the memorial submitted to the Foreign Ministry in February had received no written response in seven weeks. Second: Monroe was expected in Paris within the next day, and his arrival would alter the character of the American representation in ways that made immediate conference more, not less, necessary. Third—and this he would not say aloud—that Livingston had perhaps eighteen hours remaining as the sole American voice in Paris, and he intended to use them. If Monroe arrived to find the door still closed, the initiative would pass to Jefferson's man, and Livingston would become what he had spent eighteen months refusing to become: a functionary who had been present for the history without having made any of it.

The secretary set down his pen. He opened the appointment ledger on the left side of his table with the particular care of someone trained to make a refusal look like an act of administrative precision.

"The minister's calendar for this week," the secretary said, "is engaged through Thursday. If the minister plenipotentiary would permit me to note the third of next week—"

"One moment." Livingston leaned forward and placed the sealed memorial—his own copy, the one he had carried since February—on the table between them. He did not push it toward the secretary. He simply left it there. "The matter brought before the minister concerns the peace of two nations. Not a commercial grievance. Not a boundary question. The peace." He kept his voice level; he had learned, in eighteen months of Parisian diplomacy, that volume was the instrument of those who possessed no other. "The minister will wish to have received me before the week is out. You may tell him I said so."

The secretary looked at the memorial. He looked at Livingston. He reached for the appointment book again, his fingers settling on the page for the following Tuesday, and began to write.

Livingston placed his hand flat on the open page.

The scratch of the pen stopped. The secretary's eyes came up—not with the blankness of before but with the sharp attention of someone recalculating a situation. The cold of the marble floor pressed through the thin soles of Livingston's shoes, and the vendor's cry had moved off down the street, and the room held its breath.

"If I am turned away this morning," Livingston said, not removing his hand, "the envoy arriving tomorrow will carry instructions to treat the refusal as France's answer to the memorial. I do not think the minister desires that to be France's answer." He withdrew his hand and folded both in his lap. "But I may be mistaken."

The secretary closed the book. He stood, took the memorial, and disappeared through the door behind him.

The antechamber held only the sound of its own emptiness—the faint percussion of the building's deeper life, footsteps on some upper floor, the distant close of another door. Livingston turned his hat once in his hands. If the secretary returned with another refusal—if next Tuesday was the final word—then Monroe would arrive to find the American minister still petitioning, still without a single written response, and that account would reach Jefferson before Livingston's own dispatch could correct it. His commission would be effectively ended. Not revoked—Jefferson was too courteous for that—but hollowed, the way a title is hollowed when the authority behind it has been quietly passed to another man.

Then the secretary returned. He did not carry the memorial. He carried nothing at all, and his expression had shifted in the unmistakable manner of a man whose instructions have been revised mid-errand.

"If the minister plenipotentiary would follow me," he said.

Livingston rose. He left his hat on the chair.

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Scene 2

Talleyrand's private office was a room arranged to work against its visitor. The desk sat at an angle that required Livingston to turn his body to address the minister directly, and the fire—built high, absurdly high for the eleventh of April—threw warmth across the left side of his face while the rest of the room held the chill of old stone. He drew his chair two inches closer to the desk than protocol strictly warranted, scraping it across the parquet with a sound that made the retreating secretary glance back. Neither principal remarked on it.

The minister had been speaking for some minutes about the commercial interests of the Batavian Republic. Livingston watched his mouth with the practised attention of a man who reads lips the way a cartographer reads coastlines—for what the line reveals and what it withholds. He was following well enough. What he could not follow was the purpose, and the clock on the mantelpiece had already consumed a quarter-hour he could not afford to lose.

He interrupted.

"Citizen Minister." The words fell across Talleyrand's sentence with the deliberateness of someone who has decided that courtesy has become its own form of obstruction. "I do not wish to be ungracious, but the Batavian Republic is not the matter that has brought me here, and I suspect it is not the matter you intended to raise when you admitted me."

Talleyrand stopped. Set down the paper he had been consulting. Regarded Livingston with mild, attentive interest, as though the interruption had confirmed something he had been waiting to confirm.

"No," he said. "It is not."

The fire cracked and settled in the grate. Heat pressed against Livingston's left cheek; he did not loosen his cravat.

He drew from his coat the précis he had prepared that morning—a single sheet, unsigned, listing the memorial's three points in abbreviated form—and laid it on the desk between them, oriented toward Talleyrand. Then, before the minister could reach for it, he spoke. "I have reduced the substance of the memorial to terms that may be more convenient for consideration. The American government requires an answer before Envoy Monroe's arrival renders the question moot."

Talleyrand did not touch the paper. He looked at it, then past it, then at Livingston.

"Would it interest your government, one wonders," Talleyrand said, "to treat for the whole?"

The whole.

Livingston's hand, still resting on the edge of the sheet, went still. He had prepared, across eighteen months, for a dozen versions of this conversation—arguments for the deposit, for the right of navigation, for the cession of New Orleans and the eastern bank, for silence and for evasion. He had not prepared for this. He drew the paper back across the desk and returned it to his coat. Whatever he had come to argue was no longer the argument.

Talleyrand did not move. He had the patience of a man at cards who understands that the first number spoken in any room becomes the room's furniture—permanent, load-bearing, impossible to shift without visible effort.

Livingston looked at him. Said nothing for three seconds. Four.

"The extent of American interest," he said, "would depend entirely upon what France proposed."

Talleyrand inclined his head the fraction of a degree that indicated he had received this without surprise.

Livingston pressed before he could redirect. "I must put the question to you directly, Citizen Minister. What would France require for the territory entire?"

"That," Talleyrand said, "is a question one might more profitably put in different terms." His French was measured, unhurried, each word disposed as a man disposes the silver before a dinner he has not yet decided to serve. "What would Louisiana be worth—to the republic across the water?"

The inversion was so clean it required a moment to register. Not what does France require but what will America pay. The burden of the first figure now belonged entirely to him—and if he named it wrong, he would fix the floor of a negotiation he had no authority to open. If he named nothing, Talleyrand would close the interview and report to Bonaparte that the American envoy had been offered the continent and had sat mute in his chair.

Talleyrand watched him. Said nothing further. The fire was too hot. The room smelled of cedar and old paper and the faint, sharp residue of a candle recently extinguished.

The clock on the mantelpiece struck the quarter. Livingston had perhaps thirty seconds before the silence itself became the answer—the answer of a minister without authority—and the door would not open again before Monroe arrived to walk through it.

What passed between them in those thirty seconds was not, precisely, a negotiation. It was something older and more dangerous: the moment when two men in a closed room, each operating beyond the limits of what he has been sanctioned to say, recognise in the other the same transgression. Talleyrand had not been instructed to offer the territory; Livingston had not been instructed to receive such an offer. The fire was too high for April. The room smelled of beeswax and old leather and something beneath both—the close, particular smell of papers that have absorbed years of carefully worded confidences. Whatever Livingston said next would exist in no official instrument. Whatever Talleyrand recorded would be his own account, shaped to his own purposes. They were, in that moment, two men alone with a secret that neither had sought and both now possessed.

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Scene 3

Fifty million francs.

The figure hung in the room the way a poorly aimed pistol hangs—pointed at everything, aimed at nothing, the only certainty being that someone would eventually require it to discharge.

Talleyrand received it without the alteration of a single feature. Not the narrowing of the eye that signals calculation, not the small arrested breath that signals surprise. His hands remained folded on the desk's green leather surface, and the fire crackled and settled, and he regarded Livingston with the patience of one whose entire career had been built on the understanding that the next thirty seconds belong to whoever says nothing.

Livingston said nothing.

A coal in the grate shifted with a sharp crack. His shoulders contracted before he could arrest the motion.

Then Talleyrand moved toward the small escritoire at the desk's corner, where a leather memorandum book lay open at the day's date. He drew it closer with two fingers, unhurried, and placed his right hand upon it, flat—the gesture of a man taking quiet possession of something already decided.

"The figure," he said, in French, with the inflection of someone quoting another man's words back to him not as agreement but as evidence, "is, as you say, an opening estimate."

Livingston watched the hand on the leather cover. The number was being written nowhere and recorded everywhere. By morning it would exist in whatever account Talleyrand chose to render to the First Consul—not as a passing remark, not as a speculation, but as the American minister's opening position, volunteered without solicitation, five times what any instruction from Madison could sustain. Monroe would arrive to find the hand already played and the table already set, and there would be no version of events in which Robert Livingston had not been the one to place it there.

He stood.

"It is precisely that—a passing remark, nothing more." He moved to the mantelpiece, putting the fire between himself and the desk, and turned to face Talleyrand across the room's length. The heat pressed against his back. "Any sum I have named is entirely speculative. Subject, entirely, to the instructions of my government. I should not wish the Citizen Minister to carry away a different impression."

"Naturally."

Talleyrand turned slightly in his chair—not toward the desk but toward the fire, a small reorientation that managed to suggest, without stating, that the matter under discussion had resolved itself to his satisfaction.

"In any event," he said, "it is Citizen Barbé-Marbois who would be better placed to speak to the reckoning. The minister of the treasury has the relevant figures at his command. I should not wish to trespass upon his province."

Livingston did not move from the mantelpiece.

He had come to this room intending to sound the minister's disposition and depart with nothing committed on either side. He was leaving—if he left now—having committed everything on one side and obtained a redirection on the other. Barbé-Marbois. A treasury official. A man whose province was calculation, not authority, and who could receive an American figure and transmit it upward to Bonaparte without any instrument existing that bore Talleyrand's name or France's formal intention. If Livingston walked out now, the fifty millions would travel upward to the First Consul as an American offer, and downward to Barbé-Marbois as a starting position, and Livingston would have no document, no written word, nothing to prove that the figure had been solicited rather than volunteered.

He crossed back to the desk and sat.

"Citizen Minister." He kept his voice level, his French careful, his eyes on Talleyrand's face rather than the leather cover, because to look at it again would be to confess that he had seen what it signified. "Before I trouble the treasury, I require one clarification. The question you raised—Louisiana's entire extent—I should wish to understand whether France is prepared to treat upon that basis. Not speculatively. In writing."

He paused, and then, because the pause was not sufficient, he continued: "A written confirmation that France is prepared to treat for the territory's whole extent would serve to establish that this conversation has carried official weight. Without such confirmation, I confess I should find it difficult to characterise our exchange to my government in terms that would justify the further discussions you propose."

The implication was plain enough. Without a written statement, there was no official conversation—which meant there was equally no official figure, no American position, nothing that could be reported to Bonaparte as an offer received. Talleyrand could keep the number only if he acknowledged the conversation that had produced it.

Talleyrand's hands unfolded. He took up the pen from his writing stand—the first time he had touched it in the course of the interview—and held it for a moment, the nib poised above the open page. Then, with the unhurried deliberateness of someone who has decided to demonstrate rather than conceal, he laid it down once more.

"A written confirmation of the nature you describe," he said, "would properly originate with the minister of the treasury, in whose province these discussions now reside." A pause, delicate as a held breath. "I should not wish to complicate Citizen Barbé-Marbois's position by issuing instruments that fall within his authority rather than my own."

The pen lay on the desk. The memorandum book lay beside it. Talleyrand had written nothing in the course of two hours, and yet something had been written—in the minister's recollection, in the account that would reach Bonaparte before Monroe's carriage reached the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in the opened position of a transaction that Livingston had not been authorised to open.

He rose.

He understood, with the flat, unsparing clarity of someone reading a judgment against himself, that this conversation had never been a negotiation. It had been a deposition. He had provided testimony; the minister had taken it; and the record, though it existed in no document he could contest, was now closed.

He retrieved his hat from the antechamber chair, returned to the doorway, and turned.

"I shall call upon Citizen Barbé-Marbois this evening," he said. "And I shall convey to him that the question of Louisiana's whole extent originated with the minister of foreign affairs, not with the American legation. I trust the Citizen Minister will not find it necessary to contradict that account."

Talleyrand smiled—the first alteration of his features in two hours. It was the smile of one who has been offered a threat so small it constitutes a compliment.

"I should not dream of it," he said.

Livingston put on his hat and left.

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Scene 4

The study on the rue Trudon held the smell of candle tallow and the particular dustiness of papers long undisturbed—dispatches from Madison stacked in their ribboned bundles along the shelf, his own unsent drafts accumulating like the evidence of a case not yet ready to try. Through the window, the plane trees in the garden held their new leaves against the last of the afternoon light, that thin April green that would be gone by May, deepened into something ordinary and forgettable. He had not lit the lamps. He sat at the writing table with Madison's instructions open before him and the blank sheet waiting, and he trimmed the candle.

The flame was perfectly adequate. He trimmed it again.

He had read the instructions three times in the past hour. He knew their language without reading them—had known them for months, had composed his memorials in careful deference to their limits—but some part of him kept returning to the page as though repetition might alter what was written there.

You are not authorized to treat for more than New Orleans and the right of deposit, and your ceiling in that regard shall not exceed the sum of ten million dollars.

He set the page down.

Ten million dollars. He had offered, this morning, fifty million francs—roughly nine and a half million at the present exchange, but the figure would not stay there. Barbé-Marbois would counter at sixty million, perhaps more, and the final sum would exceed Madison's ceiling by a margin sufficient to end a career. Not only his career. If Madison repudiated the figure publicly, the negotiation died and France received confirmation that the American government could not govern its own representative. If Madison accepted it, he accepted a sum that Jefferson had never authorised and that the Senate would demand to examine. Either consequence destroyed something. The only question was what, and whose.

He sat for a long time without reaching for the quill.

The afternoon light moved across the floor in its slow, indifferent way. Outside, someone in the street below called out a name—a woman's voice, impatient, answered by nothing—and then the city resumed its ordinary murmur, and the study was quiet again except for the small sounds of a building settling into evening: a creak in the floorboards above, the distant complaint of a shutter, the faint sigh of a draught through the window's imperfect seal.

He thought of the map. He thought of the river running down its centre, that broad authority of water he had been arguing over for a year and a half without once having set eyes upon it. He thought of the territory spreading west of it in the undifferentiated brown of cartographic uncertainty—boundaries unmarked, distances approximate, the whole of it a conjecture held in place by ink and optimism. He had come to Paris to argue for a city at the river's mouth. He had opened something else entirely.

He picked up the quill.

The undersigned, Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the French Republic, has the honour to report—

He stopped. His right hand cramped around the shaft of the quill, a sudden seizing of the tendons across his knuckles, and he had to lay it aside and press his fingers against the table's edge and wait for it to pass. The wood was cold under his palm. He flexed his hand, staring at the unfinished sentence.

What he felt, sitting there with his cramped hand pressed against the cold table, was not triumph. He had expected triumph—had imagined it, in the long months of Talleyrand's courteous evasions, as the natural consequence of the moment he had been working toward. What he felt instead was something closer to vertigo: the sensation of one who has stepped through a door he cannot now close and finds himself on the wrong side of a threshold he did not know existed. He had acted in the republic's interest. He believed it. He believed it entirely. And yet the hand cramped on the cold table, and the instructions lay face-down on the desk where he had turned them, and the blank sheet waited.

When the cramp released he did not immediately reach for the quill again.

From the shelf, the ribboned bundles of Madison's dispatches regarded him with the mute authority of a government four thousand miles distant and six weeks behind the present moment. He took the instructions and turned them face-down on the desk.

Then he wrote.

Not a justification. Not a request for new authority, which would arrive too late to be useful and might arrive in time to be ruinous—for if Madison's reply reached Paris in June with a repudiation of the figure, France would know the American envoy had acted without sanction, and the whole edifice would collapse. He wrote what had occurred: the audience sought, the audience granted; the question posed by the Foreign Minister regarding the territory's whole extent; the answer given; the figure named; the name of Barbé-Marbois, previously unknown to him as a principal in this transaction, now apparently its designated instrument. He wrote plainly, the way a surveyor records a boundary—here the line runs, here it turns, here it meets the river. He did not write I exceeded my instructions. He wrote I acted as the moment required and as I judged the republic's interest demanded, and when he reached that sentence he read it back and found it accurate, which was not the same as finding it comfortable.

The smell of fresh ink rose from the page, sharp and ferrous in the close air of the study.

He wrote a final sentence: that the moment had arrived for which the republic had waited, and that he had not permitted it to pass.

He did not ask Madison's approbation. He reported, as someone who had already decided.

He read the dispatch through once, corrected two words, and reached for the sealing wax. Then he stopped.

He drew the sheet back and dipped the quill and, in the opening sentence, where he had written The undersigned, Minister Plenipotentiary, he crossed out undersigned with a single deliberate stroke, replacing it with his name. Robert R. Livingston, Minister Plenipotentiary of the American republic, begs to report to the Secretary of State the following account of events of that April morning, in which the said Minister, acting upon his own judgment in the absence of further instruction—

He revised the opening sentence. Then he revised it again. On the third attempt he had his name where he wanted it, and the account that followed attributed to him, clearly and without ambiguity, the initiative of the morning's exchange.

Monroe's name did not appear in the dispatch.

Monroe had not yet arrived. There was nothing to report.

He reached again for the sealing wax. He struck the flint, held the stick to the flame, and watched the red wax pool on the fold. His hand was steady. He pressed the seal—the arms of the republic, the eagle with its arrows and its olive branch—into the wax and held it until the impression set. Then he wrote the direction: The Honorable James Madison, Washington City. The courier sailed from Le Havre on Friday. If the letter reached the packet in time, Madison would read it in six weeks. Monroe's first dispatch, written tomorrow or the day after, would travel on the same vessel or the next.

Two accounts of that same April morning, departing Paris within days of each other. Madison would receive them together, or nearly so, and read them against each other, and find that they did not agree.

He placed the sealed letter at the edge of the desk. He did not touch it again.

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Scene 5

The candles had burned themselves to stumps. He had not replaced them.

Paris was quiet in the way that cities are quiet at two in the morning—not silent, never silent, but reduced to its lowest register: a cart somewhere on the rue Saint-Honoré, the distant complaint of a gate hinge, then nothing. The study held the particular chill of a room whose fire had been allowed to go out, and Livingston sat in the chair beside the cold grate and did not call for wood.

The letter was sealed. The courier would come at five.

He had poured the glass of Bordeaux an hour ago, when the letter was done, intending it as a kind of conclusion. He had not drunk it. The wine had gone cold, the glass cold against his palm, and he held it without lifting it to his lips, the way a man holds a thing he has already decided to set down.

He thought of his wife, briefly—of the drawing room at Clermont, the particular quality of autumn light through those windows, the smell of woodsmoke and the Hudson River cold coming off the water. He had been away from it for sixteen months. He would be away from it longer still. He had written her, in his last letter, that the affair was nearly concluded and that he hoped to return before the summer's end. That letter was already a lie, though he had not known it when he wrote it.

He set the glass on the mantelpiece.

The map was there, as it had been for sixteen months—the Mississippi running down its centre, the territory spreading west in the undifferentiated brown of cartographic uncertainty. He had stood before it so many times that he knew its imprecisions the way he knew the imprecisions of a familiar face: the eastern bank drawn with false confidence, the western reaches trailing off into the vague, the whole of it a conjecture held in place by ink and the ambitions of dead empires. He had come to Paris to argue for a city at the river's mouth. That city was now merely the threshold of something so vast it made his instructions read like a letter addressed to the wrong house.

He pressed his fingertip to the river's course. The paper was cool, faintly rough, carrying the grain of years in this room—damp winters, tallow smoke, the slow exhalations of a failed negotiation now succeeded by something he had not yet found the word for.

He had not found the word for it because the word was not triumph. He had expected triumph. He had imagined it often enough—the moment of the door opening, the moment of the offer, the moment of his own voice in the room where the thing was decided. He had imagined himself equal to it, and perhaps he had been. But standing now before the map in the cold of two in the morning, with the sealed letter at the desk's edge and the untouched wine on the mantelpiece and the courier coming at five, he felt something that had no name in the diplomatic vocabulary he had spent his life acquiring. Not regret. Not fear, precisely. Something more like the recognition that a door has closed behind you in the dark, and the room you are now in is larger than the one you left, and you cannot yet see its walls.

Barbé-Marbois would come with a figure of his own—sixty million, he suspected, sixty at minimum—and the transaction would continue from the position he had established with a sentence he could not now recall having decided to speak. He had simply spoken it. He had looked at Talleyrand across that desk, with the fire too hot for April and the heat at his collar and the knowledge that something enormous had just been placed before him, and he had spoken.

Monroe at eight.

He crossed the room to the writing table, unlocked the lower drawer, and drew out the dossier he had assembled on James Monroe. Not the public record—Monroe's debts, his failed governorship of Virginia, the recall from Paris in '96 that had left him bitter and suspicious of the very diplomatic apparatus he was now being sent to command. He had assembled it months ago, in a moment of cold professional foresight he was not entirely proud of. A man with debts could be generous with the republic's money. A man nursing a grievance against the State Department could be persuaded that the State Department's resident minister had done him a service rather than stolen his occasion—if the argument were made correctly, in the first minutes, before pride had time to harden into opposition.

He closed the dossier. Returned it to the drawer. Locked it.

He did not yet know what he would say to Monroe. He knew what the dispatch to Madison said. He knew what Talleyrand had heard and what Barbé-Marbois would be told. He did not know what he would say to James Monroe, who was Jefferson's envoy and therefore in some technical sense his superior, and who would read the situation in an instant—Monroe was not a man to be managed by flattery or misdirection, and Livingston had never supposed otherwise—and who would then decide whether the two of them would enter Barbé-Marbois's apartments as partners who had agreed on the same account of the previous day, or as adversaries who had not.

If Monroe chose to contest the account, he could destroy everything in a single dispatch. He had only to write to Jefferson that the resident minister had exceeded his commission on the day before Monroe's arrival, had named a figure five times the authorised ceiling, had sent a self-serving account to Madison without consulting the envoy who had been dispatched precisely because the administration had lost confidence in Livingston's conduct of the affair. Every word of it would be accurate. Every word of it would kill the transaction and, with it, whatever remained of Livingston's standing in the republic he had served for thirty years.

He thought again of the drawing room at Clermont. The light through those windows. The particular silence of a house at peace with itself.

The cart on the rue Saint-Honoré had gone quiet. Somewhere in the house, a shutter moved against its frame—a faint wooden knock, then silence. The cold of the unlit grate had settled into the room's stones, and Living

ston stood before the map in his coat, his breath faintly visible in the guttering light of the last candle's stub.

Three hours until the courier. Six until Monroe.

He pulled the chair to the writing table, took a fresh sheet, and set the nib to the page. Not a dispatch. Not a memorial. A letter to a man he had never entirely trusted and now needed entirely—a letter whose first line would establish, in the seconds Monroe spent reading it before he looked up, whether the two of them were allies or adversaries in the hours that followed.

He wrote the opening. Read it back. Wrong—too formal, the distance of it too legible, the careful courtesy of it indistinguishable from a warning. He crossed it through.

He wrote another. Worse: the eagerness beneath the syntax, almost an apology in its arrangement, would tell Monroe everything he needed to know about Livingston's position and nothing Monroe could be permitted to know before they were in the same room.

He set the pen down and looked at the map.

The Mississippi ran south to its mouth in the dark of the room, and the territory spread west beyond all reckoning, and somewhere in that unmarked brown expanse was the answer to a question the republic had not yet thought to ask. He had opened it. He had opened it alone, in a room he had not been invited into until he forced the door, with a figure he had not been authorised to name, and the courier would come at five and Monroe at eight and Barbé-Marbois whenever Barbé-Marbois chose—

Three sharp blows at the street door. Not the porter's unhurried knock, not the measured summons of a servant delivering a card at the proper hour—three blows in rapid succession, the iron ring dropped hard against the plate, the sound of a man who had ridden and would not wait.

Livingston did not move.

A second series—four this time, and then a voice in the passage below, too low to carry words but not too low to carry its register: authoritative, French, and not Barbé-Marbois.

He heard the porter's shuffling step, the drawing of the bolt, the creak of the outer door against the cold.

Then silence—the particular silence of a conversation conducted in rapid undertones at the threshold of a house in the dark hours before dawn.

He rose from the chair. The unfinished letter lay on the table, Monroe's name alone upon it, and the candle had burned to its last quarter-inch of tallow, and the footsteps now ascending the stair were not one man's but two.