Chapter 6: The Interloper's Arrival

Scene 1

The groom had been walking the horse in circles for twenty minutes. Livingston watched him through the single window—the animal's breath lifting in pale wisps, the groom's shoulders drawn up against the April chill—and found the repetitive circuit oddly steadying. The courtyard revolved. The horse revolved. The morning held its position.

He looked back at the dispatch.

Seven pages, fair-copied in his own hand because he trusted no secretary with this particular construction. The ink had dried fully; he could run his thumb across the lines without smearing, and he had done so twice already, as though the slight resistance of dried ink might confirm what reading could not settle. The room smelled of cold ash from the grate and the particular staleness of a study occupied through the night—paper and sealing wax and the faint sourness of tallow burned to its stub. He had not slept. The candles were new; he had replaced them at dawn.

The approach of Monsieur Barbé-Marbois on the evening of the eleventh instant, he read, must be understood as the natural consequence of representations I had long been pressing upon the French ministry, representations which had, over the course of the preceding weeks, created in the mind of the Treasury the conviction that the American government stood prepared to treat on terms of genuine consequence.

He stopped.

He pressed his palm flat against his left ear—the dead one—and held it there a moment, then withdrew his hand. The gesture accomplished nothing. It never did.

Representations I had long been pressing.

The phrase was architecturally sound. It bore weight. A reader in Washington City, six weeks hence, would form a picture: Livingston at the work of patient cultivation, Barbé-Marbois arriving at last to confirm that the cultivation had borne fruit. Madison would read it that way. Jefferson would read it that way, and Jefferson was the reader who mattered most.

The difficulty was the next paragraph.

He read on, though he did not need to. He had written the sentences; he knew what they contained. Barbé-Marbois had come to him unbidden, had named the whole of Louisiana, had set the frame, produced the figure, defined the object of the transaction. Livingston had responded—had responded well, he judged, better than most men would have managed on no sleep and with a mandate that authorized nothing remotely resembling what was being proposed—but the sequence was irreducible. The approach had been French. The opening had been French. Livingston's role on the evening of April eleventh had been, in the precise legal sense, reactive.

Representations I had long been pressing was not, in the strict construction, false. He had been pressing representations. He had submitted memorials, engaged Talleyrand's office, cultivated Joseph Bonaparte to the extent that forty words exchanged at two receptions could be called cultivation. None of it had produced this. None of it was connected to this. Barbé-Marbois had come on Napoleon's instruction, along a channel that ran nowhere near anything Livingston had built.

The sentence was a falsehood so smooth it almost convinced him.

He set the quill down beside the inkwell without wiping it. Ink spread across the blotter in a slow, irregular stain, and he did not move to correct it.

The question, reduced to its essentials, was this: Monroe would arrive before nightfall. Monroe would ask to see the correspondence. Monroe would read this dispatch, and what Monroe read would become the foundation—or the fault line—of everything that followed. An honest account would show Madison that Livingston had possessed no authority to engage on the Louisiana question, that the offer had arrived unsolicited, that Livingston had named a figure five times his ceiling on the strength of nothing but his own judgment and the pressure of the moment. An honest account would make Monroe the man with the mandate and Livingston the man who had improvised his way into someone else's negotiation.

He gathered the seven pages and aligned them at the corners with two careful passes of his hand. He reached for the sealing wax.

The draft, with its sentence intact, went into its fold. He pressed the seal hard into the softened wax—harder than necessary—and set the finished packet at the near edge of the desk, where it would be visible the moment a visitor entered the room.

Outside, the groom completed another circuit. The horse's breath rose and thinned in the cold air, and the morning held its position, indifferent to what had just been decided at the desk above.

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Monroe's calling card had arrived an hour before Monroe himself.

Livingston had read it twice—James Monroe, Special Envoy to France and Spain—and set it face-down on the silver tray, where it remained when he heard the carriage in the street below. The sound preceded the knocker: wheels on the cobblestones of the rue Trudon, the horses blowing hard from the posting house, a driver's brief command cutting through the late afternoon noise of the city. The vendor's cry from the corner—bougie, bougie—continued without interruption as Livingston descended from his study to the reception room, aware that the next several minutes would establish terms that no subsequent conversation could entirely revise.

He picked up Monroe's card from the tray. He turned it once between his fingers without looking at it, then set it down face-down again.

The door opened.

Monroe entered bearing the marks of six weeks at sea and two days on the road from Le Havre—his coat creased at the elbows and dark at the collar, his face carrying the drawn, greyish quality of sustained exhaustion. He was thinner than Livingston remembered. Behind him came a young secretary, slight and watchful, carrying a leather satchel that Livingston recognized at once as the kind of bag in which official papers traveled. The sealed packet would be in there. Madison's instructions.

Livingston crossed the room.

'Mr. Monroe.' He took the man's hand and pressed it. 'You are very welcome to Paris. I trust the crossing was not altogether brutal.'

'The crossing was what crossings are.' Monroe's voice was steady enough, its Virginia plainness unchanged by fatigue. He looked at Livingston with the direct, appraising attention of a man who had spent the voyage composing exactly this moment. 'I am grateful to find you well, sir.'

'You will sit. You will take something warm.' Livingston gestured toward the chairs angled near the window—the arrangement discouraging equality, as the room was designed to suggest. 'Harrington'—this to his own man, appearing at the threshold—'wine and whatever the kitchen has that is hot.'

Monroe sat. His secretary remained standing near the door, the satchel held correctly at his side, attending to everything and contributing nothing. His presence made the room triangular in a way that suited neither principal.

They exchanged the required words: the President's health, the crossing, the condition of the roads north of Rouen, the state of Le Havre's accommodations. Monroe answered each inquiry fully and without haste, which told Livingston that the man was neither so exhausted as he appeared nor so impatient as the situation warranted. He was measuring the room. Measuring Livingston.

Then Monroe set down his wine—barely touched—and said, in the same mild tone he had used to discuss the roads: 'And what is the present disposition of the ministry toward our object?'

Our object.

The phrase arrived with the soft, considered weight of a document served across a table. Not the object of your negotiation, not the matter you have been pursuing—our object, as though Monroe had been party to every dispatch and every audience for the past eighteen months, as though the whole enterprise had been conducted jointly by two men of equal standing and he had merely been delayed in transit.

Livingston did not miss the word. He had trained himself, across years of deafness, to read the precise valuation a speaker placed on each syllable, and Monroe's our had been delivered without emphasis, which was the most precise emphasis available.

'The disposition,' Livingston said, 'is considerably altered from what it was even a fortnight ago. There is much to relate, and I would do it justice.' He let a beat pass. 'I have engaged a private room for this evening at the Hôtel de Richelieu—a full account of the correspondence and the present state of the matter, with the relevant papers before us. I have been preparing the briefing in anticipation of your arrival. Shall we say eight o'clock?'

Monroe looked at him. The secretary near the door did not move.

'Eight o'clock,' Monroe said. 'I should be glad of it.'

Outside, the vendor turned the corner and his cry faded into the general noise of the street, and then there was only the sound of the city, indifferent and continuous, doing what cities do.

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Scene 3

Monroe had been reading for some time. The dispatch lay flat on the table before him, held open at its corners by his own hands, and he read it the way a lawyer reads a deposition—twice through before speaking, the second time slower than the first.

The Burgundy was nearly gone. Three candles of the original four had guttered to uneven stumps, and the fourth threw its light at an angle that caught the edges of the papers without illuminating the faces of the men behind them. Livingston had eaten nothing since the fowl, an hour past, and the wine had done its work on an empty stomach. He was aware of it. He kept his hands still.

Monroe's lips moved slightly on the second pass. Not performing—calculating. He had the habit of an advocate who had argued before juries that required every word to earn its place.

He reached the sentence. Livingston knew the moment by the brief cessation of movement, the hands gone quiet against the paper.

The natural consequence of representations I had long been pressing upon the French ministry.

Monroe spoke it aloud, quietly, to himself. Not to Livingston. The words fell into the warm air of the room without emphasis, without accusation, without anything at all except the sound of them being made audible.

Then he set the dispatch down.

'I observe, Mr. Livingston, that the account does not specify the authority under which you engaged on the question of the whole territory.' He reached for the bottle, not looking up. 'No doubt the Secretary will wish to understand that point.'

He refilled his glass. He set the bottle down. He waited.

The fire had been built against the April chill, and the room was close. Livingston felt the warmth against his left side and the cool edge of the table beneath his fingertips. He reached out and straightened the dispatch, then the sheaf of correspondence beside it, aligning the edges with both hands, his eyes on the papers rather than on Monroe. The corners met. He pressed them flat.

He cleared his throat—the wine had risen at exactly the wrong moment—and suppressed it into a brief, controlled cough.

Monroe had not moved. He held his glass and waited.

'The authority,' Livingston said, 'is the authority that the situation demanded.' He held Monroe's gaze. 'Barbé-Marbois put the question. I gave an answer that kept the conversation alive. Had I deferred for want of formal instruction, there would have been nothing to brief you upon this evening.'

Monroe turned his glass once. He said nothing.

'Mark me—the account will satisfy Madison.' Livingston set his forearms on the table. 'What it requires is that the account be ours jointly. Not mine, delivered after the fact to a co-plenipotentiary who arrived to find the ground already broken. Ours—from this evening forward, from the joint presentation to Barbé-Marbois, from the first formal session at the Treasury.' He paused. 'You are the Special Envoy. You carry the President's confidence in a form I do not. I have the acquaintance with the interlocutors, the correspondence, eighteen months of preparation. Neither of us completes this transaction alone.'

Monroe set his glass down.

The fire shifted—a log settling, the brief flare of it brightening the ceiling before it subsided—and for a moment the room was lit more fully than it had been all evening.

'You propose,' Monroe said, 'that I serve as co-plenipotentiary in the formal sessions. Present throughout. Equal in standing on the instrument itself.'

Livingston kept his voice level. 'I open with Barbé-Marbois, given my acquaintance with the ground. You are present and speak when the price question requires a formal American response. The dispatch carries a jointly signed covering letter. The account of April eleventh stands as written.'

The last sentence cost him something. Monroe heard it.

He did not press. He took up the dispatch, read the final paragraph, and set it face-down on the table.

'Very well.'

Two words. The forbearance in them was exact, and Livingston knew its price without needing to be told.

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Scene 4

The fire had burned lower, the room's warmth accumulated over hours into something that pressed on a man's temples rather than comforted him. The candles had reached their last third, their light thicker and more amber than it had been at supper, and the table between the two men held the ruins of the evening: the Burgundy bottle emptied to its last half-inch, the sheaf of correspondence pushed aside, and Madison's instructions—Monroe had drawn them from his coat and laid them flat on the cloth some quarter-hour since, as a man lays down a deed whose terms require no further argument.

Monroe read the relevant passage aloud. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to.

'Ten millions of dollars.' He set his finger under the figure. 'For New Orleans and the Floridas, or such other arrangement as shall secure the navigation of the Mississippi. Those are the Secretary's words. The President's knowledge, as it stood in January.' He looked across the table. 'On what authority, Mr. Livingston, do you propose to treat for a sum that may be five times that figure?'

Livingston pressed two fingers briefly against his left temple—the headache had been building for two hours, a slow grinding pressure from the sustained effort of following Monroe's lips across a candlelit table—then dropped his hand and rested both palms flat on the cloth.

'I propose nothing.' He held Monroe's gaze. 'I have proposed nothing formally. What I have done is receive an offer and decline to refuse it before we had occasion to confer.' He reached into the correspondence on his side of the table and drew out a folded note—Barbé-Marbois's, arrived that morning, its handwriting the clean, spare script of French administrative economy. He set it beside the Madison instructions. Two documents, edge to edge. 'The Minister of the Treasury expects both American ministers at the Treasury offices within forty-eight hours. Not at the Foreign Ministry. The Treasury. He has specified both of us, which means he knows you are here, and he is not prepared to wait for us to satisfy ourselves about the January ceiling before he satisfies himself about the British fleet.'

Monroe looked at the note. He did not touch it.

'The President's instructions—'

'Reflect January's knowledge.' Livingston let the sentence stand without inflection. 'The situation is not January's situation. You will observe that a man who set out for London in a coach and found the bridge washed out does not sit in the road consulting his directions. He exercises the discretion the road requires.'

A coal shifted in the grate. The sound of it was small and flat, and after it the room was closer than before.

Monroe was quiet for long enough that Livingston could hear his own breathing. Then Monroe reached across and took up the Madison instructions. He read them once more—not the price clause, but something further down, a passage Livingston had not seen. Whatever it contained, Monroe's face gave nothing. He folded the paper along its original creases, once and then again, and placed it in the breast pocket of his coat.

He did not return it to the table.

That was the moment Livingston understood. Not the words Monroe had spoken, nor the words he had withheld—but the gesture itself, the paper going into the coat, away from the table's shared surface and into Monroe's keeping alone. There were instructions beyond the price clause. Instructions Livingston had not been shown and would not be shown. Monroe had crossed the Atlantic carrying something he intended to produce only when the moment suited him, and the moment had not yet come.

Livingston kept his face still.

'The President,' Monroe said, 'has sent me to acquire what is necessary for the republic. His instructions represent his knowledge of the situation as it stood in January.' A pause, measured and deliberate. 'The situation has changed.'

He did not say they would exceed the ceiling. He said nothing further on the subject at all. He reached for his wine glass, found it empty, and set it down again.

Livingston did not reach for his own glass. He rested both hands flat on the table and looked at them—the spread fingers, the ink stain still faint on his right forefinger from the morning's work—and then looked up.

'There are two points,' he said. 'The first: I will open the session. The second: if the price question requires a formal American response, I will look to you.'

'That arrangement suits me.'

Neither man named the figure. It existed between them the way a large piece of furniture exists in a small room—present in every movement, requiring navigation, never directly acknowledged. Sixty million francs. Eighty million with the claims. Fifteen million dollars at any exchange rate one cared to apply, against a ceiling of ten, against a republic whose annual revenues had not yet reached eleven.

The candles threw their amber light across the table. Outside, somewhere in the rue Saint-Honoré, a carriage moved on the cobbles—the sound of it receding, growing faint, then gone into the silence of the street.

Barbé-Marbois expected them within forty-eight hours. What Monroe's coat pocket contained, Livingston did not know. What it might require of him—when Monroe chose to produce it, at whatever moment suited Monroe's purposes—he could not yet calculate. The alliance had been formed tonight, its terms agreed, its courtesies observed. He had secured what he needed. He had not secured everything.