1876 (2 page)

(I think that a little
m
é
moire
in the beautiful lyric style of the above might do very well for the
Atlantic Monthly
.)

Emma shivered in the wind. “Yes, old. Dingy, like Liverpool.”

“Waterfronts are the same everywhere. But there’s nothing old here. I recognize nothing. Not even City Hall, which ought to be over there where that marble tomb is. See? With all the columns ...”

“Perhaps you’ve forgotten. It’s been so long.”

“I feel like Rip Van Winkle.” Already I could see the beginning of my first piece for the New York
Herald
(unless I can interest Mr. Bonner at the New York
Ledger
;
he has been known to pay a thousand dollars for a single piece). “The New Rip Van Winkle, or How Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler Sailed to Europe Almost Half a Century Ago ...” And stayed there (asleep?). Now he’s come home, to report to President Martin Van Buren who sent him abroad on a diplomatic mission, to compare foreign notes with his friend Washington Irving (who invented him after all), to dine with the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck: only to find all of them, to his astonishment, long dead.

Must stop at this point.

These pages are to be a quarry, no more. A collection of day-to-day impressions of my
new
old country.

Titles: “The United States in the Year of the Centennial.” “Traveller’s Return.” “Old New York: A Knickerbocker’s Memories.” “Recollections of the Age of Jackson and Van Buren ...” Must try these out on publishers and lecture agents.

At this moment—midnight, December 4, 1875—I am somewhat staggered at the prospect of trying in some way to encompass with words this new world until now known to me only at the farthest remove. I can of course go on and on about the past, write to order of old things by the yard; and happily there is, according to my publisher, Mr. E. P. Dutton, a considerable market for my wares whenever I am in the reminiscent mood. But the real challenge, of course, is to get the sense of the country as it is today—two, three, four times more populous than it was when I left in 1837. Yet, contemplating what I saw of New York this afternoon, I begin only now to get the range as I sit, perspiring, in the parlour of our hotel suite while dry heated air comes through metal pipes in sudden blasts like an African sirocco.

None of the Americans I have met in Europe over the past four decades saw fit to prepare me for the opulence, the grandeur, the vulgarity, the poverty, the elegance, the awful crowded abundance of this city, which, when I last saw it, was a minor seaport with such small pretensions that a mansion was a house like Madame Jumel’s property on the Haarlem—no, Harlem—no,
Washington
Heights—a building that might just fill the ballroom of one of those palaces the rich are building on what is called Fifth Avenue, in my day a country road wandering through the farms north of Potter’s Field, later to be known as the Parade Ground, and later still as Washington Square Park, now lined with rows of “old” houses containing the heirs of the New York gentry of my youth.

In those days, of course, the burghers lived at the south end of the island between the Battery and Broadway where now all is commercial, or worse. I can recall when St. Mark’s Place was as far north as anyone would want to live. Now, I am told, a rich woman has built herself a cream-coloured French palace on
Fifty-seventh Street!
opposite the newly completed Central Park (how does one “complete” a park?).

A steward hurried across the deck to Emma.
“C’est un monsieur; il est arriv
é
, pour Madame la Princesse.”

Everyone told us that of all the Atlantic ships those of the French line were the most comfortable, and so the
Pereire
proved to be, despite winter gales that lasted from Le Havre to the mid-Atlantic. But the captain was charming; and most impressed by Emma’s exalted rank even though her title is Napoleonic and the second French empire is now the third French republic. Nevertheless, the captain gave us a most regal series of staterooms for only a hundred and fifty dollars (the usual cost of two first-class passages is two hundred dollars).

Our fellow passengers proved to be so comfortably dull that I was able during the eight and a half days of the crossing to complete my article for
Harper’s Monthly
, “The Empress Eugénie in Exile,” filled with facts provided by the Emperor’s cousin, my beloved Princess Mathilde who of course detests her. Conforming to current American taste, the tone of the piece is ecstatic, and somewhat fraudulent.

But the Empress has always been most kind to Emma and to me, although she once tactlessly said in my presence that literary men give her the same sense of ennui as explorers! Well, the writer is not unlike the explorer. We, too, are searching for lost cities, rare tigers, the sentence never before written.

Emma’s visitor was John Day Apgar. We found him in the mail salon. Rather forlornly, he stood amongst the crowd of first-class passengers, all looking for children, maids, valets, trunks.

Quite a number of the men were having what the Americans so colorfully refer to as “an eye-opener” at the marble-topped bar.

“Princess!” Mr. Apgar bowed low over Emma’s hand; his style is not bad for an American. But then John, as I call him, was for a year at our embassy in Paris. Now he is practising law in New York.

“Mr. Apgar. You are as good as your word.” Emma gave him her direct dark gaze, not quite as intense as the one she gave New York City, but then John, unlike the city, is a reasonably well known and familiar object to her. “I’ve a carriage waiting for you at Pier Fifty. Porters—everything. Forgive me, Mr. Schuyler.” John bowed to me; shook hands.

“How did you get on board?” I was curious. “Aren’t we still in the harbour?”

“I came out on the tender. With all sorts of people who have come to greet you.”

“Me?” I was genuinely surprised. I had telegraphed Jamie Bennett at the
Herald
that I was arriving on the fourth but I could hardly expect that indolent youth to pay me a dawn visit in the middle of the Hudson River. Who else knew of my arrival?

The captain enlightened us. “The American newspaper press is arrived on board to interview Monsieur Schuyler.” The French pronunciation of Schuyler (Shwee-lair) is something I shall never grow used to or accept. Because of it, I feel an entirely different person in France from what I am in America. Question: Am I different? Words, after all, define us.

“How extraordinary!” Emma takes a low view of journalists despite the fact that my livelihood from now on must come from my pen, from writing for newspapers, magazines, anything and everything. The panic of 1873 wiped out my capital, such as it was. Worse, Emma’s husband left her in a similar situation when he saw fit to die five years ago while ingesting a tournedos Rossini at the restaurant Lucas Carton.

Whether it was a heart attack or simply beef with foie gras lodged in the windpipe, we shall never know, since neither of us was present when the Prince d’Agrigente so abruptly departed this world during a late supper with his mistress. It was the scandal of Paris during the three days before the war with Prussia broke out. After that, Paris had other things to talk about. We did not. To this day none of us understands how it was that the Prince died
owing
the fortune that we thought he had possessed.

With the slightly shady pomp of a chamberlain at the imperial court, the captain led us across the salon to a small parlour filled with gilt chairs
à
la Louis Quinze where, waiting for me, was the flower of the youth of the New York press. That is to say, the new inexperienced journalists who are assigned to meet celebrities aboard ships in the harbour and, through trial and error (usually more of the second than of the first), learn the art of interviewing, of misdescribing in sprightly language odd fauna.

Twenty, thirty faces stared at me from a variety of long shabby overcoats, some open in response to the warmth of the cabin, others still tightly shut against the morning’s icy wind. We have been told a hundred times today that this has been the coldest winter in memory. What winter is not?

The captain introduced me to the journalists—obviously he is well-pleased that the reduction in our fare has been so dramatically and immediately justified. I sang for all our suppers; spoke glowingly of the splendour of the French line.

Questions were hurled at me whilst a near-sighted artist scribbled a drawing of me. I caught a glimpse of one of his renderings when he flipped back the first page of his paper block: a short stout pigeon of a man with three chins lodged in an exaggerated high-winged collar (yet mine is what collars should be), and of course the snubbed nose, square jaw of a Dutchman no longer young. Dear God! Why euphemize? Of a man of sixty-two, grown very old.

Thin man from the New York
Herald
.
Indolent youth from the New York
Graphic
.
Sombre dwarf from
The New York Times
.
The
Sun, Mail, World, Evening Post, Tribune
were also present but not immediately identified. Also half a dozen youths from the weeklies, the monthlies, the biweeklies, the bimonthlies ... oh, New York, the United States is the Valhalla of journalism—if Valhalla is the right word. Certainly, there are more prosperous newspapers and periodicals in the United States than in all of Europe put together. As a result, today’s men of letters come from the world of journalism, and never entirely leave it—unlike my generation, who turned with great reluctance to journalism in order to make a desperate, poor living of the sort that now faces me.

“What, Mr. Schuyler, are your impressions of the United States
today
?”
The dwarf from
The New York Times
held his notebook before him like a missal—studying it, not me.

“I shall know better when I go ashore.” Pleased chuckles from the overcoats that had begun to give off a curious musty odour of dirty wool dampened by salt spray.

Handkerchief to face, Emma stood at the door, ready for flight. But John Apgar appeared to be entirely fascinated by the Fourth Estate in all its woolly splendour.

“How long has it been, sir, since you were last in America?” A note of challenge from the
World
:
it is not good form to live outside God’s own country. “I left in the year 1837. That was the year that everyone went bankrupt. Now I am back and everyone has again gone bankrupt. There is a certain symmetry, don’t you think?”

This went down well enough. But
why
had I left?

“Because I had been appointed American vice consul at Antwerp. By President Van Buren.”

I thought that this would sound impressive, but it provoked no response. I am not sure which unfamiliar phrase puzzled them more: “vice consul” or “President Van Buren.” But then Americans have always lived entirely in the present, and this generation is no different from mine except that now there is more of a past for them to ignore.

Our republic (soon to be in its centennial year) was in its vivacious sixties when I left, the same age that I am now.

Although my life has spanned nearly two-thirds the life of the United States, it seems but a moment in time. Equally curious is Emma’s first impression of New York: “How old it looks,” she said. Yet there is hardly a building left from my youth. As I spoke to the press I did finally recognize through the window—porthole—the familiar spire of Trinity Church. At least no new fire has managed to destroy that relic of the original city.

(Noted later: my “familiar spire,” according to John Day Apgar was torn down in ’39. The current
un
familiar spire dates from the early forties.)

Questions came quickly. My answers were as sharp as I could make them, considering how tactful, even apologetic one must be for having stayed away so long. And if the newspaper reports of my return prove to be amiable, I will find it easy—I pray—to acquire a lecture agent, not to mention magazine commissions from—from anyone who will pay!

“Where have you been living, sir?”

“For the last few years in Paris. I came there—”

“Were you in Paris during the war, during the German occupation?”

I restrained myself; was modest;
agr
é
able
.
“Why, yes, in fact I wrote a little book about my experiences. Perhaps you know the title.
Paris Under the Commune
?”

Either my publishers have exaggerated the success of the book or journalists do not read books or even reviews of books. Yet
Harper’s Weekly
referred to
Paris Under the Commune
as “a terrifying and entirely fascinating eyewitness account of the siege of Paris and the rising of the Commune, all recorded with that celebrated gift for detail which marks any utterance from Mr. Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler’s pen.” I recall this notice by heart, largely because the only utterance I have ever heard my pen make is a squeak.

The man from the
Sun
looked very pleased with himself as he asked, “You yourself, sir, are not a Communist?”

“No, no, dear boy.” My voice filled suddenly with catarrh as I deliberately mimicked old Washington Irving at his most gracious. “I am a simple American.”

“Then why have you lived so long abroad?” The
Graphic
.

“When I was an American consul in Italy, I married a Swiss lady—”

“Is that her?” The dwarf looked over his missal at Emma; in fact, pointed that object at her as if he were an imp from hell with a summons.

“My wife is dead. She died at Paris some years ago. She—”

“What is
your
name, miss?” The
World
to Emma.

“Je ne comprends pas, monsieur.”
Emma’s face was white, her full lips a straight line of irritability. The French words snapped in the room like a whip.

“My daughter is the Princess d’Agrigente.” Much confusion as we worked as one to get the spelling right. Finally, a compromise: in English she is the Princess of Agrigento. “She is a widow—” I began.

“What did the Prince
do
?”
From the
Express
.