Parrot and Olivier in America (23 page)

In any case Mathilde showed his lordship no encouragement at all. It was me,
mon Perroquet
, she thanked for saving her and I held up her maman's little mirror so she could examine the recovery of her skin which would, in a very short time, show no more injury than a single small indentation in the splendid shadow of her nose.

You will say one cannot cure smallpox with olive oil.

In fact, one can. I did.

II

TO THE MARQUIS DE TILBOT,

Dear Monsieur, You always said I was ill-suited to my occupation and yet you understood my nature well enough, and with this knowledge strung me along from year to year, and I will not say I have not had an interesting life because of it.

To serve you, Monsieur, is one thing, but M. de Garmont knows not my history or abilities. He insults my honor. He entirely lacks your grace and spirit. He has threatened me, and made himself foolish in attempting to seduce my wife. For this last I would not be blamed for murdering him, so this letter is a less painful way, for himself, of sundering the connection.

I did not seek this new country you have exiled me to but, like Port Jackson many years ago, it does present me with a chance and this one I am too old to throw away.

That is to say, I must give my notice.

Yours faithfully,

J. Larrit, Esq.

III

DETERMINED TO IMMEDIATELY free myself from Garmont, I was urgently in need of employment. I therefore visited printers on both Broadway and Chatham Street but I had no etchings or letters of reference and the best offer I received was from Barnett Bros. who said they would inspect my work if I could provide a sample. I tried but did not please them. I then pretended I was also a compositor and was dismissed inside the hour without the thrashing that was offered in lieu of wages.

Finally I threw myself on the mercy of our hard-faced landlady who led me into a small dark parlor above whose mantel hung a likeness of a pair of pink-cheeked boys.

Here she seated her bony little self and studied Mathilde's
instruments
one by one. Finally, with her raw red hand, she pushed a single note across her desk to me. This instrument had been drawn by Mr. Hill, the nail manufacturer, in payment for a portrait of his daughter.

"You must raise your wife up from her bed."

"She needs her rest mum."

"So she will need her room all paid for."

"Yes, mum."

"So," she said, "this bill is written on the Bank of Zion on Pearl Street. Take her there. Don't let her accept scrip. She must not take
any
notes issued by any bank at all."

"No dollar bills?"

"When you have been in New York longer you will understand that there are many dollar bills that are worth no more than twenty cents. For now you must stick to gold and silver. Is her fever gone? Never mind. Say nothing about fever at the bank."

"Mum's the word," said I.

"That's the spirit, Mr. Larrit, you'll be out of debt in no time." And then, to my great surprise, she laid her fingers upon my cheek and I felt a little widow's hand, all filled with busy blood. "Go," she said. "Before they close their doors."

It was a dull gray Monday and the city was already counting its takings, whipping its horses, removing the jewelry from its cases. We set off for Pearl Street but managed to tour the perimeter of City Hall, arriving in Chatham Street where we had the surprise of seeing Mr. Eckerd's
Tragedy of the Revolution
already advertised.

On board the ship there had been much talk about the healthy breezes on Manhattan. They must have meant the winds blowing from the arses of the New York pigs. Beekman Street stank like a shit heap, worse than the faubourg Saint-Antoine. We headed south, past Theater Alley, into a smudgy charcoal sort of maze in which the high-haunched New York pigs mingled with New York clerks, their collars all turned down and a great deal of vanity showing on their wispy chins. I mean the clerks. Mathilde was soon distressed and very hot, so then I carried her, and this attracted a group of white-eyed black children who guided us to Pearl and Wall and declared themselves insulted when I could not pay their bill.

The banking chamber of the Bank of Zion was supported by the most boastful columns, but if the name had made me think it would be the home of Jewish bankers I was a fool. On coming beneath its rotunda, we beheld a great symbol laid in mosaic on the floor, this being a triangle and a laurel and three stars which later proved to be the sign of American Protestants who believed their voyage had been more than equal to the Israelites'. Around this circle, like a great ice rink in its size and smoothness, were more columns, between which were placed some pale and ugly clerks, one of whom read Mathilde's
instrument
, once, then twice, then silently retreated from his pen without a beg-your-pardon.

We were left to wait five minutes and were finally interrogated by what the New Yorkers call a
baas
, a short man in a frock coat and side whiskers who crossed the wide floor beneath the rotunda to ask whose
instrument
this was. There was then a lot of argy-bargy. A good quarter hour of it.

"The gentleman wishes to load his trousers with a weight of silver?" etc., etc.

"The gentleman does."

This baas then affected to laugh at our peasant ways, and I gave him the great smirking pleasure of observing how we divvied up our loot in three. It was clear it was past their closing time but only after we had shared our load did we permit ourselves to be escorted out. My pockets were so heavy I feared my trousers would fall down in front of him.

We strolled up Broadway and the evening sky was cobalt blue, the lamps yellow, the fires flickering red and orange in their
brasiers
. When I had lightened my load and tucked Mathilde into bed, I stepped out for a jiffy. I had no other plan than that I would quietly examine this place where the Marquis de Tilbot had exiled us. Perhaps some oysters too. Why not?

I entered into the white-gas stream of Broadway, but could not see the silver North River and the dark East River flowing like mercury in the night, and how could I guess what was occurring, that very hour, in the unlit streets around the Bowery, where there was a murky smoking red-flecked flow of life--not ants but human beings, a living mass of men--roaring south toward me.

I later learned that the city fathers had locked about three hundred pigs inside the Canal Street pound. I had seen a notice in the street, but what were pigs to me? The city would no longer tolerate the swine whom their improvident owners let wander the streets where they relieved themselves in public and fornicated without shame.

The people's pigs had been stolen from them, and as a result there was extreme social agitation around the pound. All the angry owners of the pigs, some armed with hammers, others with crowbars, others with no more than a skinful of John Barleycorn, had been drawn toward this enclosure like filings to a magnet.

So as I innocently wondered about the price of a dozen New York oysters, some hundred pigs were stampeding into genteel Hudson Square and a greater number of men were stumbling, falling, hollering. One wished only to retrieve his own pig and lead him home, another to steal a new pig, but most had no other ambition than to share the joy of the chase.

I heard them coming, I suppose, but I had lived so many years in Paris I thought the roar of voices to be nothing but a boxing match nearby.

On the corner of Broadway along Chambers Street, I saw a strange sight--a French noble whose cloak did not obscure the gold embroidery shining bright as Jesus in the gas. He carried a silver-capped stick in his inky right hand and an untidy pile of papers beneath his left arm.

I had forgotten that Lord Migraine was shortsighted, so when he did not see me I assumed he meant to cut me. Why not? It must be clear by now that I had no intention of being his second signatory. But then I saw he was not cutting me at all. He offered me his hand.

"Which way do you walk?" he asked.

As he was once again attempting English, I was slow to understand him.

"I trust Mrs. Larrit is recovered."

In the course of this very short conversation we had walked a block and so were on the corner of Murray Street when the swine and their fellows arrived on top of us. Murray was dark, but Broadway was lit from the Battery up to the Delphi Theatre, so although I pulled him into a doorway, the bright light caught his fancy coat, and that was jewel enough to halt the whole stampede, or that part of it composed of a hulking Irishman and his Carib friend who immediately demanded that the aristocrat tell them who he was and where he came from.

"I am Mr. Olivier de Garmont," he said, in a haughty style not well matched to his situation. "I am a friend of General Lafayette."

To which the Carib wished to know how it was his head had not been taken off his shoulders many years before.

The little fellow stepped full into the light and, with that largeness of gesture that marks French theatrical speech, declared himself a student of democracy.

Alas, his listeners knew nothing of the French or the theater. They were drunk and probably affronted that he did not have the grace to act afraid.

"Ye little curd o' moon spit," cried the Irishman, and wrapped his arm around the slender neck and dragged him into Murray Street, wrenching him so violently that papers and stick went flying in the dark.

I searched for his stick and found it by its silver knob. By this time the two large men were sending him between them back and forth like a shuttlecock and singing in loud rousing voices:

"Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons, marchons!
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos saillons!"

You have just read those words, written in a good hand. Migraine seemed not to understand the deadly intention of the song.

Silver knob or no, his lordship's stick was too light to be a useful weapon. Chance brought me a decent length of lumber, four inches by two inches, I would say. This
instrument
I brought down upon the Carib's arm.

Lord, what a crack.

Urgently the fellow held his limb against his chest, bestowing upon me, in complete silence, a look of inexorable outrage.

"Kindly bash the bugger, Jim," said he, or words to that effect.

I was a fair height, and I was strong enough, but the Irishman was taller and heavier. I later read that he was a ferry driver famous for his foul mouth and violent possession of disputed wharfs. Soon he would be a millionaire. Now he was about to murder me.

The Irishman had raised his ringed fist.

"Lord Jesus," interrupted the Carib, and sat down suddenly.

"Allez!"
cried Lord Migraine. I did not have to turn my head to see the Frenchman's arm. It was extended parallel to the earth and at one end there was a pistol with an eight-inch barrel.

"No," I said, for I did not see how he had time to prime it.

"Allez-vousen,"
he said.

The Irishman began to laugh, and that was his miscalculation for it produced a flash of flame and he was violently pushed backward on his heels.

"You!" he said, clutching at himself. It was clear he had taken a ball in the shoulder.

"Now," said my surprising ally to our two assailants.
"Maintenant rentrez chez vous."

It was clear I had much to learn about Olivier de Garmont.

Olivier

DESPITE THE HOSTILE NATURE of my financial instruments, I lived very well in my first fortnight in New York, firstly due to the allowance provided by Mr. Peek, secondly by lunching at my boardinghouse, and thirdly by accepting the invitations to dinner that, as my banker friend had predicted, soon lay heavy on my tray.

There was a long treatise on American prisons I was duty bound to write, and I certainly heard many original opinions during those nightly dinners whose guests had been clearly selected to provide me with every statistic I could ever wish to know. Being every day so occupied with notes, I had no time to consider a more flippant treatise:
On the Things Americans Put into Their Stomachs
. This
gastronomic
aspect of democracy has been quite overlooked in France, and I would propose to the young hack that he could do worse than devote a volume each to American breakfast, American dinner, and American tea, also a heavy supplement on ham, for it is served in quantity at almost every meal. The publisher might profitably provide an addendum for supper, and also that afternoon feast of cakes and tea,
the gouter
. No doubt democracy will one day find its own Larousse and we will all be the better for it.

I called frequently on Master Larrit and was irritated to find him not at home to me. However, I was a French commissioner and therefore, without having done a thing to deserve it, I had American gentlemen making servants of themselves at every turn. If news of this did not reach Mr. Parrot, then so be it. I had sent a doctor to his dying wife, but perhaps he had wished her dead and he was annoyed with me for interfering with his plans. He had frozen my assets and doubtless imagined me most upset, but by the second week I cared no more for him than in the general sense that I worked, as I was in conscience bound, to arrest the spread of his wife's disease.

A certain Mr. Robert O'Hara had called on me the second Monday in New York. He clearly felt no obligation to provide any introduction other than last week's
Mercantile Advertiser
which he indicated I might be gratified to read.

I had so quickly adapted to the new state of
egalite
that I was far less disturbed than you might imagine. Indeed, the frank eccentricity of this introduction endeared me to the stranger who carried himself with an ease that I had not hitherto seen in even the wealthiest Americans. Ah, thought I, so this is it, a new world one can greet with pleasure.