published at London. Carey was himself Crevecoeur's American publisher; and he may well have thought as he wrote the lines quoted of Crevecoeur's earlier pigeons "obscuring the sun in their flight." Crevecoeur had by this time returned to France, and was never more to ply the avocations of the American farmer. In the interval, much had happened to this victim of both the revolutions. Though the Letters are distinguished by an idyllic temper, over them is thrown the shadow of impending civil war. The Farmer was a man of peace, for all his experience under Montcalm in Canada (and even there his part was rather an engineer's than a combatant's); he long hoped, therefore, that peaceful counsels would prevail, and that England and the colonies would somehow come to an understanding without hostilities. Then, after the Americans had boldly broken with the home government, he lent them all his sympathy but not his arms. He had his family to watch over; likewise his two farms, one in Orange County, New York, one in New Jersey. As it was, the Indians in the royal service burned his New Jersey estate; and after his first return to France (he was called thither by his father, we are told, though we know nothing of the motives of this recall) he entered upon a new phase of his career. "After his first return to France," I have said, as if that had been an entirely simple matter. One cannot here describe all its alleged difficulties; his arrest at New York as a suspected spy (though after having secured a pass from the American commander. General MacDougal, he had secured a second pass from General Clinton, and permission to embark for France); his detention in the provost's prison in New York; the final embarkation with his oldest son--this on September 1, 1780; the shipwreck which he described as occurring off the Irish coast; his residence for some months in Great Britain, and during a part of that time in London, where he sold the manuscript of the Letters for thirty guineas. One would like to know Crevecoeur's emotions on finally reaching France and joining his father and relatives at Caen. One would like to describe his romantic succour of five American seamen, who had escaped from an English prison and crossed the Channel in a sloop to Normandy. A cousin of one of these seamen, a Captain Fellowes of Boston, was later to befriend Crevecoeur's daughter and younger son in the new country; that was after the Loyalists and their Indian allies had destroyed the Farmer's house at Pine Hill, after his wife had fled to Westchester with her two children, and had died there soon after, leaving them unprotected. But all this must, in nautical phrase, "go by the board," including the novel founded upon the episode. Nor can we linger over Crevecoeur's entry into polite society, both in the Norman capital and at Paris. Fancy the returned prodigal--if one may so describe him--in the salon of Madame d'Houdetot, Rousseau's former mistress! He was fairly launched, this American Farmer, in the society of the lettres.
"Twice a week," he wrote, some years after, "I went with M. de Turgot to see the Duchesse de Beauvilliers, his sister; and another twice-a-week I went with him to the Comte de Buffon's. ... It was at the table of M. de Buffon, it was in his salon, during long winter evenings, that I was awakened once more to the graces, the beauties, the timid purity of our tongue, which, during my long sojourn in North America, had become foreign to me, and of which I had almost lost command--though not the memory."
Madame d'Houdetot presented Crevecoeur to the families of La Rochefoucauld, Liancourt, d'Estissac, Breteuil, Rohan-Chabot, Beauvau, Necker; to the academicians d'Alembert, La Harpe, Grimm, Suard, Rulbriere; to the poet-academician Delille. We have in the Memoires of Brissot an allusion to his entrance into this society, under the wing of his elderly protectress:--
"Proud of possessing an American savage, she wished to form him, and to launch him in society. He had the good sense to refuse and to confine himself to the picked society of men of letters."
It was at a later period that Brissot and Crevecoeur were to meet; their quarrel, naturally, came later still.
Madame d'Houdetot did more than entertain the Farmer, whose father had been one of her oldest friends. She secured his nomination as Consul-General to the United States, now recognised by France; it was at New York that he took up residence. Through the influence of Madame d'Houdetot and her friends, he retained the appointment through the stormy years that followed, though in the end he was obliged to make way for a successor more in sympathy with the violent republicanism of the age. Throughout
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