Letters from an American Farmer | Page 2

century Thoreau. His life is certainly more interesting than the real
Thoreau's--and would be, even if it did not present many contradictions.
Our records of that life are in the highest degree inexact; he himself is
wanting in accuracy as to the date of more than one event. The records,
however, agree that Crevecoeur belonged to the petite noblesse of
Normandy. The date of his birth was January 31, 1735, the place was
Caen, and his full name (his great- grandson and biographer vouches
for it) was Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur. The boy was well
enough brought up, but without more than the attention that his birth
gave him the right to expect; he divided the years of his boyhood
between Caen, where his father's town-house stood, and the College du
Mont, where the Jesuits gave him his education. A letter dated 1785
and addressed to his children tells us all that we know of his
school-days; though it is said, too, that he distinguished himself in
mathematics. "If you only knew," the reminiscent father of a family
exclaims in this letter, "in what shabby lodging, in what a dark and
chilly closet, I was mewed up at your age; with what severity I was
treated; how I was fed and dressed!" Already his powers of observation,
that were so to distinguish him, were quickened by his old-world
milieu.
"From my earliest youth," he wrote in 1803, "I had a passion for taking
in all the antiques that I met with: moth-eaten furniture, tapestries,
family portraits, Gothic manuscripts (that I had learned how to
decipher), had for me an indefinable charm. A little later on, I loved to
walk in the solitude of cemeteries; to examine the tombs and to trace
out their mossy epitaphs. I knew most of the churches of the canton, the
date of their foundation, and what they contained of interest in the way

of pictures and sculptures."
The boy's gift of accurate and keen observation was to be tested soon
by a very different class of objects: there were to be no crumbling
saints and canvases of Bed-Chamber Grooms for him to study in the
forests of America; no reminders of the greatness of his country's past,
and the honour of his family.
From school, the future woodsman passed over into England. A distant
relative was living near Salisbury; for one reason or another the boy
was sent thither to finish his schooling. From England, with what
motives we know not, he set out for the New World, where he was to
spend his busiest and happiest days. In the Bibliotheca Americana
Nova Rich makes the statement that Crevecoeur was but sixteen when
he made the plunge, and others have followed Rich in this error. The
lad's age was really not less than nineteen or twenty. According to the
family legend, his ship touched at Lisbon on the way out; one cannot
decide whether this was just before or immediately after the great
earthquake. Then to New France, where he joined Montcalm. Entering
the service as cadet, he advanced to the rank of lieutenant; was
mentioned in the Gazette; shared in the French successes; drew maps of
the forests and block-houses that found their way to the king's cabinet;
served with Montcalm in the attack upon Fort William Henry. With
that the record is broken off: we can less definitely associate his name
with the humiliation of the French in America than with their brief
triumphs. Yet it is quite certain, says Robert de Crevecoeur, his
descendant, that he did not return to France with the rag-tag of the
defeated army. Quebec fell before Wolfe's attack in September 1759; at
some time in the course of the year 1760 we may suppose the young
officer to have entered the British colonies; to have adopted his family
name of "Saint John" (Saint-Jean), and to have gradually worked his
way south, probably by the Hudson. The reader of the Letters hardly
supposes him to have enjoyed his frontier life; nor is there any means
of knowing how much of that life it was his fortune to lead. In time, he
found himself as far south as Pennsylvania. He visited Shippensburg
and Lancaster and Carlisle; perhaps he resided at or near one of these
towns. Many years later, when his son Louis purchased a farm of two

hundred acres from Chancellor Livingstone, at Navesink, near the Blue
Mountains, Crevecoeur the elder was still remembered; and it may have
been at this epoch that he visited the place. During the term of his
military service under Montcalm, Crevecoeur saw something of the
Great Lakes and the outlying country; prior to his experience as a
cultivator, and, indeed, after he had settled down as such, he "travelled
like Plato," even visited Bermuda, by