Letters from an American Farmer | Page 6

spring
the numbers of these birds brought to market were immense. Never,
perhaps, were there so many before."
Carey wrote in 1793, the year, as has been noted, of the first American
reprint of the Letters, that had first been 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.