LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO SPY

Matthew Frassica Department of English McGill University, Montréal August 2005

A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts

© Matthew Frassica, 2005 Library and Bibliothèque et 1+1 Archives Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de l'édition

395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Canada Canada

Your file Votre référence ISBN: 978-0-494-24860-7 Our file Notre référence ISBN: 978-0-494-24860-7

NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library permettant à la Bibliothèque et Archives and Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par télécommunication ou par l'Internet, prêter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des thèses partout dans loan, distribute and sell th es es le monde, à des fins commerciales ou autres, worldwide, for commercial or non­ sur support microforme, papier, électronique commercial purposes, in microform, et/ou autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats.

The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriété du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in et des droits moraux qui protège cette thèse. this thesis. Neither the thesis Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels de nor substantial extracts from it celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés ou autrement may be printed or otherwise reproduits sans son autorisation. reproduced without the author's permission.

ln compliance with the Canadian Conformément à la loi canadienne Privacy Act some supporting sur la protection de la vie privée, forms may have been removed quelques formulaires secondaires from this thesis. ont été enlevés de cette thèse.

While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. ••• Canada 2 MATTIiEW FRAsSICA

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... 3

Introduction ...... :...... 3

La Tarantella ...... 5

The Innocent American, from Tourist to Spy ...... 115

Conclusion...... 134

End Notes ...... 135

Works Cited ...... 137

Acknowledgements ...... 139 LA TARANTEIl.A: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 3

ABSTRACT

This thesis comprises a creative work and a brief analytical essay treating the themes of espionage and innocence.

Cette thèse comprend un ouvrage de fiction et une dissertation courte sur les thèmes de l'espionnage et l'innocence.

INTRODUCTION

This thesis's objective is to demonstrate and discuss a literary character type.

The thesis has been prepared, in the case of the creative work, after a course of reading that has inc1uded works of fiction and non-fiction, and a period of reflection. AB regards the analytical essay, the research methods were much the same, but in place of the period of reflection a process of intuitive argumentative leaps was substituted. 4 MA1TIIEW FRAsSlCA LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 5

LA TARANTELLA

Well said, good woman:S- tailor! well said,

courageous Peeble! th ou wilt be as valiant as the

wrathful dove or most magnanimous mouse.

-2 HENRY IV, Acr 3 SCENE 2

There was still time, of course, to change my mind and leave. How much time have l spent since then ca1culating just when this option closed to me, at what point l could no longer safely walk away? Even now, l'm not sure-how much choice, reaUy, did l have in any of what happened that week? But this may merely be evasion. l am certain that, at the time, l believed myself the author of aU my decisions, including the one to come and, later, to act. This may be the

only way to view the whole episode, as a series of mistakes and miscalculations aU my own. 6 MATIHEW FRASSlCA

Turning around and leaving, though, did not occur to me that morning. l had just arrived, after a crossing fllied with a kind of distracted anxiety and dread that seemed like an inappropriate mixture of emotions. So in addition to anxiety and dread l felt the guilt associated with feeling the wrong thing. A rowdy group of passengers on board saw me in my gloominess as either an object of derision or a potential convert to their revelry, or both, but only added to my troubles the effort of avoiding them.

Arrival had, predictably, evaporated this heaviness with more present distractions-that is to say, evaporated aU but the guilt, which Calso predictably) retumed in the form of self-reproach for having lost the anxiety and dread, which at least were a sort of penitence, if not the right sort.

Prussian troops scrutinised our credentials as we crossed their lines into the city. They were old soldiers, out of shape and unkempt, whose suspicion of the train's passengers never exceeded the degree to which such suspicion looked to be profitable. The carousers from the ship were obliged to bribe these men with all of the exotic liquors they had won or stolen from the ship's crew, to make up for inadequate documentation. A young man seated next to me, with whom l had been observing an amicable silence, drew their attention. As one of them looked at his papers, the other asked, "And you, monsieur, why do you wish to go to Paris?"

"1 am a joumalist. With the New York Tribune. l've been assigned to go to Paris."

"Oh yes? A joumalist. l think l may have seen another joumalist from the New York Tribune come through-when was it?" LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 7

"Just yesterday, l think," said the other soldier, whose breath filled the cabin with the smell of ripe cheese.

"Oh yes, it was yesterday, l remember now. Are you sure you aren't a

Red, posing as a journalist? Perhaps we are mistaken?" There was no menace in the way the soldiers stood over us, just a kind of boredom with their routine. They posed the threat only of continuing the interview, a threat whose force they cultivated through determined inattention to hygiene. The one holding my neighbour's papers had fingers shredded at the nails like corn husks and a striking face marred with what looked like deliberate scarification. His eyes, cruelly lazy, never fully looked at us or the papers, but stared out of the compartment's window towards the platform. Both he and his colleague were grimed with soot and intentional filth, as if they had lathered themselves in mud before boarding the train.

My neighbour paid his bribe and had his identity papers returned to him.

My diplomatic laissez-passer suited them well enough to leave me alone.

l delayed appearing at my hotel so that l could linger for as long as possible in that sense of unrestrained opportunity, of not being bound even to sleeping in one particular place, that one feels only on arrivaI and, in sorne cases, departure. So though leaving was in a sense the last thing on my mind, in another sense l was deeply invested in the uncommitted threshold feeling, of not officially being there at aIl. Down through its showcase boulevards the city seemed to be holding its breath: its apartment buildings empty, shops shuttered, cafés deserted except for lone elderly waiters. It was like sleepwalking through the city at dawn, a city in a dream of homelessness and isolation. As l approached the river, a detachment of 8 MATIHEW FRASSlCA the Garde Nationale slumped past, their faces exhausted and premonitory.

(How much of what l remember is tainted by the desire to wam my former self of what is to come?) A laughing woman dashed across the street in front of me, in pursuit of or flight before a partner who never appeared.

Her laughter and footfalls against the paving stones echoed along the deserted street. l peered to the north up the alley out of which she had come; it gave onto a courtyard of shuttered windows around a fountain whose nymph still poured water from an amphora. Lilacs hung overhead. l stood in this garden looking up at the still trees in the buildings' shade, the distant explosions of ordnance sounding around the walls, when the shutters of a window opened above. A woman with a narrow, sharp face looked down towards me. Her mouth tightened into the rumour of a smile.

She asked if l was looking for someone.

No, l said, l was just admiring her courtyard.

"Ah, you are just smelling the flowers, looking for love and listening to gunfire-a true revolutionary!" She laughed tiredly as she tumed from the window to the dark interior.

Back in the boulevard l could see groups ahead, closer to the river.

Working-class families, once alien to this quarter, walked in the sun as their children played along the barricades. In the Place de la Concorde, a crowd were gathered around a puppet Guignol, jeering its Pu1cinelle. Lovers who had avoided conscription walked arm in arm with their ladies. On a kiosk, an official notice from the Commune read:

N" 315. LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 9

Les ouvrières travaillant le papier, telles que brocheuses, plieuses, etc.,

qui seraient sans emploi, s'inscriront à la Délégation scientifique, 78, rue

de Varennes, de 8 heures à 11 heures de matin.

Paris, le 13 mai 1871.

LE MEMBRE DE LA COMMUNE,

Chef de la Délégation scientifique,

PARISEL.

From the bridge 1 watched the Parisians walk along their river. A man on the quay smoking a pipe held an infinitely still fishing line. The sense of the place was one of holiday, the scene of leisure marred only at the edges by the rising barricades and the sound of explosions. Soon 1 would have to visit Père-Lachaise. 1 dreaded it because 1 knew 1 wouldn't be able to summon grief. 1 told myself that what 1 felt wasn't indifference, but that the reality of my father's death hadn't yet sunk home.

"Excuse me, do you have a light?" a voice from behind me asked in

English with a slighdy affected British accent. 1 tumed around. Facing me was a tallish, thin young man in a seersucker suit and a red tie. His gesture towards me with an unlit cigarette was arrested expectandy, and on rus face he wore a self-satisfied grin that he was pretending to suppress.

"No, sorry, 1 don't smoke."

"Hum, that's a shame, really." He took up a position next to me, leaning on the balustrade of the bridge with the unlit cigarette between his lips. He looked down at the man fishing on the quay. "Doesn't that ridiculous old man realise he's not catching anything? The fish are all in hiding. They know what's coming." 10 MATrnEW FRAsSICA

"What are you doing here, Burgess?"

"l've been in Paris since last summer. l'm a joumalist. Surely you've seen my dispatches in the Baltimore Gazette? l also do sorne research and, l don't know, secretarial work for sorne committee members. Minor intrigues, mostly. A little blackmail. l was doing translation before the war, poetry."

Burgess and l had met as members of the Medical Faculty society in

Cambridge, an undergraduate dinner club that had seen more illustrious days. We each had to perform sorne kind of public stunt to be eligible for membership. Burgess had dressed the statue of John Harvard in the robes of a Catholic priest. l had nearly drowned in the Charles as l tried to set a sculling boat with a crew of skeletons on fire in the middle of the night. l was invited to join anyway. Burgess left the society as soon as he was offered a place at the Kalumet dub.

"Poetry. Anyone l would recogruse?"

"No, l'm sure. A little play of mine is having its début tonight. Dinner theatre, l'm afraid, but one can't hope for anything better for true art now that the Commune is running aU the venues. Are you going to give me a light?" His cigarette still dangled absurdly from his mouths. l took out a cigarette for myself and lit us a match.

"Y ou don't have dinner plans, do you?"

"Well, 1-"

"Don't be ridiculous. Nadine will be there." l looked over at Burgess, trying to remember when l would have told him about Nadine. l could only recaU a long confessional night sitting on the roof with a bottle of port, but no details of what we may have said. l told him l would come. As we LA TARANTEIl.A: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 11 spoke, a group of women in dun-coloured dresses carrying bunches of white and red flowers walked by us on their way across the bridge.

The hotel in the Rue Beethoven had neglected to close when aH of the city's major hotels did. It had remained open during the Siege, Burgess had told me, by turning one floor of rooms into a kind of food bank: Parisians who didn't want to be accused of hoarding could rent part of a room as a pantry. It was a small hotel, accommodating sorne do zen clients at once, that had catered mostly to visitors ta the American quarter before the war. A saHow-faced man sat behind the desk. When 1 came in, he put down his book and stood. The American Minister had reserved me a room but he might have saved himself the trouble. There was only one other name on the guest register. The sickly concierge handed me my key and gestured towards the stairs.

My rooms were on the top floor, under the dormer. The ceiling was low and the green wallpaper rippled and sagged where water had leaked from the roof. Pigeons roosted outside the windows. I decided not to unpack my things into the dresser and to ask the peaked proprietor about laundering my shirts tomorrow. For the moment, 1 would sleep.

1 awoke to find we were under attack. Explosions thundered. 1 thought for certain Versailles had entered and determined to lay waste ta the city. 1 soared down the stairs to find my infirm hotelier sitting behind his desk, reading. He looked up and, seeing my stricken expression, said with a note of condescension, "That happens aH day, monsieur. The Commune fires its artillery from the Trocadéro, around the corner." 12 MATIHEW F'RAsSlCA

l wandered out into the street. The communard guns blew smoke down between the buildings like a censer waving down the nave of a church.

Retum fITe from the Versaillais to the west had struck several buildings nearby, inflicting superficial damage to the stonework. It was a scepe that might have been familiar to the residents of Atlanta or Vicksburg. Across the river, a column of black smoke rose from the Champ-de-Mars. l made my way through the vacant streets strewn with rubble and broken glass.

Absently l found my father's most recent address in the Champs-Elysées, with its caryatids glancing down-desirable in its day for residents of the

American quarter, but just as surely vacant now. The wife of the concierge stared at me scepticaIly from the door as l stood before the building in the middle of the street. l walked up to the door.

"Bonjour, madame.

"Bonjour monsieur. Are you looking for someone?"

"Did you know M. Coop?"

"Why, yes, monsieur, he had an apartment in my building."

"Do you know what happened to him?"

"Oh, l don't know anything about that."

"Was he a good tenant?"

"Who is asking, monsieur?"

"Excuse me. l am M. Coop's son."

"Je suis désolée. Your father was a courteous tenant." She invited me inside. We sat in the front room of her lodge and drank vermouth from taIl glasses. She was a large, animated woman, with a carefuIly-attended coif of dark brown hair and a neatly pressed yeIlow dress, given somewhat to the LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 13 collection of gossipy details that is the great pastime of proprietors everywhere and upon which l had counted. She told me my father had only lived in the building for a few months. He spent most of his days away, but in that time he had received Mr. Washbume, the American

Minister, twice, and assorted other men attached to the embassy a number of times. Washbume had been in to see him the day before he died. The

Minister had seemed, she reported, excessively polite on his way out. Her mantel still displayed porcelain commemorations of the Emperor with his pained look. l thanked her for her help and the drink and stood to leave.

"Would you like to go to his apartment?"

l hadn't anticipated this task, though l should have realised it would have to be done. l suppose l would have expected to put the chore off till later in the visit. l hadn't intended to do any of this business on the first day-my appointment with Washbume the day following was supposed to be the beginning of my errand. Or l had simply concealed the unpleasant duty from myself. My sisters had asked me to bring home certain of his effects, but somehow l had elided the necessity of searching them out.

We ascended the stairs slowly, the scent of her lavender linen water swishing down off the hem of her dress in front of me. His lodging was on the fourth fioor. Inside, the windows faced the colonnaded building on the opposite side of the street. The rooms had been closed for weeks and the still air lacked the smell of powder to which l had become accustomed since my arrivaI, its absence suddenly bringing it again to consciousness.

The light from the street was dimming and it cast the rooms in an early 14 MATIHEW FRAsSlCA dusk. l opened the top drawer of ms desk in the study, then the top of the secretary beside it.

"Where are ms things?"

"Sorne men from the embassy collected all his things the day after," she trailed off. This was a detail she had neglected to share earlier; her anxiety over it no doubt had prompted her eagemess to invite me upstairs. l thanked her for her time and headed towards the door. She asked what l wanted to do with the furniture. l felt dizzy and overheated. Recalling my charge, l pulled a walking stick with a brass mallard's head handle from an umbrella stand next to the door and told the concierge that l didn't care what she did with the furniture. Ibid her goodbye and ran down the stairs and out of the building.

In the street the bombardment had escalated in the last pink light of day. The smoke from the Versaillais artillery rose off to the West, tumed momentarily to a pillar of flame by the retreating sun. Back in the sulphur­ cleansed air l recovered from the moment of claustrophobia that had overcome me in the apartment and l headed again through Haussmann's city down towards the river. LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 15

The address Burgess had given me belonged to a stately home that had been abandoned by its owners and requisitioned by a few communard functionaries who shared the living quarters and had opened the storerooms of the class enemies to their cornrades once weekly. l knocked on the door with the butt of the walking stick's head. Burgess was occupied, the bearded man who opened the door reported. A pair of wilting-ovoid glasses perched on top of the nose that jutted above his carefully trimmed foliage, and through them he regarded me sceptically, as if Burgess's being indisposed made the timing of my appearance rather suspicious. For a moment l thought he would detain me 16 MA1TIIEW FRAsSlCA on the front walk until my bona fides could be confirmed. Instead, he stepped aside from the doorway and said solemnly, "Welcome, comrade."

A brass chandelier with frosted spheres of gas lamps like a bouquet of pearls hung in the front hall over pink marble floors which amplified the sound of dozens of revolutionaries speaking in the adjoining rooms. l passed into the room on the right. Most of the party were wearing beards and black suits; there were very few women present. One particularly ardent man was saying to a circle of listeners, "Let them prepare the best that they have! The working men and women of Paris will defeat any number of traitors and mercenaries that Thiers has purchased. On our side, we are fighting for our liberty, while they can be fighting only for their own enslavement. "

"But the desertions?"

"Desertion, frankly, doesn't much concem me. AlI Paris's citizens will defend her when the time cornes."

Seeing a guest entering the room with a glass of wine in his hand, l headed for the door from which he had come. The door opened onto a narrow staircase to the basement. Halfway down, l made way for two serious looking men who interrupted their discussion as they passed me pressed against the stones of the foundation. Be1ow, l found a clutch of black-suited men speaking in low tones, standing in the middle of a wine cellar. Candlelight from this room eHcited vague shapes and metalliè: glints from a pile of musical instruments e1sewhere in the basement. As l approached the cellar, a short man silenced the conversation by saying loudly, "Bonsoir comrade." LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 17

"Bonsoir," 1 said.

"Ah, an American. May 1 offer you a glass of wine, monsieur-?"

"Coop. Thank you, yes."

"A glass of wine for M. Coop," he said to a thin, whiskerless young man.

"How are you enjoying your stay in Paris, M. Coop?" The question lacked its customary geniality. The rest of the men in the cellar looked down or at the tops of the wine bottles arrayed around them.

"Quite weIl, thank you. 1 only arrived today."

"All this military preparation, l'm afraid, makes the city somewhat less appealing for tourism." His thick lips twisted into a smile.

''l'm not here as a tourist."

"Indeed. 1 am as sorry as you about your father's death. M. Coop, père was a true friend of the revolution, which is more than 1 can say for

Minister Washbume. My name is Raoul Rigault, Procureur of the

Revolutionary Tribunal." He delivered his title in such a way as to communicate the lethal prerogatives this position afforded him, and his voice like a revolver drawn and placed on the table said both that he was willing to delay the sentence that was his to deliver and that such a delay depended entirely upon his generosity, or his whim.

"Pleased to meet you."

"And 1 you, M. Coop, fils. That you are here tonight rather than at the

Washbume palace proves you are a man of your father's spirit." The interview being apparently over, the pale young man handed me my glass of wine and receded to his former place without meeting my eyes. 1 18 MATI1ŒW FRAsSlCA thanked Rigault curtly and headed back aboveground. The voices from the cellar resumed their fervent whispers as l reached the stairs. The admixture of thuggery and juvenility seemed altogether fitting for self-styled revolutionists, but no less irritating for that. l was particularly annoyed by

Rigault's proprietary air about the memory of iny father. Every statement had been delivered with a challenge: do you dare contradict me? That such a man was exasperating didn't alter the fact that he would also be quite dangerous. l felt absurd tapping my father's walking stick at every step.

In the front room a round-faced woman was trying to stand on a semicircular sofa below a domed clock set into a cartouche that descended from the room's gilded, botanical mouldings. She had already begun her address to the assembly and she continued to speak as she mounted the furniture. She began to topple slightly in her shoes on the upholstery, and she reached out to balance herself against a chandelier hanging before her.

The chandelier echoed her sway, and she smiled slightly as she righted herself and resumed her report.

"And, following the order of the Comité Centrale of the seventeenth, the

Union des Femmes has begun organising the election of representatives from each syndicate to what will become a federal chamber of working women." She spoke in Russian-accented French. Her arrivaI had brought a delegation of women revolutionaries who had dispersed among the bearded crowd. One lady whispered to the man who was unconcemed

about desertion; he looked pleased. "We hope to hold elections within the month." LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 19

"Cornrade Dmitrieff," said a man in the crowd. "What is the preparedness of the city's women for defence?"

"Thank you, cornrade Desrosiers. The women's defence committees in each arrondissment are in charge of organising their local defences. We have estimates of preparedness-"

"Would it not seem prudent to focus the energies of the Union on the present danger, rather than on the organisation of labour?"

A hand grasped my arm and l tumed to see Burgess looking at me impatiently. "Where were you? l saved you sorne soup. We're out in the garden." l followed him into the front hall and down a passage to the back of the house. "As l'm sure you noticed, there are sorne extraordinarily tiresome characters in there. Dmitrieff was sent by Karl Marx to manage the

Commune's ladies' social club." l nodded as if this clarified for me what l had been watching. "There's someone l want you to meet-another of our countrymen," Burgess said as he opened a door onto a large garden enclosed by the houses of the block. Rows of spindly wooden chairs faced towards the house, sitting on a smalllawn illuminated by gas lamps. Maybe half of them were occupied, while small groups stood near the edges of the lawn where paths branched off into the trees. The sound of a fountain came from somewhere deeper in the darkness. Burgess brought me to a row at the back and introduced me to one Orson Sylvester, a bearded giant who took up my hand in a hairy paw. He was sitting next to a bony woman named Dominique Marcellin. Her smile reminded me vaguely of the Tremont street burial ground. l sat next to the huge man as Burgess hurried away into the darkness of the garden theatre. Orson's bulk spilled 20 MATIliEW FRAsSICA over his seat onto the territory of the chairs on either side of him. Beads of moisture stuck to his grey beard like rain on the back of a dog. Dominique excused herself and disappeared.

"Ah! Ahem," Orson cleared his throat, watching where Dominique had been. "Ah! Another American. Fine, fine to see another of us here-we need to stick together, you know." He cocked a conspiratorial eyebrow and leaned towards me, pressing a hambone upper arm into my chest. "These frogs are ready to kill each other-we've seen enough of that already, haven't we?" His confidential tone broke and rose as he began laughing incongruously. Through the shadows of the trees at the periphery of the lawn 1 saw Nadine concentrating on the mouth of someone talking. 1 had met her at a house like this one, three years earlier. She had had a frankness unlike any young American women 1 had met; she laughed at my opinions on Courbet. Now she inclined her head to one side as if preparing to disagree with what she was hearing.

"Coop," Orson said loudly, passing me a flask half full of what his breath smelled of. "It seems to me l've met another Coop in this city."

1 took a draught from the flask. "Perhaps you met my father. He worked at the embassy."

"Ah, yes, certainly: Coop! Stalwart. Patriot. Trustworthy to the end of the road. Quite fond of him, really."

"l'm glad to hear it."

"You Coops have the right idea, coming to Paris. This city understands, you know, what culture means." LA TARANTEIl.A: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 21

"What Orson means by culture of course," said Burgess, who reappeared beside us, "is being able to go backstage at the theatres to acquaint one's self with the actresses." He handed me a bowl of cold soup which l perched awkwardly on my lap. There was no spoon.

Orson laughed. ''l'm an easy man to please. l'm happy with the coquettes in the cafés, myself."

"And a bottle of cognac, of course."

"Of course. l've always held that the man-stuff needs ample alcoholic, ah, additive to properly function. That's another example of how the French beat those temperance-fuddled tea-drinkers back home." He handed his flask back to me. "Drink up, young Coop, you are young and the deluge is coming." Nadine looked towards us and l raised the flask to her with a little nod. She smiled back and resumed her conversation.

"It's time l brought the actors down. There's no telling what they're getting up to in there and l don't expect more of our cornrades to join us,"

Burgess said and walked away. l passed Orson his flask and asked why he came to Paris. l gulped sorne of the soup: artichoke.

"Vertical integration, my boy, vertical integration did me in. l left a lot of very wealthy, very angry people waiting at the dock expecting to travel by steamship to Halifax, all because my coal plant in West Virginia hadn't made its delivery. And do you know why? They hadn't mined enough coal to make the delivery because they had no mules to pull the carts. The poor men were hitching themselves up, breaking their backs, so they were at least three weeks behind their production schedule. Why didn't they have mules? My five-star mule farm in Ohio couldn't deliver them. And why not? 22 MATrnEW FRASSlCA

Rail-gauge disparities on my inter-state rail line held them up in

Pennsylvania, where most of the beasts expired of heat exhaustion. Heat exhaustion! The survivors escaped and joined the local fauna of south­ western Pennsylvania. My investors were unhappy, not least because l had promised all of them first-class suites on the maiden voyage. Of course l offered to reimburse their tickets with a one-week stay in Hoboken's first floating luxury hotel. And sorne passengers did take me up on the offer, but a trash barge berthed-the local fauna, you see-berthed next to us and rendered the starboard side of the ship uninhabitable. That was the second fortune l lost, and l made enough people angry that it made good business sense to take what l had left and set myself up in Paris, at least until my prospects at home improved. You see, l didn't expect a war here."

"It must have made a Paris stay less appealing."

"Not at aU, my boy. A war-and then a siege!-is a valuable business opportunity for those with the nose for it. And, as an Ameriean," he lowered his voiee from what seemed to be the customary beUow to a mere holler, "given our special relationship with Prussia, l was in a unique position to develop an import operation. With priees what they were­ perhaps it's not best to go into the details. These Frenchmen are terribly persnickety about-"

"War profiteering."

"Hush! You have entirely the wrong end of the thing, son. l was helping to keep the people of Paris alive. l am a hero to these people. Or, l would be, if l cared to make my role more public, you see."

"1 think l do see." Orson again brandished his flask towards me. LA TARANTEIJ.A: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 23

. Burgess had materialised at the front of the lawn with the actors, who carried large bundles. They hoisted a screen between the back of the house and a raised platform that would serve as the stage and Burgess busied himself adjusting the gas lamps to the appropriate dimness. A light from behind the scrim cast extravagant shadows of the costuming players, suggesting inhuman transformations. The attention of the audience drew towards these projections as the murmur of voices ceased.

"Your friend," said Orson in a hoarse whisper, "has done several of these shows. I, incidentally, had a role in the last one."

"Oh?"

"Yes. l played Poseidon. AlI, l believe, acclaimed my interpretation."

Burgess finished his adjustments and mounted the stage. The lights backstage had gone out. The dimming of the garden's lamps made the foliage around the lawn seem even deeper; no light from the abandoned homes bordering the garden gave any sense of limit to the wood. Burgess spoke. "Thank you aU for coming. Tonight it is my pleasure to present to you a play provisionaUy entitled 'La TaranteUa.' It is a slight affair, a comedy, and my sincere desire is that it may serve temporarily to relieve you aU of the weary burdens of care that circumstances have imposed upon us all. l hope you enjoy it."

A short, thin girl mounted the stage as Burgess left it. The backdrop behind her was painted to represent, on one end, a forest, and on the other, a bucolic terrain of hillocks and pasture. Between them was a zone of brush or thicket. The thin girl slumped forlornly between the pasture and thicket regions of the stage, turning at the edge of the forest. She carried a 24 MA1TIIEW FRAsSlCA golden apple behind her back. At length she tumed and addressed the audience, in ltalian. The substance of her plaint seemed to be sorrowful, or at least regrettable. An actor playing an old man, hunched over a too-short walking stick, aggressively or predatorily· approached the girl onstage and spoke to her in a badgering tone, and the young girl, increasingly distressed, fled. The old man chuckled darkly. Several more male characters, dressed in robes of heavy, brightly-coloured fabric, joined the old man on stage. This group bantered for a bit, presumably over sorne shared business. At length, one of the party appeared to catch sight of something from the forest end of the stage and interrupted the discussion with agitated words and gesticulations. The group hurried offstage in the other direction. Presently an actor in a bear suit laboriously c1imbed onto the stage, sniffing the ground. Ii looked up and tumed towards the audience, then sat regarding us with a dog's expression of bemused curiosity. Two of the male characters retumed to the stage at this point bearing cudgels and brandished them at the bear, who rose and lumbered offstage with an annoyed roar. The long day and the contents of Orson's flask were beginning to have their predictable effect on me, and l may have dozed for a short time. Even if l wasn't fully asleep, l'm afraid l paid less than full attention to the next several scenes, comprising as they did mostly dialogue in ltalian. The occasional line would elicit laughter from the audience. l could glean only that a number of the male characters were involved in sexual intrigues, the concealment of which from each other and other women required increasingly elaborate conceits and contortions. The old man contrived to disrupt as many of these pairings as he could. LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 25

l glanced in Nadine's direction. She was watching the play with a half­ smile on her open mouth. We had spent a day at the Grand Exposition those three long years earlier. The advances of every industrial nation were displayed beneath the iron and glass superstructure of the exhibition hall on the Champ-de-Mars: locomotives from England, Herr Krupp's mammoth gun, a gilded mechanicallion in the French pavilion. Arrayed around these showcases of modernity were exotic peoples of every colour: African tribesmen with their crimson robes and the startling whites of their eyes, the shining blue plaits of the Chinese, the mummy's taffeta skin in his Egyptian temple to scale. We walked baçk over the river. The gardens of the

Tuileries were strung with electric lights and we danced to a distant waltz beyond their glow.

The first act of Burgess's play ended. A trio of cabrette, clarinet, and violin took to the stage and began playing a tarantella. The audience remained seated, speaking softly. Orson gently snored.

Later that night l had laid my hand on her thigh in a touch that communicated the presumption of familiarity but also a kind of magnanimous restraint; to my disgust l had recognised in Rigault's voice the distant relative of this gesture. A sanctimonious solicitude had crept into my intimacy, adding to my pleasure a kind of absurd moral self-satisfaction: at least she is enjoying this more than 1 am. The smooth skin of her thigh gave way to tiny ridges like a sand dune's ripples near the meeting of her groin.

She smelled of popcom and sweat below her ruffed pubis. In this garden she tumed to whisper something to her neighbour. The play had resumed.

On stage the bear retumed, investigating a stranded bassinet. The bear took 26 MATrnEW FRAsSlCA the handle of the bass,inet in its mouth and carried it offstage to the forest.

A young man, who had taken part in the convoluted sexual intrigues as the secret favourite of the robed men's mistresses, entered the scene comforting the thin girl, to whom he finally made sorne sort of pledge. She pretended to leave the stage, hiding in fact behind a feature of the pastorallandscape, while the young man headed into the woods. When he had exited, the thin girl began to rise in anticipation of a soliloquy. But the young man hurried back to the centre of the stage and delivered a monologue of his own, which was presently interrupted by the appearance of another, coquettish young lady, with whom the young man disappeared towards the pastures. 1 can only provide the barest sketch of the proceedings, since 1 confess that 1 was having difficulty staying awake in the cool garden. Burgess, as far as 1 could remember, hadn't shown an interest in or aptitude for theatre while at college, excluding the theatrical aspect of most of the Med. Fac. pranks.

Sometime later, the bear retumed the bassinet to the stage, whereupon the wealthy robed men beat the retreating animal with their cudgels. The safe retum of the child, however, apparently allowed the reuniting of the thin girl and the young man, whose marriage or reconciliation was celebrated by the collected cast, aIl of whom resumed their behavioural motifs and intrigues throughout the final scene, though those routines had taken on a light-hearted aspect that belied their purgatorial perpetuity. The bear retumed comically dancing, his presence little by little alarming and driving

off the rest of the players, until only he remained, still tuming and dipping to the waltz of the cabrette trio. The bear bowed and left the stage.

As someone relit the garden's gas lamps, 1 tumed to Orson. "Wel1?" LA TARANTEllA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 27

"1 didn't understand a word of it."

"Neither did 1. Excuse me."

1 stood to find Nadine beside me. "1 was sorry to hear about your father," she said.

"That's kind of you."

"He was on the right side." We walked up the lawn in the direction of the stage.

"Everyone here seems to have known a part of him 1 didn't."

"Would you have understood?"

"1 understand weIl enough to know that if this-aIl of this-was what he was looking for then he found what cornes of it."

"Y ou shouldn't pass judgement so quickly on your own father."

"Who else can we be expected to judge? Your people in there are ready to condemn any man for the neighbourhood he lives in."

"It's more complicated than that, Henry. Most of them came from lives of privilege, but they recognised how unjust that privilege was. And how unjust it is to defend that privilege with violence and repression."

"They don't seem to be too bashful about helping themselves to the spoils of that privilege now."

She turned to look at the stage's backdrop, at which we had stopped.

She was studying the leaves of the ltalian forest. Once she had said that she found faces always staring out of patterns and textures. 1 wondered now whether the faces were content or frightened, well-fed or malnourished.

"There's someone you should meet. His name is Cluseret. He knew your father very well. Maybe better than anyone." 28 MA1TIIEW FRAsSlCA

"Where is your family now?"

"Outside the city. Mine has chosen the wrong side." She straightened and tumed towards the garden and its lilac scent.

"Why are you here, Nadine? Why do you have to choose sides?"

She looked at me sadly. "We always have to choose sides, Henry."

l took a step doser to her and touched her arm. She looked away. The shadows of leaves cast by the gaslight played over her face. Her deep pores looked like the skin of an orange. From this distance l could smeU her black hair.

"Come by tomorrow moming," she said without turning back to me, and then walked away up to the house.

l found Orson inside trying to engage lingering communards in a rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

"You're giving us a bad reputation," l said.

"You know this one!"

"No, l don't. Let's go." l was anxious to avoid Burgess and the tribute he would expect to his genius. Outside in the street, Orson took me by the arm.

"You look like you could use sorne steadying, my boy. You're going aU wobbly."

"Why are you here, Orson?"

"I say: FoUow Paris, Henry Coop. She'U show you the way."

Unable to gather from his disconnected directions where it was Orson lived, l brought him back to the Rue Beethoven, where he vomited voluminously in my washbasin. LA TARANTEllA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 29

"Coop, Coop--you're not related to Robert Coop, at the embassy, are you?"

"Yes,Orson."

His expression tumed solemn. "A fine businessman. 1 never dealt with a more honest," he raised his hand here as if swearing to a court,

"trustworthy businessman."

1 washed and repaired to the arrnchair in the outer room to sleep.

Shortly, Orson's snoring rose from the bedroom as detachments of the

Garde Nationale marched in the streets below. 30 MATTHEW FRAsSlCA

Apocalyptic artillery volleys from the

Trocadéro woke me from a restless sleep. Orson hadn't stirred, but due to sorne unreasonable half-asleep assumption about being considerate l dressed as quietly as l could. Downstairs, l arranged to have my shirts laundered for the outrageous price of three francs. Still, could Orson's siege-time business have been as benign as gouging the cleanly? l determined to confront him about his profiteering. It seemed unacceptable just to assume the worst and tacitly condone it.

In the sitting-room downstairs l encountered my fellow-guest, a young man from Connecticut named Richard Dent. He folded a copy of Pyat's newspaper, Le Combat and shook my hand eagerly. LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 31

"It's so invigorating, isn't it? To meet other Americans here, now?"

"Invigorating?"

"1 mean, here, where we may finally see the full promise of equality?

The notions of our own founders, finally brought to realisation?"

"Ah. Naturally. And you've come-?"

"To do what l can to help. l've volunteered down at the Hôtel de Ville, and now l'm serving on a committee for foreign affairs. They really do appreciate our help--l'm sure you could have a similar position if you went down and offered your services."

"Actually, l am in Paris on a more personal matter."

"Of course, of course, family cornes frrst. But don't forget that here we belong to the brotherhood of man."

"l'Il endeavour to keep it in mind. Good-day." l left him to his newspaper and took to the stairs. l shuddered at the thought of encountering more of these dewy revolutionists, but l would just have to resign myself. To aIl concemed, it seemed as if my own father had actively supported these people, and to the extent that his allegiances might help to explain his end, l owed it to myself and my family to more actively pursue the knowledge that l dreaded. This is not to say that, at this point--or ever, even later, even now-I had decided that he had been murdered.

Washbume's account of the accident remained the only version l knew of and nothing l had heard suggested it was false. Still, if Washbume opposed my father's involvement with the revolutionists, he might not be the most reliable source of information. l had to admit to myself that, as distasteful as someone like Rigault could be, he would be in a position to know more 32 MATIHEW FRAsSlCA about my father's activities than the Minister. At the time l restricted the kind of information that l thought concemed me to details about events leading up to the moming in question instead of any larger picture of aUegiances and plots; it would be sorne time before l satisfied myself that the facts themselves were as immaterial as they were irretrievable.

Back in the rooms, l thought about writing my sisters, but decided to wait until l had either more conclusive information or less moral agitation, my condition of uncertainty and anxiety being almost certain to communicate itself despite me. Orson had roused himself and was now gurgling heroicaUy. l entered the room without knocking.

"What did you seU, Orson?"

He spat a pint of liquid into the basin, which still bore yeUow rings from his last night's expulsions. "Speak up, my boy."

"What did you seU during the Siege?"

"What are you looking at me like that for, Henry Coop, so suspiciously?"

He splashed water on his face and scrubbed vigorously, making snuffling noises as he did so. "What do you think l'U say? Rat sausages? There were plenty of those, anyway. Grain contaminated with ergot? Human flesh?" He puUed on his trousers. The exertion of bending and of inhaling his gut to fasten them purpled his face. He seemed genuinely hurt by my blunt question. l immediately regretted my tactlessness.

"l'm sorry, Orson. l am certain you did nothing of the kind. You understand that l'm curious about my father's activities, to get sorne idea of what he was doing before he died, and you said that-"

"Dead?" Orson interrupted incredulously. LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 33

"Yes, weeks ago. He feil-"

"Robert Coop, dead. Weil, Henry, 1 must say, this explains your dreary disposition. 1 was beginning to think you were just unsociable."

"1 don't know what you're talking about, Orson."

"My boy, when a man's father dies, it is a time that he must use to take stock, to determine what kind of person he had hoped to be and what kind of person he has become, to take responsibility-when my own father passed away, 1 was a mere pip, a tiny lad, not a whisker! But 1 headed out, nevertheless-Ieft my family-headed out, 1 say, heedless of my stature and my ignorance, headed out to hazard my life for the sake of my fortune.

That is to say, the fortune 1 would make, not of course one that 1 already had or could even imagine. An unimaginable fortune lay in my future, after hard years spent working my way up from seIling tickets to-ah, human curiosities. Years of trouble, sweat, fear, still before me but, after a few years, 1 owned the finest cigar store in Philadelphia: money, women, political influence! This is before that Mississippi steamboat-casino affair nearly ruined me, of course. Did 1 mention that to you? No? WeIl, caIl it my first lost fortune. But aIl 1 knew when 1 started out was that 1 had barely enough coins in my pocket to pay for my next meal, and that 1 had a hundred miles to go to reach the city. Listen, Henry Coop: you-weIl, you could sail back to America and get started making something of yourself, instead of moping around here. That is-did you say you're curious? About what?" He had been gesticulating forcefuIly throughout this speech, punctuating it with chuckles and a kind of wistful look into the middle distance like someone hearing a piece of music for the second time, but at 34 MATTIIEW FRAsSlCA this last question he abruptly switched tones as his reverie came to a full stop.

Still uncertain of my own motives for asking-legitimate suspicion or belated curiosity?-I opted for a more sentimental explanation. "1 didn't know him very well."

Orson sat on the bed and considered the wall above the washbasin.

After a pause, he said, "1 met Robert Coop at an establishment in the

American quarter late one night about three weeks after l arrived in Paris, months before the war. l was in the middle of a dispute with the proprietess, who was insisting on accusing me of owing a considerable bill-a bill which l had paid, mind you, days earlier. Certainly l had undertaken, that is, to pay it, if l recall, days earlier. In either event, your father arrived, asked what was what and, since he was apparently well­ respected there, set the poor wretch right. To thank him, l offered him a drink. As sure as l sit here, Henry Coop, your father very nearly drank me out the door. He was a talkative one, Robert Coop. Said he had been in ltaly with, ah, Garrison, whoever, ah, whoever it was, a great military leader there. Something to do with the Pope. l can't remember exactly, but it was lively talk. Most of these Americans over here were timid painting-watchers, you know, or else they were too ashamed of their past to share it. Lot of them were Confederates, you know. But Robert Coop! He could keep up with the longest-winded French coalman or night-porter in any cabaret or bistro anywhere in the city. A born mixer-in. Once, we attended a soirée given by one of the Empire's most famous hostesses-a Comtesse-and your father introduced me as 'the American industrialist Orson Sylvester.' It LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 35 was an honour, l can tell you, to be among the great thinkers, the politicians, the aristocrats of Paris with a respectable introduction like that.

Lady Ogilvy was making bedroom eyes at me the whole night long." He was silent for a moment as he fastened his collar. "1 sold news," he said, in answer to my first question. "That was my traffic. Minister Washbume was the only person in Paris who the Prussians allowed a newspaper-so long as he didn't share it. The rest of the city had to get its news by pigeon-post.

So we-I-borrowed Mr. Washbume's paper on occasion. Your father helped me." Orson pursed his lips in concentration as he knotted his tie.

"He was a man of his word, l'm happy to say to you." He delivered this testimony in a voice that began to betray strong emotion. l felt the same regret as l had when he had showed hurt earlier--emotions in the big man seemed to come on quickly and strongly, making one want to dry them up at the source rather than try to ford the flood. l debated the propriety of comforting the old man but he settled the question by removing his flask and fortifying himself. He exhaled loudly and offered me a draught. l declined with a frown. He held out one hand toward me. "Help me up,

Coop." l grasped his arm and heaved him off the bed, onto his feet.

He had described someone l hadn't known. My father had always shown a wry temperament: always slightly, aloofly mocking. When l had come to him with the usual crises of childhood, he had made it known­ through his tone only, never explicitly, but children are so sensitive to subtleties of tone-how truly insignificant my troubles were. A more outgoing child might have simply sought out greater troubles (and l suspect that this would have gratified his sense of humour), but l always took this 36 MATIHEW FRAsSlCA tone to be a silent rebuke, and repeatedly resolved not to confide in him. In his letters, by which we communicated almost exclusively after he sent me to New Hampshire to board, he had the annoying habit of being coyly evasive about the matters that seemed to me most pressing and blunt where l would have appreciated delicacy. As a parent, he was a contrarian. The first-and last-piece of courting advice he offered was the typically laconic, "Take her to the horse races." When l was having difficulty with a professor who seemed to take a personal dislike to me, he suggested a duel. Being largely dismissive as a confidant and scornful as a guide, he taught me to keep my own counsel. Since the time of these events, l've found in discussion with my sisters that with them he had a much gentler manner, though he had revealed to them no more of his convictions or other inner mechanisms than he had to me. His was, with them, an aloofness of a different type. Perhaps the tone he took with me was intended as playful banter, or as a serious lesson in the indifference of the world. Perhaps it was both.

After a simple breakfast with Orson l made for the address Nadine had told me to visit. On the way l tried to remember if l had brought the walking-stick back to the Rue Beethoven or left it at the house in Passy. If it were at the hotel l hadn't noticed it that morning, so l decided to ring the house after my appointment with Washbume in a few hours. Nadine was not in, but she had left an envelope for me. It contained another envelope and a short note that read, "Henry: See Gustave Cluseret. l've had to use up several favours to get this permission for you. Present this envelope to the officiaIs at the Mazas prisons. Nadine." The inner envelope was sealed with LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 37 a stamp of the figure of Paris in armour, superscribed by the motto "Liberté,

Egalité, Fraternité." Paris's fierce eyes made it c1ear just how seriously she took those words.

Up two flights of stairs from a grocer, the American embassy at 95 Rue de Chaillot lacked a certain hauteur one associates with such institutions. A bit winded, l took up a chair in a kind of sitting room with a weIl­ appointed, somewhat portIy couple who were waiting for documents that would allow them to leave the city. "We have waited so patiently for M.

Thiers," the man said. "But one just cannot stand it any longer. These ruffians-," he broke off with sorne heat. "WeIl, in any case, we should like to leave officiaIly. It seems shameful to creep out through the Prussian side of the city like fugitives."

"I assure you, theyare quite unprincipled," the woman said, evidently referring to the communards rather than the Prussians. "You've only just arrived, but you will see soon enough of what they are capable. These toughs go around with impunity-indeed, they are given authority! Free to accost respectable folk like niy husband, in the crudest imaginable language, aIl for his daring to dress suitably to his station. Of course, one understands that they feel resentment towards those of means. But we both resolved not to disguise our--our respectability, just to appease those baser elements now in charge."

"l'm sorry to hear you were roughly used," l offered.

"I say, it's a blessing Mr. Robertson doesn't understand their language, because it may have been permanently scarring." 38 MATI1-IEW FRASSlCA

"It is such a vulgar tongue," said Mr. Robertson, on whom the foregoing narrative had produced the effect of raising his colour. He began to fan his face mightily with a page of music he had borrowed from the piano beside him.

"Only when spoken by those scofflaws, darling," said Mrs. Robertson comfortingly in defence of the respectable Parisians who had been driven from the city ahead of them. ''You remember how pleasant you found the plays at the Comédie Française before the war."

Mr. Robertson appeared too transported by the emotion of recoHecting the depredations of the Parisian proletariat to respond. At last he sputtered,

"They were always so poorly acted, anyway, one could hardly foUow the action."

Ignoring her husband, Mrs. Robertson asked me, "Are you applying to leave as well?"

"No, actuaHy."

"How unlucky!" Mr. Robertson exclaimed.

"Not at aU. l find the revolutionists charming. They wear such fashionable beards. l'm talking about the theoreticians, of course, not the inferior rabble you describe." Mr. Robertson here nodded judiciously, as if l had confirmed most, but not aH, of his opinions. "Those, l'm just as willing as you, l'm sure, to see done in by the Republic in their wretched warrens."

Mr. and Mrs. Robertson simultaneously produced the same scandalised look. Mr. Robertson ceased fanning himself. "Surely, Mr. Coop, you cannot be serious," he said. "Haven't you considered that there would be no one left to do things like pave the streets and deliver the milk?" LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 39

l considered this for a moment. "If such work were taken on by respectable folk like ourselves, perhaps, we could do without the lower classes."

Mr. Robertson signalled his intention to reply by tightening his brow and wincing painfully. "Mr. Coop," his wife interjected coolly before he had wound up his response, "is having sport with us." She glared at me with the resentment she feh for all the impertinence she had had to brook since arriving in Paris. We passed a few minutes in silence. An elderly secretary with a patrician Virginian accent came in to tell the Robertsons that they were invited upstairs. Mr. Robertson gave me a grave nod as he stood to leave.

The room's chief decorative foeus was a tattered American flag framed over the frreplace, whose inscription declared that it had watched over two generic-sounding battles of the Civil War. The rest of the room's walls were dotted with paintings celebrating America's naval craft, mostly at pastel sunset in bucolic harbours. Rigid, federal style furniture discouraged comfort as if it were unpatriotic. From the front hall, Washburne's voice bellowed farewell to the Robertsons. After they had left, the Minister appeared in the doorway of the sitting room.

"Welcome, Henry." Elihu Washburne's heavy features may once have looked robust, but now they dragged his face downwards in capitulation to gravity. His long white hair had been combed straight back; its stiff tips curled outwards at the collar.

"Minister Washburne," l said. "Thank you for meeting with me." 40 MATTHEW FRASSlCA

"It was an honour to work with your father, Henry. His tenure here at the Paris embassy was the stuff of legend. l respected Robert Coop greatly, though we had OUf little disagreements."

"Y ou disagreed on fundamentals?" l saw no harm in prodding the opening Washbume had made.

"On details that we treated like fundamentals, as proud men will. Will you join me for tea?" Washbume rang a beU and ordered the suUen-Iooking attendant who answered to deliver tea.

"About my father's effects."

"Yes. We had to take a look at aU of his papers to make certain there was nothing that might compromise the national security. l'm sure you understand. "

"1 see. And when will this process of looking be finished? l ask because l had hoped to retrieve aU of his things on this visit."

"1 don't know at the moment, as l'm not abreast of the progress. l assure you that we will contact yOUf family as soon as the documents are ready to be released. How are your sisters, Henry?"

"They are weU, thank you."

"This must come as quite a blow. l understand one of yoUf sisters was just recently married." The tea arrived and Washbume busied himself pouring two cups. l had seen my father for the last time at Madeline's wedding, the spring before. l remember watching him converse easily and good-naturedly with the groom, a young man from a textile family whose nose pointed upwards and who spoke quietly but very rapidly. We had observed a cool distance, our interactions limited to a few half-smiling LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 41 questions my father put to me and my curt answers. The feeling of regret made the memory hang leaden in my abdomen.

"It has cast a pail. Especially since none of us could attend the funeral.

And we've yet to have a detailed account of the accident. May l ask-"

"His remains are interred at the Père-Lachaise cemetery."

"Thank you. That was one question that your letter answered. l was going to ask you what he had been doing on that roof."

"Certainly, l can give sorne account of the events as far as l know them.

Your father was releasing a homing pigeon when he lost his balance on a rain-slicked roof."

"Here's my confusion: why was a homing pigeon being released after the end of the Prussian siege? l understand that during the siege Parisian pigeons brought news home to the city from outside. But now?"

"That is a piece of information that l'm not at liberty to share with you,

Henry. We are involved, here, in a rather delicate position, mediating between the legitimate government in Versailles and the Commune of Paris.

The situation puts our diplomats, and every American in Paris, at peril due to its extraordinary sensitivity. We can't be seen, you see, to favour any one side."

"But you do."

"Between us, Henry: yes, we do."

"Perhaps you and my father disagreed over the side to favour."

"No. Let me assure you that your father supported the Republic as strongly as any patriotic Frenchman." 42 MATTI-IEW FRAsSlCA

"1 have met sorne fairly staunch Frenchmen in the past day that have a different opinion of M. Theirs's government in Versailles."

"Delusional utopianists and dangerous Jacobins."

"Perhaps. But they daim my father as one of their 0wn."

Washbume set his teacup in its saucer and tumed his thick neck toward the tattered flag. He looked at it as a pilgrim might look at a crucifix, with an expression of supplication and appeal. It was a look meant to demonstrate that 1 had struck wantonly at the patriotic core of the embassy's mission in my youthful ignorance and callowness, and

Washbume alone needed to beg the flag both to stay Benjamin Franklin's dread boIt and to provide wisdom. It was a look entirely for my benefit, and 1 detested the old faker for his histrionics. What he said next, however, struck me as chillingly plausible despite this theatrical interlude. "Your father, and here 1 must be as delicate as possible as 1 am straying very perilously in the direction of imprudent indiscretion, provided an invaluable service to this embassy, precisely because he had the confidence of the people you describe. In our profession-the diplomatic one-it is occasionally our duty to appear to hold convictions which our moral and political consciences would never permit us to hold in eamest. It was your father's duty, over many years, to cuItivate connections in Paris's radical movements by forming allegiances there. It was not all that uncommon before the current crisis for the well-to-do to take an interest in revolutionary ideas, especially Americans. But, you see, Robert's ideals-his moral ideals-strictly forbade him sharing their convictions. Those to whom LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 43 you have been speaking have been dupes; their ideas are all the more dangerous for their credulity."

l could tell what he was saying was true. As much as l had resisted the daims of the revolutionists to my father's political allegiances, and as wrong-headed as l had assumed those imputed allegiances to be, at least the picture of Robert Co op as a communard sympathiser lent him the virtues of loyalty and a commitment to ideals. But Washbume's version had been engaged in the dishonourable business of spying, a Benedict Arnold in Paris. At that moment l couldn't decide whether l preferred to regard my father as allied with the likes of Raoul Rigault and his cronies or with the withering old hypocrite seated in front of me.

These reflections must have been written plainly enough on my face, because Washbume gave his speech sorne time to have its effect before saying, with the possibility of irony in his tone, "Surely you find relief in the knowledge that yoUf father put no stock in the success of these murderous rascals now controlling the Hôtel de Ville. That he died in executing his duty to America's oldest ally, the Republic of France."

"Surely," l recovered my composure enough to say.

"Please convey my sincere condolences to yOUf family. l thank you for coming all this way, Henry. We will be in contact with you about yOUf father's effects." l rose to go. "YOUf father's long service and brave sacrifice to his country are to be commended. He will be missed."

l took my leave of the Minister feeling slighùy nauseated. As l passed through the front hall, the Virginian secretary stood watching me from a doorway wearing a sceptical expression of mild distaste. l wandered the 44 MATIHEW FRAsSlCA broken streets outside the embassy. On one corner, children played sorne esoteric game with ropes, while on the opposite corner, in front of a café with blue lettering on its white sign, three men loaded parts of a corpse onto an open cart. 1 walked vaguely east, past the Hôtel de Ville and its fortifications. In each street as 1 approached a growing barricade, the soldiers would caU to me to help them. Picking up a paving-stone and handing it up to the one on top seemed to dis charge this duty, since they would usuaUy have begun accosting another pedestrian by that time. In this way 1 helped build dozens of fortifications across the city. My mind was a blank, save for the ceaseless repetition of one meaningless phrase,

"America's oldest aUy, the Republic of France," keeping pace with my steps.

Whenever·1 regained presence of mind enough to reflect on my meeting with Washbume, the only conclusion 1 could draw was that 1 regretted having come to Paris at aU. This useless thought stood in the way of assimilating the new information to an idea of my father's role here, or, more importantly, of contemplating my next action. 1 just wanted to leave, as quickly as possible, like the Robertsons. Meanwhie, 1 had entered a quarter of evident squalor. Mothers shouted out open doors after their renegade children, who were forming scavenging bands under bony, quick­ eyed leaders. 1 suddenly felt ostentatious in my recently shined shoes. Or 1 felt vulnerable. Here there were no barricades; the narrow streets were uneven from wear. An old woman watched me hoUowly from an open window. Overheated and tired, 1 went into a bistro. Inside in the dark, one table was occupied by a group of soldiers, identifiable as my eyes adjusted by the glinting of their weapons. They greeted me as "comrade." LA TARANTEU.A: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 45

"Bonjour."

"Y ou are not Parisian, my friend?" one of them asked.

l told them l was not. Without reading what it was, l ordered the most expensive item on the board from the ancient waiter.

"An Ameriean maybe?" the soldier continued.

The past twenty-four hours had exhausted my interest in allegiance. The necessity of constantly dedaring my nationality and my dass sympathies grated on me. Seemingly everyone l had met, from the lowliest soldier to the Minister himself, had taken a tum at testing me. The smugness of the soldier's question, and the proximity to real violence into whieh the situation brought me, overwhelmed my diplomatie abilities. l gave a broad,

French-style shrng to convey a sense of supreme indifference to whatever he chose to believe about me.

"A cornrade from our sister republic," he said. "Welcome. What do you think of Paris?"

My meal arrived: half of a rabbit lay in a puddle dark red sauce. It seemed that any suggestion of menace had evaporated from the soldier's voiee, but l still felt no interest in talking. l raised my glass of wine and said in response, "To Paris."

"To Paris," the one soldier replied gustily.

There was silence in the bistro as l began to eat. Glare from the dusty sunshine coming through the windows lit the front of the room, where l was sitting. Outside, a woman hurried past, crying. Across a complex intersection from the bistro a drunk stepped off the curb in front of a carriage hauling munitions and though the driver pulled the horse sharply 46 MATI1fEW FRAsSICA away, he feH under the wheels. The carriage driver pulled up in the middle of the intersection as a crowd began to gather. Two tribes of child scavengers started to fight over which had arrived on the scene first.

"Monsieur, you must understand that we are fighting for our liberty, just as your people were during the revolution," the first soldier said suddenly but in a measured tone as if we had been arguing the point rather than sitting in silence.

r decided to hand up my paving-stone. "r agree perfectly with you, monsieur."

"In 1789, in 1848, my people, the people, rose up for liberty, against the inhuman oppression that has kept us in this dingy hole." The soldier began to sermonise, his reversion to wrote monologue making me feelless the object of any particular grievance than a convenient audience. "And every time, every time, we were crushed back down to the shit you see all around you. Pardon me, Cornrade," he apologised to the waiter. "We, who make this city work!" One of the soldiers made a sound of assent. The. rest stared ahead or down at their drinks, unmoved by the speech. One of them spun a fork on his index finger. "Our people," the first soldier continued,

"defended this city from the Prussians, held them back, while the rest of

France gave in to them. We kept those detested bourgeois alive, at the same time that they starved us by driving up the priee of food. And now that traitor Thiers lets the Prussian dogs parade through our city like a conquering army. Let me tell you, monsieur, they never conquered us!

Bismarck may have conquered Thiers, but he never conquered one soul in

Paris." The soldier's voiee felt uncomfortably loud in the close room, and l LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 47 looked towards where he sat in the dark end of the bistro with an expression of disinterest. 1 knew 1 could re-establish calm with a cautious word, but the heated self-righteousness of the speech had further abraded my goodwill. Still, 1 thought the better of a tart response and instead took a gulp of wine and tumed back to face the window. After fmishing the meal in silence, 1 paid the bill and tumed to leave. "1 will fight to the death for

Paris, Monsieur, so that my children will have a chance to be equal to everyone else," the soldier said in a low, firm voice.

Of course, who was 1 to expect that a future of hopelessness wasn't worth fighting against? My hostility to the talkative soldier dissolved into shame at my resistance to seeing the justice of his cause. This man had seen a life of sacrifice and suffering of a kind 1 had never imagined, aU the while mocked by the promises of govemments to improve life by increments. Who in his position wouldn't take up arms to defend the democracy that considered him an equal member, that aUowed him dignity and his work respect? "You have my confidence," 1 said with as much unambiguous eamestness as 1 could.

1 stepped out of the bistro and back into the street, where a police officer had arrived on the accident scene. During the meal 1 had felt

Nadine's envelope in my pocket, and now 1 puUed it out. 1 had forgotten or concealed from myself this mysterious appointment since my conversation at the embassy. My tolerance for revelations about my father was proving to be low, and 1 wasn't sure if 1 even wanted to pursue the question further. It seemed unlikely that Nadine's friend would know more than Washbume did, since Nadine herself had been one of the dupes. His being in prison, 48 MATrnEW FRAsSlCA though, lent him sorne credibility: maybe he too was an agent of the

Republic. If Nadine was correct about his relationship with my father, he might know more than Washbume was willing to tell. Perhaps he would tell me that one of Rigault's spies had found out about my father's duplicity and sent him off the roof. But what good would knowing that do me? It would only oblige me to lie to my sisters. Better to have a fatefully clumsy father than a murdered conspirator to moum. l was, of course, not interested in revenge, even if there were an individual rather than a slippery roof responsible; Washbume's revelation only increased my feeling that my father had found the natural result of secrecy and plotting. The idea of avenging a father who died for convictions l neither understood nor shared seemed absurdo But perhaps they were not convictions. Washbume had tried to explain Robert's loyalties in terms of ideals, ideals that were no doubt quite fine in themselves but which, it seemed to me, were less appealing when used as justification for a life of mendacity. It may have been that he had less abstract motivations: a longing for adventure, an addiction to risk, a savouring of the thrill of concealment and misdirection.

None of this conflicted with the irreverent, cosmopolitan personality he had shown me over the years, whereas passionately-held beliefs seemed not to fit. Still, if he built a professional career out of appearing to be what he was not, the wry man l Cpartially) knew could easily have been another sham.

Maybe his secret life paid well; maybe it afforded him opportunities to profit from rackets like Orson's.

And why, l put it to myself, was l so eager to reduce him to less noble motives, to compulsion, addiction, and greed? Because l could not LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 49 understand the mental life of the practicing idealist. l could understand the explanation of the soldier from the bistro. Yet though the communards fought to improve their lot, my father had nothing personally invested in either side of the question. l had come to political consciousness in a time and place that had its surfeit of destruction during the Civil War, and though sorne young men l knew joined the Union cause it was, as far as l knew, more for the want of excitement than for the possession of fiery ideas. l had been too young for enlistment or conscription, and during my university years the sentiment of the time inclined to papering over controversy in favour of normality and prosperity. There may have been radical student groups active, but the men of the Med. Fac. took the line of high-minded disavowal of political commitment. As l write this, it has become clear that such aloofness is itself a kind of political conviction, since many of my classmates have positions in the business and political establishments that today's agitators in Chicago revile. They have gained power without caring to leam about the lives their power effects, pretending to themselves that they are above politics while they practice a politics of neglect and exploitation. This logic didn't occur to me that spring, and instead l longed for the wry detachment we had all practiced and perfected in our club's house on the square. But the lesson was obvious to the communards, and it conditioned the hostility with which they greeted my neutrality.

This nagging sense that l was missing a sizable part of the story may have been what directed my steps, unbidden, southwards towards the

Seine, for although l had already decided to let the mystery alone l found 50 MATIHEW FRAsSICA myself at the end of these reflections standing in front of the Mazas prison.

From the street, the prison wore the walls of a medieval castle. Pedestrians hurried through the plaza with a kind of morbid agitation, as if passing a graveyard. l approached two soldiers of the Garde standing in front of the prison gate and asked if l could speak to a warden. One of them, a paunchy squinting man, laughed mirthlessly at me when l explained that l intended to visit an inmate.

"But no one enters Mazas by choice, cornrade!"

"Perhaps you would like to be arrested first?" the second soldier offered.

"We would have to catch you committing treason or spying in order to arrest you, cornrade. Maybe you could creep around and look suspicious for a moment, and then we could make your arrest."

l pulled out my letter of introduction, which l had hoped not to need to use at the very frrst obstacle. There was something humiliating about having to resort to an official permission when one's own bearing didn't carry enough authority to overcome such facile resistance. But now, as l produced the envelope, it occurred to me that l wasn't even certain who it was from, or indeed if it would vouchsafe my passage through however many layers of bored, bullying jailers and bureaucrats that stood between me and this prisoner. Grasping for the most intimidating name l could summon, l lied.

"1 have here a letter of conveyance from Raoul Rigault, Procurer of the

Commune. It authorises my entry to the Mazas prison and my meeting with

Gustave Cluseret." LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 51

The first guardsman said something to the second. This solider disappeared through a small door that l hadn't noticed in the larger, portcullis-shaped gate, while the first soldier and l stood silently in the midday sun. This must have been an exceptionally uninteresting assignment, l thought, to guard the prison; its only le aven would come from the observation one could make of passers-by. At the moment, an old man drove an equally old dray horse pulling a cart full of weapons across our view of the plaza. The cart driver nodded in our direction, and my solider nodded back solemnly. These may weIl have been the weapons of the dead, l thought, but then corrected myself: the Commune must have made arrangements for the manufacture of arms since the Versaillais siege began. Still, the macabre cast of the old man on top of his pile of rifles remained irrationally vivid for me. l wished he would pass more quickly. l began to feel anxious about the prospect of entering the prison. To what scenes of horror and suffering would l be subjected? What kind of infernal torture-chambers did these medieval walls conceal?

The second soldier retumed with sorne prison administrator who appeared nervous to be outside the walls. His eyes flitted over me as he asked my business, and he took in the details of my envelope and its seal very quickly. l hoped he wouldn't open it right away, partIy because of the same vanity that had made me feel weak for producing it so early, but also to avoid exposing my lie. But this official did open the letter. He read it rapidly. Without a word, he motioned to me to enter the little door behind him. l felt a small thrill in the chest, a feeling l craved when l was younger, that cornes from gaining access to that which is ordinarily off-limits, a 52 MATIHEW FRAsSlCA combination of the fear of being caught and excitement of seeing what one shouldn't. That more often than not the place or thing one gained access to was in itself unremarkable didn't diminish the intensity of this feeling.

On the other side of the theatrically fortified wall the prison itself was built in a modem bureaucratie style, nothing like the Piranesi-inspired fever­ dream of dungeons that the outside suggested. Instead, Mazas appeared to be a thoroughly regimented, enlightened institution whose architecture allied it not with the medieval keep but with the sanatorium or industrial dormitory. As the great front door swung open before us, my fidgety warden said, "This is an unusual permission. M. Rigault has allowed you one half-hour with the prisoner Cluseret. After that time, a guard will escort you from the grounds." My feeling of self-satisfaction at having successfully lied evaporated. Rigault was planning my itinerary, and the first stop was a visit to the prison: this was not a comforting thought. As the official unlocked doors and led me deeper into the unlit hallways of the prison l feltan escalating claustrophobie sense of confinement.

Gustave Cluseret stood as l entered his cell. The room looked dean and well-Iooked after, up to the specifieations of military disciplinè that govemed the General's demeanour. He was dressed in a plain blue uniform not unlike that of a Union officer, with no resemblance to any French offieer's finery. He wore an impérial style pointed beard, matching his sharp blue eyes. "Welcome, M. Coop. They told me you would be coming. It is

an honour." His English was fluent but stiff.

"The honour is mine, General." LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 53

''Your father and l had a long history together. l considered him a great friend."

"1 must admit that he never spoke of you to me."

"He would not have. Our connection came about through secrecy and continued by virtue of secrecy." The General began telling me, in brief, the story of his military career. Since then l have read his memoirs and had occasion to meel sorne of those he worked with, who filled in what he left skeletal. It was a story of a wide-ranging career of fighting on behalf of "the people," wherever they were in need of military expertise-which he seemed to find everywhere he went between the end of the Crimean War and the outbreak of the Commune. The General, it turned out, had no sympathy for the Republic. He held his revolutionary sentiments with sincerity, having won them while fighting on the side of the bourgeois

1 state. He had helped the French government suppress the revolutionists at their barricades in 1848, .so he knew first-hand the role of militant reaction.

"1 was the hand of the state', of the ruling class, striking down those unfortunates who had dared ta question the order of things and ta demand their share. It was then, with the people," he laid expressive, reverent emphasis on this word whenever he used it, "at the bayonet-ends of my men, that l resolved to make their fight my own." This, l thought, must have been a difficult resolution ta put into practice immediately, and l didn't ask whether the General had ordered his men to lower their weapons as soon as his epiphany struck. Indeed, as l later learned, Cluseret continued to serve under the Republic and then under Napoleon III for another eight years. But l recognised that l was hearing an account of a 54 MATmEW FRAsSlCA transformation, and that this account would contain by its nature sorne amount of GaUic dramatisation.

Fighting under Garibaldi in the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, Cluseret met my father, who was conspiring on the side of unification. Napoleon III was hoping to keep Italy in manipulable fragments, reversing position from his revolutionary days in the carbonari as an exile from Orleanist France.

Apparently Robert Coop handed Cluseret sorne timely piece of information warning of a nest of militant papists who were fortifying a tavem in

Messina. The tip spared Garibaldi an assassination attempt. The association between Cluseret and my father continued from that time as one of professional trust and personal camaraderie. To Cluseret, my father was a feUow idealist, a believer in the rights of the people, but above aU a competent conspirator. It was this practical aptitude, the ability to identify sources of useful information and cultivate them discreetly, that Cluseret most valued in him. That such ability depended ultimately on his talent for disingenuously appearing to share in the zeal of his source didn't seem to discourage Cluseret from trusting Coop's commitment to the cause. Or it had never occurred to him to doubt his friend.

When Washington caUed for experienced European officers to lead

Union troops, my father arranged a meeting for Cluseret with Charles

Sumner. The emancipatory mission must have appealed to Cluseret's idealism. He had already lived in New York City after leaving the service of the Emperor and before joining Garibaldi; he told me he believed America's

]effersonian principles "the finest expression, anywhere in the world, of true equality." In practice, however, the American political establishment LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 55 impressed him less. After making enemies in every command he was assigned (too often superiors were academics or politicians rather than soldiers, and Cluseret's honour and honesty refused him the shelter of tact), he joined John Frémont's presidential campaign. Frémont, he expected, would fol1ow up the Union victory with a program of radical reconstruction. The South had been defeated, so now the Union could transform it at will--Cluseret saw reconstruction as a renaissance, the chance to put America's founding ideals properly into practice as they had never been even in the abolitionist states. And so Frémont appeared to promise. But his "treacherous, backsliding" political pragmatism allowed him to compromise these plans. Cluseret dismissed this betrayal with a flick of his wrist.

The commune at Marseilles, and then at Paris: to Cluseret, true equality might finally fmd the right conditions in these cities, under democratically elected govemments. As l leamed later, however, Marseilles did not erupt with the expected fervour. Inspired by Cluseret's speechifying, a handful of radicals had seized the city hall. When Republican troops arrived to put down the uprising, the American industrialist who had been bankrol1ing

Cluseret's revolution confronted them wrapped in the tricolour and the

United States flag. Certain that they had arrived to kill him, he screamed:

"Shoot me, you cowards, shoot me if you dare!" in English. The troops marched past him to the city hall. Cluseret escaped by train to Paris.

The Paris Commune appointed him War Minister. He and my father met again and renewed their cooperation. There were so many political intrigues among the members and committees of the Commune that 56 MATTHEW FRASSlCA

Cluseret (political1y tone-deaf as he was) must have needed aU the instruction he could get. In the end, it didn't help him. Meddling superiors who were (again) politicians and professors, combined with subordinate officers who, in the spirit of equality, felt free to debate or decline orders, made effective command impossible. And the historians say that, again,

Cluseret's stubbornness and tactlessness endeared him to no one, least of aU members of the Commune whose notion of democracy required that no one contradict their opinions. He was blamed for a series of blunders caused by contradictory orders from above and insubordination from below; this most frank of soldi ers was charged with treason and jailed.

Denunciations of this sort made for political gain were common in the paranoid Commune. "As you can see, they are doing themselves no favours by locking up their best military commanders and letting the politicians put on fancy uniforms," he said with regret, never acknowledging the role his own arrogance had played in his downfaU.

l told him l knew nothing about the city's military preparedness, except that l had heard that the Union des Femmes was organising defence committees.

"A fine thing! We shaH have ladies fighting the Versaillais while our

Garde troops vote on where to build barricades. It will be a shameful defeat. Worse, it will be a massacre. We shaU see Republican viciousness that make the June days look like a domestic quarrel."

l said that this prediction surprised me. Surely if the Garde was in as much disarray as he claimed, they wouldn't be able to resist for very long.

The revolutionists' confidence in a popular uprising must have been overly LA TARANTEIl.A: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 57 optimistic: those who had failed to enlist, dodged conscription or deserted couldn't be expected to take up arms at the moment defeat became certain.

Privately, also, l considered that the Republican side represented the less zealous, and therefore (1 thought), less bloodthirsty of the antagonists.

"Young man, l am afraid it is your confidence that is optimistic. Paris is in open revoit from the national government. Thiers will put it down with aU his strength, and he will make no distinction between regulars and civilians. Sorne Garde units will defect and help him. Do you remember

General Sherman's march to the sea? Men do not need prompting to act like beasts. And you underestimate the willingness of these workers to die for their cause. They have sacrificed themselves on the barricades before.

Thousands will perish."

l stood in the silence that foUowed this prediction. If it was true, it changed the whole tenor of my time in Paris up to this point. It lent the soldier in the bistro a heroic stoicism; it tinged the fevered Red talk in Passy with a kind of tragic intensity. l remembered the calm equanimity of the city's residents enjoying their last days in the bloom of a Parisian spring.

How had l missed the meaning of aU that l had seen, how had l valued its seriousness so cheaply? A feeling of moral exhaustion came over me as l recaUed my father's role in undermining the Commune. Both sides would try to annihilate each other, and everyone l had met was contributing in sorne way to bringing off this final catastrophe.

The General took a step closer to me and in a whisper that still conveyed the gravity of his rank and experience, said, "1 have prepared instructions for a thorough defence of the city. There may yet be time to 58 MATIHEW FRAsSlCA put sorne of them in place. If it is only the first steps that can be implemented, it may hold off the Versaillais a few days. If not-at least l would know that l had done absolutely aU l could, even after this-," he glanced at the ceIl around us before deciding on an apt word. "ScandaI." l felt rather than met his intense look. l was certain he could see through to the queasy, counterfeit feeling that l was trying hard to conceal, to my hostility towards the revolutionaries and knowledge of my father's manipulation of this man of convictions. His convictions would have been the simplest handle on him. If l could count on the help of the dim light, his convictions might also blind him to my falseness. He said, "1 believe l can trust you. l knew Robert Co op very weIl, and l can see him in you. l want you to deliver these plans to an officer who will know what ta do with them." Cluseret thought he could exploit one kind of filial responsibility by this appeai. Instead, l felt bound to accept his request so as to make up for my father's disloyalty. l thought of Nadine. l would do better. "1 know that you share his ideals," he continued.

"l'm not at ail sure that l do," l said honestly, wanting to staU by addressing only this part of what the General had said, feeling certain again of my complete transparency.

"Perhaps you feel that ideals such as these, such as your father and l shared, are proper only for the lower orders, or for those less sophisticated than you are. Inequality, after aU, is how the world has functioned since

Gad preferred Abel's offering. History is clear on this point. Who are we, at this late stage, to try and change the fundamental character of human society? l would not be surprised if you suspect ail this, secretly. Vou would LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 59 not be the first. Perhaps your father never mentioned his belief in equality to you, it would not be the first time that father failed to talk to son about what wasmost important. But let me assure you that this belief has a long a distinguished history, that it has been given voice by the most brilliant and influential of men. What we are fighting for, what we will continue to fight for after the Commune is crushed and even after Paris itself has been erased, is the first true attempt at recognising the equality of ail men, that great dream that yOUf country was founded on and keeps failing to realise.

We could have that here-it is within OUf reach." Cluseret had played the same hand as Washbume with this invocation of patriotic American ideals, but to argue the opposite position. Still, as l stood in that tiny room looking into the eyes of this committed soldier whom my father had betrayed for whatever ignoble reasons, l knew l would say yeso His rhetoric hadn't moved me-I had heard enough like it not to overestimate its value or its originality, and its abstraction seemed to miss the suffering that was for me the Commune's only justification. While it seemed clear that society failed to treat the majority of people with fairness, ultimately l was sceptical that the sum of justice under one group would be greater than under any other.

And neither was l particularly moved by the idea of helping to save innocents: if the Versaillais really did stand ready to slaughter thousands of their countrymen, l was more interested in staying out of the way than in interposing myself on any one side. But my sense of inherited obligation pressed me forward. l was conscious of not knowing whether accepting would be right in sorne global, political sense. But between individu ais whose moral interactions wanted balance l felt compelled to do what l 60 MATI'HEW FRAsSICA could for the General. 1 told him 1 would be honoured to carry the letter.

He gave me directions and supervised my concealment of the envelope. It felt like our half-hour must have been spent hours ago, and 1 expected the prison official to appear at any moment with my own arrest warrant.

Cluseret wished me well. 1 asked when his trial would be held. "When they get around to me. They probably will not remember me in time. 1 can only wait." Fighting in the streets of Paris could mean either that prisoners would be given arms and released or massacred, and the awareness of the latter's likelihood seemed to dim the General's eyes for a moment. 1 wondered at his capacity to continue to believe in the promise of a regime that had given him such clear indication of its own fund of injustice. Maybe now he was acting as a humanitarian and not a revolutionary, only rehearsing for my benefit the old rhetoric.

The fidgety jailer retumed, announcing his appearance with a tremendous jangling of keys. It occurred to me that he might have been standing outside the door all along, listening to our conversation. Our only effort at concealment had been to speak softly in English. He escorted me out, and as we entered the yard 1 asked when Cluseret's trial was scheduled. "Tomorrow," he said. "His is the last trial tomorrow."

Outside, the square before Mazas remained empty of pedestrian traffic.

As 1 walked from the doors 1 felt myself under the gaze of the guards, and 1 tried to slow down my strides to appear at ease. 1 felt another old excitement from my days of college hi-jinks, that of passing unnoticed with secret information, while keeping up a calm, respectable exterior. Of course, the risk of detection in this case had more serious consequences LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 61 than expulsion. 1 was acting as courier for a former military commander accused of treason. Having agreed to do this, 1 had compromised the neutral position that 1 had assumed was my prerogative as a foreigner since myarrivaI. Now 1 had acted: 1 was a participant in what 1 had up to that point only observed warily or scornfuUy. And the moral and political dimensions of my action were of course obscure to me. The brief period of time in which 1 had made the decision had not aUowed me to consider aU the possible meanings of my action, nor could 1 have consulted with anyone who might have given me an informed opinion. 1 thought of

Burgess, with his disinterest for the intrigues in which he played a role. His neutrality was pure, in that he could just as easily work for either side of a question as long as it suited his personal interests. But here 1 had interceded on the basis of a nonsensical feeling of moral obligation instead of favouring my own welfare. 1 regretted that 1 had sacrificed my detachment and my agnostic distrust of decisiveness and action. These reflections curtailed the puerile feeling of enjoyment while they increased the level of anxiety that was the other component of the excitement 1 felt.

The sun had passed its meridian and 1 walked with it at my back along the empty street with its cluttered shops and tiny residential windows.

From behind me, a voice cried out: "L'ennemi! Traître!" 1 quickened my pace, not wanting to implicate myself (but to whom could the alarm refer besides me? 1 was in an empty street. Did 1 hear it only in my imagination, like voices speaking one's name just before sleep?). After aU, 1 wasn't a spy.

The document 1 carried, however, would make any confrontation with the police tiresome, time-consuming, and potentiaUy dangerous. FootfaUs rang 62 MATIHEW FRAsSlCA out on the paving stones behind me. 1 broke into a run and banked sharply at the corner, slamming at full force into someone coming in the opposite direction. 1 looked down as 1 continued running to see the soldier from the bistro, who recognised me and picked himself up. In the alarm and commotion a crowd of civilians materialised from the empty street as we passed. The stampede of feet at my back like an army on the retreat drove me faster towards the river, where 1 tumed sharply again, twisting my ankle in a gap in the pavement and coming down as the herd spilled over me. 1 was pinned to the ground roughly. Men on top of me spat epithets. The soldier from the bistro disengaged me from the pile and hauled me to my feet. 1 stood uneasily.

"lt is you," he said.

"A pleasure, again." My tone was noncommittally ingratiating, or sarcastic.

"This man is a spy!" shouted a boy who had pushed through the crowd.

It was his voice that 1 had heard outside the prison. "1 followed him from the American embassy to the Mazas prison, where he spoke with the traitor

Cluseret. He is conspiring to destroy the Commune!" The crowd reacted all at once, surging forward as it were if a swarm of bees acting on the directions of this one dancing drone. The soldier, still holding me in his grasp, was pushed forward along with me. Everyone spoke at once, sorne to each other, most with loud cries of recrimination or triumph. An old woman screamed: "Kill him! Kill him right now! Kill the traitor!" 1 couldn't tell how fast we were moving; my feet had been lifted off the ground and 1 could see only the upper storeys of buildings above the heads of my LA TARANTEllA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 63 captors. Faces in every window looked down on us. Sorne shouted with cruelly-twisted mouths, others just watched, resigned to the evil they supposed l had done or the evil that would be done to me. The crowd moved on, and us in it. 64 MAlTIIEW FRAsSlCA

As much as 1 felt, at that time, that 1 had wandered into the centre of things, or that 1 had reason to feel a little guilty of the accusations against me, in reality 1 knew nothing: 1 knew neither what plot 1 had entered, nor who its architects were, nor why 1 had been chosen. 1 couldn't have known any of this at the time, of course, because 1 know hardly more of it now, except in the most superficial details. Every layer of causality refers at sorne point to a higher level, as if what appear to be concentric rings actually conspire to form a spiral. The ultimate author of my actions might have been Washbume or it might have been an anonymous Washington functionary on the payroll of sorne unscrupulous

American industrialist. It might have been the functionary's wife acting on LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 65 behalf of her entrepreneuriallover. It may have been no one at all-there may have been no one external cause responsible for aIl that l did those days in May, though there were certainly beneficiaries. Or it may simply be beyond my abilities to assign such extrinsic responsibility; it may be beyond the reach of the retrievable facts or the memories of anyone involved. This is why l have said that the only way to view these events, the only profitable or coherent way, may be as a series of missteps entirely my own.

Whatever transpired could not have happened without my complicity

(ignorant as l was), so there may be no reason to search elsewhere for the blame.

As the crowd bore me forward with its shrill cries for my speedy execution, l realised that l would be spared lynching by the presence of the soldier beside me. As long as he remained grasping the collar of my shirt, he insulated me from the violence of the crowd. At aIl points, there were individuals pushing to the centre of the mob to bellow at me their personal ill wishes or to make sorne threatening gesture. Their righteous hatred made their faces grotesque and l felt the spray of their spittle. But this is as far as they would go before retreating back into the swirl of frenzied faces like something out of Hogarth. Their wretched caricatural quality made me feel ill with revulsion and anger. As we marched, the litany of my transgressions continued to grow: l had stolen or sabotaged at least six weapons, killed a husband, failed to pay the bill at several cafés, drowned a pet dog, proclaimed "Vive l'Empereur" in the presence of dozens, set fire to a henhouse. Each one of these crimes, l was assured, carried the sentence of death. We reached the Seine and l envisioned the scene of my own 66 MATTHEW FRAsSlCA drowning as if observing from the quay. An obliging member of our party, apparently a butcher by trade, judging by smeU of iron on his hands, he1ped my imagination along by describing in detail the ordeal by water l would face.

The crowd halted before a taU, modem, official-Iooking building unlike the medieval tenements of the quarter from which we had come. The list of my offences rang out again for the benefit of those inside, along with renewed suggestions for redress. An officer of the law appeared and motioned us aU inside, without regard for the size and disorder of the party.

We entered a large dark room pierced by dust-filled light from taU windows. With its coffered ceiling and rows of benches on which were intermittently stationed penitents, petitioners, and gossips, the place could have been a chapel. At the other end of the room a police officer of sorne middle rank, who was engaged in what appeared to be intractable negotiations with an old woman who kept repeating "not without my forty centimes" like a stubbom haggler, looked up at our tumultuous, variegated entrance and at once broke away from the woman.

"What is this disturbance?" he asked, referring apparently to our disruption of the bureaucratic orderliness of the reception-are a and not to whatever event might have prompted our visit. His face looked like a ripe plum wearing long sidebums. The crowd in response resumed its cacophonous testimony, to which the officer did not pretend to listen. He was looking at us each individuaUy, trying to find, l thought at frrst, the object of blame-me-but as the whole mob was continually gesturing and pointing toward me, having thrust me out in front, l realised that what he LA TARANTEllA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 67 was looking for was a single spokesperson, someone who could fill out the appropriate forms. He settled on the soldier and silenced the rest of the din by covering his ears and shouting. "One, please! You, monsieur."

"This man is an American. They say he is a spy."

"And did you witness him spying? Lurkingsuspiciously, taking notes?" he glossed.

"He was out of place, but l found him to be polite."

"Ah, a polite American. How rare." The policeman pouted his lips into a fastidious smile. "What is the basis of the charge, then?"

"He was seen leaving Mazas prison."

"Leaving Mazas? That is certainly rare. Seen by whom?" A small search was initiated for the boy who had made the initial accusation but he had evidently vanished. Not content to let the absence of evidence permit the subversive to escape, one woman who carried two children facing outwards on her hips dedared that she had seen me praising the Emperor and the Kaiser in the middle of the street. She delivered this news in atone of scandalised sobriety quite removed from the hysterics of accusation indulged outside the prefecture. A few of our party mumbled their affirmation to this daim, though none would step forward to confirm it personally. Confronted with this space of juridical reckoning and its representative of official rectitude, my persecutors had lost much of their fervour and their certainty; again l was thankful for the restraint on the mob inspired by my guardian Gardist.

"These are serious accusations, monsieur," said the officer, finally addressing me. 68 MATrnEW FRAsSlCA

"They are false. I had permission to visit Mazas from Raoul Rigault himself."

"And where is this permission?"

"I gave his letter to a warden of the prison."

"I see. We will have to detain you while these reports are investigated."

"I demand to speak with a consular official."

"We will see to that. Please come with me." The officer took me firmly by the arm and led me to the back of the room. Over his shoulder, he gave instructions for aIl my accusers to file the correct forms. We passed down a narrow iron staircase to a series of subterranean hallways. At length I found myself in a holding cell with two other men, unconscious, who by their smell I guessed had been arrested for public drunkenness. I stared out the grate in the door to a small window high up on the wall of the hallway opposite, the only source of light for our cell, through which I couid make out the hooves of a horse waiting in the alleyway. Eventually one of the sleeping men rose and immediately began raving paranoiacally. Eventually he noticed his new audience and directed his lunatic exhortations at me. I

Iooked at the man's ragged, drawn visage in the slit of blue light from the grate and wondered whether my silence would encourage him to give up his incomprehensible disquisition. Apparendy it did not, as he continued to hold forth without repetition or siowing, his expression shifting from scom to fear and anger but setding most frequendy on a kind of pleading insistence. At last I decided to make him a response. I quoted sorne lines from Milton's Satan to the effect that his own mind might be the origin of the Hell in which he found himself. My recitation took place in English, so 1 LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 69 had neither hope nor intention of his understanding it, but l delivered the verse in the loudest, most commanding voiee of whieh l was master. The man arrested rus senseless spew at the sound of the poetry and listened with a look of surprise on his wasted face. l reached the end of what l could remember of the speech, but not wanting to cede the rhetorieal ground l had gained, l continued in the same authoritative tone with a few disconnected couplets of Pope, the disguised Portia's monologue on mercy, and sorne amatory verses of Donne's l had read at a Med. Fac. dinner. l brought up "A Mighty Fortress 1s Our God," a Georgie fragment, the opening quatrain of one of Sidney's sonnets to Stella. l kept this up for as long as l could, not pausing when the lines grew dim but skipping to the next hopscotch-square of rhyme my recollection presented. Finally l quit, breathless and at the bottom of my store of doggerel and light verse. The man's face remained cast in alarmed surprise. From the hallway came ironic applause. As he opened the cell door, momentarily blocking the light,

Rigault said, "A fine performance from our rhyming saboteur."

"It was on your permission, Rigault," l said, slightlyembarrassed.

"That's why l am here to release you. Such a valu able friend of the people as Henry Coop should not be treated with disrespect. Although," he added, "1 see you are making personal connections with sorne of the most pathetic results of the parasitie monarchist system." Rigault hesitated in the doorway for effect, the effect of his wit and of his complete control of the situation. l ignored rus sally.

"1 kept telling him that l didn't know any Coleridge, but he insisted." 70 MATIHEW FRASSICA

"Certainly he could not have noticed the substitution." Rigault led me down a different hallway than l had come by and opened a short door up half a flight of stairs that deposited us onto the alley behind the poste de police. "Be on your way, Henry Coop. This neighbourhood does not agree with your constitution." With that the Procurer was swallowed back into the black mouth of building.

Out front in the street, leaning against a balustrade of the entrance,

Burgess gave a little jump as l appeared. "1 heard they were about to let you go."

"Thank you for coming down. Word travels quickly."

"Your name travels quickly. Listen," he said as we began walking towards the river. "l'm not sure if you've heard this yet, but every faction in this city-weIl, and sorne outside of it-have a different version of your father's death. The Thiers sympathisers believe he was releasing a bird with a secret message to Versailles and was pushed by the Reds. The moderate communards think he was intercepting a bird from Versailles to a

Republican agent inside the American embassy, and that Washbume hired someone to push him. The radicals don't agree on anything, and are suspicious of everyone, but for the most part they think he was killed by further-right elements of the embassy, too. Only Washbume's official story has him falling by mistake. We should have talked about this earlier. But it seemed at first safest to let you think that he sympathised with the

Commune. It seemed the story most likely to keep you from becoming­ involved." LA TARANTEllA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 71

"But what is your opinion? Surely there are those who know the real story?" l was immediately drawn back into the question that l had already forswom, and l asked this with sorne slight feeling of loathsomeness, of my craven curiosity.

Burgess tumed towards the river, looking down at the quay and the dark water. "1 don't have opinions about this kind of thing. It's much safer for me that way. But since each faction believes another did it, it seems to me less likely that it was anything but an accident after aU. The point is," he tumed back to me, "you have been extraordinarily fortunate since you came here because you have been the beneficiary of aU the goodwill he saved up."

"He was a skilled diplomat," l said with an approximation of the offhand tone l wished l could feel, one not stained by anxiety and pride.

"Something like that. But this goodwill is going to evaporate very quickly if you get yourself involved any further. You don't share his knack for being what everyone wants to see. You ought to be careful about that."

''l'U never speak to another Frenchman again."

Burgess paused delicately. "Henry, he would never get involved in something he didn't already know the outcome to. He always knew whose interests were at stake. In fact, l can say for certain one principle he shared with Washbume: they both wouldn't sit down without being sure of leaving the table winners."

"l'm not sure what you're trying to get at."

"Washbume arranged that interview with Cluseret."

"1 thought Nadine-" 72 MATIHEW FRAsSlCA

"One of the strings she pulled was his. He got her a meeting with

Rigault through his own intermediaries."

"Why did Rigault approve of it?"

"Oh, he has let Cluseret's instructions leak before. Rigault knows he's the best tactician they have, and committed. But he also knows the strategy of his own position-he's the best politician of all of them-and he knows he cannot exonerate Cluseret just yet. But for you, the question is: how are

Washbume's ends served by that meeting? 1 don't know what you are carrying for Cluseret-and believe me, 1 have a stake in not knowing-but 1 thought 1 should tell you that whatever it is, Washbume thinks it's going to benefit him and Thiers."

"And why is it that Washbume is soheavily invested in Thiers's winning?"

"Also irrelevant, but your 'invested' is apt. Assume there are economic benefits for Washington in seeing the Republic conclude its peace with

Prussia. Remember, the Republic can't start dealing with foreign govemments until Bismarck leaves the country, which he won't do until

Thiers brings Paris to heel. What economic benefits? Possibly sorne trille left over from the Emperor's muddling about to America's south. They want that hemisphere to themselves. The Republic is very likely uninterested in the kind of empire Napoleon III wanted. And the U.S. was more or less openly on the Prussian side from the beginning of the war, sore about

Mexico 1 suppose." We had stopped across from the dead spider of Notre

Dame. In the square before the Hôtel de Ville, packed with canon and milling soldiers, an old man in a half-tom sweater and a little boy wearing a LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 73 red scarf passed by, marching in step. The child raised his hands to his mouth and with that instrument produced a bugle-calI. The spring leaves of young trees permitted the sunlight through their bright green leaves and did not stir: the river shuffled down its stone trough. "Just know that, whatever you do, it will have consequences you can't anticipate."

"50 what am l to do?" l asked this frankly, but with sorne annoyance at

Burgess's pretensions to wisdom.

"Look busy, let everyone think you agree with them, but have no opinions of your own. Don't choose. And to the extent possible, do not act." Burgess put a hand on my shoulder. "l've been here from the beginning, Henry. l'm just trying to give you the advantage of my experience." His patronising tone made me want to shrug off his hand and tell him to keep his advice to hiinself. l resented his brotherly concem, even as my reason recognised it as genuine and his insight as valuable. l suppose l mostly begrudged Burgess's having waited until just this moment to open up, after l was already committed. And l was angry at myself for compromising my neutrality, for making a choice.

"Good play, by the way."

''Just something to keep me occupied. l crave comedy."

"It's rare enough."

"True." Burgess smiled slightly, sadly and walked off towards the Hôtel de Ville. l stood watching him go, then tumed back to the river.

When l was very young, my father would bring me to the Luxembourg

Gardens, to the Guignols, which l watched with a kind of anguished fixation. l suppose that he brought me there in order to watch just this 74 MATIHEW FRAsSlCA reaction, to see me watching the puppets abuse each other. Perhaps my moral understanding of violence hadn't matured much since then; the Civil

War had been so terrible but so distant, taking teachers and sorne older students and transposing them into the world l knew only from newspapers. Now my father was in Père-Lachaise, the victim of one set of ideals or its opposite, or merely his own morbid fascinations, and l had taken it upon myself to try to correct his faults, to undo his betrayals. But what l had undertaken to try to right the personal moral balance would work against its intended beneficiary-fulfilling my promise l would only further betray Cluseret. And Nadine: might l have agreed to aIl of this, might l have come té> Paris at aIl, for her sake alone? Had l agreed to carry

Cluseret's letter at least in part to demonstrate to her my own integrity, even if her belief in my father's proved misplaced? How could l expect to analyse lucidly such complex conspiracies when my own motives so evaded my understanding? l tried to concentrate on Burgess's question as l stared at the black water. What benefit to Washbume would come from my cooperation?

Perhaps he expected l would deliver the letter to him, in deference to my father's loyalty. But certainly Washbume had detected the paIlor that his news had brought to my face. He could not rely on my obedience any more than he could believe in his own appeal to my patriotism. Unless he counted on just the opposite: that he had appaIled me sufficiently to guarantee my acquiescence to Cluseret's request. He may have an agent placed in the Garde who could report back the changes that Cluseret's letter made in the city's defences. If this were the case, then l could still LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 75 fulfill my obligation to Cluseret by delivering a warning along with the letter-that there is an inside man.

l set off at a smart pace. Watching behind me for agents (of which faction l could not have said, so perplexed was l by the labyrinthine allegiances in which l had lost myself), l passed through empty streets and alleys, keeping away from the busier boulevards. The whistle and crash of incoming shells enforced a strict silence on the forsaken quarters of the city. l felt like a visitor to Atlantis during its slide into the sea or Pompeii as the stones and ash began to fall-watching the elaborate beauty of an entire civilisation making ready for the great blow that would all at once stove it in. l made a madly twisted line trending westward through the city, crossing and re-crossing the Seine, doubling back through bent medievallanes and cutting through once-private gardens whose gates had been carelessly left ajar by fleeing wealth or broken open by the will of the people. The gardens were beginning to go to seed: topiary bushes looked leggy, once­ square box hedges grew rhomboid points, immaculately ordered beds of perennials in the eighteenth-century style started to blur and intermarry, the springtime orgy went unchecked by gardeners' enlightened hands. AlI this l noted at a trot, a glance rearward. The smell of lilac began to grow unpleasantly strong. Fountains' heedless cherubim, Naiads, fawns spilled turbid water. l speeded my pace. There had been no trace of surveillance, yet l felt a pervading sense of being watched.

The captain's command post was a large, asymmetrical and poorly­ proportioned house near the Seine in the south-west corner of the city's limits. l had taken a cab there once l convinced myself l was not being 76 MATrnEW FRAsSlCA followed. The driver refused to wait, claiming the artillery bombardment would frighten his horse. And indeed, the Versaillais shelling was heavier here than in any other part of the city, even the Rue Beethoven. The bumt smell of smashed stone filled the air. l told the soldiers posted at the door that l had a message for the captain from the Hôtel de Ville. (Mazas was close enough-it struck me that the populations of the two might be exchanged to salutary effect.) Downstairs a number of soldiers ate and drank and smoked. Two were whistling loudly discordant tunes, standing next to each other but looking in opposite directions as if at duel. The soldier who escorted me upstairs opened the door to the captain's office.

"Bonjour cornrade Coop," said the captain, who was sitting behind a desk facing the door. As he said this he laid down a book had had been reading, which l suspected to be a novel from the way he carefully tumed it so l could not see its spine.

"Bonjour, Capitaine."

"Y ou have a message for me?"

''Yes , a letter." l removed the envelope from my pocket and laid it on the desk. "It is not from the Hôtel de Ville."

"No, it is not. l thank you. You have accepted no small risk to bring me this. "

"I believe it is my duty." The captain gave a sceptical, wry look at this but did not challenge it. "I also am obliged to tell you that l have been informed of sorne possibility of these instructions being passed to the

Versaillais once you have implemented them. They may have," l said gravely, "a man inside." LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 77

"There is a man inside ali of us, is there not?" the captain asked, though with the intention of wisdom or wit l couldn't tell. He removed rus glasses and stood by the side of his desk, leaning on the knuckles of his left hand.

"Thank you for the warning."

"Perhaps you could issue faIse orders as a decoy," l offered, playing the conspirator.

"Perhaps. Thank you again. Would you join me for dinner? l am interested in knowing how a young American has become the courier to a disgraced former War Minister."

"Cali it an inherited obligation. Thank you for the offer, but l must go.

The shelling has ruined my appetite."

"Just so. Very well. Adieu, M. Coop."

After walking sorne distance, l found another cab to take me back into the city. My moral quandary solved, l felt in need of sorne celebration. l headed for the Café Americain, where l took a table under the awning and ordered a pastis and water. With the credulity of youth l ceased to feel concem for the day's political and moral calculations and confusions as l assumed the poses of ease. l looked around at the others under the awning.

Several men were sitting alone, drinking aperitifs. One couple sat in silence staring obliquely across each other's gaze to the street beyond the café. The sound and smell of artillery fire rang in the air for anyone who cared to notice. Down the road a barricade stood incongruously as if sorne demented city planner had decided to pave skyward. My pastis arrived and l sipped it slowly. Early evening: before the war, at this time of day, the sidewalks would be thronging with people of all types. Couples would 78 MA111-IEW FRAsSlCA browse the windows of the shops debating where to eat dinner, pairs of women would make satirie gestures and laugh figuratively, lone boulevardiers in elaborate attire would too rapidly eat lavish meals at cafés like this one. The breeze from the river cooled the air over the sun-baked street, bringing with it the unformed promise of evening. Surely these pleasures weren't the exclusive domain of the rich-though perhaps good seats at the Comédie-Française were not, the thrill of expectant desire must be classless. And now the Comédie-Française had flown to London.

Perhaps that was the Commune's great innovation, the consolation of the destitute by means of driving away anything or anyone capable of inspiring resentment: levelling by banishing all refinements of an unequal civilisation.

That contributed to the appeal, that and revolution's endorsement­ sanctifieation--{)f collective, retributive violence. The Commune offered the chance to swat back the hand of repression; the popularity of this dream of empowerment had kept Cluseret in the business of revolution for nearly his entire career. And who could glut the appetite of the aggrieved masses for blood? Writers like Félix Pyat could adjust the chemistry of paranoia and revenge to whatever formula suited their ends, secure in the enduring attraction of this darker reward. There were, 1 know now, communard leaders genuinely concemed with leavening the misery of Parisian labourers through industrial cooperatives, guaranteed employment, workers' federations and other programs that might bring about the equality of whieh they all spoke, without relying exclusively on violence. But what hope would such reformers have had of sweeping away the brakes and barriers of convention without the goad of public brutality? 1 fmished my LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 79 pastis tired of seeing the beautiful city in its barrenness. After leaving the café, as l passed in front the awning under which l had been sitting, l received a vicious check from the side that knocked me into a waiter. His native gracefulness narrowly saved the glasses of absinthe he carried on a tray. l tumed round angrily, ready to deliver sorne sharp rebuke from the reserve of haughty bittemess l had accumulated sitting at my table.

"Henry!" Orson said in a louder-than-customary voice.

"Hello Orson." l made a show of smoothing my clothing.

"Sorry boy, sorry." Orson added a ham-sized hand to the already­ unnecessary patting process.

"It's fine."

"Tremendous to meet you here, Henry, you are just precisely the person l wanted most to see in the whole city," he said, straightening.

"Why is that, Orson?"

"1 have sorne stupendous news! But we cannot possibly discuss it here.

News this auspicious caUs for sorne celebratory libations." If l wasn't mistaken, l detected the aroma of celebration already on Orson's breath.

"We're headed to the Tuileries palace, to the grand fête. No sense malingering in these healthless swamps. Off Henry, off with us!" And so l foUowed the old man at a trot for several yards, before his humour for speed ebbed and he stopped, leaning heavily against me and breathing from the gut like a child. "Running is a habit perenniaUy in favour only among the very young and the very poor," he panted. "We two worldly successes shaU saunter the rest of the way." 80 MATIHEW FRAsSICA

We would do weU to remember that the pigeon is a kind of dove, a city-dwelling dove, a dove who in leaving its pastoral home where it cooed mornings in the upper branches of elm and oak and ash and setting out for the city has re-enacted the flight of aU agricultural youth to the citadels of civilisation-it has suffered the degradation of cramped living among too many of its kind, the interminable tousle for rank and station, the desperation of daily toil for food. It must bear its stifled pride as others look upon it as an inferior or pest, while memory presents continually its days as the most admired of the bucolic aviary, symbolic of unattainable human ideals, days before their aristocratically pale-grey plumage had grown mottled or blue. How its LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 81

. country cousins must think of it now-the ambitious aloof striver who went

for his fortune to the city only to bring low the family name by scavenging

human scraps.

Noah sent out a dove, according to tradition, after he had released a

raven that did not retum; presumably the black bird flew over the endless

sea until, exhausted, it folded its wings and tumbled from the sky. Or, in

another reading, the raven's disappearance seemed to Noah a sign that it

had found land and taken up residence there. Either way, the dove was

sent to settle the question, because it would retum to its nest on the ark

from wherever it travelled. And when the dove retumed, carrying its twig,

Noah knew by the red tint of its claws that it had landed in wet clay. That

red stain has remained and continues to colour the feet of aIl that dove's

descendents like the mark of Cain.

As the Holy Ghost, the dove descends. In thee 1 am weil pleased.

l come by this information latterly, laterally. It is a curiosity of mine. l

share it here because l think you will find it diverting.

Later that aftemoon, after l left, the captain stood in his room in the

second floor of the house by the river, up from the dispatches he had been

reading conceming the day's bombardment (heavier than usual), the

movements of the Versaillais (digging trenches in the Bois de Boulogne,

prodding defences along the wall), the requests for supplies and

ammunition (extravagant and largely impossible to satisfy). He may have

been studying these reports carefully or he may have sometime earlier

stopped apprehending the words he read, his eyes sill passing mechanically

over their shapes without registering meaning. As he stood he laid his 82 MATrnEW FRAsSlCA eyeglasses down on top of the paper and they cast the late-aftemoon sunlight in two long ovoids over the script of the reports. Out the window behind his desk he watched the river from between the houses opposite as it passed out of the city, its surface shining with the sun's coins. He had discarded his jacket. The collar of his shirt showed it hadn't been washed all week. l add all this partly from imagination and partly from the testimony of the only other person who visited the captain that aftemoon, a degenerate named Hackett who l had the misfortune of meeting many years later, introduced in the kind of fair company that such a man instantly sets on edge by his presence alone. Less than a half-hour after his arrivaI

Hackett had brought down an uncomfortable silence on the party by the overloud, gruff-voiced contemptuousness with which he privately addressed the young woman who accompanied him. During my doubly unfortunate continuing association with this man l gleaned much of what follows touching that aftemoon in Paris.

The dove's divinity dates at least to the ancient Sumerians, whose goddess Ishtar or Astarte was associated with the bird. Astarte moved to

Greece and became Aphrodite, but kept her doves, who became servants of love rather than war. Anacreon's ode to the dove, in Moore's translation, begins:

Tell me why, my sweetest dove, Thus your humid pinions move, Shedding through the air in showers Essence of the balmiest flowers? Tell me whither, whence you rove, Tell me all, my sweetest dove. Curious stranger, l belong To the bard of Teian song; With his mandate now l fly LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 83

To the nymph of azure eyej- She, whose eye has madden'd many, But the poet more than any. Venus, for a hymn of love, Warbled in her votive grove, ('twas in sooth a gentle lay,) Gave me to the bard away. See me now his faithful minion,­ Thus with softly-gliding pinion, To his lovely girl l bear Songs of passion through the air.

Here already the poet has appropriated the flock from Aphrodite's chariot to pull his own metaphor. The love goddess's parents Zeus and Dione spoke through the sacred oaks at Dodonaj the priestesses of the orade, the

Peliades-the doves-recalled for Herodotus that the grove was chosen by one of two black doves that had flown from Thebes. The bird lit on the branch of an oak and spoke in human tongue to daim that spot for Zeus.

The other bird flew to Libya and made a similar demand on behalf of

Ammon, founding a temple also sacred to Zeus. Yet Herodotus records another story, this one from Theban priests, that two priestesses had been carried away by Phoenicians and sold as slaves in Libya and Hellas, bringing with them the knowledge of divination. "But my own belief is this," Herodotus writes: the woman sold in Hellas established a temple to

Zeus under an oak in memory of the home she had lost. But the people of that place called her a dove for her foreign speech which sounded to them like the cries of birds. The name had been passed on to her followers.

Once she had leamed their language, she could again be said to speak as a human. "For how could a dove utter the speech of men?" the historian asks, forgetting who had told him the tale. 84 MATIHEW FRASSlCA

The captain tumed from the window and went to the door. He called out to the soldiers stationed downstairs to bring him coffee and any new dispatches. There would be sorne rearranging of the quartier's fortifications to be done before night, but that would have to wait until he had heard from every company in the area. From downstairs, no response came.

Solomon kept doves to communicate with the far reaches of his empire, likewise Cyrus the Great. The Egyptians used them to signal military conquest, while athletic victors in Greece would release birds to share the news with their families at home. Caesar used them to report rus advances in Gaul; the Rothschilds were informed of the battle of Waterloo's outcome by pigeon. The post-de1uvian dove, then, signaIs not peace but the end of war, though the two may appear no different to the victorious.

The captain called for a second time from the upstairs office, rus voice carrying down the faded Regency green of the empty hallways. "Un instant,

Capitaine," rang out the response from be1ow.

During the Prussian siege, no one in Paris ate pigeon. After sorne resistance, when the supply of sheep, cattle, and pigs ran out, they started substituting horse. The members of the Horse Eating Society must not have been sure whether to rejoice the city-wide adoption of their enthusiasm or to regret the loss of their missionary purpose. The Commission Centrale d'Hygiène et de Salubrité dined on consommé de cheval and culotte de cheval à la mode as a demonstration of the meat's palatability. Even the finest horses recommended themse1ves to the butchers of the city, including two that the Tsar had given as gifts to the Emperor during the Great

Exhibition three years earlier. Sorne racing investors, however, set up their LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 85 stores for the time when the tracks would reopen by contriving to sell beasts of equal weight in the place of champions. These enterprising men made a quick fortune once the sport retumed, its breeding lines decimated and stock of competitors reduced to mere prodigies of speed. But for besieged Paris, the horses didn't last either. Dog and cat became the next specialties, before the rats. Cat, evidenùy, was the disceming domestic gourmand's choice. Rat hunts were popular sport, but only the wealthy truly enjoyed rat since it required elaborate sauces to mask its taste. Of course the rich didn't much want for meat throughout the siege.

Govemment rationing came late and by half-measures; the market provided a more effective rationing system simply by pricing the city's poor into starvation. Husbands and fathers in the Garde Nationale eamed ll1z francs per day, not enough to feed a family but sufficient to ease the anger and humiliation of poverty with wine. Meanwhile, those bourgeois who had stocked up butter and stowed cows behind their homes before the siege was set felt they could survive till spring. Eventually hunger's delegates entered the city's zoological gardens. The famed elephants Castor and

Pollux of the Jardin des Plantes both fell to feed their human admirers, and unlike their namesakes they received no intercession from the gods: their tired, knowing eyes watched the approach of their reluctant butchers.

Those who could afford it ate kangaroo at Chez Brébant or paid 40 francs per pound for trunk of elephant. The great cats survived due to their fierceness (and their possible use in a ferocious sortie against the Prussian lines). The primates were also spared. Darwin had made roasting the monkey house look like a cannibal feast, a resemblance that 86 MATTHEW FRAsSlCA understandably discomforted the starving Parisians. Siege-time cannibalism is no more palatable for having ample precedent. The Wars of Religion had proven the dormant lycanthropy of the French, not to the exclusion of a taste for human flesh. Sieges at Sancerre and Paris during those vicious years drove mothers to eat their own children, or so we are told. athers tumed anthropophagous not out of hunger but out of hate: Catholics murdering their Hugenot neighbours sometimes added to their atrocity the eating of their victims' livers. Mobs dragged corpses to rivers, pulled out organs, raised entrails on poles. Ritual violence served the dual symbolic roles of sanctifying those being massacred and of giving them a foretaste of their torment in hello Public martyrdom and mutilation transmogrified into festivity and feast, a cannibal carnival. Barkers cried out the price of human meat above the music and riot of the crowd. Two hundred years later, the

Terror with its secularised guillotine differed little in spirit.

Enlightened Parisians of 1870 refused to eat primates for fear of what it might represent, the backsliding towards obscene superstition and orgiastic violence or incestuous hunger-vices of the vicious, ignorant poor. The merciless efficiency of this means of policing class distinction deserves admiration; the city's lower classes starved to death in Belleville and

Montmartre while the well-to-do refrained from monkey meat to distance themselves from the excesses of the bestial rabble.

The captain closed the door and sat again behind rus desk, not replacing his glasses but looking down abstractly at the papers before him.

Cluseret's instructions were sound, prudent measures, and among them there were a few precautions the captain hadn't already considered. LA TARANTEllA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 87

Cluseret was not familiar with the latest developments in the campaign; he could not know that the massive Versaillais artillery battery at Montretout had turned parts of the wall to rubble near the south-western corner of the city. Moreover, the captain wasn't in a position high enough to enact the grander aspects of the plans. Among his superiors, a proud and arrogant lot, he could not think of one who would accept suggestions on the improvement of the city's defences from a captain. Of course he would not mention from whom the plans had come-they would have to appear to be his own. He couldn't imagine what trust he had inspired in Cluseret that the

General thought him willing to hazard the deadly pique of his preening commanders, risking the very same charge that had put Cluseret in Mazas, for the sake of such minor improvements. Because, for aU that, what

Cluseret proposed was a mere retuning of the defences. Coop's concern that the plans might somehow leak to Versailles seemed needless: the

General's schema left no glaring weakness to exploit. It had been true for weeks, and would remain so even if aU Cluseret's changes were adopted, that the Versaillais-with their superior numbers, arms, and discipline­ could overrun the city's defences whenever they chose. Their pausing at the gates like a cautious lover had aUowed the Commune's politicians time to believe their city safe and time for her defenders anxiously to contemplate the final coup. The waiting had becorne so unbearably exhausting, each day vouchsafed by the enemy out of his cruel patience, that the captain longed for the resolution of death coming like a final cadence after standing on the dominant. 88 MA1TIIEW FRASSICA

A homing pigeon can retum to its nest from as far away as 1,000 miles from a place it has never seen along a path never traveUed. It will retum to its home after years of captivity in a new nest. No one has explained this homing capacity, mysterious as dowsing, though many scientists and pigeon fanciers have tried: they have a preterriatural sense of sight, aUowing them to see home or recognise landmarks; they navigate by the sun; they navigate by the Earth's magnetic fields; they navigate using a special organ in their inner ear; they navigate by instinct.

The captain put on his glasses and picked up the novel he had been reading when l arrived. Dumas had just died the winter before. He read disinterestedly, wishing the house's library had offered anything besides boys' adventure tales. The door's latch tumed and the door opened. "Vous avez m'appelé, Capitaine," said the man who stood under the lintel.

"Oui, j'ai t'appelé," the captain said without looking up from his book.

When the Prussians laid siege to the city in September of 1870, none of the city's hot-air baUoons were in flying condition. Visitors to the 1867

Exhibition could ride the Céleste, anchored to the ground, but three years later the baUoon leaked perilously. The empty Gare d'Orléans was transformed into a factory for baUoon-manufacture, hundreds of seamstresses sweUing the long bladders in that iron-mullioned cathedral.

Pilots trained in baskets hung from the beams. Sailors made the most desirable recruits for this office, since they would be less likely to suffer nausea from the uncontroUed spinning of flight. Once underway, the baUoonists had no control over the direction of their craft: they might sail towards Prussian-held territory as readily as the unoccupied countryside. LA TARANTEIJ.A: THE INNOCENT AMERlCAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 89

Worse, the pilots rarely knew in which direction they were headed once the winds had set them twisting dizzily. So the decision of where and when to land-to the extent that the pilot, rather than the balloon itself, had the power of choosing-was made based on a guess at the safety of the surroundings. Of course, that the aeronauts had the chance to land anywhere should itself have been cause for rejoicing; the dirigibles were filled with highly-explosive coal gas, and the Prussians had sharpshooters at the ready, sorne of them in their own tethered balloons. Observation towers tracked the balloons as they left the city and alertëd patrols to the location of the landing sites. Still, only a handful of crews were captured in the fall and early winter, and by the middle of November Paris only sent balloons by night, to avoid detection.

The balloons carried mail, diplomats, and military supplies out of the city; they were Paris's only means of communication with the world beyond the siege lines. But the communication only went one way. No balloons could fly back into the city because there was no means of directing their flight, though inventions to remedy this fauIt were numerous. The

Duquesne took to the air with a giant propeller manned by three sailors, but the wind carried it in the opposite direction. Of sails and thousands of leashed pigeons the balloon-post's administrators were overwhelmed with theories. But no design proved practical-the balloons could not return to the city. But perhaps their cargo could.

"Do you have any new reports for me? And my coffee," the captain added, lowering the novel and looking up, his head tilting as he registered annoyance at not already smelling the drink that should have been placed 90 MATrnEW FRAsSlCA immediately on his desk. This expression, however, had hardly enough time to resolve on his face before it recomposed itself into a look of reproach. "Who are you, monsieur?" he asked the stranger, who was dressed incongruously in a grey morning-coat, as if he had lost his way coming back from the hippodrome in the Bois de Boulogne in the days before the war. As he said this, the captain laid his hands palms-down on the desk and began to rise, but Hackett had crossed the room in two long strides of those spidery legs and with the momentum of this motion he swung out to his left side the walking-stick he was holding by its narrow end. He grasped the tail of this implement with his two gloved hands and then brought it around heavily, like sorne gentleman mower, its mallard's­ head handle connecting with the captain's skull with the sound of a peg driven home into a beam and the crack of the wooden shaft splintering intemally at the shock. The captain's glasses, jarred from his face, fell back onto the desk, followed by his upper body. The walking-stick, carried to the extent of Hackett's reach by the follow-through of his first great swing, now rose directly above the desk, its head glinting in the dying sun like a sceptre in the ritual of sorne occult sect, before singing again through the air down towards the now-inert figure of the captain, impacting with the dull crunch of live bone shattering. The force of this blow sent droplets of bright blood from ruptured vessels in the captain's nose splattering across the half-read dispatches. Hackett again brought up the cane and again struck it home, adopting the rhythm of the railroad or circus spike pounder, emitting short grunts of concentrated effort at the apogee of each swing. At last he ceased, with what revulsion at the sight that his hands' work had LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 91 made of a man was left to him to feel. He flung the cane to the corner, its bloodied grip leaving red traces where it bounced, and walked out of the room and the house and into the empty street in the fast -gathering dusk.

Runners tried to break through the Prussian lines back into the city, but were caught; canine messengers were sent and never heard from again. But homing pigeons, trained to race from distant cities to the capital, could be flown out by balloon and trusted to find the way back to their Parisian lofts regardless of where the baUoons brought them, provided they survived the weather and the Prussian snipers. And so the city relied upon its pigeons­ voyageurs for all of its personal mail and news, news of defeat and of no allies, of a Republican Rome and of a Spanish Amadeus. The Cumulet was the breed of bird Parisian pigeon fanciers raced before the siege called them to duty, so named because their white plumage made a flock look like a fleecy heap of cumulous cloud. Accumulating information to rain on the city thirsty for news, each bird could carry up to 40,000 messages on microfilm tied to its legs, to be transcribed by teams sitting in front of a magic lantern projector. Crowds cheered the sight of a white bird lighting in a dovecot.

After the Prussian siege had ended and the Versaillais one had begun, my father feU to his death from one of those lofts. Early that morning in

April, he edged out on to the slate roof of a house in the colonie

Americaine from one of its dormer windows, headed incrementaUy sideways towards the pigeon loft with a message or with nothing in his hand. He opened the door to the loft and pulled out a bird, either a bird that had just arrived or a bird that was being kept crated. As he pulled the 92 MATIHEW FRAsSlCA bird out, either the bird with the new message or the bird he intended to release with the message in rus hand, it squirmed a wing out of rus grasp and began flapping. Maybe the morning's bombardment began at that moment, the Versaillais artillery from the east reporting the dawn's light over the city. The pigeons remaining in the loft cooed restlessly and walked over each other. Instinctively lunging forward to grab the bird with his other hand, the one either carrying a microfilm sheet or empty, my father lost his footing on the dew-wet slate and slipped free of the roof, releasing the bird that circled above the block and lit on a chimney several streets over.

When a single pigeon from that same columbarium lifted itself into the air over the western edge of the sixteenth arrondissment in the last lambent

st light of the evening of May 21 , it carried a simple message tied to its leg:

Tonight the Point-du-Jour is unguarded. LA TARANTEllA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 93

The gardens before the palace were lit by hundreds of tiny electric globes, as they had been during the grands bals of the Second Empire, and these flightless fireflies illuminated points of greenery out of the deepening pink shadow. We found ourselves in a procession of revellers. Men and women mummed dances, singing and laughing; many wore masks constructed of common objects but transformed in the wearing into modem incarnations of antique spirits.

Unshod children stole in and around the file on their own mischief. The sounds of the celebrants were somehow muffled, as if influenced by the quietude of fading light and cooling air. Orson produced a wineskin full of sweet port. 94 MATTHEW FRAsSlCA

Inside, the Tuileries palace had been converted into a cabaret: hundreds fùled the Salle Maréchaux with a din of ambiguous cries. Along the walls, busts and portraits of previous tenants of various lineage were wrapped in white shrouds. A brass band mounted the stage at one end of the hall and began playing "La Mandolinata" over the noise of the crowd.

"What is your news, Orson?"

"Ah, my boy, it is news of a change in my fortunes-the very stroke of luck l had anticipated when l chose to come to Paris-a long-deserved reversaI, a return to form." A drunken soldier wearing tattered shoes shoved past us towards a woman dancing with another man. "Minister Washburne informed me today that l have been appointed sous-préfect for Cayenne, in

Guyana. The Republic was evidently impressed by my entrepreneurial successes. "

"That sounds like it will be an adventure," l said, uncertain what to think.

"An adventure it will surely be, Henry, with hostile nature and hostile natives to subdue. But if any man be equal to the challenge, the Minister said, it is 1."

The brass band was followed by a troupe of gymnasts. The room had grown darker; the crowd was a shifting mass, the gymnastics impossible to make out beyond the sense of bizarre forms arcing and tumbling. Footlights came up on the stage, illuminating a tower of human bodies slightly swaying. Segments of the audience grew quiet at the spectacle of human joints and flesh hoisted and cantilevered up to a finial female pointing to the coffered ceiling. One of the groundlings made a loud sound of passing LA TARANTEllA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 95 gas and the odd quiet dissolved in laughter. The tower swayed more broadly, back and forth, and figures began to peel off its upper stratum.

The tower unfolded itself from the top down. Each level as it went passed the crowning figure to the level below, until just she remained on stage, still pointing upwards in hapless optimism.

Orson announced, "They've lost the star off their Christmas tree!"

A bony man in what looked like a mask from commedia dell'arte tlourished omately before the two of us. He offered, he said, incomparable delights, a joumey of the body and spirit known only to the mahommedan sheiks in their smoke-filled harems. As he spoke, he withdrew to one side to reveal a tiny girl wrapped in iridescent indigo fabric who made a low curtsey. Her black hair hid her downcast eyes. "She knows secrets of the orient," the man hinted darkly. At this she looked up at us and her intense eyes, dark as her hair, were full of a timorous scom that had congealed there from fear. Orson wound up a furious paw to strike at the man, but l caught it as the pair hurried away into the throng. As soon as they were gone, he began weeping. l put one arm around the old man for comfort.

He straightened. "Emily," he said. "She was my sister Emily." He took a long, fortifying draught from the wineskin and passed it to me. From beside us a woman shrieked once, like a frighted horse.

Onto the stage, empty before the footlights, came a woman in a long scarlet dress, her hair up in elaborate twists. A piano introduced her tune, and the crowd tumed the moiety of its attention stagewards, announcing its approval with a cheer. The woman swayed and began, with a trilling vibrato, to sing. 96 MATI1-IEW FRAsSlCA

Dans la vieille cité française Existe une race de fer Dont l'âme comme une fournaise A de son feu bronzé la chair. Tous ses fils naissent sur la paille, Au palais ils n'ont qu'un taudis. C'est la canaille, et bien j'en suis.

Ce n'est pas le Pilier du bagne, C'est l'honnête homme dont la main Par la plume ou le marteau Gagne en suant son morceau de pain. C'est le père enfin qui travaille Des jours et quelques fois des nuits. C'est la canaille, et bien j'en suis.

C'est l'homme à la face terreuse, Au corps maigre, à l'oeil de hibou, Au bras de fer, à main nerveuse, Qui sort d'on ne sait où, Toujours avec esprit vous raille Se riant de votre mépris. C'est la canaille, et bien j'en suis.

"Ah," said Orson, "here cornes your woman friend Nadine." Indeed, intermittently through the jostle, l could make out Nadine moving incrementally towards us in the wash of faces reflecting the stage's light. "1 almost forgot," he said. "Thank you."

"What for, Orson?"

"The Minister told me that l had you to thank for my appointment."

"1 don't know what you mean."

"No, you must. He said you had done sorne great service to sorne very important people who needed encouragement." My stomach lurched in terrible recognition-my warning to the captain must not have been adequate, or l had misjudged Washbume's purpose.

C'est l'enfant que la destinée LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 97

Force à rejeter ses haillons Quand sonne sa vingtième année, Pour entrer dans vos bataillons. Chair à canon de la bataille, Toujours il succombe sans cris. C'est la canaille, et bien j'en suis.

Nadine drew up beside us. "Good evening," she said. "l'm sorry 1 wasn't in earlier today when you caUed, Henry. 1 was visiting the American ambulance to help them make preparations."

"It's quite aU right. My day was a success all the same." 1 could hear the gaU rising in my voice. For who could have known what Orson's thanks meant but Nadine?

"Yes, 1 need to speak to you about yOuf day." She took my elbow and began leading me away through the crowd. "Excuse us, Orson," she said backwardly.

"Farewell, Orson," 1 said with a mock salute. "Now they will make me pay for my crimes." 1 joked against the desperate confusion and anxiety 1 felt. My capacity for deciphering machinations had been severely overtaxed.

1 needed Nadine to explainj 1 needed Nadine to take responsibility for what use had been made of me.

Enfin c'est une armée immense Vêtue en haillons, en sabots Mais qu'aujourd'hui la France Appelle sous ses drapeaux On les verra dans la mitraille, Ils feront dire aux ennemeis: C'est la canaille, et bien j'en suis.

"Henry. Something has happened that puts you in considerable danger.

The officer you visited today-he has been assassinated. It was made to 98 MATTHEW FRASSlCA look like you did it, Henry." She watched me through her wet black brows and held my arm firmly. 1 had seen her look at me like this once before, as we both held OUf breath in the pit of the night. Now the similarity of diffused light arcing across a crescent of her face cinched a tourniquet somewhere in myabdomen. "The trains won't be safe. Washbume has arrangeda way for you to leave the city safely, but you will not be able to go until tomorrow night. In the meantime, you cannot retum to yOUf hotel.

1 have a place for you to stay, but it is a bit of a walk." She paused. "l'm sorry Henry."

In my memory a long time passed as 1 stood looking at Nadine's face, trying to grasp the significance of what she had said over the intervening surge of recoUection. But in reality 1 am certain that a bare moment passed and that 1 frankly did not comprehend before the cry came from the man who had leapt to the stage in front of the singer and tumed his anguished face to the crowd.

Instantly we were enveloped as the mass tumed on itself and began heaving its immense weight against the back wall. My head swam in the roil as we were pushed through. The heat and press combined with the port and my utter disorientation overwhelmed my senses-faces distended

and twisted, distances grew, my body seemed to shrink to a fraction of its

size. Shouts of rousing military bravado became terrifying shrieks. 1 was

assailed on aU sides by horrible, malodorant spectres, their mouths widening menacingly. They chanted together, carrying the singer's tune that

became a dirge, a benediction and an expiation of ritual sacrifice. 1 reached

out towards Nadine and saw that she was still holding my arm. It occurred LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 99 to me that it was she who was leading me to the altar: at the moment l sensed my doom l longed for it as fervently as the Mayan virgin decked in flowers as she mounts the steps of the ziggurat.

The crowd crushed us forward, out of the hall and down the steps of a wide marble staircase that had become a human waterfall. After a last squeeze we were again in the gardens. The air in my lungs turned suddenly cold. The path's grave! made a clean sound like snow underfoot. The impressions l had felt in the hall remained vivid like a nightmare on waking. Nadine turned us sharply towards the river, diverting us from the flood of Parisians streaming from the palace with cries of blood in their mouths. We ran along the quay and across the bridge, the only sound in the blackness sweeping beneath us the crack of our shoes against the stones. l knew there was a question l meant to ask but every time it began to form itself l forgot its content. We fled up Montparnasse along a series of narrow lanes and byways lit by the occasional faraway gaslight. The alarm hadn't been raised yet beyond the fête at the Tuileries. We were like a mute

Paul Revere and William Dawes riding for our lives.

We tumed in at the door of a tavem be!ow a sign-board that read "La

Pomme de Pin." The interior of the tavem had a low cramped ceiling supported by thick wooden posts carved with the texture of a pineapple's plated skin. In deep booths along the tavem's walls sat bleary burly men, any of whom could have been Orson's Gallic understudy. l followed

Nadine past these leering or sleeping drunks to the back of the room and through a short, narrow door. We stooped under the sill and crept down a steep staircase into the musty dark. At the foot of the stairs, on a hook set 100 MA1TIIEW FRAsSlCA into the foundation, was a tin lamp that Nadine unhooked and carried before us. Squat barrels hunkered at the walls. After a bit of looking and kicking away dust and gravel, Nadine lifted an iron hatch. She tumed back to me. "1'11 go first." She set the lamp down beside the shaft's mouth. She lowered herself in and then let go of the floor, touching down somewhere below with a sigh. "Pass me down the lamp." l handed it to her and the basement disappeared: all that was left was this square of light beneath me. l followed her down.

We passed through another, shorter stone room and into a hallway. The air was murkier than it had been below the tavem. l estimated that we were somewhere back down the street we had already travelled, but we had made so many tums that l could not say for certain. Another slowly curving staircase led us further down. As we continued, l glimpsed dusty Latin inscriptions slipping out of our circle of light. A last low portal opened onto a vast corbelled cavem supported by towering stone arches that reached up to dim groin vaults. A stream or sewer echoed somewhere far off in the distance. We made our way along the wall and tumed in at one archway marked by a skull fitted in among the rounded stones. Down a barrel­ vaulted corridor Nadine's lamp flickered until we reached a battered wooden door. She knocked. The door squealed open and before it stood a frail-looking, grey man wearing slightly stilted formaI attire, grinning like the skull we had navigated by. He opened the door to let us through into an anteroom lined with beaded wood. We followed him through the next door into a chamber resembling the interior of any gentlemen's club: the dark walls were set with glass-fronted bookcases, gilded plaster ceilings LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 101 were blackened with the smoke of tailow and tobacco. Other old men were stationed in pairs and threes about the library. They looked up as we entered. Our greeter whispered welcome to us and led us out a side door into a hall hung with portraits of wigged sitters holding books and scrolls.

From this hall we were led to a bed chamber where l understood l was to spend the night.

"1 will be back for you tomorrow evening," Nadine said. "You will be welllooked-after here." l thanked her and our wizened concierge weakly and they left. l lied down on the narrow bed and fell immediately to sleep.

l woke feeling sore, overslept, and deeply annoyed. l found a clean, too-Iarge shirt on a dressing-table. Outside the windowless bedroom l encountered another of the withered men who haunted the place; he told me the way to the lavatory and the dining room. This latter could have belonged to any fashionable home of the previous century, with its overwrought fixtures and its fleur-de-Iys upholstery, except that it had no source of natural light. This absence was all the more striking in the dining room because of its gaudy trompe-l'oeil ceiling depicting putti and doves ascending columnar clouds to a cyan sky. The table was set for one before a cold repast of Gruyère cheese, pâté de fois gras, a ficelle of bread, and a short decanter of claret. l found myself famished-l hadn't eaten anything since my meal at the bistro, very probably about twenty-four hours earlier.

As l ate l tried to sort out my predicament. My father's place in ail this plotting now appeared entirely irrelevant. His memory had been invoked merely to lure me into whatever maze l had entered; his name had served 102 MATTIIEW FRAsSlCA to wipe away my objections and ease my passage. In my guilt and anxiety over him l had made myself maUeable to aU who cared to manipulate me. l had been the servant of any number of interests. Washbume had certainly used me to play messenger, and now the captain was dead: l had provided a suitable scapegoat for that crime. Who could be responsible for the murder or to what end wasn't clear, but it seemed likely to have had something to do with the Versaillais' penetration of the city's defences the night before. Somehow Orson had benefited personaUy, as a quid pro quo.

The details, the sequence of cause-and-effect, were hopelessly vague. But l felt sure now that at least one person would know the shape of the larger plot, the person who had first implicated me in it, Nadine. As l ate l began to fixate on her betrayal; my hunger tumed to bile. l became impatient for her retum.

l left the dining room and made my way back to the library. l hoped to find a place to sit and something to read to pass the time. "Ah," said the man who first admitted us when l came into the room. "Good aftemoon M.

Coop. l trust you slept well."

"Yes, thank you."

"1 would like to introduce myse1f. l am the Comte de Breville. In the far chair is Baron Ricard, and over here is the bishop of Albi." These eminences looked up briefly from their reading for a perfunctory nod. l ventured to address to them a "how do you do."

"Welcome to our club, our spiritual home-and, in sorne cases, our actual one. You may be curious about the nature of this place."

"1 had wondered." LA TARANTEllA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 103

"Our society is housed beneath the establishment of a sympathetic hôtelier. We paya modest rent, and we are favoured with the services of his excellent kitchen. We have been in this location for fifty years, before that in others. Our society is very old indeed; it was founded in the thirteenth century to safeguard ancient texts that had been discovered in a reliquary chamber when the cathedral of Amiens bumed down. Our first members were churchmen who devoted their lives in secret to the study of these manuscripts. They believed them to be first-hand accounts of the construction of a massive project on a scale untried before or since: the tower of Babel. They are wonderful documents. l have read them in the society's transcribed edition."

"How is it" l asked delicately, "that those founding churchmen could read the first language?"

"Of course, it is quite impossible-the scrolls are copies, written in archaic Greek sorne four or five centuries before Christ. They are very, very recent compared to the events they describe. They are themselves the work of lost preservationists, the forebears of the Babel Society. The authenticity of these documents," he added, "is something of an article of faith with us.

They are the occasion of our founding, like a charter. Now, however, the society views its mandate as much wider-we are the trustees of Beauty."

He said this matter-of-factly, as if it were not in the least in danger of sounding absurdo "We keep Beauty safe for the time when the rest of the world will be ready to provide the conditions for its flourishing."

"Ah," l said, yet more carefully than before. "When, exactly-that is, how will you know-" 104 MATrnEW FRAsSlCA

"Oh, sorne of us make the trip above. It must be plain to you that civilisation is in an advanced state of decline. Times are considerably darker than they were when OUf founders discarded the superstition of their robes and committed themselves to reason and wisdom. The environs of our rear entrance, through which you arrived, provide a reminder of anonymous, universal death-as long as mankind insists on serving death for its own sake rather than as the vassal of Beauty that it must be, we shall wait."

"It may be quite a wait."

"We have patience. Time allows us to gather more of what might otherwise be destroyed."

"But why in secret? If yOuf work were public you could reform others by example-would not Beauty itself be put to better use?"

"Beauty has no use. One either worships it or negates it, and to negate it is to destroy it. Its exemplars are wasted on society. We gave up the notion of taking action in the world long, long ago, when we realised that all human systems based on violence will decay from their corrupt centre outwards." l decided no longer to question what appeared to me to be a rather pointless fatalism and accepted the comte's offer to tour the collection. The Babel Society's storehouse of Beauty consisted of a series of poorly-lit galleries which represented, l was told, only a fraction of the total holdings. To my inexperienced eye very little seemed to unify the collection: classical marbles and bronzes, a fragment of a giant Christian mosaic, paintings of ecstasy and scenes of home life. l could recognise here and there identifiable qualities-heroic mannerism, Carravagic chiaroscuro, the prismatic Delft light of one of the Dutch miniaturists. My guide assured LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 105 me, however, that the artists here were largely obscure to the world above, having been neglected (or merely hidden from view-he was vague on this point) these many years. The particular characteristics that made up the

Beauty his society sought to preserve were no clearer to me after seeing the artwork; the comte gave a short disquisition on the society's library of philosophy and literature which, although extensive in its catalogue of banned and profane titles, was not necessarily unique. It became clear during his exposition that Beauty incorporated that which was in accord with Nature and Reason, and the group's Epicurean habits were several times alluded to. The members enjoyed weekly dinners at which a high standard of discourse was maintained, much as at the literary salons of old

Paris. l also understood that women were considered equals among the membership, but that at present no females belonged. Women non­ members were occasionally invited to the soirées, though the intellectual character of these women he did not mention.

l asked the comte why he had taken me into the Society's confidence.

His wet eyes had a pleading look, and in his closeness l could smell his geriatric skin like the binding of an old book. He laid a hand on my forearm and said gently, "You are the guest of a great friend of the society,

Jack Burgess." l looked at him for a stunned moment and then asked his leave to peruse the collection alone. It made perfect sense, of course.

Burgess had been keeping an eye on me ever since l arrived, playing the older brother. My name had travelled quickly. As for his sympathy with the

Babel Society, it was of a piece with his college clubbiness and elitism. AlI 106 MATrnEW FRASSlCA the same l feh a chili at the sense of being the subject of plans of which everyone else l met seemed to know more than I.

My attention retumed to the painting before which l had stopped and l took note of what l had been absently staring at: it depicted a pastoral scene, with two shepherds and a shepherdess drawing a branch away from a stone slab and straining to read its inscription. Another figure crouched in the foreground, unconcemed with the mystery. The turf and sky were treated in a kind of uniform yeUow-green that suggested not verdancy but senescence.

A servant-the Babel Society, in keeping with its thoroughgoing asynchronism, had managed to retain its servants in Paris despite the general upheaval-announced Nadine's entrance to the gaUery.

"How are you enjoying yOUf artistic tour of Paris?" she asked as she came in.

"Oh, weU enough, but they have no Courbet."

"No, these old boys wouldn't approve. They are strict Academicians."

"Is it time to leave?"

''Yes. Are you ready?"

"1 don't suppose you have my luggage from the hotel?"

"No, but Washbume wili be able to send it along."

"Fine. l am already expecting a parcel from the Minister."

In the library we bid the comte goodbye and he wished us luck and handed us a torch. We exited back out into the corridor, now aU the more stagily gothic after the posh familiarity of the Society's club. As we re­ entered the cavem, l tumed to note the skuU that marked the entry; in the LA TARANTEIJ.A: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 107 torch's leaping light, what l had taken for rusticated stones making up the wall's surface resolved themselves into the ball-jointed ends of innumerable human femurs. l glanced in the surge of a primaI panic up the walls-as far as our light carried, bones shined back: stacks of ribs like ladders to the ceiling, scapulas like the wings of pinned moths, a rose-window of radiating spines, heaps of skulls chewing each other infemally. l stumbled into Nadine, my stomach and bowels in full rebellion.

"Henry, be careful," she said, unfazed by the horror of our surroundings. l vomited. The retching echoed deeply through the chamber. The column against which l was leaning was lined with the obscene, toothless arcs of mandibles: l vomited again. Nadine puUed me away and l wiped my lips on a sleeve. "They're dead. You need to concem yourself with the living," she said grimly. We walked quickly over the damp floor, down another long corridor lined with radii and ulnas in their delicate pairs.

"1 don't understand, Nadine. What did l do?" AlI of the aftemoon's mounting resentment and stored accusation had sublimed to this slighdy petulant question.

"What are you talking about," she stated more than asked, still puUing me forward. At this, aU my frustration and resentment rushed back. l planted my feet and wrenched Nadine around by the arm, in one motion puUing her towards me and tuming to wedge her against the damp, uneven wall. The torch in her other hand made the sound of a sail luffing to the wind as the flame gorged itself on the moist air rushing past. Pressing my body against hers, l clamped her hands and the torch back to the bones in the wall. l felt dizzy with the momentum of my sexual violence, the sense 108 MATrnEW FRAsSlCA of bridging perilously that of which l was capable and that which l willed.

Even in the reeking damp of the funerary catacombs l could smell the livid tang of her body. l tilted forward and kissed her mouth with the force of an anger l hadn't felt since the impotent rages of childhood. She strained and twisted her face away. Her face held a look of bitter, bitter irony.

"What did you do? You did exactly what they wanted you to do, and punctually. You've been a fool, Henry, a dupe. Washburne and the others got you to lead them right to the last loyal officer in the south-west corner and then you offered yourself so they could pin the crime on you, for however many hours it would still matter before the Versaillais came through the gap you opened at the Point-du-jour and started tearing down the city. Do you know what's going on up there, Henry? Paris is convulsing with death. It makes these catacombs look like a dollhouse. The streets are piling with corpses. And you showed them the door, Henry. You, with yOUf squeamishness about having 10 choose. They used it, you know; they used your precious neutrality like a lever arm. You never had a choice. Burgess was brilliant to suggest you."

"Why didn't you warn me?"

"Because," Nadine's expression softened. "Because they have me too, of course." She slid out from beneath my limp weight and started again down the tunnel.

As we continued deeper into the catacombs, explosions from the surface began to rumble down to us. The series of macabre chambers narrowed to another set of low, dirt-floored anterooms. We ascended again up two flights of stairs. "We must go up, now: stay near," she said. We LA TARANTEllA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 109 came up into a close, dusty room and Nadine opened a door. We emerged from a maintenance building in the Luxembourg Gardens. The leaves above us susserated in the cool night air. The street, lit garishly by house-fires, looked like just another ring of the catacombs we had travelled by torch.

Sounds of running echoed around us, unlocatàble. We stayed close to buildings, trying to keep to the shadows. Mitrailleuse fire from a local skirmish provided cover for the sound of our running. As we went l tripped over the dark shape of a body and laid out my fulliength next to a corpse whose head had been split open by the stroke of a gunstock. My hands and shirt were sticky with cold blood as Nadine dragged me up and back into a trot across the place St. Sulpice. At the end of St. Germain's diagonal we paused and looked down along the river's border: soldiers marched away from us to the east. We sprinted to the foot of the iron bridge and then fled across its length. The water reflected a long smudge of orange from the

Tuileries palace, in flames. We raced along the quay towards this pillar of fire and headed again into the gardens. Cinders blew in constellations across our path; the heat of the blaze felt like the breeze from a sea of fire.

Ahead of us, a woman with skirts burning pranced into bushes that were already alight. We reached in to try to draw her out, but the flames had spread to her sleeves and hair and she flailed screaming in the circ1e of burning foliage like someone drowning and Nadine pulled me away. We regained the street and crept down the arctic quiet of the Rue de Rivoli.

The minister's carnage waited black beneath agas lamp. Seeing us, its driver drew a wide grin across the lower half of his face. 110 MATrnEW FRASSICA

A door opened and we stepped up into the carriage. Seated inside were

Washbume and a distracted-Iooking Orson. "Welcome back Henry Coop.

Good evening Nadine," Washbume said. His driver launched the carriage forward at a furious pace, unmindful of crashing gaps in the paving surface stripped for barricades. He halted abruptly several times to answer the questions of the Garde Nationale troops who were stationed everywhere in that part of the city. As we passed they looked after the carriage with incredulity as it barrelled away down the streets. ''You did well the other day, Henry. We won't forget you-Washington can always use someone of your qualifications in the diplomatic service." l made no response to the

Minister. We passed the rest of the ride in silence, staring out the windows.

We stopped at last outside the Gare du Nord. Washbume swung himself down and held out a hand for Nadine. Orson and l followed. He looked like he had had sorne very bad news.

"Come this way, we really shouldn't tarry," Washbume said. He handed me my suitcase and led the way into the darkened station. The globes of a single pole bumed in the centre of the concourse, dividing the vast space into a luminous sphere and the intractable shadows beyond, an interior projection of night which swallowed the climbing ironwork. We passed through this circle of light and continued, walking the length of the station to the yards beyond. Washbume called out and a voice responded. It belonged to a squat man who was towing a kind of fire-hose. Our eyes followed this hose-bearer to a point between two rail lines, where he hooked its snout up into a basket. Above the basket, just visible as a lack of depth against the cloudless sky like the unilluminated gibbous of the moon, LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 111 was the giant teardrop of a balloon. "Gentleman," Washbume said grandiosely, "your Phaeton awaits." The hose-man helped us into the basket and then followed us in. He introduced himself as Claude, a sailor, and expressed his relief at leaving the city. Orson and l were silent.

Washbume and Nadine watched as Claude made final preparations. He told

Washbume that he remembered the instructions he had been given. "Attend to what Claude says, gentlemen," the Minister said. "He is my vice-regent of the air."

The hose flopped to the ground; Washbume at Claude's directions scrambled like a dock boy to untie the anchor ropes from their moorings. l looked at Nadine, but she would not retum my glance. As Washbume cast each line the balloon lurched upwards to the end of the reach of its remaining tethers. With the last one undone, the balloon rose steadily.

Nadine and the Minister stood next to each other and watched us climb.

Washbume gave a tight unanswered salute. The sensation was like floating up, arms flat against one's sides, from the bottom of a deep dive underwater. The long roof of the Gare came into view, and above the buildings the blaze of the Tuileries flashed.

"Washbume explained," Orson said in a choked voice. "He expects me to ruin them."

"What?"

"Cayenne. He expects me to cripple it with mismanagement. That is my mission, to clear the French out of South America by driving them to ruin."

"You can refuse, Orson." 112 MATIHEW FRAsSrCA

"Oh, l won't refuse. It's too late." He leaned in towards me, glancing back at Claude, who was fiddling over the side of the basket with the ballast. "1 won't refuse, but l may still run." He winked.

The horizon grew as we rose, spreading out the city beneath us like a snapped sheet coming to rest flat. The flfe's shapeless blot of black smoke cut across our view, smothering the Left Bank. We hit a CUITent of hot air from the burning palace and the balloon began to spin, as if the disorder of the collapsing city had followed us into the air. We climbed and spun and the streets below us were ripples on a dark pond. 1t was impossible to tell which way we flew, except that the balloon continued its spiral ascent until we had reached the height that a raindrop must look dizzyingly down from as it edges out of its cloud.

"A fine night for a sail, boys, no?" Claude asked jovially. l shrugged glumly. "1 can't tell you how relieved l am that Minister Washbume hired me to pilot you two out of that sinking ship of a city. 1t won't be pleasant, l can tell you." He fell into silence, looking upwards as if to avoid seeing the ground below. Eventually he relapsed into chattiness, asking us how we had liked Paris: "She's not like she was, though, no: there were days when

Paris was a true lady, before she became a crone. The Reds-their ideas are noble, perhaps, but they are too hasty. Where l come from, in Normandy, we know that Paris is always a little insane." He listed for us his favourite drinks "à l'americaine," and asked whether we had tried them in our ingenious homeland. Orson and l were obliged to disappoint the man each time he named another outlandish-sounding concoction. He fell to praising LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 113

American tobacco, and here Orson could keep the poor man occupied with his tobacconist's opinions.

We drifted for hours over fields beyond the city, watching the moon's shadows tilt across the blue landscape. l fell asleep in the swinging basket.

At dawn's grey alarm we were flying low over a forest of oaks. By sorne misca1culation of Claude's (for which he apologised loudly from the side of the basket where he was tossing out unnecessary weight to correct his mistake), we were much doser to the treetops than comfort decreed-they scraped and tore at the bottom and sides of the basket and we aU feared a lone taU branch would pierce the silk bladder from which we hung helplessly suspended like prey in the talons of a great red bird. The noise made by the scouring trees was terrible and loud after having passed the night in aerial silence. Claude hurled overboard sorne heavy blankets and we rose just beyond their reach.

The sun seeped over the horizon before us, giving us at last a sense of where we were for the moment headed. As the forest thinned and we approached another stretch of farITÙand, Claude began contriving to lower us again, though this operation seemed little more than a process of supplication to the genius of the baUoon. At length we sank as we wheeled over the smoking tail of a farrnhouse. As we coasted above the fields,

Claude tumed to Orson and me and said in a mock-solemn address,

"Messieurs, nous sommes arrivés." He bent over the side to adjust the lines or cast out an anchor. l looked to Orson and he shrugged broadly in tacit agreement: we set our shoulders to Claude's substantial hindquarters and 114 MATTIfEW FRAsSlCA sent him out over the basket's lip. He landed with a grunt behind us and the balloon immediately mounted into the air.

"WeIl done, my boy!" Orson exclaimed. "Now we are under way at last."

We sailed out over the blonde sea of grain in the sun's oblique light. As we rose higher the balloon began again to spin, whirling us into the sky and towards no foreseeable destination. LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 115

THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO SPY

tanding in the smoke and gore of Saigon's Place Garnier after a Smidday explosion, Thomas Fowler, the narrator of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, says of the titular anti-hero: "he'll always be innocent, you can't blame the innocent, they're always guiltless.

AlI you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity" (213). Pyle, the young American, has learned what he knows of

Southeast Asia from the books of York Harding, rather than by personal experience and observation, as Fowler has. More significantly for Fowler,

Pyle's beliefs about Vietnam are ideologically motivated theories--of containment and dominoes-that stand in ,the way of a more humanistic understanding. Fowler tells Pyle he "laugh[s] at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn't exist-mental concepts" (118) and instead regards the desires and suffering of individuals as essentially apolitical: "They want enough rice. [. .. ] They don't want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins around telling them what they want" (119), For Fowler (and Greene)

Pyle is emblematic of the blundering naïveté of the American intervention in Vietnam in its early years. After leaving the dead Pyle's fiat, Fowler berates the American Economic Attaché, who has asked if he has "any hunch" who may have killed Pyle. ''Yes,'' Fowler says:

They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and

ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than 116 MATTIIEW FRAsSICA

any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and

York Harding's books and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.'

He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers

and his lecturers made a fool of him. When he saw a dead body he

couldn't even see the wounds. A Red menàce, a soldier of democracy.

(32)

A genealogically related contempt of idealistic Americans dabbling in

Southeast Asia surfaces in Joan Didion's novel Democracy. Congressman

Harry Victor specialises throughout the novel in delivering (and apparently believing) politically expedient platitudes: "Harry was interviewed and expressed his conviction that this isolated incident reflected only the normal turbulence of a nascent democracy" (103). It is 1969 and Victor is visiting

Indonesia to "set about obtaining official assurance that human rights remained inviolate in the developing (USAID Recipient) nation at hand"

(93). During a reception Jack Lovett, wily CIA operative, scoffs at Victor,

"You people really interest me [... ]. You don't actually see what's happening in front of you. You don't see it unless you read it. You have to read it in the New York Times, then you start talking about it. Give a speech. CalI for an investigation. Maybe you can come down here in a year or two, investigate what's happening tonight" (100-10l). After a hand grenade goes off in the embassy cOmmissary, Lovett evacuates the delegates to the safety of a hill station.

Both Alden Pyle and Harry Victor suffer from a particularly American innocence, a "kind of insanity" that blinds them to all that does not conform to their unshakeable belief in the purity of their intentions. Greene, of LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 117 course, seems to hope that a compassionate (Catholic) approach to geopolitics might alleviate the suffering Fowler chronicles-Pyle's tolerant, liberal Unitarianism does nothing to temper his temporal ambitions-while

Didion with the advantage of forty years of hindsight would likely be a great deal more sceptical that any such reactive appeal to what we might caU a master narrative would provide salvation or even salve. Nevertheless, they both give us exemplars of the idealistic American abroad under the influence of a hubristic insanity that bends reality to dis guise itself and its disastrous effects, characters of a type that predates the Cold War by about a hundred years.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hilda from The Marble Faun is an early, exquisite, and influential specimen of this type, which for the purposes of this essay we will naturaUy enough calI the Innocent American. With characteristic subtlety, Hawthorne dresses Hilda in perpetuaI virgin white, associates her with doves, and gives her an apartment at the top of a tower consecrated to the Virgin Mary whose eternal lamp Hilda must trim every three days. She vigorously rejects the notion that Good and Evil might mingle in moral ambiguity, but only because her native Puritan spotlessness defends her from seeing anything but pure goodness:

With respect to whatever was evil, fouI, and ugly, in this populous and

corrupt city [Rome], she had trodden as if invisible, and not only so, but

blind. She was altogether unconscious of anything wicked that went

along the same pathway, but without jostling or impeding her, any more

than gross substance hinders the wanderings of a spirit. (387) 118 MATIHEW FRASSlCA

Hawthorne concludes the passage with a moral that makes Hilda the inverse of Milton's Satan: "Thus it is, that, bad as the world is said to have grown, Innocence continues to make a Paradise around itself, and keep it still unfaIlen" (387). Hilda's iron-clad sensibility is shaken when she witnesses a murder perpetrated by two European friendsj her faIl from innocence to experience doesn't even require any transgression of her own.

Meanwhile, we learn that the Italian extras who mill about in the background of this Rome belonging to expatriate bohemians cannot feel the pangs of lost innocence because they are Catholics: "in Italy, religion jostles along side by side with business and sport, after a fashion of its ownj and people are accustomed to kneel down and pray, between two fits of merriment, or between two sins" (55).

We are talking here about a variety of American exceptionalism, with its ideological invisibility cloak on. Thomas Byers defines exceptionalism as an imaginary idea of America:

the nation as both the surpassing of the past and the hope of the future

[. . .]. American exceptionalism is a doubly teleological vision, in which

aU of history prior to the formation of the Euro-American 'New World'

was pointed toward this formation as a goal, and in which that 'New

World' is not simply a place, but a mission. (85-86)

Exceptionalism marks out America as distinct and superior to its European forebearsj as such, Byers suggests, it is a kind of wild overcompensation

(90). The species of exceptionalism on display in these Innocent Americans is that which R.W.B. Lewis defines, with his structuralist's precision, as the

"Adamic myth" 0): LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 119

The American myth saw life and history as just beginning. It described

the world as starting up again under fresh initiative, in a divinely

granted second chance for the human race, after the frrst chance had

been so disastrously fumbled in the darkening Old World. It introduced

a new kind of hero, the heroic embodiment of a new set of ideal human

attributes. [ ... ] The new habits to be engendered on the new American

scene were suggested by the image of a radically new personality, the

hero of the new adventure: an individual emancipated from history,

happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual

inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant

and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid

of his own unique and inherent resources. (5)

This new hero, Lewis daims, is readily identifiable with Adam (5). Lewis dates the origin of this myth to the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Byers follows its lineage back further, to John Winthrop's sermon about

New England being "as a city upon a hill" (92). In reality the trope goes right back to the continent's frrst European visitors, who borrowed it from a discourse of fantastic medieval travelogues. Christopher Columbus and

Amerigo Vespucci, in their early publicity for the New World, boosted it as an Earthly Paradise where trees full of exotic fruit never lose their leaves

(Klarer 390). This occidental Eden coincides with descriptions of Eastern paradises in the travelogues of Marco Polo and John Mandeville; that

Columbus sailed west to reach the East proves the truth of these accounts and the success of his journey tautologically (390). Vespucci's description of the native people he finds in Brazil also draws heavily on an established 120 MATTIfEW FRAsSlCA model of Golden Age society: no laws, no religion, only the dictates of nature to fol1ow (Lestringant 28). Their lack of laws (and therefore lack of taboos, both incest and cannibalism) rapidly became a justification for the

European conversion, enslavement, or extermination (sometimes aIl three) of Paradise's inconvenient squatters. 1 Even at this generative stage, the compeIling teleology of exceptionalism obscured its obscene costs, in much the same way that the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence would elide the colonies' dependence on slave labour or that the sovereignty of the First Nations and Mexico would vanish lacunally through the doctrine of

Manifest Destiny. As both an "imaginary response" and as we can see a

"highly problematic one," Byer identifies exceptionalism as an ideology in

Althusser's sense (87).2

But Hawthorne is critical of Hilda's fundamentalist severity: In her one moment of self-inspection, she wonders if her renouncement of her

European friend (who, while not actual1y guilty of murder, probably wanted it) at her moment of crisis might have been uncharitable. The reader is encouraged to sympathise with the moral perspective of a different

American, Kenyon, whose more omnivorously liberal Protestantism leads him to advocate a felix culpa stance in favour of the moral development of experience. Yet the novel seems to aspire with Hilda to sorne future state of perfection-in his last speech in the flfst edition, Kenyon says to her, "Were you my guide, my counseIlor, my inmost friend, with that white wisdom which clothes you as with a celestial garment, aIl would go weIl. Oh, Hilda, guide me home!" (461). That "home" refers both to the "paradise within" promised by the Archangel Michael to the first couple in Paradise Lost LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 121

(XII.587) but also to their native land and its bourgeois toil to which Hilda consents to retum.

That the novel scepticaUy prods but never ultimately rejects the possibility that Hilda's vision might become reality we may observe in its extensive treatment of Guido Reni's painting of Michael slaying Satan. This iconic image, to which we will retum later, depicts the elegant angellaying a delicate foot on the beast's neck. While Hilda's vicarious experience of sin aUows her to see the spiritual vacuity of many of the devotional painters she had once admired, this masterpiece

had not faded nor deteriorated in Hilda's estimation; not that it was

better than many in which she no longer took an interest; but the subtle

delicacy of the painter's genius was peculiarly adapted to her character.

She felt, while gazing at it, that the artist had done a great thing, not

merely for the Church of Rome, but for the cause of Good. The moral of

the picture, the immortal youth and loveliness of virtue, and its

irresistible might against ugly Evil, appealed as much to Puritans as

Catholics. (352)

The poUuted and doomed Miriam, however, thinks that Guido could have taken a little of the polish off his "dapper Archangel" in acknowledgment of the difficulty of the battle against evil (184). Still, in the context of

Hawthome's parable, the FaU of Kenyon and Hilda must surely promise a final redemption-but this redemption will be a Protestant one since, the novel makes very clear, the corrupt Roman Catholic Church peddles no more than an abundance of spiritual bromides. It seems only natural that 122 MA1TI-IEW FRASSlCA salvation will also originate in the American East of Eden in which this first couple settles.

This room for the criticism of Hllda's blind, too-harsh irInocence is also characteristic of American exceptionalism. As Byer reminds us, because

"[w]e never stand outside ideology," and because ideology is not "the contents of thought" but "its conditioning structures and figures" (88), the critique of the ignorant self-righteousness encouraged by exceptionalism

"pretty much invariably takes place within the framework of exceptionalism as a mode of thought" (89). Lewis describes this critical reflexivity as a

"dialogue," both sides of which engage the Adamic myth (2). Hawthorne, according to Lewis's categories, belongs to the "party of lrony" with respect to the myth, characterised "by a sense of the tragic collisions to which irInocence was liable [. .. ], and equally by an awareness of the heightened perception and humanity which suffering made possible" (7-8). Yet the note of hope for final salvation on which the novel ends ultimately orients The

Marble Faun towards the teleological optimism of exceptionalism, even if it acknowledges the Adamic hero as a post-Iapsarian one.

The use of exceptionalism as the ground of its own critique animates treatments of the Innocent American more sceptical than Hawthorne's. We shall consider two of these, Henry ]ames's The Ambassadors and Herman

Melville's "Benito Cereno". In both, as in the whole tradition of exceptionalist critique that Byer identifies,

the individu al and social fallures or tragedies [. .. ] are rather consistently

framed, by author or readers or both, as fallures or tragedies of the LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 123

nation-rather than, on the one hand, of a particular class or gender or

social system or, on the other, of humanity in general. (99)

The nove1s invite us to experience personal or class shortcomings as a

"fallure to live up to who we really, essentiallyare as a nation" (Byer 96). In doing so, they elect one or more characters to represent America.

Lambert Strether, the focalised main character of The Ambassadors, arrives in Paris secure in the assumptions of a New England morality descended from Hilda's. He has come to retrieve the wayward heir of a

Woollett, Massachusetts-based manufacturing business, Chad Newsome, from the European dissolution and depravity into which he has strayed. The sinister influence on the American boy is of course a Parisian temptress.

Strether's friend Miss Gostrey tries to interrogate these assumptions:

"You've accepted the mission of separating him from the wicked

woman. Are you quite sure she's very bad for him?"

Something in his manner showed it was quite pulling him up. "Of

course we are. Wouldn't you be?" (31)

Here we have Strether's unreflective certainty in the unimpeachability of his own intentions. But later Gostrey suggests another possibility. There are, she says:

"two quite distinct things that-given the wonderful place he's in-may

have happened to him. One is that he may have got brutalized. The

other is that he may have got refined."

Strether stared-this was a novelty. "Refined?"

"Oh," she said quietly, "there are refinements." (41) 124 MATI1-IEW FRASSlCA

At this point, Gostrey has already begun her own sly indoctrination of the middle-aged Lambert; he has admitted to himself the morally suspect appeal of the "society" that the "woman of fashion" Maria Gostrey represents (24). Strether's New England conscience in the book is Mr.

Waymarsh of Milrose, Connecticut. Waymarsh is the Hilda of the novel, but instead of being blind to the European corruption that surrounds him (even in London), he can see nothing but evil. Strether refers to this mania as

Waymarsh's "sacred rage" (27):

The Catholic Church for Waymarsh-that was to say the enemy, the

monster of bulging eyes and far-reaching quivering groping tentacles­

was exactly society, exactly the multiplication of shibboleths, exactly the

discrimination of types and tones, exactly the wicked old Rows of

Chester, rank with feudalism; exactly in short Europe. (24)

Strether, too, misapprehends much of what he sees before his first epiphany at Gloriani's. When he sees Chad he thinks that he must be

"dealing with an irreducible young Pagan" (93), and at first he pruriently imagines lascivious subtexts to everything he observes in Paris.

The Ambassadors presents ]ames's extended consideration of the

Innocent American trope; thus both Strether (who "felt [. .. ] like Woollett in person" [17]) and Waymarsh (as "the very voice of Milrose," which voice

Strether believes "was most in the real tradition" of American rectitude even more that Woollett's [16]) are Innocent Americans, there to rescue a lapsed innocent from the iniquities of Europe. ]ames's refinement of the type is in

Chad's improvement through his relationship with Madame de Vionnet and in Strether's recognition that he has squandered his life in Woollett's LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 125 suspiciousness of refined pleasure; he tells Little Bilham to "Do what you like so long as you don't make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!"

(130). The damage that the insanity of innocence does in this novel is personal-the personal tragedy of Strether's belated emergence from an explicitly national se1f-deception. If only, the novel seems to say, Americans could appreciate the advantages of European society rather than busying themse1ves with the Puritan industriousness of the Newsomes, Pococks, and

Waymarshes, we would have a chance of enjoying "the illusion of freedom" that Strether has missed (129). The nove1 tracks Strether's moral deve10pment from a simple binary system like Waymarsh's to the admission of a cosmopolitan subtlety and gradation. Yet here, too, Strether feels compelled to "be right" by renouncing the personal advantages of Paris and

Gostrey's companionship to retum to a hopeless existence in America

(369), The nove1's conclusion gives us Strether's rear-guard shoring-up of his innocence even after he has repudiated its blindly self-righteous manifestation.

The Innocent Americans in The Marhle Faun and The Amhassadors (as elsewhere in ]ames's works) require a European setting in which to develop their thematic meanings. In this way, the trope engages fruitfully with the

American culture of trave1 in the late nineteenth century. William Stowe, in rus study Coing Ahroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American

Culture, connects the rise of transatlantic travel with increasing American wealth and the differentiation of American classes:

By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the relatively steady rise of a

leisured class of property owners and capitalists and the growing ability 126 MATrnEW FRAsSICA

of the economy to support a dass of educated professionals were

creating a pool of privileged individu aIs who could act on their desire

for the social and cultural distinctions that Europe offered. These same

developments, furthermore, were creating a large number of newly rich,

socially insecure Americans, who used the trip to Europe to daim

membership in a cultured upper dass. (6)

American economic development and new technology of travel brought the

Grand Tour within the reach of more Americans, and those Americans took advantage of the opportunity by the thousands (Stowe 8). Stowe describes sorne of the motives of these travellers: they wished to experience the cultural refinements of the Old World, not only for personal edification but also because "European travel was a way of affirming the respectability of one's race, dass, or gender" (5). This self-consciousness about the distinction of one's group affiliations links the psychological motivations of travel with those of exceptionalism. We can see this ambivalent attitude in

Waymarsh's accounting of his travels:

The fact is, Strether-and it's a comfort to have you here at last to say it

to; though l don't know, after aIl, that l've really waited; l've told it to

people l've met in the cars-the fact is, such a country as this ain't my

kind of country any-way. There ain't a country l've seen over here that

does seem my kind. Oh l don't say but what there are plenty of pretty

places and remarkable old things; but the trouble is that l don't seem to

feel anywhere in tune. That's one of the reasons l've gained so little. l

haven't had the first sign of that lift that l was led to expect. (James 17) LA TARANTEllA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 127

Waymarsh, his hopes raised by hyperbolic advertisements for travel services and accommodations and by conventional middle-class assumptions about the desirability of vaguely-defined Culture, has been disappointed by the

"pretty places and remarkable old things" that Europe everywhere pimps.

He fmds no advantage in the conspicuous consumption that many

American travellers revelled in (Stowe 8), and he fails to experience the moments of transcendence that he has been promised by promotional materials. Surely he gets sorne gratification from the "sacred rage" that

Europe allows him to feel, but he is aware that scom and moral superiority are not the expected emotional responses. Likewise, Hilda joumeys to

Rome for an artistic education in the Etemal City but is shocked to experience personal moral development by coming in contact with corrupt

Europeans. In both cases, the authors have used the figure of the Innocent

American to dramatise the challenge that the popularity of European travel posed to the Adamic exceptionalist myth. If travel is, as Stowe elaborates, a

"creative," "interpretive" act, a process of translation and reading (13), then the Innocent American is a poor reader who realises too late that he or she has mistaken the import of the text, as when one outraged reads half a parodical news piece out loud before detecting its satire.

The paradigmatic Innocent American as poor reader whose mistakes prove disastrous, Captain Amasa Delano of Melville's "Benito Cereno" returns us to the novels of espionage with which we began. For "Benito

Cereno" tests not only the Captain's interpretive powers, but the reader's;

Bruce Franklin discusses how Melville, towards the end of his writing career, began submerging the social criticism contained in his stories 128 MATIHEW FRAsSlCA beneath layers of uncomprehending narrators and embedding esoteric meanings for the careful reader (238-239). Melville's "moral vision," Franklin writes,

which was shaped by his own labor amid sorne of the most oppressed

people of his age, was in stark contradiction to the values dominant

among those in the nineteenth century who had the education and

leisure to read serious fiction-that is, the affluent gentlemen and ladies

who constituted his audience. (239)

"Benito Cereno", then, rehearses a nesting series of misreadings: on the level of the story, Delano's of his immediate situation; on the level of allegory, Americans' of their political and moral situation; on the level of reception, the complacent reader's of the apparently affirmative short story.

Crucially, each of these incorrect readings depends on an exaggerated sense of innocence and a blindness to moral complicity. Every detail in the story has its significance, and misreadings on one level are transmitted to the others, so that one could venture an intemally consistent reading of the story based on Delano's flawed understanding. Indeed, Franklin suggests that Melville left open the possibility of just such a false reading for those who would be inclined to identify with the morally oblivious captain. For the time being, however, rd like to peer through just a few of the story's

semantic keyholes, specifically those having to do with Delano's

misconstruing of the identities of the story's ships.

Delano's first impression of the Spanish ship, as it enters the empty

harbour's "lawlessness and loneliness" (673) without flying its colours, is

that it might belong to pirates. Or rather, that such would have been his LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 129 impression if Delano "had not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man" (673). Later this suspicion returns, when

Delano wonders if when Cereno's San Dominick pulls up beside his own ship it "might not [. .. ] like a slumbering volcano, suddenly let loose energies now hid?" (698). But it is Delano's own ship that sends out a tidal raiding party with the incentive that "the Spanish captain considered his ship as good as lost; that she and her cargo, including sorne gold and silver, were worth more than a thousand doubloons. Take her, and no small part should be theirs" (Franklin 237, Melville 736). Franklin points out that the name of Delano's ship gives the reader another strong hint that the

Americans are the true pirates: the real Bachelor's Delight, "was in fact one of the most infamous of aIl pirate vessels [. .. ] terroriz[ingl the very area where [Delano] now prowls" (237). On the other hand, one of the valences of name of Cereno's ship, the San Dominick, refers to Toussaint

L'Ouverture's slave rebellion on the island of San Domingo contemporaneous with the story's setting. Thus the ship's name gives the lie to Delano's racist notions of the benign, celebratory, and simpleminded blacks (Franklin 233).

Here, as elsewhere, Delano's prejudices conceal from him the nature of his reality; those prejudices feed on his smug self-satisfaction. Throughout the first part of the story, Delano chases suspicions from his mind with the reminder of his own generosity: after every dubious or disturbing scene,

"the mild sun of Captain Delano's good-nature regain[s] its meridian" (694). 130 MATTHEW FRAsSlCA

Likewise, because his good nature must have an audience, he is anxious not to appear uncharitable to his host: "Captain Delano thought he might extremely regret it, did he aUow Don Benito to become aware that he had indulged in ungenerous surmises" (695). So he decides, by way of a textual metaphor, to give Cereno the benefit of the doubt, to "leave open the margin" to "the Spaniard's black-Ietter text" (695). Because Delano "t[akes] to negroes, not philanthropicaUy, but genially, just as other men to

Newfoundland dogs" (716), he is unable to give credence to his suspicions of a plot against his life. He makes the absurd logicalleap that what he sees as his commendable liberalism and geniality shield him from racial resentment-and unable to distinguish his own identity from that of his ship or his nation, Delano can give no more serious thought to the possibility that slaves anywhere might not feel quite content with their lot.

This is why Delano must constanùy remind himself of his beneficence: by his logic, he cannot be in danger, because his intentions are good. To doubt it would be to "doubt the ever-watchful Providence above" (731). For

Delano represents mid-nineteenth-century America in its complacent ease, resting on the stability of an economy fed by the coal-stove of human

slavery and sliding effofÙessly, as Franklin reminds us, into the imperial role

being vacated by Spain (235-236), aU the while reassured by its good

intentions and sunny disposition as the chosen nation. This adoption of

Spanish imperialism-which took the form in Melville's day of the

annexation of Texas, the Mexican War, and caUs for the taking of Cuba

(Franklin 235-236}-has as its emblem in the story a shifting and

recombining image of cruel dominance. As Delano approaches the San LA TARANTEllA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 131

Dominick in his whaling-boat, he treats us to a developing view of the

Spanish ship. Seeing it from the stern, he looks at the Spanish coat-of-arms

"medallioned about by groups of mythological or symbolical devicesj uppermost and central of which was a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked" (Melville

676). According to Kermit Vanderbilt, this image contains in embryo the infernal interchangeability and inescapability of the master-slave relation: at the outset of the San Dominick's story, Aranda and Cereno are the satyr-like oppressors, while under the mutiny Babo and the blacks switch roles with these Spanish whites (69-70). But by the end of the flfSt section, Delano and the Americans have assumed the position of the dark satyr (Vanderbilt

70). Delano mimics the pose after Babo jumps into the whaling-boat: "his right foot [. .. ] ground the prostrate negro" (Melville 733). In this image

Melville alludes to Hawthorne's Archangel (we see Babo "snakishly writhing up from the boat's bottom" in rather loaded language [734]), and the manifestly false promise of salvation that The Marble Faun invested in

Hilda's vision of America. Rather than a shining Michael returning to slay

Satan, America has produced Amasa Delano, the perfect oppressor whose faith in his own benevolent good nature blinds him to his greed and inhuman exploitation. With the dauntless optimism of a Cain who mistakes himself for an a-historical, Edenic Adam, Delano reassures Cereno that "the past is passedj why moralize upon it? Forget it" (754). Again, Melville's

scathing rebuke to American hypocrisy borrows its bitter gall from the

perversion of exceptionalist promise. Lewis makes this point in a different

context: 132 MATIHEW FRAsSICA

The illusion of freedom from the past led to a more real relation to the

continuing tradition. The vision of innocence stimulated a positive and

original sense of tragedy. Without the illusion, we are conscious, no

longer of tradition but simply and coldly of the burden of history. And

without the vision, we are left, not with a mature tragic spirit, but

merely with a sterile awareness of evil uninvigorated by a sense of loss.

(9)

The tragic sense in "Benito Cereno" that Delano and the America he represents will-in ignorance and self-deception, bamboozled by their own apparently good intentions-prove man's inhumanity to man depends for its force on the disappointment of exceptionalist assumptions.

"Benito Cereno," as l've said, reconnects us to Didion's and Greene's espionage plots involving the Innocent American, because it is a spy story avant la lettre. Whereas the touring Innocent Americans in Hawthorne and

James observe moral ambiguities in a foreign context, the Innocent

American as spy discovers moral ambiguity after he has already begun to act in that foreign space. Amasa Delano bridges these two generic contexts.

In his observations of national and racial character while on board the San

Dominick he seems to regard himself as a kind of tourist. His trip to the

Spanish ship affords him a view of the light-hearted antics of "sight-loving"

Africans (712) and of a Spanish gentleman's dress and manners, both of which he reports in the manner of a travelogue. Yet as a pirate, a self­ interested free-agent who acts on the behalf of or against states, Delano is a proto-spy. This piratical stage marks the transition between the isolationist

Hilda and Waymarsh, whose reaction to moral ambiguity-figured in LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 133

Hilda's case not merely as taint but as infectious disease-is to withdraw, and the radically interventionist Pyle and Victor, whose reaction is to treat the patient with a more aggressive dose of American ideals (we are witnessing the clinical trial of this regimen, administered by those Innocent

Americans on steroids, the neoconservatives).

Allan Hepbum's book Intrigue: Espionage and Culture examines the cultural uses and meanings of fictional espionage. In his analysis intrigue caUs upon the reader to consider the problems of ideological commitment:

Narratives of intrigue L.. ] question the duties and rights of citizenship in

terms of dissenting from and, contrarily, serving the state. As such,

espionage plots figure issues of justice and obligation, not in order to let

readers abstract themselves from those obligations, but to allow readers

to evaluate the ways in which secrets and authority are transmitted to

every individual within a polity. (277)

As a vehicle for drawing attention to and criticising the individual's political affiliations and their circumscription in the ideology of exceptionalism,

"Benito Cereno" inches towards this readers' -side definition of the spy story.3 It presents the reader with a situation in which nothing and no-one are as they seem, challenges the reader's hermeneutical abilities, and ultimately confronts the reader with an unpleasant vision of the ideological system in which she is implicated. In his representation of America and its ideals in foreign waters and among Spanish and African nobility Delano is a kind of emissary; in his (flawed) decoding practices and his physical violence, in his posturing and decision-making with respect to both ideological and personal beliefs, Delano is a kind of spy. In his self- 134 MATIHEW FRASSlCA protective insanity that obscures from him the human cost of his ideological commitments, he is an Innocent American.

CONCLUSION

l don't want to belabour the calculated positioning of my project within this lineage of the Innocent American, nor do l intend to offer an analysis of the programmatic (or formulaic) aspects of the narrative. What is interesting, for me, is the way in which my intentions to include themes and situations from this tradition were thwarted or forgotten in the composition; writing creatively proceeds for me more by intuition and induction than by calculation, even though l had carefully mapped the plot before l began writing. l find, on re-reading the piece, that the'state of innocence that l had expected the protagonist to lose over the course of the story was, instead, pushed further backward in time to his memories of

Arcadian college life. Instead of being a rosy-eyed Hilda, Henry Coop has pretensions of worldliness. These pretensions do much to hide from him his total obliviousness to the actual situation-he is quite busy trying to convince himself he knows what is going on. This type of blindness allowed me to develop a intrigue plot in which the protagonist is never deceived by false information: Henry is presented with exactly the truth at every step, yet in his obsessive striving for moral rectitude, his unwillingness to acknowledge his own morally compromised position, he continually fails to register its significance. LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 135

NOTES

1. "They got typhoid and TB and athlete's foot / Diphtheria and the flu /

'Scuse me! Great Nations coming through," Randy Newman sings brighùy in

"The Great Nations of Europe."

2. That is to say, the representation of "the imaginary relation of... individu aIs to the real relations in which they live" (Althusser 296). The

"the elementary ideological effect" is to appear obvious (300); viewed from within, ideology always effaces itself as imaginary or contestable. No discourse can stand outside of ideology, according to Althusser, but ideology needn't be necessarily sinister-it may also have productive results, as when exceptionalism prompts Americans to act in accordance with their ideals.

3. Hepbum in part defines spy fiction against its progenitor, detective fiction. Detectives deal in dues which "require a literaI reading" (25) because they have "a causal or existential relation to an event or character"

(61), whereas spies work with codes demanding "hermeneusis L.. ] as allegory" (25). And though Delano is presented with what we could certainly calI dues, and though he does have the mystery of a crime to solve, Cereno with his gestures, glances, and veiled comments in English and the Spanish sailor who hands him the knotted line both try to present information in code. Another challenge to my anachronistic identification would be that Delano is hardlya spy, since he doesn't dramatise the

"impossibility of truth and commitment within ideology" (25)-he is, rather, 136 MA1TIiEW FRAsSlCA absurdly committed and by his blindness to the truth we are prompted to read aU the more dose1y for what De1ano misses. LA TARANTEllA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 137

WORKS CITED

Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Literary

Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford:

Blackwell, 1998. 294-304.

Byers, Thomas B. "A City Upon a Hill: American Literature and the Ideology

of Exceptionalism." American Studies in Scandinavia 29.2(1997): 85-

105.

Didion, Joan. Democracy. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Franklin, H. Bruce. "Past, Present, and Future Seemed One." Critical Essays

on Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno. "Ed. Robert E. Burkholder. New

York: G.K. Hall, 1992. 230-246.

Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. Kingswood, Surrey: Heinemann,

1955.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance ofMonte Beni.

New York: Penguin, 1990.

Hepburn, Allan. Intrigue: Espionage and Culture. New Haven: Yale, 2005.

James, Henry. The Ambassadors. London: Dent, 1948.

Klarer, Mario. "Cannibalism and Carnivalesque: Incorporation as Utopia in

the Early Image of America." New Literary History 30.2(1999): 389-410.

Lestringant, Frank. Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the

Cannibal from Columbus to jules Verne. Trans. Rosemary Morris. The

New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics 37. Berkeley: U of California

P,1997. 138 MATIHEW FRAsSlèA

Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam: Innocence Tragedy and Tradition in the

Nineteenth Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955.

Melville, Herman. "Benito Cereno." Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales,

The Confidence-Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd, Sailor. New York:

Library of America, 1984.

Newman, Randy. "The Great Nations of Europe." The Randy Newman

Songbook, Vol. 1. Nonesuch, 2003.

Stowe, William W. Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century

American Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994.

Vanderbilt, Kermit. "'Benito Cereno': Melville's Fable of Black Complicity."

Critical Essays on Herman Melville's ''Benito Cereno." Ed. Robert E.

Burkholder. New York: G.K. Hall, 1992. 65-75. LA TARANTELLA: THE INNOCENT AMERICAN, FROM TOURIST TO Spy 139

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following people have been essential to the composition of this thesis: Joseph and Christine Frassica, for their unconditional support;

Professor Peter Gibian, for his guidance and patience; Jordan Howie,

Joanna Lehrer, Matt Morello, Richard Parks, Leila Peacock, and Achyut

Phadke, for their gracious forbearance; Myra Wright for her generous reading, suggestions, and word-play.