The Eastern Cities

Baltimore, like all the other metropolises of the United States, did not have then the extent that it does today. It was a very pretty, clean, and animated city. I paid the captain for my passage and offered him a farewell dinner in a very good tavern near the port. I reserved my seat on the stage that three times a week made the trip to Philadelphia. At four o'clock in the morning I climbed into this stage, and there I was rolling along the highways of the New World, where I knew no one, where I was known to no one at all. My traveling companions had never seen me, and I was never to see them again after our arrival in the capital of Pennsylvania.

The road that we followed was rather sketchily laid out. The country was fairly bare and flat; few birds, few trees, some scattered houses, no villages-that was what the country presented to my eyes and what struck me disagreeably.

Approaching Philadelphia, we met farmers going to market, public conveyances and very elegant carriages. Philadelphia seemed to me a beautiful city with wide streets; some, lined with trees, crossed one another at right angles in regular order from north to south and east to west. The Delaware River runs parallel to the street that follows its western shore; it would be an impressive river in Europe but is not remarkable in America. Its banks are low and lacking in the picturesque.

Philadelphia, at the time of my trip (1791), did not yet extend to the Schuylkill River; but the land in the direction of this tributary was divided into lots on which were being constructed a few isolated houses.

The aspect of Philadelphia is cold and monotonous. In general the cities of the United States are lacking in monuments, especially old monuments. Protestantism, which sacrifices nothing to imagination and which is itself new, has not raised those towers and domes with which the ancient Catholic religion has crowned Europe. Almost nothing at Philadelphia, New York, Boston, rises above the mass of walls and roofs. The eye is saddened by this level appearance.

The United States gives rather the idea of a colony than of a nation; there one finds customs, not mores. One has the feeling that the inhabitants do not have their roots in the ground. This society, so fine in the present, has no past; the cities are new, the tombs date from yesterday. That is what made me say in The Natchez: "The Europeans had as yet no tombs in America when they already had dungeons. Those were the only monuments of the past for this society without ancestors and without memories."

There is nothing old in America save the forests, children of the earth, and liberty, mother of all human society; that is, in itself, worth many a monument and ancestor.

A man landing as I did in the United States, full of enthusiasm for the ancients, a Cato seeking everywhere for the rigidity of the early Roman manners, is necessarily shocked to find everywhere the elegance of dress, the luxury of carriages, the frivolity of conversations, the disproportion of fortunes, the immorality of banks and gaming houses, the noise of dancehalls and theaters. At Philadelphia, I could have thought myself in an English town: nothing proclaimed that I had passed from a monarchy to a republic.

As can be seen in the Historical Essay, at that time of my life I admired republics greatly. But I did not believe them possible at the present age of the world because I knew liberty only in the manner of the ancients, as a daughter of manners in a new-born society. I did not know that there was another liberty, daughter of the enlightenment of an old civilization, a liberty whose reality the representative republic has proved. It is not necessary to plow one's own little field, reject art and science, have ragged nails and a dirty beard, in order to be free.

My political disappointment no doubt gave me the ill humor that caused me to write the satirical note against the Quakers, and even somewhat against all Americans, a note that is to be found in the Historical Essay. Moreover, the appearance of the people in the streets of the capital of Pennsylvania was agreeable; the men appeared properly dressed; the women, especially the Quakeresses with their identical hats, seemed extremely pretty.

I met several settlers from Santo Domingo and some French refugees. I was impatient to begin my trip to the wilderness; everyone agreed that I should go to Albany, where, closer to the frontier and the Indian nations, I would be in a position to find guides and obtain information.

When I arrived in Philadelphia, General Washington was not there. I was obliged to wait for him about two weeks before he returned. I saw him pass in a carriage drawn rapidly by four frisky horses, freely driven. Washington, according to my ideas at that time, was necessarily Cincinnatus; Cincinnatus riding in a carriage upset my idea of the Roman republic of the year 296. Could the dictator Washington be other than a peasant prodding his oxen and holding the handle of his plow? But when I went to deliver my letter of introduction to this great man, I found the simplicity of the old Roman.

A little house in the English style, resembling the neighboring houses, was the palace of the President of the United States: no guards, not even footmen. I knocked; a young servant girl opened the door. I asked her if the General was in; she answered that he was. I replied that I had a letter to deliver to him. The servant asked me my name, difficult to pronounce in English, which she could not retain. Then she said quietly to me, "Walk in sir," and she walked before me through one of those long narrow corridors which serve as a vestibule in English houses; she showed me into a parlor, where she asked me to await the General.

I was not impressed. Greatness of soul or of fortune does not overwhelm me: I admire the first without being crushed by it; the second inspires me more with pity than with respect. A man’s appearance will never bother me.

At the end of a few minutes the General entered. He was a man of tall stature, with an air that was calm and cold rather than noble; the engravings of him are faithful. I gave him my letter in silence; he opened it and glanced at the signature, which he read aloud with an exclamation, "Colonel Armand." That was what he called the Marquis de La Rouairie and how the letter was signed.

We sat down; I explained to him as best I could the motive of my trip. He answered me in French or English monosyllables and listened to me with a sort of astonishment. I noticed this and said to him in a rather lively fashion, "But it is less difficult to discover the Northwest Passage than to create a people as you have done." "Well, well, young man!" he cried, holding out his hand to me. He invited me to dinner for the following day, and we separated.

I appeared promptly for the appointment: there were only five or six guests. The conversation turned almost exclusively on the French revolution. The General showed us a key to the Bastille: those keys to the Bastille were rather stupid toys which were distributed then in both worlds. If Washington had seen the conquerors of the Bastille in the gutters of Paris as I did, he would have had less faith in his relic. The seriousness and the force of the revolution were not in those bloody orgies. At the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 the same populace of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine demolished the Protestant church at Charenton with just as much zeal as it laid waste to the church of Saint-Denis in 1793.

I left my host at ten o'clock in the evening, and I never saw him again; he left the next morning for the country, and I continued my trip.

Such was my meeting with this man who liberated a whole world. Washington descended into the tomb before a bit of fame could be attached to my name; I passed before him as the Most unknown individual; he was in all his brilliance, and I in all my obscurity. My name did not perhaps remain a whole day in his memory. Yet how happy I am that his gaze fell upon me! I have felt warmed by it for the rest of my life: there is a power in the gaze of a great man.

I have since seen Buonaparte; thus Providence has shown me the two persons she was pleased to put at the head of their centuries' destinies.

If one compares Washington and Buonaparte, man to man the genius of the first seems less soaring than that of the second. Washington does not belong as does Buonaparte to that race of Alexanders and Caesars who exceed the stature of the human species. Nothing astonishing is attached to his person; he is not placed on a vast stage; he is not confronted by the most adroit captains and most powerful monarchs of the time; he does not cross the seas; he does not rush from Memphis to Venice and from Cadiz to Moscow: he defends himself with a handful of citizens on a land without memories and without fame, in the restricted circle of the domestic hearths. He fights none of those battles which renew the bloody triumphs of Arbela and Pharsalia; he does not upset thrones to build others with their debris; he does not place his foot on the necks of kings; he does not have them say in the vestibules of his palace: That they delay too long, and Attila is bored.

Something silent envelops the actions of Washington; he acts slowly: one would say that he feels he is the envoy of future liberty and that he is afraid to compromise it. It is not his own destiny that this hero of another sort bears, it is that of his country; he does not allow himself to toy with what does not belong to him. But from this deep obscurity, what a light is to burst forth! Seek out the unknown forests where the sword of Washington shone, what will you find there? Tombs? No, a world! Washington has left the United States as his trophy on the field of battle.

Buonaparte has no trait of this grave American: he battles in an old land, surrounded with brilliance and clamor; he wishes only to create renown for himself; he holds himself responsible only for his own fate. He seems to know that his mission will be short and that the torrent which descends from such a height will quickly spend itself. He hastens to enjoy and abuse his glory as he would fleeting youth. In the manner of the gods of Homer, he wants to reach the ends of the world in four strides: he appears on every shore, he precipitously inscribes his name in the celebrations of all peoples; rushing by, he throws crowns to his family and his soldiers; he is hurried in establishing his monuments, his laws, his victories. Leaning over the world, he casts down kings with one hand, and with the other he crushes the revolutionary giant; but in crushing anarchy he stifles liberty and finally loses his own liberty on the last field of battle.

Each is rewarded according to his works: Washington raises a nation to independence; a retired magistrate, he peacefully falls asleep beneath his paternal roof amidst the regrets of his compatriots and the veneration of all peoples.

Buonaparte steals from a nation its independence; a fallen emperor, he is cast into exile, where the fears of the world do not yet consider him well enough imprisoned under the guard of the ocean. As long as he struggles against death, weak and chained to a rock, Europe does not dare to lay down its arms. He expires: this news, published at the gate of the palace where the conqueror had proclaimed so many funerals, does not cause the passer-by to tarry or to be astonished. What did the citizens have to mourn?

The republic of Washington still exists; the empire of Buonaparte is destroyed. It rose and fell between the first and second trip of a Frenchman who found a thankful nation where he had fought for a few oppressed settlers.

Washington and Buonaparte came from the bosom of a republic: both born of liberty, the first was faithful to her, the second betrayed her. Their destinies, according to their choice, will differ in the future. The name of Washington will spread with liberty from age to age; it will mark the beginning of a new era for mankind. The name of Buonaparte will also be repeated by future generations, but it will be attached to no blessing and will often serve as authority for oppressors, great or small.

Washington was in all things representative of the needs, ideas, enlightenment, and opinions of his period; he seconded rather than opposed the movement of minds; he wanted what he should have wanted, the very thing for which he was called; that is the reason for the coherence and the perpetuity of his work. This man, scarcely striking because he is natural and of just proportions, has bound up his existence with that of his country, his glory is the common heritage of the growing civilization; his fame wells up as from one of those sanctuaries from which flows an unending spring for the people.

Buonaparte could also have enriched the public domain: he Was acting on the most civilized, the most intelligent, the bravest, the most brilliant nation of the earth. What would be the rank he would occupy today in the universe if he had joined magnanimity to what he possessed of the heroic, if combining Washington and Buonaparte at the same time, he had named liberty the heir of his glory!

But this great giant did not completely bind his destiny to that of his contemporaries: his genius belonged to the modern age, his ambition was of the olden days; he did not realize that the miracles of his life went far beyond the price of a diadem and that this gothic ornament would ill become him. At one moment he would take a stride with his century; at the next he would return to the past; and whether he went counter to the, current of the times or with it, by his prodigious force he drew the waves on or repulsed them. In his eyes men were but a means of power; no sympathy was established between their happiness and his. He had promised to deliver them, he enchained them; he isolated himself from them, they drew away from him. The kings of Egypt placed their funeral pyramids not in the midst of flourishing countrysides but in the sterile sands; these great tombs rise like eternity in solitude. Buonaparte built the monument of his fame in their image.

Those who have seen the conqueror of Europe and the legislator of America as I have, today avert their gaze from the stage of the world: a few actors who make one cry or laugh are not worth looking at.

A stagecoach similar to the one that had taken me from Baltimore to Philadelphia took me from Philadelphia to New York, a gay, populous, and commercial city, which was however far from being what it is today. I went on a pilgrimage to Boston to salute the first battlefield of American liberty. "I have seen the fields of Lexington; I stopped in silence, like the traveler at Thermopylae, to contemplate the tomb of those warriors of the two worlds, who were the first to die in obeying the laws of the homeland. As I trod on this philosophical ground which told me in its mute eloquence how empires vanish and rise, I confessed my insignificance before the laws of Providence and lowered my forehead in the dust."

After I returned to New York, I sailed on the ship that set out for Albany going up the Hudson River, otherwise known as the River of the North. In a note of the Historical Essay, I have described a part of my trip on this river, on whose shores there lurks today among the republicans of Washington, one of Buonaparte's kings, and more, one of his brothers. In this same note I spoke of Major André, that unfortunate young man about whose fate a friend, whom I have not ceased to mourn, pronounced touching and courageous words when Buonaparte was close to mounting the throne where Marie-Antoinette had sat.

When I arrived at Albany, I went to seek out a Mr. Swift for whom I had been given a letter in Philadelphia. This American was engaged in the fur trade with the Indian tribes that held an enclave in the territory which England had ceded to the United States; for the civilized powers divide up among themselves lands that do not belong to them. After having heard me, Mr. Swift made some very reasonable objections. He told me that I could not undertake a trip of this importance straight off, alone, unaided, without support, without credentials for the English, Spanish, and American posts where I would have to pass; that even if I were fortunate enough to cross so much wilderness without accident, I would arrive in frozen regions where I would perish from cold or hunger. He advised me to begin by acclimating myself, by making an excursion first into the interior of America, learning Sioux, Iroquois, and Eskimo, living some time among the Canadian scouts and the agents of the Hudson's Bay Company. Once I had performed these preliminary feats, I could then with the assistance of the French government pursue my hazardous enterprise.

This advice, whose wisdom I could not help recognizing, annoyed me; if I had followed my inclination, I would have left straight for the pole, as one goes from Paris to Saint-Cloud. However I hid my displeasure from Mr. Swift. I asked him to procure me a guide and horses so I might set out for Niagara Falls and from there for Pittsburgh, from where I could descend the Ohio. I still had in mind the first route plan that I had sketched.