The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down (7 page)

Over the next few days, the men went their separate ways, Audubon attending to his store and birds, Rafinesque searching the
woods for plants. When Rafinesque expressed his desire to see an authentic canebrake, Audubon was unable to resist the opportunity
to avenge his destroyed Cremona. He had clearly sized up his guest as an inadequate woodsman, wholly unsuited to exploring
dense and dangerous canebrakes, "the usual mode of passing through [which] is by pushing one's self backward, and wedging
a way between the stems." He led Rafinesque to the densest canebrake in the vicinity. When Rafinesque fled and collapsed in
terror at the appearance of a bear, Audubon could not help but laugh out loud at his "ridiculous exhibition." He also lied
outright to the exhausted Rafinesque by assuring him that their worst difficulties were nearly over, knowing full well that
they still had miles to go. "I kept my companion in such constant difficulties, that he now panted, perspired, and seemed
almost overcome by fatigue . . . I kept him tumbling and crawling on his hands and knees." Audubon secretly exulted when they
were drenched in a downpour; Rafinesque had apparently left his umbrella in Henderson. In an effort to lighten his load, the
naturalist abandoned all of the valuable plant specimens he had collected along the way. They eventually emerged onto the
riverbank and were ferried back to town.

Rafinesque remained with the Audubons for a full three weeks, "but never again expressed a desire of visiting a cane-brake."
Then one night he disappeared. He was sought high and low, to no avail, and the Audubons feared the worst. His evaporation
remained a mystery for several weeks until the Audubons received a thank-you note from him, presumably sent from Lexington.

Some thirteen years after the encounter, Audubon included a six-page account of this visit in the first volume of his
Ornithological
Biography,
the textual accompaniment to his
Birds of America.
By the time of its publication, Audubon was well established on the path that was to lead to international fame, while Rafinesque
was already deep into his professional decline, having been hounded in the most humiliating fashion from his post at Transylvania
University in 1826. "The Eccentric Naturalist" is written in such a way as to shed the utmost possible ridicule on its subject,
quite cruelly in view of the broad professional readership that Audubon could anticipate. Although he disguises Rafinesque
under the pseudonym "M. de T.," no one was fooled. Everyone was able to recognize, in the words of one anonymous observer,
the "genius with many peculiarities and not much dignity." Oddly enough, Rafinesque praised "The Eccentric Naturalist" when
it was published, calling Audubon "my friend," but by that time he was probably grateful for recognition of any sort.

If so, he was almost certainly unaware of the even greater injustice Audubon, in his role as trusted host and intellectual
peer, had inflicted on him thirteen years earlier. Audubon makes no mention of the prank in "The Eccentric Naturalist" and
seems, presumably for shame, to have shared it with very few. It only came to light some fifty-five years later, retailed
by David Starr Jordan in a paper read before the Indiana Academy of Sciences on December 30, 1885, and subsequently published
in
The Popular Science Monthly.
Jordan had received the story from one Dr. Kirtland, who had heard it directly from John Bachman, Audubon's great friend whose
daughters were married to Audubon's sons.

When Audubon claims in "The Eccentric Naturalist" that "M. de T. although a highly scientific man, was suspicious to a fault,
and believed such plants only to exist as he had himself seen," he was being entirely disingenuous. In fact, he was concealing
the trail of a miserable fraud that he himself had perpetrated. It seems that, during the course of Rafinesque's stay in Henderson,
Audubon had given him some ten drawings of fantastic and imaginary fish that he claimed to have personally observed in the
Ohio. Although these creatures are entirely implausible, Rafinesque - ever in thrall to his impatience, excitability, and
childlike enthusiasms - fell for them hook, line, and sinker, as Audubon must have known he would.

Even if it had gone no further, it would have been a cruel enough trick to play on anyone who was such an easy mark and so
far out of his element. But it did go further. Rafinesque subsequently named and published these findings in his
Ichthyologia
Ohiensis,
declaring the discovery of such new genera as
Pogostoma, Aplocentrus, Litholepis,
and
Pilodictis.
One fish, the "devil-jack diamond-fish"
(Litholepis adamantinus),
supposedly grew up to ten feet long and weighed four hundred pounds. Sleeping on the surface of the water and often mistaken
for a log, it had "scales as hard as flint, and even proof against lead balls! . . . they strike fire with steel!" It seems
incredible that Rafinesque would publish such findings without proof, until we remember that all of his information had been
"communicated to me by Mr. Audubon," a man whom he respected and had no reason to mistrust. (This incriminating evidence went
unnoticed because it was published long before Audubon achieved fame.) After all, as far as Rafinesque was concerned, Audubon
had been an exemplary host and generous guide in the wilderness.

Because the prank went undiscovered during Rafinesque's lifetime, it did immeasurable harm to his reputation. The
Ichthyologia
Ohiensis
continued to be a puzzle and a torment to ichthyologists for many years, since no one but Rafinesque ever succeeded in identifying
the mythological creatures it describes. It led to the general opinion among his peers that "he had described certainly twice
as many fishes, and probably nearly twice as many plants and shells, also, as really existed in the regions over which he
traveled." His few remaining supporters began to melt away. Already widely disliked and dismissed by his colleagues for his
rash denunciations and his monomania on the subject of new species, as well as for his lack of scientific rigor, Rafinesque
had been hanging on to respectability by a thread. His
Ichthyologia
cut it. Even today, more than 160 years after his death, his work continues to be debunked. One noted scholar, David Oestreicher,
recently disproved Rafinesque's claim to have discovered the
Walum Olum,
an epic saga written in pictographs on tree bark, supposedly documenting the Lenape tribe's migration to North America from
Siberia across the frozen Bering Strait.

His declining years in Philadelphia tell a miserable tale of desperation, paranoia, and grandiosity. He became the kind of
man who refers to his perceived enemies as "the foes of man­kind." While writing, seemingly, on every subject under the sun
from the principles of wealth and safe banking, through the Hebrew Bible, to the cure for consumption, not to mention a two-hundred-page
poem titled
The World; Or, Instability
- he claimed to have invented coupon bonds, steam plows, aquatic railroads, and fire-proof houses. In 1832, he made the utterly
delusional claim that "my illustrations of 30 years' travels, with 2,000 figures will soon begin to be published, and be superior
to those of my friend Audubon." Although he published more than nine hundred titles in his lifetime, he was utterly ignored
and forgotten at the time of his death of cancer in 1840. His landlord locked the corpse in his room, intending to sell it
to a medical school, until a small group of friends broke in, lowered it by ropes out the back window, and spirited it away
for burial in the "Strangers Ground" of Ronaldson's cemetery. In the words of one biographer, he "loved no man or woman, and
died, as he had lived, alone." When sold at auction, his lifetime's collection of books and specimens, filling eight drays,
left his administrator $14.43 in debt.

It could be argued that Audubon's abuse of the laws of hospitality - his cruel pranks played upon a trusting and vulnerable
guest had a tangible negative impact on the progress of American science and naturalism. While such a claim is debatable and
may even be grandiloquent, in my opinion it barely scratches the surface of the enormity of Audubon's crime.

The story is told in Judges of the traveling Levite who, on his way from Bethlehem to Ephraim, is given shelter by an old
farmer of Gibeah. That evening, the Benjaminites of Gibeah surround the farmer's house and demand that he deliver the Levite
to them. Rather than violate the law of hospitality requiring hosts to protect their guests, the farmer offers the mob his
own virgin daughter. In the end, the thugs take the Levite's concubine, whom they rape and murder, an outrage that precipitates
a war and the desolation of the tribe of Benjamin.

The farmer of Gibeah knew very well that there was more at stake in protecting his guest than his own honor and the safety
of a single traveler. This was a time when the Israelites were consolidating their power over recently and imperfectly conquered
land. If they could not guarantee safe travel among their own kind, how could they ever hope to establish secure and prosperous
dominion? Hospitality was not just a revered tradition - it was also an essential component of national unity and the trading
network. Its failure posed a direct threat to Israelite strength. Ensuring safe and comfortable passage to one's kinsmen was
a patriotic duty.

Americans and Europeans on the American frontier in the early nineteenth century were in a very similar situation. Frontiers
may be opened by force, but they can only coalesce and mature around communities, which must be prepared to welcome newcomers
into their midst. White people who found themselves on the frontier without kinfolk had no choice but to rely on the hospitality
of strangers, as there were no hotels, inns, or even reliable roads to speak of and federal currency was scarce. Audubon,
who played long-term host to several frontier families, knew this better than most. Unless the newcomers could trust their
hosts implicitly, they would not come, or stay, so reliable hospitality was as crucial to the consolidation of frontiers as
armed self-defense. What Audubon did, for better or for worse, in failing in his duties as a host was to put the entire vanguard
of American westward expansion at risk. The fact that Rafinesque may not have been the easiest of guests, or that Audubon's
pranks might be considered by some to be well-earned payback, is no excuse whatsoever.

But we do not need to embrace the political argument to condemn Audubon for
Use hospitalite.
On the face of it, true, he assumed his responsibility for feeding and housing a stranger in need, but that can hardly mitigate
his delinquency. What he did was to take in a stranger - some sort of holy fool by all appearances - gain his trust and friendship,
and then betray him in the crudest and most unjustified way. Why did he do it? For fun? Rafinesque certainly didn't need anybody's
help making a fool of himself. Out of boredom, pique, rivalry? We will probably never know, but it hardly matters. Abusing
a guest under one's own roof undermines the entire edifice of hospitality, which perches at the best of times on dubious foundations.
Without trust, there is no hospitality; without hospitality, there is no civilization; without civilization, there are no
naturalists.

CHAPTER IV

THE DUCHESS WHO WOULDN'T SIT DOWN

People of quality know everything without ever having had to learn a
thing.

Moliere,
Les Precieuses ridicules

When I was a young boy, I had a friend from a wealthy and very proper French family. His father was the first secretary in
the embassy or perhaps even the ambassador to the Court of St. James. My friend was the kind of child who cried when he got
a B+. His brother and very beautiful older sister were the same. It was a family of brilliant, brittle overachievers with
very high standards. I didn't know such people existed and I was wholly unprepared when I was invited for a sleepover.

I am grateful for being unable to remember most of that awful night, but I do remember the supper. The table in the formal
dining room was clothed in white linen and set with crystal, silver, and bone china. We sat bolt upright, leaning our forearms
delicately against the table's edge. My friend's father sat at the far end, wearing a crisp gray suit. His mother sat at the
opposite end with her back to a hotplate on which our supper awaited, a small silver bell by her right hand. She gave it the
most peremptory tinkle and the maidservant wafted in from the kitchen to serve us.

The meal was something revolting to me at the time - sweetbreads or pigeon in aspic. Whatever it was, it provoked my friend
and me into making surreptitious grimaces of disgust at each other across the table. This was inappropriate behavior; my friend
knew it, but I didn't (it would have seemed perfectly normal, even restrained, in my home). I persisted and was reprimanded
with an icy stare from Madame. My friend's sister was in the middle of telling a story of heartbreak or academic difficulties.
I grew nervous, flustered, and overcome by hysterical giggling, which I managed to suppress only partway through her account,
so that, when I could contain myself no longer, it appeared that I was mocking her suffering. I was asked to leave the table
and finished my supper in the kitchen, with the maid. The sister never talked to me again. I wet the bed that night. I was
not invited back.

It is an ugly but undeniable truth that everybody has someone they can't invite to the party. Quirky traits and tics that
may be endearing to or at least accepted by a friend suddenly become awkward and embarrassing when that friend is a host.
We may love this eccentric dearly and enjoy an intimate and confiding friendship with her, but she just doesn't know how to
behave in company. She talks about herself obsessively, she is easily offended by offhand remarks, she is too loud, she is
too quiet, she is suspicious of strangers, she is too aggressive, she is too picky an eater. We think twice about inviting
her, this old and loyal friend of ours. Can she really be trusted to keep her temper? Will she really fit in this group? Who
can we sit her next to?
Does she
understand the rules?

Maybe the truth is simpler. Maybe she understands the rules perfectly well but just can't be bothered to obey them. There
is, after all - as I remember very well - a certain perverse satisfaction in wetting the bed, especially someone else's.

In 1648, France was engulfed in a four-year civil war known as the Fronde. The conflict began as a revolt of the Parlement
against the king's powers of taxation, but was later complicated by the ambitions to power of a cabal of aristocrats led by
the prince de Conde, a noble of the highest lineage and cousin to the Dauphin Louis. When Conde was arrested, his supporters
rose up. The prince was released and Chief Minister Mazarin dismissed, but Louis's mother, Anne of Austria, succeeded in dividing
Conde's party and he was indicted again in 1651, leading to another uprising in which the prince successfully held Paris for
a time. The royalists, led by the great General Turenne, eventually turned the tide and Condé fled to Spain. Louis, now king,
returned to Paris in 1652 at the age of fourteen, and Mazarin was recalled shortly thereafter.

For the rest of the 1650s, as France warred with Spain, Louis spent his time much as any teenager would, to the extent possible
for a king of France with the eyes of all Europe upon him. He stayed up late with his friends, danced a great deal, flirted
scandalously with his brother's wife. A famously expert shot, he hunted tirelessly at his chateâux outside Paris - including
a modest lodge built by his father in the small village of Versailles and indulged an almost inexhaustible appetite for sex
with the many willing ladies of the court, single and less so. Given the disarray of his finances, the corruption of state
officials, and Mazarin's tight fist, his hospitality was necessarily limited, at least in comparison to what it would be a
decade later, but he nevertheless managed to stage some memorable events, such as the great carousel of 1656, at which three
teams of knights, Louis at the head of one in crimson and white and a plumed helmet, competed at spearing a golden ring.

Still, throughout this time Louis stayed close to Mazarin, absorbing his advice and eagerly learning the intricacies of statecraft
and kingship. Mazarin could not live forever, and Louis had never forgotten the bitter lessons of the Fronde or his humiliation
at the hands of the self-serving nobility, including his close relatives. He remembered only too well their greed and fickle
allegiance; how he had been compelled for lack of funds to wear the same ratty dressing gown and sleep in the same worn sheets
for three years straight; how, one night in 1651, he lay shivering in bed, feigning sleep, as his mother - in an effort to
allay rumors that the royal family was planning to abandon Paris - had exhibited him to the mob that had entered the Palais
Royal; how, when they did flee to Saint-Germain, he and his court had had to bed down on cots and straw in the empty, echoing
palace. Even at that tender age, Louis had held a deep conviction in his divine right, and his keen sense of the outrage done
then to his person and his position was in no way blunted by a carefree adolescence - nor, indeed, by the subsequent decades
of unparalleled glory. It had been the kind of childhood that breaks most people and tempers a very few, providing them both
with their obsessions and with the strength and will to pursue them.

In 1659, a peace treaty was signed with Spain, ending twenty-four years of war, and ratified the following year with Louis's
marriage to the infanta Marie-Thérèse. In 1661, Mazarin died and Louis assumed full control of the government, declining to
replace the chief minister. That same year, Louis ordered the arrest and trial of Nicolas Fouquet, his superintendant of finances,
on corruption charges. He hired the now unemployed trio of geniuses who had built Fouquet's chateau at Vaux - the architect
Le Vau, the painter Le Brun, and the landscaper Le Nôtre - and set them to rebuilding his hunting lodge at Versailles.

It is not clear how long Louis had been planning to make Versailles the crucible of his experiment in autodeification, but
he had certainly been toying with the idea long before Mazarin's death. It had always been his favorite house, while the Louvre
had the double disadvantage of being far too small, capable of housing a bare few hundred courtiers, and of being in central
Paris, vulnerable to the mob. Shortly before his arrest, Fouquet had been foolish enough to host a fete at Vaux that was so
lavish entertainment by Moliere, music by Lully, poetry by La Fontaine - as to throw his financial and cultural superiority
over the king into stark relief to everyone present, and it may have marked the decisive indignity that sealed Louis's determination.
In any case, with the establishment of peace and the speedy regularization of his finances, Louis was now free to turn his
very focused attention to building his dream home and mapping out a system that would transform Versailles into the most luxurious
and escape-proof gilded cage ever conceived, and to forge his hospitality at Versailles into the ultimate tool of authoritarian
government.

From 1651 onward, Louis was the sole source of power and advancement. Shutting out the entire noble estate, including his
own brother, he appointed only commoners to his tiny council, and then only to advise - never, under any circumstances, to
take decisions. Every significant preferment, every sinecure, every military appointment, every grant, and every loan - even
minor matters once lucratively assigned to venal undersecretaries - now went directly through him. It is true that Louis worked
harder, and enjoyed his work more, than any French monarch had before him, but he devised a relatively simple basis on which
to make his decisions. If the king were to give you anything, he had to know you and to like you, both by reputation and by
sight. And in order to know you, he had to see you every day - in his hallways, at his games, in his bedroom, in the chapel,
at his entertainments. For any nobleman with even a modicum of ambition, attendance upon the king was virtually compulsory.

When the court had been in the capital, every nobleman had kept his own town house, along with his privacy, within easy reach
of the palace. This was no longer possible. Versailles the village offered no suitable lodgings and Paris, some fourteen miles
away, was too far for a daily commute. The chateau itself had apartments for some one thousand courtiers and ancillary lodgings
for four thousand of their attendants, but the competition for quarters there was fierce, despite the fact that it was notoriously
drafty and cold in the winter. Family apartments, handed down from one generation to the next, were usually subdivided, sometimes
into tiny airless cubicles with barely enough room for a cot and a chamber pot. Since the ceilings were so high, the larger
apartments were often divided horizontally as well, creating two floors of cramped, smoky, windowless warrens hidden behind
a pair of magnificent gilded doors on a main corridor.

Still, as the due de Saint-Simon discovered to his chagrin, "to live at the Court without a lodging, or even to frequent it,
was intolerable and impossible." He sums up the dilemma common to every courtier: "The care of my patrimony required my constant
presence at the Court, for there would always be the possibility of its being removed from me in anger." When, through carelessness,
he loses the reversion of his apartment to his own brother-in-law, he finds himself in despair.

The greatest trouble for me . . . was that I had no lodging at Versailles, for not only did that entail the fatigue of journeys
to and from Paris, but it curtailed the social activities that imperceptibly brought one great advantage.

"I never see him," the king would say of an absentee courtier, and it was not meant, and never taken, as a casual remark.
It was an almost certain forewarning that, some time in the not-too-distant future, the king would strip the delinquent of
his reversions, his command, or his hereditary post, all of which had to be paid for and renewed at intervals. The doomed
man would find his friends melting away, his invitations evaporating, his reputation sullied. He would soon have little option
but to slink off to his provincial estates, his career and social prospects gone, to mingle with the lowly local gentry, the
"bonne noblesse,"
a term he would have used at court not long before with utmost contempt. There was no recourse, no appeal. Louis was a stubborn
and opinionated arbiter - though he often bought his opinions wholesale from the mistresses and courtiers who had his ear
- and he rarely reversed a bias once he had made it known. "His Majesty does not like you," Turenne told one disconsolate
courtier, "and when he has a poor impression of someone he never sets it aside." Even more rarely did the king find himself
compelled by public opinion to tolerate someone he actively disliked, such as the charming prince de Conti, whom "the courtiers
could not easily dispense with." Louis ultimately made an exception in the case of Conti (who was, after all, his own grandson),
but "was much relieved when he died."

The painful issue of lodgings was a problem surpassed only by that of financing a life at court. Versailles was prohibitively
expensive for all but the wealthiest aristocrats, making regular attendance, with its potential for securing favor, pensions,
and appointments, all the more necessary. Since most Versailles residents spent their days either attending the king or roaming
the hallways and gardens, appearances had to be kept up at all costs. The burden of keeping servants, stables, and carriages;
travel and entertainment expenses; the constant gambling and gift giving; and, above all, the cost of clothing and wigs, kept
many on the verge of penury and in hopeless debt. Costumes, of the finest silk, gold, and silver thread, with buttons and
jewelry of the most precious metals and gemstones, were changed several times a day. The king was said to dress "in utmost
simplicity" he hardly ever wore his diamond-encrusted coat worth twelve million livres - but when he ordered new clothes he
was likely to set off a near riot of shopping among his courtiers. The wedding of Louis's grandson, the due de Bourgogne,
to Marie-Adelaide of Savoy set Saint-Simon back twenty thousand livres (about ninety thousand dollars) in clothing costs and
established a standard in rapacious rivalry for tailors that even the king had cause to rue.

This, of course, was all as Louis intended. It served several of his purposes. First, it made his the most glittering court
in Europe, concentrating all the country's wealth and glamour in one place. Then, too, since the grounds and staterooms of
Versailles were open to any decently dressed member of the public, it provided a show for the masses, dazzling them with the
glory of France, filling them with patriotic pride and awe of their sovereign. Above all, however, was the dependency of the
nobility. Poor courtiers were submissive courtiers, far from the power and the financial bases in the provinces that had underwritten
their earlier rebellions. If the haughtiest and most belligerent
Frondeurs,
such as Conde and the due de Beaufort, could now be seen trotting abjectly down the Hall of Mirrors at Louis's heels; and
with rich, less rich, and heavily indebted alike engaged in heated sartorial competition with one another, instead of in intrigues
and cabals; and with the entire court a fishbowl under Louis's watchful eye, "discovering the most secret views of our own
courtiers, their most hidden interests which come to us through the play of contrary interests," who was there left in all
of France to rise up and challenge the regal authority? No one, that's who.