COUNT EDWARD DE CRILLON ACCORDING to mathematicians, every man carries with him a personal error in his observation of facts, for which a certain. allowance must be made before attaining perfect accuracy. In a subject like history, the personal error must be serious, since it tends to distort the whole subject, and to disturb the relations of every detail. Further, the same allowance must be made for every authority cited by the historian. Each has his personal. error, varying in value, and often unknown to the writer quoting him. Finally, the facts themselves carry with them an error of their own; they may be correctly stated, and still lead to wrong. conclusions. Of the reader's personal error nothing need be said. The sum of such inevitable errors must be considerable. At the most moderate estimate the historian can hardly expect that four out of five of his statements of fact shall be exact. On an average every history contains at least one assertion of fact to every line. A history like that of Macaulay contains much more than one hundred and fifty thousand assertions or assumptions of fact. If the rule holds good, at least thirty thousand of these so-called facts must be more or less inexact. In regard to events of earlier history or of less familiar societies, the necessary error must be much greater. The historian is properly responsible only for his own personal error, but this he can never calculate, since it is hopelessly confused with the conditions of his education, his society, and his age. His personal tricks of thought or manner he may sometimes recognize. One can imagine that Gibbon and Macaulay might even have been greatly annoyed by their own mannerism, had they been of a nervous temperament; but their personal error would have remained the same. Some historians are more, some less, inaccurate; but the best must always stand in terror of the blunders which no precaution and no anxiety for truth can save him from committing. This subject acquires serious interest to any one who undertakes to teach or write upon History, because, of all objects of study, human beings are the most complicated and least easily understood. They do not even understand themselves. They habitually deceive themselves about their own motives. The most respectable and the most honest are seen in politics engaged in transactions which, from another point of view, seem to imply the want of a moral sense. Their evidence is rarely conclusive. If, to this confusion of error, the personal error of the historian is added, the result becomes an inextricable mess. Almost every great criminal in history has been defended with more or less force, and almost every example of lofty virtue has been more or less successfully attacked. After two thousand years of hot dispute, society to-day is still hotly disputing the characters of the Gracchi, of Cicero, of Brutus, and of Julius Cæsar, while that of Oliver Cromwell shakes the credit of a ministry. Conscious of the pitfalls that surround him, the writer of history can only wait in silent hope that no one will read him, - at least with too much attention. He knows the worst. He has taken some patriot at his own estimate, and condemned some traitor at the estimate of the patriot! He has misread some document, adding his own blunder to the deception intended by the author of the document! He has accepted, as authority, an official statement, made, for once, without intent to deceive; and thus, thrown off his guard by the evident absence of dishonest intention, he has fallen into the blunder of taking a government at its own low estimate of itself. One of these blunders, which is fortunately of so little consequence as to allow of attaching a story to it, will be found in Volume II., page 186, of the History of the First Administration of Madison. Special students of American history may remember the curious episode of John Henry in 1812, who got fifty thousand dollars from Mr. Madison for revealing the intrigues which the Boston Federalists had not had with the British government. Opinions differed then, and probably differ still, as to the value of John Henry's papers, but few persons would differ about the value of John Henry himself. He was a political blackmailer; an adventurer; and, like a good many of his political superiors, more or less of a liar; yet, on the whole, want of truth was not one of his strongest peculiarities. Indeed, except for the overestimate of his own services, the statements made by Henry were reasonably exact. The History has no quarrel with him. A person who more interested society at the time, and is more amusing still, than John Henry, was an extraordinary Frenchman, who appeared suddenly, as Henry's patron, in Washington society, and figured conspicuously at the White House, at the French and British Legations, and before a Congressional committee, disappearing as suddenly as he came, and leaving only the conviction that he was a rogue, and general perplexity to account for his presence in such a part of the world. The world naturally inferred that Savary, Duke de Rovigo, Napoleon's Minister of Police, was in the secret. The Frenchman was an agent of Napoleon's secret police. This inference became the accepted version of history. Among the French secretaries at Washington who knew the so-called Count Edward de Crillon was the Count Georges de Caraman, who published, forty years afterwards, in the Revue Contemporaine for August, 1852, an account of the affair, an account authorized by Serurier, who, in 1812, was the French minister in Washington. Caraman, who might be supposed to know, expressly said that the man who called himself Crillon was found to be an agent of the Emperor's secret police. From Caraman's memoirs, the statement slipped naturally into the History of the Administration of Madison, where it stands on the page already cited. In spite of Caraman's assertion, and in spite of the apparent safety of taking for granted that he knew what he said was known, the so-called Count Edward de Crillon seems not to have had any authority to act as a police agent. In that character he appears only as a volunteer. The French police were frequently in pursuit of him, but are not known to have availed themselves of his distinguished services. The statement made in the History should therefore be struck out, and, as no further conclusions were deduced from it, the error, unlike many other similar mistakes, stops there. Yet the correction, slight as it is, leads to another inquiry, which has little to do with the history of the United States, but opens a curious chapter of the social history of the world at the beginning of the century. If Count Edward de Crillon was not a secret agent of the French police, who was he, and how did it happen that he appeared and disappeared so dramatically in the diplomatic drama of the War of 1812? A volume of the archives of the French Foreign Office, overlooked in the original search for documents relating to the United States, contains some papers relating to this matter, which seems. at the time to have perplexed the French government almost as much as it annoyed Mr. Madison. The first of these papers is a letter from the Prefect of the Department of the Gers, in the south of France, written four years after Crillon's adventure in America, and directed to the Minister of Foreign Relations at Paris. ! THE PREFECT OF THE DEPARTMENT OF THE GERS ΤΟ MONSEIGNEUR [THE DUKE DE RICHELIEU] THE MINISTER OF FOREIGN Monseigneur: RELATIONS.1 PREFECTURE OF THE GERS, The nomination of M. Hyde de Neuville to the Legation of the United States has suggested to me the idea of putting under your Excellency's eyes some papers which were seized at the domicil of a Sr. Soubiran of Lectoure, and a knowledge of which may interest the mission of His Majesty's ambassador. This Soubiran is an intriguer of the first order, who, being son of a goldsmith of Lectoure, has successively played the roles of Colonel, Consul, Ambassador, and Chevalier of all the Orders. Pursued by the imperial police whom he had disturbed from Spain to Hamburg by his political or financial expedients, he finished by reaching the United States, where he contracted a kind of intimacy with an Irish major named Henry, whose name your Excellency will doubtless remember to have seen figure in the quarrel of the United States with England. It seems that this Major, having been charged with some political exploration by the chiefs of the English army, sold the secret of his mission to President Madison, and the memoir of Soubiran seems to show him as intermediary in that negotiation, of which he doubtless allotted to himself a good part of the price, since he returned to France with 70,000 livres of bills of exchange from Consul Lescallier, who treated him with intimacy, as did also M. Serurier, then Minister of France in the United States. As all this medley [tripotage] seems to me to have some relation with the respective efforts of the two American parties which then respectively cultivated or combatted the envoy of France, I have thought necessary to communicate to your Excellency the verbose and romantic memoir of Soubiran, in which the simple or impudent avowals may, to a certain point, offer a presumption of truth. I am with respect, Monseigneur, your Excellency's very humble and very obedient servant, The Prefect of the Gers, If exactness of translation matters little, exact dates would be convenient, but the Prefect unfortunately did not mention whether Soubiran's papers had been just seized, or whether the seizure had taken place at some previous time. None of the papers seem to have been written later than 1814. The first is the memoir which the Prefect correctly described as 1 Etats Unis, Supt. 2, 103. verbose and romantic, but which he thought might to a certain point offer a presumption of truth. Most of Soubiran's papers offer only a presumption of untruth, but his account of the episode of Henry's documents can, to some extent, be tested by other evidence. MEMOIR OF SOUBIRAN.1 The Last Two Years of my Life. The 1st August, 1810, after having sold furniture, I set out for Baréges. My health had no need of the mineral waters, but my purse had need of supplies. In consequence, I left Baréges for Bagnères, where, two hours after my arrival, I sacrificed to the Tapis vert, and, deceived for the hundredth time in my hopes, I saw myself a victim and was immolated on this stage of fortune. Nevertheless, I had the courage to remain until October 15, and, after having borrowed 600 francs from the Prefect Chazal, I quitted this place which had been so often disastrous to me and returned to my country. I arrived at Lectoure with 54 francs and a valet de chambre. My project was to pass the winter there, but when I learned that I was under suit for a bill of exchange from Paris, I determined to go to offer my services in Moldavia to the hospodar (Prince -), with whom I had relations; and I remained only a few hours at Lectoure. On arriving at Agen I had drawn 18 francs on my fund, and I had hired a small boat to Bordeaux for 72 francs, when my faithful valet came to join me at Port Ste. Marie, and to my great astonishment, brought me six double Louis that he borrowed of a certain lady whose loyal conduct will never be lost in my grateful heart. A high and puissant seigneur, I reached Bordeaux, where I received the most amiable reception from all my friends. I left it, always filled with my great project. I stopped at Blois, where for two years I had maintained a correspondence with a charming woman (Madame de Lajonquière). I wanted to find out whether amiability or trickery [rouerie] formed the essence of her character; and, in consequence, a carriage was harnessed, and four post-horses conducted me to the Chateau de la Savonière, whither a note and my Gilbert had already preceded me. On leaping from my carriage, I was met by a man who seemed to me frank, loyal, and generous. "M. de Soubiran," he said to me, "how glad I am to see you, and how happy I should be if my wife, who is waiting for you in the parlor, could enjoy the same pleasure! but for twenty years past she has been blind! What happiness for us to receive among us him who protected our son in Spain that poor Albert! He is prisoner in England! He was taken in the affair of Ta- Ta- eh! yes! Talavera!" I knew nothing about it! No matter! We arrived in the salon, where 1 Etats Unis, Supt. 2, 102. |