A certain Mr. Robert O'Hara had called on me the second Monday in New York. He clearly felt no obligation to provide any introduction other than last week's Mercantile Advertiser which he indicated I might be gratified to read.

I had so quickly adapted to the new state of egalite that I was far less disturbed than you might imagine. Indeed, the frank eccentricity of this introduction endeared me to the stranger who carried himself with an ease that I had not hitherto seen in even the wealthiest Americans. Ah, thought I, so this is it, a new world one can greet with pleasure.

The Man of the Future was of a middle age, tall, broad, bearded, with a great shock of dark hair which he brushed back off his high forehead in the "romantic" style. He had rather to squeeze himself into his chair but once ensconced he made himself very comfortable indeed, crossing his considerable legs, sipping his tiny tea, all his features displaying his eager anticipation of my response.

We understand, I read, on the front page of the New York newspaper, that the French magistrate M. de Garmont has arrived on the ship Havre, sent here by order of the Minister for the Interior, to examine the various prisons in our country, and make a report on his return to France. To other countries, especially in Europe, a commission has also been sent, as the French government have it in contemplation to improve their penitentiary system and this means obtaining all proper information. In our country, we have no doubt that every facility will be extended to the gentleman who has arrived.

I smiled at my visitor, thinking, This article will make the banks obey me.

Mr. O'Hara modestly inclined his head. He could not know I had no more interest in prisons than did my mother. As for the new government of France, the penal system of America was completely unimportant to them except insomuch as the Minister for the Interior would insist that my report be both long and detailed. In this way I would be punished for taking up his valuable time.

Mr. O'Hara waited calmly while I affected to reread the newspaper, privately wondering what I was supposed to do with him.

Then quite suddenly, as blunt as a gardener, he declared himself my servant.

What could I say? I did not know him. I immediately took refuge in excessive compliments, telling him that he spoke my language like a native, but his soft gray eyes acknowledged mine with such frankness that I immediately regretted my insincerity. His French had indeed been comical and disturbingly familiar. Yet it was surely a far more elevated form of speech than my English which had caused me endless difficulty since my arrival.

We then discussed the late season and the vivid leaves, and my visitor named for me the red maple, sugar maple, red oak, dogwood, and sumac, whose colors are far more intense than those we are acquainted with in Europe. Seeming to continue on this subject, he produced a letter from a Mrs. Dougdale. Between Mrs. Dougdale's handwriting and my English, I understood only that O'Hara was, in some sense, an ambassador. I imagined she might be his mistress, but then he produced a gift from the writer of the letter, a severe black tract titled Society for the Alleviation of the Miseries of the Public Prisons.

So: She was not his mistress. My heart sank. The joyless Protestant appearance of the tract depressed me. The French commissioner, it seemed, was the object of Mrs. Dougdale's veneration and respect. I was her champion. It was expected that I would be the French translator of the society's publication. I must devour whatever else was written on this unappealing subject.

I inquired where I might find a more suitable office than my boardinghouse?

O'Hara was my servant. He led me to the Athenaeum immediately. We strolled together down Broadway which showed, to my eye, no sign of the two classes which we, in France, are so eager to keep apart. I would have questioned him but he was, quite unlike a Frenchman, without guile or secrets about himself. I was, I confess, disappointed to hear that he was disaffected with his democracy and had been brought low with ennui. He had recovered from this condition, he said, when the British burned down the capital in the summer of 1814, and he was then in such a rage that it was, for at least two years, quite invigorating. His ennui finally reasserting itself, he had sailed for Europe which he found advanced and backward both at once. He was, he said, more than happy to act as my interpreter, as it were, and I should know, he said, that all New York was drunk on the idea that a French nobleman was about to defer to their wisdom.

The Athenaeum reading room he treated as if it were his private business, and so it happened that, on the basis of no more than the write-up in the Mercantile Advertiser and Mr. O'Hara's ill-informed excitement about my achievements, I was made a temporary member and-having received apologies that this could not be made permanent until tomorrow fortnight-I was given the freedom of the house.

How I missed my dear Blacqueville. In Versailles we had wrestled with our destinies, seeking to be great men when our very class was swept away. Misfortune and tragedy we knew already, but which one of us could have guessed it would come to this so quickly, one of us dead, the other kidnapped, transported to a society in the midst of such excitable self-invention that its best library had the heady quality of a drinking club.

I quickly occupied this democratic society at its highest levels, but how confusing this was, and the optimistic observer found himself one moment elevated and the next cast down in pure despair.

For instance:

No matter how strong their religious sentiments, or their passion about the reform of criminals, the Americans quickly revealed themselves to be obsessed with trade and money and beyond the walls of that particular cell they simply could not see anything that diminished their enthusiasm for self-congratulation. They had got their hands on a mighty continent from which the least of them could, by dint of some effort, extract unlimited wealth. There being so much to be extracted it scarcely mattered how or if they were governed, because there is no need to argue when there is plenty for all. The energy put into this quest for wealth left little room for anything one might think of as culture, and so marked was this lack that I would always, in speaking of the wealthier families, use the English term middle class and never bourgeoisie. There was, as they were continually pleased to tell me, no aristocracy required.

It is true that I judged harshly in my first few weeks, and yet my need was such that I would rather find their fabled city on the hill. Thus I persisted tirelessly. I will not bore the reader with a list of all the prisons I toured with the mayor and the rotund police commissioner, but let me name the Tombs, the House of Refuge for Delinquent Minors, Bloomingdale Hospital for the Insane, the Deaf and Dumb Asylum on Fifth Avenue, the Bellevue Almshouse and Penitentiary, Blackwell's Island-all these visits normally accompanied by some twenty-five other gentlemen not one of whom spoke French. Delicacy prevents me from listing the dinners, the peculiar menus, the names of the ladies who lived only to marry and, when married, thought only of their husbands.

O'Hara, I thought, had saved my bacon. If there was to be a less than superficial understanding, I trusted it would come from him. I doubted another American could have understood why I was still unable to confront my English servant, lest the fellow imagine I had only paid for his woman's doctor to serve my own advantage. I would meet with Master Larrit, of course, but I was not yet prepared to so crudely place myself at his mercy.

There was-O'Hara said it-no need to sue for peace, but my Irish landlady had taken to placing my account underneath my door.