In my own country I would have been reluctant to accept O'Hara's money. I would have seen him as a rather shallow and perhaps raffish individual, but Peek had retreated to his farm, and without benefit of other advice, isolated by my language, depressed by my false situation, O'Hara appeared as a treasure beyond price.

He arrived at my rooms on the third Monday, that is, the evening of the day on which I had made my first real mark as French commissioner. I had that afternoon produced the first twenty pages of what would become known as The Penitentiary System in the United States, a volume whose famous first words-Society, in our days, is in a state of disquiet, for which there are two causes-presently lay on a severely Calvinist desk at the Athenaeum. I had begun that first sentence almost out of boredom but as I proceeded it seemed to me there really were two causes. And, dreary as they might be at table, the Americans were in a situation to do what the French had never done-experiment with their prisons and their prisoners. I had spent thirteen dinners and luncheons interrogating jailers and philanthropists. I had read Bentham and the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. Even so early, so asymmetrically, I was well equipped to consider the history of incarceration and its purposes. All of New York wished to tell me more.

O'Hara would guide me, I trusted him completely. Yet when the jovial Catholic pranced into my rooms that very evening, it was to announce that we would abandon our worthy dinner in the Bronx. He had taken care of this. Instead we were to go to?

"Is it Five Points?"

"Yes, but better than planned."

He had originally proposed that we visit the iniquitous district in the company of a policeman but now he had a much better scheme which would leave us free to disport ourselves as we saw fit. That is, we would go armed. So saying, he flung back his blue-lined cloak to reveal a delicate rosewood box held in his hand.

He opened the lid sufficiently for me to see two handsome pistols nestled in the red velvet compartments of the chest.

"To show a rascal a pistol is so much nicer than going with policemen, cheaper too, and better company. Now Olivier, my dear, please pay attention, for what I have here is what the English call a bloody wonder."

I have written publicly about the evils of the duel but when O'Hara set the casket before me, when he demonstrated the marvelous intricacy of its Yankee design, I was entranced. Here nestled two long-barreled pistols, and a variety of devices including a dozen pink paper cylinders which were already packed with powder.

Each pistol bore an engraved shield bearing a coat of arms, a mullet encircled by a garter and surmounted by a ducal coronet, although O'Hara, seeing my attention on this point, misunderstood me so much as to insist that I understand the duke was by no means legitime and that I must not let that distract me from something of far greater import.

"You might not like our pompous speeches old chap," said he, "and we are in many respects a damned provincial lot, but you must admit this is a work of genius. This is an American patent."

There was, in the case, a small compartment holding a treasure of small golden cones-capsules fulminantes as I understood the term. These small hats fitted onto a nipple mounted in the breech. This nipple contained a tiny channel which carried the flash to the cartridge. But that was not the end of the ingenuity of the Americans. Each of the pistols had two barrels, two locks, two triggers. When the two upper barrels had discharged, the four barrels were turned on a pivot thus aligning the loaded barrels with the locks.

"Well, it is not the equal of Voltaire," I said, "but it is a lovely thing."

"I am not done, sir."

He instructed me to close my eyes and I did as he requested, also holding my arms out ahead of me when he desired it. I felt the pressure of his hands as they brushed gently across my shoulders and lower back, and then, all at once, a curious sensation without an explanation, a firm saddler's embrace.

Next, a brandy-scented whisper, "Open your eyes."

On obeying I found myself encased in a leather harness into which O'Hara now fitted the patent pistol so it was held hard against my ribs.

"You look handsome," he said.

He stood back to look at me, his leg cocked, his finger held to his lips.

"Very fine," said he, and hurled his cloak from his broad shoulders to reveal an identical contraption. To this he now fitted the second pistol.

"Ten o'clock," he said. "My dear Olivier, I will collect you then."

"All these charades and you abandon me," I joked.

"I will never abandon you," he said.

And I was suddenly very pleased, not only with his friendship but what it represented-the splendid American ingenuity which had, until this moment, been hidden by the rawness of colonial manners. This patent, this unheralded mechanism, was the precise equivalent of what Guizot hints we might discover in the social arrangements of the New World, something dazzling and generally much improved, a method of modern government like this luxurious pink cartridge in which all the explosive forces are kept safely contained, so ordered and original that one could place them next to an apple and simply admire how the colors played against the light.

"Ten o'clock," he cried, taking my cheek between thumb and finger. "Tonight will be your first night in America." He meant, although he did not once mention, Paradise Square, Black-and-Tan cabarets, Curlers Hook. "The art of pleasure," O'Hara cried, crushing me to his chest.

And then he was gone, leaving me with the reminders of tobacco and leather. Could it be in this giddy air that a civilization might take its next substantial step?

I set out to remove what is, I now know, called a holster. What fastening mechanism there was I could not see, although I soon understood that it was high up in the middle of my back. Even with my shaving mirror I was unable to decipher its peculiar construction, and although I twisted, turned, lay upon my bed, and contorted myself like a corseted matron thrusting her backside in the air, although I made myself a vulgar sight, it was without reward.

I had no choice but remain captive for the next three hours.

I sat a short while in my armchair but was pinched and cut. I might have stood and studied had my books not been at the Athenaeum, and at length that was where I thought to go, to continue to ask how the American penitentiary system might have application in France.

On Broadway-my secret hidden by a cloak, grasped tightly all around-I appreciated the benefit of the corset for the female sex, for I do believe, on stepping out into the night, I was never so hopeful in all my life.