"They did not have the Cartouche," the Parrot said.

"They?"

"The bookstore had no Cartouche."

"Tartuffe." I smiled with difficulty, aware that he would sometimes, as the English say, pull my leg.

"It is no matter," said he. "Your lordship can relax."

"Tartuffe?"

"He had a great stock in English translation, but I would not touch them."

"Oh dear," I said, staring at James who awaited me, clearly in expectation of his reward.

"Your lordship need not worry," John Larrit said, finally removing that dreadful hat. Said he, "I found you a lovely edition of Moliere."

James held out his hand.

"Bon voyage," said he.

Parrot looked at me tenderly as I shook the black man's dusty hand.

"You asked for Cartouche?" I demanded. "Or Tartuffe?"

"Tartuffe, Tartuffe, of course Tartuffe. If the joke don't suit you, never mind. It is more a matter of what I have."

He produced the parcel and it was coal-black James, still waiting, who produced a little penknife, cut the string and collected the paper.

Only then, as he shook the Parrot's hand, did I begin to realize what I was looking at.

"See," said the member of the parrot family, "it's a lovely edition."

To all this James paid close attention, as if to a game of shuttlecock.

"It is not verse," I cried. "Not verse."

"It is Moliere." He shrugged, complacent, half educated in spite of how he mimicked me, not even clever enough to be afraid.

"It is not even a play. Did you not read it?"

"Your lordship, look at the pages," he said. "Please. It is a treasure."

And then I saw, of course, he had bought me a pretty picture book. But how could I recite a picture book? It was no use to me at all. Every shopkeeper knows that the L'Impromptu de Versailles is not even a proper play. The characters have no lines. They admit it themselves. They spend their time worrying that they have no performance for the king. It is all about how Moliere will retaliate against his critics, but it ends with the king excusing them the command. There is no verse. There is no play. I knew my face was coloring. I was a beet.

"Dear sir," said Mr. Larrit, forger, thief, murderer for all I knew. I reached for the whore's purse of a book, a flimflam filigree woven around the great name of Moliere, and I thought of the Englishman's alleged pictures of savages and eucalypts. I wrenched the book free of him and made as if to cast it in the coal pit.

"It is a nonsense," I cried, looking with dismay as the volume, against my wish, rose from my hand like a partridge frightened by beaters before dropping, stone dead, into the Delaware River.

My servant uttered a cry, raw and raucous as a gull. He cast his hat and coat aside and jumped. There was an awful splash. He disappeared.

I thought, Dear God, he's killed himself. I was the French commissioner. I could not be tainted.

But the colliers were clapping and the great hawking bird rose, spitting, snorting, coughing, holding the book on high, dripping wet, his eyes rimmed red as a kitten's.

He would not look at me, not even when James and I pulled him up onto the dock. It was the Negro to whom he entrusted my Moliere.

"Here," said he. "Protect it."

And who was he to say protect it, but I gave James a silver dollar to retrieve my property, and thus we boarded the Zeus, a very silly pair indeed.

THAT TUESDAY MORNING Captain Cammer's steamboat Zeus, carrying sufficient fuel to feed her boilers all the way to New Haven, departed the Crooked Billet Wharf. No matter its name, it proceeded out into the bay like a floating stack of firewood.

The picture was less dire belowdecks where I followed my servant's dripping path into a large public cabin with curtained windows in the style of a Broadway oyster house. Along the bulkheads on each side were banks of settees that would later be converted into berths. Aft of this cabin was the violent engine compartment, and aft of that two smaller cabins, one of which I engaged for my drowned Englishman who continued to hold his Versailles Impromptu away from him (like a pudding on a tray as the purser commented). For myself I took the deluxe cabin, not on account of its size, which was not so considerable, but for the big windows that stretched across the square transom stern.

Here, in this compartment perfectly constructed for the contemplation of the American sublime, was placed the inevitable machine, that awful monument to democratic restlessness-a rocking chair.

Oh Blacqueville, I wish you were here to see these Americans. They are the most turbulent, unpeaceful, least-contented people, far worse than Italians and Greeks. Clearly there is nothing less suited to meditation than democracy. You will never find, as in aristocracies, one class that sits back in its own comfort and another that will not stir itself because it despairs of ever improving its status. In America, everyone is in a state of agitation: some to attain power, others to grab wealth, and when they cannot move, they rock. They dig canals, they tear along the rivers in a rage of machinery, the engines pumping like sawyers in a pit, the shores denuded of their ancient trees. Napoleon restored the fortunes of France by plunder, and a similar economic principle is here being enacted, the mower splintering the scythe, the smokestack eating up the wind. And there will be acres more of it to pillage if Old Hickory has his way.

It is strange, in New York and Philadelphia, to see the feverish enthusiasm which accompanies Americans' pursuit of prosperity and the way they are ceaselessly tormented by the vague fear that they have failed to choose the shortest route to achieve it.

I have it from Duponceau that the restless Benjamin Franklin-who supposedly taught himself five languages, invented bifocal glasses and the lightning rod-is responsible for the awful rocking chair. I had that particular horror removed from the deluxe cabin and replaced with a comfortable wing-backed reading chair which would not rock no matter how heavily I sat in it. Having arranged all the papers on my bed, I spread my leather case upon my lap and there, setting all physical excitements aside, prepared to enjoy my memory of she toward whom the churning wheels propelled me.

I first took up the very gracious letter from Mr. Godefroy. He wished, he said, to draw me to the other side of Sing Sing so I could witness the authentic Auburn style of penitentiary without the distraction of Mr. Elam Lynds and his busy lash. This last comment I understood exactly. He was opposing the threatened cruelty of the Auburn system but was also against the Quakers. He hoped, I read-and this was perhaps the sixth time my eyes had crossed his sentence-that I would be a guest in his own home and make the acquaintance of those members of my family as yet unknown to you.

Dear heavens. Dear Miss Godefroy. She had spoken of me.

The door flung open, banging brass on brass. And there was Mr. Stasis himself, his hair standing high, wearing a comical yellow nightshirt that did not protect one from his bony knees and big raw feet.

"I'm very sorry," he declared.

Well, thought I, as I appraised the apparition, a kind of Holy Rooster.

"I am extremely sorry," he said. "I wished only to serve."

Serve what? I thought. Dear Lord, look at him.

"I had no clue you wished Moliere in bloody verse. You did not say so. Sir. You never did."

"I said Tartuffe. Dear fellow."

"And Tartuffe you would have had, but there was not a bloody crumb of him. The old Yankee said he had no call for Tartuffe. I did not believe him until he showed me he had almost nothing in the language. It was English floor to ceiling, books of the very worst kind. How to do this. How to do that. And Bibles. And arguments about the soul. Shelves of them, and not a word you'd take some pleasure in."