Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

I am losing the battle to keep Louis Napoleon out of my book, which I thought had nothing to do with him. Part of the trouble is that he keeps reminding me of George W. Bush. You know: lesser, largely overlooked scion of a political dynasty; early adulthood on the bottle; represents himself before taking power as the nurturing variant of the law-and-order ideology; not exactly elected; afterwards, empire. But the metempsychotic possibilities are beginning to be uncanny.

Consider the impression that Louis Napoleon made on the National Assembly of France in the fall of 1848. The New York Herald of 27 October 1848 reprints a description from the London Chronicle. At the time, every democrat in France was afraid that Louis Napoleon would stage a coup. They had tried to exclude him from the assembly, but the strategy backfired; five different counties elected him as their representative, in protest. Now the assembly was considering an amendment that would exclude from the presidency “the members of all the families which had at any time reigned in France.” Louis Napoleon was the only serious contender the amendment would have inhibited. His parliamentary enemies were once again making a martyr of him—handing him another grand political opportunity.

He seems, however, to have flubbed it. But what’s interesting to me is how he flubbed it.

Prince Louis Napoleon, in directing his steps towards the tribune, showed that he was overwhelmed with his position. On his arrival there, he had some difficulty in commencing at all, and at length he came out, in a hesitating and unconnected manner, with the following words:—

Citizens—I do not come before you to speak against the amendment; certainly I have been sufficiently rewarded in recovering all my rights as a citizen to entertain any other ambition. Neither do I come here to make any complaint against the calumnies of which I have been the object. It is in the name of the 300,000 electors who have twice honored me with their suffrages that I disavow the appellation of pretender, which is constantly brought forward against me.

At this point the Prince stopped, hesitated, and appeared inclined to go on, but at length he descended from the tribune, apparently greatly disconcerted, and amidst marks of great astonishment on the part of a portion of the members, and of annoyance on the part of others. The German accent, the confusion, the vagueness and inanity of the words spoken, the absence of all the qualities of a popular orator, had done their work. . . . He has more damaged his cause by this short attempt to speak than by all the past follies of his life. . . . M. Anthony Thouret rose, and in a tone of contempt which was not even disguised, he said that after the few short words they had heard, he was quite satisfied that his fears from the pretender were exaggerated, and that his amendment was needless, and that he therefore withdrew it. The observation was received with loud plaudits from all sides of the Assembly. . . . The Dˆbats says that the words spoken by the oratorical novice produced a marvelous effefct, for that they set those who most feared him quite at their ease.

In other words, the democrats found his accent so hickish, his syntax so garbled, and his style so rhetorically impoverished that they congratulated themselves and misunderestimated him. Note that whatever the democrats may have thought of the speech, it procured for Louis Napoleon exactly what he wanted: the defeat of the amendment excluding him from the presidency. And his enemies let their guard down.

This will risk being a little pretentious, and will be exceedingly nerdy, but here goes. When I read, I have a habit of writing down any words I have to look up, usually on an old postcard I’ve repurposed as a bookmark. The postcard-bookmark then gets recycled and years later, I find it stashed in some other book altogether and find myself wondering what book the words came from.

For example, some time after I acquired a postcard dated 22 September 1999, I did not know the definitions of the following: morion, galliot, cope, pentimento, cassowary, tontine, and houding. Hope I haven’t just typed the launch code to anything. And, um, I still don’t know what more than a few of those mean. My self-improvement scheme doesn’t include writing out the definitions. I have a guess about what book this list is from, but I’m not sure.

Here’s another: taw, oast, drugget, bullace, sprigged, medlar, sago, and topee. I checked my guess about which book this is from, and my guess is wrong.

Okay, and going back to ancient history—the years immediately following college—I used to keep the same lists in a journal. In this virtuous era, I wrote out definitions. Very early on, I also recorded what books the lists were from. So I can say that spiles, telemark, troll, christy, and khud are from a collection of Hemingway stories. Or maybe the khud is from somewhere else. There are no guarantees as to the single-volume integrity of these lists.

I didn’t keep to the discipline of writing down the book titles for long. Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure that the very short list esurient, intercrural comes from Richard Ellman’s biography of James Joyce, because I still vividly recall the moment of looking up intercrural, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who remembers the word “in context,” as the vocabulary drillmasters advise.

But I have no idea where this list came from: divot, clepsydra, lentisk, mastic, lictor, and terebinth. A lot of gummy trees, evidently.

Or this one: rennet, mortise, imbrication, lanai, cantilever, cataplexy, quaquaversal, etui, and fescue. For years I hoped to be able to use imbrication in print somewhere, but the postcolonials got to it first and ruined it.

If any of these look familiar, feel free to hazard an identification.

To add to the list of odd items found in books, as chronicled so far by Alex Ross and Our Girl in Chicago, my best find was at the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library. In the pages of a 19th-century belletrist, I found a bookmark dating from World War II with detailed instructions on how to save lard. Once you had a nice potfull, you were supposed to turn it in at a local collection center. (Obedient dupe of the system that I am, I returned it with the book to the shelves, an act of improvident good-citizenship I regretted almost immediately. I’ve requested the title again several times since, but the library has so many copies that they’ve never sent back the same one.)

My next best find was at an estate sale held in a Catholic church in Philadelphia in the mid-1990s. Somewhat incongruously, the deceased had been a collector of early 20th-century books on sexuality. I skipped the ones in German, which was most of them, but I snatched up the 1922 edition of Huysmans’s Against the Grain. On the inside front cover, the owner had written, very neatly, “First edition in English. Translation completed.” He had pasted in his own translations, typed onto onionskin paper, of passages that the American publisher had found too naughty to include.

I used to think I had figured out the dog brain: Dogs have an associative memory but not a historical one. For example, if dogs hear the jingle of the leash, they know to expect a walk. They recognize people after years of absence, because they are reminded at once of the fondness (or anxiety) they once felt with them. But although they’re very good at these associations and remember them a long time, they can’t put them in any chronological order. Few dogs like to be on a leash, but if you praise a dog lavishly every time you put the leash on, they submit happily, because no matter how many times it happens, they never really figure out that the state “being on a leash” always follows the event “putting on a leash.”

My killer example for this was my dog’s response one day to a neighbor she loved more than anyone else in the world (and who is still, I suspect, my dog’s favorite person, even though the neighbor has lived on the other coast for the last few years). Returning from a walk, my dog and I saw the neighbor leaving our building. My dog greeted her with enthusiasm and then looked longingly at her over her shoulder as she walked away. Moments later, inside the building, we passed my neighbor’s apartment on the second floor, and my dog hurled herself against the door, hoping to find her friend inside. She had recognized my neighbor; she had just said good-bye to her with impressive wistfulness; and she expected her to be waiting inside the apartment we had just seen her leave.

Excellent associative memory, no historical memory. But there’s a problem with my model. Whenever we take a trip, the infallible sign by which my dog recognizes that a car is in her future is my red dop kit. Its unzipping sends her into frantic and somewhat maddening barks of joy. If my theory were correct, the unzipping of this dop kit would arouse her when I unpack after a trip just as much as it does when I pack before one. But it doesn’t. After a trip, she listens equably, as if she remembers quite clearly that we’ve just come home. Even if half an hour has elapsed between our return home and the unzipping, she isn’t fazed. Is this evidence of a historical memory? Has she remembered a sequence? Or is my original theory correct, and she’s picking up a signal, ineffable to me but obvious to her, that overrides the signal of the unzipped dop kit? Such a signal would indicate “This is the unpacking pattern; no rides in the car are associated with it.” I haven’t been able to isolate the signal, however, and I have a strong incentive to; packing would be quieter if I knew how to trigger it.

The illustration above is from yet another advertisement for a Newfoundland in 19th-century newspaper, the Tribune of 31 January 1849. It’s not meant to look like a Newfoundland; it’s just the standard icon for dogs in classified ads. The ad reads “CALIFORNIA.—A large Newfoundland DOG for sale cheap. Inquire at the Bird store, 5 John-st.” In other words, someone was off to prospect for gold and had decided not to bring his dog.