On June 22, 1815, in order to establish a new and sounder base of empire, I abdicated the throne of France and withdrew to the port of Rochefort, where two of my frigates — new, fast, well-manned and — gunned — lay ready to run Your Majesty's blockade of the harbour and carry me to America. Captain Ponée of the Méduse planned to engage on the night of July 10 the principal English vessel, H.M.S. Bellerophon, a 74-gunner but old and slow, against which he estimated the Méduse could hold out for two hours while her sister ship, with my party aboard, outran the lesser blockading craft. The plan was audacious but certain of success; reluctant, however, to sacrifice Méduse, I resolved instead like a cunning wrestler to turn my adversary's strength to my advantage; to reach my goal by means of rather than despite Your Majesty's navy; and so 1 addressed to your son the Prince Regent the following:
Isle of Aix, 12 July 1815
In view of the factions that divide my country and of the enmity of the greatest powers in Europe I have brought my political career to a close and am going like Themistocles to seat myself on the hearthstone of the British people. I put myself under the protection of English law and request that Protection of Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most generous of my enemies.
Having sent my aide-de-camp before me with this message and instructions to request from the Prince Regent passports to America, on Bastille Day I put myself and my entourage in the hands of Commander Maitland aboard the Bellerophon and left France. Alas, Your Majesty's own betrayal and confinement on the mischievous charge of insanity should have taught me that my confidence in your son and his ministers was ill-placed, more especially as it is with the Muse of the Past that I have ever gone to school for present direction. When therefore I learned that my destination was to be, not London and Baltimore, but St. Helena, like a derelict student I applied in vain to my old schoolmistress for vindication:
On board the Bellerophon, at Sea
. . I appeal to history. History will say that an enemy who waged war for twenty years against the English people came of his own free will, in his misfortune, to seek asylum under her laws. What more striking proof could he give of his esteem and his trust? But what reply was made in England to such magnanimity? There was a pretence of extending a hospitable hand to that enemy, and when he had yielded himself up in good faith, he was sacrificed.
My maroonment on that desolated rock I need not describe to one so long and even more ignobly gaoled. I, at least, had the consolation that my exile was both temporary and as it were voluntary; I needed no Perseus to save me; I could have escaped at any time, and waited seven years only because that period was needed for me to exploit to best advantage my martyrdom, complete the development of that stage of my political philosophy set down in the Memorial of St. Helena, and execute convincingly the fiction of my death in 1821; also for my brother Joseph in Point Breeze, New Jersey, my officers at Champ d'Asile in the Gulf of Mexico, and my agents in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Bloodsworth Island, and Rio de Janeiro to complete the groundwork for my American operations.
By means I will not here disclose (but which must bear some correspondence to those by which Your Majesty effected his own escape from Windsor), I departed St. Helena in 1822 for my American headquarters — first in a house not far from your own in the Maryland marshes, ultimately in western New York — an area to which my attention had been directed during my First Consulship by Mme de Staël (who owned 23,000 acres of St. Lawrence County) in the days before that person, like Anteia or the wife of Potiphar, turned against me. Here, for the last century-and-a-half, I have directed my operatives in the slow elaboration of my grand strategy, first conceived aboard the Bellerophon, whereof the time has now arrived to commence the execution: a project beside which Jena, Austerlitz, Vim, Marengo, the 18th Brumaire, even the original Revolution, are as our ancient 18-Pounders to an H-bomb, or my old field-glass to the Mount Palomar reflector: I mean the New, the Second Revolution, an utterly novel revolution.
"There will be no innovations in my time," Your Majesty declared to Chancellor Eldon. But the truly revolutionary nature of my project, as examination of the "Bellerophonic" prospectus (en route to you under separate cover) will show, is that, as the first genuinely scientific model of the genre, it will of necessity contain nothing original whatever, but be the quintessence, the absolute type, as it were the Platonic Form expressed.
The plan is audacious but certain of Reset Nothing now is wanting for the immediate implementation of its first phase save sufficient funding for construction of a more versatile computer facility at my Lilydale base, and while such funding is available to me from several sources, the voice of History directs me to Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most generous of my Reset Adversaries, we shook the world; as allies, who could withstand us? What might we not accomplish?
In 1789 Your Majesty "recovered" from the strait-waistcoat of your first "madness," put to rout those intriguing with your son to establish his Regency, and until your second and "final" betrayal by those same intriguers in 1811, enjoyed an unparalleled popularity with your subjects — as did I between Elba and St. Helena. Then let us together, from our Second Exiles, make a Second Return, as more glorious than our First as its coming, to a world impatient to be transfigured, has been longer. To the once-King of the Seas, the once-Monarch of the Shore once again extends his hand. Only grasp it and, companions-in-arms such as this planet has not seen, we shall be Emperours of the World.
N.
Of this obscurely touching epistle, its several familiar names glinting from their dark context like those shepherds' fires I'd seen on my first flight, I asked a few trial questions — Who am I? et cetera — and receiving no reply, sent it out with mixed feelings on the next tide. I hopefully presumed Polyeidus to be following a classic pattern himself, the pattern of graduated approach, as had Athene on my appeals to her (I mean Deliades's and mine) and Iobates in the matter of opening Proetus's letter; as three days had elapsed already of the five I'd bid Philonoë wait, I called after the departing amphora to please do its trick if possible in two more steps rather than, say, four, six, or eight. All that night I swatted bugs, studied stars, listened to my heart beat, wondered what a Bellerophonic prospectus was. My name, from endless repetition, lost its sense. Toward dawn a ship sailed by, unless I dreamed it. By and by the pot-red jug bobbed back, barnacled now and sea-grown as if from long voyaging, et cetera. I watched impassive till it fetched up at my feet, fished out its contents, the script in places run, et cetera.
To: Mr. Todd Andrews, Executive Secretary
Tidewater Foundation, Tower Hall
Marshyhope State University
Redman's Neck, Maryland, 21612
From: Jerome B. Bray
Lilydale, New York, 14752
July 4, 1974
Re: Reapplication for Renewal of Tidewater Foundation Grant for Reconstruction of Lilydale Computer Facility for Second Phase of Composition of Revolutionary Novel NOTES
Sir:
In as much as concepts, including the concepts fiction and necessity, are more or less necessary fictions, fiction is more or less necessary. Butterflies exist in our imaginations, along with existence, imagination, and the rest. Archimedeses, we lever reality by conceiving ourselves apart from its other things, them from one another, the whole from unreality. Thus Art is as natural an artifice as Nature; the truth of fiction is that Fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the world.