The Square Pegs Read Online Free PDF

supplies and mail between Trinidad and Brazil. He hired an agent to bargain for construction of docks, wharves, a lighthouse, and homes. As he planned an idle aristocracy, with four orders of chivalry, and as his island-empire had nothing native to subjugate beyond turtles, Harden-Hickey decided to buy himself a ready-made proletariat. After months of dickering in California, he contracted for five hundred Chinese coolies to do all the manual labor on the island. Back in New York, he ordered a quantity of postage stamps bearing pictures of the island, several red flags imprinted with yellow triangles, and one sparkling royal crown.
    Constant Readers scratched their heads. Nine days had elapsed, and then nine months, and the cuckoo was still with them. But between November 5, 1893, when the Tribune first broke the story of Harden-Hickey, and August 1, 1895, when his island-kingdom became an international cause célèbre, some New Yorkers slowly began to realize that what they had on hand was not a madman, but simply a human born out of time. It was like having King Arthur in we ll Bridgeport, Connecticut.
    James Aloysius Harden-Hickey was born in San Francisco on December 8, 1854. His father, E. C. Hickey, was a well-to-do Irish miner. His mother was French. Thirty-three years after his birth, in a book called Our Writers , an encyclopedia of famous French authors which he wrote in French and had published in Paris, Harden-Hickey included a full page of material on himself and his antecedents alongside biographies of such other writers as Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Victor Hugo and their families.
    “My old Irish family traces its origin to Milesius, King of Spain,” he wrote. “Several members of the Hickey family have served the French kings as officers in the Irish Brigade. One of them was wounded at Fontenoy. The Hardens were from Normandy. Their nobility was acknowledged by a charter given Antoine de Harden by Henry II in 1556. Jacques de Harden, the last offspring from this family, took a ship with James II for Kinsale, settled in Ireland, and allied himself to the Hickey family.” When King James II, a converted Catholic, tried to fight the Established Church of England, he met strong resistance from clergy and gentry alike. By November 1688 William of Orange had landed at Tor Bay, and James II was on his way into French exile, dutifully followed by the Hickeys, ardent Catholic Royalists.
    Harden-Hickey’s parents were among San Francisco’s earliest settlers. As he was born only five years after the gold rush, the San Francisco of his youth was one vast brawling beerhall. His French-born mother, remembering the amenities of the Old World, remembering perhaps that not so long before, other Hickeys had known courtlier days at Saint-Germain, suggested that the boy be educated in a more cultured climate.
    Harden-Hickey was taken to Paris, It was the Paris of Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Flaubert, Jean Troppmann, Cora Pearl, the Goncourts, and the young Sarah Bernhardt, “Paris at her maddest, baddest and best,” a New York correspondent reported. Above all, Paris was again part of a storybook monarchy, gay and garish in the old tradition. Sober historians spoke of “the French Court’s glitter and intrigue.” J. M. Thompson wrote that “the Court had never been so formal or magnificent since the time of Louis XV, or so frivolous since that of Marie Antoinette.”
    Napoleon III, though he appeared ill-cast for his glamorous role and though he too often resembled a figure misplaced by Madame Tussaud, proved himself a true grandson of the earlier Napoleon’s Josephine. He instituted the Médaille Militaire for courage in the field of combat. He resumed the stag hunts, in eighteenth-century costume, at Fontainebleau. He constructed the great Paris Opera, and he completed the Louvre. He introduced footmen in knee breeches and Cent-Gardes in steel helmets to the Tuileries. He again made the institution of