The Square Pegs Read Online Free PDF Page B

mistress fashionable: Elizabeth Howard, the onetime English barmaid, who saved 20,000 pounds from the generosity of her patrons and backed Napoleon’s coup d’état ; Marguerite Bellanger, the circus rider and acrobat, whose remarkable energies gave the Emperor a child and a physical collapse, thereby provoking the Empress to rage at her: “Mademoiselle, you have got to go! You are killing the Emperor!”; and the Contessa Nicchia de Castiglione, the Florentine beauty who counted the Pope her friend and the King of Sardinia her lover, whose mission by order of her King was to win Napoleon’s affection for herself and for her homeland and whose mission was, at least partially, accomplished.
    This dazzling, dreamlike environment was James Harden-Hickey’s childhood playground. It made a lasting imprint on his memory. For while impressionable youngsters in the New World were being prepared for the American Century by Ragged Dick and Mark The Match Boy, Harden-Hickey was becoming convinced that Napoleon III, who had won the Crimean War, restored the Pope to Rome, and sent Maximilian and Carlotta to Mexico, could defeat and dominate anyone on earth. The Emperor could not, of course, as the Germans proved a few years later at Sedan, but Harden-Hickey always thought so. He would never quite forget Napoleon’s waxed mustache, the giant Zouave guards, the Empress Eugénie in her carriage, the jingling of medals and the rattling of swords in the Tuileries and about the Elysées, the prefect Baron Haussmann’s sweeping grand boulevards (widened so that mobs could no longer impede troop movements by throwing furniture into the streets), and, as he would later write, “the Parisian crowds gaily leaving the theatres to fill the brilliantly lit cafés with their windows sparkling as from a thousand fires.”
    He was soon taken from Paris and enrolled in the Jesuit College at Namur, Belgium, near Liege. The change seems to have distressed him. The only record Harden-Hickey left of that experience was in an autobiographical novel, Souvenirs of a Gommeux , published in Paris during 1877. Gommeux was slang of that period for dandy. In this novel Harden-Hickey sends his hero, Henri, “son of wealthy though honest people,” to a Jesuit College in Belgium. “Lock up the youth, as is the habit nowadays,” wrote Harden-Hickey, “and they become sullen, unhealthy; their sap dries up.”
    After the Jesuit College, Harden-Hickey was sent to the University of Leipzig for two years to study law. When he was nineteen it was agreed that he would make the French Army his career. He passed the competitive examinations for the Military College established by Napoleon I in 1808 at Saint-Cyr-L’École, three miles west of Versailles. This, apparently, was more like it. In Saint-Cyr, where students wore
    uniforms, swords, and monarchist manners, Harden-Hickey had little difficulty in conjuring up a very real picture of the imperial court.
    In 1875 Harden-Hickey was graduated, with honors, from Saint-Cyr, and shortly thereafter, his father died in San Francisco. There was a small inheritance. Reluctantly, Harden-Hickey decided to abandon his military career and to spend the money on a new profession in France. For two years he dabbled in sculpture, and, under the pseudonym of Saint-Patrice, wrote and sold his first novel. Angered by the attacks of Parisian Republicans on the Catholic Church, he turned his full attention to writing. By 1878 he had been made a Baron of the Catholic Church for his numerous pamphlets defending the Faith and had married the Countess de Saint-Pery, by whom he later had a boy and a girl. He was twenty-four years old, powerfully built, a tall, square-faced young man with a crew haircut, drooping mustache, cleanshaven chin, and thick neck. Though he wore a low collar, and affected to dress like the late Baudelaire, he was proper, conservative, Catholic, and a little dull. If he possessed the qualifications for royal rule, no