Au Japon. Amedee Baillot de Guerville

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Though the book has long since been relegated to the purgatorio of used booksellers, it had its day in the sun. Au Japon went through seven printings, indicative of respectable sales.

      Even more so than Au Japon itself, its author has since retreated into anonymity, his experiences and observations largely forgotten.3 Who was A. B. de Guerville, this obscure French-American journalist and travel writer? And perhaps more importantly, why should we care about him today? The second, and more easily answered, question shall be addressed later. Tracing the life of de Guerville himself poses more of a challenge. On this question, secondary sources are of practically no use, for there are hardly any to speak of. The biography of de Guerville has never been written, even in the most abbreviated sense. What can be woven together of de Guerville’s life today must remain an insufficient patchwork, one stitched together solely from primary sources, often from the pen of the man himself. Yet it reveals a man and a voice worth hearing again, if for the first time.

      We know from his own writings and a surviving New York marriage certificate that Amédée Baillot de Guerville was born in Paris in 1869, son of another Amédée Baillot de Guerville and Antoinette Luce. Though the de Guerville name boasted a prominent pedigree going back to its ennoblement in the fifteenth century, by all appearances Amédée’s upbringing was on a more modest scale than that of his forebears. His namesake (Amadeus in English, a popular name of the period and a reflection of more middle-class taste in Mozart) suggests this, as do the circumstances of his young life, as we shall see. Though his teaching, writing and editing income must have often been rather modest, A. B. de Guerville never seemed to lack funds, whether for establishing a small French newspaper in Milwaukee or for his extensive travels. Indeed, he later gained entrance into the highly exclusive and expensive Nordach Clinic for consumptives, all of which seem to indicate the possession of at least a modest personal fortune.

      A. B. de Guerville, who was always reticent concerning his own background, rarely mentioned his family, though on a few occasions he wrote of his mother and a younger brother with fondness. An obscure notice in an 1853 London Times reveals that a man who was likely de Guerville’s father (though certainly a relation), Paul Louis Amédée Baillot de Guerville, was in dire straits, in the courts for bankruptcy after stinting several students of the French lessons he had been paid to teach.4 It’s conceivable that the elder de Guerville was one of a contingent of continental exiles following the upheavals of 1848. In any case, though this was still nearly fifteen years before our A. B. de Guerville’s birth, it gives us the first indication that A. B. de Guerville had cosmopolitan roots, and based on his later career probably grew up speaking English and French fluently. London is where we first hear the Baillot de Guerville name; it is the last place as well.

      We have no specific information regarding A. B. de Guerville’s childhood or early adolescence but it would have no doubt been infused with that sense of fatalism that pervaded the lives of so many Frenchmen in the years following the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). It was this war that put a dramatic and humiliating end to almost a century of French material grandeur and empire. Though the flame of imperial glory and national honor would be kept kindling with its mission civilisatrice in far-off Cochinchina and Panama, and the closer shores of North Africa, names that became intimately familiar to a whole generation of Frenchman of de Guerville’s time, French prestige and amour-propre never fully recovered from the debacle (as Émile Zola properly termed it) of Sedan and the 1871 declaration of a German Empire in the Palace of Versailles.

      To a man of de Guerville’s background and temperament—educated, ambitious, adventuresome, young—it was the American frontier that beckoned rather than the tired old lands of Europe with their perennial rivalries. And it was to America that the young Amédée fled when he was barely out of childhood. The exact circumstances that would inspire such a young man to abandon home and hearth remain concealed, but whatever the causes, the act itself certainly reveals a strong-headedness and precocious independence, even for a time when children grew up faster to the world.

      Perhaps one may look at de Guerville’s flight to America in the same way one regards the flight to Greece and Italy of an earlier generation of youth. The young Louis Napoleon, who went on to rule France as Napoleon III, had nearly gotten himself killed in the Italian Wars, where he had fled seeking the vanished glory of his uncle’s day. A later generation of young idealists—if the expression is not redundant—sought meaning in the Spanish Civil War and the struggle against fascism. In short, it was a quest more than a voyage, and it is likely that America held for the young de Guerville all the hope and potential his homeland seemed to lack.

      There was another factor. As de Guerville would relate later, from an early age he suffered from that great killer of the age, tuberculosis. The typical nineteenth century remedy for the consumptive (as with de Guerville’s compatriot and exact contemporary André Gide), besides generous portions of cod liver oil and open windows, was a change of scenery, specifically to a drier, more arid locale away from the vapors of wetter or lower altitudes that were thought to congest the lungs. In his own irreverent fashion, Mark Twain had recommended a stint in the American West as a palliative for diseased lungs. Robert Louis Stevenson (also a consumptive) found great relief during several months’ residence in Napa Valley, California. De Guerville’s tuberculosis may also have played a role in his solitary flight from his homeland for the America West in 1887.

Figure 1. Milwaukee Women’s College at the time of de Guerville’s employment there (1890). Milwaukee-Downer College. Records, 1852-1964. Milwaukee Manuscript Collection L. Wisconsin Historical Society. Milwaukee Area Research Center. Golda Meir Library. University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee. Used by permission.

      The final two decades of the nineteenth century saw a virtual flood of European immigrants to the United States, primarily from Ireland and the states of southern Europe. It was among these boatloads, though probably traveling in a bit more comfort, that de Guerville arrived in the United States in 1887, at the age of eighteen. He numbered among the very first immigrants to witness the Statue of Liberty—a gift from his native France—welcoming the huddled masses into New York Harbor. The statue was placed on its new granite pedestal in 1886, thanks greatly to the fundraising efforts of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

      Of his first years in the United States little at all is known, save that he first sought his fortune in the American West. We know this only because de Guerville reminisced years later, writing about anti-Semitism in France, “I shall never forget that years ago, when a boy of eighteen, struggling for a living in the far West, and suddenly taken ill, a German Jew extended his hand to me, and in those dark days proved the truest, most devoted, most generous of friends.”5

      A period photograph shows de Guerville sitting for a group portrait with his students at Milwaukee College. He is not an especially handsome man. His face is long, eyes close set, and ears small but notable by their protrusion. His glance is focused and intelligent, and he seems most like a gentle and resigned figure, like someone who had already suffered much despite the gangliness that still betrays his youth.

Figure 2. A. B. de Guerville and his students at Milwaukee Women’s College (1890). Milwaukee-Downer College. Records, 1852-1964. Milwaukee Manuscript Collection L. Wisconsin Historical Society. Milwaukee Area Research Center. Golda Meir Library. University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee. Used by permission.

      Though he claims in 1892 to be an American—both in heart and on paper—de Guerville’s trail is frustratingly difficult to trace in these early years. Unfortunately, data from the 1890 census (the only one de Guerville would have participated in) was destroyed through fire and neglect. Nor does de Guerville’s name appear among the lists of naturalized citizens of New York City. In fact, de Guerville seems to have left hardly a trace in the bureaucratic records of the United States.

      But СКАЧАТЬ