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A Shipwreck in Texas

Dr. Augustin Savardan, Paris, Garnier Frères, 1858. English translation of french_clean.md. Subtitle: Observations and impressions gathered over two and a half years in Texas and across the United States of America. — Author of A Rural Asylum for Foundling Children.

Savardan's memoir — the bitter insider's rebuttal to Considérant's Du Texas. A physician of sixty, he sailed on the Nuremberg (end of February 1855), spent two and a half years at the colony, and wrote this on returning to France, quoting Considérant's pamphlet page by page to argue against it. He calls Considérant "the new Moses." Read as the foil to From Texas: a first-hand witness, present throughout, and embittered. The prose keeps the period's long sentences and dash-laden texture. Uncertain readings are marked [?]. Status: ENGLISH COMPLETE (chapters I–XVIII). All eighteen chapters are translated in full from the complete French transcription (french_clean.md). Ch. III and IV were retranslated against the complete French, restoring the passages the source french.txt had abridged. The first scan stopped, truncated, at printed p. 249, mid–ch. XVI; the end of ch. XVI (the rest and total of the "swallowings-up" tally, the loss-of-profit projections, the grand-jury episode, the departure), and chapters XVII ("The Climate") and XVIII ("The Return"), have been recovered from a complete copy (complete_naufrage_au_texas_savardan.pdf, 366 pp.) and translated here. The book's back matter — the table of contents and the alphabetical subject index (a French keyword→page apparatus, not translated) — is transcribed in french_clean.md.

Tantæ molis erat romanam condere gentem. [So vast a task it was to found the Roman race.] — Virgil So much pain[?] it cost, The long birth-pangs of Roman greatness. — Delille

To My Family and My Friends

You all, who have been the dearer to me in proportion to the distance that parted me from you — I left you, three years ago, to lend M. Victor Considérant my help in the associative, agricultural, industrial, and commercial undertaking for which he had appealed to the Phalansterian School.

More than one of you deplored, as an act of folly, so long a voyage undertaken at sixty; but all of you accompanied me with your affection, your good wishes, and your esteem as well.

On returning to France I find a pamphlet by M. Considérant entitled Du Texas, in which (p. 1) he bitterly complains "of having seen swallowed up before his eyes, against his will, over two years, the greater part of the funds that had been entrusted to him";

In which, again (p. 17), he is willing to spare the guilty "an expression of merited blame";

And in which, finally (p. 12), he expresses "the regret of not having dared to send back to France nine tenths of the persons heaped up on the spot."

As I have neither the hope nor the desire to be counted in that elite tenth with which M. Considérant liked to surround himself, I believe I owe, to you and to myself, the history of these three years; and I believe too that I may hope that, once you have read it, your friendship and your esteem for me will not refuse to accept its dedication.

SAVARDAN.

I. — Should This History Be Written?

"If, at the end of three years' residence, we have not managed to bring out sufficiently the superiority of solidary condensation over isolation — of association over fragmentation — it will be because we have operated very badly indeed." (Address of the management to the general assembly of shareholders, 26 December 1854.) "The dissolution of the Society of Réunion and the settlement of the reserved shares had, above all, the advantage of turning to the profit of 'private appropriation and the fixing of settlement upon the lands of the domain'; it was thus 'in conformity with the principles laid down in the mission given to M. Bureau by the three managers on his departure from France.'" (Bulletin of the management, 5 May 1857.) Réunion (Texas), 1 June 1857.

Toward the end of the year 1854, the Phalansterian School, at the voice of its head, M. Victor Considérant, subscribed a sum of about eighteen hundred thousand francs for the establishment of a Europeo-American colonization society in Texas.

It was a magnificent answer to the appeal he had made to it in a book entitled Au Texas.

In the course of the years 1855 and 1856, about three hundred persons, more or less long and knowingly attached to the principles of that School, left France to go settle on the society's lands.

"A relatively considerable number of them had expressed, in their emigration forms, the intention of forming part of an association, and this desire was shared by M. Considérant himself." (Au Texas, pp. 314 and 313, 2nd ed.)

"The tendency, the aim, and the nature of the particular society that was to be raised immediately on the spot could not fail to be grasped perfectly by everyone." (Au Texas, p. 315.)

The name Réunion, adopted for the first center in Texas, was plainly — in accordance with the plan — the sign of "a cooperative establishment indubitably better fitted than any individual establishment for the first reception of newcomers." (Au Texas, p. 147.)

Finally the management (bulletin of January 1855) asked for "three years to prove, on pain of having operated very badly, the superiority of solidary condensation over isolation, of association over fragmentation."

But by the end of 1856 and in 1857, the founder gives up being the engineer and the conductor of the practical realization of the science he had preached for thirty years.

It is proclaimed in his name that one must first return "to private appropriation, and that association must henceforth be only the product of individual initiative."

Thus the master recuses himself when it comes to the application of the science and to directing us in that application.

He sends us back to all the difficulties of civilized life about which he had so enlightened us, and with which he had so deeply disgusted us through his speeches, his journals, and his books.

He would have it that the pupils, by their initiative, should teach the masters, the keepers of the word, the secrets of putting into practice, of realizing the principles.

In short, he imposes this task on us in a country where civilization, barely born yesterday, has nothing to offer us but its miseries and none of the countless and magnificent compensations by which it knows so well how to make itself bearable in the mother country.

Three years were asked for in his name "to furnish the proof," and after two years he abdicates.

"Can one really have operated so badly?"

Be that as it may, in the face of such a failing, the world — which so readily confounds principles with those who profess them — the world will not fail, once again, to accuse the doctrine of impotence and falsehood.

We, who are certain that the doctrine, in all this, has not for an instant left the tabernacle;

We, who have witnessed, for three years, every fact and every circumstance, and who have not ceased for a single day to record them exactly, to warn, and to protest;

We, who, in reading the latest bulletins of our society, suffer, with all the men of heart at Réunion, from the placidity with which — without understanding the immense responsibility he assumes — that bulletin records and praises, with intentions doubtless good but blind, the unintelligent and unjust acts committed every day in Texas, as well as the erroneous reports that tend to draw yet more victims into that thankless place;

We believe that it would be a betrayal of the science and of the faith if, for personal considerations — to our mind, here, very secondary ones — we did not say aloud what we believe, what we know to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Paris, 25 October 1857.

If the motives set out in this first chapter did not sufficiently justify the one that guides us, we should find its complement in a pamphlet that M. Victor Considérant has just published under this title: Du Texas.

Without dwelling on the tone and the style — about which M. Considérant's own friends can conceal neither their astonishment nor their grief — we simply copy out the first nine lines:

"I take up the pen again after nearly three years of silence — a silence beside which that of death would have been sweet.

"I take up the pen again after three years, during two of which the greater part of the available funds of the colonization society, of which I was the founder and the head, were swallowed up, before my eyes, in operations not merely little in keeping with, but formally contradictory to, the plan proposed by me, adopted by you all, and to the spirit of the statutes that had codified the ideas of that plan."

There are, above all, in this exordium, two surprising things:

1. This persistence of M. Considérant in setting himself up as perpetual and omnipotent head of a society of shareholders governed by a general assembly and by a management — of which he was the founder, no doubt, but of which he is now only the executive agent.

"Do you not know, then," he cried one day, "that the management is nothing, absolutely nothing in Texas, and that I alone am everything!"

2. The unexplained, mysterious attitude of this head who, for two years, looks on at the swallowing-up of the greater part of the funds entrusted to him, and who can do nothing to oppose it but groan — thunderstruck, crushed, flattened like a breathing corpse, a state far worse than that of the dead corpse, as he tells us himself (pp. 6 and 8 of his pamphlet); a state so grave, a hell so terrible, that even if, by returning to it, he could save the lives of all his friends, save humanity, the whole world, and God himself, he would flatly refuse to return (p. 24); preferring to that great act of devotion — worthy nonetheless of tempting a great soul — to brood upon and, above all, to recount to everyone strange thoughts of suicide (pp. 9 and 24) which, thank God, were not carried out.

After these two surprising things, which are explained in our work, there is a third that assuredly deserves to be cleared up;

"Before M. Considérant, for two years, funds were swallowed up…" — But how?… and by whom?…

What man of heart who, having lived at Réunion during those two years of swallowing-up and having more or less taken part in the affairs of that colony, would not, he too, have the right to groan a little under this accusing insinuation that names no one but leaves suspicion hanging over everyone?

It is seen, then, abundantly, and the shareholders must wish it: this history must be written.

Already, in the bulletin of 14 November 1856, a letter from M. Considérant contained insinuations of the same kind (p. 42, last paragraph), when he spoke, with emphasis, "of men on whom he could rely."

As for the practice of insinuation, I shall content myself with quoting this sentence from one of our former deputies of Lyon, M. Sauzet, addressed to the Chamber in the sitting of 6 December 1834[?]:

"Accusation is a cruelty; but insinuation is war with perfidy added and peril removed; and so a French Chamber will never commit the cowardice of an insinuation."

I will add, finally, this consideration of a higher order:

This history may momentarily harm M. Considérant's financial speculation, in which capital is engaged that is commendable for the devotion that gathered it;

But there are, above financial questions, high moral considerations that must come first, and in whose name we must neutralize insinuation by truth and thus forestall fresh disappointments.

II. — On the Right to Be the Historian of This History

Obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit. (Terence.) Compliance makes friends; truth begets hatred. Sed magis amica veritas. (Cicero.) Yet I love truth the more.

For twenty years now the science announced by Charles Fourier has been the object of my studies.

For fourteen years I have shared in the sacrifices made for the propagation of that science.

A few works inspired by it have earned me honorable approbation.

The general council and the prefecture of the Seine, in 1847, unanimously granted their patronage to my project of a rural asylum for foundling children — an institution meant to bring about, little by little but effectively, the Extinction of Pauperism, by realizing through education the accord of individual self-interest with the general interest of society.

The Emperor, in 1852, honored this project with a word of benevolent attention.

In 1853 a sum of a hundred thousand francs was subscribed into my hands and those of one of my friends, M. Laverdant, for the trial of this asylum at Condé-sur-Vesgres, under our joint direction.

In 1854 this modest project — miscarried through causes that I hope to be able to indicate — was replaced by a solemn appeal of the School to the soil of Texas, in the United States of America.

My adherence to that appeal was the tenth registered.

On the 5th of November of the same year, the central agency of the Europeo-American society in Texas appealed "to my experience and to my proven aptitude (these are its words), for the preparation of the statutes of the Phalansterian society that was to be installed first and to take the direction of one of the important wheels of the colonization society."

On the 26th of December of the same year, I had the honor of presiding over the first general assembly of the shareholders of that society.

In 1855, on the 28th of February, I embarked at Le Havre, charged by the management with conducting to Texas 45 emigrants and a considerable quantity of equipment.

After three and a half months of travel — by sea, first from Le Havre to New Orleans, from that city to Galveston and to Houston, then overland, for a hundred leagues, as far as the forks of the Trinity — we arrived at Réunion on the 16th of June 1855,[^arr] in the best conditions of health, order, goodwill, and hope.

[^arr]: The printed text reads "the 16th of June 1856," but embarkation on 28 February 1855 plus "three and a half months" of travel places the arrival in June 1855 (the reading adopted here).

On the 7th of August I was named member and secretary of the council of the Society of Réunion and cashier of the two societies.

The council was composed of nine members, and I never ceased to be in agreement with the director and two thirds of that council.

I discharged these functions until the 6th of July 1856, at which time I felt obliged to resign them.

Throughout this time too, besides my medical practice — which had for its object 228 patients during my stay in Texas — I had worked assiduously and alone at drawing up the general inventory, one of my first preoccupations.

All the accounts to which these functions could give rise, as well as the affairs of the group I led from France to Réunion, were rendered, verified, and receipted without dispute.

No salary or fees were entered, on account of these functions or on any other ground, to the credit of these accounts, and I have wished, and wish, to claim none.

We are therefore, up to now — the colonization society and I — perfectly quits, in money matters, the one toward the other.

I feel, moreover, none of the convictions that the study of Fourier had given me in any way altered. His science remained wholly foreign to the work in Texas. It matters to demonstrate this, so that the idea may not be compromised in public opinion.

The only thing changed in me is my faith in certain men. That faith was too great; it was blind. To alter it, there had to be grave and public faults of head, of heart, and of character. The men who committed those faults persist in remaining at the government of our society, and the general assembly of the shareholders, insufficiently enlightened, authorizes them in it and awards them civic crowns (bulletin of 30 September 1857).

I believe, then, that it is in the interest of the School and is my duty that the truth be told, be shown, in regard to all these things.

I am not an impassive man, and I should be vexed to be thought one; but I have, above all, the passion for truth and for justice. I have hatred for the harm done to them; but I never feel more than irritation against those who do it, and only while they are doing it.

The truths I have to tell have too much proof and too much testimony for me — with my age to help and whatever the coloring of the style — to lack the calm or the firmness to tell them. I hope thus to possess sufficiently the conditions of justice and impartiality that may be required of a contemporary historian who is himself an actor in his history.

III. — Precedents

It is when the spring has run dry[?] that one goes back to the source. (Proverb.)

Fourier was still living when a Phalansterian, devoted to the point of sacrifice — Dr. Baudet-Dulary[?], a former deputy — devoted his whole fortune to the establishment of the phalanstery of Condé-sur-Vesgres.

The history of that establishment is not well enough known to us for us to say what part each man took in it.

We know that Fourier, who paid it a visit, found fault with several things and declined all responsibility.

We have been assured that M. Considérant formed part of the first group that inhabited that first phalanstery, and what he says of it in the Phalansterian bulletin of 15 February 1847 does not contradict the assertion.

We were shown there a large room since turned into a kitchen, which at first had been the theater hall.

We have been assured that this first attempt was not of long duration.

M. Dulary was ruined, and the property was sold.

M. Considérant, in the bulletin we have just mentioned, says that the miscarriage of this attempt — which he calls the fortunate fault of Condé — rendered the School the eminent service of stripping it of its illusions about the ease of realization. We shall have to examine later whether "the fortunate fault of Condé" was not a most unfortunate fault, analogous to that of Réunion in Texas, and arising quite simply from the fact that among M. Considérant's aptitudes there is not that of knowing well by what means and how one must begin, nor how men who are not regimented may be directed; while, nonetheless, it is in his character to be unwilling to leave anyone the liberty of beginning without his high direction, but with the reservation of engaging his responsibility as little as possible in case of failure.

It was there, probably, that M. Considérant conceived the idea — ever since put into practice — of the necessity, for a chief, of having, between himself and those he means to govern, intermediaries onto whom may be cast the disavowal, the blame, the reprobation of the wishes and the acts that turn out badly. The action of the chiefs, at Condé, was direct upon a hundred or so Phalansterian workmen come from Paris to build the Phalanstery there. Despite the devotion of a few lettered young men who had fraternally given themselves to the life of the workshop in order to establish order and harmony in all things, there was a group — of which M. Considérant formed part — that claimed to impose on these free workers the habits of military discipline, and that soon drove them thereby into a spirit of hatred and revolt such that it was prudent to leave the place.

Since then, an Englishman full of devotion as well, M. Arthur Young, bought the old abbey of Cîteaux and there attempted, aided by Madame Gatti de Gamond[?], the founding of a rudiment of a phalanstery.

Fourier had died after complaining several times — as trustworthy persons have assured us — of the trenchant and domineering character of M. Considérant. The latter, then head of the School, refused all official support to that work of Cîteaux and to several others in America that led their founders to the same result as M. Dulary.

Later still, honorable Phalansterians of Lyon and Besançon associated to ask the French government for an important concession of land in Africa and to found there a colony under the name of Union du Sig.

Numerous adherences came from all sides to this fine enterprise, but the official support of the School was imperturbably refused it by the Center.

The work has not perished; but, for want of that support perhaps, it has languished for some years without taking the developments it was just to hope for.

While the general spirit of the School manifested itself by these attempts at realization, the Center continued the propagation of the ideas.

The journal the Phalanstère, founded in 1832, took in 1836 the title of the Phalange.

In 1840, a company, founded under the style V. Considérant, Paget & Co., continued, with the funds of Arthur Young, the weekly publication of this journal.

In 1843, the Phalange, having been unable to meet its costs, became a daily paper under the name of Démocratie pacifique, with funds drawn from an issue of shares of 260 francs each.

The appeal published to this effect contains, on the financial future of this subscription and on the developments of the School, the most encouraging considerations and calculations.

The name Démocratie pacifique, by giving a political color to the School, had painfully roused the attention of a few pure Phalansterians who believed, with Fourier, that his doctrine ought to be grafted onto no party, but to remain a neutral ground on which all would one day come to join hands.

Fortunately, democratic ideas — speculatively congenial to the greater number — were then an object of terror to no one, and the epithet pacifique, which one had had the wise precaution to join to it, made this title be received with an almost general favor.

In the month of August of that same year 1843 appeared the first number of the Démocratie pacifique. The manifesto it contains was an object of satisfaction and hope for all.

That was the apogee of M. Considérant's talent and wisdom.

Nine months later, on the 5th of May 1844, the management of the new journal announced to the general assembly of shareholders that the call for subscription made to the School had produced 200,240 francs collected and 34,760 in obligations payable at term.

It added that the company of 1840 — which had remained distinct and was the owner of the Phalansterian bookshop — was, owing to the expansion of the sale of that bookshop's books, in a prosperous situation, "if one does not take into account the sums it had previously absorbed."

On the 20th of August of the same year 1844, a call for subscription was made for the publication, under the name of the Phalange, of a monthly Phalansterian review.

In 1845, a pamphlet by M. Victor Considérant — drawn from the first number of the Phalange and bearing the title System of the Developments of the Societary School — responds sympathetically to the wish for a beginning of realization expressed by all; but the author subordinates this realization to the prior constitution of a fund of four million, an indispensable minimum, he says, for the decisive verification of the serial law.

At the beginning of 1846, M. Considérant publishes, in the name of the board of direction of the Démocratie pacifique, a communication to the School having for its object "(under pain of being reduced to a dissolution):"

"1. To organize an annuity for the support of the two existing companies (1840 and 1843); "2. To open a third company (a special company of realization); "3. To carry out the realization."

This need to support the two companies was produced by the situation of the two journals, the Démocratie pacifique and the Phalange, which were not meeting their costs.

The cause of this failing of the two journals is attributed by M. Considérant "to the ignoble system of mercantilism that the speculators have introduced into the press."

I note particularly these expressions of indignation against the ignominies of mercantilism, because I shall later have to examine, in Texas, notable modifications of this indignation.

In the month of August of the same year 1846, the annual Phalansterian annuity rose to more than a hundred thousand francs, and M. Considérant announces that as soon as it shall have reached the figure of a hundred and twenty thousand — necessary for the continuation of the propagation of the theory — a call will be made for the realization of a miniature phalanx composed of four hundred children and a hundred grown persons.

He announces at the same time the immediate creation, at Paris, under the direction of M. Laverdant, of an infant-school, which was not realized at all.

We must, even now, set down here an observation to which we shall essentially need to return later — namely, that all these subscriptions were never filled except by the aid of the subscribers' passion for realization and of their hope of having, "always soon," a trial.

Each appeal never failed to reckon with this passion and this hope, which did not cease to show themselves as fruitful as they were always disappointed.

Toward the middle of 1847, a grave revolution took place in the direction of the School. Faithful until then, despite its democratic title, to its program of neutrality between the political parties, it was wearying of the slowness of its progress in the distrustful mind of the conservative element, which was not sufficiently reassured either by the epithet pacifique or by the formal declarations of respect for the fundamental social institutions — religion, the family, and property.

The Démocratie pacifique, moreover, bore with difficulty the severe reproaches of militant democracy, which accused it of lulling to sleep, by its moderatism, too great a number of progressive natures destined, without it, to more energetic manifestations in favor of the progress of liberty.

And so, doubtless foreseeing the great revolution that was to take place a few months later, the chief of the School announced, in an article full of clarity and energy, that his journal, renouncing the task of enlightening a party whose death, as a progressive social element, seemed to him duly established, raised, from then on, the flag of the only living political party, the democratic party.

This declaration and this new attitude were a fault. They vindicated the distrust of the one side and inspired only a mediocre confidence in the other. It was a real downfall. The Phalansterian School, placed until then outside all parties, had — by the calm of its teachings and the clarity of its formulas — opened many hearts to hope, changed many negations into doubt, brought back to security, or at least to the calm of indifference, many apprehensions and hatreds, and made many hostilities cease.

But from the day when it was seen to grow enthusiastic for ordinary ambitions, to canvass for public office, to dream of ministries, to attack with bitterness what, until then, it had wisely contented itself with criticizing in moderation, then to show itself in the second rank in the great popular demonstrations, to figure likewise in the great political trials, and finally to condemn itself to ostracism in the persons of its chiefs — it lost successively, in the measure of all these phases, the exceptional prestige of neutrality that made its strength and that would have brought it, sooner or later, to the glorious role of arbiter among all.

In a time when the movement of the public funds serves as a thermometer for so many things, the progressive lowering of the Phalansterian annuity, the disavowal of an imposing number of the School's notabilities, and the withdrawal of their support ought to have been salutary warnings; but the eyes and the ears had ceased to see and hear anything other than the clouds and the rustlings of a vulgar ambition.

It had been forgotten that the greatest things, after their conception, must undergo all the infirmities, all the pains of incubation, of birth, and of childhood.

It had been believed, contrary to this universal law, that the phalanstery ought not, could not be produced and born — like Minerva springing fully armed from the brain of Jupiter — save with the splendors of every kind with which, for the future, the genius of its immortal creator has endowed it.

And so, persisting in regarding the failure of Condé and the others as the necessary products of a special impossibility, inherent in the thing itself — which could not, it was asserted, be born and live save with the proportions of adult age; persisting, we say, in this consoling error, instead of imposing on pride the obligation of inquiring whether the inexperience and insufficiency of men ought not to accept the responsibility for it — they had gone down into the forum and had taken part in its struggles, in the hope of receiving, from the munificence of the victorious party, those palaces and those millions of which they had dreamed, and without which they refused to Phalansterian life the possibility of coming into bloom.

After the immense political failure that put an end to these illusions, the Phalansterian School concentrated within itself, wisely set about healing the old wounds of its finances, and awaited in silence a better future.

Yet the passion for realization had not fallen asleep, and, as early as the end of 1849, honorable Phalansterians of Nantes — among those whom the political manifestations of the Center had estranged from it — opened negotiations and proposed a subscription for the establishment of a school.

Among the various forms proposed at different times for this establishment, they had chosen the one described under the title rural asylum for foundling children, and they had declared that all their confidence and their support would be secured to this work, if MM. Laverdant and Savardan would consent to be its directors — the first for education and the second for administration.

These two, having promptly come to an understanding on the work itself and on the part each of them was to take in it, addressed to their friends, in 1851, an appeal for the realization of a maternal colony at Condé-sur-Vesgres.

That fine building, that fine property which had cost Dr. Dulary so dear, was then for sale.

It had received the double consecration of a visit from Fourier, "and of a fortunate failure" under M. Considérant's patronage.

The desire to raise it up again from that failure seemed to all a happy idea, and, in the space of a few months, the hundred-odd thousand francs needed were subscribed into the hands of the two directors.

These two, contrary to the intentions of several of the subscribers, had wished that nothing be undertaken without the consent and the support of the Center.

This consent and this support were granted, but (we say it with regret) with a lukewarmness and reticences that gave reason to think that this project — conceived and taken up outside the inspirations and the direction of the chief of the School, and seeming able to be carried out without him — had only imperfectly won his sympathies.

And so, when in 1852 — at the moment when the Condé estate was about to be bought — our friend M. Laverdant manifested, after two years of good and cordial understanding, apprehensions about our agreement in the religious direction of our school, I remained persuaded that M. Considérant had not been without influence on the backward step our colleague had just taken and on the abandonment he thought he ought to make of our project.

Our persuasion resulted, among other things, from two letters: one addressed to M. Laverdant, in which M. Considérant, criticizing, from the religious point of view, the bases on which the latter meant to found the education of our school's children, praised, by contrast, the clarity and simplicity of the plan proposed by me; then another addressed to me, in which he set in opposition the breadth of M. Laverdant's views and the narrowness of my project of a rural asylum.

While forgetting that the union of the two men he thus set in opposition, and of the two ideas he thus alternately criticized and praised — that this union, we say, destroyed the criticism, since the two men and the two ideas were going to complete one another — M. Considérant thus let it be glimpsed that his official assent was not the effect of a frank sympathy.

This impression, soon afterward forgotten, revived in us during the two years we spent in Texas.

We find it implicitly justified in the book au Texas, where, from the very first word, M. Considérant declares that toward the end of 1852 (just after the withdrawal of our friend Laverdant) he was occupied with a note tending to some work or other — "to an experiment in Switzerland of the serial process, reduced to the simplest data, to the absolutely indispensable elements, and calling for the least resources."

To us, this communication seemed to prove that our project — though classed by our chief among the last resorts — had at least had the effect of waking him from the torpor into which the disappointments of the tribune and of the great political demonstrations seemed to have plunged him for three years.

It also proved that he had been converted, for a moment at least, to the theory of the natural progression of all existences, and that he had then renounced the great ambitions that have so much delayed and compromised the practical demonstrations of the law discovered by Charles Fourier.

But, as he himself relates to us, "he was snatched from the meditation of these practical reductions and taken off to America rather than went there." This was the 28th of November 1852.

This nine months' voyage, of which forty days were devoted to crossing the Texan territory, produced the book au Texas.

Before it came off the press, it was already, at the center of the School, the object of animated controversies, and we had particularly pronounced ourselves against an emigration — out of love for France and out of respect for Fourier, who very formally recommended to his disciples that they not think of expatriating themselves (vol. 1, p. 451).

We even said then that, in the impossibility in which M. Considérant found himself of returning to France at present, he ought not to let egoism so dominate him as to wish that the society and the Phalansterian interests abandon their fatherland.

During the year that was spent on the production of the book au Texas — the Condé estate having been sold — various projects for establishing the maternal school, notably at La Chapelle-Gaugain, had been worked out with hopes of realization.

But the book appeared in the first days of May 1854, and on the 14th of the same month I addressed to our friends MM. Bureau, Brunier, Bourdon, and Guillon my adherence, my first subscription, my desire to set out among the first, and the conditions of associative life to which I subordinated all these things.

The book, from the first reading, had destroyed all my repugnances against emigration.

It had, by its captivating style, by the precision of its assertions on the beauty of the climate, the miraculous fertility, and the extreme cheapness of the soil, raised in my mind as in so many others the mirage of the rapid founding of the city of our dreams, of the magnificent Phalansterian city.

Persuaded that, at the least, our maternal school would be one of the first elements of the new creation, I wished to set out among the first, so that this mechanism — of which I had thought so much for ten years — should not be built without my having the honor of putting my hand to it.

I thought too of so many trials that had failed for want of order in the administration of material things, and, believing that Providence has particularly endowed me with the love of order in all things, I regarded it as a duty to devote myself to the creation of that condition without which the most ingenious combinations and the enterprises richest in capital and in hopes necessarily and always fail.

Pressed, obsessed by these ideas, I set out for Brussels on the 27th of August 1854.

Although the reading of the book au Texas — although what it contains concerning the North-American Phalanx (pp. 11 to 15) — could leave us no doubt as to M. Considérant's intentions regarding the associative constitution of the administrative center of our society, I wished to hear from his own mouth the affirmation of these intentions.

The first of the conditions that could determine my departure was therefore the immediate constitution, on the ground, of an administrative center, living associatively.

By this associative life I meant quite simply a kitchen, a restaurant, a library, a school, an infirmary, a bath, a laundry, a bazaar or store, a few horses, a carriage, etc., at the disposal of all, in exchange for a contribution proportioned to the use that should be made of all these things; and, finally, well-separated dwellings for the individuals and families who should not like the regimen of the dormitory or the common room — and all that as much at the disposal of strangers as of the associates.

We were completely in agreement on this fundamental condition. And how should we not have been, since all this and much more (ch. XIV, pp. 406 to 410) was in twenty other pages of the book au Texas?

From there, and apart from that, the executive agency could devote itself to all the land speculations, to all the private installations, and to all the general affairs of the society that it might seem useful to it to undertake or pursue.

As to the question of order, my thought seemed to answer one of M. Considérant's preoccupations.

I expressed to him the desire to set out with M. Cantagrel, who was soon to go and preside over the first installation.

I may, even now, set forth here — as I did then, because I am in a position to bear in this regard, in the course of this work, an authentic and wholly opposite testimony — that I had brought from Paris, and from my conversations with some of our friends of the Center, apprehensions relative to the spirit of order of this first chief of our pioneers; and I hoped that, seconded by me in the details of the administration, he would thus find himself freer in the exercise of his fine faculties and less liable to give rise to the few reproaches of too much laxity in expenditures and in the keeping of administrative documents.

The day after this overture, M. Considérant said to me: "I have reflected on your proposal and its motives. I accordingly urge you to hold yourself ready, for I may call you very soon."

On the 3rd of October, my preparations not having been able to be finished, M. Cantagrel set out for America without me. M. Considérant had given him as a traveling companion a young Belgian medical student, M. Roger, to whom — to fill a role corresponding to the one I had offered to take — he had given particular instructions, but ones then unknown to M. Cantagrel.

I must say here — not for M. Cantagrel, who has no doubts in this regard — that if I had set out with him, motives and instructions would have been completely shared in common, because that was for me, as for him, the only honorable way of being each other's socius.

On the 12th of October 1854, M. Considérant published (au Texas, 2nd edition, p. 171) a supplement in which, answering the wishes "of a relatively considerable number of persons who have, in their immigration forms, expressed the intention of forming part of an association," he declares "that he has had to devise the means of preparing the satisfaction and the accomplishment of this desire, which, moreover, he himself shares." (Pp. 314 and 315.)

"I have been anxious," he had said, p. 174, "that you should each know that here, and for this work, you are no longer named Peter, John, Mark, or Paul, but… Legion."

He had said also, p. 230: "We shall very promptly lay the foundations of a first associative commune;" — and, p. 308: "Our task is to unite capital and labor by association."

These citations, which we could greatly multiply, suffice perfectly, together with the facts that close this chapter, to establish this truth: that, besides the aim of creating a financial company speculating on the purchase and sale of lands, M. Considérant indicated, without postponement, as his inner aim, "the association of capital and labor in an associative commune."

On the 5th of November 1854,[^nov54] I received from the management of the Europeo-American colonization society in Texas a letter from which I believe I ought to extract the following passages:

[^nov54]: The printed text reads "5 November 1834"; the reading is corrected to 1854 (the letter falls between the 12th of October and the 26th of December 1854).

"Dear doctor, we come to appeal to your experience, to your proven aptitude for the drawing up of the statutes of the Phalansterian society which is, in our thought, to be the first to establish itself within the bosom of the general society, and to take the direction of one of the important wheels of the colonization work. "This Phalansterian association is to be, first, an associative household and a possible stock of the first phalanstery. As a constitution, this approaches what you wished to do at Condé, with other elements added, of course."

On the 26th of December there took place at Paris, 2 rue de Beaune, a first general assembly of the shareholders.

There, the principle of association and solidarity in our work received an official consecration by the vote of a relief fund of 10,000 fr., destined, in conformity with article 56 of the statutes, for the relief of particular misfortunes and for the repatriation to the mother country in case of illness or any other sufficient and sufficiently established cause.

On the very evening of the 26th of December, I set out again for Brussels with MM. Bureau, Godin, and Burcly,[^burkli] and there, joined by several other Phalansterians, we heard the reading of, and we discussed, for some days, under M. Considérant's direction, the conditions of the provisional agreement, preliminary to the act that was, in Texas, to constitute the first Phalansterian society.

[^burkli]: "Burcly" in the text: this is Karl Bürkli (Burkli), the Swiss Phalansterian who raised funds in Switzerland for the colony.

After this exposition of the aim of association, which thus seemed to dominate in M. Considérant's project and which manifested itself as clearly in the minds of all, one will pardon me, I hope, the superabundance of these citations, when it is known that I was reproached as for a crime with my attachment to this aim, my constant recalling of the promises made, my protests against the violations of those promises, my indignation against the harshnesses with which those violations were carried out, and my repeated warnings on the subject of the disasters that were produced, and that were bound to be produced, by a conduct so disloyal and so unskillful.

The exposition of the facts will justify superabundantly, I am convinced, the injustice of the accusation addressed to me and the justice of the one I bring.

In this Brussels meeting, each of those who had received the mission of leading groups of emigrants to Texas had presented to M. Considérant a list of names. These lists had been by him and by us attentively examined, discussed, and settled.

If, at the moment of the departures, these lists were somewhat exceeded, the management (M. Considérant having left) had given its consent thereto, in the persuasion that it could not thereby spoil the founder's plan, and that it did not deserve the bitter and unjust reproaches he made it on that score for so long — until, sacrificing the sentiments and opinions it had so many times manifested in its public declarations and in its correspondence, it accepted, against all evidence, as primitive, absolute, and as the pivot of the work, the exclusive plan of private appropriation, which M. Considérant invented in Texas — forgetting the most formal promises and the most explicit declarations — only to give a false impression about the solemn and final foundering of his capacity in the application, in the realization, in the practice of the teachings of the School.

IV. — Departure: A Hundred and Ten Days' Voyage and Arrival at Réunion (Texas)

Light of the burning bush!… Promised land!… Sacred land, land of realization!… (Au Texas, by V. Considérant, 2nd ed., pp. 33, 82, 66.)

On the 28th of February 1855,[^emb] I embarked at Le Havre on the fine American vessel of 1,800 tons, the Nuremberg, with forty-three traveling companions and a considerable quantity of industrial equipment destined for the founding of the first center, the first social nucleus (Au Texas, pp. 94, 95, 99, 103, 113, 123, 124, etc.) of the Europeo-American colonization society in Texas.

[^emb]: The printed text reads "the 28th of February 1853," a misprint (or OCR error). Savardan himself writes elsewhere "In 1855, on the 28th of February, I embarked at Le Havre" (ch. II) and mentions "the excessive cold of the end of February 1855" at the moment of departure. The reading adopted is 1855.

My faith — which had been weakened by no grave blow and which has not bent under the disappointments with which it has been drenched; my faith, kindled by the biblical style of the man I took pleasure in calling the new Moses; my faith, full of hopes — had been able to overcome the pains of a separation that tore at my old fatherly heart.

Yet warnings had not been wanting to me. There were some among them to which I ought, no doubt, to have given more serious attention. Members of the School, among the oldest and most respected, had shown me the most affectionate fears about the results of my enthusiasm. One of them, whom I will name because he has ceased to live — Fugères, a positive mind, a creator and organizer, a man of devotion and order — said to me shortly before my departure:

"You are wrong to commit yourself under Considérant's direction; that man, whom I have seen at work, is utterly incapable of directing men and affairs, and you will have, besides, cause to complain of his character."

But we were going "under a delicious climate whose perfection was close to the ideal (Au Texas, pp. 48, 72), and which was to triple in the year the span one lives under other climes (p. 133); we were going to create there so easily, along with comfort, the social life (p. 55)" that was the object of our native aspirations and of our most serious studies. I could well, then — since it had occurred to no one to contest the exactness of the description of Texas — sacrifice a year, even two, to that marvelous creation, in the midst of which I firmly counted (they can all bear witness to it) on installing my children and my friends, after returning one last time to France to wrest them "from the miseries of European civilization." (P. 62.)

These dreams lulled me through our fifty-two days of crossing and helped me bear the majestic monotony of the Ocean, which — apart from a little gust of wind in the Channel and the breaking of two topgallant masts — did not give me even the diversion of the slightest storm to record.

We had been preceded by four small groups: 1. that of M. Cantagrel, who, at the moment of our departure, was already at Dallas and beginning the installation of Réunion, aided by the precious support of M. John Allen (Au Texas, pp. 27, 101), of M. Bourgeois (p. 59), and of a few American hired men, very fortunately chosen;

2. That of M. Cousin, a Belgian surveyor (see Du Texas, p. 7). This group of twelve persons, eight Belgians and four French, included young de Guelles, son of a former member of the general council of the Jura, exiled in Belgium.

This young man of seventeen had set out "under the impulse of M. Considérant" (Du Texas, p. 7); his mother had been able to part with him only in the hope of soon going to rejoin him, and reassured above all by the promises of maternal guardianship that Madame Considérant had made her.

But this guardianship by the executive agency failed him completely.

Led astray by bad counsel, he was able to leave the colony and go to live three leagues farther off with some pioneers, whose regimen — as little favorable to health as to the completing of a still unfinished education — soon led him to pulmonary phthisis.

Deprived there of all help, he was at last brought back to Réunion by the urgings and the care of M. Cantagrel and of Dr. Nicolas, but still too late for him not to have succumbed a few weeks after.

Was it, then, with a view to private appropriation that "the impulse of M. Considérant" had induced that respectable family to part thus with this child?

3. The group of MM. Raizant and Nusbaumer, composed of nine persons;

4. And finally that of M. Considérant and his family, composed of three persons.

Ours — apart from five persons who had come spontaneously from the Jura and who stayed at New Orleans — had been put together by the management, by our friends, and by me, with a view to answering the wishes expressed by the founder.

Eleven had come from Carcassonne, chosen by M. Rouby: two bakers, a grocer-weaver, a cattle-shearer, an equestrian-gymnast, a former pupil of Saumur, two young men who had served in the navy, two women, and two young ladies.

Three had come from the Hautes-Alpes: our worthy friend Dr. Nicolas, a physician-naturalist-horticulturist, highly educated and a very skilled mechanic; M. Pascal, a millwright-carpenter, as distinguished by his devotion as by his learning; and M. Brochier, a farmer, accustomed to the care of livestock and something of a joiner.

Three had come from the Ardennes: the Guyot-Rémy family — the mother, the father, and a young son. Madame Guyot was, during these two years, one of the best examples in the colony, by her excellent character and her courage at work.

Château-Renault had furnished us four persons: a young and skilled locksmith, M. Brunet, and the Boulay family, which recommended itself by two years already spent in Brazil during Dr. Mure's expedition.

Seven had come from Le Mans: a wheelwright-farmer, a turner-joiner with his wife and his two young daughters, and two young men without a trade, but showing the best goodwill.

Orléans had given us a workshop chief of the first order, M. Dailly, a good mathematician, whose bookkeeping — applied to the use and the products of time — will remain at Réunion as a model. Besides this aptitude and this science of general order, so essential, he has also those of mechanic, carpenter, farmer, vine-grower, and he is especially a very skilled tinsmith. Finally, the young people who lived at Réunion will not forget with what inexhaustible obligingness he made them dance, every Sunday, to the sound of his excellent flute or his oboe.

A schoolmistress, educated and gentle with the children, had come from Rouen to join us at Le Havre.

We had, from Paris, only four emigrants: an accountant, M. Bussy; a cooper; a notary's clerk — a profession of little use at first sight, and which we were surprised to find without any second trade on our list — then a building painter-joiner, M. Capy, a precious assistant to M. Dailly in the mastery of the workshops, in their ordering, and in their bookkeeping. M. Capy had, besides, made good studies in chemistry and geology, and none of the colonists of Réunion will forget the wholly disinterested zeal with which, for two years, this distinguished pupil of Dr. Chevé's school of singing opened and carried on an excellent course of vocal music.

Finally, my own village, La Chapelle-Gaugain, had furnished its worthy share to our work, to which four young men had wished to devote themselves: a plowman, a skilled stone-cutter, then the brother and sister Abel and Catherine Bossereau. Abel — a cooper by trade, a hoop-maker, woodcutter, good gardener, vine-grower, excellent hunter and fisherman — ought to have been charged especially, in an order of things where aptitudes could have shown themselves freely and been sufficiently appreciated, charged, I say, with the oversight of the colony's forests and waters. It was there that his remarkably observant eye and his tireless activity could render the most essential services.

I was hoping to see this office created for him — the urgent need of which has never ceased to make itself felt to men of agricultural practice — when a complicated typhoid fever, amid the extreme heat of July 1856, with abundant nasal hemorrhages, carried him off in a fortnight from the affection of his worthy sister and his many friends.

Mademoiselle Catherine Bossereau, who became at Réunion Madame Dailly, never ceased, during the two years she spent at the colony, to be there — with her friend Madame Guyot-Rémy — an uncontested example of order, of work, and of zeal to the point of sacrifice. She had created there the poultry-yard, whose growth, under her intelligent management, had been rapid, despite the relentless war waged on it by the snakes and the polecats (a kind of skunk), and despite the meagerness of the means placed at her disposal.

She would likewise have created the cheese-dairy, at which she was very skilled, had they furnished her the indispensable elements: milk and a cellar.

This group — for which we anticipate perhaps a little too much the order of dates; this group, the greater part of whose names had, we repeat, passed before M. Considérant's eyes and received his approval — this group contained, in notable majority, the agents "of the industries imperatively designated by the nature of things, and coming in the first rank: the agricultural operations, comprising large-scale tillage, horticulture, nurseries, the cultivation of the vine and the making of wine, the raising of animals, the cheese-dairy, etc."

It also contained skilled representatives "of the industries of building, furniture-making, and locksmithing, which present themselves in the front line, and finally of all that pertains to the preparation of food." (Au Texas, pp. 168 and 169.)

It was therefore really a group of the initial phase, generally well chosen for "the regular constitution of the system of the material bases of social life, interior or exterior." (P. 104.)

We have dwelt at length on this appraisal of the members of the Nuremberg group; our motives are grave:

This group is the most numerous of all those that came to Réunion;

It had — we must repeat it again — received in great majority the approval of M. Victor Considérant before its departure;

It had been composed by the management and by its correspondents with the zeal and the care that faith can inspire;

It was, in general, full of goodwill and devotion.

What, then, must our surprise have been at New Orleans when, instead of meeting M. Considérant, we learned that, on receiving at New York the news of our departure without having yet received that of an installation made by M. Cantagrel, he had let himself be overcome by fits of grief and discouragement quite unreassuring for the pioneers who had embarked with such confidence in that "practical spirit (Au Texas, p. 97) with which he believed himself so superiorly endowed."

He had "reckoned on a hundred and fifty workers (Au Texas, p. 129), employed for a year in the preparation of a reception center for twelve hundred colonists, and composed of a certain number of European elements, special and select." (P. 129.)

The Nuremberg group, accepted in advance, for the most part, by M. Considérant — was it not, then, as far as possible, within the conditions of that part of the plan?

The management therefore in no way deserved the reproach of having spoiled the plan — a reproach whose echoes resounded so bitterly at Réunion for two years.

On the other hand, M. Cantagrel, arrived at New York at the beginning of November, could not, around the 15th of March — the time at which M. Considérant received the news of our departure — deserve the reproach of having lost time, since he had had to travel more than a thousand leagues, of which about a hundred and fifty on horseback, through unknown country; to stop at Cincinnati to engage there a few American pioneers, buy the tools of first necessity, and set up an agency; to stop also at Patriot to take on the "brave Allen" (Au Texas, p. 27), to whom (p. 101) belonged by right the office of "natural chief of the preparatory operations."

We like to repeat this expression brave Allen, so justly applied in every respect to his noble and tireless devotion; and yet the repetition of that noble epithet is not without bitterness for us, because it reminds us that the same pen bestowed it several times on others for whom it was, by public notoriety, a deplorable extravagance.

Arrived at the forks of the Trinity — which had been designated to him by the founder as the point where the site of our "first social nucleus" was to be sought — M. Cantagrel had had to explore, in midwinter, the vast region where these forks flow: the West Fork, the Clear Fork, the Elm Fork, and the East Fork, and at last to venture a choice among the numerous sites that had most particularly drawn his attention and that of his companions.

Fort Worth, a most desirable position, was no longer at our disposal.

M. Considérant, in his forty days' exploration of Texas in 1853,[^expl] had spent some eight of them at Dallas, with the "brave Gouhénans." (Au Texas, p. 44.)

[^expl]: The printed text reads "in 1833"; a misprint for 1853, the year of Considérant's exploratory voyage to Texas.

Here — we say it with regret — the epithet is one of those we spoke of a moment ago. Strongly contested by M. Cabet, to whom, in a note of the first edition, a peremptory justification had been promised, this epithet remained in the second edition, but without that justification which the public opinion of the counties of Dallas and Tarrant, in America, still awaits.

M. Considérant, charmed by the insinuating suppleness of M. Gouhénans's manners, had granted him great confidence. He had confided to him the projects that were beginning to ferment in his head.

M. Gouhénans —

… Every flatterer Lives at the expense of the one who listens to him —

had glimpsed for himself a lucrative financial agency; and when M. Considérant (the book and the subscription having borne fruit) wished to buy that fine position of Fort Worth, which the government had abandoned for another farther west (Fort Belknap), he found the position taken by M. Gouhénans himself and by a few others who had already made of it a rudiment of a town — since become the seat of Tarrant County, in place of Birdville,[?] much less well situated.

Obliged, then, either to buy at second hand from clever speculators or to look elsewhere, and at last pressed by time and by M. Considérant's impatience, M. Cantagrel was much embarrassed.

He had wished, in agreement with M. Allen, to prolong the search still further, and particularly on the Clear Fork of the Brazos; but M. Roger insisted tenaciously that the matter be ended, and, the site of Réunion having been found, he demanded — in a manner of speaking, alleging particular instructions from M. Considérant — he demanded, we say, that they stop there.

Paralyzed by this belated allegation of a mark of confidence as surprising for the mystery in which it had been wrapped as for the inferiority into which it seemed, in M. Considérant's mind and in favor of a young man barely out of the Jesuit college where he had been raised, to bring down a friend of twenty years' standing, M. Cantagrel, and a friend of the worth of the "brave Allen" — to whom the book had destined, I repeat, the office of "natural chief of the preparatory operations" (Au Texas, pp. 27 and 101, § 3) — the acquisition of Réunion was made, and the work of installation began. This was in the first days of March 1855.

The Nuremberg, after a dozen days of heavy weather and cold, had crossed, on the 12th of March, the group of the Azores and found spring there.

Driven by a north wind, weak but persistent, it had been forced to go down south as far as the twentieth degree of latitude and had been able to enter the Caribbean Sea only between Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Jamaica, instead of by the channels of Providence, Bahama, and Florida, which are the ordinary route (five degrees farther north) of vessels bound for the south of the United States.

For three days and three magnificent nights it had breathed the delicious aromas sent to it by the forests of the island of Cuba.

Passing so close to Santo Domingo, I had saluted with hand and heart my old and intimate friend Maxime Raybaud, consul-general of France to the government of Haiti, and wished in vain for a little storm that might force us to go seek, for a few moments, a refuge with him.

At last we had entered the Gulf of Mexico on the 14th of April, and on the 20th we made land at New Orleans.

The vast mouth of the Mississippi had not charmed us. Its flat and marshy banks, its yellow waters, cluttered with trunks of rotten or rotting trees and covered with hideous sleeping caimans — all that, under a stifling sun, somewhat tarnished the cheerful and poetic memories of our childhood reading.

But on approaching New Orleans, this first impression had softened at the sight of some pretty white dwellings, whose light galleries or verandas, framed in thick groves, breathed a coolness so enviable upon the burning deck of a ship.

A steamboat — a pilot steamer — had placed itself between the Nuremberg and another vessel arriving from Central America, had hooked onto them, and towed them thus with a speed very satisfactory to navigators bored and wearied by a long crossing.

The vessel from Central America had a full cargo of pineapples and bananas, which we were allowed to go visit and from which we were able to draw abundant means of refreshment.

As I savored these excellent fruits — objects, we were told, of a special and very active trade between the Spanish colonies and Louisiana — I was seized by an anguish, the first shiver of all the disappointments held in reserve for us.

Could it be thus, I said to myself, looking uneasily at that fruit-merchant ship — could it be thus that "the figs, the oranges, the lemons, the dates, the pineapples, the olives, and the other fruits of the tropics, together with the peaches, the melons, the grapes, and the other fruits of the temperate climates, abound in the southern parts of North America?" (Au Texas, p. 71.)

Who would amuse himself by transporting them thus from the tenth to the thirtieth degree, if they "abounded" naturally at this latter point?

And what, then, will it be in Texas, set back five degrees north farther than Florida?

But this preoccupation had to give way to those that crowded our arrival, on the 21st of April.

The first was to look along the bank for M. Considérant, or one of his people. He himself had given us reason to hope for this good fortune, and, at the moment of departure, our friends MM. Bureau and Guillon had repeated to us that we could count on it.

By means of an electric telegraph placed at the village of the Balize, the arrival of vessels is signaled to New Orleans the moment they have entered the river, and the newspapers have always announced it twenty-four hours before the landing.

But we walked the shore in vain. No one was looking for us; no one had any commission to attend to us.

I set out in haste in search of a few inhabitants of the city whose addresses I had brought with me and for whom I had been given errands.

I fortunately found at once, in M. Jules Juif — a French lawyer entrusted in Louisiana with the interests of a very rich and old French family — not only the most affectionate welcome, but a most precious spontaneous assistance for the landing and the temporary establishment of the personnel and the equipment of our group.

The embarrassments and difficulties of the customs-house were very notably eased for me by the excellent intervention of an American, M. Thomas Durand, one of the most distinguished lawyers of the Louisiana court. He had the kindness to present me to the director of customs, to explain to him the purpose of our voyage and the destination of our immigration equipment, and I obtained from that high official the most gracious dispensation from nearly all the ordinary formalities.

I cannot too preciously preserve the grateful memory of the kindnesses these amiable and respectable gentlemen showed me.

Despite these important services, our equipment could not be taken out of the Nuremberg and transshipped onto the steam-ship that was to carry it to Galveston until the 28th of April.

The next morning, the greater part of the group embarked with this equipment under the direction of M. Bussy.

As early as the 25th, Dr. Nicolas — whom the stifling heat of New Orleans was making ill — had set out as an advance guard with ten of the most impatient.

I had had to prolong my stay further — for sums to be drawn at the Bank of Louisiana, to make up the canteen of provisions needed for some forty persons during a hundred leagues of slow march through very thinly inhabited country, and finally to confer with M. Considérant, who had just arrived.

This question of the canteen having been, at Réunion, the object of criticisms as bitter as they were untruthful on the part of the two men of M. Considérant's most intimate confidence, MM. Roger and Cousin, we believe we must dwell on it a moment.

What we have to say of it, moreover, can only be a good lesson for other immigrants.

The management, in entrusting to us at the moment of departure drafts for two thousand dollars on the Bank of Louisiana, had charged us with various purchases at New Orleans; but, "above all and before everything, with providing for the life of the group during the long land journey we should have to make."

This journey, by all the information taken, was to last at least a month, not counting accidental circumstances.

I resolved, consequently, to make a provisioning for two months, and I composed it thus:

1. 20 barrels of biscuit, weighing about 1,000 pounds.

This biscuit was of two kinds, one sweetened and the other not. The first was a little smaller, but the same price as the second, and, as it can dispense with sweetening the coffee, it simplifies the service, and everyone constantly made much of it.

2. 10 half-barrels of beer, weighing 2,000 pounds.

Beer (we had observed it during the crossing, and we have observed it since, on returning to France) is, like almost all light bitters, a precious relief to the disturbances of the digestive functions produced by seasickness.

Since the name of that ugly malady has presented itself under my pen, I will pause a moment to give my opinion of it.

I firmly believe that seasickness — which I felt for half a day, and which other passengers, weak women especially, endured throughout the crossing — is nothing other than an indigestion. The rockings of the ship, by jolting the food in the pouch of the stomach, disturb and bruise that organ in the undulatory movements by which it kneads and combines the alimentary bolus with the gastric juices.

Wounded thus in its function, and perhaps sometimes even in its tissue, it rejects the foreign body that it cannot manage to govern and assimilate.

Those who persist in eating during these disorders increase and prolong them.

Those who remain lying down, especially in the open air, on deck, and who know how to wait for hunger, suffer much less.

Since the circulation of the blood and the visible phenomena of the nervous system ordinarily manifest no disturbance — or none other than those one ordinarily remarks in migraine (an indigestion with reaction upon the brain) — it is wrongly, I am persuaded, that people wear themselves out seeking, in those organs and their functions, by very ingenious subtleties, causes that appear so evident in the first.

I must record here, even now, an observation that I was able to make only three years later, during my crossing from New York to Le Havre — an observation which, so far as I know, has not yet been made by anyone.

On the Nuremberg, going from Le Havre to New Orleans, the crew had taught us, and we had observed, that of the two movements imparted to the ship by the waves, the pitching (longitudinal movement, fore and aft), which makes the two extremities of the ship alternately plunge and rise, is much harder to bear, and causes seasickness far more, than the rolling — a transverse movement analogous to that of a child's cradle being rocked.

This fact, thus affirmed and demonstrated, had been accepted by us as a general and invariable law, and our three hundred leagues of navigation from New Orleans to Galveston and Houston had furnished no occasion for fresh observation in this regard.

It was therefore with great surprise that, on the steam-ship Ariel, in October 1857, I heard the crew lay down as a principle the very opposite. There it was the rolling that was bad, while the pitching rocked us gently without wearying the passengers.

Whence could so notable a contradiction come?

After several days of preoccupation and meditation on so singular a question, here is the explanation at which, barring a better opinion, I believed I ought to stop:

On the Nuremberg the beds were placed lengthwise with the ship, the feet turned toward the bow and the heads toward the stern — in the direction of the pitching, consequently.

On the Ariel, on the contrary, the beds are placed parallel to the width, in the direction of the rolling, which then alternately lowers and raises the head and the feet.

It occurred to me to examine what relations these movements might have with the form, the position, and the function of the stomach.

This organ, a kind of conical bag rather like that of a bagpipe, is placed transversely beneath the left side of the chest. Its small extremity, answering to the pit of the stomach (the epigastrium), has two contractile openings, an upper one, called the cardia, and a lower one, called the pylorus.

These openings are endowed with extreme sensitivity: when the movements of the ship (pitching or rolling) act parallel to the length of the body and, consequently, transversely to that of the stomach, the food contained in that organ, being tossed up and down and down and up, strikes directly and alternately the two openings of which I have just spoken. This direct shock causes a malaise much greater than the mere bruising produced by the undulation of the food in the transverse direction of the body and parallel to the length of the stomach.

The contradiction between the two crews of the Nuremberg and the Ariel, as well as our wholly opposite observations on these two vessels, had therefore an explanation.

If it is correct, as I believe I have exactly verified, it must have as its consequence the following precept: always place the length of the body crosswise to the most pronounced movement of the ship — or, in other terms, always place the great diameter of the stomach parallel to that greatest movement.

As to the application of the precept, it must be admitted that it is not always easy, for the weather does not always permit one to go stretch out on deck; and the beds, fixed in place, are far from wide enough for one to carry out in them all the evolutions that changes of weather may render necessary.

For the rest, if the precept is correct, everyone will contrive well enough to find its application; and as to the arrangement of the beds on ships, it ought always to be, by preference, parallel to the length of the latter, because the rolling is by far more frequent than the pitching, and because one almost always ends, on the vessels where this arrangement exists, by growing used — with a kind of happiness — to that reminiscence of the oscillations of the cradle of earliest infancy.

Finally, there exists on the ships themselves a mechanism whose application, with a view to seasickness, might lead to the solution of this important question. I mean the manner of suspending the chronometers and the lamps. Let it be tried on a few beds, on a few cabins even. It would be neither very difficult nor very costly, and if seasickness were to disappear in those parts of the ship so arranged, would it then be impossible to apply the same mechanism to the decks themselves, and thus to free them from the greater part of the violent movements that vessels undergo?

But let us return to our canteen, that condition indispensable to the success of all voyages:

3. 30 pounds of tallow-candles; 4. 100 pounds of coffee; 5. 50 pounds of chocolate; 6. 6 pounds of spirits of wine; 7. 130 pounds of Gruyère cheese; 8. 200 pounds of beans; 9. 180 pounds of cooking oil; 10. 200 pounds of smoked pork tongues; 11. 150 pounds of lentils; 12. 370 pounds of plum marmalade; 13. 20 pounds of mustard; 14. 25 pounds of onions; 15. 20 pounds of pepper; 16. 110 pounds of dried apples; 17. 650 pounds of rice; 18. 100 pounds of lard; 19. 20 pounds of sardines and small tins; 20. 100 pounds of sausages; 21. 100 pounds of salt; 22. 68 pounds of white sugar; 23. 137 pounds of brown sugar; 24. 120 pounds of vermicelli and macaroni; 25. 1,000 pounds of wine in two casks; 26. 360 pounds of vinegar; 27. 300 pounds of whiskey; 28. Finally, 25 pounds of powder and 100 pounds of shot.

All this weighed about 7,000 pounds and cost, including transport charges as far as Dallas, 1,000 dollars (5,200 fr.).

On arriving at Réunion, the canteen-keeper turned over to the colony's stores — which had great need of them — 640 dollars' worth of all these things, and 360 dollars in cash or in individual accounts, to be settled by each man, for the consumption made on the way.

Of all these provisions, the only ones found to be at fault were the plum marmalade, which quickly turned sour and was nonetheless consumed, and then the smoked meats.

These last, compared by the many wags of the troop to boot-heels when they were cut into rounds, remained almost entirely — under that name — in the cases that held them.

New Orleans did not yet possess any depot of those precious tablets of dried vegetables which today make the provisioning of the navy so easy and so wholesome. We keenly regretted that our precautions had not been able to extend so far in France. Ten days of illness before departure and the excessive cold of the end of February 1855 thus stood in the way of several things, which we missed on the road.

We must add here that, on these journeys as on the sea-crossings, French emigrants will always do well to depart, as far as possible, from the old custom of shipping large stores of smoked meats: they almost always spoil, then they spoil the water (a serious matter when one is so often liable to lack water, or at least sound and fresh water), and finally they spoil the health, were it only by dint of repugnance and disgust.

For the portion that is obligatory in this regard, we urge them to take only barreled pork, salted and not smoked. When it is well chosen and well looked after on the way, it remains, to the very end, an agreeable and wholesome food.

All these preparations being made, we embarked for Galveston with five ladies who had preferred to wait for us, and a good young man from the Hautes-Alpes, M. Christophe, who had just joined us.

We had seen little of M. Considérant. He was, though better, still suffering from his New York illness. He seemed preoccupied, anxious, sad; we had thought it best not to speak to him of any of our affairs. We were, besides, to meet again in a few days at Galveston, then at Houston, and to continue (so at least we believed) our journey together.

With him had arrived, and continued to accompany him, Madame Considérant and Madame Vigoureux; Madame Cantagrel and the little girl she had brought into the world on the steam-ship, during the crossing from Europe to New York; our friend M. César Daly, the witty and learned editor of the Revue d'Architecture; and two Frenchmen, MM. Maguet and Willemet, met by M. Considérant at the North-American Phalanx, whom he had engaged, with two others, for Texas.

The North-American Phalanx was a colony of Phalansterian intentions, established in New Jersey, a few leagues from New York.

This colony — whose languor M. Considérant attributes "to the absolute lack of the serial organism" (au Texas, p. 12) — was gnawed by a quite different malady: disorder in the management of property, of provisions, and of finances, a disorder which it was not in M. Considérant's nature to feel or to see, and which led that remarkable institution to a liquidation analogous to that of Condé.

The vessel that, on the 3rd of May, carried us off to Galveston was the fine steam-ship Louisiana, which, just two years later, in May 1857, perished by fire with two-thirds of its passengers, on a like passage.

We descended the great river gaily to the sound of the military music of an American regiment that was going to garrison the Mexican frontiers of Texas; then we resumed, but to the west, the navigation of the Gulf of Mexico, and, forty-eight hours later, we had covered the two hundred leagues that separate New Orleans from Galveston, where we landed on the 5th of May.

The day before, in the middle of Galveston Bay, we were traveling in company with a pretty decked boat coming from New York, on which were the two other young Frenchmen engaged by M. Considérant at the North-American Phalanx.

The boat, at a moment when its maneuvers had brought it within half a voice's reach of us, had just been saluted with a flourish by the American band and was beginning a new tack that carried it away from us, when fire broke out in the floor of the steam-ship's kitchen.

At once, at the captain's order, the carpenters and sailors come to arm themselves from a fine sheaf of great axes that gleamed on the deck, and hasten back down to the seat of the fire; others take their places at the pumps. The ship's course is changed and (we learned it afterward), to the great surprise of the boat's passengers, it sets off at full steam on the same tack as she, so as not to lose her help in case of emergency.

All this was done in a moment, and that moment was solemn for those who knew the cause of these unaccustomed movements.

A kitchen fire, in broad noon, when so many arms are there to put it out, can scarcely be very dangerous, and everything had resumed its accustomed course half an hour later.

More than half the passengers learned of the event only when everything had already returned to order.

The fire that has just destroyed that fine Louisiana in 1857 had been noticed only in the middle of a dark night, and when its progress made extinction impossible.

A few months earlier, another fine vessel of the same company, the Nautilus, had perished by foundering in the same waters, and the cook alone had escaped the wreck.

If the wand of some Asmodeus could lay bare the bottom of those terrible approaches to Galveston Bay, what histories, what dramas, what sorrows, and what things might be exhumed from it!

One of the passengers, hearing our group speak French, came to greet us. He was a merchant from Bordeaux, M. Castagné, established at Galveston, to whom we owed good information about Galveston, Houston, and Texas in general.

He confirmed to us the news, already known at New Orleans, that for a year no rain had fallen in Texas, and that the harvests had been almost nil.

M. Considérant, to whom we had said a word of it, had reminded us that there is no rule without exception, and there remained to us, of this sad news, only the vexation of beginning with so grave an exception.

Shortly after M. Castagné, we were approached — with a French greeting and a few wholly kindly questions about the purpose of our voyage — by a gentleman whose accent, mixed with English and French inflections, left us for a few moments in doubt as to his origin.

His countenance, intelligent and gentle, expressing — like his speech — only good sentiments, and bearing some respectable signs of the beginnings of old age, had at once invited us to confidence.

Our conversation, steered by him so as to learn upon what ideas our undertaking rested — of which the preceding groups had made an object of almost general curiosity along our route — our conversation, we say, soon became a discussion, remaining always on the best terms, but in which I believed I detected the Catholic priest.

Noticing, shortly after, on one of my interlocutor's fingers a ring whose bezel was a large emerald — one of the insignia of the episcopate — I shared my observation with him.

He answered me that he was indeed the Catholic bishop of Galveston and of Texas.

His face, like his wholly evangelical speech, reminded me of the former archbishop of Bordeaux, M. de Cheverus, who had begun his apostolate, like him, in America, and of a former vicar-general of Verdun, the Abbé de Gaulme, my uncle, whom the emigration had kept nearly twenty years in Poland.

I found in these memories, as in the resemblance and the comparison of these three venerable heads, the confirmation of an opinion already old with me — namely, that the Catholic priests who have traveled much, and especially in countries where the only authority they can invoke is that of their teachings, that those priests are, in general, much more tolerant, much more persuasive, because they are much more really evangelical.

Monseigneur Odin, during our forty-eight hours' crossing, several times did me the honor of seeking me out on the vessel and of returning to our conversations on the end and the future of humanity in this world and the other. Our minds were not in complete agreement, but our hearts were in sympathy.

He had the kindness, before my landing, to offer me the hospitality of his modest but comfortable episcopal palace, which I could not accept, having myself too, I told him, a charge of souls; but I visited him several times during my stay at Galveston, and I do not wish to leave Texas without reminding him that I have kept a memory full of gratitude for his wholly kindly welcome.

There, at least, on the quay of Galveston, we did not invoke in vain the provident solicitude of a friend. From the deck of the ship, where we still were, I heard myself hailed by a voice until then unknown to me, but which I had no difficulty in recognizing as that of a friend. An instant later I was clasping the hand of M. Vaizian, a resigned officer of the Army of Africa, who had come to America to engage in commercial affairs and who, a friend of M. Considérant's, had placed himself at his disposal for the work of Texas.

We found in him a precious auxiliary for all the difficulties entailed by the landing, the wharf dues, and the re-embarking of numerous parcels. Ours set off a few hours later for Houston, with our little group, from which I was obliged to part for a few days, in order to await there the arrival of M. Considérant and to settle some affairs with M. de Saint-Cyr, consul of France and a merchant charged, with his partner M. Saltzmann, with our interests in that place.

M. de Saint-Cyr appeared to me, like all men of business in America, under two different aspects.

In his office — a building completely separate, according to the general custom, from the family dwelling — he is a positive man, attentive first to the preservation and improvement of his own interests, but careful too of the interests of his principals.

The son, we were told, of a former colonel of the Empire from whose care he had been torn by a tragic event at the time of the Restoration, M. de Saint-Cyr had come very young to America, to Brazil first. He had spent several years among the Indians; then he had come to Texas, and had settled on the little island of Galveston, to whose development and prosperity he had greatly contributed.

Seen within his household, beside a young and amiable mother of a family, amid several pretty little children (his own and those of a deceased brother or sister), M. de Saint-Cyr is no longer the American handling commercial affairs on a large scale and coldly; he is the French gentleman, instructed by travel, and, like the clergy, knowing — even much better than in the countries where the nobility and the Church dominate — how to take account, more Christianly, of the real worth of individuals than of the conventional values with which chance, so often, decks them.

Galveston is a little island, long, narrow, and low, stretched parallel to the Texan coast and formed of the earthy deposits perpetually carried down by the Trinity (Trinity river), after the example of its nine great sisters — the Red River, the Sabine, the Neige [Neches], the Brazos, the Colorado, the Guadalupe, the San Antonio, the Nueces, and the Rio Grande del Norte — a slow and ceaseless labor of transformation of the earth's surface, which will someday have filled up the Gulf of Mexico and joined the Antilles to the American continent.

Galveston, with its town broadly laid out, like all American towns, and built on a bed of sand; Galveston, covered with oleanders in bloom and refreshed by the breezes of the Gulf, invites one to settle there, and seems destined, far better than its marshy neighbor Houston, to brave the visits of yellow fever.

A long carriage drive in the presence of that immense gulf and on the solid sand of the southern beach, where the horses' feet and the wheels are at every moment bathed by the waves, left us a vivid impression, in accord with those of the book au Texas under whose influence we had set out; and although we found there neither the banana trees, nor the coconut palms, nor the orange trees, nor the lemon trees, nor the date palms, nor the olive trees, nor, in short, all that tropical vegetation that had been promised us (p. 71), and which had had for us — for all of us — so great a weight in our decisions, we were nonetheless in agreement with our new and witty friend M. Vaizian in regretting the obligation we were under to leave that fine beach and to plunge so far from the sea, into lands where all those fine things, lacking to us thus from the very arrival, would be found still less.

We visited the cathedral — a small brick church of a quite simple style — and there heard a sermon preached in English by a young French vicar-general who, as far as we could understand, commented with fire on the sad theme of the eternal tortures of hell. We spoke to the bishop of this display of threats of eternal vengeance, reminding him of the much less terrible opinion of Origen; the bishop, while reserving for his vicar-general the merit of the orthodoxy in which the Father of the Church we had just cited is accused of having been wanting, was pleased to admit that he shared my preference for those sermons which, instead of sounding the biblical thunders of divine implacability, set forth Christianly to sinners the evangelical treasures of infinite mercy.

On the evening of the 8th of May we set off for Houston, on the steamer the Eclipse, with the four colonists engaged at the North-American Phalanx and a still considerable quantity of equipment — wagons, tools, and utensils of every kind, bought, by M. Considérant's orders and through the care of our friends MM. Simonin and Daly, at New York, at Cincinnati, and at New Orleans.

Let us note here that these four engaged by M. Considérant — namely, two tailors, a maker of toilet soap, and a cloth-cleaner — had certainly not been engaged with a view to the supposed "plan of private appropriation," since all four had needed the executive agent to advance them the costs of their journey, and since their trades could offer in Texas no chance of success outside the associative life. If the aim had not been a "collective center," what could these four artisans have done on M. Considérant's lands, and why would he have engaged them?

This passage is made about half within Galveston Bay, which one traverses from south to north along its whole length, and half by the Buffalo Bayou.

A bayou, as the name indicates, is either a kind of natural canal into which the waters of a bay penetrate, or a small watercourse that empties into one. We have no other authority to invoke for this etymology than its simplicity. They call creek (pronounce it crik) all the small watercourses, of spring or of rain, which empty into the rivers through a small mouth (bay or cove).

The bayou of which we speak is so narrow that, almost everywhere, one can go down, right and left, onto the banks with the help of a mere plank; and it was with no more difficulty than that that travelers put in, all along the route, when they arrived opposite their properties, where a few Negroes provided with lanterns awaited them on the bank.

Almost everywhere too the great trees of the shore come to form a thick arbor above the vessel, and to avoid the collisions to which the steamer would be exposed during the night in this narrow and long passage, they keep up at the bow and on each side, in a kind of iron basket hoisted outboard, a fire of pinewood that lights up this curious landscape most picturesquely.

Great and numerous magnolias swayed their magnificent flowers above our heads; enormous bunches of these flowers were set at intervals in great vases, on the tables and consoles of the long and splendid interior gallery that all these vessels possess, sometimes on two stories.

These fires, this dark night, these thick arbors, this interior gallery, this rapid and silent course of the vessel, all these passengers wandering or seated along the outer galleries and on the poop, all that lit and perfumed in a manner so unwonted for us — all that was still, whatever was lacking in it, the Texas of the book and the Texas of our dreams, and we spent the whole night, without lying down, in this contemplation.

At daybreak we were at Houston.

Eight days were necessary to assemble the wagons (so they call the four-wheeled draft carts), buy oxen and horses, hire six extra wagons for the transport of the mills, forges, and tools of every kind, and carry out the loading.

It was there that there began for us the series of disenchantments and disappointments that was to result from a real study of Texas over two years and from the comparison of the man of the book with the man of the realization.

The man of the realization had at the very first shown himself of a great weakness, as we have said, on his arrival at New York. Forgetting the conditions of time and number that he had himself fixed, and losing his head at the first fear of a miscalculation, he abandons himself to the prostration of the poorest discouragement, and neither we nor others have ever found him since without more or less marked symptoms of that malady, whose effects he took pleasure, like some invalids, in recounting to far too many people.

We remarked in him, without being able then to explain it to ourselves, a pronounced disdain, a repugnance, against the greater part of the emigrants who had come to him with such confidence, who counted so firmly on his lofty direction for the realization of the well-being of every kind whose coming he had, for twenty years, so eloquently announced, and who all felt so keenly their need of the word, the teachings, and the example of a true chief.

It was a happiness for all to think that we were going, over a hundred leagues, to travel by short stages, with the chief of our School, that magnificent Texas so brilliantly described by him, and to enjoy, from then on, at each halt, the benefit of his eloquent word.

It is thus, indeed, that the Cabets and so many others, and today still the Mormon leaders, know how — by sharing their toils — to direct the populations they draw along and to sustain their enthusiasm for a long time, however little reasonable and solid be the bases on which it rests.

But M. Victor Considérant had left Europe alone, alone again he had left New York, alone New Orleans, alone Galveston, and alone Houston; as later he will leave and leave again, alone, from Réunion to live alone at San Antonio, and always alone — as, in short, we had seen him, during his political career, sit on the highest bench of the French legislative Chamber.

When we say alone, we speak from the point of view of the associative life to which he had invited us. A wife, a mother-in-law, a friend — accompaniments often necessary, by their self-abnegation, to the most solitary man — should change nothing in our expression.

Thus, after having had fitted out a pretty char-à-bancs that had cost him a hundred dollars at Cincinnati, and having had it harnessed with two fine gray mares bought for four hundred dollars at Houston; then, after adding three saddle horses to this equipage, he set out alone — that is to say, without us — on the 17th of May 1855.

We had asked ourselves whether these manifestations of repulsion for the group's life were not produced by a kind of distaste for the somewhat vulgar speech and habits — or, in other terms, for the lack of education — of some of the workers who made up our groups; but we gradually acquired the proof that the cause was to be sought elsewhere. We have since seen, at Réunion, every day, M. Considérant seat himself and seat his ladies at table, side by side with people in bare arms, elbows on the table, hat on the head, and pipe in the mouth.

At Houston itself, we had had to point out to him, at the request of our host, M. Husbud, that it was a rigorous custom in America not to present oneself at table without a coat and with the hat on the head.

In Texas, in that country of miseries of every kind, clothes full of holes, widely torn, are very well, very nobly worn; but one never takes them off in company.

"It was well worth the trouble," M. Considérant would answer us, "to come to this land of liberty only to submit to such constraints."

Our friend M. Cantagrel had more faithfully preserved our French forms and better observed certain nuances of American manners. He had, at the very outset, in creating the provisionally common table of Réunion, secured that not a man should take his place at it before the ladies were seated, and that not one should smoke during the meals. This was not only a precious first step on the way to inaugurating the tone of good company, but it was also to show our American neighbors that we were not, and did not wish to be, any more than they, strangers to their manners — so remarkably respectful toward women, everywhere and in all classes or shades of the population of the United States.

But we have just shown, in setting forth the habits of the table-neighborhood of Mesdames Vigoureux and Considérant, how promptly people had freed themselves from that honest constraint which the founder did not approve — which opened a path along which, ever since, people did not cease to backslide in a deplorable manner.

The next day, the 18th of May, our long convoy set out, guided by a worthy American wagoner, M. Black, an inhabitant of a county neighboring that of Dallas, and returning to his farm after having deposited at Houston the cotton load of his two wagons.

At the moment of M. Considérant's departure, M. Vaizian, somewhat vexed, had come to tell us that he was staying with us, the founder having so decided. We were glad of this decision, which gave us a companion amiable, active, and English-speaking.

Despite his help, the first march was far from being made with the desirable order.

I had let go on ahead the four wagoners who carried our heavy machines. Their wagons were in rather bad condition and could not have failed to cause us delays on the road. Master Black himself, despite his sixteen good oxen, had not wheels such as would let him hope for a journey without breakdowns, and the six wagoners, with the six substitutes I had improvised from our group, had, most of them, too much need of learning their new trade for the first days not to be days of embarrassment and disorder.

We had, from the start, for more than a mile, one of those roads so well described by Madame Stowe, which, to make the marshes passable, are paved with tree trunks laid in the mud across the road.

Deprived of a saddle horse that I had bought at Houston and ceded to M. Considérant, to whom it had taken his fancy, I had fallen back on a buggy (a four-wheeled cabriolet), drawn by a good old horse, but with which — being unable always, in barely passable roads, to run easily from the front to the rear of the convoy, and sometimes over a space of more than a mile — I had resolved to travel last of all, so as to be sure, at least, of leaving nothing behind. One can imagine the effects of a road of tree trunks on the springs of such a carriage, and its dangers for the horses' legs.

At the end of the first day, our cavalry found itself increased by one of M. Considérant's horses. He had recognized its uselessness for his journey and had left it for us at the first farm, with part of his too-heavy baggage. We then had six horses, two belonging to those who rode them and four belonging to the society. One of them was adopted by M. Vaizian, another by the accountant M. Bussy, the third by our riding-master M. Barret, and we reserved the fourth, a mare in foal, for weary travelers.

But our horsemen were taking the habit of going on ahead, so as to rest in the shade or at a farm while waiting for us, thus leaving to the convoy all the difficulties of a march sometimes very hard, and in which the wagon to which some accident befell was abandoned by all — everyone wishing to arrive first and practicing every-man-for-himself in a manner most unsatisfactory to those who did not so easily forget the sentiments of brotherhood and the principles of association in whose name we had embarked on this long pilgrimage.

Painfully preoccupied, during the third day, with these sad manifestations of egoism, I had resolved to begin, with the fourth, a more harmonian march.

In the evening I gathered our five horsemen and asked them to arrange among themselves so that, while keeping their liberty, two of them, by turns, should continually accompany the convoy — one at the front, the other at the rear — so that messages might easily be exchanged from one end to the other.

Then I made the wagoners understand that it was in their interest never to pass one another, and to stop all together when one of them was forced to stop, and finally, in the evening, for the encampment, to draw up as close as possible to one another, placing at the center the two wagons that carried the canteen, so as to simplify and shorten the small details of the food service.

This order of march, thus agreed among us all, without its having been necessary to employ anything other than affectionately persuasive words, gave us the next day the happiness of seeing undulate, as one, the long festoons formed in the prairies and the forests by our nine vehicles and our forty oxen following one another, without passing one another henceforth, a few meters apart.

When one of them was forced to stop, one of the horsemen on duty ran at once to warn the guide, and then everyone, coming to lend his aid to the repair of a breakdown, all soon set off again, satisfied with this accord, which left no room for discouragement and of which each, in turn, gathered the benefit.

It was above all at the crossing of the creeks that the importance of this cordial understanding showed itself.

A creek is a ravine, sometimes twenty to thirty meters deep, formed over centuries by the flow of rainwater, and across which the Americans have traced with their carts, amid the tree trunks, the brushwood, the vines, and the brambles, the least passable roads one can imagine.

Almost always these roads are perpendicular to the course of the creek and of so steep a grade, in these narrow ravines, that the strength of the oxen and the stoutest drag-shoes do not always remove the obligation of unloading the wagons and carrying the load across in several relays.

Before each creek the convoy halted. Master Black passed first, with a great reinforcement — especially in climbing — of pathetic expressions and of strokes of his two-handed whip, which reaches, with much skill and force, from one end to the other of his team twenty meters long.

The epithet cows (pronounced câous), repeated rapidly at each crack of the whip so long as the climb lasts, and seasoned with just as many goddams, seems to sting the oxen's self-esteem singularly. Vexed at being treated as cows, they redouble their efforts to prove that they are worth more, and at last, arrived at the top, an all right from the master (it's well) repays them for their trouble.

But in difficult cases, these brave leaders of the file must begin the same passage over again until, unhitched after each crossing, they have come back successively to bring help to all the other wagons; then the march begins anew.

There are, in these crossings of the creeks, two major difficulties: if it has rained, the descent and the climb are half again as hard on that greasy, slippery mud of Texas; if it is dry and the oxen, parched, smell water, they rush irresistibly, like madmen, until they are at the bottom of the creek.

And so, to avoid these confused descents in which men, beasts, and wagons are greatly endangered, one often takes care to unhitch beforehand and lead the oxen to drink before making the crossing.

Sometimes a third difficulty arises: when some storm has come to turn these creeks into torrents, one must camp on the bank until the waters have run off — which lengthens the journey without enlivening it and makes it most painful for those who have not amply provided their canteen.

Before leaving Houston, we had proposed to our traveling companions to group themselves, for the road, according to their tastes and sympathies, into several tables whose service could, better than a single one, achieve the rather difficult accord in matters of cookery, when one has few dishes and sometimes little time at one's disposal. This proposal, unanimously welcomed, had produced the formation of four groups which — save for a few comets flitting from one group to another — remained to the end about as they had formed at the start.

Each group had its officers, and particularly one in whose name were entered, on the canteen's register, the supplies it furnished at each meal. These supplies were all — like all the costs of travel and transport — at the charge of each of us, and not at all at the charge of the society, as our friends too readily persuaded themselves in France.

Every evening, as soon as the wagons were drawn up, the horses tethered to the picket, and the oxen coupled and thus set at liberty, everyone prepared his bed: the ladies and the children in the wagons, the men beneath them or in hammocks slung from the wheels. Four fires were lit a short distance from one another, the canteen opened and made its distributions, and the pots and coffee-kettles began to boil.

The products of the hunt — wild turkeys, prairie hens, partridges, turtledoves, and rabbits — rarely failed to figure in these preparations.

Sometimes too we found, here and there, at the farms, milk, eggs, and poultry, which the four groups shared among themselves.

Almost all the men of the convoy, clad in red flannel after the custom of American sailors, and wearing long beards, formed — by the glow of the evening fires, at the moment of the encampment and of the supper preparations to which some ten ladies devoted themselves — formed, we say, with the wagons, the horses, and the oxen, a spectacle that lacked only a skilled pencil to preserve its picturesque memory.

But there were bad days too. The settlers would, most often, put at our disposal only an ox, half of which we should have had to waste — an extravagance that no reason of urgency could justify; and when our group had no other meat at its service than the boot-heels, our friend Vaizian grew irritated, and declared that, in his quality as a former officer of the Army of Africa, he would make a raid on the first settler who refused to sell us a few head of his poultry-yard, or of his livestock, in proportion to our needs.

We had not taken these sallies seriously, and we set the example of a resignation — for us and for many others very easy — in the presence of the rice, the beans, the sardines, the cooked apples, good coffee, and excellent biscuit.

But Vaizian's threat was serious, and the poor fellow — perhaps already sick with the malady that took him from us — had the misfortune, one day, of killing a young pig at some distance from a farm, and of dragging it to our camp, which, fortunately, went unnoticed by the people of the farm.

We tried to make him understand the motives of our refusal to accept such a resource; but he grew irritated and obstinate to the point that we had to appeal to the authority with which the management had invested us in entrusting to us the direction of the convoy.

In his turn he invoked for a moment a particular authority with which M. Considérant was supposed to have invested him in attaching him to the group; but as this delegation was in no way justified, he had to give it up, and declared that he would no longer continue to us the help he had granted us until then.

It was for the third time in a few days that he thus forced our hand, with signs of irritation that had not until then seemed compatible with his gaiety and his excellent heart. We thought we ought at last to accept, though with regret, this sort of resignation. His relations with the group were souring from day to day. His opinions on the service had taken the form of commands that had gone as far as threats. Almost everyone saw him abstain with pleasure.

We tried to make him forget these dissensions and to make him understand that his health, visibly impaired, would be impaired still more if he persisted in seeking, in our fermented drinks, the strength that failed him more and more each day.

He seemed touched by our remarks, which did not tear him from the dejection that had seized him. He begged us to let him go on ahead to Réunion, where he would rest the sooner and would announce our arrival. He set off, in fact, on the 7th of June with MM. Bussy and Montreul, and we found him again eight days later at Réunion — where he had taken to his bed on arriving — only to see him die, three days after our arrival, of the typhoid fever that had declared itself the day after he had left us.

When I later learned from M. John Allen of M. Roger's particular mission with M. Cantagrel, there came back to my memory the expressions Vaizian had used in announcing to me an analogous mission with regard to me, and I remained persuaded that M. Considérant had indeed given it to him, but without the noble character of our young and brave friend having been able to resign itself to fulfilling it literally.

As we approached Réunion — where we were all arriving, though wearied by our three and a half months' journey, in very satisfactory conditions of health and gaiety — we still recalled the seductive image of "the post" on which one would read: "Here we believe in the happiness of man" (au Texas, p. 234); and, persuaded that even before the erection of that post people were busy — especially since the founder's arrival — with all that could successively lead to the realization of that happiness, we counted, among the first things, as on the quay of New Orleans, on meeting some friend sent some distance ahead of us, to give us welcome and to direct us through the last windings of the road.

But we looked in vain at every horizon: always, "we saw nothing coming," and we had not even the consolation of meeting a signpost marking the point where we must leave the high road for the byroad — a consolation that I have since at least given myself to those who came after us, by placing, from Lancaster to Réunion (15 miles), signposts and little boards at all the crossroads of the route.

Our oxen, devoured by thirst and harassed by their almost continual march through deep and burning sands, dragging their heavy carts now only with great pain, forced us to halts more and more frequent, after which it was not without great difficulty that some of them could get back on their legs.

The wagoners who had preceded us had already left one [ox] that we found stretched on the road, and our guide, Master Black, had been forced to a like sacrifice, on the occasion of which he had shown all the American unconcern by a very cheerful good bye addressed to his ox in abandoning it.

One of the great difficulties of these journeys across the prairies and forests of Texas is the rallying of the oxen at the moment of departure. These unhappy animals, which travel the whole day without eating and sometimes without drinking, and with no other rest than a halt, without being unhitched at midday, are in haste in the evening to reach the watering place and the pasture, and very often they have to go far for this double quest.

Then, when they have put between themselves and the camp a few creeks covered with thick brush, and when, lying down in the morning in some fold of a dense wood, they ruminate in peace without shaking their bells, one often spends hours, mornings, even whole days in search of them.

When we could find for a camp a well-stocked prairie near a creek containing water, the animals did not stray, and the night watch was easier. This watch — which I had striven to establish by means of two sentinels, relieved every two hours and continually making, by crossing each other and counting the oxen, the round of the herd — this watch, I say, often saved us great losses of time; but the zeal was not always proportioned to the usefulness of this measure, and more than once I found some one of our sentinels and our scouts asleep in the middle of the prairie.

Despite the extreme drought that, on M. Considérant's word, we believed exceptional — whereas it is the rule in Texas — we sometimes found, in low-lying spots, a few green prairies abundantly furnished with good grass. These encounters revived for a moment our wavering enthusiasm; but when we came upon farms where our oxen and horses did not find even a pond to slake their thirst, and where sometimes the settler even showed us empty the cask in which he went, a mile or several miles off, by means of a sledge, to fetch the supply of water needed for his family, we then had need to draw deeply, while awaiting better, on the source of our faith and our hopes.

We were drawing near, however, and, learning that we were now only a few miles from Réunion, I resolved to send someone ahead to ask for a reinforcement of two or three pairs of oxen to hasten our arrival a little.

Our riding-master, M. Barret, was the only available horseman, and I asked him to crown the campaign with this easy errand; but the worthy man, despite his habitual obligingness, could not bring himself to it. He had one day got lost in the forest, where he had been obliged to spend the night, and his imagination had seen there so many phantoms of Indians and ferocious Mexicans that he had come back the next day truly mad with terror, and no longer dared to go a hundred paces from the convoy.

Since his return to France he will, we hope, have completely recovered his fine and joyous energy.

I set off in his place, after seeing to a few instructions for the rest of the journey; but the "few miles" were, like the leagues of France, of a despairing length when they are reckoned by country folk, and I did not reach Réunion until nightfall, after crossing — for want of any indication of the true road — abominable creeks, where the legs and the coolness of my old horse, as well as the bones of my old buggy, acquired just claims to high esteem.

After clasping the hands of our friends, I set forth the sad situation of our teams; but I was assured that there was not a single ox available in the colony, and that our group must get out of the difficulty as it could.

I then asked whether there might not be, among the colonists, someone who knew the road and who would mount immediately on horseback, to go tell our convoy that it must camp again that night and put off its arrival to the morrow.

A young man presented himself at once with a kindliness that at first opened my heart to a lively sympathy for him. Alas! it was M. Roger! Would that he had afterward better understood that treasure of friendship of which I should have been so happy to remain the keeper!

The welcome of our friend M. Considérant had been serious, almost cold.

The supper served to me was detestable: a piece of boiled beef, tough and gamey, and for drink some lukewarm water smelling of mud.

The lodging compensated me very little: a straw pallet and a blanket on the floor, and a corner in a great building under construction, without doors or windows, completed my day of the 13th of June 1855.[^arr13]

[^arr13]: The printed text reads "13 June 1853"; a misprint for 1855, the year of the Nuremberg's arrival (three and a half months after the embarkation of 28 February 1855).

On the 16th, I was up at daybreak, ready to go meet our convoy; but my good horse — which M. Considérant had, at my request, commended the evening before to a colonist — had been shut up, without having drunk, in a neighboring enclosure that it had leaped over, accusing me no doubt of black ingratitude and fleeing so well its bad hostelry that it was not found again until six months later, in the middle of a prairie about eight miles off, where it had admirably fattened itself in a complete far niente and in forgetfulness of its old master.

At last our companions of the Nuremberg arrived. The whole of that building where I had slept was put at their disposal, and there they gaily began their installation for the night, in compartments arranged one above another, like the tiered beds of the ship's 'tween-decks and cabins. And so this building immediately received the name of the Nuremberg, which is not yet forgotten, although it has been, this year 1857, turned into a store (the colony's general shop).

The veranda, furnished with benches and planks on trestles, was our dining hall.

There they served us imperturbably, for several months as our dietary base: in the morning, about five o'clock, a cup of water-coffee and bread; at noon, a bread soup amply soaked in a broth whose extreme paleness betrayed to all the omission we had made of a few browned onions from our canteen's provisions. The soup was invariably followed by the boiled beef, which, two times out of three, betrayed to every nose the decomposing power of a sun that, in the shade, on our plateau, made the centigrade thermometer rise from 30 to 40 degrees every day; finally, in the evening, the remains of the beef, a cup of tea, and a small glass of whiskey.

This small glass of whiskey was not served at table, but in the yard.

M. Cousin, M. Considérant's trusted man, and who was then minister of the interior, would take under his arm, on leaving the table, a big wicker-cased bottle, and in his hand a small glass.

Thus armed, he had the obligingness to go round all the groups, offering and pouring the dram to all comers and taking his share in his turn.

This mode of distribution and this dietary regimen were, like all the miseries of the journey, on the part of the Nuremberg group, the object of jokes, in which we always willingly took part. To do serious things gaily and to bear misery laughing has always seemed to us very wise; but we had to deal with certain characters whom the Belgian fogs and beer had made morose, and who, not knowing how to handle a joke, soured at its touch.

M. Considérant, to whom malicious reports were made every day about this unhappy group so guilty of a little French wit, thought he ought to reproach me for my complicity in these gaieties so injudiciously interpreted.

"Reserve your discontents," I said to him, "for the angers that may well be stirred up by the unjust and unintelligent malevolences of which we are the object. So long as we do no more than laugh at the Réunion stew-pot, so much the worse for those who administer it so badly; but you, dear master, you must leave much latitude to the castigat ridendo mores: to correct by laughing is a Christian and salutary remedy.

"—But do you not see, then," he replied, "that these jokes tend to drag us into exaggerated table expenses and into extravagances like those to which your canteen gave rise?

"—No," I answered: "when you have settled the conditions of work and set up the restaurant, your anxieties will be without object: each man, set in the presence of his purse and of an establishment in which each portion of food will have a fixed price and be paid for in cash — each will live as he wishes or as he can, and you will be, in this matter, no more obliged than our Paris restaurateurs to concern yourself with the private affairs of those who come to sit at your tables.

"As for the extravagances of my canteen, the accounts of it have just been settled by M. Bussy, your accountant. It results that our average expense per person for thirty-odd days was eight and a half dollars (44 fr. 50 c.), and that, although this expense was in reality very notably unequal (some having spent more than sixty francs and others less than thirty), all — with the exception of Vaizian, victim of long prior excesses of every kind — all arrived in good health and satisfied.

"Whereas the group of M. Cousin — which, on average, spent, it is true, fifty sous less than ours per person for the whole journey — generally and bitterly complained of the parsimony with which that envious chief, who criticizes us and to whom you listen far too complaisantly, himself distributed to each the meagerest food."

These complaints had, in fact, gone as far as a separation. Joined by the Raizant[?] group after a few days, seven of M. Cousin's compatriots had abandoned him after demanding a division of the provisions, which barely sufficed for the completion of the journey.

And we must say again that with M. Cousin this average of eight dollars per person had been invariably applied to each according to the egalitarian principle of the communists, whereas with us (we take pleasure in repeating it), each had paid only in proportion to his expense — a relative equality that has always seemed to us much more just than the one that tends to bring under the same level the tastes, the appetites, the aptitudes, the intelligences, and the acts.

Several of us, walking through the garden, had admired the vigor of growth of a magnificent purslane that crept spontaneously everywhere; and, recalling that our canteen had delivered to the store a notable quantity of oil and vinegar, asked that this generous plant be at least turned into salad.

This addition to our menu was unanimously welcomed as a boon; but someone took it into his head to ask that this poor succulent plant be turned into a stew, and although this stringy, gluey mess was generally disliked, they persisted, out of economy, in serving it to us alternately with the salad.

M. Considérant, resolved to find everything good in this order of things, had loudly congratulated one of our cooks on the excellence of the purslane in beef-fat that she had prepared.

For my part, who — with so many others — made a piteous face on the days of cooked purslane, I found a use for it whose usefulness consoled me for the forced fasts to which it condemned us:

We were short of linseed flour; marshmallow is very rare and bread worth sparing: I accordingly prescribed for my patients, who were the better for it, the leaves of cooked purslane in poultices, and the juice… in irrigations.

But M. Considérant did not forgive me this profanation, at which he ought to have laughed with me, and I am persuaded that it weighed heavily in the sentence he pronounced against me, declaring that in his eyes I was not a doctor at all, not at all — a sentence that might have proved a great power of divination, M. Considérant never having made me undergo any examination, never having addressed to me a single question about my medical practice, and having always deprived me of the happiness of meeting him at my patients' bedside.

V. — Medicine at Réunion

Ne sutor ultrà! [Let the cobbler stick to his last.] Each to his own trade, and the sheep will be well guarded. (Free translation.)

Since I have been led to speak of the sick and of medical practice, I think I ought to gather here, without following the order of dates, all that has seemed to me of some interest on this subject during these three years.

At the time of the first general assembly of the shareholders, at Paris, 6 rue de Beaune, on the 26th of December 1854,[^dec54] the assembly voted, as I have already said, a first fund of ten thousand francs, destined for the relief of particular misfortunes.

[^dec54]: Printed "1834"; read 1854 (the same first general assembly cited in ch. III).

I begged the assembly to make its opinion clearly manifest on the use of these ten thousand francs, notably as concerned the sick.

I asked it whether it was not in its intentions that the colonists who should fall ill in the service of the society be treated at its expense. The answer was affirmative and unanimous.

This affirmation, in consecrating toward the colonists an act of humanity and of justice, answered one of the preoccupations of my mind — the organization of medical practice — and one of the great difficulties of that practice, the difficulty attached to the delicate question of fees.

I understand as well as anyone, and I approve, that sacramental formula: "The priest must live by the altar;" but, just as I have made vows that the priest be freed from the servitude of the surplice-fees,[^v1] so too[^v2] I have wished that the physician be relieved of the cares of claiming his fees. The exercise of his profession (at least so have I always understood it) is also a priesthood, which the fee too often lowers to the level of a commerce or an industry sometimes of little use to the patient, by the obligation in which the physician finds himself of restricting his visits, so as not to seem to speculate too much on their proceeds.

[^v1]: Monseigneur the Bishop of Le Mans and the Phalanstery. 8vo, 1846, 6 rue de Beaune; pp. 42 to 52.

[^v2]: Phalansterian Almanac for the Year 1846, p. 53.

The lawyer, whom I have often envied on this point — the lawyer, in a quite similar position, has at least the attorney [avoué] who can spare him, and often does spare him, all the difficulties and unpleasantnesses of the direct settlement of fees.

If the physician had been only the repairer of the material disorders that health undergoes, we should have understood without difficulty that his care, like that of an architect, could easily be resolved into a memorandum regularized at need by tariffs, after the repairs made. But such cases are very rare; whereas, almost always, the physician and the patient need — the one to know the malady well and direct its treatment, the other to acquire the peace of mind, the security necessary to him — need, I say, to exchange tokens of confidence and affection all the more useful as they are more intimate.

Then, when the physician has thus become, almost always, like the lawyer, the confidant, the friend, the confessor of his patient, and when he has entered into the intimacy of his life, is it then very easy to decide the moment, the form, the propriety, the sum, in short the opportuneness of a claim to address to the client who, for causes often independent of his will, seems to us to put off too long or to forget the pecuniary obligation contracted toward us?

But when the cured client comes to thank his physician and to ask him what pecuniary obligation he has contracted toward him, is the question not often just as embarrassing to resolve?

If the financial position of the client were known to the physician, that would be easier; but as a physician's care is not a merchandise that is quoted on the Exchange and that can be invariable, it is therefore for him — when he must determine his price for each new situation — it is for him, we say, that Rabelais's quarter-hour is truly, from every point of view, a bad quarter-hour.

I had therefore glimpsed with happiness for myself, in the work of Texas, the cessation of these difficulties with which I have never been able to familiarize myself.

The physicians were to be the physicians of the colony, which would take charge of the settlement, the apportionment, and the collection of their fees. Public officials henceforth, their priesthood was to rise to all its dignity, without the rights of each — at various degrees in the medical hierarchy — being able to be more disregarded than they are in all the other branches of the public administration.

The first bulletins had announced that a young Belgian physician, M. Roger, had already set out.

We knew that a physician from the Hautes-Alpes, Dr. Nicolas, was to join us.

By these two colleagues were to be represented in Texas the Faculties of Brussels and of Montpellier, and by me the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, where I had the honor of receiving my degrees, and also the military medicine of France, to which I was attached for six years, and from which I retired with the rank of assistant-major at the age of twenty-eight.

From this conjunction were to result, I hoped, useful observations on medical practice in the regions we were going to traverse.

I brought from France, on this subject, five principal preoccupations:

Is it true that, in high latitudes, the sulphate of quinine must necessarily be given in very high doses?

Is it true that, "in these latitudes, any blood-letting, even slight, is often very unfortunate and even very grave"? (M. Considérant's expression.)

Is it true that calomel, in high doses, combats much better than blood-lettings the inflammatory phenomena that manifest themselves in most maladies, even in typhus, cholera, and gangrene[?]?

What will be the modifications brought by the climate to the effect of the cupping-glasses so generally employed in France, Germany, and Russia, as they had been in Greece from the earliest times of the history of medicine?

Finally, what is seasickness?

This program, however narrow it may appear to certain minds, opens a vast field (physicians know it) to the examination of the questions on which the air, the temperature, the waters, and the places can exert an influence.

After the decision of the general assembly relative to the treatment of the sick, the management had charged me with having composed, on the society's account, two cases, one of surgical supplies and the other of medicines. These two objects, chosen — the first at the establishment of the honorable and celebrated M. Charrière, the second at the central pharmacy — left nothing to be desired in their composition and rendered us eminent services.

The day after our arrival at Réunion, when the wagons were unloaded, M. Roger had transported into his room, without warning me, the two cases of which I have just spoken; then he came to ask me for the keys.

He had arrived five months before us; he was M. Considérant's physician and the man of his intimate confidence in all things. This was a de facto possession that had its just side, and I passed over the defect of form without attaching great importance to it.

But when I learned that M. Roger had not finished his medical studies; when I saw at work that he was not even yet familiar with the practice of the operations of minor surgery; that he hesitated to open, and managed to open only at the third attempt, an abscess whose matter, fluctuating under the skin, announced a depth of four or five centimeters with no surrounding anatomical difficulty; when I saw him compose his medical practice of a so-called eclectic mixture of homeopathy and allopathy; when I learned too that the respectable Dr. Nicolas — with whom I had just spent two months at sea in the best accord — had been, since his arrival (three weeks before us), the object of the sarcasms and the bitternesses of this young medical student; and when, at last, finding myself with him in the council of direction instituted by article 14 of the provisional agreement (au Texas, p. 319), I saw him sow among us, in the form of insinuations, nothing but malevolent manifestations against MM. Cantagrel and Allen, his traveling companions, then against MM. Burcly and Daly and against me, and when I recognized his fatal influence on the sick mind of our founder — I had to begin to reckon with him and to renounce the confraternity with which Dr. Nicolas and I had been pleased to honor him.

Let us finish, anticipating still further the order of dates, this disagreeable but necessary part of our work.

On the 15th of August following, there arrived at Réunion MM. Robert Nusbaumer and Chavannes. Both came from Houston, where the yellow fever rarely fails to claim victims each year at this season, which one chooses by preference for traveling north.

Everyone in the School knows the name of the first and his old, so complete devotion to the propagation and the realization of the idea. Charged with the administration of the little farm bought at Houston for the depot of the plants sent from Europe, he had there completed — by clearing labors to which he was not accustomed — the deterioration of a health profoundly impaired for several years.

He had there contracted intermittent fevers that now left him only rarely, and for which he had consumed, and was still consuming on his arrival, strong doses of sulphate of quinine.

He added to them, as Vaizian had done, and believing, like him, to draw from it strength that was failing, not excesses, but a daily use of whiskey — a drink fatal, like tobacco, to the reason and the health of those who use it, and especially of those who abuse it.

He hoped that at Réunion, amid old friends and at the spectacle of the prosperities he had dreamed of, like all of us — by the aid of the book — he was going to be cured and to live again; but his first impression on arriving had been a deep blow to his most intimate sentiments: M. Considérant had received him badly.

The bitter complaints that M. Chavannes and he then made on this subject in the intimacy of a few conversations have not been effaced from our memory and from that of our friends.

Nusbaumer had had rather grave disputes at Houston with M. Cousin, and he found again at Réunion the same man — quite new in the School — invested, to his detriment, he believed, with all the founder's confidence, with no other rights, in the eyes of all, than a great suppleness of attitude and of character for which M. Considérant has always shown a quite particular predilection.

Whether this impression was well founded or not, the fact remains that the worthy man — finding at Réunion, with this welcome, only a bad garret for a dwelling, shared with several others and under a roof permeable to all the injuries of the weather, then the food we have just described, then the anxiety and the discontent that were beginning to rumble in all minds and all hearts — the worthy man was seized again by the intermittent fever in its daily form.

I had been his Phalansterian friend for nearly eight years; he addressed himself to me, on the 22nd of August; I administered to him, as I had been doing in France for forty years, and always with success, and as I have not ceased to do with the same results for two years in America, the small dose of two to four decigrams of sulphate of quinine between each attack, with an interval of two hours between each decigram.

After the second dose, on the 24th of August, the fever did not reappear, and I obtained from him the promise that he would abstain completely from whiskey.

The dietary regimen of the colony had just grown worse still.

Someone had told M. Considérant that, in cases of scarcity, one supplemented the tea with a little aromatic plant, to which our botanists of Réunion assigned neither name nor family, and which the public voice named thé-xas [Tea-xas].

A tisane of thé-xas had therefore been made, and M. Considérant having proclaimed it far superior to China tea, the latter disappeared completely for a few days from our evening meals; but we protested against this aggravation, which was commuted, as for the purslane, into that of alternation: one day China tea, one day thé-xas — that is to say, one day of fasting out of two for those who have the bad taste not to nourish themselves on tisane. Happy the constitutions which, by systematic economy, can swallow anything!

An attempt was indeed made to disguise the economical innovation by mixing it with the real tea, but this profanation, at once discovered, did not dare to repeat itself.

The fact remains that poor Nusbaumer, suffering and accustomed to his cup of real tea, bore still more sadly the sojourn in "the promised land," and that, on the 10th of September, he was seized by violent pains of the bladder and the intestines, a malady to which, he told us, he had been subject for several years.

I begged my good colleague, Dr. Nicolas, to join me, and we agreed that, for want of leeches, we would make on him applications of scarified cupping-glasses until the cessation of the pains.

On the 15th of September, Nusbaumer resumed his habitual walks; but he refused the continuation of the cupping, in the use of which, despite the improvement, it would have mattered to persevere.

M. Considérant, who had pronounced his sentence against me, against blood-lettings in general and against cupping-glasses in particular, had managed to inspire fears in our patient.

Madame Considérant had even thought she ought to make an approach to me on this subject, and to beg me "to open my eyes to the dangers of my practice and, above all, kindly not to use it with regard to M. Nusbaumer."

Here, in substance, was my answer:

"I infinitely regret, madame, not being able to defer to the counsels you think you ought to give me, and I will venture to submit to you the following reflection:

"If, at sixty-two, and after forty-five years of medical studies and practice, a physician were to let himself be guided by the opinions of society people, would he not be perfectly unworthy of his profession?"

Madame Considérant, having left my study (here, this last word means a long square of two meters eighty-nine centimeters by one meter seventy-nine centimeters, which — formed of planks through which penetrate the wind, the rain, the extreme heat, and the extreme cold, and which, lit by a sash window, constitutes my whole apartment for two years) — Madame Considérant, I say, complained bitterly of my answer.

However, for want of the continuation of the revulsive means that had attenuated the pains, these reappeared on the 12th, with symptoms of typhoid fever that decided us, Dr. Nicolas and me, to inform M. Considérant of our grave anxieties about our patient.

M. Considérant then carried out a coup d'État: he went, without warning us, to install M. Roger, day and night, by the patient, and installed himself there too, to make sure of the integrity of the medical direction he had just decreed.

Dr. Nicolas at once ceased his visits. He thought, with me, that the lack of tact which M. Considérant was then showing in so essential a manner ought to have been corrected by the medical student, had the latter remembered, or understood, the respect to which his elders had a right.

What is more, they had not even — M. Considérant and he — had the prudence to put their responsibility under cover, from every point of view, by proposing to us a consultation, the only honest mode of proceeding in such a case.

More than that, they had even forgotten to ask the patient his consent.

And as M. Roger, like his intimate M. Cousin, were perfectly antipathetic to Nusbaumer, the latter protested to the end — every time his lethargic sleep and his delirium allowed him to express an idea before us — protested, I say, by his voice, his eyes, or his gesture, against the imposition made on him, day and night, of such a sick-nurse.

"Why this?…" he said to me several times during the visits I had not ceased to make him as a friend; and he then clearly designated to me the object of the nightmare that oppressed him; then his head fell back on the pallet, in a drowsiness or a delirium that ended in his death, after eleven days of this torment, and without his having been able to know its cause, on the 26th of September 1856.[^nus]

[^nus]: Printed date "1856"; the account nonetheless attaches it to the summer following the arrival (15 August), thus probably 1855.

M. Chavannes, a young French clockmaker established at Houston, and who had shown himself, toward M. Considérant and all of us, of a real obligingness when we arrived in his city, left Réunion with the thought that the welcome he had received there from the chief greatly resembled either ingratitude or a great forgetfulness of the simplest duties of a master of a house.

Moreover, public opinion at Réunion no more sanctioned the right that M. Considérant arrogated to himself of delivering and withdrawing diplomas than it had sanctioned his distributions of certificates of bravery (recall the protest of M. Cabet against the apology for the brave Gouhénans).

During the two years I spent in Texas, my care was sought by 228 patients, all of whose maladies were the object of observations exactly recorded in a register, and, despite the anathema cast upon cupping-glasses, 99 of them underwent the operation on the occasion of cerebral, typhoid, intermittent fevers, etc., etc., and always — as Herodicus already proclaimed in Greece some three thousand years ago, and as Caelius Aurelianus, Oribasius, and so many others later repeated — always perfectly inoffensive, they usefully marked their beneficent revulsive power.

Of these 228 patients, I had the sorrow of losing five, or a little less than 2 1/2 per cent; but all five had to reproach themselves, like our friend Vaizian, with grave imprudences and with neglects of warnings that I never ceased to repeat to all on questions of general and particular hygiene.

These 228 patients spent together 889 days of illness, or, on average, 8 1/2 days each, and 428 days of convalescence, or, for each, about 2 1/2 days; total: 11 days.

We find again, in this summary of medical practice during thirty-one months in America, the confirmation — already old for me — of the happy influence of cupping-glasses on the duration of maladies. By their revulsive power, the cupping-glasses dispense with the necessity of drawing much blood; they displace it, they divert it from the diseased part without removing it from the general circulation, and when the malady has ceased, when equilibrium and order are reestablished, the convalescence is short, because, having lost nothing or almost nothing, and consequently having nothing or almost nothing to recover, life finds itself again almost immediately in its normal state and at once resumes its accustomed course.

I think I ought to repeat here a wish already expressed some ten years ago with an example in support[^v3]: that of seeing physicians adopt — according to uniform rules that the Academy of Medicine could determine — the practice of thus communicating to one another, every year, the balance-sheet of their medical practice. These views, cast retrospectively on the results of the application of doctrines so diverse and often so opposed, would be precious warnings for each in particular. They would be a preservative against the forgetting of failures and against the slumbers of routine. Could they not, moreover, be usefully consulted by patients on the occasion of the so delicate choice of a physician?

[^v3]: A Physician's Last Examination of Conscience. Librairie sociétaire, 6 rue de Beaune.

These reviews would be, finally, precious pathological and necrological statistics. They would complete the mortality tables which, based on the number of deaths compared to the figure of the population and not to that of the maladies, do not offer all the exactitude that it is natural to desire in such grave matters.

The great argument of the enemies of cupping-glasses, and particularly of M. Considérant, was this:

"Wherever one has a pain, cupping-glasses and always cupping-glasses, from head to foot and from foot to head!"

It is true that of the 228 patients who received my care, fewer than half underwent this little operation, which already reduces by as much the value, in judgment and in exactitude, of the reproach made to the one who prescribes them.

But this proud mania of judging what one does not know, with which many minds otherwise highly distinguished are afflicted, distorts their judgment to the point that they forget that every day, by routine, they accept, without more reflection, things that would appear much more absurd, if one thought about them without possessing the science that authorizes their practice.

Thus, wherever such people have a pain, one sees them swallow, without reflection and without idea of criticism, all the remedies that the physician judges suitable to deposit in their stomach, and even those they believe they can prescribe themselves.

The stomach, in this case, really performs, for each of the medicines confided to it, the office of the postal administration with regard to the letters deposited in its boxes. But the letters have addresses; whereas the administration of the stomach — receiving, with no indication it can read, objects to deliver, and sometimes, at the same time, to the brain, the eye, the throat, the lung, the heart, the liver, the spleen, etc., etc. — might well appear, to less judicious minds, strongly exposed either to errors, or to inexactitudes, or to congestions more or less compromising for itself.

Well, certain witty people who so love to gloss upon physicians, whose independent spirit displeases them, have not even glimpsed this pretty vein of criticism to exploit; while they disparage the cupping-glasses — these which at least give that proof, palpable to all, of a judicious view, by attacking the malady directly and following its trace from head to foot and from foot to head, wherever it manifests itself.

If pride were not born blind, it would no doubt understand that, by dint of despising simple things, it falls into simplicities that greatly compromise it.

The lightness of M. Considérant's appraisals, so prodigiously manifest in so many things, is found again in this sentence on page 54 of his book, when he speaks of the treatment of fevers:

"An easy and well-known treatment readily makes an end of it."

Thus, for M. Considérant, the sulphate of quinine being well known as the specific for intermittent fevers, all the rest is easy and all is said. The hours at which the medicine must be administered, before or after the attacks; the mixtures to which it can be subjected, and its doses — all that, which theoretical and practical science alone can teach to judicious minds, all that is nothing for M. Considérant, and he affirms that one readily makes an end of these maladies.

Public notoriety, on the contrary, establishes every day that in America the mode of administration adopted and the doses make its effects very frequently faulty.

The sulphate of quinine, dissolved in whiskey, at a dose of at least one gram, is everywhere administered all at once between each attack, and the excitation that this far too energetic and concentrated medication produces in the stomach makes the cure, most often, slow and difficult, develops in the organs of digestion inflammatory congestions, obstructions by which health and life are more or less gravely compromised.

M. Jacques Nusbaumer and Mademoiselle Gaudel furnished the colony two very remarkable examples of this. Their fevers persisted several months in the first and more than a year in the second. The latter, after a year spent at Dallas, returned to us with obstructions so grave of the liver, the intestines, and the spleen that she was long considered incurable, and several times as dying.

Her health was reestablished only under the influence of daily repeated applications of cupping-glasses and of sulphate of quinine administered in pills — consequently without whiskey, and in very small doses, two to three decigrams between each attack, fractioned by decigrams and with two hours' interval between each.

Thirty-nine cases of intermittent fevers submitted by me to this mode of administration never, with a single exception, experienced the return of three attacks after the first dose.

The exception was a quartan fever, the most stubborn type.

It was, moreover, kept up by grave errors of regimen, and yielded at last, after two months, to a few cupping-glasses applied on the region of the spleen and strongly scarified at the beginning of the attacks.

We must add, finally, to complete the justification of the use of cupping-glasses in America as well as in Europe, that Dr. Prior's junior — who enjoys, so justly, a very high medical reputation in Dallas County, and with whom an attempt had been made to ridicule our confidence in our "cupping procedure" (M. Considérant's expression) — formally replied that he applied them himself, and that he owed to this mode of blood-letting too remarkable cures for him to be able to blame our predilection before having heard us.

And Dr. Prior's, we hope, will not contradict us if we say that, after having heard us, and in leaving him, we left a friend.

During our voyage on the Arkansas, we conversed long with a young surgeon of the United States army, M. Stub, who assured us that the cupping-glasses are in daily use in the hospitals of the American forts.

We have still to invoke the testimony of the Indians themselves, who, from time immemorial, are in possession of the cupping-glasses, which they apply with horns of buffalo, whose broad extremity is set on the skin and in which they make the vacuum by practicing, through the point pierced ad hoc, strong aspirations. As for the scarifications, they make them with sharpened pebbles, until civilization furnishes them with pieces of glass, then with cutting metals.

Finally, the travelers who have visited the interior of Africa have found this practice established there among tribes that seemed to have had until then no relations with the old civilization. All these facts, joined to our forty-odd years of observations and experience, must justify us for our lack of submission to M. Considérant's sentence.

As for the fees due to me for the care given to these two hundred and twenty-eight patients, faithful to the principle of solidarity stated in the program adopted on this subject by the first general assembly, I have always refused to receive them from the patients in particular, and I believe they are due to me — like my salary as cashier — by the Europeo-American colonization society in Texas, no less legitimately than the salary of M. Victor Considérant.

But as I have never had the thought that, for me, the budget should be charged with them before the distribution of the surplus-values that the book promises us, and as I shall certainly be dead when they are distributed, I beg the management of that time to remember that I leave heirs, and that this debt — the price of a labor full of difficulties, of sacrifices, and of zeal — ought to be no less sacred than the others.

VI. — Réunion: Its Aspect, Its Administration, Its Developments

Telle manière de prognostiquer par nom n'est moderne. [Such a way of prognosticating by name is not modern.] (Rabelais.)

Chaque chose en son nom porte sa destinée! [Each thing carries its destiny in its name!] (Alphonse Esquiros.)

Private appropriation being unable to be for us in Texas — neither in reality nor in the spirit of the Phalansterian school — a mode of gathering, we were marching toward a goal and toward an associative center, all of us who, in 1855, had set out only with a view to, and under the most formal promises — verbal, written, and printed — of the constitution, for us and by us, of "a center, an associative household, possible stock of the first phalanstery." This name Réunion was therefore a symbol.

After this recall of the principle under whose influence we had abandoned France, let us examine the site of our colony:

Coming from the south, one arrives at Réunion by a great plain that may be compared to that of Montrouge, near Paris. The colony's buildings are situated, like the Saint-Jacques barrier, at the north end of the plain, on the crest where begins the slope that leads into the valley (a valley, in America, is called bottom and is pronounced bot'eum[?]).

From this crest, one sees the valley unfold, which — including the back-slopes of the hills that enclose it — stretches from one horizon to the other, like that of the Seine, six to eight miles (3 to 4 leagues) from south to north and double that from east to west.

The bottom of this valley divides, lengthwise, into two parts; one of prairies and the other of forests, the latter twice the depth of the former.

It is in the midst of this forest that there flows, from northwest to east, the river — or rather two rivers, the West Fork and the Elm Fork (fork of the west and fork of the elm), two of the four forks or upper branches of the Trinity.

Above this long and deep forest, where already appear a few farms and a few mills, one distinguishes superimposed horizons — now prairies, now woods — which, diversely lit at the different hours of the day and at the moment of storms, offer aspects that the photographer and the landscape painter will someday seize with delight.

Moreover, this first, truly beautiful aspect offered to the eyes nothing that could satisfy the thirst for new, tropical vegetation that the book had kindled in us.

It was nothing more than a fine valley of central France, without a single foliage that could stand against the comparison.

A kind of buckthorn called shittim, whose wood would be precious for cabinet-making (it is perhaps the shittim of the Bible), then the pepper-tree, which is but a false pepper plant, and finally the Judas-tree, do not suffice to make us regret this judgment.

They were fine oaks, fine poplars, fine walnuts or pecans, fine ash trees, ugly elms, Virginia junipers, wild vines, etc.; in short, all old things which — heavily damaged almost everywhere by fires, by the careless axe of the Americans, by the frosts, and soiled with immense secular debris — sadly carried our thoughts back amid our forests, our valleys, and our civilized dales of France.

If at least this Réunion bottom had offered to our eyes the sight of one of those fine rivers that furrow, brimful, all the soil of France!

But the West Fork, like almost all the rivers of America, flows unperceived in the midst of the forest, and in a bed so deeply ravined that one must be on the very edge to perceive its course ten meters below.

As for the name Réunion, it has to this day, alas! borne its destiny within it very badly, and each of our chapters will successively develop the causes.

From the very day after our arrival, I asked to see the springs (seven in number, the correspondence had said) that flowed in the dales by which the plateau of Réunion is bordered to the east and west.

I was led to the principal one.

The principal one, alas!… a few drops of water seeping painfully into a hole two or three meters deep… forming there, by their accumulation, a little reservoir, and losing itself a few meters farther on in a muddy ravine filled with brushwood.

Those of my friends who know, in the department of the Sarthe, the fine and perpetual spring of La Chapelle-Gaugain, and who know the fruitful irrigations I obtained from it, will understand what a wringing of the heart I must have felt at this sight.

Three conditions are necessary for a good establishment in the country: an elevated position, woods, and running water;

And this last condition, the most indispensable of the three, was lacking to us in so essential a manner — and that, "in one of the best-watered regions in the world!" (Au Texas, p. 289.)

I visited carefully, about a mile from our dwelling, the course of the West Fork, the nearest of the forks of the Trinity.

A great number of creeks or ravines pour into it the rainwater of our great valley.

By arresting the course of the river below the mouth of one of these creeks, by means of a dam whose materials are all there at hand, I clearly saw the possibility, the ease, of making the West Fork flow back into a canal, into some ditch crossing our cultivations and vivifying them, and of obtaining thus, besides, a motive power whose usefulness can dispense with being argued.

This was the object of my first proposal to M. Considérant, as I looked with him, from the top of the plateau, at that fine and long prairie without superficial arteries, and already giving, by the end of June, signs of deterioration little reassuring for the pastures and the harvests.

But M. Considérant answered me with one of those paternal smiles that the unreflecting and inexperienced ideas of children give rise to:

"Doctor, your ideas are truly the ideas of a giant!" "Did you not, then, proclaim us legion!" I answered him (au Texas, p. 174).

Was it not, moreover, the means of realizing for us that "superb system of irrigation with which Texas is endowed," and of establishing in America — "that homeland of realizations, an integral system of dietary bases, mills, ovens…" — all things announced by M. Considérant on pages 25, 49, and 100 of his book au Texas, and before the execution of which his practical spirit was going to fail in so fatal a manner?

Well, this dam — which, for M. Considérant, a former pupil of the Polytechnic School of France and a captain of engineers, then having about two million at his disposal; this dam, which seemed to him a giant's labor, and which we saw, with deep sorrow, despised and rejected like the vision of an old man in his second childhood; this dam was carried out a year later, two miles from Réunion, on banks much steeper than ours, not by a legion, nor even by certified engineers, but by two American carpenters, MM. Newton and Pendleton, who, with a turbine, drive a vertical saw and turn a millstone (saw and corn-mill).

MM. Newton and Pendleton stopped and settled near Réunion, on the strength of the ideas of association that seemed destined to preside over the works of this colony. Socialists by sentiment, they yet know nothing but the name of the science announced by Fourier; but while waiting until they can initiate themselves into it through the English translations whose publication has been begun at New York by the care of M. Brisbane, MM. Newton and Pendleton form part of the temperance society and are very exact observers of its regulations.

Their ladies form part of the society of the Bloomerists, whose law, announced by Madame Bloomer, consists in seeking, for women, a costume that combines, with elegance, conditions of salutary freedom for the body.

The costume adopted, for the present, has some resemblance to the costume of our French canteen-women, and its superiority over the balloons hooped with steel or whalebone does not seem to us to be open to dispute.

These balloons are very elegant, no doubt, in great drawing-rooms and on the broad armchairs that our great-grandmothers' panniers required; but when we see this costume so painfully and sometimes so ridiculously worn and tucked up in muddy streets, so singularly tossed and dented by the wind, or so unhappily crumpled on the narrow benches of our omnibuses and carriages, we cannot dispense with greatly preferring the Bloomerist costume for the immense majority of women who are obliged to travel on the public way otherwise than in vast coaches.

MM. Newton and Pendleton did not concern themselves with an irrigation canal, because they are industrialists and not farmers; whereas, granting that we should have to defer the works of a wide-mouthed canal, we could, by a simple furrow of the plough, traced on the indications of a most easy leveling, fertilize at least two hundred hectares of land and rapidly multiply its value tenfold.[^vi1]

[^vi1]: See in chapter XVI the calculation of the losses caused by our inertias.

This project, examined since with me by my friend M. Doderet — who has made a special study of irrigation and of the mechanical means that can be applied to it — this project seemed to him perfectly feasible and capable of amply repaying the costs it would have required.

To this fine result we should have added the use of the saws and the mills which we had, at such great cost, brought from France, and which M. Godin-le-Maire, one of our managers, had chosen with so much solicitude.

We should have saved them from the contempt with which they had been cast, by M. Cousin's order, under a shed where they rust and rot since their arrival; and, in their turn, they would have freed us from the enormous tributes paid to the American mills for our wood and our flour.[^vi2]

[^vi2]: I learn, on arriving in France, that M. Cousin has just sold the largest of these mills (November 1857): had it then been bought to be resold at a loss, and had the management, in buying it while M. Considérant was still in Europe, already "spoiled his plan"?

There was not even the pretext of uncertainty about the good setting-up of these machines: a skilled millwright, M. Pascal — who possesses in the Hautes-Alpes a sawmill and mills built by his own hands — had come on purpose to devote to the realization of this part of the idea his instruction, his devotion, and his tried practical experience.

But (one will scarcely believe such pettinesses) M. Pascal had come from the Hautes-Alpes with Dr. Nicolas, whose friend he is; and — the medical corps of Réunion being to be summed up in M. Roger, by virtue of the title of doctor that M. Considérant had granted him — M. Nicolas had been jeered at, from the outset, by M. Roger, then grossly insulted by M. Considérant's master gardener, M. Barbot, a friend of M. Roger; then sharply and magisterially admonished, on the occasion of his medical practice, by M. Considérant himself in the full dining hall; — and, by the natural law of ricochets under governments that know no justice but cronyism, M. Pascal, a modest and little-flattering man, was decreed incapable, and M. Considérant opened negotiations for the sale of our mills to the Americans.

M. Pascal, wishing, in agreement with a few friends, to spare our nascent colony the humiliation that was to result for it from such an act of mercantilism, asked to set up at his own expense the mill and the saws, and to work them at his own risk and peril in the capacity of tenant-farmer.

He offered also, in default of M. Considérant's initiative, to create a distillery of maize, of sorghum, and of wild fruits, and to try the manufacture of beer.

These latter proposals — which were, however, to answer so well, in M. Considérant's mind, to "that plan of individual appropriation" which he so accused the management and us of "having spoiled for him" — these proposals were not rejected less obstinately than the others; and M. Pascal, discouraged and indignant, set off again for his mountains without awaiting the end of the first year.

Was it not rather those departures that alone, then, made up M. Considérant's plan? It was more economical, in fact, to obtain, through discouragement, voluntary returns to Europe, than to "send back nine tenths of us at the society's expense" — which he would nevertheless have preferred, he says (du Texas, p. 12), had he been, or had he felt himself, "in a state to master the disastrous effect that such a blow would then have produced in Europe and on the spot."

Who would have believed that the eloquent translator of Rittinghausen's book on direct government had counted, had he dared, deportation among the springs of "his plan" of colonization?

He had said, on page 67 of his book au Texas: "From what you know of the atmospheric currents of Texas, you easily understand that there is no country in the world, Holland included, more favorable to the establishment of windmills, and where this mechanism is more powerfully called for — for the raising of water, for the grindings, for the manufacture of oils, the sawing of wood, and a hundred other objects.

"Well! there is not a single windmill in the country!"

In default of the watermill and its motor-irrigator, which were so inconceivably refused us, we did not doubt that at least the windmill, so precisely indicated in the book, would unite all the votes and would soon raise its glorious flag.

M. de Vry, a Belgian engineer, and M. Dailly each presented a plan and an estimate, which were not accepted by M. Considérant.

I then reminded him of the plan of our friend M. Franchot, whose ideas in mechanics are so remarkably powerful, though so sparing of springs.

"But he has not yet taken out a patent of invention," the master answered me. "Well, if you wrote to him and proposed to him, in the name of our society, the advance of the cost of his patents, on condition of a share in the products?" "Did we come here to take out patents?"

Such was M. Considérant's reply, and "the breeze, that crown of all the benefits that nature seems to have been pleased to gather upon the high Texas" (au Texas, p. 49), continues to refresh us, but ashamed (we fear) of the little care the chief of the Phalansterian School has shown in making it play, in our industry, the great role to which its constancy seems to have predestined it.

A little disconcerted by all these refusals, rather bitterly meted out by our friend M. Considérant, and still hesitating to scrutinize causes that appeared to us in spite of ourselves, I resolved to address myself to another element.

I had employed all my evenings, since my arrival and for several weeks, in tracing paths on the slope of our plateau, in order to seek there, in the midst of the thick thicket that covers it, a place suitable for the opening of a cellar.

I had at last found, in the shade of several great oaks, an almost perpendicular space, where the preparatory works would have required very little time.

I gathered my friends of the Nuremberg and proposed to them to undertake, as a work of devotion, the digging of this cellar.

I did not even have the thought of setting forth its usefulness to them: everyone knew too well that, for want of a cellar, we were condemned to hot water, to spoiled meat, and to the deprivation of milk, butter, cheese, and all fermented drinks.

My proposal was acclaimed, and in the space of three days almost all the workers of the colony had come to sign this act of devotion, which consisted, for each, in devoting every day, gratuitously, one hour of his time to this work, and two hours every Sunday.

It was proposed, to avoid crowding, to form groups that would share for this work the three or four hours of rest in the middle of the day.

Our excavation was to be made in a mass of blue schist, very compact, surmounted by a thick layer of limestone that would form the vault.

I had proposed, as a first plan, susceptible of indefinite extension, the adoption of a gallery four meters wide, three high, fifteen long, ending in a transept destined to facilitate the maneuvers of a little cart that might be assigned to the cellar's service.

On the sides would be dug, as needs arose, vaults more or less deep.

Our friend M. Daly, the founder of the Revue d'Architecture, had had the kindness to draw us the plan of the entrance door, to which, without departing from conditions of the greatest simplicity, he had known how to give a very satisfactory monumental character.

MM. Dailly and Capy had done the leveling works.

M. Renier, a skilled stone-cutter, had accepted the cutting of the door in the solid rock, and the conduct of the excavation.

Already the first group had cleared the ground of all the brushwood that encumbered it, when M. Considérant, moved by this movement to which he had remained a stranger — he, as well as his two Belgian aides-de-camp, MM. Roger and Cousin — took the trouble to come and find us on the worksite itself.

"So you want to make a cellar there?" "Yes." "Have you sufficiently calculated all the difficulties of such a work — the consistency of the soil, the possibility of seeing it form a solid vault, the perseverance of the workers? etc., etc." "The well thirty meters deep that was dug on the summit of the plateau allowed MM. Dailly and Capy to examine and measure exactly the thickness, the nature, and the consistency of the layers in which we are to operate. There is certainty of possibility. There are several of us here who come from the banks of the Loir and the Loire, where the soil is deeply pierced with similar underground passages. M. Renier, besides, has experience of these works, and I think you may be easy, since our friend M. Daly has been good enough to take the direction of it and the social treasury has no need to concern itself with it." "But could you not have chosen a better site, nearer the kitchen, with which the cellar must have continual relations?" "Your observation is very just, and if you will have the kindness to point out to us the spot you have in view, we shall all be too happy to see you take an interest in this work not to defer to your advice."

The worksite was indeed immediately changed. New levelings were calculated, and I at once added to the first conception the idea of a corresponding shaft from the kitchen to the cellar, giving a wide current of air so useful to both establishments and containing, by means of pulleys, a most economical to-and-fro for the service.

Besides these arrangements, everyone glimpsed, at need, in these underground works, shelters cool in summer and warm in winter.

But this understanding which, for the first time, seemed to be establishing itself between M. Considérant and the Phalansterians, evidently did not suit MM. Roger and Cousin. Their attitude always apart, their ironical smiles, their sour little remarks, their bitter criticisms of the French and of the French spirit — all that created for them the unhappy role of representatives of that bad side of the Belgian spirit which compromises that worthy nation by enviously denigrating French works, all the while counterfeiting them.

This underground labor of envious denigration — begun from Brussels and proved by the state of enmity, since avowed, in which M. Roger had taken charge of the secret surveillance of M. Cantagrel, who believed him his friend; this labor, which received a powerful support that we do not wish to discuss, so as to enter as little as possible into household details, had embittered, deteriorated, and really debased the character of M. Considérant, whose former comrades still extol his earlier excellence, while having difficulty in recognizing him thus counterfeited.

This labor of discord — fed by conversations furtively overheard through the disjointed planks of our cabins, or surprised at night amid the shadows of the prairie and maliciously reported — this labor did not delay in manifesting its dissolving action on the work of unity I have just described. The group of the gardener Barbot was the first to cease its support; then at last the groups of the Nuremberg — preoccupied with interests still more immediate, whose settlement was tarrying far too long — became discouraged one after another under the rolling fire of the calumnious sarcasms of which they were the object, and abandoned us all.

For a long time one saw us alone, in the evening — like, formerly, under the Restoration, the workman of the triumphal arch of the Étoile — continuing, in hope of better times, this work which finally had to be given up, the legion dissolving more and more every day, with no hope of return.

If M. Considérant's irritations and repulsions had had only me for their object, and if he had been in direct harmony with the interests I believed I ought to help defend, I should certainly have abstained; and however unjust he might have been, I should, in withdrawing, have resolved, in the general interest, the personal difficulty that would have concerned me; but the malevolence of the executive agent was systematic: it attacked the Phalansterian spirit and all those who wished its manifestation through works. It evidently wished, by discouraging them, to force them to deport themselves, and thus to free itself of the care "of sending them back at the society's expense." (Du Texas, p. 12.) It was therefore legitimate to remain united to the imposing majority that this unintelligent despotism so obstinately persecuted.

The following example will justify the preceding paragraph.

On the 5th of July, our friend M. Charles Burcly[^burkli6] arrived at Réunion, leading a group of twenty Swiss, whose generally vigorous and energetic appearance promised the colony an excellent reinforcement.

[^burkli6]: Karl (Charles) Bürkli, here Frenchified as "Burcly" by Savardan (a form variously disfigured by the OCR as Burely, Burdy, Bqrcly). The Swiss delegate who raised 150,000 francs at Zurich for the colony and left after a few months.

Two fine young girls, the Mesdemoiselles Baër, with their mother, then four little children, then another good mother of a family, also promised precious auxiliaries for the administration of the associative household and for the founding of our infant-school.

By contrast with the Nuremberg group, which had fallen almost completely into disgrace, MM. Roger and Cousin were inexhaustible in praises of the Swiss group, and we wholeheartedly chimed in with them, although they made of it an object of comparison with us, repeating with a malevolent affectation: "Well and good, here at least are men."

All the works soon had their excellent reinforcement of Swiss; but MM. Roger and Cousin, in praising so warmly these worthy co-emigrants, proved that the master's thought had not yet clearly revealed itself to their minds. M. Considérant then no more wanted "his friend M. Burcly, former member of the grand council of Zurich" (au Texas, p. 80), nor the group that, with his assent, the latter had brought him, than he wanted the previously arrived groups.

The proof of this repulsive will did not long keep itself waiting: six months later, nineteen out of twenty of this elite group had left the colony, discouraged by the derisory conditions of existence that the executive agent made for them.

From his arrival, M. Burcly had concerned himself with the question of the tannery, of which he had made, practically, at Zurich, a special study.

A fresh oxhide, or simply sun-dried, is worth one dollar in Texas.

It is worth eight dollars when it has been softened and put out of reach of the attacks of worms and insects by macerations in a bath of ashes and alum.

It is worth, finally, twenty to twenty-five dollars when it has been transformed into workable leather by the operations of the tannery; and so, relatively, with the hides of all the other animals.

Now, in a country where the raw material costs so little and where bad footwear — the product of imperfect machines — costs so dear, the question of the tannery and then of the shoemaking was bound to be one of the essential preoccupations of our colony.

Our friend M. Burcly had courageously devoted himself to this work.

He had laboriously built with his own hands a dam in the creek of the dale that borders our plateau to the east. He had formed there a sheet of water sufficient for the washing of the hides.

He had arranged a site for the vats, and by conveying there the ashes of the colony's hearths, he had been able to begin the first preparations.

He needed tannin: the oak and sumac brushwood that surrounded us was not to let him lack it, and, for want of a mill to grind the barks, he cut into small fragments the slender branches of the brushwood of which we have just spoken, and their maceration in water furnished a perfectly sufficient quantity of tannin.

This rudiment of an establishment lacked only a shed indispensable for putting the workers and their tools out of reach of the sun and the rain; but his request was not only constantly repulsed by M. Considérant, but moreover the felling of the brushwood destined to produce tan was severely qualified as "ravaging of the property."

Such reproaches, though ridiculous, led none the less to discouragement, when one thought that the destiny of an enterprise like ours, and the fate of so many worthy people, depended on an intelligence so essentially impoverished.

All practical questions were treated by M. Considérant with the same power of reason.

We complained every day of the small quantity of cattle (8 cows[?]) the colony possessed and of the deprivation of dairy that resulted from it, when this food would have been so necessary to make up for the bad feeding of which we have spoken before.

We complained of not possessing, instead of a score of old horses, a group of fine mares whose offspring are of the easiest sale in all America.

We complained of the purchase of butcher's meat at the rate of twelve to fifteen dollars a head, when the possession of a herd of a few hundred head would have procured it for us at half the price.

We complained of possessing neither pigs nor sheep — a kind of livestock whose profits had been so vaunted by the book (au Texas, p. 89), and which, by giving us the variety of food necessary to the preservation of health, would have dispensed us from the obligation of killing oxen on days of great heat, and of serving on our tables, or throwing to the dump, enormous quantities of meat too rapidly putrefied.

To all these claims, M. Considérant — remembering no more either the sumptuous budget of pages 129 to 131 of his book, or the story of the tailor Bourgeois's so prolific sow (au Texas, p. 89), a story of which the latter has, moreover, kept no greater memory — M. Considérant answered us that the more cattle one had, the more one was exposed to losing them by epizootics.

If these answers and this conduct had not had as witnesses all the members of the colony's council, I should perhaps have hesitated to point them out, so difficult are they to explain and to believe.

Be that as it may, under their influence, many eyes turned back toward Europe, and resolutions of departure fixed themselves more and more.

Our friend M. Burcly himself, so devoted to our work and to M. Considérant, but having confidence no longer in either the one or the other in Texas, spoke discouraged, like M. Pascal, and went off to seek in Central America that climate and those tropical plants which the book had, as to us, so solemnly promised him and which were so completely lacking to us.

But it must be said too that M. Burcly, like all of us, would have pardoned the book the compromising errors it has committed in such great number — and which each page of this work will successively demonstrate — if the author had redeemed them by the remembrance and the realization of his teachings and his promises; and all of us, though deceived in a host of our hopes, but thinking that the whole earth must enjoy the benefits of the social organization that is the object of our Christian faith, we should have attached ourselves to this plateau of Réunion, despite its climate of extremes, and we should have made it fruitful, had not egoism, pride, and laziness taken offense at the zeal and the efforts of devotion, and had they not had the power to paralyze them.

From our arrival, our very skilled locksmith, M. Brunet, had observed that the field forge, which formed part of our road baggage, was of too small a dimension to suffice for the works relating to agriculture.

M. Considérant advised him to build himself, in the fashion of some American blacksmiths — that is to say, with tree trunks, mud, and stones — a forge in the open air.

M. Brunet observed to him that these American blacksmiths used it thus only for want of being able to do better, and that, having moreover only rare jobs, they could choose their hours; whereas he, obliged to work the whole day, could do so with difficulty under a sun of sixty degrees, or during the rains, or again during the great breezes that would carry far off the coals of his hearth, with great dangers of fire.

But M. Considérant held firm, the most destitute Americans being bound, according to him, before all and in everything, to serve us as models.

M. Brunet therefore built his forge, which cost thirty dollars.

Scarcely built, one of those sudden and violent gusts of wind, so common in this region, swept away the hearth, kindled the dry grass of the prairie, communicated the fire to the surrounding coppices, and for half a day devoured two or three hectares of wood, a hundred and fifty meters from our dwellings.

One understood then the dangers of the open air and the necessity of a shed, and the shed was decreed.

This fire put us, for the first time, in the presence of one of those great fires whose striking depiction we had read with such lively interest in Fenimore Cooper's novel entitled The Prairie.

The seat of the fire — fortunately circumscribed on one side by the road that descends into the valley, on another side by a creek, and above by the plateau where it had begun — was separated from the saddlery building only by three or four meters of open space, and the wind was rapidly pushing the flaming wave in that direction.

A brave and worthy American, our friend M. Steere — who, from a teacher of music and English, had made himself a carpenter — took charge with me of the defense of this dangerous point; but this defense was easy.

We remembered the stories in which Hawkeye, Leatherstocking, or the Old Trapper — that admirable hero of Fenimore Cooper — had taught us how one makes oneself master of a fire by which one is threatened or surrounded, and which pursues you with a rapidity that even a horse's speed does not always escape.

We gathered several heaps of dry grass and wood, to which we set fire. This fire spread to the brushwood and marched to meet the great blaze, clearing little by little the approaches of the saddlery, which was soon sufficiently isolated and out of all danger.

A few weeks later (it is in autumn that everywhere systematically begin these great burnings, destined either to make clean ground for the plough or to facilitate the renewal of the pastures), I had set out, one evening, shortly before sunset, to go visit, two miles from Réunion, a sick American. MM. Cantagrel and Burcly were lighting, at the moment of my departure, the dry grass of a high prairie that is separated from our dwellings only by the dale whose burning we have just recalled.

On my return (it was pitch-dark night), I saw outlined from afar, in a vast circumference of more than a square mile, the blaze that had been but a spark at the moment of my departure; and when I was on the bank of that flaming sea, the spectacle was composed of a considerable number of streams of fire, separated by the spaces already burned, and undulating, winding, rolling, now rapidly, now slowly, according to the impulse of the breeze, and forming, in short, the most marvelous illumination I have ever been able to dream or to see, even at the Opera.

Three months later, the forge, built of mud, required a reconstruction. The continual play of the bellows and the action of the sun on the bad materials of which it was formed had completely dislocated it.

We asked that our stone-cutter and the limestone whose qualities the book (au Texas, p. 132) vaunted to us be admitted to begin there the production of their proofs. We were refused.

Yet the locksmith and the stone-cutter were so well persuaded, with us, that this was the only judicious thing to do, that we took upon ourselves to urge them, in spite of all, to build of cut stone, even should we have to discharge from our own purse the price of this work, in case of the administration's refusal.

The forge was therefore thus built. M. Considérant greeted it with this exclamation: "A monumental forge!"

M. Roger saluted it sourly with this sentence: "The frog will be eaten the sooner."

For our part, we comparatively drew up, and presented to the council of administration, the estimate of the two forges, and by a most happy chance they cost exactly the same price, thirty dollars each. The last, that monumental forge, has three cubic meters of masonry.

The only difference there was between them is that the first, having but one hearth, had lasted three months, whereas the second, which has two hearths and two bellows, has functioned for two years without any deterioration and will live yet another twenty years, if M. Cousin does not carry out the threat he has made to demolish it, stigmatizing it still today (1857),[^date57] in aping his master, with the name of monument.

[^date57]: Printed "1837" here and in several other places in the chapter; read 1857, the year in which Savardan writes (the book appears in 1858).

It was the same with the paving of the kitchen and the bakery; the same again with the chimneys of the cottage built for M. Considérant. Everywhere and always his groanings, his complaints, and the bilious and acid criticisms of his two Belgians on every idea and every realization having the character of solidity, of permanence, and of will — in short, of a serious associative fixing on this plateau.

The oven is yet another striking example of this: it was a portable oven, of sheet-iron, whose interior construction, with an iron framework, was very ingenious but complicated, and could no longer suffice, by its narrowness, for the needs of the population.

It was a question of a new construction. M. Cousin, and with him M. Considérant, wanted a copy, on a larger scale, of the portable oven. The locksmith and the tinsmith, consulted, declared that this work — which can be done cheaply in Belgium, in special workshops equipped ad hoc, and where labor and iron are at low prices — would necessarily undergo here, in quite different conditions, a considerable increase.

The bakers, for their part, insisted on a brick oven.

The stone-cutter offered to build one whose price would rise to a hundred dollars at most.

M. Cousin held firm for his Belgian oven; M. Considérant required that the brick oven be given up, and after a long suspension of works necessitated by a winter so rigorous that M. Considérant himself called it "exceptional, unheard-of," we had the great sheet-iron oven, very well executed, but which, all accounts made, came to two hundred dollars and satisfied the bakers no more than the previous one had done.

Lime was to be a precious conquest in an establishment like ours. Our stone-cutter was persuaded that this limestone — indicated by the book, and on which our whole plateau rests — would give good products for the making of mortar; but mortar, that serves to make walls, solid and thick things that can protect against the great heats and the great colds, and it was becoming, unfortunately, more and more evident every day that M. Considérant absolutely wanted nothing solid at Réunion.

Nevertheless M. Renier, the stone-cutter, employed his hours of rest in the construction of a very little lime-kiln, on which he heaped debris from the quarry. He spent three days and three nights keeping up the fire there, and he obtained good lime, which was used for the laying of the foundations of a house, but which, instead of the thanks he was well entitled to expect, earned him only discouraging reflections on the right he had arrogated to himself of doing a work that had not been ordered of him.

It was thus that at every step, in practice, that liberty so solemnly promised in theory (au Texas, p. 113) was treated.

There was, however, one point of our works with which M. Considérant showed himself quite particularly preoccupied — that was the clearings.

"If at least," he said, "I could announce this year in Europe that we have a thousand acres cleared!"

Nothing more legitimate, indeed, than such a wish; but the idea of its immediate realization could germinate in a brain — otherwise so remarkably furnished with mathematics and with purely speculative ideas — only in the shade of the most complete ignorance of the things of agriculture.

No doubt, as he had said in his book (au Texas, p. 104), "it is the material needs that must, before all, be provided for;" but the least harvest that a thousand acres can produce is two thousand hectoliters, and even had we been to see our population — which did not then reach the half of it — rise to three hundred inhabitants the following year, and each person consuming, on average, only four hectoliters, our provisions of wheat would have exceeded our annual needs by seven or eight hundred hectoliters.

That would have been a fine reserve;

But where to lodge and where to preserve from the rain these two thousand hectoliters?

But before thinking of their lodging, there would be needed seven ploughmen ploughing every day, without accidents, without repairs, without illnesses, for six months, with seventy oxen led by seven ox-drivers;

There would be needed every day, for the harvest, during an average of fifteen days, fifty mowers, or four good mowing machines, and some fifty helpers for the swathing;

Then, finally, all the work of the threshing, etc.

Now, we had not then a quarter of the elements indispensable to all these things, and it was evident that this preoccupation — predominating in M. Considérant's mind over those that the various industrial establishments of which I have just spoken, and particularly the composition of our herds, ought to have given him — it was evident, I say, that this preoccupation could lead us only to put the plough before the oxen.

This question, brought several times into discussion, probably led the executive agent to think that the direction of agriculture ought not absolutely to form part of his attributions, and he did me one day, in the presence of the council, the honor of asking me whether I would take charge of it. I accepted.

I had confidence in these words of the book (au Texas, pp. 112 and 113):

"What is to be done for the constitution of the desired organism?

"To leave to the elective affinities of the elements present, to the free play of their reciprocal activities, the labor of this constitution."

I at once made, by means of a notice, an appeal to all those who, from near or far, by profession or by taste, wished to devote all or part of their time to agriculture, and we found ourselves, one Sunday, some thirty gathered under the great shed.

I had prepared a list of the various works that concern agriculture, and I urged the members of the meeting to have themselves inscribed in those of the indicated categories for which they felt a vocation and some portion of usefulness.

From the clearing of the prairie to the raking of the garden paths; from the care of the teams to that of the rabbits; from the harvest of the wheat to that of the small flower seeds; from the cow-house to the henhouse — in short, from the cedar to the hyssop — we had soon composed a score of groups which all found their officers, happy to glimpse a congenial organization of their works of affection.

Each of us understood perfectly that each of these groups must have a chief, elected by the members of the group, and that each of these chiefs, after consulting his collaborators, would join the other chiefs to form a council of agriculture, from which would emanate proposals on which the colony's council of administration would pronounce.

We adjourned to the following Sunday the elections that were to complete this organization. I wished, in the interval, to take the advice of M. Considérant and of the council on the whole of this little electoral movement; but I did not delay in seeing the few uncertainties that preoccupied me cease on this subject:

"What!… doctor!… groups!… chiefs of groups!… and elections!…" cried M. Considérant. "And it is thus that you claim to do agriculture!… But you are mad, then!… Ah! do not speak to me of such things!…

"—So be it," I answered; "but, as everyone has his principles or his routine in the exercise of a function, I must either have the liberty of employing the means that seem to me the best, or abstain."

And I abstained, persuaded more and more that M. Considérant did not look with a favorable eye on the understanding of the "elective affinities," and did not wish to favor "the free play of their reciprocal activities."

I abstained, remembering that in the book au Texas, pp. 12 and 13, one reads that the languor of the interesting colony of New Jersey is due "to the absolute lack of the serial organism," and rightly astonished that the author should show himself so hostile to the inauguration of that organism.

To all these oppositions, to all these repulsions, did M. Considérant supply other views, counsels, some impulse given to the workers and the works? No — nothing, absolutely nothing but his bitter and sterile criticisms. His aim, his plan (the sequel has proved it too well), was purely and simply, and for want of a spirit of direction, the discouragement and the dismissal of the "nine tenths of the persons accumulated on the spot." (Du Texas, p. 12.)

In this disposition of mind — which a man more strongly tempered would have loyally avowed and proclaimed, instead of dissembling it "for fear of not being able to master its disastrous effect" (p. 12) — it was natural that M. Considérant should not treat the intellectual needs any better.

He had wished (au Texas, p. 107) that "these be stimulated by the organization of rival schools, by a nucleus of a library and reading-rooms, so that the agricultural and working population of the first phase should feel itself raised in dignity and in noble ambition… by the culture of its intelligence."

He had taught (pp. 107 and 108) that "the collective culture of music was as pressing here as that of the fields and gardens, and that, for the satisfaction of the moral needs, one must provide for the creation, in a certain measure, of social pleasures: assembly halls, games, dances, café, education and artistic enjoyments, festivals — in short, collective luxury and a first sketch of a theatrical stage (reminiscence of the theater hall of Condé-sur-Vesgres)."

Finally he had proclaimed (p. 108) that "these elements of the first phase, which have answered the first call of the generating idea, have also — if they have come with the legitimate desire and the well-founded hope of finding well-being — brought the notion of a great social aim, the sentiment of human solidarity, the modern faith of humanity, etc., etc."

And finally he had said that "Sunday is naturally consecrated to the regular and periodic action of the spoken word, of the verb — to the collective elucidation of the social aim and of the common faith, to the higher and free education of the soul, of general ideas, and of the unityist or religious sentiments of the population."

Well! what came of all these fine things? — Nothing! absolutely nothing!

Oh! yes; something… something hard to say: always the negation, the refusal, the contempt, the calumny, then finally the destruction of all that the men of zeal and faith propose or attempted in this path.

M. Capy had opened, and he continued for two years, a course of vocal music after the Chevé method. How was this "collective culture, as pressing as that of the fields and gardens" (au Texas, pp. 107 and 108), received by the founder?

Never did he deign — not only to present himself a single time at this course — but even to honor the teacher with a single word of encouragement.

A single time Madame Considérant was willing to address a few words on this subject to M. Capy, but to criticize what she called the exclusivism of the inventors of the method.

We had proposed the organization of three rival schools of gardening. This harmonic creation needed, in order to succeed, only a few conciliating words from the founder. M. Barbot, with his second, M. Taupin, was at the head of the great garden. The group of the doctors' garden, of which I shall speak presently, devoted itself, in its leisure hours, to modest works, but which, on certain points, could very well sustain the competition. Finally, a former director of cultivation of the Sig colony, M. Reverchon — who had wished to live alone with his son at the McCracken farm — had created there a garden for his personal use.

On these three points, horticulture could be carried on concurrently, with very great advantages for the colony and for the very difficult studies that this so varied branch of agriculture requires under a climate of extremes and of temperature variations exasperating by their abruptness; but the founder knew how to favor only discord, by persecuting the disinterested and devoted labor and by exalting — without knowing anything whatever about it — the enormously more costly than productive labor of the great garden.

M. Barbot, a vigorous market-gardener-laborer from the environs of Paris, had been instituted by M. Considérant general director of horticulture, including the plantations and the nurseries, with five to six hundred dollars of salary a year.

Now M. Barbot, whom we saw at work, had not even the routine notion of plantations, no more for the choice of sites and their arrangement than for the setting of the trees in place.

And so the three thousand dollars and more that he spent for the creation of the great garden did not produce three hundred of them, and the nurseries he planted there, at great cost, in regular quincunxes, are perfectly frozen and withered.

As for M. Reverchon, his three months of directing the cultivation of the Sig and his misanthropic isolation at McCracken furnished few materials for appraising his capacity. His conversation is that of an educated man; his mind is cultivated, but his character seems to resemble much the climate of extremes and of sudden variations of Texas. Finally, I have kept of the rectitude of his judgment an impression that I leave to each the care of determining under the influence of this sentence, which he several times repeated in the colony and during his journey:

"I have acquired very extensive knowledge in agriculture, and that was bound to be, since I have spent three hundred thousand francs of my fortune in agricultural experiments."

A collection of good books — products of gifts made to the colony by devoted Phalansterians believing, like us, in M. Considérant's promises — have remained, since their arrival, heaped pell-mell in a garret, without its having been possible to obtain — we will not say, like the book, "reading-rooms" (p. 107) — but even a few shelves where, without changing their humble abode, one might at least range them and find them when the population wished to "raise itself in dignity and in noble ambition by the culture of its intelligence."

Today (1857), M. Cousin, who does little reading, sells these books to whoever wishes to buy them. What are the donors going to think and say?

To answer "the sentiment of human solidarity, that modern faith of humanity, which the elements of the first phase had brought with them" (p. 109), I asked, from our arrival, that some place or other be arranged and consecrated, as an infirmary, to the care of the sick who might wish to let themselves be transported there.

We could obtain this establishment only in 1856, and a year later (1857) M. Cousin began, by its suppression, the use of the powers M. Considérant had confided to him.

On the arrival of the Swiss, we believed in the establishment of the institution that has always seemed to me fundamental in our work — the school of the children.

M. Gaspard Baër, a former pupil of Pestalozzi, author of an excellent biographical notice of that great man, which he completed very intelligently by the serious study of the admirable views of Charles Fourier on education; M. Baër, father of four children, endowed with an admirable character of gentleness and patience, speaking German, French, and English, having solid theoretical and practical knowledge in agriculture, having, with all his family, the sentiment and the practice of fine German music — M. Baër was really a gift of Providence for the Phalansterian work of Texas.

He could, at need, be perfectly seconded by another Swiss schoolmaster, an excellent nature too, M. Vogel.

On their arrival, the constitution of the society of Réunion was being elaborated in the thought — for a moment reawakened — of M. Considérant.

I urged M. Baër, while awaiting the provisions of this constitution, to gather and to begin the direction of a dozen children who wandered without supervision in our midst, to the detriment of many moral and material things.

We did not doubt then that a suitable position — though modest at first — would be made for him by the act that was being prepared, and his devotion would have contented itself with it.

The American settlers who surround the plateau of Réunion awaited with impatience the creation of our school, in order to send their children there, and their subventions would have sufficed for the greater part of our costs.

But M. Considérant answered our questions and our solicitations on this subject that it was absurd to think of creating a school with twelve or fifteen children, and that there would be time to see to it when we had fifty of them.

Then, the act of the society of Réunion being finished, M. Baër and M. Vogel were placed in the category of the workers at three and a half sous an hour, that is, thirty-five sous a day for ten hours of work.

We shall see later, on the 7th of May 1856, M. Considérant display the finest zeal for the establishment of a school — at a time when the number of children had not varied, when the schoolmasters had left, and when the dissolution of the society of Réunion was resolved upon.

The Mesdames Baër had the liberty of entering the category of the linen-room (washing and ironing), and the worthy women tried it and were obliged to give it up.

The first portion of this work, the washing, was a work so badly organized and so painful that the most energetic constitutions and the most devoted natures wore themselves out at it.

One had to go, in all weathers, a mile from the dwellings, spend whole days on the bank of the West Fork — now a torrent, now a puddle of putrefied water — to endure there heats of thirty-five to forty-five degrees in the shade in summer, colds of ten degrees and more in winter, and the storm rains with which the country is watered about once every month.

And so the worthy Baër family abandoned Réunion for want of being able to live there, and went to Dallas to seek some resources in a small trade of which it understood little, and which it left to create, near Fort Worth, a farm in which it soon lacked both the muscular force and the sufficient capital.

Finally, it came back down, ruined or nearly so, toward New Orleans, leaving M. Considérant a subject of remorse to which I know no extenuating circumstance.

"The Sunday that was to be so naturally consecrated to the regular and periodic action of the spoken word, of the verb" (au Texas, p. 108) — above all in a country where the force of habit prevails, even with respect to the abstention from all work during this seventh day, over the liberty that the law has consecrated — Sunday heard no more than the other days the word announced and promised. All awaited it, all desired it, all felt more or less its importance; but all felt more and more that the founder — very preoccupied with his work from the point of view of the consequences it might have for him personally — lacked essentially in solicitude for the consequences it might have for others.

People danced, it is true, on Sunday evening, and that was a wrong in a country where this day is wholly consecrated to religious observance; but our friend M. Allen had managed — by a few warm and eloquent improvisations addressed to the Americans of the environs who attended these balls out of curiosity, and who ended by taking part in them — to make them understand that in France we had not, like them, two days of rest, one consecrated to worship and the other, Saturday, consecrated to pleasures; that these two things, both essential in different degrees, shared the same day.

This explanation had been very favorably received and would have perfectly sufficed, had the morning been, indeed, consecrated to the teachings of the verb.

In America, one does not ask what a man's religion is, because all enjoy the same liberty; but, in case of doubt, one asks whether it could be true that such a man had no religion — which appears either a monstrosity or a madness.

Our neighbors believed, for some time, that we had one, to which they showed themselves very sympathetic by listening to the singing lesson to which M. Capy had obtained from his pupils the consecration of two hours every Sunday; but the general discouragement having caused it to be abandoned, and this appearance of worship disappearing, the question remained judged to our detriment, and for a long time. It would take many meetings (public assemblies) to raise up here the Phalansterian School from this grave judgment.

This discouragement made me too abandon the project of a course of hygiene, whose plan — embracing material, intellectual, and moral hygiene — would have had, I hoped, interest and usefulness for everyone.

It would have contained a summary study: 1. of the anatomy of each organ and of its functions from the triple point of view of which I have just spoken; 2. of the causes that can disturb that organ in its normal life; 3. and finally of the means that can best preserve it from the influence of those causes.

In this course, and on the occasion of each organ, would have been placed the teachings that our forefathers so naively transmitted to us under the title of Civility, Childlike and Honest.

The milieu in which one is born imprints — it cannot be contested — upon all the rest of life a stamp very difficult to efface. The usage of the world — that kind of very complicated science which constitutes, in the expression of thought as in the habits of the body, what is called a man of tact, or at least a well-bred man — is almost always acquired only with great difficulty and imperfectly, when one has not learned it at the same time as one's mother tongue.

This course — from which most of my friends hoped a useful influence on the tone of the general and particular relations in the colony — this course was obliged to return to the files, like all that was proposed to the executive agent for the improvement of the material, financial, intellectual, and moral lot of the emigrants.

"It was well worth the trouble" (let us not forget it), "it was well worth the trouble" (he had answered us at Houston, see p. 47) "to come to this land of liberty only to submit to such constraints."

More and more discouraged by these continual contradictions between the book and its author, we thought, Dr. Nicolas and I, that nothing better remained for us to do than to go, like Candide, dig our garden.

We could invoke the book again in support of this resolution; for it had (p. 26) spoken of "gardens radiant with flowers."

It had said that "all our European cultivations succeed marvelously." (P. 49.)

It had said again that "all that came without watering, without weeding, without care of any kind…" (P. 46.)

It had added: "Explain it as one will, once the garden is made, the weeds respect it." (P. 46.)

Finally it had ended with this conclusion:

"These things have the air of fairy tales." (P. 46.)

These things had indeed, in fact, perfectly the air of fairy tales! and we, and Dr. Nicolas, and so many others — gardeners by aptitude and in fact all our lives — we had believed, or rather we had wished to believe, and we had affirmed these things.

The wise folk, proud of their wisdom, are going to believe that we must be much humiliated by this immense power of credulity. Well, let them undeceive themselves! We too, we are proud, on the contrary, of that powerful faith which can believe in miracles that reason rejects; of that faith without which one moves nothing, not even mountains; because if this gift of heaven is often fatal to those who have received it, it nevertheless carries with it its reward, by raising them above the monotonous vegetative life of the so-called wise of this world. People of faith (we still have, for consolation, this faith deeply graven in our soul) are predestined to see God much sooner than the others. It is of them that Jesus Christ spoke when he said:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs."

Let the wise — let the orderly and prudent folk, for whom the oceans and the deserts are no less antipathetic than the vast fields of ideas, and who, in the one as in the other, do not think they ought to allow their wisdom more than the flight of a capon; let those, understanding better the respect that the devotions of faith deserve — without which there would have been no martyrs, neither in religion, nor in the profession of arms, nor in the sciences, nor in the arts, nor in the practice of charity — let those, we say, reserve their pity for the men who, after having raised and overexcited such manifestations of faith, do not know the first word of the immense use one can make of them; who abandon, while calumniating them, "the legions" they had claimed to draw out of the captivity of Egypt, and who force them into dispersion, without even having tried to make gush from the rock the water that was to slake their thirst and water their fields, and without having made shine before their eyes a single ray "of that new light of the burning bush" with which they said themselves illumined, and which they had so pompously announced to the world.

For our part, who could not yet renounce the hope of the resurrection of Moses, we sought meanwhile all the paths where our aptitudes could be exercised usefully for others and agreeably for us.

We had read, on page 113 of the book au Texas, that "the first social nucleus would be instituted in the best conditions of strength, of health, and of activity relatively to the state of its elements, by the liberty left to the elective affinities of the elements present, to the free play of their reciprocal activities."

I had therefore believed that I could freely devote myself to the henceforth dominant innocent passion of my mind — the laying out and the planting of gardens.

Dr. Nicolas having, for his part, the corresponding passion for sowing and for the cultivation of plants, our elective affinities came to an understanding again on this point, and we sought together the place where our reciprocal activities could be exercised.

We visited successively all the springs of our territory, and we recognized with sorrow that all of them — one only excepted, perhaps — were nothing other than points of outflow of the rainwater, which were bound necessarily to dry up when "the rains, balanced as if for a watering on demand" (au Texas, p. 49), came to fail, as they had done for eleven months the previous year, and as they did again the year of our arrival (1855), and as they did in 1856 and especially in 1857.

The spring that seemed to us to make an exception — because its level corresponds with the sheet of water that feeds the wells of the garden — that one would have consoled us, although it furnishes hardly more than one or two cubic centimeters of water per second; but it is more than a mile from our dwellings, on the section which, from the name of its seller, bears the name of Horton. We were obliged to give it up.

Dr. Nicolas, in haste to put into the ground the numerous seeds he had brought from the Hautes-Alpes, called me back toward the poor spring of our eastern dale, and, in despair of anything better, we resolved to begin there, near it, a clearing.

The resolution once taken, the works went on energetically, and dead trees and brushwood, and snakes of all kinds, fell pell-mell under our blows.

The enclosure we had adopted for our first works contained about an acre and a half (sixty ares), taken from a dale whose surface is no less than a hundred hectares.

M. Considérant came again to find us there, as he had done at the cellar. That day, he had come with our friend M. Cantagrel. He sat down sadly on a dead tree trunk that the vigorous axe of our good colleague had just thrown to the ground, and after a few seconds he said to us with a kind of effort:

"Well! you want, then, to destroy this grove?" "You are mistaken: we want to rid it of the dead trees and the brushwood that disfigure it, to trace there paths that allow one to walk in it, and to clear some parts of it in order to sow and to plant there." "But I see you felling young and fine trees…" And he pointed out to us a stalk of oak about two meters high, sprung up with several others on an old burned stump.

We answered him with a kind of vivacity:

"This is not called a tree, but a branch of coppice, without value and without future, and I am vexed to be obliged to teach you, you, a thing so elementary. Allow me to add this too: We have been, all our lives, M. Nicolas and I, owners, creators, and cultivators of gardens; let us do, then, and suffer, we beg you, that our old experience believe itself dispensed from having recourse to yours in such a matter."

After a moment of silence, the master rose and withdrew without addressing us a word.

Some time after, he set off for Austin, without giving us, in informing us of his departure, the occasion to clasp his hand.

On his return, the following month of March, he passed by the same spot with his two aides-de-camp, arriving from Austin after six months' absence; we were there, half a dozen workers, in the midst of that ground which had already taken on some aspect of a garden of France, but which the weeds, alas! respected no more than M. Gouhénans had respected the truth and his host, in making the latter believe — and us by ricochet — so ridiculous a story (au Texas, p. 46). M. Considérant passed near us without stopping, without addressing the word to anyone, without even (the greeting comes from outside, says the proverb), without even honoring us with a salute.

Had he then the weakness of such a rancor, so little worthy of a great chief?

We should not have dared to affirm it, had not M. Cousin — become, this year (1857), at Réunion, the special mandatary of the executive agent, the depositary and the very exact executor of his wishes — pursued with a thousand petty vexatious measures the poor doctors, and especially the excellent Dr. Nicolas, saying to him naively:

"Besides, this garden was made in spite of Considérant…" and thus obliging this worthy and inoffensive colleague to flee, like so many others, the inhospitable lands governed by the chief of the Phalansterian School.

And yet this garden was the only one where, by the quite particular care of MM. Nicolas and Doderet, fruit trees and vines of France had been preserved; the only one where M. Nicolas, a skilled bee-keeper, had fruitfully raised bees — which M. Cousin had brutally caused to be taken from him, and which he sold, without taking into account the care he had given them and without even being willing to distinguish those that belonged personally to the rearer.

This garden — which the director of the society of Réunion, M. Cantagrel, held in great esteem, whose constitution he had called an excellent initiative, to which he had wished to give that name of the doctors' garden which has remained to it, and which had become the goal of the walks of the ladies of the colony and the environs — this garden had yet another great grievance in the eyes of M. Considérant:

It was governed by an associative constitution that a score of gardening amateurs had signed with us, and which, highly approved by the director and by the colony's council of administration, had determined the latter to concede, under its supervision, to this society of devotion, the disposal of the whole dale, in order to make of it, in conformity with the program, a colonial park.

Who would have believed that M. Considérant's rancors would have come to seek us out and persecute us even there?

Since my return to France, I have learned that this garden had been bought by my friend M. Bureau. Despite my persistence in disapproving of this dismemberment of the unity that, for two years, we had striven to create, it is a consolation for me to know this garden fallen into the possession of a friend. May the summers there not be too dry, the winters too hard, and our spring too sparing of its tears!

May this excellent family find, at last, as I did, in this garden, under those fine oaks, and in continuing those cultivations, a softening to its numerous disappointments and to its regrets for the fatherland!

VII. — The Society of Réunion

"The debates over execution require that we raise on this ground a first establishment serving as a pied-à-terre for the immigrant population." "Most of the immigration forms received so far opt for a system of associative combination." "It is a first milestone on the road that leads to integral association." (Au Texas, pp. 312, 313, and 318.)

The arrival of our worthy Swiss had unfortunately taken place at the moment when anxieties and discontents, as just as they were grave, were swelling every day.

For two months the works had been open, and everyone had devoted himself to them in the measure of his strength, without thinking of asking what their conditions would be.

But, the bad welcome and the bad feeding aiding, the hundred and twenty inhabitants the colony possessed began to be uneasy at a state of things in which the chief of the enterprise manifested himself only by the most complete inaction, a moroseness that the slightest smile never lit up, and the systematic repulsion of all proposals of realizations whatsoever that were submitted to him from various sides.

All, I have already said, all had counted on the master's word and on his teachings. He had announced to us (p. 106) "preparations destined amply to assure the satisfaction of the material needs."

He had promised, "for the maintenance of health (pp. 106 and 107) and for the development of the vigor and the equilibrium of the physical faculties of the population, the organization of a composite gymnastics whose rudiments," he said, "horsemanship and swimming, ought not to be deferred."

It was assuredly under the influence of this preoccupation that he had, at Brussels, favorably received, for the post of riding-master, the name of M. Barret, a former pupil of Saumur, whom M. Rouby had proposed to him.

But, at Réunion, M. Considérant — afflicted with the singular malady of making himself judge, and absolute judge, in numerous things which, like agriculture, gardening, medicine, the veterinary art, horsemanship, and the practical worth of men, are unknown to him or very nearly so — M. Considérant had decided that M. Barret knew no more than he about horses, and he had told him so, urging him to go away.

Now, these sentences of expulsion — deliberated in little committees where MM. Roger and Cousin exploited and kept up, to the profit of their petty hatreds, the misanthropy with which the chief of the School was afflicted; these sentences, pronounced two thousand leagues from the fatherland against unfortunates who, most of them, had exhausted all their resources to answer the seductive appeal that had been made to them by the book; these sentences, I say, suspended over the head of all a kind of sword of Damocles which raised in minds a fever whose growing paroxysm threatened us with embarrassments all the greater as their cause appeared more tainted with caprice and injustice.

M. Considérant — receiving each day, envenomed by the reports of his entourage, the repercussion of all the difficulties, all the anxieties, and all the discontents — attributed them, very probably, neither to his inaction, nor to his practical sterility, nor to the forgetting of his promises, nor to the ease with which he impregnated his character with the repulsive bitternesses that his intimates spread around him.

Then, letting himself be thus deceived as to the effects as well as the causes, he took men and things of Réunion in hatred, and roused himself for a moment to rid himself of them.

He convoked the council of direction instituted by article 44 of the provisional agreement (au Texas, p. 310), and presented to it successively — written, scratched out, corrected, and entirely recopied by his hand — the articles of the statutes of the Phalansterian Society which, according to the management's expressions (letter of the 6th[?] of November 1854), "was to be the first to establish itself."

I copy here the principal articles of these statutes:

"Art. 2. — The object of the society is its acquisition of the domain of Réunion (Dallas county) and the development of the agricultural and industrial establishment in process of formation on this domain, which will constitute a first center of colonization where the later immigrants, recommended by the general society, may gather, inform themselves, provision themselves, and find on their arrival a provisional lodging, a friendly population, and the elements proper to facilitate their definitive establishment. "Art. 4. — The social capital, fixed at 600,000 dollars, is represented by 4,800 shares of 125 dollars, divisible into coupons of 25 and 5 dollars. "Art. 7. — The deliberations of the general assembly are valid, whatever the number of members present, provided that the convocation has been previously posted for three days at the ordinary place of acts of publicity, at Réunion. "Art. 10. — The society proposing to itself, in the exploitation of its domain and its industries, to associate labor with the profits that capital reserves exclusively to itself in ordinary enterprises, the council of administration will proceed in this path, taking as its point of departure the relations existing between these two elements. In consequence, the comparative productive values of capital and labor will be primitively estimated in proportion to their average price on the surrounding market. The products and the surplus-values of every kind annually realized on the society's domain by the development of its cultivations, its industries, its population, etc., will belong jointly to the shareholders or associated providers of funds and to the providers of associated labor, and will be attributed, to the one and the other, in parts proportional, for each, to the figure of his productive concurrence, estimated by a regular and consented evaluation. "Art. 11. — The attribution will take place in the following manner: the shareholders and the providers of associated labor will receive, in the course of the annual exercise, advances of parts proportional to their said evaluated productive concurrence, and their definitive parts will be settled and attributed at the end of the exercise, in view of the general inventory of the society, which will be drawn up by the care of the council of administration, with the concurrence of a commission of three members named by the providers of associated labor. "Art. 18. — In consideration of the foregoing clauses, M. Considérant, in his quality as executive agent of the general society, cedes and brings to the society of Réunion, which accepts, all the rights that the general society has acquired and which constitute the domain of Réunion and its dependencies. "Furthermore, M. Considérant subscribes, from this day, the complement of the sum fixed (art. 4) as necessary for the constitution of the present society. "4. No modification to the present statutes of the society of Réunion and to the conventions of the present act, of a nature to alter the relations established by this act and these statutes between the society of Réunion and the general society, will be valid unless the said modification has been accepted in writing by the member of the council of administration specially representing the general society in the said council. "The same written consent would be indispensable to the validity of any resolution relative to a dissolution of the society of Réunion before the term provided (art. 3)."

The council of administration, composed of the six above-named members and of M. V. Considérant, representing the general society, met the same day, 7 August 1855.[^vii_dates]

[^vii_dates]: The years in this chapter are frequently scrambled by the OCR/printing (the "3," "5," and "7" are confused): read 1855 for the "1833" and "1835" (the Réunion act and deliberations), 1857 for the "1837," 1854 for the "1834" of the journey to Brussels. Corrected throughout the text.

"1. The council names as director M. F. Cantagrel. "2. The council, taking into consideration the wishes expressed by persons intending to become providers of associated labor — namely 'that the labor element, although not yet having, in that capacity, an actual and realized interest in the society, should nevertheless from the outset have a representation in the council of administration' — decides: "As soon as the number of the providers of associated labor is thirty persons, they will elect two members who will be added to the six members of the council named by the general assembly of shareholders and to the member named by the general society. "3. Having to settle, in execution of article 10 of the statutes, the relations of associated capital and labor, as regards the respective parts that each of these two elements will receive by way of advance, the council decides that there is occasion, for the entry into exercise, to establish it as follows: "1. The advance of part to be made to capital will be 3 and one-third per cent. "2. The advance of part to be made to associated labor will result from a convention to intervene between the director and each of the providers of associated labor, signed by both parties, and in which the aim will be to make for associated labor, relative to its productive value and in the general conditions of the country, a position analogous to that which is made for capital by the advance of 3 and one-third per cent."

Entirely confident in M. Considérant's mathematical aptitudes, I accepted without discussion his combinations of advance-parts and reserved parts (art. 11 of the statutes and art. 3 of the deliberation of 7 August 1855), and the whole colony did the same, so much was it in haste to come out of the disorderly inorganization in which it had been left to deteriorate since its foundation.

We knew, moreover, that practice would teach us, much better still than the speculations of theory, the modifications of which this act, like all human institutions, would be progressively susceptible. The essential thing was to begin, somehow or other.

I made the act but one reproach: that of charging the new society with thirteen thousand acres of land, when a third of it would have perfectly sufficed, and of ceding to it — without estimate, inventories, or verification — a considerable equipment whose prices and presence nothing justified with any exactness, even approximate.

But it was becoming more evident every day that M. Considérant wished to lay down a burden under which he felt overwhelmed, and that he did not wish to keep a particle of it at Réunion. In the presence of a population that saw and freely discussed his practical impotence; his frights on the occasion of the most evidently productive expenses; his progressive negations of the most solemn promises; and his days continually spent in a hammock and continually employed in poisoning his intelligence with the emanations of a pipe that never goes out — M. Considérant had come to detest this population, to find it a superfluity and an obstacle "to what he calls his plan," and to wish to make a clean sweep of it.

We all, therefore, passed over the grave anomalies of the act.

But it was not the same with the classification of the workers and the advance-part that he obstinately wished to make to each.

I have already shown at what rate he had appraised M. Gaspard Baër.

I attributed then such insufficient allocations to the mere ignorance of the value of labor and of the needs of the workers; but I learned, a year later, the dominant and then dissimulated motive of this combination.

I was discussing with MM. Considérant and Cantagrel, at the beginning of May 1856, some of the conditions of the Réunion act, and I particularly asked, with insistence, for the modification of the third of advance accorded to capital and labor by article 3 of the deliberation of 7 August 1855, and, for the reason of established insufficiency, its replacement by the half equivalent to 5 per cent — a figure that M. Cantagrel had insistently and uselessly requested at the time of the making of the act; but M. Considérant answered us with a marked brusqueness and discontent:

"No, truly, I will not grant that, for I fixed this rate expressly to force them to go away, if they do not know how to live on it."

But we shall return to this point, as to the other articles of this act, which were finally, on reflection, modified, a few days later, by the deliberation of 7 May 1856 — at a time when, in agreement with him, the management had decided the suppression of the society of Réunion (bulletin of 5 May 1856, p. 56, 6th paragraph).

Article 10 of these statutes brings out the magnanimity of capital, which is willing, at Réunion, "contrary to all usage," to associate labor with the profits its concurrence will have produced.

But capital was probably counting much on the good nature of labor in holding to it such language and in granting it only a third of its ordinary wage (art. 3 of the deliberation of 7 August 1855).

But it was counting on it still much more when (art. 11) it fixes at the end of each year the distribution of the parts reserved "in view of the general inventory."

As it is evident that, in the first years of an agricultural and industrial enterprise, there are only expenses to be made, and that "the view of the general inventory" can show, for a long time, only large balances on the debit side, it is evident also that the magnanimous capital of Réunion, represented by M. Victor Considérant — the democratic socialist of 1847 and 1848 — had found the ingenious procedure of obtaining, for several years, labor at two thirds less than it would have paid for it to the ordinary wage-earners.

I should insist less on the subtlety of this combination, if, in 1856 — when I asked either for the reform of this part of the statutes or for the payment of the reserved parts — the founder's thought had not publicly revealed itself.

M. Considérant, assisted by M. Cousin, was discussing with a deputation of the workers — and with the will, then avowed, of suppressing the society of Réunion — this question of the reserved parts, and M. Cousin cried out, without being contradicted by his master:

"There is nothing as a balance to the credit of the inventory; therefore nothing is owed to you… and besides, what have you to complain of — have you not been fed?"

We have said with what food capital had indeed fed us, and we have the right to remark that the ten deaths that afflicted the colony all took place in the period when this feeding had been able to exercise its very harmful influence. We have therefore no need to insist on the sublimity of derision and indiscretion displayed by M. Cousin and in no way disavowed by M. Considérant.

Nevertheless, the classification of the workers went on painfully, because M. Considérant and his aides-de-camp fought for an enormous reduction which, as I have said, proved at least their complete ignorance of the value of men, of their labor, and of their most essential needs, while I fought foot by foot, with my old practical experience of these things, for more equitable evaluations. I was, fortunately, called on one of those days to the side of a friend of M. Considérant's who was ill at Dallas, and I found on my return the classification finished and closed. They had hastened to be done with it, to rid themselves of "the plague of my observations" (M. Considérant's expression).

This patient was "poor Mique," as M. Considérant names him in his last pamphlet (du Texas, p. 57), a pamphlet with which I must again occupy myself a moment here, anticipating the dates.

I had wished to spare our executive agent the memory of "that execution," which, he says, "tore his heart." But since he thought he ought to recount the details of it, in order to glorify his firmness by it, I cannot do better — save a few rectifications that will come afterward — than to copy after him (du Texas, p. 56).

It is a matter there, for M. Considérant — who undertakes to rewarm the much-cooled zeal of the School — of proving to it that henceforth he will no longer let the funds confided to him be swallowed up, and he supposes that this question has been put to him:

"Where is the guarantee? "—The guarantee? he replies. This time I give it, and I give it with good title, because I hold it. The same case cannot recur this time, because, this time, I reckon everyone warned in such a way that no kind of possible case, no consideration of the safety of persons or of the moral interests of the society, can make me deviate from the line. "Among all those who came, in the first batches, up there, there was one — poor fellow! — toward whom I was armed. He had written to me twice, when I was still at Brussels, insisting strongly on setting out promptly. I answered him twice that it was not before a year or two that he could think of coming, and that I would call him when it was time. In spite of that, he set out. He arrived, wounded in the foot, dragging a sorry nag that carried his effects, and having spent almost all his ready money. I had known him from his childhood. He had been, as a very small child, brought up in my father's house and cherished by all my family. He was the only one of the colonists with whom I had ties so affectionate and of such long standing. He was certainly worth, moreover, as a colonist, the average of the others; he had a little held the tail of the plough; he had left in Europe a liquidation to the care of his wife, who was to come and rejoin him. — Other persons were announced, coming spontaneously again, from various points, to ask us for a roof and advances of subsistence. If I had admitted this one — personally and repeatedly warned as he had been — there remained to me no reason, in the logic of justice, to refuse anyone. 'You received my letters?' I said to him. — 'You know it well.' — 'You came in spite of what I told you in them?' — 'What would you have? I believed…' — 'You are going to leave here this very instant.' — 'Leave me at least a few days; you see the state I am in.' — 'Not an hour. You will sleep tonight as you slept yesterday, in the prairie; you will go to Dallas; you will go where you will; you will not stay here.' — 'But if I go to Dallas, I go there to catch the fever; in the state I am in, you send me to my death! you! you? oh! that is not possible!' — 'I send you to your fate, to the fate you wished and that you made for yourself.' He left in despair. He nearly died at Dallas; and his nature is so good that, a few months later, returning to Europe, he came — as affectionate as in the time of his childhood — to embrace me, to make his farewells, and to ask me my errands for my sisters. — I do not know whether there are people to whom such executions are easy; this one tore my heart."

This account, were it exact in all points, would indeed be of a nature to prove that there is no weakness of M. Considérant's heart to be feared, however torn that heart may be.

But M. Considérant, in matters so grave, interrogates very inexactly his memories, and very inexactly too, I fear, the bottom of his thought.

It was before me that "the execution of poor Mique" took place.

M. Mique, who was of the Nuremberg group, had left us at New Orleans, in consequence of some dissensions that had arisen between him and me during the crossing.

On his arrival at Réunion, he had nevertheless addressed himself to me, and, after having loyally and worthily confessed his wrongs toward me, he had begged me to be his intermediary with M. Considérant.

I knew that this man — generous and frank, but of a weak character — had been guilty only by his lack of resistance to bad influences. He had, moreover, much more than a wound in the foot; he had the fever, he was exhausted with hunger and fatigue; he asked for hospitality; I accepted his mission, and M. Considérant, requested by me, came to find him under one of our verandas.

During all this conversation that M. Considérant recounts — and to which, to be exact, one would have to add a few injurious reproaches whose harshness, perhaps, ought then to have been spared a man supplicating and so deeply stricken — during all this conversation, M. Considérant had appeared solely preoccupied with the irritation that M. Mique's lack of obedience toward him caused him. His tone (the heart's rendings can be dissembled thus, perhaps) was that of a schoolmaster angry with an insubordinate pupil. The form vous, instead of the familiar tu, had not ceased to be employed — which M. Mique manifested, by several exclamations, to be more painful to him than all the reproaches, than all the outbursts, than all the harshnesses of his old childhood friend.

M. Considérant therefore left him without wishing to change anything in his sentence, and the poor man had still to add, to reach Dallas, several miles to the already so heavy weight of that hard day.

A few days after, he had me asked to come and see him. I found him stretched on the planks of an abandoned cabin, which public charity had allowed him to occupy, and where it had, by some food relief, kept him from dying of hunger.

At the sight of me he burst into tears, speaking to me of his wife and his children whom he no longer hoped to see again. I managed to bring back a little courage and hope into that soul vanquished by fatigue, hunger, fever, isolation, disappointments, and regrets.

He begged me to ask M. Considérant for the advance, on his signature, of the sum strictly necessary to return to France; I promised it to him.

On my return to Réunion, I sent him the medicines I believed useful for his cure, and a short time after he came to receive from M. Considérant the requested advance and to take leave of him.

In leaving me, he renewed to me with effusion the foregoing avowal of his wrongs toward me, his regrets, and the expression of his gratitude.

Let us now examine the consequences that M. Considérant draws from "that execution."

In the eyes of the shareholders whose confidence and funds he still solicits, "that execution" is to be a guarantee of the force with which he can — "when he is armed by warnings as precise as those he had reiterated to M. Mique" — oppose the swallowing-up of the capital confided to him.

Well, M. Considérant is mistaken: he is not at all the strong man he supposes. I have seen him at work, and I can affirm and prove that he is indeed strong, and even hard, toward those who, like "poor Mique," like M. Barret, like M. Vogel, like the unfortunate and so interesting Baër family, etc., are timid, gentle, and humble of heart.

Whereas with people more energetically tempered, and who, rightly or wrongly, know how to assert with firmness what they consider their rights or those of reason and justice, M. Considérant is sometimes weak to excess.

We have seen him grant an advance of repatriation of two hundred dollars to a family of three persons who said audaciously: "If you will not, we stay, and you will be quite obliged to feed us."

Whereas he granted only a hundred dollars to a family of four persons whose claim was formulated in a manner a little less trenchant.

It is, moreover, completely contrary to the truth to say that there came to Réunion persons asking gratuitously for "a roof and advances of subsistence." All, with very few exceptions — which were the doing of M. Considérant much more than of anyone else — all came, or had come, at their own expense, counting on the promises of work with which "the book" is filled — work that one did not wish to let be put at their disposal, and that even today (1857), M. Cousin refuses them, to the point of giving work by preference to Americans.

What is more, that group from Louvain which forms the subject of page 7 of the last pamphlet (du Texas) — was it not, still more than "poor Mique," within the conditions of precise and official warnings? Was not M. Considérant, with regard to it, "armed" from head to foot? The persons who composed it were neither his childhood friends nor even old acquaintances. "They had set out in spite of him" and in his presence.

Well! he allowed that, "under his eyes," some of that group — who were not even shareholders — should "swallow up" little by little a few hundred dollars of "those available funds" that were confided to him.

Why, then, that sad courage, so distressing to see, with which he refused "poor Mique" — a shareholder, he — a thing that is refused nowhere: hospitality, above all when the one who humbly implores it, in the name of an old friendship, is ill, exhausted, and devoured by anxieties, sorrows, and regrets?

Why? — Because, I repeat it again, the moral force of M. Considérant is in perfectly inverse ratio to the force of his adversaries.

The first act of the council of administration of the society of Réunion was to accept the nomination, proposed by M. Considérant, of M. Cantagrel to the functions of director.

Unity (so at least it was believed) was at last going to be reborn in the administration of the colony and to make cease the disorder resulting from contradictory orders given by everyone without official responsibility for any.

M. Cantagrel — occupied almost exclusively until then with the acquisition, the survey, and the delimitation of the lands — had been able only at short intervals to occupy himself with the interior administration, of which MM. Cousin and Roger had made themselves the directors.

The act of justice from which M. Considérant had been unable to dispense himself with regard to M. Cantagrel, his devoted friend of twenty years, had increased — by the aid of envy (that sad malady of narrow hearts and minds) — the two Belgians' hatred against the director. A spiteful war, very often employing arms quite uncourteous, began thenceforth more openly against him and continued, to the great detriment of the society, until — weary of the war and disillusioned — he resigned his functions to return to Europe.

For M. Cantagrel and for all of us who had taken seriously both the promises of associative life so solemnly made by M. Considérant, by his book, by the provisional agreement — of which the Réunion act was but the consequence — we all believed that we had entered the path indicated by article 48 of the statutes of the general society, "reimbursement of the shares to an association of immigrants" (au Texas, p. 255), and we seriously prepared to realize the program we had accepted in conformity with "the three last paragraphs of the preamble of the provisional agreement" (the creation of a first associative center), and with articles 1, 14, 15, 16, 17 of that agreement, and finally with the second paragraph of page 321 of the book, which sums up all its spirit (au Texas, pp. 316 to 321).

Our first preoccupation was to make cease as quickly as possible the dictatorship resulting, for M. V. Considérant, from articles 4 and 18 of the Réunion statutes.

He himself loudly expressed the desire for it.

But we believed we glimpsed that, in his thought, it was on condition that the funds which would release the silent partnership [commandite] of the general society should be new funds, and not those of the subscriptions already realized;

Whereas we, who found much too high the price that had been imposed on us, wished that, at least, it should be the object of a reimbursement of the shares subscribed and paid up.

It was therefore in this spirit that I wrote to the management to beg it to invite, in its bulletin, the shareholders to adhere to the act of the society of Réunion, and to choose, among the residents in Texas, the mandataries who should represent them in the general assemblies.

But the management and its entourage had seen in the Réunion act only the complete cession of all that the general society then possessed in Texas.

Long since shaped to the autocratic humor of the editor-in-chief of the Démocratie pacifique, it did not dare scrutinize the thought and explain to itself the motives of the executive agent. Not even glimpsing the long predominance that the condition of silent partner it occupied in the new society left it, the management saw in the act only a kind of attempt at emancipation against its direction; and, holding essentially to finding the donkey on whose back it could let fall whatever the master's work might deserve of anger and reprobation, it wished to persuade itself, and did persuade itself, that the act — the famous Réunion act — was the work of MM. Cantagrel and Savardan, and that one need no longer be astonished if it was "so badly made." Such was, textually, its conclusion.

It thus came, all the way to America, to practice that old usage which consists in applying to the back of the pages the correction deserved by the prince.

The management went still much further: under the influence of its first impression, it formulated by insinuation accusations that could attack probity itself; but it acknowledged too spontaneously, too promptly, and in terms too laudatory the wrong it had committed, for it to have been possible for us not to extend to it again a fraternal hand.

A single sentence, which I believe I owe it to myself to cite, will justify the foregoing:

"Your personality," I was written on the 14th of April 1856, "your character, your devotion have not ceased to unite all the votes. If there is a fine biographical page in our sad history of Texas, it will be yours."

That said for the honor of the historian, let us continue the history.

Despite this honorable and so affectionate disavowal of certain personalities, the management, the executive agency, and the direction of Réunion remained perfectly disunited.

The management would not make to the shareholders the appeal I had asked of it.

M. Considérant assured me that he had formally, and in agreement with M. Cantagrel, supported this request.

But the refusal — by leaving the society of Réunion composed of ten shareholders who disposed of only a minimal sum of shares — implicitly annulled the contract. It would have been more loyal to annul it effectively; but that did not then suit M. Considérant.

He has too authentically proved to us, since, that his policy consists in having, everywhere and always, as in the time of his functions as editor-in-chief, "a responsible editor," a plastron on which the blows can fall without reaching the one who deserves them — so much so that we do not hesitate to say that M. Cantagrel was that victim designated and sacrificed in advance.

He had judiciously and loyally seen, for his part, in the Réunion act and in the direction confided to him, the accomplishment of the verbal and written promises made by the author of the book (au Texas, pp. 230, 309 to 315) and by the provisional agreement, etc., etc.

He believed that only 4,000 acres ought to have been granted to this first society, and that it would have developed there more freely and more surely than with the enormous charge of the administration of 13,000 acres.

He believed that the remaining 9,000 acres ought to have been kept by the executive agent, on behalf of the general society, in order to be able to answer the requests for private establishments — outside the pivotal associative establishment — that might be made by the persons to whom the associative regime did not suit.

In default of the executive agent, who had then wished to rid himself completely of all official work and all responsibility, M. Cantagrel had loudly proclaimed the portion of the program indicated in the two preceding paragraphs, and of which here is the simple commentary:

Association of consumption and of general services relating to the care of the sick, to the education of the children, to the intellectual and moral perfecting of the colonists by the library, by artistic and scientific courses, by the organization of honest recreations, by the propagation and the elucidation of the religious idea that guided the colonists, and finally to the cultivation of the social domain and to its fecundation by industry and commerce.

In this milieu thus constituted, in this honest community of families, each would have been free to enter, to leave, to return, to be associate, boarder, or simply passing guest — but in conforming to the regulations that might or could concern each of these positions.

Ah! regulations!… That is what, to our great surprise, has been seriously and repeatedly reproached to us, and what we are truly ashamed to have to discuss.

Thus, there are, in our School, intelligent people who believe that a collection of men could and should live without regulation, without legislation.

The reproach of our wholly opposite opinion came to us first from Paris, from the very bosom of the management; then, strong in this superior support, those of the emigrants who belonged much more to democratic radicalism than to the judicious theory of Fourier protested against any formula determining the reciprocal duties and rights of the associates.

The director resisted this tendency. He lost his popularity by it, and I honor myself to have shared this loss with him.

M. Considérant's entourage seized eagerly upon this momentary division, and fomented it to the profit of its hatred against the director and of the dissolution that the executive agent was meditating; but when, later (let us say it by anticipation), the director had given his resignation, had left the colony, and the work of dissolution and expulsion was loudly proclaimed, the friends of the liberty of individual fancies and caprices began to understand the falseness of the path into which they had strayed; they began to understand and to regret a direction that had understood and so loyally willed their good… and popularity returned to those who had momentarily lost it, but too late for it to be useful… they had left or were leaving.

If M. Considérant and his aides-de-camp had confined themselves to exercising their right of criticism in the meetings of the colony's council, that would have been loyal and might have been useful; but it was above all outside — by malevolent criticisms, and sometimes even by contradictory orders — that they manifested more or less openly their hatred against the director.

There resulted from it (it is the history of all weak and false governments) a system of see-saw that brought the colony, little by little, to the most pitiable anarchy.

Meanwhile the meetings of the council of administration took place with a kind of regularity, and here is about how the time was spent there:

The director, M. Cantagrel, brought there, elaborated in advance, all the questions that interested the colony, and asked for solutions.

M. Roger rarely failed to raise, on each question — with insidious forms of insinuation that belong only to certain people — personal criticisms and interminable difficulties. The attacked director defended himself, like a brave bull harassed by the darts and the feints of a picador; but, like the bulldog once fastened to its prey, M. Roger never let go, and we have seen these struggles of no general interest often last for several hours.

M. Considérant, president of the council, lay in one of his two hammocks, around which the councilors sat — seated either on the ground or on logs, as at the council of the Indians.

M. Cousin lay in the other hammock and passed, from time to time, to his master the match destined to keep up the eternal fire of the nicotian weed.

One would have said that, thus nonchalantly stretched out both of them, they were bent on justifying more and more the word fainéanstériens [idler-ansterians — a pun on fainéant, idler], which, in a moment of ill humor, had been coined for them.

M. Considérant — enveloped in the clouds and the haloes of smoke, which he had become very skilled at filling and adorning the atmosphere with; M. Considérant, adding to this occupation that of gravely whittling little pieces of wood in the American fashion — seemed either to take pleasure in the lulling of these discussions without end and without usefulness, or else to let his imagination wander everywhere but in this little world that ought to have so seriously preoccupied him.

I stop here a moment to explain these haloes of smoke and this whittling of pieces of wood.

The somewhat puerile recollection of the haloes appeared to me in a serious light from my first journey to Brussels, in 1854.[^vii_dates]

I found M. Considérant stretched on a sofa and smoking his pipe. We clasped hands and began the conversation I have reported on page 20.

From time to time he suspended the colloquy, rapidly inhaled several mouthfuls of smoke, accumulated them at the bottom of his mouth, made them undergo there, with a quite particular care, a mysterious preparation; then, opening his mouth very wide, he exhaled a globe which, rising in the air, widened little by little into a crown that the smoker accompanied with a look of contentment and admiration, until the circle broke and dissipated.

I ventured to put a kind of question-mark into my look and into a smile.

M. Considérant understood my thought and answered me gravely:

"Do you not know, then, that no more than that is needed to strike the Indians with stupor and to save my life, were I ever their prisoner?"

As for the American usage, so puerile in appearance, of incessantly whittling little pieces of wood, it must have a serious cause, and here is the one we attribute to it.

In this country of liberty, where the public administration watches very little over individuals, each very often does justice to himself.

When the attack or the vengeance does not take place from afar, with gunshots, but hand to hand, the one who feels himself the stronger strikes first with fist or stick (it is thus that, almost everywhere, bravery manifests itself by a cowardice of the strong toward the weak); but the weaker does not neglect to put himself on the defensive, and the knife has prepared itself in advance to reestablish the equilibrium.

But this prudent preparation might have the inconvenience of indicating a premeditation that justice considers everywhere as an aggravating circumstance.

Now, to escape this inconvenience, without neglecting the care of a defense whose necessity may be of every instant, one has had to seek an occupation that could always justify the presence of a knife on the scene, and one has taken the habit of always whittling the first piece of wood that comes to hand.

In default of pieces of wood, one cuts the chairs and the tables — an inconvenience that the ladies have been able to escape, in their households, only by installing there baskets full of pieces of wood, which they take great care never to leave empty.

But let us return to our council.

A single thing had the power to wake M. Considérant well — it was when the dean and secretary of the council, bored, wearied beyond measure by the bad seat on which he was obliged to be so long, to no purpose, a spectator of such gymnastics, intervened in the discussion, either to ask permission to go away, or to beg M. Roger to be done with it, or to introduce into the defects of the cuirass of this sour jouster some argument destined to make him let go. Oh! then, M. Considérant never failed to intervene, and with that paternal but severe tone of which we have already spoken, and which reminded me of the scoldings of my first schools, M. Considérant invoked my old age and my white beard which, he said, yielded much too much to the over-youthful vivacity of my character.

I then begged M. Considérant — since he invoked my old age, whose privileges I never claim — kindly to spare him lessons a little too pedagogical, and to reserve them for his young favorite, if the latter was not strong enough to defend himself all alone in the struggles he continually took pleasure in engaging, and whose annoyances he ought to spare the council a little more.

M. Considérant — accustomed for some twenty years never to be seriously contradicted by his entourage — had above all accepted my concurrence in the hope that I would usefully figure in America in the silent, somnolent, and respectable employment of the white-beards; and so he was much irritated by the new error of appraisal he had made about me, and classed me more and more in the pathological series of plagues, heaping up against me and against my friends torrents of rancor with which we shall see him later cause us to be inundated by his agents.

Another cause of disagreement also arose several times in these meetings:

MM. Roger and Cousin had taken, after the example of M. Considérant, the habit of exalting in all things the American character and spirit and of praising all their acts to the detriment of the French character and spirit.

This habit — excusable up to a certain point in the two Belgians — could pass unnoticed; but in the council of administration, where my functions as secretary obliged me to listen to everything, I could not bear, at such close range and in silence, manifestations which, in the midst of an almost wholly French population, seemed to me at the least unseemly.

It was, as usual, M. Considérant who took it upon himself to answer me for his favorites, and who did so with his ordinary bitterness, treating my reaction as chauvinism.

I answered him several times that, whatever the sense and the bearing of that word, I believed I could accept it two thousand leagues from our fatherland, in the persuasion that there was, in this chauvinism, much more dignity, much more honorableness, than in the chauvinism of denigration that manifested itself thus at such great distances.

For M. Considérant, to uphold so bad a cause was to resemble a little too much those prides which believe that the sun of the fatherland is extinguished when they have ceased to project their lights upon it.

After these sittings — where the hours were lost, for the greater part, in struggles of the aides-de-camp against the director — the latter ordinarily withdrew with the executive agent, to whom he tried, but always in vain, to make understand that his spirit of favoritism and of command in the smallest details of the administration — in continual critical contradiction with the responsible administrator — established a duality of action contrary to all principles, and kept up in the colony, to its great detriment, two centers, two factions perpetually hostile, mutually paralyzing each other in their best intentions, in their best efforts, and thus deteriorating all the characters.

By virtue of the principle that consecrates the elective mode for all employments, the associated workers of the colony asked that labor should have, like capital, its share of elected representation in the council.

They invoked this sentence of the provisional agreement (au Texas, p. 319): "In principle, all employments are devolved to election."

This wish was officially manifested by a letter from MM. Daly and Capy addressed to M. Considérant.

The opinion of these gentlemen and of their constituents was that capital and labor should be immediately represented, in equal portions, in the administration of the association's affairs.

But this time, the council was unanimous for the non-admission of this pretension, and here are the motives of my opposition:

"The worker is a capital whose figure can be established according to its annual product. This capital — by reason of the freedom of movement it enjoys and of its voluntary or accidental variability — cannot be compared to the immobilized money-capital, and could not have an innate right to govern it, since it has no surety or guarantee to offer for the consequences of its government. In the impossibility in which it is of guaranteeing for itself a stability similar to that which the money-capital enjoys — which is itself but former labors capitalized — it must recognize the inequitable side of its pretension and not persist in it. "A share of representation, from the very origin of the association, before any product on the part of the workers, is therefore, on the part of capital, an act of fraternity too evident for there to result from it, under pain of manifest injustice, anything other than harmonic sentiments between the two elements. "The share of administrative right that labor claims is but a question of progression, to which each day will furnish new materials, new reserves which — capitalized and immobilized, as the interests of capital can be — will realize with equity the claimed right. It is only a question of patience."

Such were the principal motives of the restricted concession made by the deliberation of 7 August 1855.

Although it did not completely answer the wish of those who had asked for it, it was accepted as a progress, and we occupied ourselves with the election.

On the 12th of August, a preparatory meeting took place in the great workshop. There, M. Roger wished to establish a distinction between what he called the workers and the bourgeois. It was evidently with the aim of dividing the majority, which was not favorable to his candidates.

It was also, in the midst of the American population — in which there are only citizens and not classes differing from one another — an unskillful distinction and a double contradiction. And so we protested against it, and it was admitted in principle that "every associate is a worker, if he makes himself useful to the society in any branch whatever of human activity, and that, in consequence, at Réunion, all the associates had the right to take part in this election."

Under the influence of this recall to unity, Dr. Nicolas was named president of this first meeting.

MM. Roger and Cousin had put forward the candidacy of MM. Barbot and Willemet, the gardener and the maître d'hôtel; but their functions and their salaries gave them too much the appearance of people contributing to the composition of M. Considérant's domestic staff for their candidacy to have any chances.

The election gave, in fact, out of sixty-six voters, sixty-two votes to M. Loukx, chief of the woodwork workshop, fifty-four to M. Dailly, chief of the metallurgy workshop, and only nine to M. Barbot.

This majority of sixty-two against nine ought to have been a lesson for M. Considérant. It counted, besides the director and the council of administration of the colony, all that Réunion then possessed of Phalansterians, M. Considérant alone excepted; and even he had had the prudence to abstain, ostensibly depositing a blank ballot.

Of what use, then, had it been to him to have taught for so long in his journal, in France, that the governments which take no account of public opinion are on the road to perdition?

Three months later, the management's letters proved to us that this warning had been for M. Considérant only a wound to his pride, and for his entourage only an occasion to exploit calumny, in default of food for slander.

Moreover, those nine votes accorded to the master gardener alone — those nine votes whose biographer M. Considérant would certainly not try to be today — those nine votes were nevertheless just exactly that tenth of the elite that he would have wished (du Texas, p. 12) to exempt from the general proscription.

In recounting some incidents of the sittings of the council of administration, I have forgotten a fact that must not be passed over in silence: I had received, on the 1st of July 1855, a letter from Professor Auguste Duméril, who thanked me, in the name of his illustrious father, for a remembrance I had addressed to him at the moment of my departure.

He told me also that Texas had as yet been but very little explored by the naturalists, and that he would be most grateful to me if I could collect, for the course with which he was charged at the Jardin des Plantes as his father's deputy, the reptiles that the lands of our colony furnished.

M. Duméril joined to this request instructions on the manner of transporting these animals alive or dead.

Persuaded that it would be a great honor for our colony to create for it such relations with the illustrious administration of the Museum of Natural History of Paris, and quite happy at this good fortune, I hastened to communicate my letter to M. Considérant.

But it was written, no doubt, that in expiation of my too blind faith in this man, I should have to undergo through him the most unexpected and the most incredible disappointments.

"Do you count," he said to me, disdainfully handing me back M. Duméril's letter, "do you count, in sending live serpents to France, on deferring to the desire expressed in this letter?"

"Assuredly; as far as it shall be possible for me."

"Well! I must warn you that I formally oppose it."

"Before examining," I answered him, "to what point this opposition ought to seem obligatory to me, could you tell me the motives for it?"

"What! you do not understand that, in doing such a thing, you expose France to adding to all its ills those that these animals might cause it, if they came to escape!"

"Oh! if that is all, you reassure me perfectly. If it were a matter of furnishing a few specimens to the itinerant natural history of the fairs, your fears and your prohibition would probably touch me; but when it is a matter of a course of instruction like the one given at our Jardin des Plantes, you will permit me, I hope, to persist in my will and in my hope of satisfying it."

"I warn you, at least, that I do not wish these consignments to be made in the name of the administration of the colony."

"So be it: I may even say, to be just and to put your responsibility well under cover, that they were made in spite of you."

There ended this painful conversation, which proves on what tone, from our arrival, M. Considérant had established the relations that were going to exist between us.

I had indeed been tempted to calm the singular fear he manifested to us by citing to him that page 56 of his book in which he tells us that serpents are very rare in Texas — and that because he had encountered very few of them on the roads he had traveled there; as if the serpents awaited the travelers along the roads!

I too have crossed the south of the United States over two hundred leagues — for it is at Fort Smith, at the confluence of the Poteau and the Arkansas, that I write these lines, on the 7th of September 1857, the sixty-fourth anniversary of my birth — and if I knew the serpents of this region only by the two I encountered on my road, I might write too that they are very rare.

But besides a great number that my friends and I had encountered during our hunts, it is by hundreds that the serpents were killed at Réunion during the first year of the establishment. One found them everywhere — in the furniture, in the fabrics, along the framework, under the beds, and even on the beds.

As for M. Duméril's desire, I have nothing to reproach myself with for having neglected the means of satisfying it.

I had had made — following his instructions and adding to them some modifications that had seemed to me useful — a solid box, locking with a key, and divided, at need, into sixteen cells separated by movable partitions of wire gauze, so as to be able easily to watch the animals that should be enclosed in it.

During the winter of 1856 to 1857, I kept there for four months a big viper of those called in Texas copper-heads; but it died in the spring.

During the following summer (1857), I gathered in this box as many as ten serpents at a time; but, leaving Texas before winter, I had to renounce the desire of returning to France with my collection, their longest existence being, in captivity, about six weeks during the heats.

The care taken to feed them changed nothing in this condition. Chicken-snakes, well sated with the mice they swallowed avidly, did not live longer than the copper-heads, which — contenting themselves with biting the mice and thus killing them in a few seconds — then coiled themselves in a corner of their cell, without wishing to eat them.

To take the serpents without danger, I had had made a spring-pincers fixed to the end of a light stick a meter fifty centimeters long. At the other end of the stick is a pressure-spring which, joined to the pincers by means of a brass wire lodged in a groove notched along the stick, allows one to open these pincers when one wishes to seize a serpent.

It suffices to cease the pressure for the pincers to close again with a force sufficient to hold the animal without wounding it.

Another pincers about sixty centimeters long, and having the form of a blacksmith's tongs, serves to withdraw, at need, the serpents from their cells and to change their place.

Moreover, these preparations may, I hope, not be lost: I have confided them, over there, to good friends who will soon have completed the collection and furnished the box, if some traveler, leaving Texas toward the end of October to return to France, consents to take charge of it.

Often, in devoting myself to these researches and these observations, for which I found in myself aptitudes that had remained unknown to me until then, I regretted not having consecrated my life to the gentle and peaceful studies of natural history.

To study, in the midst of the forests, the prairies, and on the banks of the waters, the manners and habits of animals; to dissect, to stuff fine birds; to make fine collections of insects and plants, and to put them in order — that would have rendered my life much better than this dissection of men, of which the honor of the truth makes me a duty, and would have caused me much less agitation, weariness, disappointment, and stirred up for me far fewer enemies.

If at least I had found over there — as I had so much right to hope from the chief of the Phalansterian School — a real sympathy for the children and for the so easy establishment of a school conformable to our principles; or rather if I had stayed in France, when lofty intelligences expressed the desire, and had the power, to verify, by a trial of a maternal school, the value of our doctrines — I should have found in this occupation of a superior order very precious compensations for the pains and the vigils I should have consecrated to it, so much is childhood sympathetic to the old age that loves it, and so rich is it in future for the happiness of humanity.

But since we are only at natural history properly so called, let us occupy ourselves yet a moment with the serpents and the insects.

VIII. — Serpents and Insects

"Mosquitoes are nothing in the high Texas." "I suppose that the annual prairie fires count for much in the rarity of the serpents, and the breezes in that of the harmful insects." (Au Texas, pp. 56 and 57.)

There is therefore in Texas, whatever M. Considérant may say, a great quantity and a rather great variety of serpents.

In our yard, under our sheds, in our workshops, beneath our floors, the rattlesnake (or serpent with bells) and the copper-heads were very common the first year and are still not encountered very rarely.

After these two venomous and dangerous beasts, one finds again, but more rarely, a black serpent that I have not seen, but which, I am told, has received the name cotton-mouth, because of the whiteness of the interior of its mouth, which stands out against the dark color of its skin.

The few examples we have had of the bite of these serpents lead us to believe that their venom is not very powerful in the high Texas.

Before my arrival at Réunion, a woman had been bitten by one of those vipers called copper-heads. M. Roger relates that, after having exactly cleaned the bite, he had made this woman drunk with whiskey, and that the next day she was cured.

One of our dogs was, in the presence of a hunter, bitten on the lower lip by a rattlesnake. Its neck and its head remained much swollen for a few days, and these symptoms dissipated little by little, without the bite — which could not be found — having been cauterized, and with no other drink than a few drops of ammonia in water.

During our journey from Houston to Réunion, in 1855, one of our hunters was bitten on the hand by a large water-snake, and the bite — strongly sucked and exactly washed — was followed by no ill effect.

None of these serpents exceeds two meters in length, and the biggest are no thicker than an arm of medium size.

None of them attacks man without provocation. All flee at his approach; but there is this well-marked difference between the venomous serpents and those that are not: the former withdraw slowly, majestically, as if they knew the power of their means of defense; whereas the latter, especially during the great heats, flee with a rapidity that makes hunting them very difficult.

The non-venomous serpents are numerous and very varied.

The most common is the chicken-snake, literally the chicken grass-snake [couleuvre à poulets].

This serpent was, at Réunion, the familiar guest of our dwellings and especially of our henhouses, where it did damage distressing to the stewardess of our poultry-yard.

I killed two of them which, climbed up an oak in search of some bird or squirrel nests, were entwined so as to form a fine braid nearly two meters long, and representing perfectly the ordinary ornament of Mercury's caduceus.

Finally, we found every day pretty little grass-snakes, most of them twined around tree branches, with whose foliage some were so confounded — especially one all green, of a fine tender green — that one often perceived them only at the moment when one was about to put one's hand on them, and when they reared up, no less frightened than frightening at first sight.

Two others deserve still to be cited: one striped longitudinally with little ribbons of green, red, and yellow, and another whose red, blue, and yellow ribbons are placed transversely, in alternating rings, along the whole length of the body.

All these little grass-snakes, perfectly inoffensive, would be very disposed — like our pretty French grass-snake with the blue collar — to become intimate with man; but their fatal resemblance to the venomous serpents makes us kill them all, without distinction; just as, in the world, one pursues without examination honest ideas, very useful perhaps to realize, but under the pretext that they also resemble ugly ideas that hide perfidious poisons — acting thus like that zealous cardinal-legate who, at the siege of Béziers, ordered that all the besieged be killed, so as to be sure of not letting a single heretic escape, the good God being afterward to distinguish perfectly the good from the bad and to make for each an equitable share.

As for the insects, none of us has been able to understand the privilege M. Considérant had had of finding them rare in Texas.

We began to preoccupy ourselves with this idea during our journey from Houston to Réunion. Scarcely had we begun to bivouac in the prairies when each of us, without exception, had his legs devoured by irresistible itchings caused by a considerable number of pustules. It was claimed that this was a tribute to be paid to acclimatization; but the people of young and clear sight looked more closely and recognized that these pustules were produced by a kind of infinitely small tick, similar or nearly so to the one called in France rouget [harvest mite], which penetrates beneath the epidermis — probably in order to shelter its young family there — and produces numerous pustules.

I have never been able to see this insect; but during the three summers we spent in Texas, I amply furnished them pasture, like everyone; and what proves that it is not at all an effect of acclimatization is that the Americans are no more exempt from it than the foreigners, and that all the legs that rub against the prairie grasses are rapidly covered with them and soon after literally flayed, so irresistible and persistent are the itchings that these insects cause.

Their invasion does not delay in extending to the whole body and in causing there the same disorders.

In some colonists, these itchings bring on the eruption of numerous boils that constitute a veritable malady, very painful, or ulcerations that the impossibility of not scratching renders very difficult to cure.

Almost no one, each year, escaped this scourge, and our friend M. Daly was, for three months, gravely enough affected by it to be forced to remain in bed almost all that time.

During all this time too he had the sorrow — we must record these sad facts — of being visited by his old friend M. Victor Considérant only when, near to leaving the colony, and observations on this subject having been transmitted by M. Cantagrel to the executive agent, the latter remembered that he had at least some duty of propriety to fulfill in this circumstance, and came to excuse himself for his long forgetfulness and that of his family.

Moreover, we find in a letter from one of the oldest Phalansterians — a schoolmate and friend of M. Considérant — the appraisal of the role, alas! too completely missed, to which it was supposed, in France, that M. Considérant's family was to devote itself in Texas:

"The role of counselor of peace, of agent of rallying, of advocate of the weak, of sister of charity to the sick, of organizer of the general care owed to the children, etc., etc."

That said, with regret assuredly, but necessarily, let us return to our subject.

After the ticks, we had to verify the question of the mosquitoes, which one almost never encounters on the heights and which become numerous in the valleys and on the banks of the waters only in summer and especially in autumn.

Now, M. Considérant, having crossed Texas at the beginning of spring, quite simply committed an anachronism in congratulating this region on the rarity of that insect which abounds admirably there when its hour has come — which the beds wrapped in mosquito-nets ought to have indicated to him.

All those of our workers who devoted themselves to works in the depths of the valleys suffered very seriously from them, and we were, toward evening, obliged to deprive ourselves early of the pleasure of our gardening works, in order to save our skin from their stinging attacks.

Moreover, the mosquitoes cause only a momentary painful itching, and are thus much less to be feared than the inevitable ticks; inevitable, unless one wears those boots that completely envelop the lower extremities — but on condition of never sitting on the grass, and even then the animal does find the means of climbing beyond the point defended by these boots.

The tarantulas, enormous and hideous spiders, were frequently encountered during this journey, and showed themselves no less numerous at Réunion. We had no occasion to observe the effects of their bite, and we do not regret it, if it is true that a dog (as we were assured) died two hours after such an accident.

One finds there also, though more rarely, the scolopendras — mille-pattes [thousand-legs] in France, centipedes in America — and whose bites, thank God, we did not have to study, which are claimed to be more dangerous than those of the rattlesnakes.

These frightful beasts are up to twenty centimeters long and three wide.

The scorpions, which are innumerable, and about whose stings frightening tales had been told us, are at least without serious danger: their sting has no more painful and grave effects than that of a wasp.

The wood-ticks were a veritable scourge for those of our workers charged with the exploitation of the woods, and even for the walkers who do not fear the brushwood.

Finally — and without taking account of the ants, of which M. Considérant at least noted the great number, and against which one guards oneself by putting the feet of the furniture in vessels filled with water; then, without speaking of the rats and the mice[?] that devoured provisions and clothes, nor of the great mason-wasp that filled with its constructions the sleeves of our garments hung on the coat-racks — we come to the bedbugs, and we are astonished that M. Considérant forgot them: Texas is infested with them to the point that not a single wooden house is exempt, and that they swarm there so much that, to flee their torment, everyone, at Réunion, deserts his bed to sleep under the verandas, under the sheds, in the wagons, in hammocks, or even in the prairie.

They are so numerous that they assail even the hens, whose nests are full of them, and which have thus to add, to the fever of incubation, that which these innumerable bites must cause them.

If we added to this enumeration of the insects that attach themselves to man those that devour his gardens and his fields, we should have difficulty in ending: millions of grasshoppers, caterpillars, aphids, cockchafers, and beetles of all sorts share the pleasure of devouring what escapes the extremes and the excesses of cold and heat, and especially the numerous and abrupt variations of the temperature, which we have seen striding across thirty centigrade degrees in a few hours.

I was about to forget, in the enumeration I have just made, an insect that I cannot hesitate to place among the malefactors, so much did it tear our hearing during the three long summers we were obliged to hear it. It is a big cicada that I have permitted myself to nickname stridens [the shrill one], and which, during nine months of the year, realizes day and night, without end or truce, the noise of the thousands of bobbins of a cotton-spinning mill — a noise with which this beast pursues us still, today, 16 September 1857, from the two bushy banks of the Arkansas all the way onto the steamboat that carries us to the Mississippi.

Here, then, by fair count, are at least a dozen species of insects which, most of them, have drawn upon the book au Texas more curses than it has lines — which the author would so easily have spared it with a little more seriousness in his observations and a little less levity and self-assurance in his assertions.

But one must be just: not all the insects are absolutely malefic in Texas. Without counting the grasshoppers, the cicadas, and many others of which the ancients were very fond, and of which it would suffice to rediscover or to invent the preparation and the sauce — the bees there are, like all the animals of the country, of a gentleness that contrasts in a very remarkable manner with the character of most of our beasts of Europe, and moreover they furnish an excellent honey.

We should not dare to speak here — so difficult is it to find proper expressions for the account of its history — of an insect which, by a continual, painful, and singular labor, rendered us signal services; but since the learned founder of the journal l'Ami des sciences did me the unhoped-for honor of publishing what I had said of this insect in a private letter, I do not resist, under his patronage, the pleasure of recopying this curious history from his number of the 2nd of December 1855:

"From our arrival we had to preoccupy ourselves with a grave question of hygiene, the establishment of latrines. During the researches and the estimates necessary for this establishment, we noticed that the objects of our preoccupation disappeared completely every day, and even after a few hours. It was important to discover the thieves, and here is the result of our observations: "A few moments after the deposit of these objects, here and there, in the surrounding thickets and coppices, numerous black beetles, flying and buzzing, arrive from all sides, alight a few centimeters from the deposit, surround it; then, with an activity full of vigor and perseverance, each cuts out of the block, unguibus et rostro [with claws and beak], a ball perfectly round and the size of a small walnut. "When the ball is entirely detached, it is a matter of transporting it to distances sometimes, and relatively, very great — ten, fifteen, twenty meters. "To carry out this conveyance, here is how our active workers proceed: if the goal is to the north, the beetle places itself to the south of the ball; then, putting its head down and supporting itself on the ground with its front legs, it raises its hind legs onto the top of the ball, and it is with the latter that, thus inverted, it pushes it rapidly. "In the impossibility in which it is, placed in this way, of seeing its route with other eyes than those of instinct, many irregularities of the ground, many shocks, many tumbles stop it in its march or separate it from its burden. It turns some of them, energetically resists others, and returns incessantly to its singular hauling. "This labor earned it, and all its tribe, from our workers — compagnons du devoir [guild journeymen] — the name of compagnons routeurs [haulier-journeymen]. "When the ball has the dimensions of a rather big walnut, two haulier-companions seize it at the same time; but the second, smaller than the first (is it the female or a child?), reared in the inverse and opposite way to the first on its hind legs, draws toward itself and makes the object roll with its front legs, turning its back to the route — which gives rise to many more tumbles still, because the two impulses are not always perfectly concordant. "The disagreement goes sometimes as far as anger: the bigger beetle then leaves its position and comes to speak very sharply to its helper, and if it is not satisfied with the reply, it pushes it away and beats it until it has left the place; then it resumes its hauling alone. "All these balls are conveyed to various underground storehouses belonging either to families or to corporations. The surface of these storehouses — moreover always very clean and like a portion of a garden bed recently raked — is pierced with several little openings through which the haulier-companions penetrate, drawing their burdens in. "The interior of these burrows never extends to more than five or six centimeters of depth, and consists only of numerous galleries in which the balls remain in deposit. "As for the aim that the haulier-companions propose to themselves, opinions are divided: some claim that these balls serve as a deposit, a nest for the eggs and the larvae of these insects; but this opinion, wholly theoretical, has been justified by no kind of proof; whereas it is evidently a question, in this case, of stocking, by precaution, the larder of the tribe. "While awaiting the demonstration of the correctness of the first opinion, here is the proof of mine — the proof of the pronounced taste, of the greediness, that the haulier-companions feel for the substance of which their balls are formed. "When the blocks in which they have the habit of cutting these balls are of a consistency that renders them unfit for hauling, then we see our brave beetles range themselves, seat themselves side by side and in a circle around the object, and give themselves up, on the spot, to a feast that ceases only when the circle, little by little narrowed, has reached the center and has made exactly a clean sweep. "Have we not, then, in the presence of the difficulties of our enterprise, reason to admire and thank Providence which — after having given us the vulture (in Texas English, carencraw [carrion crow]) to rid us of the carcasses of the animals — thought also to send us the help of our haulier-companions?"

IX. — Architecture

"Comfortable dwellings, and of an overall aspect already very elegant." (Au Texas, p. 133.) "The atmosphere and the sky generally fulfill here, moreover, the functions of the street-gallery [rue-galerie]. A unitarily combined system of separate pavilions linked by verandas or galleries." (P. 123.)

The electoral movement being calmed to the satisfaction of nine tenths of the population, the ordinary works resumed their course and the men their habits.

The council continued its too often idle and interminable deliberations; M. Considérant and M. Cousin continued to spread there the smoke of their pipes, and M. Roger his bitternesses.

Let us try, however, in our quality as secretary, to analyze the results of them, and let us begin with the architecture.

M. Cantagrel — pressed, as we have said, by the announcement of the approaching arrival of about a hundred colonists and by the imperative desolations of M. Considérant, transmitted and in a manner signified by M. Roger — had decided, with regret and against M. Allen, to seek no better than the fine plateau of Réunion.

Pressed by the same necessity with regard to the constructions, he thought above all of putting the arrivals under shelter, and, inspired by the fine plan traced by M. Morize and at the same time by M. Considérant's counsels contained in the epigraph of this chapter, he hastily built the three blocks of buildings which, on the same line, form to the north the back of the courtyard of Réunion.

Three prescriptions were thus judiciously accomplished: 1. to put everyone promptly under shelter — for which time would have utterly failed, had one begun with the construction of small separate pavilions; 2. to raise a few large buildings indispensable for the establishment of the dining hall, the bazaar, and the assembly rooms; 3. finally, to put immediately under cover the administration's papers, the linen-room, the sick, and the food provisions.

Now that we know thoroughly the practical faculties of M. Considérant, we should be quite curious to know what he would have done that was more and better in such a circumstance, and we must say that we should not have posed this question — which would be an attack — had we not, like the whole colony, heard far too often M. Considérant pursue these large buildings with his eternal sarcasms, applying to them (always big words) the terrible epithet of "mastodons."

But why did M. Considérant thus pursue, to the detriment of order and harmony, an old friend of twenty years?

Eh! good God… because, by virtue of the eternal laws of "the butterfly [la papillonne]," he no longer loved him, and that, quite on the contrary, he detested him — of which everyone has had numerous proofs: by the daily criticisms made to the workers about the works the director had confided to them; by the only instant of gaiety one saw in M. Considérant here, at a moment when M. Cantagrel had a dangerous fall from his horse; and finally by orders given directly in the tone a bad master would have with his valet.

Here is how we explain this phenomenon:

M. Cantagrel, as a profoundly devoted friend, bore painfully these hostilities, which went sometimes as far as insult. He defended himself with a firmness always benevolent and calm, for which I could not dispense myself from reproaching him, so much did I fear that the master's lack of dignity would at last rub off on the placidity that the disciple never ceased — however deeply and justly wounded he was — to impose on himself, until, being able to bear no more, he abandoned this penal colony where he was thus tortured and where everything was made impossible for him.

As long as M. Considérant was in his fine and good period — which we make begin after the death of Fourier and end at the "Manifesto of the Societary School" — he was then, as a journalist, truly too superior to his disciples for those of their qualities that he did not have to be able to cast a shadow over him, and there were between them relations that made them believe there was in him the heart of a friend.

But when, beginning from the epoch of that apogee of which we spoke just now (the Manifesto of the Societary School), the star let itself be little by little drawn from its orbit and obscured by the ambitions of militant politics, he understood intuitively that he was declining, and probably no longer feeling in himself either the courage or the means to make an honorable retreat, his pride (ultimum moriens, the last to die in that sick organism) reacted too powerfully on a character henceforth embittered, and rendered him spiteful, even vindictive against every friend, however old and devoted he might be, who dared to protest against his ideas, his pretensions, or his acts.

We believe we can cite yet an example of it:

At the time when he was occupied with the drafting of the statutes of the general society, he summoned to Brussels a friend for whom he destined one of the three places of the management.

This friend is one of the most learned and exact accountants.

He found, in the financial organization of the statutes, difficulties that bookkeeping would later be powerless to resolve.

For a fortnight, M. Considérant battled for the defense of his combinations, and, being unable to bring the practical man to admit them, he dismissed him — much vexed, he told us, at having thus lost a fortnight with him without being able to make him understand anything — and he named another manager.

Despite the very pronounced condescension of M. Cantagrel and of a few intimates for the new career opened by the chief of the School, the latter soon took in hatred all that, by nature or by enormous efforts of suppleness, did not let appear, as wide as in the past, the distance that existed between them.

He had descended, and he would have wished that the others should descend in the same proportion.

What was still only a glimmer at the moment of the revolution of 1848 became, during the exile in Belgium, a complete counterfeit of that remarkable spirit, and the fruits of this counterfeit showed themselves in so striking a manner and by so many facts in Texas that — as we have already shown, and as it remains for us to do — his decline has become a historical fact; and were he to take up the pen to crush us, as he believed he had crushed Cabet and M. Proudhon, were he to find in our correspondence with the management — as we are threatened — some contradictions resulting from the difference of time and experience that separates them, and of which no account is taken, he would not prevent the facts from being facts, the truth from being the truth, and our old word a history.

I regret not having, like him — to render well comprehensible this difficult study of the spirit and the heart of a former master, by whom I imperturbably swore for fifteen years — I regret not having found somewhere a pretty passage like the one which, by reminiscence, he borrowed from Sterne, without remembering the author, and which he inserted in his pamphlet entitled "My Justification." (See that pamphlet and the Sentimental Journey.)

The necessity in which his pride placed him, of seeking very low the men he could henceforth tolerate near him, manifested itself remarkably on the occasion of the constructions that are the subject of this chapter.

Just as he had delivered a title of doctor of medicine to M. Roger, so too he had made of M. Cousin an architect.

Although M. Cantagrel was really an architect, he, and had been attached as such to the public works of Paris; although he was then the director of the society of Réunion, and no direction of affairs could be taken from him without the council having decided it; and although we had with us M. Daly, architect and founder of the Revue de l'architecture — M. Considérant wished that M. Cousin should henceforth be the engineer and architect of the colony, and M. Cantagrel, always out of deference for his friend of twenty years, effaced himself again on this point and let it be.

The three buildings constructed in haste by M. Cantagrel on his arrival had been roofed with shingles. It is the only roofing in use in the country, under the name of shingles, and it is too well known in Europe for it to be useful to say that it protects very well from the rain.

But M. Cousin — who wished to do nothing like M. Cantagrel, which suited his master perfectly, whom he knew how to flatter thus — invented to roof by means of a boarding of planks six inches wide, superimposed horizontally one upon another and overlapping by about two inches.

His friend M. Roger himself observed to him that this mode of roofing was going to be much more costly than the other; but natures of M. Cousin's species are stubborn, and he did not fail his own.

He thus roofed what was called the great shed, which not only had for its object to shelter the joinery workshop and all the industrial and commercial equipment brought at great cost from Paris, New York, and other cities, but which became moreover, in its loft, the dormitory of a score of colonists.

At the first storm that came (it was at night), all these poor inhabitants and the underlying equipment were completely soaked.

It is in this loft that, since, our brave Nusbaumer died — whom we could preserve from similar inundations only by having a tent-canvas nailed above him on the roof.

Despite this failure, our architect undertook the building in which I occupied a study for two years, and part of which was destined for the office; and, by virtue of that obstinacy of which we spoke just now, he did not budge an iota from the intelligent system of the shed.

And so, at the next storm, we were (three inhabitants of the place that we then were) obliged to hoist our umbrellas. The papers and the registers of the administration, as well as our own, were literally inundated, and that happened several times — among others during nights that we were obliged to spend under our umbrellas and seated on benches, while our pallets were providentially and admirably washed.

In a fit of equitable munificence, the architect was rewarded with a patent of invention for skimmer-roofs, and he had the ingratitude to seem displeased with it.

We had to believe that this displeasure was but a manifestation of his modesty, for he continued — and would no doubt still continue — the exploitation of the patent, had not the council of administration become alarmed at the results, and had it not, in its deliberations of the 5th and 11th of September 1855, decided "the substitution of shingles for the planks (weather-boards), for all the roofs that do not preserve the inhabitants from the rain."

The council had said "all the roofs," because two great workshops, the kitchen, the bakery, a laundry, and the grocery store had still been imperturbably roofed in the same manner, and because it was urgent to prevent the rusting of all the tools and the complete melting of our brown sugars.

Displeased with these two decisions, M. Considérant announced that he was going to have built at his own expense a cottage, and M. Cousin seemed to set himself to the study of the plan; but we have reason to believe that the plans M. Cousin draws and those he executes are but M. Considérant's plans. The latter has always been rich enough in ideas to place some of them under names taken from his intimate circle. What is certain is that this building was roofed with shingles, and we do not believe M. Cousin capable of such a concession without constraint.

Moreover, the distribution, whoever be its author, deserves an observation.

This cottage was destined for three persons: M. and Madame Considérant and Madame Vigoureux. The plan indicated, and the construction realized, two rooms on the ground floor — a large one and a small one — and above, in the loft, a painting studio for Madame Considérant.

One climbs to this studio by a staircase or miller's ladder without a rail, situated on the exterior. It is also by the same procedure — adopted despite all our efforts — that one climbs into the loft of the office, which M. Considérant had destined for the council chamber, and where we had deposited our cases of books.

These exterior staircases are evidently not M. Cousin's. Let the miller's ladder pass: they are made everywhere, even in Belgium; but M. Considérant, freshly returned from Switzerland, must have kept the memory of those staircases and galleries so pretty in the drawings of landscapes, and although this must be absurd in countries with storms and rigorous colds, M. Considérant had insisted on it, without thinking that one would have — for a lady especially — to renounce the use of this room during the weathers of which we have just spoken.

During the same weathers, these ladies, the mother and the daughter, in case of illness, had still to go out at night under the veranda to go from the one to the other; for the architect had not even had that thought, so natural in a family, of an interior communicating door, at least in case of accident, between the different rooms of an apartment.

M. Cousin had finally proposed to the stone-cutter, M. Renier, the following plan of the two chimneys the cottage was to possess.

These two chimneys were, by a very ingenious economical system, to take up between the two of them only the place of an ordinary chimney;

The hearth of the one filling half the hearth of the other, and vice versa;

In short, telescoping chimneys fitting one into the other, so that, when one was in front of it, one would have seen in the hearth the fire in one corner and in the other corner the bulge of the opposite hearth.

Ought not such an invention to have figured at the Universal Exhibition of the products of industry?

This plan — of which M. Considérant left the responsibility to his architect — gave rise, between the latter and the mason, to the following conversation:

"Sir," said the mason, "it is not possible for me to execute that plan, and I ask your permission to present you another tomorrow."

"Why?"

"Because, were it executed, one would not ask who is the architect, but who is the mason who built that?… and I should be dishonored."

M. Renier presented his plan and executed it. They were — like the simplest village taverns in France have — two chimneys set back to back, whose common flue is divided in two by a tongue and terminated by a cowl in the form of a cornice. They had, all accounts made, cost forty dollars.

They did not, however, escape the famous sentence: "monumental chimneys!"

Here are bounded, for the present, the works of M. Considérant's architect. We shall find him again farther on, developing his genius in the creation of an entire city with which he himself wishes to endow Texas. Let us therefore reserve our judgment still, until we see him on that great theater, and let us occupy ourselves meanwhile with the questions of order and bookkeeping that are to lead us to the discovery of those "swallowings-up" of which M. Considérant complains, and at which he had the courage to assist for two years with no other efforts of rescue than the "death-rattles" he recounts to us in his last pamphlet.

X. — Order: Bookkeeping and Control

"One must really get one thing into one's head: that bookkeeping is the pivotal agent of the organic mechanism of association…" (Au Texas, p. 336.) "Bookkeeping!… Does one not make it say all one wishes?" (M. Considérant, in a discussion with Dr. Savardan, before M. Cantagrel, in 1856.)

In the presence of a contradiction such as the one that emerges from this epigraph, we can only say, making use of a formula imitated from M. Considérant (au Texas, p. 46):

"That is not believable, but it is so."

We had indeed not wished to believe it, when this contradiction had been recounted to us by several other persons; but how to refuse the testimony of one's own ears?

The first sentence of the epigraph was a concession made to the opinion of the men who hold to seeing clear in affairs, and who know that this clarity is the first guarantee of success.

The consequence of this concession had been, at Brussels, a contract concluded with an accountant recommended by friends as an elite man in matters of bookkeeping.

This accountant was M. Bussy, to whom M. Considérant had granted very favorable conditions.

After this contract made, the thought came to verify the practical worth of the functionary: he was invited to come into the offices of the management to acquaint himself, before the departure, with the mode of bookkeeping adopted there; but he did not set out without leaving anxieties as to the support the society might find in him for the regularity of its accounts.

M. Bussy did not count, in fact, among his aptitudes, that rectitude of judgment, that calm character, that regularity in habits, that love of order and exactitude in all things, which are the essential qualities of an accountant.

The information about him had evidently been insufficient, as it had been about several others who had to regret, and to cause others to regret, displacements more or less onerous and deplorable.

It is true that if M. Considérant had been the practical man that the executive agent ought to have been, he would have usefully rectified erroneous classifications and found the very fruitful employment of men who, not knowing themselves well, seemed irremediable contradictions in the employment for which they had been, or had themselves been, designated.

Thus, M. Bussy — to whom the registers, the writings, and the sedentary works of the office were perfectly antipathetic, and who proved it no less perfectly by the disorder in which he left the bookkeeping — M. Bussy had manifested aptitudes whose setting-to-work would assuredly have prepared important results.

He had at the very first presented to M. Considérant a project of transports that answered, with a great intelligence, the wish expressed in this sentence of the book (p. 68):

"Finally, a nucleus of colonization somewhat compact and proceeding with an idea of the whole, merely by organizing its own transports and its lines of communication, would seize, with the greatest facility, on wide zones bordering these lines, a commerce that would be a benefit for the surrounding populations and whose profits would surpass even those of the other branches."

M. Bussy proposed, therefore, to set up, from Réunion to Houston, a few stations destined to form relays for the haulage.

It was quite simply a matter of buying a few acres of land, more or less; of building at each determined point a house and of placing there, with some livestock, those of our colonists — and there would be found such — to whom a private establishment would suit much better than the associative life.

Profiting by precise information furnished by Dr. Nicolas and by M. Capy on precious deposits of iron and coal, discovered by them on this route, and which could be the object of important workings, M. Bussy proposed to acquire, by preference, lands and to fix relays in the neighborhood of these deposits.

He added that the relay-keepers could, at need, and according to the opportunity of the places, become themselves store-keepers, and thus prepare centers of commerce whose future might be of great importance.

But M. Considérant did not want even a bazaar at Réunion, and he said that such a creation could only be harmful to the society. In vain did we ask that this opinion — so contradictory still with the one expressed by the book on pages 100 and … [the second figure left blank in the original] — be explained to us; in vain did we set forth that our money, come from France or earned in America, and transformed for us into objects of toilet or into better food, with some profit for the society, ought to be for it a useful branch of industry — M. Considérant refused all concession, all explanation; and we, disconcerted by all these refusals which appeared to us betrayals either of good sense or of the interests of the society, had come to ask ourselves with anxiety which of the two — the executive agent or we — was losing or had lost his intellectual compass.

This impression was attenuated a few weeks later, when M. Roger had, in the council, declared himself converted to the usefulness of the bazaar or store, and when the executive agent had ratified this declaration by his silence.

M. Bussy could and also wished to undertake a brewery and a distillery; but M. Considérant would not, any more on this point than for the relays, make use of the true aptitudes of this man, whom he preferred to dismiss before even having replaced him.

It is true that M. Bussy — and M. Considérant does not pardon such things — complained that, alone of all the functionaries who had had in hand funds belonging to the society, M. Considérant rendered no exact, clear, satisfactory account of their employment, and that, by him alone, the bookkeeping found itself gravely hampered and incomplete; and we have heard the same reproach from all the accountants who have since occupied themselves — and even before — with this branch of the administration of the Phalansterian affairs.

Bookkeeping — we mean that which one does not make say all one wishes — has for its base inventories and a control.

M. Cantagrel — who, during his journey and in the first months of his establishment at Réunion, had had to be sole orderer of expenses, cashier, and accountant — had hastened to confide to me the cash and to hand over to M. Bussy the account of all his expenses.

There began the bookkeeping and the control. To complete them, inventories were needed. In default of the accountant who declined, though wrongly, his competence; in default of M. Cousin, "the only man of order in the colony," said M. Considérant, and who contented himself with bitterly complaining of the disorder without finding the least expedient to remedy it; in default of any other, finally — I set myself to the work, and for a year I devoted to it very often, per day, as many as seventeen hours out of twenty-four.

All the objects composing the enormous equipment of the colony passed through my hands, and, to be sure of making no confusion or duplication, I registered each object in alphabetical order on detached cards, and I struck it with the dry stamp of the colony, R. N., and with an order-number by series of objects.

This day's work was, in the evening and during part of the night, transferred onto a great register that I had drawn up ad hoc, with the assent of the director and of the accountant M. Bussy.

This register — each page of which is divided into several columns — was arranged so that each day one could know exactly the state of the colony's movable property; and if its texture is not perfectly conformable to the ordinary rules of bookkeeping — rules which, by the way, seemed to me susceptible of varying in the details as much as the accountants themselves vary — it is none the less true that this register is still, at Réunion, the only work where one finds the complete information up to the day on which I ceased to keep it; the only one, finally, by means of which one has been able to furnish the management with statements on the situation of this branch of the administration.

The registration of the livestock holds there a place to which I believe I owe a particular mention.

The book had said (au Texas, p. 52): "One marks the beasts and one leaves them free. To bring them back from time to time and mark the young — no other trouble and no other expense."

We should therefore have taken good care not to make, for the livestock, an exception to our mode of inventory.

I had some difficulty in making M. Cantagrel understand the importance of the numbering of the livestock; he had been forewarned by M. Considérant, who, with the sententious levity of almost all his judgments, had declared that the numbering of the movable property in general and of the livestock in particular was a supreme extravagance.

Have zeal and devotion, then, to be encouraged with so much benevolence and intelligence!

But M. Cantagrel did not delay in understanding — as did the whole colony after him (M. Considérant and his aides-de-camp always excepted) — that when one had a movable property composed of numerous series, the numbering was the only means of carrying out the census of it with exactitude.

In the army — where the regiments, reviewed in masses at the same hour, can easily furnish an exact enumeration — each man, nevertheless, besides his name, is still and much better known by his matriculation number.

How should the movable objects — which it is impossible to make appear all together, which one can sometimes find again only at great distances and at great intervals of time — be deprived of this simple and only efficacious mode?

The marking and the numbering — objects of the particular administration of the colony — were therefore, despite M. Considérant's sentence, continued with the approval of everyone.

Persuaded that the application of this principle — "A place for each object, and that object always put back in its place" — is the first condition of order in the administration of movable property, I was preoccupying myself with this application relative to the delivery of the tools to each worker, when our friend M. César Daly indicated to me the following means, which was at once put into practice: series of ten identical numbers were struck on little tokens of tin-plate. When a worker came to borrow a tool, he received a series of ten tokens bearing the number 1, for example. His name and the number of this series were inscribed on a register, and he left a token for the tool he had just taken, and successively other tokens for other borrowed tools. When he brought back a tool, one of his tokens was restored to him.

As for these tokens, they were deposited in a set of pigeonholes, each compartment of which bore, in alphabetical order, the name of an object in circulation.

Did one wish to make the census of the axes, for example? One opened the register to ascertain the total number of these tools; then, verification made of the number existing in the store, one completed this number by the number of tokens deposited in the compartment Axes.

There was necessarily needed a functionary attached to the store and charged with the delivery of the objects, the distribution and reception of the tokens, and the interior order of this essential branch of the administration.

A young tailor, M. Lanotte — in whom we had recognized, during our land journey, particular habits of order, and whose sedentary profession accorded with the need of a continuous station at the store — seemed to us the suitable man in this circumstance. We proposed him to M. Cantagrel, who accepted him, despite the opposition of M. Cousin and M. Considérant.

Everyone, in the colony, perceiving the efforts thus made on various sides to obtain the good employment, the conservation of all things, and the general order — everyone, we say, found himself happy at it, showed his satisfaction at it; and, on the side of the population, the director could hope for and glimpsed with happiness a concurrence that would answer his faith, his hopes, and his efforts.

But he did not cease to find, in the executive agency, all the ill wills and all the obstacles that can be stirred up, in narrow hearts, by the spite of being incompetent for all that ought to be done and all that was then being done, the envy against those who produced with zeal the fruits of their practical experience, and finally all the moral miseries that laziness, pride, and the continual absorption of the stupefying emanations of tobacco engender.

To complete the system of bookkeeping and control toward which we were tending, I asked — and I always asked in vain — that the store and the office be united in the same premises, and that the operation of commerce be submitted to the organization of the great commercial houses of Paris, in which the selling clerk — who has received in account some quantity of inventoried and priced merchandise — has no other function than to sell it and to have its price paid into the hands of the cashier by means of a note that the bookkeeping registers, as it goes, in a journal ad hoc.

By this triple operation — whose simplicity and regularity leave not even the place for the idea of a control of which distrust would be the cause — the dignity of each is perfectly safe, and this double-entry bookkeeping, the inevitable expression of the truth, is really a science of order that in no way deserves the stigma M. Considérant never ceased to inflict on it, calling it bookkeeping in muddled part [partie trouble — a pun on partie double, double-entry].

There would have been needed, for this so necessary improvement, only a slight modification of construction, which would have become an economy by the simplification of the service; but M. Cantagrel did not dare brave to that point the opposition of the executive agent.

Before finishing this chapter, we must say that M. Considérant — obliged to be alone of his opinion on the supreme extravagance of the numbering of the livestock — fell back on the danger of producing burns as considerable, and on the enormous expense that resulted from this operation.

He claimed that the heats were going to give rise to immense wounds, to multiplied losses, and that, besides, six men employed at this work and marking only twenty-five animals a day, he said, sufficiently constituted the supreme extravagance of which he complained.

We were, in fact, in the month of May 1856, but we had then for reinforcement a young and very learned veterinarian, M. Louis, who, like me, affirmed that the operation offered no danger, and who, by very intelligent arrangements of his personnel, marked without difficulty, per day, not twenty-five, but as many as seventy-five head of cattle.

He thus marked about six hundred of them, and not a single one gave M. Considérant the satisfaction of seeing his complaints and his sinister predictions justified in any respect whatever.

It is true also that these complaints were founded only on the unintelligent and malevolent reports made to M. Considérant by his two aides-de-camp; for never did he give himself, any more than they, the trouble to inspect, to see even with some attention, and to discuss directly the objects of their poor criticisms. The director alone bore the burden of these daily bitternesses, systematically destined to discourage him and to wear him out.

XI. — Free Concessions from the Government of Texas

"It is very probable that, in the presence of a serious operation such as this one, the government of Texas will make, by legislative measure, to the colonization company, a concession of lands that may be very considerable." (Au Texas, p. 128.)

After about five months lost in contradictions, in irritations, and in negations on all things, M. Considérant set off for Austin (the capital of Texas), in October 1855, with his interpreter M. Roger, in order to claim there the free concession of lands he had hoped for from it.

He left the colony in a discord that corresponded perfectly and necessarily to the one he had managed to establish between his administration and himself.

He left it, finally, for several months, without saying to it a single word of farewell.

On arriving at Austin, he produced, written in English, an address to the American people. This address — destined to win the favor of all the parties that might find themselves face to face in the legislature — had the misfortune to produce a quite contrary effect.

It is that, in America, one does not admit, or rather one does not know, neutralities.

The political or religious parties, seeing that this publication promised to neither the one nor the other a partisan the more, were equally displeased with the manifestation and all showed themselves little favorable to the author and his work.

Then, when M. Considérant — who could not himself converse in English — presented to the legislators of Texas that pale and cold face of his interpreter M. Roger, the effect was not attractive, and the affairs advanced still less.

He understood, or he soon learned, that he had to renounce the concessions he had flattered himself with; and, in order not to appear to fail in an affair so capital and so loudly proclaimed, he had — or it was suggested to him — the idea of asking the legislature for the faculty of possessing, by virtue of a law not yet abrogated but without obligation of direct residence, as many half-sections of land as he could produce colonists, naturalized Americans and having sojourned for at least three years in the colony.

Providence seemed to wish, for one moment more, to help in this extremity the man who knew so little how to help himself.

Our friend M. Daly — whose devotion and old friendship had been so singularly received — had set off, he too, toward the end of October, but for France, where personal interests, precious and too long sacrificed, recalled him.

Fallen ill again at Fort Wasitha[?] [Fort Washita], in the Indian territory, he had had to renounce the continuation of this fatiguing journey and to return to Réunion, in order to reach from there New Orleans.

Our friend M. Cantagrel, knowing the embarrassment in which M. Considérant found himself, advised M. Daly to go away by Austin and to put himself, without rancor, at the disposal of the executive agent.

The advice was followed, and his services were accepted anew.

It was there, indeed — in the relations with the government — that his perfect knowledge of the English language and his easy, witty, varied conversation were to be used: a conversation that knew, with so much tact and spirit, how to fix all attentions, to unwrinkle the American phlegm, and to melt the superficial ice in which, in this country, a great fund of gaiety and curiosity wraps itself.

And so (by the avowal even of our manager, M. Bureau, who resides at Austin), what remains, in this city and in the legislature, of benevolence for our colonization society is due particularly to the good memories that attach to the name of M. Daly.

Under his influence, the press — from hostile as it was to us — had ceased to attack M. Considérant and our society; a commission named to examine the request for the exceptional concession of which we have just spoken had made, on this request, a favorable reply, and the best hopes were beginning to be reborn.

But the legislature adjourned for three months, and M. Considérant — believing he could, and desiring to, dispense with the concurrence of M. Daly, who cast a shadow over him — showed him no desire to see him either stay or return. There was in him something that prevented him from understanding henceforth that a chief grows, in the eyes of the world, in proportion to the greatness of the ministers he employs.

M. Daly went off to explore Central America before returning to France; then the Texan legislature, no longer finding, at the reopening of its session, the man who had known how to unwrinkle its brow and awaken its sympathies, resumed its phlegm at the sight of M. Considérant and his two aides-de-camp, MM. Roger and Cousin, and rejected the request for concession that had been made to it.

M. Considérant — as after the fortunate fault of Condé, and as after all the failures to which his enterprises have led him — declares that this result was truly preferable, and that "it was much better to buy lands than to receive them gratis." (Du Texas, pp. 33 and 34.)

He adds that he had not made the request for this concession enter, even as a probability, into his calculations — which has the right to astonish us when we read the epigraph of the present chapter and that sentence which, in his book au Texas (p. 130), ends his colonization budget.

"Total expenses. … 1,300,000 fr. "And, in the hypothesis of the free concession of the lands by the Texan government. … 900,000 fr."

Whence it results, however, that this request entered for at least 400,000 fr. into the calculations of probability that he had furnished us in 1854.[^xi_date]

[^xi_date]: Printed "1834"; read 1854 (the year of his book au Texas, from which these figures are drawn). Same type of date-misprint as in ch. VII.

M. Considérant finally calls this failure "his withdrawal of the request for territorial concessions." (Du Texas, p. 33.)

Do not such withdrawals resemble a little too much that of the fox with regard to the grapes?

Be that as it may — the Phalansterian School, which for twenty-five years pays, out of its numerous and ever larger subscriptions, for all the happinesses that, from the fortunate fault of Condé down to the withdrawal at Austin and the dissolution of the society of Réunion, it owes to the administration of M. Considérant — the Phalansterian School, we say, will it not come to think that there might be for it, in other paths, other happinesses a little less costly, a little less compromising, and a little more fruitful for the realization that has never ceased to be the goal of its aspirations and its sacrifices?

This reflection reminds me of a remark of M. Considérant's that it is perhaps well not to let be lost:

In 1848, at the commemorative banquet of the birth of Fourier, in the Valentino hall, I had the honor of being seated beside M. Considérant.

The happiness full of hopes that this sympathetic gathering of five hundred Phalansterians caused me was mingled with a regret that I expressed thus:

"What a misfortune that Fourier could not be present at such manifestations!"

"You are mistaken, doctor: it was necessary that Fourier should be dead, for such manifestations to take place."

This remark would have seemed harsh to me, had I not supposed in it a wise profundity that escaped the reach of my intelligence; but more than once, since, I have asked myself whether — the work of popularizing the idea being one day finished by M. Considérant, as that of its emission had been for Fourier — the same remark would not come too, for the disciple as for the master, to the thought and to the lips of some one of their descendants, in the presence of an effective work of realization.

XII. — The Flight

"To have justice in the heart, one must have justness in the mind." (Alexandre de Laborde.)

Admirable in his power of enthusiasm in the different appeals he had addressed to the School, M. Considérant ought, for his glory, to have restricted himself to that brilliant role.

Peter the Hermit accompanied and preached the army of the Crusaders in Palestine, but he did not command it.

And so M. Considérant's spirit had deceived him on almost all the objects of his enterprise. Men and things failed him, as he himself failed everything and everyone.

And as the justice of the heart is in direct ratio to the justness of the mind, he had returned from Austin, as we have already said, in dispositions less and less benevolent toward the population and the society of Réunion.

During the suspension of the legislature, he had been drawn off to San Antonio by a senator, M. Supervielle — born French, and who, practicing there the profession of lawyer, was quite naturally to attract there emigrants whose capital and presence would necessarily create for himself those surplus-values which, in the book au Texas, have so well colored the future of our colonization society.

It was also a matter, in this journey, of going to visit, twenty-five leagues from San Antonio, a valley called the Cañon of Uvalde, which some speculators of the country had an interest in selling, and which tempted M. Considérant, because this Cañon — surrounded on almost all sides, it is said, by sheer mountains — can be considered as an island in which, with men "on whom one can count" (M. Considérant's expression), one will very probably do wonders.

Whatever may be the case with this Cañon — on which we shall have occasion to return — we knew in advance, from M. Considérant himself, that this little Eldorado is very poorly furnished with trees, but covered, by compensation, with a great deal of brushwood.

M. Considérant, needing, in order to visit it, his friend M. Cousin, summoned him to Austin, and it was in the company of his two aides-de-camp that he made this first journey, and that he was seized with a fine passion for a place that gave him the hope — very little fruitful for the interests of our society — of putting a hundred leagues of distance between our first establishment and the second.

Such is M. Considérant: charged with the interests of a colonization society whose first operation ought to be the choice, the appraisal, and the acquisition of considerable lands, he chooses first himself — he who does not know how to distinguish a tree from a coppice-shoot — and he adjoins to himself a medical student and a surveying student; and behold the scientific and practical commission that is to judge the conditions, so numerous and sometimes so delicate, required for the foundation of a good rural administration!

And there were nevertheless at Réunion, at this epoch, twenty American or European colonists who had passed their lives at the works of the fields — either directing them as landowning farmers, or executing them as cultivators, gardeners, or woodcutters.

Meanwhile he had lent, on a repurchase agreement [à réméré], to a famous dealer in property of the region (land-speculator), M. Cordova, a sum of two thousand piastres (10,000 fr.). When we complained of this use of funds that it would have been so easy to make fruitful in noble enterprises, we were answered that this kind of loan was in the American customs and produced, moreover, very fine interest. We none the less persisted in thinking that, like us, our friends in France had not had such operations in view for the use of their capital.

Until the day when the proposal to acquire the Cañon of Uvalde was made to M. Considérant and opened to his imagination a door of escape for the essentially false position he had created for himself at Réunion, his courage had been always weakening, and he had relapsed into the discouragements and the despairs that had nearly annihilated him at New York.

He had remained six to eight months without writing a single word to the management, and he received from it on this subject just and severe reproaches.

He wrote to M. Cantagrel, in reply to requests for counsel:

"I am ill and can neither nor will occupy myself with anything whatever. I delegate to you all my powers."

In the presence of circumstances so grave, the management had a great course to take: to accept the resignation thus given, implicitly, by the executive agent, and to replace the man of letters by a man of business.

M. Godin, one of its members, was of this opinion, and he offered to come and take charge of the direction of the society in America.

He had proved himself in the creation of a great industry and in the government of men and things; he might be the savior of our interests.

But our friends MM. Bureau and Guillon — the artist and the political writer — drawn along, as always, by the bonds of an old comradeship, opposed this wise measure of salvation. After having written to M. Considérant those great reproaches of which I have just spoken, they let themselves be drawn along again by his eloquence and re-fascinated by him, when the Cañon of Uvalde had made him believe in the possibility of a new enterprise into which he would not let mingle the henceforth detested men of the colony of Réunion.

This malevolence against us had two ways of manifesting itself: to live, to pass in our midst without looking at us, or without addressing to us, instead of a benevolent word, anything other than a few criticisms as dry and unreflecting as they were sterile; then to fasten every day onto our director, to torture him for long hours with his bitternesses and his outbursts.

A horse had just died; whose fault? the director's, assuredly.

"This horse ought not to have died!" the executive agent had decreed.

The cemetery — which M. Considérant, despite my urgings (the dean of the colony had indeed some right to give an opinion on this matter), had placed in a wood exposed to flooding during the truly rainy years, and in preference to a little hill completely isolated in the middle of the valley — the cemetery had been surrounded with a fence after the death of Vaizian.

A fence is the enclosure by means of which, in America, one preserves the cultivated lands from the incursions of livestock. It is composed of pieces of split wood eight feet long and four to six inches thick. These pieces of wood, which are called rails, are superimposed one upon another by angular and alternating cross-interlacings that give the whole the aspect of what is called, in fortification style, lines of circumvallation.

They must be very high (seven to eight feet) to oppose the invasions of the oxen, the cows, and the horses, which are in general very agile and which, in spite of all — and the horns aiding — almost always find means of making passages through them.

The pigs especially oblige, on this subject, a quite particular surveillance and continual repairs, by the intelligence and the obstinacy with which they attack these enclosures at the smallest defect, the smallest gap, and always end by making a passage through them.

The fences do not serve only for the enclosure of the cultivated lands: it is with them that one forms the enclosures for the livestock; and, to spare themselves long runs, the settlers have speculated on an attraction that brings the animals back, evening and morning, into the fence.

This attraction is the sentiment of the family.

The livestock being, a first time, gathered in the fence (in the evening, for example), all the calves are sent, for the night, to the pasture.

Separated thus from their mothers, they stray little and are exact, in the morning, in coming to claim their ration of milk. The fence is opened to them and, as soon as they have suckled, they are shut up in a compartment destined for them, and the cows are, in their turn, sent to the pasture, where the bulls and the oxen follow them, rarely straying from them.

In the evening they come back of their own accord to suckle their young, and the same maneuver thus begins again every day.

When — as in our Horton farm — one has been able to enclose (a rare good fortune) a spring within the fence, the attraction being double, the settler is much more sure still of the exactitude of all his boarders.

The Americans and even the Indian cultivators have already had the idea of replacing the fences with hedges of bois d'arc — a kind of mulberry very thorny and very hardy (maclura aurantiaca, Osage orange), with fruits as big as oranges, and which cultivation might perhaps render edible.

But they have made of it, until now, only what is called in France flat hedges — that is to say, without any raising of the earth on which they are planted — and the animals always find means of making a passage through them.

In the lease of that Horton farm of which I spoke just now, and which I constituted before my departure, near Réunion, in partnership with a few friends, I imposed on the tenant-farmer the obligation of making, every year, two hundred meters of enclosure, in conformity with the method of the west of France — that is to say, ditches a meter fifty wide and a meter deep, whose earth, thrown up as a bank inside the property, will be, on its summit, planted with a tight line of bois d'arc. After two years of planting, this bois d'arc will be bent from north to south or from west to east, so as to form one of those trellises which, in our departments of the Sarthe, of Maine-et-Loire, and of the Vendée, are — when their upkeep is careful — solid obstacles to the invasion of the livestock and even of the poultry.

If this clause is faithfully fulfilled, the tenant-farmer and the property will derive great advantages from it, and the example, soon imitated, will make agriculture and stock-raising make an important progress in America.

These inconveniences of the wooden fences were grave for a cemetery. They had been the object of numerous complaints and had decided the director to have made an enclosure of palisade rather extensive, though very restricted, so as not to be obliged continually to begin again.

He had charged with this work two good and conscientious joiner-carpenters recently arrived from France, from Orléans. They had already shown their talents and their assiduity in various works, and their conscientiousness in the construction of a little staircase, for eight dollars, when the Belgian workshop, by a written proposal that has remained in the archives, had not wished to undertake it for less than twenty-four dollars.

The staircase had been executed and set up in four days by MM. Eymar and Bonneville, who were satisfied with their gain of each one dollar a day.

They had therefore undertaken the enclosure of the cemetery, and here is the conversation they recounted one evening in the colony, after their day's work done.

M. Considérant and M. Cousin had come, that day, to visit them, and the first had held to them this language:

"What are you doing there?" "You see, sir, an enclosure for the cemetery." "Was not the fence enough?" "Oh! sir, the fence does not even preserve from the invasion of the pigs, and besides, you understand that this is more suitable for a cemetery." "But why do you make this enclosure so big? does he hope to fill it?" "But, sir, one must be able to enter a cemetery without walking on the graves, and besides, another ten deaths or so, and there will be no more room."

Six colonists only have entered it since, and all the ground is filled.

There remained, from this conversation repeated from one to another, a wounding of the sentiments of the population in the matter of the respect one owes to tombs, and for me, in particular, a doubt as to the application that the remark — "does he hope to fill it?" — was meant to have, to me or to the director.

During this time there arrived to us from France, every day, new colonists. I will cite M. Doderet, a young Burgundian notary, whose knowledge in agriculture and rural constructions promised — no less than his very independent position of fortune and his devotion to the Phalansterian cause — a precious cooperator; but he had had unfortunate beginnings in the colony: the eve of his arrival, he had had, alone, in a cold of fifteen degrees, to spend the night in the middle of the prairie, without having been able to light a fire, and without supper. He had thus had to savor that foretaste of the quasi-perpetual spring the book had announced to him; then, instead of a comfortable furnished room the management had promised him at his departure, he had to content himself with a corner, with a straw pallet on the floor, in a loft open to all the winds; finally he had hastened, immediately after M. Considérant's return, to go pay a visit to him and his family, and he had come out of the cottage with the firm resolution never to return there.

Besides, he had traveled on horseback the hundred leagues that separate us from Houston, under the weight of the wholly painful impressions that a letter from M. Considérant had caused him, addressed to M. Raizant — director then of the Houston farm — a letter by which it was in a manner enjoined to all the arrivals not to take a single step further and to provide for themselves anywhere else than at Réunion, as they should see fit for the best of their interests.

Few immigrants had deferred to this singular invitation, which many of them refused to recognize as written by the hand of M. Considérant, so much did such a fact seem to them incredible, impossible on his part.

But the latter — a prey to a redoubling of his immigrophobia, seeing the slight effect of his first letter — had hastened, immediately after his return to Réunion, to dispatch to Europe his aide-de-camp M. Roger, with the mission of stopping, in whatever place it might be on the road, all the emigrants he could meet, and of making all his efforts to make them renounce the continuation of their journey.

He had charged him with a letter, a kind of circular too diffuse, too embarrassed, and too long for us to believe we ought to copy it here.

This letter — if one could separate it from the circumstances that precede it, remove from it some declamatory formulas the habit of which the author could not even shake off in this sad occurrence, make disappear from it those insinuations by means of which, with the precaution of naming no one, he never fails to throw upon others the great causes of his failures, and forget, finally, that the unfortunates to whom he addresses himself were then in America, on the way to Réunion, in the middle of the prairies, and that they are enjoined to turn back, or to stop at the seat of the yellow fever, or to undertake the journey to San Antonio, when their last resources are almost entirely exhausted —

this letter, we say, might, at the first reading, touch — with a benevolent pity for the embarrassments of the author — good hearts that have lived too far from the miseries he has caused for the impression they have received of them to be, in their minds, as deeply graven, as vivid as in mine.

My duty — whatever cruelty there be in fulfilling it — is therefore to say, in conformity with my conviction, that the interest of the emigrants, in this case, did not preoccupy M. Considérant at all.

He no longer wanted French emigrants at Réunion, and, in order to be able to drive away those who had lived there for a year, it was necessary above all to prevent the others from arriving there, whatever might be the fate that could result for them from it.

I do not fear to affirm — as the honest and courageous M. Santerre will tell us presently — that all, even families of seven young children like his, could live there fruitfully for themselves and for our society, if M. Considérant — who showed there neither courage, nor skill, nor instruction, nor practical charity — had had only, in the interest of his reputation, the wit to yield his place to one of our managers, M. Godin-Lemaire. The latter offered, I repeat, to complete his sacrifices by coming to bring us the help of his long experience of industrial affairs and his calm so benevolent and so firm in the presence of all men and all circumstances. He would not have refused, he, the creation of all the productive establishments the book had indicated and which so many special and devoted men would have so well made fruitful under such a chief, and which would have furnished excellent work to all these arrivals and to many others.

Was such — was so sad a mission, accepted by M. Roger — only an act of devotion, or the product of the influences he exercised over the executive agent? We incline, without affirming it, to the second supposition. M. Roger had too much marked his repulsion for France and the French for his bitter and insidious character not to find a certain pleasure in such a message.

The facts have proved it since; there had been, during M. Considérant's absence and under the influence of his new hopes on the San Antonio side, a veritable conspiracy hatched between him and his aides-de-camp against immigration in general and against the colony of Réunion in particular.

The delenda est Carthago (Carthage must be destroyed) had been pronounced, and we shall see, during the whole year that followed, this work of vengeance and destruction pursued with an implacable but very active dissimulation.

Moreover, M. Roger was not happy in his negotiation: he met, one evening, a first group of twenty to thirty immigrants, camped in the middle of the prairie and advancing full of gaiety and hopes toward the Réunion so dreamed of and so longed for.

The reading of the letter we have just cited cast a profound perturbation among this group. None would believe at first in its reality. Such a treason, they said, could not be the work of Considérant. That could emanate only from some spy charged with working at the destruction of the magnificent Phalansterian realization that the book had so warmly proclaimed.

But the night, which brings counsel, obliged each to recognize — incredible as it was — that this communication was indeed from M. Considérant himself.

It is true that none would defer to the quasi-imperative invitation the letter contained. "If Réunion," they said, "if M. Considérant cannot feed, in exchange for their labor, the colonists the management has chosen from a thousand to send to him, as well die at Réunion, with other French at least, than scatter and die isolated from one another on lands whose language and customs are unknown to us."

Several of these worthy immigrants — who brought to Texas arms and hearts full of energy and aptitudes proper to a host of useful works, but who had devoted to the costs of the journey all that the slender wages one earns in France had allowed them of economy — were struck with stupor to the point of falling seriously ill, and arrived at Réunion only to languish there, some for several months, under the influence of typhoid fever and homesickness.

M. Roger, after his check with the first group, continued his road and arrived at the Houston farm. He set off again from it almost at once to go to Galveston and to New Orleans to meet the last groups, in order to pursue with them the sad mission with which he was charged.

M. Raizant — confident, no doubt, in the results of this mission — slept henceforth in peace in his farm, which is about half a kilometer from the Buffalo Bayou, and no longer counted on the nocturnal visits of the arrivals.

We have said (pp. 44 and 45) that the steamboats made this crossing during the night and deposited here and there on the banks the travelers arrived at the term of their journey.

The place of landing for the French farm was well known to them, and several groups were thus deposited there; but, once there, without guide, without fire, without light, in the middle of the woods, it happened more than once that this night was a night of misery and fright for women and children who dreamed of Indians and serpents, and who, by their tears, made the heads of families cruelly feel the responsibility they had incurred in letting themselves be drawn along by their zeal so far from the old fatherland.

Several of these nights were aggravated by the rain, which the fire one managed to light remedied only by half.

We have heard one of these nights recounted by a worthy cultivator of the environs of Blois, M. Santerre, whom a real Phalansterian faith — really enlightened by some attentive readings and above all by a straight judgment — had subjected, like so many others, to the enthusiasm of M. Considérant's book.

After having leased some properties he possesses in the Blaisois and sold his furniture, he had bravely embarked with his wife and seven children, tempted by the magnificence of the climate, the fertility of the lands, and the advantages of the associative life.

Arrived opposite the Houston farm, he was deposited on the shore with his little tribe and his baggage. It was raining, and at once, the steamboat gone, one found oneself in the deepest obscurity, without anything whatever — not even a visible path that might indicate the neighborhood of a dwelling.

The children, pressed against one another, cry; the mother weeps; and all that composes for the worthy father a situation by which many others, in his place, might have been embarrassed.

The magnolias perfumed the atmosphere in vain. The poetry of these nights could not be understood by this worthy family, wet and frightened.

But the head of the family is an old soldier and a man of a real energy. He lights a good fire, arranges his people around it with the provisions of the journey; then, while the little family makes a little truce to its groanings, to warm itself and sup, he recommends to it a little patience and sets off in quest of the farm.

At the end of half an hour he glimpses a house; he knocks there; but he is answered in German, of which he does not understand a word, then in English, which sounds no clearer to his ear.

At last the thought came to him to ask for the French-farm — a word heard in advance and which came back to his memory. The German farmer then opened his door and pointed out to him the situation of the object of his search, which he reached ten minutes after.

M. Raizant, profoundly asleep, was in no hurry to answer the emigrant's call; but, once well awake, he went to fetch the worthy family, installed it in the house, and strove, by the cordiality of the welcome, to make it forget the two hours of anguish it had undergone.

M. Raizant, like M. Roger, communicated to M. Santerre the letter of M. Considérant. M. Santerre replied:

"I received, long before my departure, the visit of one of the managers, M. Godin-Lemaire. He saw my dwelling, my wife, and my children, and it is in agreement with him that I resolved to go and settle at Réunion.

"I leased my lands and sold my furniture.

"At the moment of my departure for Le Havre, I received from the management, in the name of M. Considérant, an invitation to stay; but it was already too late: a cultivator cannot, after the arrangements I had just made, submit to such changes of mind, and I set out.

"It is much later still today, since I am in America.

"Now, as at Réunion land is not lacking, and as I have to ask of our colonization society, in exchange for my money, only a field and materials of exploitation, in conformity with our statutes, why should I stay in a country exposed to yellow fever?

"Let M. Considérant be easy, and let him fulfill his obligations as exactly as my wife and I, and he will see whether I am at a loss to feed and raise my children and to create my share of surplus-value to his lands."

Such is the sense of the language — but much more animated and much more picturesque in his mouth — of the worthy and honest Santerre. He is still at Réunion and does not wish to leave it, despite the persecutions of M. Cousin, who, to punish him for his disobedience as poor Mique was punished, neglects nothing, as I shall prove, to accomplish his execution too.

Before the arrival of all these groups had taken place that of M. Simonin, come from New York with a special mission from the management to repair the disorders of the bookkeeping.

He had stopped at Austin, where he had fruitfully helped M. Daly to render the minds of the legislators and the dispositions of the press less unfavorable to our cause.

In three months, by an incessant labor whose activity often surprised us, he created the whole bookkeeping of the colony, brought up to date more than two hundred individual accounts, and had the merit — much too unnoticed perhaps, on account of some inevitable imperfections in the conditions made for him — of drawing all that out of a chaos that many others in his place could never have disentangled.

Come for this sole purpose, with this special mission, and recalled by other interests to New York, he stayed until the arrival of a successor who had been announced to him, and to whom he explained all the work he had had to do, how this work had been done, and to whom he handed over the accounting documents that justified each entry.

Then he left us on the 23rd of May, leaving us the very keen regret of the loss of the excellent relations we had not ceased to have with him and of his concurrence as zealous as it was skillful in the settlement of our bookkeeping.

In the month of February had also arrived our worthy friend Guillemet, former sergeant-major in the Army of Africa, one of those devotions proof against everything, whom we shall see later — despite the special mission, wholly of confidence, that the management had given him, or perhaps even on account of this mission — treated by the Considérant family and by M. Cousin with the most pitiless harshness.

We must say that, at his departure from Paris and that of M. Doderet, the impression of the management was that, in any case, these gentlemen ought to group themselves around Dr. Savardan — which, later, the management let M. Considérant impute to them as a crime.

At this epoch we had already lost all the Americans whom M. Cantagrel had brought to Réunion, and who would have remained seriously attached to our work if — as our friend M. John Allen has since told us — the intrigues and the hatred of M. Considérant's intimates had not decided him to withdraw.

In that time too took place the first marriage at Réunion, that of M. Abel Dailly with Mademoiselle Catherine Bossereau — a happy alliance of the very intelligent, very learned, very skillful worker, but a little too much of an artist perhaps, in the sense of the love of diversions, for his union with a judicious woman, full of order and courage, not to be for him a veritable gift of Providence.

Marriages, in America, are made with a simplicity of formalities truly admirable.

For one dollar, and without prior publications, nor proofs of the consent of the parents, nor certificates of birth, one has oneself inscribed on a register kept by a functionary named county-clerk (clerk or notary of the county).

That is the only document of civil status that the citizens can invoke in America. One is born, one dies without note being taken and kept of it by anyone whatever, and when one needs to prove something in this regard, that can be done, and is done, only by acts of notoriety of whose exactitude one has perfectly the right to doubt.

After this formality fulfilled with the county-clerk, one presents oneself before a priest who — in the church, in the temple, in his room, or in any room whatever, and after having read to the betrothed the articles of the law relative to marriages (articles similar to those of the French law), and after having received the ordinary oath — pronounces the formula of the union!

Three other marriages have taken place since in the same manner, under the happiest auspices of sympathy and harmony, and the births, like the deaths, have had, in the colony, their register exactly kept as we kept it in France during our long functions as mayor.

As for M. Considérant — who has always kept himself perfectly apart from these various details of the administration of our colony — he had made a campaign completely unfruitful; he had completely failed in those magnificent hopes of free concessions so brilliantly announced to the shareholders, and for the realization of which he had, with no less care, put before the eyes of the legislature of Texas those hundreds of immigration forms which promised the country so notable an increase of associative population.

This bait, presented to the legislators, had not been able to destroy the distrust M. Considérant had inspired in them; and the latter — no longer needing those living testimonies from which he had hoped, but in vain, for the colonization society, a minimum of 320 acres per head — hastened, finding them then a superfluity, to accuse them of coming to spoil his plan and to write the circular of which I have just spoken.

But a very small number of those to whom it was addressed had let themselves be influenced by it, and he had the sorrow, since his return, of seeing arrive every day, by groups — but full of anxieties, discontents, and sufferings — those men, those families who had embarked with such confidence in his appeal and whom he feared so little, in repelling them, to deliver to all the miseries of the foreign land.

Among them were found men who had tried the egalitarian life instituted at Nauvoo in Illinois by M. Cabet, and even also the mystical life of the Mormons.

They had found in the first establishment a loyal attempt at association. There the necessity of industrial development had been understood, and the various workshops, intelligently established and directed, gave the colony a very prosperous financial situation and very legitimate hopes of fortune.

But for those who have read M. Cabet's Voyage en Icarie, it was easy to foresee that his system of subordination of the aptitudes, the tastes, and the will in the smallest details of life would not delay in wounding the most legitimate susceptibilities and in hampering and destroying the successes of the industrial organization.

And so the questions of form and quality of the clothing, the furniture, and the food — regulated by rigorously obligatory decrees — gradually raised discontents, complaints, discords, and brought on divisions, then the retreat of M. Cabet and his death at Louisville, and finally the dissolution of the elements of this communist society.

Our new arrivals belonged therefore to very different religious and political communions.

Some went to pay a visit to M. Considérant, but a very small number conceived the desire to return there. There was decidedly a notable and reciprocal impairment of confidence between this world and him.

M. Considérant's acts had therefore all been, until then, acts of negation, of opposition, and of repulsion. Hopes, promises, devotions, efforts, sacrifices — all that was doomed to the execution by means of which one had got rid of poor Mique. Each day brought its proof of the underground labor destined to destroy our establishment.

Toward the end of April (1856) the rumor began to run that M. Considérant was having carried out, by M. Cousin, on the lands surrounding the plateau of Réunion, surveys, layouts, and divisions destined for a parceling-out and for the sale of the society's lands.

Questioned on this point, he replied:

"Has not the council asked that the plan of the property be made?"

This diplomatic reply had a calming effect too slight and of too short a duration for M. Considérant not to have shown himself a more skillful diplomat in abstaining from it.

The rumors of dismemberment and sale having rapidly taken an increase that indiscretions and the evidence of the facts justified, I believed I ought to communicate my impressions of it to M. Considérant, and I cannot do better here than to copy the principal parts of these communications.

DR. SAVARDAN TO M. CONSIDÉRANT.

11 April 1856.

Your return — which, everywhere there are Phalansterians, ought to renew faith, hope, and charity — your return has produced the contrary. I feel the need, and I consider it a duty, to tell you my thought of it. Apart from here a small number of unsociable minds and egoistic hearts who ask to isolate themselves and who will find (the School has taught it enough) only misery in their isolation, everyone here, in agreement with the majority of the shareholders, desires association and holds to it. It is true that not everyone adds to this desire the sentiment of all the duties that association imposes, but that is less the fault of the characters than that of the habits and the lack of direction. These old habits can be vanquished and the sentiment of duty can be developed. We acquired some proofs of it every day. Several services were visibly improving. Agriculture and industry, under the influence of piecework and of new, intelligent, and practical directions; — the organization of the household by the establishment of seven groups of general order which have already notably marked their existence; — the gardening, by the example of the garden of the spring, which already gathers thirty-eight associates whose labor has as yet asked nothing of the colony and will ask of it (such is its constitution) a remuneration only on the day of the division of the profits and when the council of the colony shall have found it just; — all that, I repeat, marked its existence by slow but real progress for those who give themselves the trouble to look and who know how to look themselves; in short, minds were improving no less than the works. The bookkeeping — chaos until then — was going to give its necessary solution and, thanks to the accountant M. Simonin, will give it in spite of all. Finally the restaurant was going to open on the 1st of April and to cure, without disturbance, without violence, one of the widest wounds with which we are gnawed. You have returned, and from the day of your arrival, the spirit of division, intrigue, complaints have reawakened and are progressing; the works are languishing; somber anxieties again agitate all minds; the question of the restaurant has entered your house and no longer leaves it, etc., etc. Such is, dear master, the situation that coincides with your return. I believe that this situation, so grave, enormously engages your moral responsibility and imposes some duties on you. I have in no way the pretension of indicating to you how these duties ought to be fulfilled, but I essentially need, with all, to come out of the state of uncertainty, anxiety, insecurity into which your return has plunged us. I believed, the evening of the 7th of April, that these anxieties were not founded; but if we had, that evening, some good words, by which I was particularly touched and of which I hastened to go and show you my gratitude, we have as yet had only that, and that does not suffice, for the evil persists and worsens. For me — who have not ceased to believe in association, even with the incoherent elements the School can furnish us; I who do not doubt the possibility of conducting fruitfully these elements in the difficult path into which we are launched; I who have not yet felt a discouragement — I am in haste to shake off the paralysis that oppresses and ruins us. Uncertainty is the worst of all evils. I therefore ask urgently, in order to take a course, a clear, frank, and prompt solution.

A few moments after the sending of this letter, M. Considérant arrived in my room with M. Cantagrel. It was the first and the only visit I received from him during my sojourn in Texas.

"You are right, doctor," he said to me rapidly, without sitting down and with a kind of embarrassment; "you ought to be present at the conversations that take place between Cantagrel and me, and to know the arrangements I desire to make. I beg you, therefore, to accompany him to my house after dinner."

I responded to this invitation, and the following note, handed the next day, 17 April, to M. Considérant, ought to render, I believe, an exact account of this interview.

What seemed to me to dominate in our conversation of yesterday is your thought, your will to break the Association of Réunion, the act of 7 August 1855. What seemed to me the object of a great preoccupation is the what to put in the place of this foundation? Before giving oneself up to this preoccupation, would it not be just to examine the causes that may have produced it? One does not destroy an act without motives, and the ordinary motives are the non-execution of the clauses of that act. What, then, are the conditions of the act of 7 August that have not been or are not accomplished? Article 2 defined its object. In what has it been contravened? Are the sums subscribed by the general society absorbed? Have they been diverted from their destination? What are the grave reproaches to be made to their employment during your absence? What do the council of administration and the bookkeeping say of it? You who have created this society and its statutes — ought you not to be greatly interested that the necessity of their destruction leave no doubt, that this coup d'État not resemble a caprice? Réunion certainly has (and you ought to have counted on it) difficulties of administration; but as long as these difficulties do not make it go out of the limits of its contract, there is no occasion — there would be no justice — in disturbing it, in stopping it in the midst of the labor of its bringing-forth. If you proposed to it cessions of territory outside the radius of its workings and of its normal enclosure, outside the enclosure necessary to the existence of its unity, everyone would be, and has always been, ready for this kind of operation. But to survey its territory, to trace there lines of parceling-out, to negotiate — without its consent and even without forewarning it — dismemberments and partial sales, as you have been having done since your return, is to do violence to the unity of its administration, to the security, to the consideration that are indispensable to it. I repeat that it has difficulties of administration; but I repeat also that, at the moment of your return, all these difficulties were in a manifest way of healing. I add that the gravest difficulties come not from it, but from the management, which thinks it ought to govern it from two thousand leagues away, by means of a correspondence that cannot put less than three months' interval between the request and the reply, and above all by the executive agency which — knowing only very imperfectly the population of the colony and the facts — creates every day, by its intromission into the direction, a duplicity of action condemned in advance in principle, and which the results condemn still much more. I am therefore forced to say that if, by virtue of a coup d'État, one now destroys the society of Réunion, one will commit an unjust act and, moreover, an irreparable fault. Among the immigrants, there are not ten in a hundred who want the parceling-out, and still fewer who can begin and above all continue the life of settlers. You will therefore make wage-earners or dismissed men. In the first case, will they take in the affairs of the master who will employ them more interest than they take in their own affairs, and will they cost less? No, they will rapidly and hatefully retrograde in the path of improvement into which they have truly entered, and they will ruin the treasury. In the second case, it is certain that if the executive agency wishes to brave the immense cry of reprobation that would rise against it, the management protests energetically against such a thought. Let these two powers therefore begin by coming to an understanding! In the case of parceling-out with a view to a few profits per acre of land sold, what will become of the buildings, the workshops, the machines, etc., gathered at great cost with a view to association? For one dollar gained on the one side, one will lose a hundred on the other. One will lose, moreover, the confidence accorded to the promises made to the spirit of association in the correspondence, in the appeals, in the provisional agreement, and in the appendix (see the book au Texas). One will lose, finally, all the reputations that have engaged themselves in this unhappy path. I am therefore forced, before setting forth how I conceive the maintenance of our association, to protest without reserve, for the present, against its dissolution. In protesting against the destruction of the act of the society of Réunion — for the case where it should be imposed without motives less obscure and less evidently unjust than those alleged today — I must say what this society has done until now, despite the difficulties of every kind that have been raised against it, and indicate what one ought to have, and what one ought to, let it do. The association of Réunion has for its aim (au Texas, p. 230) the formation of a great agricultural, commercial, and industrial establishment, base of a first associative commune. Its personnel is composed of workers voluntarily associated and voluntarily non-wage-earning, whatever has been said of it to the management, or however much its imagination — on the way to error — has made it persistently affirm the contrary. The society of Réunion, to attain its aim, today cultivates 430 acres of land, of which it has itself cleared and fenced two fifths, and it continues without relaxation its first-order works. It has acquired, during your absence, a fine herd of 400 horned beasts which gives, almost without cost, to the colonists, an abundant provision of milk — food indispensable here, first resource of all the settlers, and of which we had, without reason, so unfortunately been short since our arrival. It has acquired pigs, sheep, poultry, and it thus disposes of varied food resources that cost it half as much as during the whole preceding year, and that promise it for the future important commercial resources. It has built fences (enclosures) and a well for the gathering of its livestock; a well and a building for the handling of the fats and the making of candles and soap; a shed for the laundry; a building for the offices; a kitchen, a bakery, a grocery store, an apiary, a henhouse, a smoke-house for smoking the meats, a forge, and finally a cottage for the lodging of the executive agent. It has begun the construction of two little houses, one of wood and the other of pisé [rammed earth], each of eight rooms, capable of being divided among several households. It has made the acquisition of machines for mowing, reaping, threshing, and husking. It has added, near its dwellings, two half-sections to its central territory, which is still only just barely sufficient for its normal development. It has undergone, with a submission that ought to have been counted to it, large expenses (3 or 4,000 dollars), carried out under the patronage of the executive agency, for the establishment of a great garden whose conditions of situation and of execution — generally blamed by competent men — have almost completely justified that blame. It has undertaken, with no other expense than a hundred dollars or so, and by other, more disinterested hands, a work of the same nature which excites a real interest in the colony, which attracts, even from rather far off, the visits of the neighbors, but which has the misfortune to displease the executive agency. It has created — also against the advice of the latter — a store or bazaar which already gives rise to a movement of funds of at least 300 dollars a month, coming from outside, with 20 to 30 per cent of net profit. It had prepared, to be opened on the 1st of April, a restaurant and an interior currency destined to make cease a communist dietary regime — bad from the economic point of view, extremely bad from the hygienic point of view, and worse still from the moral point of view. It asks unanimously for the revision of the article of its statutes relative to the advance-part on the price of the works — a part really insufficient for the life of the workers. It asks likewise for the revision of the article concerning the reserved parts, whose distribution cannot fail to be perfectly illusory for several years.[^xii_leray] To obviate the refusal of this revision, it has — in agreement with the executive agency — converted almost all the works into tasks [piecework], which notably diminishes the necessities of surveillance and puts the conscience of the workers better in harmony with their interests and the general interests; but the price of these tasks — of which the worker receives only the third — having had to be raised, thus constitutes a bad precedent and moreover overburdens the future at the expense of capital, when it shall be a question of the distribution of the reserved parts. The bookkeeping, so unfortunately tangled in the origin, comes little by little out of its ruins, begins to say, not all one wishes, but simply what is, and with a clarity that answers victoriously all serious reproaches. Besides all these things, the society of Réunion would have wished to make use of its mills, its sawmill apparatus, to create the tannery, the soap-works, the making of candles, the distillery, the cheese-dairy, the haulage, and to irrigate the valley in the middle of which flows the West Fork. All these establishments would have required an advance of a few thousand dollars, to which the executive agency has obstinately refused itself, and which would nevertheless, and rapidly, have given important products. Here, then, is what the society of Réunion has done and what it would have wished and been able to do in the nine months that have just elapsed, despite the difficulties inevitable at the beginning of all things. Where, then, are the motives of its dissolution? The near-unanimity of the colony is in agreement with me to affirm that there exists none that one can seriously, conscientiously sustain. Whence, then, comes to it the agitation that troubles it so profoundly for nearly three weeks? This agitation comes from the intentions attributed to the executive agency and from the duality of direction that results from it. It comes from the resignation of the director and from the cessation of the general Saturday meetings, which had so happily acted on the spirit, on the morale of the colony. It comes from the subversive hopes that the least sociable minds always conceive, in the midst of such conflicts and in the presence of two authorities competing with each other. What, then, ought to be the remedy for such a situation? To leave to the colony, without any reserve, its administrative unity; To reconstitute the council of administration, to which there remain only four members instead of nine; And, for the executive agency, to intervene only there, because it is there only that it can and that it ought to ask for and obtain regularly the information and the accounts by which it must be edified on the execution of the act dictated by it to the colony, on 7 August 1855.

[^xii_leray]: A Belgian, M. Leray — a poet as witty as he was an active worker — left Réunion after the promulgation of the statutes drawn up by M. Considérant. In speaking of the reserved parts, he left, on leaving, this play on words in the colony: "I leave, because there is neither justice nor progress to hope for here: Leray would always be leurré [duped] here." (A pun on his name.)

The conferences that continued between MM. Considérant, Cantagrel, and Savardan, after these communications, long found M. Cantagrel unshakable in his resolution to be henceforth at Réunion only the provisional executor of the written decisions that M. Considérant should judge suitable to make.

I long combated this determination, which tended to deprive us of a director for whom, in the colony, the persons animated by goodwill felt every day more esteem, confidence, and attachment.

In vain, to surmount his resistance, did M. Considérant renounce the parceling-out of the surrounding domain and the dissolution of the society — measures he had nevertheless proclaimed indispensable and irrevocably decided.

In vain did he give carte blanche to M. Cantagrel, giving him all his powers and promising him to leave immediately.

M. Cantagrel did not yield.

But on the 7th of May, M. Considérant presented to the council a deliberation which — while realizing only a portion of his promises — seemed so complete a return to the maintenance of our associative center, to the administrative unity of this center, to a more equitable distribution of the products of labor, and to the principles of solidarity that ought to assure the education of the children and the mutual aid in case of illness, that M. Cantagrel consented to withdraw his resignation.[^xii_bulletin]

[^xii_bulletin]: We ought not to weary of repeating, on the faith of the bulletin of 5 May 1857, that, in that very moment when M. Considérant seemed thus to yield to the wishes of the colony, he was awaiting the arrival of a manager on whom he counted specially to destroy the association (see that bulletin, p. 56, § 8).

But the gleam of hope that had resulted from this return of confidence lasted hardly longer than the one we had glimpsed in the toast of the 7th of April (see p. 174). M. Considérant left Réunion only two months after, and these two months (drive out nature, it returns at a gallop) had been so well employed in criticisms and vexations that, on the 6th of July, M. Cantagrel gave his resignation again, never again to withdraw it, and to leave Réunion a month after.[^xii_quotes]

[^xii_quotes]: In one of our conversations, M. Considérant said to M. Cantagrel: "No, you ought not, you cannot go away. No one here can replace you; you are necessary, indispensable here. In leaving, you would force me to suicide." — Then, the same day still, M. Considérant said to the chief of cultivation, M. Pierquet: "Cantagrel is resigning, he is right: the poor man has grown slack in committing the folly of marrying; but I cannot, in conscience, tell an old friend of twenty years to go away."

A fragment of a reply, addressed then by me to M. Considérant, seems to me useful to publish, to establish at this epoch the reciprocal state of minds:

4 June 1856.

You have already so many times reminded me of my old age, and — without remembering the deference to which it might have a right — you have addressed to it, in a tone so singularly magisterial, so many remonstrances, that, in its turn, it may well tell you, with its ordinary honest freedom, that it sees, with a real pain, the sad path in which you persist in stationing yourself and the disaffection that results from it every day more for you, and as much in Europe as in America. I know that you count on some new occasion of addressing to all, in the style of au Texas, a pamphlet that is to electrify, once more, minds and hearts, and to loosen again the strings of the poor Phalansterian purse. My old age predicts to you that this hope is vain. The time of resounding phrases is past. One has ascertained, under their wrapping, so many erroneous appraisals of men, of the climate, of the quality of the lands and their products, and finally, in your character, so many little obstacles to practical things, so much aversion, jealousy, and distrust against all initiative, and so little address [savoir-faire], that minds have ended, little by little, by putting themselves in unison with yours. What alone can succeed today in our work is the very active practice of stock-farming, of agriculture, of industry, of commerce, and of bookkeeping — all things which, well conducted, are, in this country especially, remarkably productive, but to which you are completely a stranger and moreover very little sympathetic, and which your persistence of perpetual criticism and obstruction, since your return, disorganizes in a deplorable manner.[^xii_brochure]

[^xii_brochure]: We foresaw, more than a year in advance, something like the pamphlet published at the end of 1857 under the title: Du Texas.

From the 11th of April[?] to the 4th of June, one sees, by these notes, that no good had been produced by our conferences.

M. Considérant had reproached me with the trouble I took to write to him, when we had every day the occasion and the facility to see each other.

I had had to point out to him that, in our interviews, he had so much the habit of tolerating no reply, of interrupting and growing irritated always, that one had indeed to renounce conversations that ceaselessly took the tone of a dispute.

Be that as it may — and despite the new engagements resulting from the deliberation of 7 May — he had come back to the will to dissolve the society of Réunion, and he had me proposed to sign a declaration containing my consent to this dissolution.

Here is my reply:

You have me asked, through M. Cantagrel, for the signature of my consent — drawn up by you — to the annulment of the act which, on the 7th of August of last year, constituted the society of Réunion. I must remind you of the principal motive of my resistance, during our long interview of yesterday, to the numerous and pressing solicitations you addressed to me on this subject: As long as the providers of associated labor — as long as the workers who have, for eleven months, consented to the retention of an important part of the price of their labor — shall not have received satisfaction for this sacrifice made to the spirit of association, I protest and I shall protest against the measure. I therefore repeat it today: my consent — under all reserves, moreover, of my intimate disapproval of such a measure — my consent cannot be accorded to it, as a manifestation of the spirit of conciliation, except insofar as the workers shall have authentically declared that they are satisfied with the manner in which you shall have known how to compensate them for their sacrifice.

M. Considérant — holding much, which I little understood, to the obtaining of my signature in this circumstance — gathered at his house the chiefs of the workshops and entered with them into negotiations.

It was in one of these meetings that M. Cousin explained to them so clearly — as we have seen (p. 111) — the legal consequences of article 11 of the statutes of the society of Réunion and of the engagements they had contracted.

During these negotiations, M. Considérant was secretly conducting another.

He had at last found a replacement for M. Cantagrel, who, on the 6th of July, had given, for the second time and definitively, his resignation.

This replacement was M. Duthoya, the accountant.

M. Cantagrel had, the eve, brought me, on behalf of M. Considérant, a deliberation containing this nomination.

Here is my reply:

M. Cantagrel presents me to sign a deliberation, written by you, and containing decisions of the council taken unanimously. One of these decisions has for its object the nomination of M. Duthoya to the functions of acting director, without providing for his replacement in the functions of accountant. These two functions are incompatible. If M. Duthoya accepts them, I ought not to have to reproach myself with having authorized, by my consent, this double infraction of uncontested principles. And so that you may not have to reproach me with troubling the unanimity of a council in which you sit, you deliberate, you decide, and you sign all alone, I here deposit my resignation as member and secretary of this council, and besides that of cashier of the two societies.

M. Considérant — thus completely rid of a remnant of council of administration that hampered him — then signs, all alone, the following singular deliberation:

The director (what director?) communicates to the council the resignation addressed to him by M. Savardan of his functions of member of the council of administration and of cashier of the society of Réunion. M. Considérant proposes the adoption, by the council, of various sales of lands. He sets forth, moreover, that M. Cantagrel persists in the will to leave his functions. The council, after having deliberated on it, decides unanimously: M. Duthoya, presented by M. Considérant, is named director of Réunion. The council takes note from M. Considérant of the transmission that the latter makes to M. Duthoya of his powers as executive agent. Signed: Victor Considérant.

The council having thus — with this touching unanimity, represented by M. Considérant all alone — deliberated, approved, and decided all these decisions of which I have just given the extract, the executive agent continued, with the chiefs of the workshop, his negotiation on the subject of the reserved parts; and, on the 7th of July, he agreed with them that, by definitive transaction, he consented to grant them the half of these parts. They, in their turn, declared in their name, and standing surety for all their comrades, that they accepted without reserve this half as complement of the price of their labor during the year that had just elapsed.

The act of this transaction was to be drawn up and signed the next day.

But!… the next day!… M. Considérant had disappeared, from the morning, with M. Cousin, and the colony of Réunion had not yet seen him again eighteen months after!

XIII. — An Acting Director

"You see it, gentlemen, you see it!… This man has no need of money!" (Exclamation of M. Considérant after his last interview with M. Duthoya.)

This disappearance of M. Considérant — at the moment fixed by him for the realization of a promise, for the discharge of a debt — cast into the colony a stupor, then a general irritation that I shall not try to describe.

This departure received the name of flight, and that was the least of the curses with which it was accompanied.

But I must say that, while sharing the general impression, I did not do M. Considérant the insult of believing him spontaneously, in mind and heart, capable of such a fault.

Weakened by the feeling and the proofs of his insufficiency; subjected, as he himself says, to the disastrous influences of opiate preparations, and, I add, to the enervation produced by a supreme abuse of tobacco — M. Considérant evidently no longer had the strength to judge bad counsels and to resist them.

The obligation to pay to the workers — at the expense of the original social capital and before destroying the society of Réunion — the half of the reserved parts that the act had promised them entire, this obligation was a heartbreak; but this heartbreak would not have led M. Considérant, had he been alone, to the idea of escaping it in this manner. There is in him, I have always believed, a high and deep sentiment of dignity which ordinarily preserves from solutions so vulgar.

But his entourage, and above all the complaisant and sad companion of his intimacy, M. Cousin, exercised over him too an influence pernicious to the moral sense.

M. Cousin — a man whose mind, education, and instruction leave much to be desired — had (we have seen it in his functions of chief of group) manifested, for essential things, a parsimony whose narrowness and clumsiness had alienated from him the mind of all his traveling companions.

I was not present at his intimate conversations with M. Considérant on the subject of the reserved parts, but I firmly believe that — deploring together the necessity of taking from the social treasury a large sum for the accomplishment of this act of justice — it was in the intellectual nature, native and acquired, of M. Cousin to give the counsel of flight, and that it was likewise in the weakened nature of M. Considérant to let himself go to this Mephistophelian temptation.

It is again from the same source that there must necessarily have come the choice of M. Duthoya to direct, with all the powers of the executive agent, the affairs of the colony.

It was already a rather large enormity to have chosen, for accountant of our society in Texas, a merchant who — unknown until then in the School — had, as he himself recounted quite naively, ended by a bankruptcy his commercial career.

The bankruptcy of the one, compared to the flight of the other, was a theme to which rather legitimate commentaries were not wanting.

Moreover, he was an honest man, full of good intentions, no doubt, that M. Duthoya, and we have in no way the thought of contradicting on this point the affirmation of M. Considérant (du Texas, p. 15, l. 9); but to unite in the same hands things so incompatible as the decision, the ordering, and the bookkeeping of the expenses, was to expose oneself light-heartedly to having attributed to oneself the design of justifying that property — attributed to bookkeeping — of "saying all one wishes." (See p. 147.)

He was an honest man — we ask nothing better than to repeat it; but does honesty suffice in administration? and would M. Considérant dare to insinuate that this essential quality was found only there on the plateau of Réunion?

For my part, I knew there twenty colonists who, to this fundamental condition of honesty — and without having failed in anything whatever — would have joined an administrative intelligence and capacity that showed themselves completely, ridiculously absent in M. Duthoya.

This worthy man applied to the direction of our affairs all the intellectual power he had developed in the government of his own interests, and the result was relatively the same: the eight months of his administration were a continual bankruptcy — first to the bookkeeping, which, without control, offers no guarantee of exactitude; then to order in the movable property, in the expenses, and in the works; then to the tone of the colony, in which the honest people — abandoned, by an administrator without initiative and without force, to the violences of a few good-for-nothings — were obliged, after the American method, to be continually armed and ready to repel the attacks with which they were loudly threatened; then finally to the general consideration which always flees, thank God, incapable and disordered pride.

This pride had pushed poor M. Duthoya to cry out, before M. Considérant:

"Ah! if it were I, that would go quite otherwise: I would make all that go without money!"

And M. Considérant — fascinated by this perspective of supreme economy — had believed he found there the solution of all his embarrassments, and he had cried out, he too:

"You see it, gentlemen, you see it!… This man has no need of money!"

And he had hastened to delegate to him all his powers two days before abandoning us.

The details of this administration of eight months would perhaps be curious to recount. They would prove that, at no epoch of these three years, were the swallowings-up of which M. Considérant complains more evident and more considerable than during this period.

And yet (I was told so at the management since my return to Paris), the balances of the accounts sent by M. Duthoya are far from justifying the complaints of M. Considérant and my own. Everything in them announces a satisfactory situation, and we are probably mad to complain.

I will recount one fact, however: it is M. Duthoya's first directorial act. The responsibility for this act must, I am persuaded, go back to M. Considérant, who must, before his departure, have made of it an article of the plan he had traced and of which he had, he says, "set the execution in gear." (Du Texas, p. 15.)

This act was the restoration of one of our colonists to the functions of maître d'hôtel.

This maître d'hôtel had been engaged at New York by M. Considérant, who, trusting in the sureness of his coup d'œil, had sought no information about his origin.

We had learned by chance, at Réunion, that the name of this gentleman was an assumed name, and we asked ourselves quite naturally why he had left France and why he had abandoned the name of his father.

M. Considérant having nothing to teach us on this subject, I believed I ought — in addressing to the management sufficient indications — to beg it to seek a reply to these prudent questions. This reply never came to us. It was nevertheless legitimate to enlighten the colony. M. Considérant, to whom this reply was addressed, will have feared perhaps to avow a levity and an error very grave, of which it seems to me just to leave him all the responsibility. The courage he had "to execute" his friend poor Mique, who deserved it so little, is probably not (as we have set forth, pp. 115 and 116) a reason for him to have this courage toward those who might deserve it infinitely more.

This maître d'hôtel had been revoked from his functions by M. Cantagrel for acts of insubordination and of bad management that it was no longer possible to tolerate. M. Considérant, in his turn, had shown his regrets at it, and M. Duthoya had hastened to reinstate him, without even awaiting the departure of M. Cantagrel.

Now, this maître d'hôtel was in fact, during the whole interim, the true director of the colony, M. Duthoya not daring to contradict a violent man and moreover the object of the benevolence of the Considérant family, of which he had been the coachman during the journey from Houston to Réunion.

Since we are occupying ourselves with the maître d'hôtel, a few words on the institution of the restaurant may quite naturally find here their place.

For ten months and a half the dietary regime of the colony had been submitted to the communist mode.

Four great tables were set up around the dining hall. Each of them was served with a great dish of soup and a great dish of meat which circulated round; but woe to the last arrivals or to those who received the dish last. Very often the dish was empty, and it was not always easy to obtain supplements, especially if one had not the good graces of the maître d'hôtel.

The consumers were divided into four categories: the men, paying per day 22 sous; the women, 18 sous; the children from six to twelve years, 12 sous; and the children under six years, 6 sous.

A communist table is therefore evidently an aristocratic institution in which — and for each of the categories — the nobility is represented by the big eaters. This nobility has, for titles, the power of the stomachs, the force of the jaws, and the promptness of the movements that establish, in fact, its right of tithe and re-tithe over the people, represented there by the least energetic material constitutions and the most timid characters.

We therefore claimed, in favor of this people, the suppression of the mess-bowl and its replacement by the restaurant by the portion.

At the restaurant, the nobility can very well continue to deserve and keep all its titles, but not its privileges. It can, freely but more worthily, satisfy its great aptitudes, but by participating in the expenses in the proportion of the quantities it consumes;

Whereas the people — provided with very inferior faculties, but emancipated by the most legitimate of revolutions — continues to participate in the expenses of the community, but in a relative and henceforth much more equitable proportion.

We regret being obliged to say that this nobility of our dining hall — theoretically democratic from the political point of view — did not in general receive the restaurant with favor. However just one may be at bottom, one does not willingly lose old privileges so much passed into habit that one has ended, with the best faith in the world, by considering them as perfectly legitimate rights.

A commission of six members, presided over by the director M. Cantagrel, had minutely studied the question of the restaurant from the double point of view of the variety of the dishes and of their price according to exact doses.

These prices, which covered exactly the expenses, proved that the communist regime had been a cause of daily loss for the society, and that the new institution could cure it of all the evils the old one had produced in this branch of the administration.

Moreover, the effective prices of labor (the advance-parts) being evidently insufficient, there had been until then, by way of the common table, a kind of compensation of which it would not have been just to complain.

Despite the evident advantages this project of a restaurant offered — under the triple relation of equity, hygiene, and economy — so long desired, asked for, and awaited, M. Considérant kept it for a month and a half at his house without occupying himself with it, returned it without honoring it with a word of approval or of criticism, and the opening of it could be made only on the 10th of May 1856.[^xiii_dates]

[^xiii_dates]: As in the preceding chapters, several of the chapter's years are scrambled in the printing ("1356," "1836," "1830," "18S7"); the context imposes 1856 or 1857. Corrected throughout the text.

For three months this institution, regularly directed and controlled, gave all it had promised: a suitably varied diet, thanks to the acquisitions of cows, sheep, pigs, and poultry that the director had made during M. Considérant's absence; a just proportionality, for each, between the price exacted and the substances consumed; and finally the exact return of all the advances made by the society.

But as soon as M. Cantagrel had left, the maître d'hôtel — without any resistance from M. Duthoya — hastened to rid himself little by little of all control, and the swallowing-up was such, on this point, that — without counting the evident and prodigious contredanses of the basket-handle [pilfering] — there soon did not even come back into the treasury the half of the price of the advances made by the society, of which an irrefutable testimony is rendered by the daily entries regularly made by M. Guillemet, entries whose communication the general assembly of shareholders can require, if it desires authentic proofs.

Such a state of things must have pleased many people: to eat more and better and to pay less was, for those who reckon only with themselves, a proof of administrative genius that envy alone could contest.

And so, when M. Duthoya — preoccupied with our complaints relative to such a disorder — had the excellent idea of having a certificate delivered to him by his administered, he found twenty signatures, that of the maître d'hôtel at the head, which hastened to attest the excellence of all his virtues.

And when our worthy friend M. Guillemet — defending foot by foot the interests of the society — protested energetically against such dilapidations, he was insulted and threatened by the dilapidators and bitterly blamed by M. Duthoya and by Madame Considérant herself, who — a stranger to the facts — believed she judged them well through the reports of the agents of the kitchen, to whom she listened far too complaisantly.

M. Cantagrel had therefore left Réunion on the 3rd of August 1856 with his family. Everyone felt the void, difficult to fill, that his departure left us, and honorable regrets followed him. Those of the notabilities of the country were not wanting to him. They have not ceased to render an affectionate testimony of the excellent relations he had known how to maintain with them, and from which the colony had many times gathered precious advantages.

The management, however — not despising, as M. Considérant has always done, the most elementary rules of administration — had become alarmed at the state of things created at Réunion by the executive agent; and from the 27th of August 1856 — six weeks after the disappearance of this functionary, and just after the time necessary to receive the letters of advice of all these events — the management, I say, had hastened to write me the following letter:

"Dear doctor, "The present letter is addressed to you through the intermediary of Considérant. It has for its object to beg you to take in hand the direction of Réunion until the moment when the one of us who writes these lines (A. Bureau) shall have been able to reach the colony, which will be toward the end of November probably. We keenly desire that M. Duthoya not be distracted from the special work confided to him, the bookkeeping. The fruit of the mission accomplished by M. Simonin must not be lost by a new arrears. We hold essentially to the accounts of the exercise 1856 being able to be rendered in the first three or four months of 1857. "We count on your proven activity, on your high sentiment of order, on your devotion, and on the cordial concurrence that MM. Doderet, Guillemet, etc., will lend you, to maintain the position, assure the conservation of the existing equipment and provisions, and provide for the preparatory works of the next campaign, so that nothing essential be compromised for the immediate future at the very least. "The grave and fundamental questions will naturally be adjourned until the arrival of Bureau. "It is a very modest role we ask you to accept, but you will know how to appreciate to what point it finds itself enhanced by its circumstantial importance, and you will, once more, do an act of unityism in consecrating to it the force, the energy, and the goodwill with which we know you so excellently provided. "Believe us, dear doctor, your very affectionate. "Signed: Bureau, Guillon, Godin & Co. "P.S. If, as we do not doubt, you accept, you will kindly hand the enclosed to M. Duthoya."

This letter — addressed under cover of M. Considérant — not finding him at Réunion, went to seek him at San Antonio, whence he sent it back to me on the 27th of October.

On receiving this letter on the 1st of November 1856, and before having read it, I at once handed the one it contained to M. Duthoya, who, at once also, handed me his resignation from the functions of director.

But the management had previously announced to us that M. Bureau was embarking on the 7th of September on a steam vessel. His arrival, at the date of the 7th of November, was therefore to be expected from one day to the next.

This consideration dispensed me from examining whether I had the strength to accomplish this task, and determined me to change nothing, for so short a time, in the established state of things, and to beg M. Duthoya to continue his functions, which he accepted without having himself in any way pressed.

My refusal to accept, at this hour, the mission that was offered me, found moreover, in my eyes, its justification in a series of little facts which, gathered together, proved to me superabundantly that my good angel had well counseled me.

This letter of the 27th of August had been put under cover of M. Considérant, but addressed to Réunion, with this note on the address: "To be handed to Dr. Savardan in case of absence of MM. Considérant and Cantagrel."

Madame Considérant — to whom the letter was first presented by the postman — had it sent back to the post for San Antonio, without taking account of the destination noted on the address: a first fact indicating to me, if I had been able to doubt it, the state of hostility I should have to accept on the part of the executive agent and his family.

I could therefore have received this letter a month sooner.

In addressing it to M. Considérant, the management had wished — while believing itself obliged to thwart so essentially his will — to forewarn him above all, out of regard, of this act of authority.

M. Considérant, in his turn, had — a little belatedly, at the end of some twenty days — sent me back the letter without any commentary, and after having disdainfully sealed it "without reading it," as he tells M. Bureau, during their interview at San Antonio a few weeks after: a second fact which corroborated in my eyes rather evidently the first, although I did not at all believe in its complete exactitude.

Besides, my nomination — thus made without the intervention of a council of administration — was no more legal, though more frankly autocratic, than that of M. Duthoya, made by M. Considérant in the name of a council that no longer existed and whose pretended deliberations he had signed in spite of all.

Finally, when, on the 17th of January, M. Bureau arrived at Réunion, I had the definitive proof — at the welcome he gave us, me and my friends — that I had been well inspired in not accepting the testimony of confidence he had so graciously offered me on the 27th of August, and for the acceptance of which he would probably have been very embarrassed to thank me after the forty-eight hours of fascination he had just undergone with M. Considérant at San Antonio.

XIV. — The Management at Réunion

"Despite all the bad news from Réunion for six weeks, Bureau leaves with a great moral force. 'The unanimity' that has come about among the three managers and all our friends, to redress the course followed at Réunion and to facilitate there private establishments, 'without destroying the collective center,' counts for much in it." "You will henceforth have to deal only with the Management." "The projects of establishments that are dearest to you — the school, the tannery, etc., etc. — are equally at heart with us." (Letters of the Management to Dr. Savardan dated the 10th and 18th of September 1856.)

M. Bureau had therefore left France to redress, in the course followed at Réunion, all that occasioned the complaints of all, but not to destroy the collective center.

He had left in order to see and judge for himself, with all the powers with which the management is invested, and with the will to undergo no other influences than that of the facts seen with his own eyes on the very ground where they took place.

Now he arrived at Réunion on the 17th of January 1857, in fifteen degrees of temperature below zero — a second winter that so painfully gave the lie, for us, to all the promises of perpetual spring the book had made us.

Our welcome, ours, was warm with cordiality; his seemed to us all far too much in harmony with the exterior temperature. He was sad, dejected: San Antonio had evidently rubbed off on him.

I have recounted the injurious and threatening persecutions our friend M. Guillemet had drawn upon himself by the constancy of his zeal to defend the interests of the society and to fulfill the mission M. Bureau himself had confided to him. It seemed to me just that the principal should manifest, before all examination, the confidence he had had until then in his mandatary.

I submitted this thought to M. Bureau. He found it just, and at my request, he went to sit at the restaurant beside M. Guillemet; then he asked him to lead him to Madame Considérant's.

But there, at her house, an outburst full of bitterness was made by this lady against M. Guillemet, relative to circumstances she knew only through gossip to which she ought to have remained much more a stranger, since, in listening to it and growing passionate for it, she had known how to do nothing to calm and rally minds.

Our friend M. Bureau thus received, from the outset, the repercussion of the impressions that had already so fatally struck him during the forty-eight hours he had spent with M. Considérant.

He had learned there that he had to renounce his hopes of preserving the collective center and of bringing back harmony to it.

He had learned there that his mission at Réunion was to be a general execution, after the fashion of that of poor Mique; and as such acts are perfectly antipathetic to the eminently benevolent character of M. Bureau, and as, on the other hand, his old friendship for M. Considérant takes from him all force of resistance to the wishes of that much too absolute master, he had come out of San Antonio overwhelmed. His sadness and his prolonged silences with his family and his friends, when he was back at Austin, and his sickly dejection at Réunion bore witness to it loudly enough.

For him — who has not even thought of that autocratic egoism of M. Considérant who, instead of coming himself to Austin, obliges him to add still the road of San Antonio to the fatigues of two thousand leagues and eighty days of journey for him; who takes only in his heart his condescension to the wishes of the master — he believed, with the best faith in the world, that no violence had been done to his will, to his resolutions as manager; and, floating between these resolutions and the ultimatum of San Antonio, he did not delay, in order to come out of these embarrassments of heart and mind, in descending to despair, to the thought of suicide.

This sickly state — whose extent I was to know only a few days after — had struck me from the arrival.

M. Duthoya and his maître d'hôtel had not even thought of having a straw pallet prepared for the new director of the colony; and, without our worthy friends M. and Madame Louis, who were able to organize a good bed for him in a study like mine and adjoining it, he would have spent his first night on the planks of our ice-houses.

It is true that — still under the charm of those interesting tales he has so well translated for us from Captain Mayne-Reid — our worthy friend would have found such miseries perfectly worthy of the trade of pioneer.

But the pioneers — dominated by the powerful passion of the hunt and not knowing the sweetnesses of civilized life — bear by necessity, by habit, privations that would fall into the domain of the ridiculous if those who endure them had near them the means of escaping them.

It is very wise to bear gaily the privations that necessity imposes; but to set oneself up as Spartans and to play gravely and romantically at misery, as M. and Madame Considérant do, and, moreover, to wish to impose it on one's friends, is the height of the ridiculous.

Thanks to the contrary system, which consists in creating well-being everywhere that is reasonably possible, our friend M. Bureau had at his disposal, on arriving, a real civilized bed.

After having let him rest for three days without speaking to him of business, I read to him, on the 20th of January, in agreement with a score of my friends, a report on the situation of the colony and an exposition of our views and our wishes for the future.

This report was hardly more than the repetition, divided into chapters, of all I have already cited of my conversations and my correspondence with M. Considérant.

It contained a single thing more: a mode of distribution more equitable and simpler of the reserved parts.

This mode consisted in settling, every week or every fortnight, the account of each worker, and in delivering to him his part of reserve, for the labor accomplished, in a title representing a similar share in the surplus-values of the common property. This possession, in portfolio, of the title of property would have been an immediate, effective realization of the profits of labor, with all the causes of encouragement to order and to the mutual surveillance of the general interests, thus composed of individual interests clearly defined, determined, and liquidated.

Capital, in its turn, would have received every year, or more often, after the settlement of its account, similar titles for its reserved parts of interest; and, on the day of the distributions of surplus-values duly established, the dividend being fixed, each individual account would have received its share without the least difficulty.

According to this so simple mode, all the chances and all the interests would have been equal before the common law, and one cannot deny that there would have been there a cause of harmony that could powerfully help the creation of many others.

After this reading, which our friend had attentively listened to, he said to me with a sigh and an accent of profound sadness:

"We were, indeed, quite in agreement with you on all that at the moment of my departure from France…"

"Would you no longer be so today?" I answered him.

"Ah! today!…"

And this unfinished reply was the only one we could obtain.

The next day he asked me to lend him the report I had read him the eve. He read it with attention and returned it to me, without a word, with a profoundly sad sigh.

On the 24th of January, M. Bureau, on getting up, told me "that he no longer slept; that his ideas, more and more upset, could not arrive at the distinction of what was good and what was bad, and that he would be much happier if he slept at the bottom of a well."

I urged him to go take, at Austin, some time of rest beside his family; he refused it.

Without respect for this state of suffering, which a profound sadness and dejection manifested to all eyes, the maître d'hôtel and his friends were arranging the staging of little comedies destined to render the manager favorable to them, by impairing in his mind the confidence we had inspired in him until then, my friends and I.

The chief of these interludes is worth recounting. It connects with the bookkeeping without control instituted by M. Considérant in the person of M. Duthoya.

A M. Goodseels, landowner at Louvain (Belgium) — seduced by the speculative idea developed in the book au Texas — had subscribed for a large sum, about thirty thousand francs, and had sent his eldest son as a scout to Réunion. The latter was soon drawn off, with young de Guelles, to the farm of Montagne-Creek, and was thus separated from the community.

M. Goodseels the father passed in his turn through Réunion at the beginning of 1856, to go and settle beside his son, at Montagne-Creek, whence he hastened — by buying the farm and the surrounding lands — to evict the first founder, M. Sauzeau, and his associates.

Then he traced on his land, after the American fashion, a town with a great public square, and he named it Louvain.

It is thus that, in America, all the centers of population have successively formed: by a pioneer who — either ambitious or a faithful guardian of the memories of the fatherland — makes of his cabin of tree trunks, under a more or less historic name (his own or another's), the center of his great hopes for the future.

Those who have read the book au Texas will not have forgotten (p. 27) the name of Ginger-Box given, with the ordinary emphasis, to the poor cabin of poor M. Gingembre [Ginger], the architect of Indret and of the phalanstery of Condé-sur-Vesgres.

Thus have been founded several towns of Napoléon, of Paris, of London, of Madrid, of Saint-Louis, Louisville, etc., etc.

When the site has been intelligently chosen — like that of Saint-Louis near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri, like that of Napoléon at the confluence of the Arkansas and the Mississippi — or when fortuitous circumstances bring there just a branch of a railroad, as for Cairo (the famous city of Eden in Dickens's novel entitled Martin Chuzzlewit), then the foundation becomes a town, and the cabin of tree trunks is replaced by certain hotels before which, at Paris itself or at London, one would not disdain to stop.

But when the ambitious foundation has for its seat, like the city of Louvain, mediocre, unhealthy lands, far from all watercourse and with no hope of a railroad, the cabins there remain cabins — unless a rich man like M. Goodseels persists in dooming his family there to isolation and boredom, and in placing his fortune there with no other satisfactory results for the future than a house of planks or of bricks.

When M. Goodseels had made his acquisition and decided his town plan, he asked M. Considérant — by virtue of article 48 of the statutes of the colonization society — for the reimbursement of the shares he had subscribed in this society. But the society of Réunion — in the stores and workshops of which M. Considérant wished to draw to satisfy M. Goodseels's requests — did not at all understand this operation in the same manner as its founder: it was quite willing to sell what it had acquired with a view to commerce, but it wished neither to empty immediately its stores, in which the public of the colony and the exterior public had the habit and the need to provision themselves daily, nor to part with utensils and tools indispensable to its various industries.

It wished it all the less as M. Goodseels was beginning loudly to display the pretension of attracting to Montagne-Creek all the commerce that the society of Réunion had known how — despite so many obstacles — to attract and to found at home. He added to this pretension the grave fact of depreciating Réunion and of sowing all around the rumor of its approaching ruin.

Thus there came to us again there, from Belgium, a singular Phalansterian counterfeit, which consisted in an enterprise of competition destined to destroy — to the profit of individual appropriation — the work of association that had just been founded.

Despite the claims of the associates, M. Considérant — without consulting the council of the colony — sold all that was asked of him, and every day M. Goodseels moved Réunion out with such eagerness that it happened to him — having bought the smaller of our two portable forges — to have the larger one loaded, which he was going to carry off, had not M. Dailly (to whose tinware workshop this forge was consecrated) intervened, and had he not managed, after a long and lively contestation, to have his forge unloaded and to keep it.

After the departure of MM. Considérant and Cantagrel, M. Goodseels complained bitterly to M. Duthoya of the enormity of the prices that had been imposed on him, and asked for reductions whose figure is not known to us, but to which M. Duthoya consented in principle before us and before several other persons. He even consented to take back various objects M. Goodseels no longer wanted.

All that — however little suitable it was for the interests of the society of Réunion — was within the limits of the powers of M. Duthoya, who held to showing himself greater than the authors of such claims; and all that might, at least, have been regular, if new accounting entries had exactly established it.

But we learned that, instead of new writings, words and figures had quite simply been scratched out and overwritten in the journal of sales, and we had complained of these irregularities.

It was on the occasion of these complaints that, on the 24th of January, M. Bureau came to ask me whether I would lend myself to explanations that MM. Goodseels and Duthoya desired to give and obtain before him and before four arbiters, MM. Bessard, Capy, Dailly, and Willemain.

I accepted, and the examination of the registers established — as it can establish again and always — the scratchings-out and overwritings of which I have just spoken; but M. Duthoya having required that the additions of the columns of the accounts concerning M. Goodseels be verified, the arbiters declared that these additions were exact, but that a more serious examination of the bookkeeping would be needed to judge completely; and, perceiving no less than I that M. Bureau felt from these facts and these discussions a sickly effect of the most painful kind, they declared that the discussion ought to be closed and that the parties ought to hold themselves satisfied.

For my part — while adhering to this decision — I believed it my duty to repeat that a bookkeeping without control, like that of M. Duthoya, and subject to such discussions, would seem to me continually at least vicious in the form, and that, whatever the consequences might be, I would not renounce the right of manifesting my opinion on this subject.

The next day it was the turn of another colonist of Louvain, who wished and who obtained an explanation about similar to that of M. Guillemet, who had complained of the rapid and continual increase of the debt of this colonist toward the society.

But there manifested itself in the colony such a disapproval of these recriminatory maneuvers that M. Bureau declared, at the request of MM. Dailly and Capy, that he no longer wished to let himself be diverted by them from the general affairs.

On the 26th of January, M. Bureau forewarned me that he wished to gather the colony that very day, after supper, in order to entertain it on the question of the reserved parts. I tried to demonstrate to him that a general meeting, in the present disposition of certain minds, would have no good result and might have bad ones; whereas he could count on a pacific solution if — taking up, by means of a simple notice, the question where M. Considérant had left it — he dealt in isolation with each interested party.

M. Bureau did not think he ought to take account of my observation, and the meeting took place; but he found not only exaggerated pretensions — such as that of being paid integrally and in money — but moreover manifestations so threatening that, knowing in no way, he too, the personnel he had to deal with, he let himself be impressed and intimidated to the point of raising the sitting amid the vociferations of a few fanatics and without even having been able to make to them the exposition of his intentions.

There would have been needed, with those few people, only the firmness and the energy that save, almost always, a good captain, when his crew revolts; but our worthy friend M. Bureau — a soul of an artist, wholly Christian and wholly resigned — was evidently not the man necessary for such circumstances.

And so, coming back later to our counsel of dealing in isolation with each, he found them all much less tractable and believed himself obliged, toward some, to concessions which — refused to others — were evidently unfortunate weaknesses.

The day after this deplorable scene, the 27th of January, M. Bureau was somber, so dejected, so preoccupied with the thought of suicide, that it was scarcely possible to obtain from him a few monosyllables of reply.

I had it told to Madame Considérant that it was indispensable to forewarn her husband and to invite him to come without delay to take the direction of affairs and to save our friend M. Bureau from a crisis I had the fear of seeing become fatal. This communication was very flatly repulsed, as well as the proposal to beg Madame Bureau to come and rejoin her husband. Madame Considérant was preoccupied with only one thing: to establish at her house M. Bureau and the archives of the administration, in order to isolate them completely — which she carried out the same day, after having had her mother move out and having made of her little room the bookkeeping office, the center and the rendezvous of all the affairs, and the dwelling of our patient.

I wrote at once to M. Considérant, and I believe I ought to transcribe here a few words of this letter:

"I have the sorrow of announcing to you that our worthy Bureau, arrived on the 17th in the evening, is today seriously ill. "I hasten to warn you, and I add that, in the state in which the colony finds itself, it seems to me indispensable that you be here without any delay. The general interest, that of our friend, and your own are too gravely compromised for me to have had to hesitate."

By the same courier I also warned the management.

The next day, the 28th of January, a notice signed Bureau announced to the colony that the society of Réunion was dissolved.

Such was the coup d'État imposed on the manager by the executive agent, and which Madame Considérant had managed to realize by establishing M. Bureau in her dwelling.

This coup d'État, destructive of the collective center — contrary to the resolutions decided among the three managers before M. Bureau's departure, essentially contrary also to the personal sentiments and the hopes of this worthy friend — was moreover tainted with a vice of form of which we had doubly the right to complain.

Article 7 and the two last paragraphs of article 18 of those statutes — drawn up by M. Considérant, and by means of which he had constituted the society of Réunion — these articles, I say, contain (see p. 107) obligatory provisions whose violation renders perfectly null, in law, the decision that had just been wrested from M. Bureau.

This decision, thus tainted, weighed so on the heart and on the mind of our friend, it had also so increased the trouble and the disorder of the colony, that MM. Willemain and Bessard — friends of Madame Considérant — came on the 31st of January to announce to me that M. Bureau had arrived at a state of moral prostration and of despair such that it was no longer possible to obtain from him the least work nor even the least reply; that, in consequence, they came to propose to me to gather all that the general society could count of shareholders at Réunion and, with their concurrence, to form — given the urgency — a committee of public safety charged with watching over and safeguarding the general interests that the progressive disorder compromised in a disquieting manner.

I pointed out to these gentlemen that the shareholder element, at Réunion, comprised only a score of persons; that ten only were shareholders for 125 dollars and could thus, under the terms of the statutes, form part of a general assembly; and that, finally, we should find there no fewer discordant elements than in the rest of the colony.

I reminded them, moreover, that I had written to M. Considérant; that my letter, on the way for five days, was going to reach him, and that we ought to count on his arrival at the latest in ten days.

I added that the only means of obtaining, meanwhile, a legal administrative form was to present to M. Bureau, and to obtain from him the signature of, some list or other of men having — with the will to make their deliberations respected — some chance of coming to an understanding, and forming, thus gathered, a real council of administration.

These gentlemen returned, three days after, to communicate to me the list formed by them and approved by the manager, of a consultative commission composed of MM. Bessard, Brochier, Capy, Crétien, Dailly, Delasseux, Guérin, Guyot-Rémy, Haeck, Loupot, Savardan, and Willemain.

MM. Doderet and Dr. Nicolas, who were preparing their departure, had asked that one not think of them.

This creation — which lightened the burden whose weight had until then weighed on the manager all alone — seemed to restore to him a little security and confidence. He came the next day, the 3rd of February, to preside over the first meeting of the commission, at which M. Guillemet was asked to be present, in order to obtain from him the information relative to the bookkeeping. M. Bureau set forth in a few words the situation — that is to say, the impossibility, for a single man, to suffice for all the difficulties, and the particular need he had to be helped in the state of profound uncertainty and suffering into which the moral state of the colony had thrown him on his arrival.

He might have added with justice: and into which there had thrown him, from San Antonio onward, the exigencies of M. Considérant who — not wishing to lose, at least I am persuaded of it, the benefits of his flight — had wished that M. Bureau should be the executor of those three great measures he had not had the strength to execute himself: "the suppression of the associative center, the dismissal of the colonists, and the rejection of the claims relative to the reserved parts."

But the first preoccupation of the consultative commission had positively for its object the settlement of these reserved parts.

Two of its members, MM. Guyot and Loupot, put forward at the very first — and with an animation unanimously blamed by their colleagues — the pretension of an integral reimbursement and in money, a pretension rejected no less unanimously.

Then, the two opponents having withdrawn, the commission — feeling inwardly the propriety of releasing and accomplishing the promise made to the workers by M. Considérant the eve of his departure — proposed to M. Bureau to grant, by definitive transaction, the half of the reserved parts, reimbursable in labor-bonds capable of being exchanged on the spot for objects of consumption or for livestock, tools, lands, etc.

M. Bureau accepted this proposal. He found it just; but one felt, from certain reticences, from his embarrassment, and from certain exclamations of regret, that his mind had to combat in this case a superior will, contrary to his own sentiments.

This great and capital question thus disposed of, that of the restaurant was put on the carpet. M. Guérin and M. Delasseux — who had fulfilled the functions of maître d'hôtel — set forth very clearly the mode of operating to which the regulation had submitted them, and the infractions made by the present maître d'hôtel of this regulation.

The responsibility for these ruinous infractions was referred by me to the acting director, M. Duthoya, who had too obstinately closed his ear to warnings come from all sides for one to have to blame the maître d'hôtel all alone.

M. Bureau took up the defense of M. Duthoya, alleging that a certificate, covered with numerous signatures, had been delivered to him and contained the most explicit praises of his administration; but he did not insist when it was demonstrated to him that the great majority of that score of signatures was composed of the names of the maître d'hôtel and of the persons who held to profiting with him from the disorders pointed out.

Finally M. Bureau appearing, that evening, better disposed to conversation and explanations, I ventured to point out to him how easy it would have been for him — by convoking the few shareholders of the society of Réunion — not to violate the statutes of this society in destroying it.

His reply was this:

"Doctor, if I have had wrongs at Réunion, it is above all toward you, and I should wish to be able to proclaim it before the whole colony."

Thus manifested itself the combat that was waged, in the mind of this excellent friend, between his love for truth and for justice and his weakness against the wishes of the Considérant family.

The decision taken on the subject of the reserved parts had calmed for a moment the anxieties of the manager; but all was not finished — it was still necessary to proclaim this decision and above all to execute it.

Now, the next day, the proclamation of the decision was not made. We were persuaded that the influence of Madame Considérant was not a stranger to this delay. Some members of the commission went to M. Bureau to remind him of the engagements contracted the eve, and the decision was finally posted in the evening.

The next morning, the notice had disappeared, and the restaurant hall resounded with the threatening declamations of those who had honestly lulled themselves with the idea of an integral reimbursement.

But twenty-four hours after, the most terrible in appearance were the first to ask for their reimbursement in conformity with the decision.

M. Guillemet — foreseeing thenceforth the abandonment in which the management was soon to leave him, thinking also with anxiety of the fate reserved for him at Réunion with a wife and three children of tender age and no means of return to Europe — M. Guillemet consulted me on his position:

He possessed 75 dollars' worth of shares of the colonization society, and one of his friends had confided to him 600 dollars' worth, with the mission of employing them in the constitution of a farm.

All calculations made, these two sums could not suffice for the establishment of a family, and I proposed to him to come to an understanding with a few friends and to constitute with them and with him a fund sufficient for his establishment on a piece of land of which he should be co-owner and tenant-farmer. He accepted, and the half-section of Horton (320 acres), which I indicated to him, seemed to him, as to me, the object of a good settlement.

This half-section had cost the society four dollars an acre.

After having come to an understanding about it with MM. Doderet, Dailly, and Capy, and to avoid this object being asked for by others before us, we addressed to M. Bureau a collective request for this land in reimbursement, and we offered eight dollars an acre for it.

M. Bureau — without emitting any opinion on this offer — begged us to await the arrival of M. Considérant, which could not be long.

For those of the colonists who, like M. Guillemet, could do nothing other than stay at Réunion, the reimbursement of the reserved parts was easy; but those whom the dissolution of the society and the cessation of the works left without means of existence, and who were preparing to go seek fortune elsewhere — what could they do with the labor-bonds offered them in payment of their reserved parts?

There was there a grave difficulty for which M. Bureau did not have the thought of asking the advice of the commission, and whose solution exposed him to a host of unpleasantnesses.

Requests for money were made to him with obsessions and threats, to which he would not have been exposed, if Madame Considérant had not isolated him in her cottage, and if she had left him in our midst in his original dwelling.

These incessant claims so aggravated the state of moral suffering of our friend that — full of anxieties about the consequences of the somber despair in which we saw him plunged — I resolved to forewarn Madame Bureau.

I applauded myself all the more for this determination as, instead of M. Considérant, so impatiently awaited, it was M. Cousin who arrived at Réunion on the 15th of February 1857.

He arrived under the pretext — alleged by him — of coming to fetch Madame Considérant and Madame Vigoureux; a pretext doubly false, since their departure, under the conduct of M. Willemain, had long been decided in agreement with M. Considérant, and since, in fact, they left a week after, without M. Cousin accompanying them.

Among the letters he had brought was found a little square of paper that Madame Considérant had handed to me and on which her husband had written:

"Tell Dr. Savardan that I thank him for having written to me, but that I cannot go to Réunion, where, by mutual convention between those gentlemen of Paris and me, I am no longer to have to intervene."

My letter to Madame Bureau had been written on the 20th of February. This lady arrived at Dallas on the 4th of March, although she had met Madame Considérant on the way, and although that lady had announced before her departure that she would prevent her from coming.

Madame Bureau had arrived very late in the evening, and as it would not have been possible for her, at that hour, to come on foot to Réunion, she awaited there the return of a friend of her husband, M. Debray, who had accompanied her from Austin and who — directed by a guide — arrived toward ten o'clock at the colony.

M. Bureau set off at once with M. Debray and returned no more.

Madame Bureau — to whom I had not written a word that had reference to the thoughts of suicide with which her husband seemed to me obsessed — was struck at the very first by this direction of his mind.

M. Debray himself — whom I had not seen, whose arrival I was ignorant of until the next day — was struck by the same fears during the journey from Réunion to Dallas.

Thus were justified my sad forebodings and the cruel combats that the exigencies of M. Considérant — so opposed to the resolutions and the hopes that had presided over the departure from France of this excellent family — had raised in the soul of our friend.

Madame Bureau — justly frightened — decided her husband to return to Austin with her, and they left Dallas on the 6th of March.

She had had the kindness to have handed to me the eve the following few words:

"Thank you, sir, thank you! "You alone have had the charity to forewarn me; I shall have for it an eternal gratitude."

I knew that Madame Bureau had had great difficulties to overcome to obtain the departure of her husband. He was preoccupied with the idea that, at Réunion, we should accuse him too of a cowardly abandonment, and this idea obsessed him, drove him to despair during the whole road.

I hastened to write him the following letter:

"Dear sir and friend, I feel the need to show you — with our regrets at your absence — the hope of finding ourselves again under your benevolent direction in circumstances more reconcilable with your nature, wholly of affection and devotion. "We find here, in the necessity of the momentary rest that the solicitude of your family and your friends requires of you, a compensation whose value is incontestable: "It will withdraw you from obligations and from a responsibility whose burden it was too unjust to impose on you. "You are not made, dear sir and friend, for the harshnesses of the demolition and the dispersion that are being carried out. It is therefore just that the complaints of the victims should not find you between them and the authors of the disaster. "You are the man of the epoch of harmony. Reserve yourself for it, and believe, I beg you, that, among the hearts that are here sincerely devoted to you, it would not be just to forget mine."

At the bottom of this letter MM. Guillemet, Doderet, Nicolas, Bessard, Petit, Guérin, Delasseux, Santerre, Crétien, Capy, Dailly, and Louis added the following:

"The undersigned beg M. Bureau to accept their wholly sympathetic adherence to the sentiments and wishes expressed above."

I received, a few days after, a letter by which Madame Bureau thanked me with effusion for the calm her husband had felt after having received the above communication; her letter ended thus:

"Receive, sir, the testimonies of gratitude of a whole family that owes to you the preservation of its head."

I hope that the lack of discretion and modesty that makes me cite these letters will be pardoned me by those who will not forget that, even outside my task of historian, I have to defend my friends and myself against insinuations and allegations that tend to distort strangely, even on this point, our intentions and our acts.

XV. — M. Vincent Cousin

"The only man who could conjure away the final disaster." (Du Texas, p. 20.)

We already know M. Cousin:

We have seen him, in his functions of chief of group, himself measuring out, with such parsimony, to his companions of the road, the most indispensable foods, so that all those who could abandon him abandoned him to follow another group (see pp. 57, 58, and 59);

We have seen him, despite this parsimony, set up his group at as much expense as those who had amply — but with order — provided for the needs of a long and difficult journey.

We have seen him, by erroneous appraisals and calculations — of which true bookkeeping has made justice — lead into error the chief of the enterprise and make him commit the fault of unfounded reproaches (see pp. 57, 58, and 59);

We have seen him, at Houston — he, young and unknown in the School — conduct himself with regard to his elder, M. Robert Nusbaumer, in such a manner that this man so benevolent and so devoted has not ceased, since, to consider him as an enemy and as the cause of the wounding welcome he had received from M. Considérant on his arrival at Réunion (see p. 66);

We have seen him, at Réunion, the whiskey bottle under his arm and the little glass in his hand, distributing the dram to the takers (see p. 57);

We have seen him, in the bulletin of the 18th of December 1855, p. 6, tell us that the wheat, in Texas, ordinarily reaches seven to eight feet in height — a figure of rhetoric just as true as those we point out in such great number in the book au Texas;

Finally we have seen him, when M. Considérant had raised him to the condition of architect, develop and manifest his genius in the construction of the roofs, the staircases, and the chimneys (see pp. 142 to 146);

Let us see him, then, now in the high functions for which the new fate (du Texas, p. 18) inspired his choice in M. Considérant;

Let us see him closing the abyss that would have devoured everything (du Texas, p. 19); but let us say beforehand that that other providential man (M. Duthoya), who had no need of money (see p. 189), had therefore not completely justified — since M. Cousin replaced him — the great admiring exclamation of which he had been the object.

M. Cousin did not long leave us undecided — if we could have been so — on the true aim of his journey and on the value, in veracity, of the pretext alleged on his arrival (see p. 210).

He installed his bed beside that of M. Bureau; accompanied him until his departure, without leaving him either day or night; did not permit, without his intermediary, the least communication with him; took it upon himself to answer all questions; unsealed his letters[^xv1]; and addressed himself to him only to have given to him the signatures that could serve to fix on the manager the responsibility for the acts and to discharge of it the executive agent and his representative.

[^xv1]: Before me, and in the presence of MM. Capy, Dailly, and Guillemet, a letter from M. Louis was brought for M. Bureau. M. Cousin took this letter, unsealed it, read it, then passed it to M. Bureau, who — stupefied no doubt by this inconceivable conduct — crumpled the letter and laid it, without a word, on the chimney-piece, after having only cast a glance at the address. Then when M. Debray — come a second time from Dallas to Réunion to fetch M. Bureau's trunk — asked to see me in order to hand me the letter from Madame Bureau, M. Cousin made, with an obstinacy become irritating by dint of impropriety, all his efforts to prevent him from entering my room; then, during the few minutes this gentleman spent in my room to accomplish the message confided to him, M. Cousin had the inconceivable boldness to enter twice, without knocking and without greeting, and to press M. Debray abruptly, almost imperatively, to leave it.

This last fact proves, in favor of M. Cousin, that he had at least at the bottom of his conscience, and by a kind of vague intuition, the sensation of the lack of education and of the little dignity with which he represented his friend M. Considérant, and he evidently feared my testimony on this subject.

This testimony is therefore a duty: the importance and the consequences of M. Cousin's mission, the gratitude that his principal claims for him, and the thanks that the general assembly of our shareholders voted him at the end of 1857 will justify sufficiently, I hope, the care with which I believe I ought to give the exposition of his acts.

After the dissolution of the society of Réunion and the destruction of the collective center, the consultative commission had actively occupied itself (the parts of reserve being settled) with giving to each individual interest the means of escaping, as far as possible, the embarrassments, the difficulties of individual appropriation.

M. Bureau had found in these cares a softening of the sorrow that the hard mission M. Considérant had imposed on him caused him so profoundly, and he lent himself with all his benevolence to the arrangements the commission proposed and to those the colonists asked.

The lands sown with wheat or to be cleared, as well as the agricultural implements, were leased to the farmers; the workshops and the tools of the various industries were likewise divided among the workers. The forge was leased to M. Louis, a workbench and joinery tools to M. Capy, the tinware to M. Dailly, etc., etc.

Every day some one of these leases of rental was drawn up in duplicate and signed by M. Bureau and by the taker.

But when M. Bureau had left, M. Cousin — suppressing the consultative commission — refused to recognize the conventions of rental made by the manager and not yet signed, and declared that he wished to lease nothing, but to sell everything. It was represented to him in vain that not all the colonists had the sums necessary for these acquisitions; he none the less persisted in his exigencies.

The tinware tooling, for example, required a rather large outlay of funds. M. Dailly — the only tinsmith in the colony, thinking wisely to reserve for himself the means of returning to France — did not wish to deprive himself of it by such an acquisition. He produced, moreover, a letter from M. Godin-le-Maire who, in 1855, in charging him to buy on the society's account this tinware tooling, recognized, in the name of the management, that M. Dailly was not going to Texas to establish himself there as a tinsmith, but in order to exercise this profession, in associative mode, on the account of the colonization society and of the collective center that should be constituted.

Finally M. Dailly invoked the word given by M. Bureau, and the act of rental drawn up in agreement with him and with the commission, and which the abrupt departure of the manager alone had prevented from being signed.

All that was dead letters for M. Cousin, who — cutting the question short to escape arguments without reply — had the tooling removed from the workshop, and preferred to render it useless by piling it up in the store and by obliging the colonists to go off to Dallas for acquisitions and repairs daily indispensable in all households.

M. and Madame Dailly — thus deprived of the means of living in America — could, they at least, meet the costs of their journey and return to France.

They had (we have seen it previously, pp. 27 and 28) lost their brother Abel Bossereau, and there was due to this young man a sum of reserved parts that M. and Madame Dailly claimed.

M. Cousin's reply is worth keeping:

"Your brother!… does he need anything, since he is dead?"

The sum was nevertheless paid, after long parleys, M. Cousin not daring to run the chances of a judicial claim.

Thus were carried out, and have been carried out, the executions after the fashion of that of poor Mique.

M. Considérant — to whom these executions tear the heart (du Texas, p. 56) — found it thus, no doubt, less heart-rending to have them done; and, this time, by one of those numerous strokes of fate (du Texas, pp. 18 to 21) which come, if one believes him, to illuminate and rewarm his work, this time he had truly had a happy hand: never did an executioner show better than M. Cousin pleasure and zeal at his task.

Meanwhile each hastened to escape, by flight too, this mode of destruction of the collective center and of the hopes of associative organization that the book, the letters, and the verbal promises of M. Considérant had given.

Four gardeners, M. Barbot at the head, abandoned the great garden to individual appropriation, after three or four thousand dollars of expenses swallowed up in wells, irrigation canals, vast sanded paths, plantations of nurseries in geometric quincunxes, great glazed frames, etc. — expenses which, all passionately protected by M. Considérant, are reduced today to a great field of cultivation, like the most ordinary clearing.

Some fifteen other colonists soon followed them on the road to Houston;

Ten had already preceded them under the administration of M. Duthoya;

M. Pierquet, the ex-chief of cultivation, returns to New York;

M. Doderet and Dr. Nicolas leave us to go make an exploration of Venezuela and then return to France.

M. Duthoya soon follows them; and M. Cousin — having dismissed M. Guillemet — then unites in himself alone the functions of director, accountant, and cashier, and realizes, by this economy of springs, that bookkeeping which, according to the happy expression of M. Considérant, and thanks to the suppression of control, "one can, indeed, always make say all one wishes."

Here is a last example of it, too remarkable for me to be able to omit it, although it concerns me personally:

One of our colonists had owed me, for two years, a hundred and eleven dollars that I had advanced for his travel costs. He had one day, the 28th of February 1857, the idea of discharging this debt — which is justified, moreover, by a note signed by him — and, as the credit of his individual account contained a more than sufficient sum, he went to beg the accountant, M. Duthoya, to pass an installment of ninety-one dollars from the credit of his account to the credit of mine; which was done in these terms:

"Likewise to the debit, Blot, by his order. 91 dollars 86 c."

I had therefore, from then on, ninety-one dollars more belonging to me and available in the society's treasury.

But when I left Réunion and settled my account, there were positively lacking in it the ninety-one dollars of which I have just spoken.

And M. Cousin, to justify this deficit, showed me, in the debit of the account, at the date of the 28th of March, an item worded thus:

"Annulment of the transfer of the 28th of February. 91 dollars 86 c."

And when I asked him by what motive he could justify this subtraction made from my purse and without my knowledge, he answered me:

"M. Blot showed me his regret at having paid you, and I returned him his money."

Such facts have no need of commentaries, and I shall not await in vain from the management, I hope, the redress of this singular operation.

The colonists who had for resources only their reserved parts and their titles of subscription tried private establishments — the only means for them of creating for themselves at least some food resources.

But to found these private establishments, one had to obtain from M. Cousin, in reimbursement, the lands, materials, and movable objects indispensable.

According to what principles were the prices of all these objects to be determined?

According to the will of M. Cousin all alone, for each colonist, reduced to this extremity, had neither the faculty of choosing, nor the time to wait, nor anyone to appeal to.

Let us cite first the example of M. Guillemet: he had offered eight dollars an acre for the land of Horton; that was half again the price of the country at the moment of this offer, and that was a hundred per cent of net profit offered to the colonization society.

M. Bureau had adjourned his reply until the arrival of M. Considérant.

In default of the latter, M. Cousin cut the question short by requiring fifteen dollars instead of eight; and, forced by the necessity of which we spoke just now, we subscribed the acquisition at this price.

But, beforehand, we had put before his eyes and before the eyes of M. Bureau the following passages of letters from the management which ought, in our view, to have served as law to these sorts of transactions:

"The society has not the intention of profiting by commerce on the inhabitants of the colony. It constitutes itself the commercial agency of the colonists and will simply cover its disbursements by adding the simple corresponding provision to the general expenses. "It will not be the same with respect to those who are strangers to the colony and who come to provision themselves in our bazaars. For those we shall have the right to profit. "The society has an evident interest in doing everything so that the inhabitants of the colony find on its territory the greatest possible advantages; for it is they who are its wealth, and as they are it, all things considered, the interests are merged. "The lands will naturally be sold at the price they shall be worth at the moment of the acquisition."

Now, the land which, in the neighborhood of Réunion, had been sold at the highest price and in quite exceptional conditions that increased its value, had been sold, a year before, ten dollars an acre.

Since then — and under the influence of the disorganization of our society and of the sale at fifty sous an acre, by the government, of the lands of the railroad reserve — the built and cultivated properties that surrounded us, and that one seemed, a year before, to want to cede only at ten dollars and even well beyond, were offered to us then at four dollars an acre at the maximum.

There was a great distance from that to the price of fifteen dollars that the executor of the wishes of M. Considérant imposed on us, and to the exaggerated price at which he sold to the colonists all the objects of consumption.

People had indeed come back then from that indignation manifested in 1846 against the "ignominies of mercantilism," and of which I spoke on page 14.

This violence exercised against people henceforth without defense violated not only solemn promises and compromised the honor of those who had made them, but it compromised much more still the honor of M. Considérant and of his agent M. Cousin, who had just had published in the bulletin of the 31st of December 1856, in 85 lines of page 47, under the title Information proper to free colonization, a bait for new colonists able to dispose of eighteen thousand francs.

This bait consisted in a budget by which these gentlemen — comparing the use of these eighteen thousand francs with their product — establish first that the price of the land is "at the maximum, four dollars an acre."

Then they give the list of all the other expenses and of the receipts of the first year, and they arrive textually, without flinching, at this conclusion:

"Twenty thousand francs of net profit at the end of the first year — that is to say, more than a hundred per cent of the capital employed."

That was as judicious and as true as "the wheat that ordinarily reaches seven to eight feet high"; as true as "the vegetables that come without watering and without being disturbed by the weeds."

These exaggerations might have been excusable at the beginning of 1855, when — under the influence of spring, of the enthusiasm raised by the book au Texas, and of the excitement of the journey — one saw, and wished to see, everything in a fine light; but after two winters and three summers, there can, there must be more than blindness in renewing such language.

A respectable and good landowner of Le Mans, seduced by the statement of such marvels, conceived at once the idea of selling all he possessed in France and of coming, with his three children, thus to double all at once his fortune in Texas; but not daring, however, quite to believe his eyes, and having some confidence in my veracity and in the wisdom that my age makes one suppose, he had my advice asked of me — which summed itself up in a counsel to wait still before changing anything whatever in his good and honorable position. (This advice, sent through the intermediary of the management, did not reach him.)

I addressed at the same time to the management a counter-budget whose conclusion — the result of observations gathered during two years' sojourn in Texas — is that the budget of the first year of a settler reduces itself literally to zero for the profits, and that it is only after long years of miseries, and under the influence of happy chances which are far from being the general rule, that the visions of MM. Considérant and Cousin can take a body and some reality.

I added that to promise lands at four dollars at most, when one made them be paid for at ten, fifteen, twenty dollars and more by those who, once on the spot, could no longer take back the money of their subscriptions and turn back — that that, I said, took on a tinge of charlatanism and of bad faith that the public would not know how, like us, to distinguish from thoughtlessness, from the errors into which judgment can fall, from the levity, in short, and the inconsistency of certain minds in certain circumstances of their life.

This rectification was not published, and we regretted it; for this abstention proves that — as I complained of it — the bulletin was becoming the little-veracious journal of M. Considérant and M. Cousin, instead of remaining the property and the organ of our whole society.

I was able at last, by my private correspondence or by my silence, to prevent or delay determinations that would have been fatal to other worthy friends who had consulted me; but the duty, today, does not stop there: it is to all that one must address oneself, because — in an interest that can be, above all, only personal — one persists in offering, to all, deceptive mirages that can lead only to those disasters on which one finds it so natural to found anew "the finest chances." (Page 237.)

The harshness and the tenacity with which M. Cousin imposed usurious prices so contrary to the promises might have been attributed to an excess of zeal for the interests of the society and for the repair of its losses; but he did not even know how to keep for himself the benefit of a doubt favorable on this subject.

This man — so parsimonious, so pitilessly exacting with regard to those he did not like — showed himself, on the contrary, of a ruinous prodigality for the society, when it was a matter of his friends.

Thus the horses, the carriages, the machines were leased very dear — dearer than in the past — to the first, while they were gratuitously, every day, at the disposal of the second.

They were so much at the disposal of the latter that — under the pretext of a compensation for the cares of conservation they were supposed to give them — they were permitted to sublease them and to execute with them works of which no product came back to the colony.

When I left Réunion, M. Haizé came to offer to drive me, over a hundred to a hundred and fifty leagues, across the Indian territory I wished to traverse. He put at my disposal the two best mules of the colony and that wagon of which I have already spoken and which had served for the journey of the Considérant family. We agreed on eighty dollars (416 fr.), which I paid him on my arrival at Fort Smith, and of which the society did not profit by an obol, M. Cousin having permitted him — as all his other friends — to use these objects gratuitously.

The lands themselves were no exception to these debauches of generosity.

There exists, five or six miles from Réunion (one to two leagues), a land called the land of Moone (pronounced Moûne). This land — forming a half-section — is the best of the whole domain for pastures. It possesses a solid house, quite new, of tree trunks, situated on a little hill exposed to the south, and, a few steps off, a fence for the livestock and a pretty spring that has never dried up.

This land — which rivals that of Horton, and which several of our farmers consider as very superior, although it is generally marshy — was coveted by M. Brochier, the factotum of M. Cousin.

M. Brochier — who had been raised, with thirty dollars of salary a month, to the difficult functions of appraiser and seller of all the materials of the liquidation that was being carried out, functions very superior to his knowledge; M. Brochier, who — charged moreover with the surveillance of the herds, his specialty — now let them, by overload of attributions, wander, stray, and be lost henceforth without inventory and without mark, as far as thirty and forty miles from our dwellings; M. Brochier was judged by M. Cousin worthy of an excess of reward; and, while lands very inferior to that of Moone were sold at from ten to twenty dollars an acre to some ten families that could in no way escape this hard necessity, M. Brochier obtained that of Moone at three dollars — a price inferior, or at the very least equal, to that of acquisition.

Was this indeed — even from M. Considérant's point of view — a means, and an equitable means, of conjuring away the final disaster?

Such facts must make one understand how important it is, for those who have been witnesses of them, to affirm them and to produce the proofs of them.

That M. Considérant, in his last pamphlet entitled du Texas, has compromised his reputation as a writer and as a sensible man, and has morally and notably diminished himself in the eyes of the School — his work none the less contains insinuations that those against whom they are surreptitiously directed must repel.

It would be to condemn oneself to keep silence. It would be to deliver oneself too good-naturedly to the spirit of calumny that grafts itself so easily onto the spirit of insinuation, and which has not even awaited this publication to give itself free rein. If there has been in M. Considérant something more than the diminishing of the writer, it must be said, since his writing contains attacks all the graver as they are less precise. Mine, at least, will not deserve this reproach, and I continue:

I have said that, to force the colonists to depart, the envoy of M. Considérant had withdrawn from them the instruments of labor and had had these instruments piled up in the store, where they remain, there, unproductive for everyone.

But there still remained in the hands of Dr. Savardan — to whom they had been confided by the management for a gratuitous use (as I have set forth on page …[?]) — a case of surgical supplies and one of medicines; then also a thermometer and a barometer by means of which I exactly gathered, three times a day, for fifteen months, meteorological observations that the management inserted in its bulletin.

The two doctors (Nicolas and Savardan) are too much partisans of the economy of springs in their medical practice for it to be possible to reproach them with prodigality in the use of the deposit that had been confided to them: a flask of sulphate of quinine, a few pills of gummy extract of opium, a flask of collodion, two flasks of ether, a few salts, a few preparations of iodine, a roll of diachylon sticking-plaster, and English court-plaster — in short, and in all, about fifty to sixty francs' worth of medicines, are all that the treatment of about three hundred patients cost the general society during two years and a half.

And so, in default of motives and pretexts, M. Cousin contented himself with signifying to Dr. Savardan that he should hand him the four objects indicated above.

There arose, between M. Cousin and me, a conflict grave enough for me to have been able to fear for an instant the necessity of a deplorable conclusion.

I begged M. Cousin to justify to my eyes the powers by virtue of which he addressed this request to me.

He drew from his portfolio a little square of paper on which M. Bureau, at the moment of his departure, had delegated to him his powers as manager.

One could oppose to this delegation the sickly disposition of mind in which the manager found himself when he had signed it — a disposition that would have prevented more than one delicate man from making use of this delegation; one could allege also that M. Bureau — who certainly would not have made this claim to me — could not have given the mission to make it; but the delegation bore besides a radical nullity that I pointed out to M. Cousin.

It had no other signature than that of Bureau, and I had to declare that, for want of the corporate signature Bureau, Guillon, Godin & Co., this document had no legal value, and that I refused to conform to the orders that leaned on it.

I added that M. Cousin had no more, and could not have, a legal power of attorney emanating from M. Considérant, since the latter had written to me — as I have already noted (page 210) — "that he could no longer go to Réunion, where, by mutual convention with those gentlemen of Paris, he was no longer to have to intervene."

I added further that M. Considérant had again confirmed to me the same determination in a letter of the 9th of March 1857, from which I extract the following expressions:

"It is a long time since I wrote to Paris to be replaced at Réunion and made the condition of no longer meddling with that side of our affairs; it is a long time too since they made to me, myself, the condition of no longer meddling with it. I have exhausted there all my strength and I can do nothing more there."

Despite these refusals, M. Cousin persisted in his exigencies; and, having himself, each time, assisted by several witnesses, he threatened me with denouncing me to justice and having me put in prison, if I persisted in my refusal.

Certain of the vanity of his pretensions, as long as his powers should not be regularized, I persisted in this refusal.

He returned to the charge again on the 24th of March, and — accompanied by two young men of the colony, MM. Colin and Delore — he enjoined me to hand him the four objects he had previously claimed of me.

I renewed my refusal, reminding him of the motives of it.

He then ordered the two young men to enter my room and to seize by force these objects. Both remained motionless, and the elder, M. Colin — respectfully removing his hat — addressed to M. Cousin the following observations:

"If we had known that you were bringing us here to do such a job at the doctor's, we should have begged you to permit us not to accompany you; for you must well believe, M. Cousin, that we did not come to America to fulfill the functions of gendarmes or rural guards."

"Well!" cried M. Cousin, "I will enter it myself!"

"Ah! that is better," I answered him in my turn; "but do not forget, sir, that it will be at your own risk and peril; for I am quite resolved, whatever may come of it, to make my dwelling respected."

For a few minutes, M. Cousin repeated twice more his threat; then he took the course of withdrawing without having dared to give it a beginning of execution.

I would willingly have thanked him for his retreat — which took from me a painful nightmare, that of the consequences of his attack — if his will had been of the temper of mine.

Everywhere, under all legislations, the dwelling is sacred. Justice alone can penetrate it without the will of a citizen, and after the conditions required by the law have been fulfilled; but when — outside the great cities — there exists, as in the United States, no institution having for its object the immediate protection of all and of each, each then — having to count only on himself for his own defense — accustoms himself early to be, in the absence of all police, his own dispenser of justice.

And so, as the people of bad intentions or of a bad character are all and always armed for the attack, the people of peaceful nature are all, likewise, armed for the defense.

There, then, the dwelling (the home) is in a manner much more sacred than anywhere else. While in France, for example, the judges and the jurors weigh with a grave and very legitimate attention the circumstances in which a citizen could believe himself to have the right to repel by arms the invasion of his dwelling, and sometimes punish the too unreflecting and too precipitate use of this right — in America, on the contrary, it suffices that the attempt at this violation be established, for the one who has repelled it to be immediately absolved. "Why did you enter? Why did you exercise the first a violence? So much the worse for you if the reaction has exceeded the scope of the attack." Such is the spirit that always presides, in America, over the verdicts of the jurors — a wise spirit, we believe, if, under the influence of the obligation of the unanimity of the jurors for the validity of their decisions, it did not so often degenerate into deplorable indulgences for great and proven criminals.

A few months later I found at Fort Smith a worthy Frenchman from the banks of the Garonne, M. Joseph Bonnefoux, who, a short time before, had been the object of a solemn manifestation of the American spirit concerning the rights of a citizen in his dwelling.

M. Bonnefoux — although of very small stature — is the chief seller of liquors (bar-keeper) of Fort Smith.

Entrenched behind his long counter — having behind him, symmetrically and artistically arranged, all the phials, all the bottles destined for the very varied composition of the beverages that, during nine months of extreme heats, the inhabitants of the south of America consume incessantly — M. Bonnefoux is truly a man worthy of being seen in the heat of the rapid and somewhat theatrical composition of these iced mixtures, composed sometimes of some ten substances that he knows admirably how to accommodate to the taste of his numerous customers, speaking to all of them with volubility the language of their country.

M. Bonnefoux adds to these talents a veritable passion for the imperial government of France, and for the emperor Napoleon III in particular. He is inexhaustible on this manifestation of his patriotism.

One evening, at the regulation hour when he was to close his house, he sees three dragoons of the garrison of the fort enter. One of them was a dragoon six feet tall, known and feared by all for his quarrelsome and spiteful spirit.

The first words of this man were an insult to the French, to France, and to their emperor.

M. Bonnefoux — so prompt to serve his clients — remains with arms crossed without answering a word.

The dragoon, with a great reinforcement of insults, orders him to pour him a drink.

M. Bonnefoux points out the clock to him with his finger and makes him a negative sign.

The furious dragoon hurls himself on the bar-keeper and takes him by the throat. The latter — quick as lightning — seizes a tomahawk, a little Indian axe that serves him to break his sugar, and splits the soldier's forehead with a blow so firm that — hurled onto the floor — the giant, carried off by his two comrades, was buried three days after.

M. Bonnefoux went at once to recount this event to the judge, was admitted by him to post bail and to keep his liberty; then, appearing shortly after before the jury, he was acquitted unanimously.

Be that as it may, it is probably not doubtful that M. Considérant would have much preferred that M. Cousin, his representative, had spared himself his ridiculous attempt at intimidation toward me.

I persist in naming M. Cousin the representative, the mandatary, as the intimate confidant and executor of the wishes of M. Considérant, although the latter has persisted in protesting against this qualification; he said in a letter to M. Doderet:

"M. Cousin was named by M. Bureau and not by me, and, had I no other reasons for abstaining, I should certainly not expose myself to a meddling in their affairs with third parties."

The sending of M. Cousin by M. Considérant — when everyone had come to an agreement at Réunion to desire and ask for the latter — then the unceremonious eagerness with which M. Cousin had seized the government of the colony, had proved in advance the frankness of M. Considérant in these assertions; but we are far from being at the end of our proofs.

M. Cousin — understanding the solidity of my objections and the poverty of his threats, for the execution of which the heart had fortunately failed him — had taken the only reasonable course, that of asking for regular powers; and, on the 6th of April, he arrived all triumphant from Dallas, and — escorted by three witnesses — he came, threatening me anew with prison, to signify to me a power of attorney he had just received from M. Considérant. This power of attorney — while containing general powers — contained, twice repeated, the special mandate "to withdraw from the hands to which they might have been confided, all the objects, whatever they might be, belonging to the society."

The nullity of this power would not have been difficult to sustain in justice, by the production of the letters in which M. Considérant established so clearly "that he no longer had the right to meddle with the affairs of Réunion"; but our aim had been to bring the executive agent to the loyal avowal of the mandate of execution with which he had charged M. Cousin, and to free M. Bureau from the responsibility of such a choice. This aim was attained; but it became evident that M. Considérant had still hoped quite the contrary. He had written to M. Bureau to press him to give himself a new power more regular than the first, and his own was evidently only an in-case [en-cas — a stopgap] of which M. Cousin — pushed by the desire to triumph over my resistance — was in far too great a hurry to make use.

I had the evident proof of it by two letters received at the same time a week after.

The one, from M. Bureau, and the other, from M. Considérant, written ten days after the sending of his power of attorney:

"Doctor," he said to me, "I have already written to you categorically that I would not intervene in any fashion in the affairs that may be treated at Réunion between third parties and the person, whoever it may be, charged with treating them on the account of the society; I repeat it to you again, since you wish it, in the most formal terms. "Allow me to repeat to you one last time that you will not bring me to interpose myself in the affairs of Réunion between you and the one or those who are or shall be charged with doing them."

This letter had been written to me a week after the sending of that power of attorney in which M. Considérant repeated twice that M. Cousin had for particular mission "to withdraw from the hands to which they might have been confided all the objects, whatever they might be, belonging to the society."

Now, I was the only one who had put obstacle to the wishes of M. Cousin relative to these surrenders. M. Considérant, by his power of attorney, so special, had therefore — whatever he might say of it — interposed himself between M. Cousin and me.

But how had M. Considérant's intelligence not preserved him from this contradiction he gave himself so singularly and so evidently?

M. Bureau's letter explains it very clearly:

"My dear M. Savardan, I am informed by Considérant of the position you are taking with regard to Cousin."

The whole letter then proves that M. Considérant — to determine M. Bureau to send himself a new power — did not hesitate to speak to him, with the intention of irritating him against me, of the state of moral despair in which he had found himself at Réunion and of the opinion I had manifested in this regard; but this tactic remained without success.

M. Bureau — while urging me to yield — did not send a new mandate, and his letter ends thus:

"Whatever may happen, dear doctor, believe always in the persistence of my old affection for you."

The reply I addressed to him ends thus:

"Moreover, dear sir and friend, the conflict is ended. Considérant having decided to send M. Cousin a general power of attorney, to take openly at last the responsibility for movements and acts of which he was, behind the scenes, the sole mover, my opposition has ceased immediately, and I shall not delay, I hope, in freeing the administration of Réunion from an old and honest figure that hampers it — because this old figure lets itself be imposed upon neither by declamations, nor by threats, nor by any fetishism. "I too have remained your friend, and, in this capacity, I shall end by adjuring you to renounce offering yourself as a holocaust to the coldest and most ungrateful egoism. You have ceased to be in question; beware of re-entering it. You owe this care to your friends, to yourself, and above all to your family, which, I am persuaded, has long suffered from its share in your self-abnegations."

There ended, in fact, my personal conflicts with M. Considérant and his agent; but there does not yet end the history of their administration.

Before continuing it, it is well to sum up what precedes:

M. Considérant — after having disappeared from Réunion in the circumstances we have recounted — continued from afar the government of it through the successive intermediary of MM. Duthoya, Bureau, and Cousin; but he wished above all to be able to disavow all the bad things that should result from this combination.

He could not decline the responsibility for the choice of M. Duthoya; but this choice was forced: an honest man was needed while awaiting the manager, and M. Considérant knew no other at Réunion.

But after the arrival of the manager — and although M. Considérant exercised irresistibly over him the influence we have mentioned — he was then well under cover; for, by virtue of the statutes, the manager was the chief, and so much the worse for him if he had the weakness to undergo other impulsions than those of his own judgment.

But again, when the health of M. Bureau and the circumstances render urgent the request for the intervention of the executive agent, he refuses, under the pretext that he has not the right "to intervene in anything whatever," and he intervenes nevertheless through the intermediary of M. Cousin — but under the pretext of sending the latter to fetch Madame Considérant.

Then, when the manager has left and the power left by him finds itself insufficient, M. Considérant still declines all right of intervention, obstinately throws upon M. Bureau the choice of M. Cousin, and sends nevertheless to the latter — while hoping that it will be useless — a general and special power of attorney, which he has followed still, a week after, by a formal declaration of having no right to intervene.

It is true that M. Considérant will be able to say — and one has already said for him — that he did not intervene, that is to say, did not come himself; but, in conscience, how many would there be found in the School who would not blush to see descend from so high such a piece of equivocation [escobarderie]?

M. Cousin — henceforth administrator-in-chief — must be shown in the exercise of these high functions, in the midst of which I was able to study him still for four months after these last events.

When the suppression of all the workshops of the collective center and the accumulation, without inventory, of all the instruments of labor in the store, as well as the dispersion of the workers, were accomplished, there still remained one associative institution, that of the restaurant. M. Cousin suppressed it.

Instead of two persons who could suffice for the work of this establishment, twelve were then needed for a dozen kitchens — a number equal to that of the families that necessity still nailed to the plateau of Réunion.

Each of these little centers — obliged to provide itself with water, wood, foodstuffs, and the indispensable utensils — keenly felt the miseries of this individual appropriation, so long condemned by M. Considérant, and to which, according to his bulletin, we must return today to render ourselves worthy of the association he had promised us.

M. Cousin — faithful translator of this retrograde theory, and forced to provide for his own feeding — created a bourgeois boarding-house, in which each could have his appetite exploited for thirty-five sous a day; but the contractor — finding himself too much exploited himself on the occasion of the prices at which M. Cousin sold him the butcher's meat and leased him the utensils and the premises of the kitchen — soon renounced this speculation.

Another, more sympathetic to M. Cousin, obtained from him more favorable conditions and continued the operation.

But soon too the boarders found their board ill-balanced with the price imposed on them; and, from eight as they were in the origin — without counting the family of the operator — they were reduced to four, and soon to three at the moment of my departure, the others having preferred to do their cooking themselves in isolation or to join with other families. A few comers and goers alone furnished the contractor the means of not yet abandoning the enterprise.

For my part — who should have produced, in sitting at the table of M. Cousin, a double effect little agreeable — I extricated myself from embarrassment by proposing to some ten sympathetic persons who, like me, completely disoriented, did not wish to enter the sphere of the bourgeois boarding-house, to continue the food-association on the bases of the defunct restaurant.

M. Cousin leased us the building of the infirmary, where we were able to continue to care for two patients who had nearly died, and also to install our kitchen and our dining hall (all that in the same room, of course).

Distribution made, in equal portions, of a few general expenses, such as the rent; and, each paying afterward, of the food substances, only the quantity consumed and conscientiously measured, we had — thanks to the active intelligence and the devotion of our ladies — a modest cuisine, but very superior to that of the bourgeois boarding-house, and whose price, on average, did not exceed twenty-five sous a day.

Each — according to his strength and his aptitudes — furnished his contingent to the works of this little community: the ladies, besides the interior cares of the household, used their walks for the gathering of salads of purslane and of evening-primrose and of wild onions. The strong men broke and sawed the wood; Dr. Nicolas — besides the products of our garden — brought us at each trip two watering-cans full of fresh water; and I, finally, kept the bookkeeping, and after two hours' walk taken every evening, I frequently hung in the larder some piece of game: rabbits, turtledoves, partridges, plovers, etc.

Moreover, the butcher's meat and the venison (deer and roe-deer) — although doubled in price since the dissolution of the society — were not wanting to us.

Our Horton farm, when we had constituted it, began to furnish us with excellent milk, butter, fresh cheeses, eggs, and firewood.

Finally, poor Negro slaves of the environs brought us excellent fish. A cat-fish, of ten to fifteen pounds, cost us from twenty-five to thirty sous. Its flesh much resembles that of the pike, but it is much more tender and without bones. Some of these fish reach as much as the weight of fifty pounds.

By thus remaining faithful to the sentiments and the ideas of association that had brought us, we proved the possibility of putting them into practice even in the least favorable conditions of number, and we obtained — at a notably inferior price — better and more varied food.

We lived thus for six months, in perfect harmony, happy to gather three times a day to chat, to groan, or to laugh at all our miseries, moral and material — for to eat less badly is not everything — and with no other grave clouds than the successive departures of the members of our association.

The first who left us was young Allen, for whom — while awaiting a sure occasion of return to his father's — we had created the profession of master of English pronunciation, which completed, for all of us, the excellent lessons of the Robertson method.

After him left M. and Madame Dailly;

Then Dr. Nicolas and M. Doderet.

Each of these departures was a stinging sorrow for the little association. It felt then more keenly the wrongs of M. Considérant, who had known neither how to welcome, nor to appreciate, nor to employ such natures, such devotions.

In default of this little associative combination, several of us — in this country where free domestic service is unknown — would have been reduced to the obligation of buying or leasing slaves; but, however benevolent their conduct might have been with regard to these unfortunate blacks, and whatever care they might have been able to take of their education, one would not have pardoned us in France; one would not even have pardoned old men, for whom the works of the household were impossible, for having had recourse to such a means of preservation.

The Americans, for their part, would not have pardoned us these cares of education and these sympathetic relations contrary to their manners, their customs, and even their laws.

What, then, had we come to do in these regions where the question of slavery violates the liberty of all in so radical a manner, and must serve, from one instant to another — as already in Kansas — as motive for an atrocious civil war?

The associative mode, the collective center, alone could give us the chance of escaping these consequences. In this center — where each has a share of the general service and from which the wage-system is banished — the necessity of the domestic or of the slave does not exist, and our neighbors had soon perfectly understood that if we had none, it was because we had no need of any.

But from the day when one sends us back to individual appropriation, one renders life impossible for us in Texas, if the moral considerations that bind us to Europe are powerful enough to forbid us the use and the speculation of slaves — the only auxiliaries, the only domestics on whom a landowner can count in this region.

M. Considérant — in bringing us to Texas, where the political constitution could create for us still more difficulties than the climatic constitution; M. Considérant — in disowning the promises made to the spirit of association and in throwing us violently, with such conditions, into the difficulties of private appropriation — M. Considérant was twice culpable, for the most seductive offers had been made to him to engage him to settle in the States of Central America, where there exist in reality all the advantages one finds only in the state of declamatory advertisement in the book au Texas.

But we must return one last time to the providential man, to the providentially chosen man, to M. Cousin (du Texas, p. 20).

M. Cousin, he too, had — like M. Goodseels — drawn a plan of a town destined to replace, on the plateau of Réunion, the associative edifice sketched by M. Cantagrel.

This plan — which one can see in the offices of the management, and of which a copy has just very recently (July 1858) been sent to each shareholder; this plan which M. Considérant, with his ordinary prudence, has until now left under the name of M. Cousin — this plan, I do not doubt it at all, was the work of the master. In case of success, M. Cousin will have the glory of having penciled it and of having traced it on the ground; but, in the contrary case, he will have the very laudable courage of monopolizing all the hisses.

MM. Cantagrel and Goodseels, they, had at least each made the economy of a responsible editor.

M. Cousin therefore traced his town (the town of Réunion); then he divided it into little lots that he named town lots, to distinguish them from other lots of greater dimension which — in a circumference of about a mile's radius — had received the name of country lots.

That done, the constructions began, and at the moment of my departure, three wooden cabins were already built and inhabited, some fifty meters from one another, by three colonists who — functionaries of the administration of M. Cousin — had not been able to refuse to let themselves be paid in this manner.

And it is there, on a plateau without vegetable earth and without water — it is these town lots — that M. Considérant has offered in France, to the shareholders, in reimbursement of their advances.

This plan of a town, a few kilometers from Dallas, county seat, on a plateau far from the great roads, from the watercourses, and still too far from a doubtful layout of a railroad; this plan of a town in a region whose springs and wells dry up, and whose first and rare inhabitants begin to flee the climate of extreme heats and the extreme drought — this plan of a town is a stillborn plan, like that of the Louvain of M. Goodseels.

A collective center, a community alone could — if one had known how, as in the charterhouses of the old world, to develop there a faith without which nothing connects and nothing progresses — a community alone could, we say, make fruitful the plateau of Réunion.

It might have become an important industrial and agricultural establishment, but on condition of not proclaiming, as M. Cousin did, the absorption of Dallas by Réunion.

To change the capital of a county — as took place from Cedar-Spring to Dallas for the county of Dallas, and from Birdsville to Fort Worth for the county of Tarrant — more is needed than the puffs of a poor pride; the new center must have over the old an evident superiority in the eyes of the general interests, and Réunion — despite the salubrity of its elevated plateau — will never possess either the inexhaustible waters of Dallas, or the shore of the Trinity, which American industry well counts on, and will know how, to make fruitful one day by navigation by means of dams and locks.

Instead of this community so easy to render prosperous, we had in the month of April 1857 — beside the old colony, disorganized and more and more deserted — only the town of M. Cousin with its three plank cabins, whose inhabitants — anxious, sorrowful, or sick — had before them only the saddest perspectives.

The Americans who came to visit us established this state of things by an exclamation under which was hidden probably as much irony as it seemed to want to show pity, and which everyone will understand without its being necessary to translate it:

Oh!… melancholick Re-union!

An exclamation we have heard twenty times in all the tones of the guttural Anglo-Saxon tongue.

The country lots were far from presenting a more cheerful aspect.

Ten of these establishments had been formed, by agreement or by force, in a radius of about a kilometer around the town.

Their installation had been the putting into practice of that famous budget of which I spoke on pages 220 and 221, and which — sent from Texas as a bait to the bulletin of the 31st of December 1856 — promised the doubling of the capital from the very first year.

These ten establishments all offered, in degrees proportioned to their antiquity, the least doubtful signs of misery and discouragement. Eight lacked water, and several would have esteemed themselves very happy if one had bought their properties and their hopes for much less than they had cost them.

And let it not be believed, however, that these results are of a nature to tear the heart of M. Considérant; quite on the contrary:

"The greater the evil shall be," he says (du Texas, p. 21), "and so much the better will it be for us, for our circumstances. "The more there shall be of inevitable disgusts for those who have begun without being solidly provided, who gather little, and whom their isolation and their weakness deliver to a hundred diverse exploitations… "And the more we shall have chances — the most unhoped-for and the finest — not only of raising up and re-establishing our affairs suitably, but moreover of taking up again, at their finest, all our projects, all our hopes."

Once more, what, then, has become of the indignations of M. Considérant against the ignominies of mercantilism?

Such were — and such they are still (July 1858), despite the bulletin of the 16th of June — such were, in the town and in the suburbs, the seductive beginnings of the social organization inaugurated by M. Considérant.

Water was wanting to the town no less than to the country. M. Cousin understood the importance of this lacuna and had a new well dug in the dale that borders the plateau to the east. Water was found at about ten meters' depth; but if one judges by the state of the surrounding springs and wells — which are all about dried up — it is little probable that this sheet of water can long suffice for the needs of a town.

This work was, moreover, useless, at least for the first year, M. Cousin having had the idea of having this well lined with masonry — an operation that changed into lime-water, completely unfit for the needs of the colony, a water of which it had so pressing a need.

To remedy this error of judgment, M. Cousin turned his views toward the well whose digging had been begun from the origin in the middle of the courtyard. One had reached about thirty meters without having yet met the sheet of water that was to feed it; but in stormy weather, the rainwater — filtering through the earth — came, by an underground channel it had dug for itself, to throw itself into the well, a few meters from its curb.

This water, thus filtered and falling into a well dug through a rock of blue schist, kept itself there perfectly pure, and has sometimes sufficed for three months for the needs of the colony. That, at least, was an excellent cistern.

M. Cousin had the idea of having opened in this well, at the spot where the rainwater flowed, a horizontal gallery.

We had all thought that his aim was — in thus increasing the extent of the cistern — to prepare for us a more considerable reserve of water; and we should have found it much more judicious, in this case, to continue the vertical perforation of the well, which might have led us to a spring.

But his aim was quite simply (no one would have wished to believe it, had he not said it) to economize some ten meters of the rope that served to draw water; and to realize this economy, he had thrown into the bottom of our cistern — so clean and so salubrious — all the earth whose extraction produced the horizontal gallery.

It is thus that the genius of the agent of M. Considérant knows how to fill up the abyss that would have devoured everything.

This work — which, it too, cost a hundred dollars or so — produced indeed the economy of the rope; but the recently disturbed earth — occupying much more place, absorbing much more water, and dissolving much more easily than that which the centuries have trodden — we had henceforth, instead of a vertical cistern in the rock, a horizontal cistern in calcareous earth, and with that a muddy water and in less great quantity than the limpid water we were accustomed to draw.

Behold what, in the bulletin of the 5th of May 1857 (p. 56), M. Cousin calls "inexpensive arrangements to assure to the plateau of Réunion water during the whole year," and what contributes to give him "much hope that all this will take a good turn."

It is perhaps difficult to appear serious and veracious in recounting such manifestations of an intelligence, of a good sense to which, according to M. Considérant, we owe so much gratitude (du Texas, pp. 19 and 20); but material facts of this kind do not fear the embarrassments of contradictory testimonies. They are there to bear witness themselves: it suffices to look at them.

But in truth, when one has been present at all these things, would one be very culpable in asking M. Considérant on what rests his pretension of delivering and withdrawing so magisterially patents of good sense and of capacity to his friends and his enemies?

Perhaps he would answer that he loved and esteemed the colonists of Réunion just enough not to find them worthy of a better chief than the one Charles XII promised to the senate of Stockholm, in threatening to send it his boot to govern it.

Charles XII, at least, had made only a threat.

For my part, I think that — after having given to Réunion, in the person of M. Duthoya, the equivalent of the King Log of which the fable speaks — M. Considérant had found himself very happy at the circumstances that had permitted him to slip in there in his place a worthy minister of the executions he had destined for us for so long and which he did not dare to accomplish himself.

XVI. — The Subscription and Its Employment

"For two years, the greater part of the available funds were swallowed up before my eyes." (M. Victor Considérant, du Texas, p. 1[?].)

We have seen that the Phalansterian School had answered by a subscription of about eighteen hundred thousand francs the appeal M. Considérant had made to it in 1854.

We have seen that a "relatively considerable number of the subscribers had expressed in their immigration forms the intention of forming part of an association, and that this desire was shared by M. Considérant (au Texas, pp. 314 and 315)."

We have seen that the management (bulletin of January 1855) asked only "three years to prove — under pain of having operated very badly — the superiority of solidary condensation over isolation, of association over fragmentation."

We have seen M. Considérant carrying off to Texas all these forms of associative immigration, in order to put them before the eyes of the Texan government, and to claim from it, in the name of all these immigrants, a free concession equivalent at least to those this government had made until then to all the immigrants who had settled on its lands.

We have seen (au Texas, p. 316) M. Considérant drawing up before his departure an act that he called the Provisional Agreement, and in which he settles the conditions of the first association, of the cooperative establishment that will be "indubitably more apt than any individual establishment for the first reception of the newcomers" (au Texas, p. 147);

We have seen him at Brussels, at the end of 1854, controlling and approving lists of immigrants presented to him by the managers and by various chiefs of group come from various points of France, Switzerland, and Belgium, and whose departure was decided, in agreement with him, for the first weeks of the year 1855;

We have seen him corroborating all these things by his verbal or written promises, then finally by twenty passages of his book au Texas;

But we have seen him, from New York onward, losing the memory of all these things, lose his head too at the news of our embarkation, disown all the conventions provisional or other, and not cease crying out that one had "spoiled his plan" — an expression that, at Réunion, was applied since proverbially and ironically to any individual who complained of some error or some disappointment;

We have seen him at New York, also — by one of those contradictions, too numerous in his life, and which do not announce a great justness of memory and judgment — engage there, without knowing them, at the moment when he was lamenting our departure, four colonists for Réunion: two tailors, a maker of toilet soap, and a dyer-cloth-cleaner; make them in full the advances of their travel costs (which was done for no other); then dismiss one of them the day of his arrival at Réunion; then finally renounce henceforth, I hope, for another who had left his true name in France, justifying and defending the choice he had made of him;

He had, there again, so turned the head of a skilled lithographer, M. Henry, that this man left New York — where he had an assured existence — and came with his wife and four little children to swallow up at Réunion, in a farm M. Considérant sold him at a usurious price, some twenty thousand francs that have as yet produced only misery, illnesses, and despair.

We have seen him, finally, in Texas, abandon himself to the most discouraged and most discouraging prostration; fail with the government in all his steps to obtain a free concession of lands; then exile himself from Réunion to evade the accomplishment of a promise; then refuse to return there when he was recalled there by the gravest circumstances; declare that he no longer had the right to occupy himself, in any fashion, with the affairs that might be treated there; then nevertheless slip a mandatary in there and give him at last himself a power of attorney to treat there all the general and individual affairs;

Finally we have seen him end his third year by that pamphlet entitled du Texas — an unfortunate tissue of insinuations and declamations, and in which he declares "that he saw for two years — he, the chief of the enterprise — swallowed up before his eyes the greater part of the available funds that were confided to him."

Now, these insinuations — perfidious weapons — justify the emotion they could cause to those who — like me, in my quality as cashier — handled for a year a large part of these available funds;

Now, it does not suffice to protest against these insinuations, to invoke these incontestable and uncontested cash registers, and to offer to all the communication of the definitive receipt that was delivered to me after the auditing of my accounts; it is important also, in the interest of my friends and of the truth, to make known what I can know of these swallowings-up and their causes.

I have said that M. Considérant — despite his absolute ignorance of all that concerns rural administration — had, contrary to repeated advice, persisted in confiding the functions of chief gardener to a laborer whose ignorance cost, in pure loss, three to four thousand dollars to the society, that is … 3,000.

I have said that — forced to buy butcher's meat for ten months — we had paid double what it would have cost us had we been from the origin possessors of a numerous herd, and this surcharge of expense rose to no less than … 300.

I have said that M. Considérant had bought for his journey a pretty char-à-bancs at Cincinnati, then at Houston two fine gray mares and a saddle horse.

Carried forward: 3,300.

I have said that at Réunion he had had built — outside of, and as a criticism of, the general plan adopted by M. Cantagrel — a cottage for his dwelling. It is a rather mediocre copy of a little Swiss chalet, whose vices of construction I have already noted, and which assuredly justifies none of the admiring ecstasies with which its author saluted it.

All that — which had cost no less than a thousand dollars and which seemed, or had been announced, as personal expenses, notably the house — all that remained on the account of the society of Réunion.

The horses have been stolen or are dead; the char-à-bancs — for want of a shelter against the influences of the sun — is three-quarters worn out; and the cottage, like all the other buildings, will fall into ruin in a few years, henceforth useless to the society, and all sacrificed to the admirable conception of the town of Réunion that we have described on pages 235 and 236.

All these buildings, thus sacrificed, cost at least — including the roofs of M. Cousin that had to be redone — … 10,000.

In forgetting to keep for his own account the horses and the char-à-bancs he had bought and which had served him for his journey, M. Considérant had forgotten that all the immigrants had exactly paid all the transport costs the society had made for their account with its wagons. His own journey remained exempt from this just tribute, which would have risen to no less than … 100.

I should probably not have descended to these small details — however just it be — if M. Considérant had not rendered indispensable the search for the causes of the swallowing-up of which he complains so bitterly, and if these details did not coincide with an observation that seems to us curious to establish.

M. Considérant — after having told us previously that the Cañon of Uvalde was about six leagues long and two and a half wide — recounts to us, dated from San Antonio, in the bulletin of the 14th of November 1856, p. 43, that he is returning from his "second journey to the Cañon;" then he adds:

"We shall set off again tomorrow morning and we shall go, this time, all the way to the end."

It must be noted first that there are at least twenty-five leagues from San Antonio to the Cañon.

Now, to make, at the society's expense, three journeys to the Cañon (150 leagues, there and back) to reach the very end of this dale six leagues long — that has always seemed to us a great prodigality of time, of money, and of prudence, and proves that M. Considérant, with a little attention, could have found in his own acts a good part of the causes of swallowing-up that — "without naming anyone" (which appears, in the eyes of his friends, of an admirable magnanimity) — he attributes, by insinuation, so liberally to his collaborators, of whom he ought, he says (p. 12), to have sent back nine tenths.

Let us add — to finish today with this Cañon, on which M. Considérant, in this same bulletin, lavishes his praises while depreciating the establishment of Réunion — let us add, not losing sight of what we have heard from the very mouth of M. Considérant and what he repeats in his letters, as well as what we have learned by various other channels, that this acquisition may someday be a pleasant retreat for an angler, when the limpid waters of the Sabinal shall have been suitably stocked with fish, but that it will always be a poor investment for the settlers who count above all on abundant woods and on fertile lands and pastures.

The visit of which M. Considérant speaks to us on page 26 of his last pamphlet cannot, moreover, change our opinion in this regard: it is not the impressions of artists, but rather those of good farmers, that ought to guide in matters of colonization.

Our tourists, MM. Bureau, Maliber, Willemain, and Madame Considérant, saw there a settler who appears to have arrived at that well-being of feeding that results from a poultry-yard abundantly furnished and a numerous livestock, and they admired, while breakfasting, this exceptional result; but this man is hampered in his developments by no close and compact neighborhood. The day when M. Considérant's appeal should people more this narrow dale, that day would be the beginning of misery and of war — of war against the squatters, adventurers whom one does not dispossess easily of the right of first occupants that they have arrogated to themselves.

Such islets are good for Robinson-Crusoe-like novels, but not for the realization of a great plan of colonization by private appropriation.

There, moreover, the incursions of bands of thieving and scalping Indians are not rare; and at San Antonio itself — according to the State Gazette of Austin — bands of thieves and assassins pillaged and assassinated every night, last winter (1856 to 1857), in the environs of this city, and forced the inhabitants to be continually on their guard.

There, finally, and for a long time yet, the incessant revolutions of Mexico will leave no security to its frontiers.

It was in the vast and fertile lands that surround Fort Belknap, on the Clear Fork of the Brazos — as our friend M. John Allen wished, and as the settlers of the country have not ceased repeating to us — it was there that our second establishment ought to have been formed. There, the coal mines are worked in the open air; our forge was fed from them, and there are no more than forty leagues between Fort Belknap and Réunion.

There, finally, we should have had, for a hundred thousand francs, as much good land and fine forest as M. Considérant can have mediocre land for two hundred thousand in his Cañons; and the two establishments — which would not have been a hundred leagues from each other — could have joined hands and lent each other a mutual and solidary assistance.

I shall end on this subject by wishes that the appeal of M. Considérant, to the clockmaker friends our School counts on the frontiers of Switzerland and in Switzerland, remain without influence on them. We have too well heard discussed and established — by three of them, M. Willemain himself and the Henry brothers, who have inhabited Texas for eighteen months — the radical impossibilities of a manufactory in this country, not to be convinced with them that there would be nothing but disasters, miseries, and disappointments of every kind to gather in this enterprise.

I return to Réunion.

Among the measures — perfectly laudable — that the chiefs of our workshops had taken were the putting-in-order of the workshops and particularly the exact inventory of all the materials of carpentry, joinery, wheelwrighting, and metallurgy.

This work — undertaken by MM. Dailly, Capy, and Louis — had been executed by them in the most exact manner. A perfect order, satisfying to see, existed in this vast worksite, whose entries and exits were scrupulously registered.

But these chiefs of workshop had fallen into disgrace with the maître d'hôtel, on account of the exactitude of the controls exercised by them on the handling of the provisions. According to this maître d'hôtel, they were no longer worthy of anything but to be hanged or killed with gunshots; and M. Duthoya — governed by this man with the assumed name — had not delayed himself in making war on control.

Here is an example of it:

One of our colonists, M. Boulay, asked the authorization to build, for his use, on the land of the colony, a house which — raised with the materials of the society — should belong to the latter when it should wish to use it.

Until then there was not much to reproach in the proposal and in its acceptance; but when M. Capy wished — for M. Boulay as for everyone — to register the quantities of wood delivered, M. Duthoya authorized the latter to take without counting.

This door, once opened to disorder, did not delay in being opened to dilapidation. All the favorites of the administration had the right to pass through it, and on the day of my departure, the worksite was about empty.

Then, M. Boulay having asked to buy the land on which he had built, this land was ceded to him in reimbursement of his shares; but the house?… It passed, forgotten, into the bargain. Now this little part of swallowing-up — easy, moreover, to inventory — may well be valued, at least, at fifty dollars.

Carried forward from elsewhere: 14,400. — Total: 14,450.

The management had made a particular agreement with a gardener named M. Guillier, who had left the nursery of Milianah in Algeria to come direct those of our society in America.

M. Guillier had first stopped, for a few weeks, at our Houston nursery — whose direction was specially confided to him — and whence, fearing the yellow fever, he had set off, in the course of the month of May 1856, to come to Réunion. He arrived there at the beginning of June and stayed there until the month of March 1857 — eight to nine months, during which his sole and continual occupation was to play an accordion that did not delay in becoming the object of the curses of the whole colony, so much do the finest things become tiresome when one is sated with them without rule and without measure.

That was unfortunately not the only hobbyhorse of M. Guillier. He knew by heart, on the tip of his finger, his catalogue of the nursery of Milianah, which gave him, at the very first, the appearance of a man very learned in horticulture; but when he had given himself up, for some time, to the pleasure of reciting to us this catalogue and of opening his mouth only to recount Milianah, and when one had perceived that, outside of that, his science was more pretentious than real, then everyone fled with an equal eagerness the accordion and Milianah.

The satisfaction of these two passions not constituting a real occupation, M. Guillier had ended by undergoing the bad influences of idleness; he had made himself the gazette of the country, and, soon no longer knowing how to spare, in his itchings of the tongue, either women or friends, he left the colony without leaving in it a single regret.

All that would here be a doubly misplaced superfluity, if M. Guillier had not had an agreement that assured him forty dollars of salary a month, and of which, he said, not a centime should be cut.

"I did not come here to work," he added, "but to make others work. Let one indicate to me a field of work and give me workmen, and I shall show what I am capable of."

"And the Houston nursery?" one answered him; "who prevents you from returning there?"

As for M. Duthoya, he answered — despite the full powers of M. Considérant — that he had nothing to order to M. Guillier and that it did not concern him.

And M. Guillier, at the end of eight months, was dismissed by the manager, M. Bureau, on his arrival. But the latter was obliged, under the terms of the contract, to pay at least three hundred and twenty dollars (16 to 1,700 fr.) for the exhibition — so remarkably harmonic — at Réunion, of the catalogue of the nursery of Milianah … 320.

M. Duthoya, in his turn, was seized with the ambition of leaving at Réunion monuments of his talents in architecture.

His heart had been moved with pity for the pigs that swarm in the woods. Instead of imitating the American farmers who kill them at the beginning of winter, in order to have good smoked meats to consume and to sell during the whole year, M. Duthoya undertook the creation of a pigsty. He had dug, at the surface of the rock, a vast square hole, for which he destined a wooden shed as a covering; but after an enormous clearing-away of calcareous stone — a clearing-away that cost no less than a hundred dollars or so … 100 — this work, recognized as bad, was abandoned, and will none the less remain eternally gaping, to bear witness to the passage of its author.

Carried forward: 14,870.

But that is not all: M. Duthoya wished also to build himself a cottage. He dug with his hands, beside that monument destined for the pigs, a hole of about six square meters of surface, to which he gave the happy form of a very irregular trapezoid, and where he sketched the beginning of a chimney; then two door-jambs whose perpendiculars much resembled that of the tower of Pisa. This edifice underwent the fate of its neighbor; it remained unfinished. It had at least, that one, cost the colony only the time its director had spent on it — for which it compensated itself by not sparing him its jeers.

Finally — and not holding himself beaten — he attacked that poor spring around which we had, Dr. Nicolas and I, helped by a few friends, sketched a garden. Armed with the dictatorial power that M. Considérant had transmitted to him, he made litter of the contract by virtue of which the council of administration of the colony had conceded to us the whole dale, and he undertook to transform the spring into a well and its surroundings into a watering-trough for the horses.

This work cost more than a hundred dollars … 100; but the spring — deprived of that sweet liberty it had enjoyed for centuries — completely refused its waters to the edifice of M. Duthoya. More than a year after, at the time of my departure, his well had not ceased to be dry; but Providence — which had not put in this dale a thread of water in order that the turtledoves, the mockingbird, the cardinals, the hummingbirds, and the bees should die of thirst there — reopened, four or five hundred meters farther off, a spring whence our poor source began again, in the open air and in liberty at least, its modest and silent course.

Carried forward: 14,970.

Without entering, on the subject of the maître d'hôtel's administration, into details that would be tedious here, I must say that, in view of the registers kept with perfect regularity by M. Guillemet with respect to the restaurant, it would be easy to show, in an irrefutable manner, that during the eight months of M. Duthoya's interim this branch of the administration cost the society more than two thousand dollars; to wit … 2000.

We should also see M. Considérant himself making, in order to facilitate the departure of certain colonists, advances which amounted to scarcely less than a thousand dollars, of which he will not recover the half; say, as loss … 500.

We must also recall that these advances had been ostensibly made from M. Considérant's private purse, whereas the accounts establish, for these advances as for the cottage, that the society alone will remain charged with them.

M. Duthoya, following the ways of his principal, and wishing, as he said, to "show himself greater" than those who thus drew at sight upon the cash-box "and not to make enemies of them," M. Duthoya himself allowed, despite repeated warnings, irrecoverable debts to be created amounting to no less than five hundred dollars … 500.

Say, in all, about eighteen thousand dollars … 17,970.

If, finally, the society were today to demand the exact and duly verified inventory of the movable property of every kind of which we have drawn up the schedule, it would see that the sum of the swallowings-up must have risen to from twenty to thirty thousand dollars, that is, from one hundred to one hundred and fifty thousand francs.

But, if it does not forget the statement we have just made to it, which cannot be contradicted without doing violence to the truth, it will see that this swallowing-up was, from the very beginning, the doing of M. Considérant himself, either directly or through the defective choices he made of his agents after the departure of M. Cantagrel.

It will see — we do not fear to predict it — that the suppression of the inventory and the numbering of the cattle, and that the transfer of our fine flock of sheep from the salubrious plateau of Réunion into the marshes of the Moone land, proof of the radical ignorance of M. Cousin and his friend M. Brochier, will deal the last blow to this capital branch of our establishment.

But it is important too that it cast its eyes upon the losses of profit due to M. Considérant's failings.

Réunion, as a collective center, might have, in the course of its first three years, created — with the Northern States, which engage little in cattle-raising — a trade in mules, cows, and oxen which, speculating each year on only three hundred head and on ten dollars of net profit per head, would have yielded … 3000.

A herd of one thousand to twelve hundred head would have sufficed for this speculation, upon which I gathered, during my return journey, information that leaves no doubt as to its success.

By means of the system of irrigation of which I spoke on page 76, and speculating on only six hundred acres or about twelve hundred hectares, one would have assured our crops a yield of at least six hectoliters more per hectare, or twelve hundred for the whole, or, at three dollars the hectoliter … 3600.

Réunion might have, with two mills — one driven by the water of the West-Fork and the other by the wind — obtained, like the few mills of the country and much better than they as regards the quality of the flour, a minimum of ten dollars of net profit per mill per day, or per year … 7000.

It might have gained on the sawmill … 1000.

It might have, speculating each year on only two hundred ox-hides which, weighing together twelve thousand pounds, would have cost it two hundred dollars, and which, transformed by the tannery into leather at forty sous the pound, would have yielded it net, at the minimum … 2000.

By creating the carting system of which we have spoken (pp. 148 and 149), it would easily have drawn from this service … 1000; and obtained, at much lower cost, by direct purchases, most of the articles of consumption and of commerce used in the colony, without counting the profits it might have drawn from secondary bazaars established at the relays of its carting line.

The bazaar or store, whose foundation took place against M. Considérant's advice, and whose trial has so far been made under the least favorable conditions, may give a net profit of at least … 1000.

Total: 18,600.

The enterprise of preserved foods — smoked beef and pork, game in terrines such as deer, roe-deer, turkeys, and wild fowl, etc. — could (all these things costing us at most twenty-five centimes the kilo) have furnished useful cargoes to our wagons and created for us at Galveston and New Orleans a trade which, deducting fifty centimes per kilo for all expenses and speculating on only one franc for the sale and on a total weight of ten thousand kilos, would have given us a net profit of a thousand dollars.

All these estimates and forecasts will appear of an extreme moderation to those who know the country and who know with what eagerness the American marine takes charge of all these things.

One might also have established at once the distillery, the soap-works, the brickyard, the pottery, and twenty other industries of prime necessity which, joined to the preceding, might have, from the second year of their establishment, yielded more than a hundred thousand francs of net revenue clear of all expenses.

The principal elements of all these things existed on the plateau of Réunion as early as the month of July 1855.

But there would have been needed an executive agent who, instead of standing — like a capricious and timid child, or like a miser — as an obstacle to all these things, knew how to make them fruitful by a lofty and active understanding of business and of the government of workshops.

There would have been needed a chief who, when we advised him to direct things himself instead of forever criticizing, did not answer us with a sort of disdain:

"Am I a foreman of works?"

There would therefore have been needed — we cannot repeat it too often — to accept the offer of M. Godin, in whom appeared most of the qualities necessary to the founding and the first developments of such a work.

M. Considérant's insinuations on the subject of "the swallowing-up of the funds that had been entrusted to him" (du Texas, p. 1, and p. 5 of this work) require that we turn our eyes back once more for a moment:

During M. Cantagrel's administration, the funds of the colonization society had been employed in the acquisition of thirteen thousand acres of land within a radius of six to eight miles around the plateau of Réunion. These lands had cost fifteen to sixteen thousand dollars, or … 80,000 fr.

Buildings of every kind … 60,000 Movables: tools, goods, provisions … 50,000 Cattle … 24,000 Approximate total: 214,000 fr.

The employment of this sum had given rise to an industrial movement, to an animation in the works, which proved — despite numerous imperfections inevitable in such beginnings — all the use that might have been made of men and things.

The houses, the sheds, the wells, the fences or enclosures, the clearings, the inventories, and order in all things were establishing themselves successively, despite the obstacles I have already so many times pointed out.

If this capital, instead of suffering, in its employment and its developments, the obstacles which the executive agent never ceased to oppose to it, either directly or through intermediaries; if this capital, instead of being paralyzed and so notably impaired during the year that followed M. Cantagrel's departure, had been able (an easy thing) to develop itself through all the industries of which I have given the enumeration above, its products would not only have covered, together with the faults, the expenses of an administration which, as M. Considérant had organized it, has cost, to this day, no less than thirty thousand francs a year; but they would have assured besides the fulfillment of the promises of dividends and surplus-values which he had so solemnly proclaimed.

And what remains today to M. Considérant of that group of instructed and devoted phalansterians whom he had called his friends, and who had given themselves body and soul to this work?

There remains to him nothing, neither among the French, nor among the Swiss, nor among the Americans: all, painfully disillusioned, have withdrawn from him without return.

There will not even remain that general interest, that collective solicitude of which our associative colony would have been the object in Europe — a solicitude of which a few settlers, henceforth isolated and unknown, will not even be able to gather the remnants.

And what remains, then, in Texas, after the destruction of the collective center and the consignment of its fragments to private appropriation? There remains, in the person of M. Victor Considérant, what is called in Texas a land-speculator, and, in France, a dealer in property, with six thousand francs of annual salary, not counting his travel expenses and those of his agents, as well as large shares in the profits to come — but without the knowledge and the activity necessary for this kind of speculation.

There remains a man who, after having failed in all the calculations of his political ambition, believed he had found in Texas, in the trade in lands — for which he is expensively unfit — a mine as fertile as that found by the Saint-Simonians in the working of railways;

A man who, having to reconcile Belgian phlegm with French humour, did not hesitate to sacrifice the latter completely to the former, and to disunite instead of to rally;

A man who, after having asked of the spirit of association and of the thirst for realization that reign in the School the funds necessary for this enterprise, and who, after having established, once more, his radical practical impotence, puts off to the Greek Kalends that realization so many times promised, and which was the sine qua non condition of our first emigration;

A man who, in his latest writing (du Texas), as in all the preceding, still caresses that passion for realization, ever so fruitful, and never ceases to solicit its sacrifices — while understanding well henceforth, I hope, that if the festivals of propagation could not, in his own expression (see p. 158), be manifested until after the death of Fourier, neither will it be otherwise than after having ceased to endure the trammels of his paralytic influence that realization will be able to be born, to grow, and to accomplish its destinies.

If, at least, the colonization society, while thus letting its capital be swallowed up, had preserved in Dallas County the consideration which M. Cantagrel's administration had particularly won for it!

But it was reserved for us, as a final ordeal, to see M. Considérant's agent summoned, with two of his principal employees, to appear before the grand jury of the Dallas court, there to undergo an inquiry.

American legislation, in its scrupulous solicitude for the liberty of the citizens, has not permitted the inquiry relative to offenses to be entrusted to the magistrates, although these are elected and removable. It has created a special jury, called the grand jury, to which, at each session and before judgment, all criminal matters are referred by the public prosecutor.

This jury always proceeds behind closed doors, and the secrecy of all that passes in its sittings is obligatory, under penalty of imprisonment and heavy fines.

The sheriff — an elected ministerial officer, charged, under his personal responsibility guaranteed by a heavy bond (a precious institution, which French legislation perhaps lacks), with the execution of all the orders and decrees of the court — the sheriff arrived at Réunion on the 16th of July 1857, and served upon M. Cousin, for the next morning, an order to appear before the grand jury.

The court, fearing no doubt that M. Cousin, as a foreigner, had not sufficiently understood the obligatory nature of the summons, sent the sheriff again the next morning, who renewed his summons, adding to it the statement of the penalties to which those expose themselves who neglect or refuse to comply.

This rigorous secrecy with which the grand jury envelops the inquiries of criminal justice left to this affair all that vagueness of interpretation which seems to us more unfortunate than publicity.

What nevertheless always transpires from these inquiries, in which a score of persons take part, informed us positively that the jury had addressed to M. Cousin severe and threatening observations on certain details of his administration which might compromise the interests of the colonists and of the colony's neighbors; and matters went no further.

But such an event did not raise, in public opinion, M. Considérant's representative at the head of the colony; and so, no longer expecting anything from the realization of the ideas, the hopes, and the promises which had determined my journey to Texas, and resigned to drawing a line through those three years which M. Considérant had made us lose, I quitted Réunion on the 16th of August 1857.[^xvi_depart]

Two-thirds of the remaining colonists gathered round me at the moment of departure; and although the sorrows of a separation are almost always deeper for those who stay than for those who go — above all in the sad conditions in which I had the grief of leaving them — the marks of sympathy of those brave companions of so many disappointments and miseries left room then, in my mind and in my heart, only for keen regrets, which followed me long, and which the happiness procured by family, and that of having found excellent friends again in the old fatherland, will never completely efface.

[^xvi_depart]: The printed text here reads "the 16th of August 1857," but in chapter XVIII Savardan dates his departure from Réunion "the 18th of August 1857, at eight in the morning." An internal contradiction left unresolved (probably a slip in one of the two passages).

XVII. — The Climate

"But a climate … if the joys it lavishes rise to the height of a true poetry; if it multiplies life, if it becomes a happiness, it may be difficult to speak of it without exaltation… "The climate is raised to a perfection bordering on the ideal. "The ice, a light layer, never lasts there more than three days. "The rains balanced and distributed as if for watering on command, etc., etc." — M. Victor CONSIDÉRANT, au Texas, pp. 47, 48, and 49.

Before leaving Dallas County, it remains for me to speak of the climate. M. Considérant had, in the spring of 1853, spent forty days crossing Texas from north to south, and we have seen so far that his observations left much to be desired as regards justness and exactness.

Will he have been less mistaken regarding the climate?

Twenty-eight months spent in that country give me the right to state my opinion of it too.

I spoke, in chapter IV, of the spring at Galveston, of the truly delicious nights of the Buffalo-Bayou, and of the fine evenings passed amid the prairies.

It was in the month of May, in the spring of 1855.

But when, approaching Réunion in the first fortnight of June, we found the springs and the creeks nearly or sometimes wholly dried up, and when we recalled the eleven months without rain that, according to every account, had marked the year 1854; when, again, I found one day, at the moment of a departure, my poor horse, his head plunged to the eyes in a hole of still-moist mud, on contact with which he refreshed his tongue and his nostrils parched with thirst — I then reread, with a suspicious uneasiness, those fine phrases of the book that have just served me as an epigraph; and we all advanced thus, each day a little more and in spite of ourselves, into that career of innumerable disappointments which justified so ill our immense confidence and which justify so well the title of this work.[^xvii_titre]

The heats were sometimes increased still further by the breeze which, crossing parched prairies under an almost perpendicular sun, came to envelop us in its burning gusts.

This breeze, it is true, reached us most often at a moderate temperature which made it delicious — but delicious as the glass of cool water in the midst of fever, by contrast with the painful prostration produced, for several months, by a temperature of thirty to forty-five degrees in the shade.

It is therefore really paying rather dear for that emphatic "crown of all the benefits which nature seems to have taken pleasure in gathering upon high Texas." (Au Texas, p. 49.)

Despite this high temperature, the oleanders and the magnolias had disappeared, without our then being able to explain to ourselves this disappearance — for which we consoled ourselves, however, with the hope of making up for it by cultivation.

At last, autumn came. A few fine storms came to bring back the water into our cistern, into our creeks, into our springs, and hope into our hearts.

One of these storms struck, ten paces from me, the corner of one of our buildings, without setting it on fire and with no other damage than a few broken planks.

Then came winter, in December, half of whose days were marked by frost, and, for some, down to thirteen degrees.

The thermometric observations taken on the plateau of Réunion always showed a temperature three to four degrees lower than that of the valley.

In January we had twenty-three days of frost, including eleven in a row, which somewhat compromised that sententious phrase: "The ice, a light layer, never lasts there more than three days." (Au Texas, p. 49.)

February had seven more, and March two, and the thermometer descended to fifteen degrees in our cabins, which, thanks to their wholly disjointed walls and to the permeable roofs built by the architect M. Cousin, settled perfectly into equilibrium with the outside temperature.

When our stoves were lit, each of the innumerable cracks in the walls of our cabins did the office of a bellows-pipe.

One burned on one side and froze on the other; and so, during the day, we preferred to light fires in the midst of some sheltered clearing of the forest, where the air, circulating without obstacle, was much less painful to bear.

It was a truly cruel and discouraging state of things for everyone; but for the women and for the very small children!…

I saw our so respectable Madame Vigoureux weep in the morning at the hearth of the kitchen, where she came to warm her fingers devoured by chilblains.

I proposed to transport to the bureau the only sick person then in the infirmary, and to leave that room, which had a stove, at this lady's disposal; but Madame Considérant refused, for her mother and for herself.

The five poor hearths the colony possessed — at the bakery, the kitchen, the dining-hall, the infirmary, and the bureau — were ceaselessly surrounded by children purple, by women blue with cold, and by men shivering and all cursing the book that had so radically led us astray.

Meanwhile M. Considérant wrote from Austin that this winter, and the two years of extreme drought that had preceded it, were only exceptional things, unheard of until then in Texas.

But our neighbor, M. Coombes the elder, who has lived in the country for sixteen years, told us and repeated to us that he had seen far more rigorous winters — winters during which the deer and the roe-deer froze in the valley.

To sustain the morale of our companions, we forced them to agree that, when we should have good houses like our houses in France, all our sufferings would prove very light in a country where wood abounds and on a plateau whence humidity seems forever banished.

The summers of 1856 and 1857 resembled those of 1854 and 1855. Our springs, dried up from the month of June 1856, had not yet reappeared by the month of August of the following year.

But the winter that separated these two summers was even more exceptional and more unheard-of than the preceding one.

It offered us, at the end of February, a phenomenon worthy of description, and which the management — to whom I had sent the description of it — will not have dared to publish in the bulletin, doubtless for fear that this hard truth might displease M. Considérant.

There fell one day a light layer of snow, followed by a thick fog, then by a frost which changed the whole into glaze-ice.

For three days the fog and the frost succeeded one another thus without interruption, and in such a way that all the objects affected by them — from the slenderest blade of grass, the carcasses of insects, the smallest stone or bits of wood, and the thinnest branch, up to the largest trees — all were enveloped in a coat of glaze-ice perfectly transparent and one to three centimeters thick.

The trees resembled immense crystal chandeliers which, at the least breath of the breeze, produced a most singular clinking, and each blade of which let one see, very distinctly, the little branch that served it as support.

The smaller objects, placed at the surface of the ground, resembled those vases or those crystal globes within which are enclosed designs and paintings of all sorts of objects, and with which all the crystal-shops in Paris are decorated.

A few Judas-trees, which had already begun their flowering, produced a charming effect with their flowers thus crystallized.

But the animals, deprived of all nourishment — save a few that a great stable which M. Cantagrel had had built sheltered — lowed mournfully around our dwellings, and reached in a few days a state of leanness and weakening, the spectacle of which added notably to the general sadness.

At the end of eight days the north wind came to blow violently upon this immense crystallization, which spread over no less than two hundred square kilometers of Texas. The branches of the trees, loaded beyond measure, broke on every side, fell with a crash, and dragged down in their fall, with sounds of thunder, the old trees that time and fire had undermined until then without being able to fell them.

The passage through the forest was truly dangerous during this break-up, and the roads that cross it were long made difficult amid all this debris.

We then had the explanation of another phenomenon which had greatly intrigued us, Dr. Nicolas and me, ever since our arrival: the trees are almost all broken at their summit and present quartered, dry points that decrown and dishonor them. We attributed this sad phenomenon to the fires that frequently and alternately visit all the woods in America; but as it was noticed likewise on trees that fire had never reached, Dr. Nicolas persisted in seeking the explanation elsewhere. Today doubt is no longer permitted, and we know, from the mouth of the oldest inhabitants of the country, that scarcely five years pass without the whole of nature being thus, for a longer or shorter time, enveloped in crystals and hacked by their weight and their fall.

Louisiana itself is accustomed to winters short, no doubt, but rigorous enough that they have always opposed themselves to tropical cultures otherwise than with the aid of shelters and costly care.

And so, to claim, as M. Considérant does, "that the question of the banana is henceforth settled in Texas," because an amateur of gardening, or a speculator, M. Guilbaud, manages at San Antonio to preserve banana-trees by burying them during the winter — is to be as judicious as would be our pretension in France of having settled the question of the orange-tree by preserving it in our greenhouses.

This winter of 1856 to 1857 lasted three months, with a few intervals of high heat during which the vegetation set off again with an astonishing vigor, only to be destroyed anew up to three times.

Not an oak was spared. They all resembled, toward the end of April, trees ravaged by fire or that the sap has completely abandoned at the end of autumn.

Some, of at least fifty centimeters in circumference, were frozen to the heart.

But every cloud has a silver lining: the caterpillars that hatched at this period, caught thus without greenery, all perished of hunger; but beforehand they invaded our cabins to seek some nourishment there, and it was in our quarters that most of them expired.

The wheat, frozen three times also and ever sprouting again, gave in the end only the poorest harvests.

We then had, on the occasion of the maize-plantings, the proof of the directing intelligence of MM. Considérant and Cousin in matters of cultivation: we had heard them repeat a hundred times that it was enough to scratch the earth with a tree-branch to obtain from it magnificent harvests; and, quite proud of their journey into the west — which makes them stronger against the criticisms of those who had not gone so far in that direction — they repeated ceaselessly, in every tone of magisterial sentence: "The Mexicans do not do otherwise." A fine authority, truly!

Two of our plowmen, sowing at the same time two portions of bordering lands, each did a different work. The one, a poor Swiss brought to us by misery, let himself be seduced by the fine words of M. Cousin and contented himself with sowing his maize seeds in a barely scratched soil; the other, a true plowman, come from La Chapelle-Gaugain, did his planting after a genuine French plowing. The maize of the first rose scarcely to sixty centimeters and dried up where it stood; that of the second, one to two meters high, was still, despite the extreme drought, perfectly green and bushy at the time of my departure.

If at least all these lessons, sent by Providence to the pride of M. Considérant and to the imitative naïveté of his aide-de-camp, had brought them to repentance! But it is enough to read that sad pamphlet entitled du Texas to see that those unhappy people are destined to die in final impenitence.

I repeat it: the soil of Texas — whose fertility deserves none of M. Considérant's exclamations, and which, like all soils, loses its fertility under the influence of cultures ever the same, ceaselessly repeated and deprived until now of the renewal that the science of manures procures in Europe — the soil of Texas has nowhere, before long years, anything to offer the capitalists, reared amid the intellectual and material refinements of civilization, but vexations, disgusts, miseries, and disappointments.

The only immigrants who can turn the resources of this country to account, for a less distant future, are the European peasants who, accustomed in advance to the moral miseries of their education and to the material miseries of their existence, can attain little by little, without too much regret, a well-being that until now almost always flees them in Europe, and which they go, as far as they can, deserting the countryside, to try to find in the towns.

A few workmen, skilled in the industrial works of prime necessity, can prosper there too, if they are wise enough to preserve themselves from the fatal influence of alcoholic drinks.

Association, in which M. Considérant has so completely failed, alone could usefully bring to Texas all the social elements, by creating — for those who cannot renounce, neither for themselves nor for their children, the benefits of a liberal education and the enjoyments of the company of good society — an intellectual, artistic, and scientific center that might enable some of the benefits of civilization to be found again in the midst of the desert.

What I say here in general, I repeat in particular for the new lands which M. Considérant, driven by his rancor against Réunion, went to buy in the environs of San Antonio — far enough off (according to the maxim: Divide in order to rule) that the immigrants of the two establishments can neither understand, nor aid, nor succor one another — and in the hope of peopling these new lands with "people upon whom he can count," manufactured expressly for him, that is to say, who have neither eyes to see his complete and ever-hostile nullity in the presence of labor and of those who devote themselves to it, nor those characters that allow themselves to compare and discuss the pretensions and works of a chief.

The country surrounding San Antonio is (everyone in Texas knows it) much less fertile, much more arid still than that of the east. If I needed fresh affirmations on this point, M. Considérant himself would not let me want for them.

He had said, on the subject of the climate of Dallas and its surroundings:

"All our European cultures succeed there marvelously, without watering, without weeding, without care of any kind." (Au Texas, pp. 46 and 49.)

Three years of hard experience have sufficiently proved to us that there was not a word of truth in those declamations, of which we find, in 1855, the solemn refutation on pages 40 and 41 of M. Considérant's pamphlet entitled du Texas:

"It must be known," he says, "that under Spanish domination the flat and very open valley where the San Antonio flows was, over long stretches, furrowed with asequias or irrigation canals, several of which still subsist and work; the others, half filled in, are easy to restore. The state of war inaugurated in the country in 1810, to cease only at the recognition of Texas as a member of the American Union, destroyed this system. This fine creation of unity, due to the action of the Spanish missionaries — being neither in the traditions, nor in the habits, nor even in the spirit of the new masters of the country — abandonment continued the work of war. "But if the eye is saddened to see, on the territories dependent on the city and the old missions strung along the San Antonio, so many cultures still so flourishing at the beginning of the century, today transformed into immense fallows, the plots placed under the action of the asequias that still swarm — and the marvelous contrast they offer this year with the surrounding countryside, by the lesson they make burst forth, by the idea they command of what one can do in this country, of what, in any case, one can there assure by assuring water — amply compensate me for my part. "All the fields of maize reached by irrigation speak the same language: With irrigation one can do everything."

In the presence of this homage rendered to irrigation in 1857, let it be remembered — in order rightly to appreciate the value of M. Considérant's judgment and his power as a director of colonization — let it be remembered with what supreme disdain, in 1855, this officer of the engineers of France greeted, "as a giant's idea," the idea of a dam on the West-Fork, intended not only to drive a mill and a sawmill, but also to fertilize, by irrigation, a considerable extent of our lands in the valley of Réunion.

Let it also not be forgotten that these irrigations of San Antonio were due to associations, to the Catholic missions, and that they were abandoned or destroyed by private appropriation.

Let it further be remembered that M. Considérant vaunts to us the works of association and shows us its necessity in matters of cultivation, at the very moment when he is completing — through the obtuse ministry of his intimate agent M. Cousin — the brutal destruction of the association of Réunion.

Let it be remembered, finally, that he makes, in 1857, the criticism "of the enclosed habits and of the love of isolation so characteristic of the Americans" (du Texas, p. 42), at the very moment when he is forcing the members of Réunion to leave this colony or to settle in isolation on his lands, usuriously sold at up to six times their worth.

Has M. Considérant, then, on occasion, two weights and two measures?

Would he be a socialist in theory, in the practice of appeals, and an anti-socialist in the practice of association?

I do not hesitate to answer in the affirmative.

[^xvii_titre]: The first title adopted for this work was: Déception : le Texas et l'École phalanstérienne ("Disappointment: Texas and the Phalansterian School").

XVIII. — The Return

It is the ashes of the dead that created the fatherland. — Lamartine There one lives near one's ancestors, There one dies near one's friends. — Chateaubriand

It had needed, in order to leave the fatherland — where so many ties, where so many memories bound me; where that word of Fourier, "Do not think of expatriating yourselves," and where so many hopes ought to have held me back — it had needed that thirst for realization by which those are ceaselessly devoured whom faith in a better future animates; that faith which, like all the religious inspirations issued from the Gospel, drives irresistibly to sacrifice those who are possessed by it.

Having set out with men who, like me, had believed in the power of the spirit that had called us, and in his fidelity to the principles of solidarity he had so long taught, I remained until he had broken the last tie of that Réunion in whose name he had proclaimed us a Legion (au Texas, p. 174).

Household, labors, succor, and associative education — all had been disregarded, hindered, repelled, or destroyed by him. He had raised the banner of the coldest individualism (see pp. 112 to 116, and du Texas, pp. 56 to 59, the story of poor Mique), and had even preached speculation upon the spoils of the victims (see p. 237, and du Texas, p. 21).

After two years of efforts and useless struggles against these ceaseless attacks of the spirit of unsolidary mercantilism, it must have been legitimate to think of returning.

I therefore quitted Réunion on the 18th of August 1857, at eight in the morning.

My wagon carried, besides my own baggage and that of my driver, thick blankets, a hammock, provisions of food reckoned for thirty days, kitchen utensils, my arms, my munitions, a bundle of ropes, and a few small tools.

The food provisions consisted of bacon (one pronounces it béconne, smoked lard), crackers (little sea-biscuits), a few loaves, coffee, tea, sugar, salt, tins of sardines, a bottle of old cognac, and a sack of oats for the mules.

The kitchen utensils were a little frying-pan, a saucepan, two bowls, two tumblers, a filter coffee-pot, a little cask for the water supply, chemical matches, a few candles, and a candlestick.

My arms were a good double gun of the Lefaucheux system, a little double carbine with conical balls, a pair of large double pistols, a pair of pocket pistols, a dagger; besides, geographical maps, a spyglass, a compass, a good watch — but with a silver case, which excites cupidity far less — a solar watch, notebooks of white paper, and pencils.

A little box of medical aid contained linen, lint, thread and needles, a roll of court-plaster, a roll of diachylon, three vials — one of sulphate of quinine, one of iodide of potassium, and one of ammonia — a few pills of gummy extract of opium, a complete cupping apparatus, and the principal instruments of the dentist and of minor surgery.

Such was the vade mecum, the baggage that had seemed to me necessary, as in my first journey, in order to be ready for any event during a hundred and fifty leagues traveled by short stages across the Indian territory.

I stopped a few hours at Dallas to shake the hand of a dozen former colonists of Réunion, who had found there, by dint of labor, some compensations for the destruction of our associative establishment, and to take letters of recommendation which the excellent Dr. Prior's had had the kindness to offer me for some of the principal professors of the Northern universities.

I had, a few days before, attended in that town a meeting held by one of the celebrities of Texas, General Sam-Houston.

Quite young, and following dissensions with his brothers and sisters, he had gone to mingle with the Indian tribes of Texas, had adopted their manners and their costume, and had become a great chief among them.

Later, he contributed powerfully to the declaration of independence of that country. Pursued by Santa-Anna, he dared, with fewer than eight hundred men, to attack that famous chief in an entrenchment where he had shut himself up with sixteen hundred Mexicans, and, by a most daring maneuver, routed his army and took him prisoner — an event of which the United States preserve the memory preciously under the name of the battle of San Jacinto.

After the annexation of Texas to the American Union, he was named president of that State, then a member of the Senate at Washington.

In 1857 he was again soliciting the suffrage of the Texians for the presidency of the State; but two great parties were then face to face: the Know-Nothings and the Democrats — the former bitter enemies of the admission of foreigners to the exercise of political rights, and the latter favorable to that admission.

The most numerous party, the Democrats, reproached General Houston with repelling foreigners and with having leanings toward the emancipation of the slaves. In a meeting held previously at the center of the State, at Waco, they had rejected his candidacy, and he was traveling through Texas to justify himself of the insinuations and accusations of which he had been the object. He spoke for three hours with ease, sometimes even with eloquence; and I should have suffered the more in seeing that old and respectable warrior obliged to come thus to justify himself before his fellow-citizens, to whom he had rendered so many signal services, had his speech not been unfortunately interlarded with trivial jokes and Indian cries meant to enliven the audience — to the great detriment, in my view, of the orator's dignity.

A lawyer, paid by the commission of the Waco meeting and charged with sustaining the accusations that had motivated the exclusion, followed him everywhere and took the floor after him. This maneuver succeeded, and Samuel Houston failed in his candidacy.

A young French watchmaker, M. Eugène Henry, having begged me to take him to Sherman — a town situated about seventy miles (some thirty leagues) on the road to Preston — I accepted with pleasure this excellent traveling companion.

At noon we stopped to dine, two miles from Dallas, at the home of one of our former Swiss colonists, M. Jacques Nusbeaumer, who has founded there a pretty farm, and who, associated with his compatriot Boll — whose sister he has married — appears, while still regretting Switzerland, happy in that prosperity which order, and a labor to which one has been accustomed from childhood, produce little by little. They have joined to their agricultural works the trade of butcher, which the neighborhood of Dallas makes easy and lucrative for them.

At the close of day we stopped to camp beside a little cistern of rainwater filtering slowly through the earth, and we supped on the remains of a chicken brought from Réunion, and on cold coffee, without taking the trouble to light a fire.

I will state here, once for all and so as not to return to it, the order and arrangement of our meals:

In the morning, on waking, master Jules Haizé, my driver, tended his mules and prepared them for departure, while I lit the fire and made the coffee. He then armed himself with the frying-pan, spread in it a few slices of bacon which, once fried, left a juice in which flour, diluted, spread and browned into excellent pancakes, or in which we fried the eggs that the farms along the road sometimes furnished us.

Almost every day, a few good pieces of game, which strolled on our road and seemed very curious to watch us pass, came, into our frying-pan, to break the somewhat prosaic monotony of our smoked lard.

Finally, the sardines served as an entremets, and the coffee took the place of an excellent dessert.

As for the old cognac, it served to correct the water when it allowed itself to be not good.

There I lacked a little filter-can that I had had made in Paris, at M. Ducommun's, in 1854; but the pleasure I had had in offering it to brave friends who remained at Réunion, condemned to drink the muddy water of M. Cousin's cistern, consoled me for its absence. I cannot too much recommend its use in such journeys. By placing it in a current of air and wrapping it in a wet cloth, one has continually fresh and clear water — an inestimable happiness under high latitudes.

I must say one word more of the game of Texas: I have already spoken of the deer and the roe-deer. These last are rarely met on the roads; one must seek them in the depths of the forests; it is the same with the raccoon (a kind of little bear) and the opossum, a kind of marsupial, whose flesh, in stew, seemed to us to yield in nothing to that of the hare, and seems to me to deserve that these two animals — very little wild and in no way offensive — should be the object of an experiment in acclimatization in France.

Had M. Considérant not so peremptorily repelled my desire to profit, for our colony's relations with the Jardin des Plantes of Paris, by the benevolent overtures of Professor Duméril, these relations might easily have been precious for both establishments and given rise to useful exchanges.

The rivers, besides excellent fish whose fry would perhaps not be very difficult to transport to Europe, possess an enormous frog, the thigh-bones of which, eight to ten centimeters long, support an excellent chicken-like flesh that all the Americans eat, and which is abundant enough that a single one of these animals furnishes a dish more copious than twenty frogs of France.

The voice of this frog — a true bass of its kind — had strongly intrigued us when, in our first journey and before knowing it, we heard it croak by night at the edge of the waters near which our camp was established.

Finally, the wild turkeys, the prairie-hens, the rabbits and the squirrels are frequently met on the roads, and above all, in abundance, the turtledoves and the partridges.

On the 19th, we crossed Mac-Kinney, a hamlet decorated with the title of county seat of Collins County.

On the 20th, we crossed the town of West-Town, composed of a dozen wooden houses; and in the evening we left, with keen regret, our young and good companion, M. Henry, at Sherman, the goal of his journey, and a hamlet county-seat of Granson County.

On the 21st, we arrived at Preston, the last village of the county, on the right bank of the red river.

This bank is there cut sheer, to a depth of at least thirty meters, in a red clay that strongly tinges the waters of the river and justifies its name.

The opposite bank, on which the Indian territory begins, is low; and, if one judges by the traces of water left at a great height on the escarpment of the right bank, the territory must be flooded over a great extent during the rainy season.

And so its soil, all alluvial, is covered with magnificent forests, into which I was eager to plunge.

But I was glad too to gather news at the store where I had stopped, and under whose veranda some Indians were seated.

My white beard, thick and then more than thirty centimeters long, fixed their attention particularly; and when, answering the questions of the American store-keeper (keeper of the store), I said that we were, my driver and I, Frenchmen, the attention and the questions redoubled.

Before us, this brave dealer had never seen Frenchmen; and, taking me briskly by the hand, he led me to the back of his shop and placed me before two colored engravings, one representing the three Napoleons and the other Lafayette; then, with the tone of a professor administering an examination, he said to me, gazing at me fixedly:

"— Do you know these? — Yes, I answered him, three Napoleons and Lafayette; and I have seen all four of them. — Oh!… he added, are they not four great men? — Oh!… certainly!" I answered in my turn, with the happiness of finding in a desert, twenty-five hundred leagues from France, such an homage rendered to the illustrious men of my country.

An old Indian, named John, seemed, even more than the others, struck by the length of my beard; and despite the ordinary and dignified circumspection of these brave people, he asked me leave to touch it. He pressed it several times in his hand; he passed his fingers through it to sound its thickness; then, showing, by contrast and with a very expressive pantomime, the scantiness and the slight length of his own, he pointed again to mine, saying in English: "Oh! fine beard! soft beard! magnificent beard! respectable beard!"

I had already seen, at the other end of Texas, at Houston, several members of a little Indian tribe remaining in the country, where it lives by the products of its hunting, and whose costume much resembles, in form, that of the Scottish Highlanders; but I saw there, for the first time, a garment made wholly of deerskin and tanned so as to be of the greatest suppleness. The edges of each of the pieces of which this garment (paletot and trousers) is composed are cut into thin strips eight to ten centimeters long, which form, on each seam, a fringe more bizarre than pretty.

John offered us slices of sun-dried beef which we found good, and which replaced for us the quids of tobacco that the Americans — and even the women — chew without ceasing.

After having dined very ill at Madame Bloom's boarding-house, we crossed the Red-River by boat, at one in the afternoon, and went to camp twelve miles farther off, in the Indian forest.

We had traveled, for more than two miles, through that luxuriant forest which had appeared to us from the heights of Preston, and whose vegetation is so admirably quickened by the annual overflows of the Red River. Enormous plane-trees and sycamores — trees rare in high Texas — give the vegetation of this part of the Indian territory an aspect more varied, less vulgar, and of a fresher and tenderer green; but when the alluvial soil ceased, the light-foliaged trees disappeared and the forests resumed their severe physiognomy, never again to lay it aside until the end of the journey.

There, as in Texas, one finds only a few very mediocre wild fruits: tiny nuts called pecans, harsh plums, a kind of barberry of the most acid, a few mulberries, and wild grapes.

A single fruit, that of the persimmon, is naturally good. It is a kind of medlar which, when softened and taken in time, offers a very pronounced and very fine apricot flavor.

But the grape — what is it possible to say of it, since a colonist of Réunion, seeking to stun himself over the lot he has made for his family by throwing upon the lands of Texas his last stake and children reared for the liberal professions and not for the manual labors of a farm — since that colonist, I say, wrote in the bulletin of our society, dated January 1858, that "the wine of Texas, which one would take for wine of Cyprus mixed with wine of Spain, is destined to take rank among the first wines of the globe"?

We had made wine at Réunion before that colonist arrived there, and we had appreciated — but infinitely less emphatically as to quality — the benefit of such a harvest in a country deprived of so many things.

The vine grows naturally in Texas, it is true; but what will it be able to produce so long as, in the dales that nourish it, the thermometer descends, as it does almost every year, from fifteen to twenty degrees below zero?

It is, finally, with just as much judgment as — vying with his friend M. Cousin, who had announced to us wheat eight feet high — it is with just as much judgment that the same colonist has seen the maize take on "arborescent proportions," a height of "five meters," and that he promises Réunion figs and almonds, as if the delicate trees that produce them could give fruit under such temperatures.

The laws relative to paternal authority may allow a father to prepare such disappointments for his family; but when the public is exposed to being fascinated by such exaggerations, it is a duty to protest, to warn, and to enlighten.

When Texas, in 1845, entered as a State into the American Union, almost all the Indians who inhabited its territory refused to submit to the new government and withdrew little by little, and more and more, toward the far west (the distant west).

It was not the same for the States situated to the north, between the Red River and the Arkansas and beyond, as far as the Missouri. There were emigrations too, but several nations — and among others the two principal ones, the Choctaws and the Cherokees — made a treaty with the government of the United States, to which they ceded their vast territories.

This cession had for its principal clauses: 1st, fairly considerable subsidies in money, which were to be paid to the chiefs for a certain number of years; 2nd, the right, for these and their nations, to reside in perpetuity on the ceded territories, and without any American or any other foreigner having the right to establish himself there otherwise than by marrying an Indian girl.

There were, however, two exceptions to this clause: the first, in favor of the military establishments, the forts which it should please the government to establish, and certain agencies, for which it reserved to itself the patenting of the holders.

These agencies are stores or bazaars provided with all the articles of clothing, of armament, of furniture, of tooling, and of food that the Indians may desire, and which they take in exchange for the products of their soil and their industries.

These patents, which give rise to considerable profits, are much sought after by the Americans.

But the government, by a foresight one cannot too much praise, has reserved to itself the right to issue them, in order to preserve these nations as far as possible from the pernicious effects produced by alcoholic drinks, the sale of which is prohibited.

The agents thus patented are a kind of consul, ordinarily very exact in observing the instructions of the administration that names them, because, obliged to make considerable advances and credits, they are radically ruined the day when, the patent being withdrawn from them, they are obliged to leave the country immediately.

Despite the severe prohibition of whiskey and the laudable efforts of the temperance societies, contraband still brings far too much of it into these territories annexed to the Union, and the use of these drinks deplorably deteriorates the excellent character of these Indians as well as that of the Americans.

The drunkenness caused by this detestable maize brandy has nothing resembling the drunkenness produced by our wines of France. It is almost always a stupid fever of ferocity that engenders all the murders with which this land of liberty is perpetually soiled. Governmental action, which never intervenes in the private life of the citizens, would doubtless, thanks to its absence, be a very fine thing, were it not ceaselessly replaced — with no other counterweight than the almost always impossible convictions of juries — by the more or less drunken intervention of the rifle, the dagger, or the revolver.

The marriages of whites with the daughters of the Red-Skins are an occasion of fortune for the former when they have the love and the understanding of order and of agricultural labor. Each new member of the Indian family becomes proprietor of all the land he can enclose, and it is rare that the head of the family is poor enough not to be able to give his son-in-law several head of each kind of cattle, and even a negro or a negress. With these elements, in a country where the multiplication of cattle has no limits, the farmer who knows how to bear the difficulties of the first years and how to merit the confidence of his new family sees abundance reign little by little in his household.

It is the Germans who have shown the most seriousness and the most conscientiousness in these establishments, and they have been rewarded for it by an inner happiness sufficient for men who had fled too great miseries to have to regret the refinements, unknown to them, of civilization.

Those of the Americans who come to seek their fortune in these regions are not always the elite of their population. It happens to them more than once, after some time of residence, to be seized with the spleen and to abandon their poor squaws and their children, after having taken from them all that can easily be carried off; and so in this country the name of Yankee seems to inspire, at first, a mediocre confidence. I have, however, met more than one American farm where that prosperous order of which I have just spoken seemed also to reign.

The poor Indians extricate themselves little by little from misery by the painful but lucrative trade of wagoners.

They go to the various ports of debarkation, at great distances, to load for the stores and agencies of their regions the goods addressed to them.

These journeys and these relations develop their intelligence and prepare them for civilization.

As for the chiefs, thanks to the negroes that the subventions of the American government have permitted them to buy, they have themselves created farms which yield in nothing to those of the immigrants.

By combining intelligently the resources offered them by these subventions, agriculture, and above all the raising of cattle and of slaves, some have arrived at great fortunes. The passion for luxury has seized them, and this passion has given rise, in the stores, to a trade in watches, chains, and vessels of gold and silver, which jar somewhat with the poverty of the cabins and the simplicity of the garments, and which are besides the object of very illicit profits through the very low quality of the materials, whose fineness is variable and unguaranteed.

Everyone tells with admiration, in Arkansas, of the magnificent gold basket in which, at the home of the chief of the Cherokees, are served each day the little maize cakes that form, with bacon, the meager base of all the meals in these regions.

Some of these Indian chiefs seek a luxury far preferable, and one that promises the American government the reward of the efforts it has made to civilize them and attach them to itself. This luxury is that of education: they send their children, even their daughters, to the various boarding-schools that have been established around them.

But it is again with happiness that I was able to see there French education preferred to all others. It is more than a hundred leagues from those solitudes which I was then traversing — it is at Saint-Louis of Missouri, at the college directed by French Jesuits and at the boarding-school directed by the ladies of the Sacré-Cœur — that are sent the children of these Indian nations, as well as the children of the Creoles of Louisiana.

It is well understood that this happiness of which I speak prejudges no question: neither religious questions, nor questions of education. It is quite simply the happiness of hearing, so far off and in so many things, the fatherland honored. I passed too far from Saint-Louis to be able to visit the two establishments of which I have just spoken, but I know that they enjoy a great favor, and that the Jesuits' one above all — richly built and possessor of a fine farm cultivated by negroes — receives about three hundred pupils and enjoys a prosperity that increases each year.

The negroes, in initiating the Indians into the labors of agriculture, will have been for them a providential instrument of civilization; and education will some day complete, we must hope, the emancipation of the two races.

The existence of these negroes among the Indians appears, at first, an anomaly, above all among the Choctaws, whose physiognomy announces no intelligence superior to that of their slaves.

The face of these Indians, literally square, owes this form — I was assured, without my having been able to verify it — to the habit of depressing, by a compressive bandage, the top of the head and the forehead of newborn children. The results of this practice might very well mislead the phrenologists. The temporal region, developed by this compression at the expense of the frontal region, would lead one to believe in the predominance of violent and subversive passions that the gentle and benevolent character of the Choctaws in no way manifests. Their stature is generally small; the compression of the brain may very well harm the development of the rest of the body.

This inferiority of physical strength must have entered for much into the considerations of their submission to the United States. They were oppressed by their more energetic and more warlike neighbors; they needed protectors; they chose those who offered them, with rich subsidies, the powerful protection of forts furnished with an artillery before which the most indomitable of these nations flee or successively succumb.

Like all the Indians, the Choctaws are very good horsemen, and they gain much by being seen mounted on their pretty and excellent ponies.

They have more than once, thus mounted, drawn us, by their example, out of embarrassments that might have stopped us much longer:

Held back at the edge of creeks turned into torrents by a few days of rain, we might, for want of knowing the depth, have lost much time waiting for the waters to subside, had not some Indian, coming or going, given us the measure of that depth by crossing them.

These rains had many other inconveniences too: they made the fire of our kitchen difficult to light and to maintain; they passed through the canvas of our wagon, which was not completely impermeable, and thus rendered our dining-room and our bedroom infinitely uncomfortable.

After having passed near Fort Washita without stopping there, we crossed, on the 22nd of August, a large village named Bogy-de-Po, where I bought moccasins (Indian footwear); and, from this point, the road became more and more hilly, rough, and difficult. The high prairies that one meets uniformly on all the plateaus of Texas were replaced, in this part of the Indian territory and in Arkansas, by high mountains, garnished to the summit with thick forests, on whose slopes and in whose gorges the roads are traced.

These roads — works of the Americans (for the Indians have never traced any but little paths just wide enough for men and horses to pass along them in single file) — these roads, intended for the communications of the forts with one another and for the transport of artillery, have been widened with the axe by fellings of trees cut about a half-meter above the root, a height sufficient that the axles of the wagons are not caught, but also that the wheels strike against them at every instant, whatever care one takes to avoid them.

As much as stones are wanting at the surface of the earth in Texas, so much are the Indian forests paved with them — but paved in such a way that tree-trunks and blocks of rock form perpetual cascades upon which I have firmly promised myself never henceforth to risk my bones and the frame of any vehicle whatever.

The only way to be able to travel, without bruising oneself, on such roads, is on horseback or on foot.

We met a convoy of infantry and artillery that came from Fort Smith and was making for Fort Washita.

One does not meet, in these long journeys, without stopping to exchange information on the state of the road and the creeks and on the distances.

The officer who commanded the detachment marched a few hundred paces in advance of his convoy. He was young, of a very graceful figure, and mounted on a fine horse. The butts of two revolvers showed at the bows of his saddle. We stopped simultaneously to exchange the ordinary information of which I have just spoken; then he added that Fort Gibson, situated in the north of the Indian territory, among the Cherokees, had just, by order of the government, been abandoned as henceforth useless, and that the convoy he was leading to Washita was composed of part of the armament and the garrison of that fort, and that it was destined for the war against the Mormons.

We had hoped that the greatest difficulties of our route were at last surmounted; but on seeing two of the convoy's wagons deprived of their hind wheels and supported by great oak-wood forks strongly bound to the axle and dragging on the ground, we understood that we still needed much precaution, perseverance, and resignation.

Besides the hard roads that break the wheels, and which ours had the good fortune to resist, we also found those deep creeks at the edge of which one must necessarily camp until the waters have sufficiently flowed off, but whose banks are so sheer and so damaged by the rains and by the trampling of cattle that one day, among others, our mules, sunk in the mud to the belly and our wheels to the hubs, would probably still be there, had not a brave American settler obligingly pulled them out by harnessing four of his oxen to them.

In these forced and often prolonged halts, one can gather precious information on the manners of the inhabitants. These creeks, momentarily impassable, become the rendezvous, not only of all the travelers who must cross on the road, but also of the neighbors who seek there a food for their so rarely satisfied curiosity.

The Indian, who makes it his dignity not to appear preoccupied with the affairs of others, never comes to these meeting-places without carrying in his hand a bundle of little stakes. As soon as he arrives he plants one on the bank, just at the spot where the water comes level, then sits down silently, looking at no one. He has come to know whether the water is rising or falling. That is his pretext. His action has proved his purpose. One cannot suspect him of indiscretion; his dignity is safe.

When the water, after a few minutes, has risen or fallen, he places a second piece of wood, without disturbing the first, and so on successively. If no one addresses him, he will go off gravely as he came.

The American, who believes or knows himself very superior to the Indian, imitates him nonetheless in many things. He imitates as much as he can his silent gravity; he imitates his various guttural cries meant for calling the cattle. He even imitates his war-cry, which, in these pacified countries, is no longer anything but a reminiscence, a musical exercise resembling somewhat the highest and most cadenced notes of the Tyrolean songs.

Finally, in circumstances similar to the one of which I have just spoken, he imitates with the same gravity the operation of the little pieces of wood.

If a German arrives — but above all a Frenchman — it is by them that the conversation begins; and it is the Indian who always knows best how to master the impulses of his curiosity and the itchings of his tongue.

He masters them because, furnished with a dose of vanity that yields in nothing to that of the others, and fearing to show himself ignorant before people who come from farther off than he, he finds it prudent to keep on his reserve; and the American imitates him on this point in proportion to the instruction he lacks: the less he knows, the more circumspect and silent he is.

Is it not a little the contrary in France?

It is the custom, in America, to enter houses; to sit down there, if there is a vacant seat; to remain standing or to squat, if no seat is free; to approach the fire, if it is cold; to draw from a vessel always kept within everyone's reach and to drink, with a common cup, a glass of water, if it is hot; then, as a question on the motives of one's entrance or departure would be contrary to the laws of hospitality, one often goes out without the least greeting, the least word, the least good-day having been exchanged.

Never, either, does the hat serve any other purpose than to cover the head.

Slaves alone uncover in speaking to a free man.

As I was saying just now, it was by us, Frenchmen, that the conversation began at the edge of that creek where we were obliged to wait for twelve hours; and while on the other bank there was a dozen Americans, we had only Indians on ours, and not one spoke English or French.

Among them was a stout Indian, bordering on obesity — a chief probably already fattened on the share he had made for himself in the American subventions. He was clad in a cotton shirt, and over it trousers and a paletot of deerskin. After having stuck his first little piece of wood at the water's edge, he had gravely sat down. A few others, clad in garments similar to his in form, but of cotton stuffs streaked with the most gaudy colors, and coiffed with kerchiefs rolled about the head without covering its top, and surmounted by a feather — a few others, I say, stood near him, listening silently to a long tale he had begun for them.

One of them, older than the others, alone gave the response, with an approving air and by means of the little interjection i, placed in a gentle tone and on a high note between all the pauses the orator made.

This colloquy lasted thus a long time, and until another old Indian, appearing on horseback on the opposite bank, threw himself without ceremony into the torrent, which he crossed with the water up to his waist.

Curious to judge exactly the depth of the water, I approached him, asking him by signs leave to measure the height of the trace the water had marked on his horse and on himself. He began by graciously extending to me a hand to which mine hastened to respond no less courteously; then he himself indicated to me the line I was seeking, but trying to make me understand, by a gesture of his two arms, that the horse, not having always been able to touch the bottom, had swum for an instant — which decided us to pass the night with our wagon on this bank, after the example of the Americans who, though on horseback, had lit their fires on the other.

Ten paces from the Indian chief, a woman, his squaw probably, had silently squatted. She was, like him, of a most pronounced stoutness. Her garments — a dress, and her head and neck kerchiefs, of cotton stuff — were very ill fastened and of very faded colors. Her features were thick, gross, without expression, and her whole person announced a vegetative life, a life of squatting, without dignity and without ideas.

I sketch this so unattractive portrait because it is that of nearly all the Indian women I met on my route. All, from childhood, have a tendency to softening, to the flaccidity of skin and flesh; and all, fashioned thus no doubt by the state of servility to which usage and prejudice have subjected them, are remarkable representations of bored ugliness. A half-dozen little boys of eight to ten years, entirely naked, who played around us, all had spindly legs and an enormous belly. One of them, an evident mixture of the red race and the black race, had a very ugly and very wicked face and showed much more activity than the others.

In the following days, and approaching New-York, I met in the stores and in the railway stations, and even into Canada, women of other Indian nations executing and selling little works of embroidery in deer-hair upon deerskin and upon bark — moccasins, pin-cushions, little baskets, bonnets, etc. — works that require intelligence and skill for the dyeing of the hair and for its arrangement into flowers and fruits that our embroideresses of Europe do not always execute better; but these women, with such delicate fingers, all resemble the portrait I have just sketched.

This comes evidently, as I was saying just now, from the state of extreme submission and abjection in which the prejudices of the Indians keep them. This state contrasts strikingly with that of the American women, who are all tall, slender, dressed with a certain elegance, though often poor, and whose distinguished but little expressive physiognomy reflects above all — even in the most destitute peasant-woman — the intimate sentiment of dignity to which a great liberty accustoms them from youth, and later the deference and the respect of all men and of their husbands in particular.

By contrast too, the American ladies — the farm-wives, even those who have no slaves — show infinitely little activity and skill at work. I never saw of them anything but a few rather mediocre knitting-works which they come to exchange in the stores, along with the eggs of their hens and butter whose milk is never sufficiently pressed out, for small objects of toilet and household.

While the Indian women follow on foot the horses of their husbands, the American women never travel except on horseback, with hooked saddles on which they sit very elegantly; but the clothes of their husbands, their own dresses, and the garments of their children are often rags that are never mended and that are worn torn until money or credit permits them to be thrown away after being replaced by new garments.

The next morning, the travelers of the left bank of the creek decided to cross it. They were eight on horseback, seven young men and a gentleman of some fifty years who seemed their chief. Though without uniform, like the chief of the convoy that had preceded him, he seemed to me to be a superior officer of that army which the obstinacy of the Mormons was forcing the government to send to the famous city of the Salt Lake. He stopped before me, and after a coldly benevolent greeting, said to me: "We have just crossed, but it is still a little too early for your wagon." I thanked him for his obliging advice, and we parted, wishing each other a mutual good journey.

A few moments after, the creek was crossed by two Indians, each carrying a bow and arrows, and having for all garment but a long and dirty shirt of yellow calico. Thus these poor Indians, having on one side the love of their old customs — so good under such temperatures — and on the other the fear of the divine vengeances preached to them by the missionaries of every sect, have adopted, under pretext of decency, this ignoble shirt that descends to their heels, hampering and uglifying them.

Their breech-cloth, adorned with beads, with glass trinkets, with embroidery, with fine bird-feathers, with a tomahawk and a shining knife — their breech-cloth, did it not join, in conscience, to a true elegance, a much more real decency?

We at last crossed the creek in our turn, as I have related on page 279, and we continued our route after having exchanged a cordial handshake with the worthy gentleman who had so benevolently drawn us out of trouble.

Among the information we had gathered concerning our route, we had carefully noted in our memory the usefulness of an active watch during the night to guard our mules from the clutch of thieves; and it doubtless served us well never to have failed in it.

We met — a rare thing in America — a traveler on foot. He was a tall and vigorous fair-haired young man, with a smiling face, but of a coaxing and false smile. His baggage, contained in a very flat sack, announced misery. We admitted him to a share of our lard, and the impression his conversation and his manners left on us made us baptize him an Irishman. Now, Irishman, in America, is a word which, under the impression of a general sentiment of repulsion against the immigrants of that brave and unfortunate nation, is applied to anything which, with more or less fair hair, seems to sniff a little too curiously the goods of others.

So when, at the passage of a creek, he climbed into our wagon so as not to get wet, all his attention was employed in making the inventory of our movables, in asking the time so as to see our watches, in questioning about the weight of our trunks and above all about the number and value of our arms.

A little later we met a poor American settler who, not having done good business in Texas, was returning to the North with his wife, two little children, two oxen, two little horses, and a poor wagon. All this, sad and lean, announced misery; and the somber face of the American was no more sympathetic to us than that of the Irishman.

The latter left us to follow the settler, and the two soon seemed the best friends in the world. Their evening visits around us did not seem to us of good augury. Several times the Irishman, during the day, tried to direct us on the road, to dissuade us from crossing certain creeks, and to make us camp in deep gorges where we had no wish at all to pass the night in his company and in that of his companion.

We were at last rid of them in the midst of a prairie filled with a fine herd of Indian horses. Though it was not the usual hour for halts, they stopped there; and we did not see them again until several days later, but without the wagon and the family, and rapidly leading six horses.

These horses, which had not, like us, in their hands pistols always ready and guns with which we had shown that at sixty paces we could pierce a bird with a ball — these horses had doubtless seemed a less dangerous capture.

On seeing them enter thus a village not far from Fort Smith, we should have been sorely tempted to say to the authority of the place a word of this horse-trade.

In France, we should not have hesitated an instant.

But there, two considerations held us back: the first, wholly of egoism, represented to us the inconveniences there might be in intervening in the affairs of others; the second, resulting from a sentiment of charity and justice, is worth a little digression:

There exists in America an old law, called Lynch law, by virtue of which the flagrant offense may be punished by the citizens without the intervention of the tribunals. This law, whose repeal enlightened men demand, is still — though falling into disuse — applied far too often. It is applied above all to offenses committed in regard to things that are left every day and by everyone under the guarantee of the public faith. Horse-thieves, for example, are thus pitilessly hanged; but one reproaches the executioners, with some reason, with making themselves a little too much judges in their own cause, and with not being always very scrupulous as to the nature of the proofs that serve to establish their conviction and the equity of their acts.

And so, as, in the end, we supposed the theft and had not seen it committed, and as we might have been the cause of the unjust application of a barbarous law, we continued our route, congratulating ourselves on no longer having the fear of being obliged to apply this law ourselves in the case of our legitimate and immediate defense.

On the 29th of August, we crossed, in a ferry directed by negroes, a great river named the Poteau; we reached, on the other bank, the territory of the Cherokees; and, in the evening, we supped and lodged at Fort Smith, with brave Alsatians, M. and Madame Nays, who, following there for a long time already the trade of butcher and innkeeper, appear to be rearing prosperously six fine children.

I was eager to wake the next day to see "the smiling city which, according to the book au Texas, rises at the foot of Fort Smith." (Au Texas, p. 30.)

But it was now only under benefit of inventory that it was possible to accept the enthusiastic phrases of M. Considérant; and it was not without distrust that we reread on the same page:

"They were white houses or houses of rose-colored brick, surrounded by verandas all verdant, separated by gardens in flower; wide and perfectly aligned streets; shops of every sort; ladies in muslin dresses; children coquettishly arrayed playing with their parasols; lawyers, physicians, goldsmiths, watchmakers, etc., and three or four great steamboats at the quay on the Arkansas; a whole civilization, young, alert, and prosperous."

I stayed fifteen days at Fort Smith — time enough, no doubt, to verify well the exactness of that smiling description which M. Considérant made of it after having spent there two hours buying horses.

What there is exact in this description is that the bricks are rose-colored, the streets wide and perfectly aligned, the shops provided with many sorts of things; it is that there are ladies in muslin dresses, children coquettishly arrayed, lawyers — many lawyers and physicians — one or two goldsmiths, as many watchmakers, and sometimes more than one steamboat at the quay.

But when, like M. Considérant, and in the quality of head of a School, one writes a book meant to enthuse one's coreligionists and to attract their capital to a foreign land, one may be led into blind capitulations of conscience, which prevent one from turning round and showing the reverse of the medal. To us, then, again to show that reverse, such as we saw it at Fort Smith, even six years after M. Considérant's passage.

There are, indeed, houses of rose-colored brick and houses of wood whitewashed with lime; there are even today houses of enormous blocks of well-cut gray granite; but for one of these, there are still more than twenty dilapidated cabins, where misery and diseases decimate their poor inhabitants.

The fine houses belong, most of them, to merchants — above all to German or Polish Jews — who draw from these buildings heavy rents, ruinous for the tenants. And so one finds there almost as many miseries, no less stinging though less complete, as in the log-houses (houses of tree-trunks).

For one lady and one child coquettishly arrayed, there are fifty wearing the rags of misery.

There are therefore still, in "that smiling city, in that civilization young, alert, and prosperous," and in the midst of "that naturing nature" (au Texas, pp. 30 and 31), more than twenty miseries for one prosperity.

And these miseries have all for their victims unfortunates who have fled other miseries, material or moral, with which they were afflicted in their fatherland, or who have given their last coin and their families to the seduction of those fine phrases against which we devote at least our experience to forestalling fresh entrainments.

It is with "the verandas all verdant, separated by gardens in flower" as with "the respect of the weeds for those gardens," and as with twenty other aphorisms of the same force escaped from the imagination of the author of the book au Texas.

Gardens are really things unknown in Texas, and even at Fort Smith — though one cultivates with success, at least in this last place, cabbages and potatoes. Apart from the gardens of Réunion, one garden at Dallas and two at Galveston, we did not find, in the space of two hundred leagues, a single cultivation that deserved that title, a single one in which the weeds did not hold much more place than the cultivated plants. One sees everywhere only the slight theoretical and practical instruction of the gardeners and their easy discouragement before the force that nature shows in reproducing, in the vegetable kingdom as in the animal kingdom, all that struggles against the conquests of man upon the earth.

And so there is not, in Texas and as far as Fort Smith, a single one of those cities — so smiling in M. Considérant's book — whose streets and clearings are not filled and infested, among other things, with the venomous and stinking datura stramonium, and with a prodigious profusion whose analogical cause would well be worth being studied by our learned friend M. Toussenel.

"The streets are wide and perfectly aligned": that is perfectly exact. The whole surface of the American earth is thus divided by the square, and the ensemble of the cities and the countryside forms a vast chessboard which it is permitted to truncate on no point.

The city of Réunion[^xviii_reunion] itself — M. Cousin's city, with its three cabins and despite its so ill-chosen situation — has certainly, like Fort Smith and like all the budding cities of these vast regions, wide and perfectly aligned streets; but everywhere these streets are either cloacas of black mud, as at Houston, or quagmires of sand where one sinks to mid-leg, as at Dallas and Galveston, or finally ravines of sand, mud, and ugly tall weeds, in which, as at Fort Smith, bands of hogs, cows, and calves wander, pen, root, or sleep night and day, without even respecting the cemetery.

Fort Smith has, like almost all America, and in great number, lawyers and physicians without diplomas — living proofs of the epidemics of every kind that gnaw at the new establishments.

It has sometimes too more than one steamboat at the quay; but six months sometimes pass without a single one being able to land there; and if this point had not been until now an important strategic position for the surveillance of the Indians, it might have been a hamlet, but nothing more; and when the American government abandons the fort, as it has already, little by little, abandoned so many others, there will be there many existences compromised, many people obliged to go again to seek their fortune elsewhere.

There are slaves too at Fort Smith; and during the fifteen days I passed there waiting for the steamboat, I learned things that seemed to me lacking in Mrs. Stowe's book (Uncle Tom's Cabin).

In the ordinary circumstances of life, when slaves and masters are neither aggrieved nor ill; when they have neither the blue devils, nor the spleen, nor antipathetic characters, each of them has an interest in harmony, and they live in peace. The slave, suitably fed in his quality of high-priced cattle, and reasonably charged with work, can live a material life sweet enough.

But when the reverse takes place; when the masters have a sour and despotic humor and the slaves bend with difficulty to the manifestations that result from it, bitterness, insults, and blows come to complicate the situation; and when hatred has once placed itself between them, mutual duties and interests are too often sacrificed to the meditations and the pleasure of vengeance.

The negro neglects his service and flees when he can. Sometimes too he sets fire and murders; but the negress, she has found a more refined vengeance: they wish to marry her so that the herd may increase; and as one has not yet everywhere come, on this point, to absolute constraint, there are some who, without the aid of the cloister and in the midst of every means of seduction, take the resolution not to give their masters the benefit of their maternity, and who observe their vow of celibacy with a perseverance that would do honor to certain vestals.

In the hotel I inhabited, a young negress of nineteen, mother for four years of a pretty little negro for whom two hundred dollars were already refused, had, three years ago, committed a little theft in a lodger's room. The mistress, feeling the gravity of this act in a house like hers, and wishing to produce a powerful and durable impression on her slave's mind, found nothing better than to beat her. The latter, less touched by her fault than by the correction — which may have been a little too severe and prolonged — declared to her mistress that, henceforth, she would have no more children by her; and for three years she has kept her promise. Her husband is a fine negro… she loves him… she has since experienced only good treatment from her masters, but she has been implacable.

In a house of the neighborhood, another — a pregnant woman — had been beaten two days running by her mistress, so that her cries and her groans, for nearly an hour each time, reached us.

A few days after, the slave fell ill, and her illness ended in a miscarriage.

A physician to whom I related this accident answered me:

"The lashes of the whip given to the slaves are painful to the skin, no doubt, but it is hardly possible that their effect could go so far as such disorders. This woman, I am persuaded, will have had recourse, in a spirit of vengeance, to an operation and to very dangerous medicines that very rarely fail of their effect, when they do not kill. — But who gives them these medicines, and who are the operators? — Who?… why, they are the physicians, assuredly! These women shrink from no possible sacrifice, in such cases; and these cases, on which American law is silent, become besides far too numerous for it to be just to renounce so lucrative a branch of medical practice."

This answer was a bitter criticism, but a true criticism, of the state of the slaves and of the state of medical practice in the United States. The true physicians groan rightly, with all people of heart and judgment, at the inconsistencies to which the often ill-understood love of liberty thus leads, every day, in this country.

In the presence of these facts, where the sublime is so near the horrible, I was eager to reach those Northern States that demand, with so touching and so persevering a philanthropy, the emancipation of the slaves, and that, from afar, seem so well to understand the honorable place that the races of color might obtain in humanity, were they admitted to the benefits of education and liberty.

But when, a few days later, I learned from the very mouth of these philanthropists of the North that their brothers of the South were, without any indemnity, to renounce immediately the property of their slaves, to accept in its entirety and to make alone to liberty a sacrifice that would reduce them to misery, and in which the Northern States would participate only by their speeches;

Then, when I had seen with my own eyes this same race of color be the object of the repugnances, the repulsions, and the insulting contempt of those republicans of the North who so obstinately demand its emancipation for the Southern States, I turned my eyes still more toward France, where — however restricted may be, in certain circumstances, the liberty of speaking and writing — there reigns, more than anywhere else, a spirit of equality and justice henceforth inalienable, which, a beginning of realization of the teachings of the Gospel, promises more to liberty and will do more for it than the declamations inspired by the narrow speculations of egoism.

This confidence in the mother country, this faith in the lofty place she occupies on so many grounds among the nations, this love for her and this thirst for return are found among all the Frenchmen one meets on foreign soil. If some, conquered by the memory of the obstacles they may have left behind and which pride, misery, or other circumstances of force majeure take from them the possibility of surmounting — if those strive to dissemble the inner sentiment that oppresses them, those are worthy of a great commiseration; for, whatever the indifference they affect, their inner weight has always shown itself to us the heavier as they had the less hope of lightening it.

The French population of Fort Smith offered me no exception to this rule. For one family to whom fortune shows itself somewhat favorable, there are ten that vegetate; and to vegetate far from France is to pine away twice.

One of them had won for himself, in the profession of bar-keeper (dealer in liquors), a little fortune that he increased each day by a few dollars carefully buried, so as to await, sheltered from thieves, the so-longed-for hour of departure. He fell ill and called in — alas! — one of those physicians who, as there are so many in this country, improvise for themselves the necessary title and then audaciously exploit the confidence and the purse of the patients.

As the poor sick man could hardly rise any longer and lived alone, with a little dog, in his back-shop, he had indicated to the physician the place where, from outside, the latter could take the key and enter without disturbing him; but a kind of second sight, provoked by manifestations of a curiosity a little too indiscreet, soon made him regret this mark of confidence.

One evening, the physician wished to make him take a packet of powder. The sick man refused, telling him to leave it there and that he would take it later.

Once alone, it was to his dog that he administered the drug; and at the end of two hours the dog was dead.

At daybreak, the physician was entering; but he found, seated on his bed, the poor sick man who, showing him the dead dog and presenting him the barrel of a revolver, ordered him to go out and not to come back.

He thought, poor man, to be quit for that ordeal; but a few nights later his house was set on fire with a few others of the neighborhood. He lost all his effects and all his goods, and saved only with great difficulty his money and his person.

But he had to employ that money in setting up a new shop; and when I asked him whether he did not hope soon to rejoin his family, he answered me with tears in his eyes: "Oh! now, it is over: what I possessed was enough to bring back to my country a little ease for my own and for me. Today that I have less than at the time of my departure, what should I go to do back there? No, I shall die here, and they will hear no more of me."

One alone found, in the perfectly free satisfaction of a dominant aptitude, the love of the hunt, the counterweight to his regrets for his native country. "In France," he said to me, "I was but a poacher, discredited by the pursuits of the keepers and the gendarmes, and I came to hate a society in the midst of which I could not satisfy without offense that passion which the good God has given me in an irresistible manner; whereas here, my life, wisely divided between my family, the obligations of my profession (he is a skilful pastry-cook and confectioner), and the satisfaction of my passion for the forests and the emotions of the hunt — my life is prosperous and honored. I regret my fatherland; but it doubtless lacks some institutions that would prevent it from making, for some of its children, a crime and a torture of a passion as natural, as primitive, and as innocent as mine, and which alone could give me the courage to expatriate myself."

The obligation to wait for the steamboat — which might arrive from one instant to the next and which sometimes stops only a few hours — prevented me from visiting as far as I should have wished the nation of the Cherokees; but the trade of butcher-purveyor to the fort had created for my host intimate relations with the garrison and with the Indians, who sold him cattle. Each day the American non-commissioned officers and the Cherokee chiefs came to sit at the hotel table; and I learned more in these relations, become almost intimate, than I could have done in excursions where the travel would have taken the greatest part of the time employed.

The Cherokees — come, like the Choctaws, the Creeks, the Osages, etc., from the southern banks of the Mississippi — have at last escaped that continual pushing-back operated by the Americans; and there is reason to hope that these united nations, become in a stable manner, through agriculture, integral parts of the great nation, will not be slow to be definitively incorporated into it with the title of State.

There are between the Choctaws and the Cherokees differences of stature, of forms, and of manners so striking that the first recall those of our peasants of France whom continual-compression swaddling, a bad diet, excessive labors, and the lack of instruction have maintained in conditions of stature, of forms, and of physiognomic expression of a type so deteriorated and inferior that, in certain cantons, one does not always succeed in finding the contingent required for the recruitment of the army; while the second represent the industrial, bourgeois, or aristocratic classes, which owe to better habits in the physical life and to more development of the intellectual life forms and an expression whose superiority is, in various degrees, really incontestable.

All these nations have, moreover, abandoned the use of tattooing, which one no longer finds except among the unsubmissive nations, pushed back with the buffalo into the more remote deserts of the far west.

One sees again only, on feast-days, the not-general use of decorating the face with red, blue, yellow, and black paintings.

The head of the Cherokees has not that square form which I generally remarked among the Choctaws. Their facial angle is more upright, their face more oval, their stature taller, and their manners attain the distinction of those of true gentlemen. It is they who most willingly furnish pupils to the schools and who have constituted the finest rural establishments.

Whence comes to them this superiority over their neighbors?

They preserve with pride and recount with pleasure traditions from which it results that, about sixty years ago, some Frenchmen, gone out of their country following great revolutions, came or were deported to America; that they ascended the Mississippi and that the greater number stopped among the Cherokees.

Received there with a fraternal benevolence, most of them settled there and married daughters of the nation.

Those who told me this story think that these exiles, already of a mature age at their arrival, have all returned to the Great Spirit; but their memory has remained dear in the nation; and their children, who have preserved a few words of the French language, count among the principal of their fellow-citizens.

Should I be wrong in supposing that these exiles, gone out of France following the revolutions which, during some fifteen years, succeeded that of '89, belonged more or less to that brand-new race of thinkers which the philosophy of the eighteenth century had created, and that the first benefit with which they repaid the hospitality of the Cherokees was to demonstrate to them, as J. J. Rousseau had done, the grave inconveniences of the swaddling of newborns and the advantages of liberty from the first days of life?

Sixty years of the practice of such a liberty — can they not suffice for the physical regeneration of a nation and contribute to the development of its intelligence?

What I learned there of the American army comes down to a few very simple considerations.

Product of voluntary enlistments obtained by the temptation of a fairly high pay, the little army of the United States (some fifteen thousand men) is composed of scarcely anything but young men, most of them foreign to the country, and whose first steps in life have not all been marked by the most exemplary conduct.

The ambition of advancement can hardly raise their minds, as in the European armies, to the idea of distinctions, of decorations, or of pensions capable of compensating for some great sacrifices. None of them has his marshal's baton in his knapsack, and the only rank to which a soldier who is not American can aspire is that of sergeant.

It is Germans who most often attain this rank, in which, with order, they can make fairly good savings that allow them to choose more easily a career, when they take the course of retirement.

The officers, reared in schools over which the American government watches with the greatest solicitude and for which it neglects no care — the officers, I say, form a body generally very distinguished and which yields nothing in instruction to our staffs of Europe.

And, it must be said, their merit is great; for the American people, in its uneasy and suspicious love of liberty, and proud besides of its three millions of militia always available, sees only with distrust the existence of a regular army, and rewards very mediocrely its devotion and its sacrifices.

On the 13th of September, at ten in the morning, I saw at last arrive the pretty steamboat the Arkansas, on which I installed myself immediately, and which, after having taken on board three pieces of cannon and munitions from Fort Gibson, set off again the next morning at nine.

All my brave compatriots had come to shake my hand at the moment of departure, and to entrust me with their commissions for France.

One of them, the worthy hunter-confectioner of whom I spoke just now, remained on the steamboat and accompanied me thirty miles farther, as far as Van-Buren, in order to talk hunting again with me, and above all, he said, to show me a little longer his gratitude on the occasion of his child, who was dying at the time of my arrival, and whose health had been restored during the use of a few very simple remedies I had advised for him.

At Van-Buren — thus named after one of the presidents of the United States, and the first gathering of houses a little deserving the name of town since Galveston — he took me to see a French physician, M. Pernot, who, married there for some years, has made for himself a fine and honorable practice.

I had through him the confirmation of a drama recently related by some newspapers, and whose tragic dénouement — the assassination of Pratt, the second chief of the Mormons — had taken place a mile from Van-Buren.

Pratt had successfully carried about, some two years before, his Mormonian preachings from the north to the south of the United States. Among the new saints converted to the doctrine, a lady, Mrs. Mac-Lean, had pushed the enthusiasm of her conversion to the point of leaving her husband and her two children to follow the missionary. At the end of a year, the maternal sentiment combating in her heart the sentiments that had made her abandon her family, she had returned to the conjugal home, where she had obtained, with her reinstatement, a noble and generous pardon.

But, soon profiting by an absence of her husband, she had fled anew, had furtively carried off her two children, and left to the noble heart that had pardoned her a deserted house for reward.

Mac-Lean, on his return, promptly made his despair give way to the cares of a legitimate vengeance, in which his brother-in-law wished to associate himself.

The two set out on the traces of the guilty mother, whom they followed step by step across Texas and the Indian territory as far as Fort Smith, then as far as Van-Buren — exactly the same journey I had made for the past two years and a half.

As soon as he arrived, Mac-Lean betook himself to Pratt's dwelling, where he found him holding the place of head of the family, between his wife and his children.

Pratt falls dead from a revolver-shot, without a single word having been addressed to him; Mrs. Mac-Lean falls in a faint; and her husband, without occupying himself with her, returns to Van-Buren with his two children, presents himself before the judge who admits him to furnish bail, then awaits calmly the meeting of the jury, which acquits him unanimously.

Dr. Pernot, who had been charged by the magistrates to make, in his quality of physician, a report to the court on the circumstances of the murder, had besides the spectacle of the expiation — as terrible as it was just — undergone by that woman, twice and thrice false, cruel, and perjured; and he obtained from public pity a subscription that put her in a position to go seek from her mother a last pardon and an asylum.

At the steamboat's last signal I shook very cordially the hands of my two brave compatriots, and I re-embarked, all sad at finding myself henceforth alone, and for a thousand leagues still as far as New-York, among men whose language I could hardly understand and who were completely unknown to me.

I took a place, like all the travelers, around the fine veranda that occupies the fore of all the steamers; and there, after the example of all as well, thrown back in my armchair and my legs stretched much higher than my head on the ship's gunwale, I let my melancholy wander amid the magnificent landscape that began to unroll before us, no more to leave us until the sea.

This habit the Americans have of placing thus everywhere their legs in the air on whatever can serve them as support — a habit which, at New-Orleans, and to our great astonishment, made us see at the windows many more feet than heads; this habit, which not even the presence of ladies prevents — is it, as some maintain, one of the consequences of an insufficiently complete education?

I think I can give it a less severe and more rational explanation.

Everyone knows that under these extreme temperatures the circulation undergoes, during the excesses of heat, notable slowings, and that the relaxed tissues let the blood accumulate more easily in the lower limbs, which become engorged, which swell, and might thus give rise to grave disorders, did not instinct, without even the aid of reflection, indicate this salutary position, generally adopted in America.

But, one may object, the ladies, who do not use the same procedure, do not for that seem to have thicker feet and less fine legs. Granted: the observation is just; but one must not forget that the ladies, from the humblest cabins to the most sumptuous drawing-rooms, have adopted another usage that aids the circulation no less efficaciously: they all sit on armchairs (rocking-chairs, chairs on rockers) whose feet, placed on arcs of a circle, like those of children's wooden horses, permit, under the least effort, a perpetual swaying.

It is true too that this general pitching in a drawing-room gives the conversation an aspect, a turn that, at first, disposes one to vertigo, and to which it is not always easy to grow accustomed.

If life, such as humanity bears it so far, is full of those fits of isolation, of melancholy, of faintness, of spleen, caused by the loss of our friends, our hopes, or our illusions — Providence, it must be acknowledged, rarely leaves us without some compensations, which it suffices only to know how to seize in passing, according to the occasion and with discernment.

I cast right and left a few scrutinizing glances on my traveling companions, and I recalled the recommendations of prudence that had been made to me at Fort Smith, where I had been told, among other things, the following story, happened quite recently:

One of the richest Jewish merchants of the town had gone to New Orleans to renew his stock. He had devoted to it a sum of two hundred thousand francs, and all this cargo was ascending the Mississippi with him on one of the great steamboats with which the river is furrowed.

Satisfied with his brilliant business, he watered his happiness with numerous bumpers of whiskey which had completely drowned that compass so much in use among his coreligionists, and which one decorates at least with the wise name of circumspection. He had become talkative and boastful; and, urged on by a circle of interested admirers, he had spread out for them handfuls of dollars, to show them that he had had no need to convert all his resources into goods. They tried to make him play; but, whether from ignorance or from lack of taste, he was invulnerable on this point, and he took the course of going to bed.

But the next morning, his dollars and he had disappeared.

A few days after, another steamboat found again in the river his body on one side and his head on the other, and then all was said; and his cargo, arrived without him at Fort Smith, is there governed by strangers in the interest of minor children, and perishes of a rapid consumption.

I was listening with interest, on my left, to a group in which a young man with a very intelligent face gave, alternately and without any hesitation, the response to Americans, to Germans, and to Spaniards, and to all in their own tongue.

I was distracted from this observation by a gentleman who, on my right, asked me whether I wished, with his friends and him, to make a game of cards (to play cards).

I answered him, imitating as best I could the American phlegm: I never play. He insisted, and speaking with volubility his language, to the hearing of which I was little accustomed, he obliged me to say to him: "You speak a little too fast, I do not understand." Then, as people without reflection do, who believe that by speaking loud they will be better understood by foreigners, little children, or animals, he began to shout as if he had been speaking to a deaf man. In vain I repeated to him that I heard very well, but that I did not understand: he spoke no less loud nor less fast for it.

The young man on my left, then addressing me in very good French, said to me: "I believe, monsieur, that you would rather speak French. If it may be agreeable to you, I shall be very happy to serve you as interpreter"; and in a few words, indeed, he soon rendered me the service of ridding me of my neighbor on the right.

The latter went to carry his industry elsewhere, managed to enlist a very young man who, in the space of a few hours, was stripped of all the money he had on him.

As for my young interpreter, to whom I offered my thanks in extending him my hand, I was soon at ease with him. He was a Creole of Louisiana, born of a French mother and an English father. He traveled continually for a great house of New-Orleans of which he was a partner. He had just crossed Texas and the Indian territory too, and after having stayed a month ill at Van-Buren, he was returning by descending the Arkansas and the Mississippi.

We were therefore soon to part at Napoléon; but the three days we passed together sufficed to give him one friend more. As for his friendship for me, it was marked — whether during that descent of nearly three hundred leagues, or above all at the moment of debarkation and re-embarkation — by too many cares, by those cares that a good son would not have shown better toward his father, for the name of James Graham not to remain graven in my memory beside my best memories.

On the 16th of September we touched at Little-Rock (little rock), arsenal and one of the principal cannon-foundries of the United States, a town of about eight thousand inhabitants, and which, always accessible by the steamers, need not fear, like Fort Smith, to see its developments become later subjects of regret.

On the 15th of September we had touched for an instant at a village named Dardanelles.

The founders, even of a single cabin, having brought the names of the cities and great men of their fatherland, or those they have met in their travels, or those they have found again in the memories of their first studies, or finally even those that express their political or other sentiments — the geography of America is (I have perhaps said it already) a marquetry of names rather surprised to find themselves thus side by side.

On the evening of the 16th, we touched at the little town of Pine-Bluff (plateau of the pine); and finally, on the 17th, between nine and ten at night, at Napoléon — a town also nascent, and which, dominating from on high the magnificent view of the mouth of the Arkansas into the Mississippi, must be able to promise itself a prosperous future.

After a night of painful struggle against a stifling heat and against thousands of mosquitoes, I took my place, on the 18th of September, at ten in the morning, on a vast steamboat which, coming from New Orleans, was making for Saint-Louis of Missouri.

By M. Graham's advice, I gave up ascending the Ohio (one pronounces it Ohayo) as far as Cincinnati, and decided to take the railroad at Cairo as far as the falls of Niagara.

This itinerary assured me, for six hundred leagues still, an excellent traveling companion, Captain Ellis, an old seaman of the American navy, to whom his friend M. Graham — before shaking our hands a last time — had recommended me with that same warmth he had himself put into showing me his sympathy.

People have more than once already given very exact descriptions of those fine steamboats that ceaselessly traverse the Mississippi and its tributaries; I ask nonetheless leave to describe here again, in my own manner, the one that was conducting me to Cairo.

Let the reader be so good as to transport himself, in thought, into the great picture-gallery of the Louvre museum, which everyone must know;

Let him measure off, in length, eighty meters of that gallery, taking for center one of those fine pavilions that indicate more particularly, above the roof, the porticoes through which takes place, on the ground floor, the circulation of carriages;

Let him separate, still in thought, these eighty meters from the rest of the edifice;

Let him lower proportionally each of the parts of the building so as not to exceed, from the ground floor to the summit, a height of eleven to twelve meters;

Let him, after having cut the extremities so that one of them can form the apex of a cone and the fore of the ship, and that the other, suitably rounded, can form the aft and receive the rudder; let him, after this double and easy operation, I say, replace the ground by the bed of the Seine;

Let him give this edifice a width of sixteen meters;

Let him suppress the windows of the gallery and, after having lighted it by the roof, reduce it to ten meters in width by building on each side little rooms or cabins of two square meters, opening outward by glazed doors onto a little open gallery one meter wide that forms a balcony all along the ship;

Let him above all, should he ever inhabit one of these cabins, carefully close, during the night, the glazed door that gives onto this balcony, for it is by there that there enter (and that is not very rare) thieves and assassins;

Let these same cabins, each containing two superposed berths, open by solid doors onto the inner gallery;

Let the forward part of the gallery — that is to say, the fore of the ship — be, over a length of twelve meters, free of all construction of cabins; let it be separated from the rest by a great glazed door, let its ceiling be supported by elegant little columns so as to form a fine summer salon, from which, in the open air and sheltered from the sun, one discovers to right, to left, and ahead, the river and all the landscape;

Let, at the aft, a hall eight meters long be reserved for the washing and ironing service of the chambermaids;

Let the sixty meters remaining between these two extremities be divided, by means of a movable partition, into two parts — one twenty meters long, called the ladies' salon, into which no man may enter when he has not his family there; and the other, finally, of forty meters, forming a vast salon common to all the passengers and transforming itself, at each meal, into a dining-hall by means of very artfully arranged drawer-tables;

Let the reader, continuing his architectural operation, build the wainscoting of this gallery of a mixture of mahogany, ebony, lemon-wood, and rosewood; let the cornices of the ceiling be richly gilded; let three great crystal chandeliers be suspended there; let thick carpets cover the floors; let the ladies' salon have, into the bargain, a grand piano, mirrors, divans, and numerous and soft rocking-chairs;

Let him, artfully dissembling the household of the ship, lodge on the ground floor and in the cellar or hold the steam-engine, the provisions of every kind — all the service, in short;

Let him, in the upper and central pavilion, transformed into an elegant belvedere glazed on all sides, lodge, as it should be, at the highest point, the soul that directs all this machine; and let that soul — the pilot — hover afar over the route to be traveled, and transmit, by means of a bell-cord, his orders to the engineer, and by means of a wheel his impulse to the rudder;

Let him, finally — and to come back down to cares more vulgar, though no less important — be so good as to figure to himself three meals a day sumptuously served; and he will have, if my explanation is not too confused, an idea of the life of those steamboats that cross by thousands on the rivers, the streams, and the lakes of America.

But I was about to forget a criticism that the interest of truth requires:

Who could believe that, in the midst of all this luxury and all this comfort, the steamboats have no other water to offer their thirsting passengers than the red ochreous water of the Red-River, or the thick, dark-yellow-ochre water of the Arkansas, or the milky water of the Mississippi, etc., to which the common people, in America, attribute precious virtues for the health? These waters are, it is true, ceaselessly cooled by ice, the supply of which never fails; but red mud diluted, however fresh it be, is no less a detestable drink that ought to leave dye enough on the foreheads of the Americans to give them the idea of asking Europe what a filter is.

On the 19th of September we touched at Memphis, a pretty town of Tennessee, after having passed before Victoria, Kosciusko, Peyton, Commerce, and Norfolk, towns of the State of Mississippi.

It is at Memphis that the travelers who wish to ascend the Ohio stop to take another steamer.

Several young Creoles of French origin who, the vacation being over, were returning from Louisiana to Saint-Louis to continue their studies there, addressed me numerous questions about France, in exchange for all those that interested me about the mode of education followed for them at the Jesuits' college. It was the same with a few pupils who were returning also to the school of medicine established in the same town.

A Frenchman who travels through America to practice there the art of embalming came to take part in our conversation. He appeared little satisfied with the results of his journey since New Orleans and with the effects of his advertisements in the newspapers. He had evidently ill-chosen his field of exploitation. He had reckoned without the positive spirit of the Americans, who weigh all the acts of their life by the weight of the products they can draw from them, or who, seeing in what concerns the dead a religious question, and finding in the Bible no text that orders or justifies the practice of embalming, have no disposition to launch into such an expense.

This encounter reminded me of a study to which I had given myself on this question in 1851, and to which — superficial as it is — it is perhaps not useless to call the attention of theologians and physiologists.

This study, the memory of which served as the basis of my discussion with our embalmer, had been submitted to a few members of the clergy of the diocese of Arras, as a case of conscience, on the occasion of the embalming of the body of Monseigneur the Cardinal de la Tour-d'Auvergne-Lauraguais, bishop of Arras; and I said to them:

"The embalming of Monseigneur's body raises in our mind doubts that we believe we ought to submit, in a few words and in all humility, to the appreciation of the theologians. "Embalming — that pagan art which, after thousands of years, has made us find old Egypt again entire in the state of mummy — can the embalming of corpses be a Christian art? "Had Catholicism the right to borrow from paganism, and to perfect or to deteriorate this practice, by means of the mineral poisons that modern art employs? "Let us examine: "God Himself said it to the human race: 'Thou art dust, and unto dust shalt thou return.' (Genesis, chap. I[?], v. 19.) "Is embalming, then, not a proud and culpable attempt against the execution of this sentence of the sovereign master? "Is not death the momentary separation of the two eternal principles, spirit and matter, whose union constitutes individualities? "Are not these two principles destined, after times of diverse trials (the Church teaches us so), to a more or less definitive reunion? "Do not the trials of matter consist, above all, in dissolution (epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, chap. V), in separation, in purification by fire (purgatory), in the oxygenation, finally, of the few elementary substances that compose it? "'And when my body shall have been consumed (says the holy man Job, chap. XIX), I shall yet see the Lord in my flesh; I shall see Him with my eyes: this hope reposes in my bosom.' "Is it not on the third day after death that there begins, by putrefaction, by dissolution, the separation and the evaporation of the elements of matter — that resurrection which God had so clearly announced and promised? "Is it not to this end that Saint Paul adds in the same chapter (v. 4): 'For we would not be unclothed (expoliari), but clothed upon (supervestiti), that what is mortal might be swallowed up (ut absorbeatur quod mortale est).' "Is not the disorganization of bodies that have accomplished one of the periods of their existence destined to furnish materials for new existences? "Has not God measured the sum of oxygen, of hydrogen, of nitrogen, and of carbon that must perpetually circulate for the successive maintenance of all existences? "Does not life pass thus from a body in decomposition to other bodies on the way to composition — whether by the suction of the roots of plants: 'And your bones shall revive like the grass' (Isaiah, chap. LXVI, v. 14), or by respiration, or finally still more directly by digestion? "Are not life and death thus an admirable and perpetual exchange of services between the vegetable and animal kingdoms and between each of the individualities that compose them? "To what, then, would the pretension of arresting this perpetual disorganization and transmission tend? "Does one believe that its so general realization in Egypt — by mummifying, during thousands of years, so considerable a mass of the materials indispensable to life — counted for nothing in the complete disappearance of the primitive race of that fertile land? "Does one believe that, had this practice entered into the designs of the God of Israel, His people would not have found it written among the numerous precepts of hygiene transmitted to it by Moses, and that, so long the slave of the Egyptians, it would not have carried away with it all the secrets of it? "The Jews wrapped the corpses in aromatics and perfumes; then, even for a long time, they burned them, in order to render still prompter that deliverance, that purification, and that resurrection of matter which enter so evidently into the designs of the Creator. "Does one believe, besides, that the materials of life, set free by their disaggregation after the death of individuals, are not destined to benefit, in new combinations, by that law of eternal progress to the application of which we see God working and ever urging us on with so much perseverance? "And does one not see from here, at the great day of universal resurrection and of the last judgment such as the Church predicts and teaches them to us — does one not see the disappointment of our illustrious and handsome prelate when, instead of finding again, purified and rejuvenated by a series of progressive transformations, the remains he had entrusted to us in ascending to heaven, His Grandeur shall find to put on only an old poisoned mummy? "For these motives, and while awaiting a canonical decision to which we are humbly ready to submit, we do not hesitate to believe that the embalming of corpses and their imprisonment in coffins hermetically sealed and soldered is an act harmful to those one wishes to honor, a cruel outrage against their liberty of expansion; a protest — thoughtless no doubt, but impious — against the ceremony of Ash Wednesday; an ignorant attack upon the laws of general physiology; or rather, finally — and so as not to cast the stone, even in appearance, at any of our brothers — yet another audacious defiance of the demon against the will of God so clearly expressed in this word: "'For thou art dust, and unto dust shalt thou return.'"

This discussion, or rather this conversation with our unlucky traveling companion, led us — by means of a transition introduced by an American — to discuss the more or less of reason of the various usages relative to the beard. He found it astonishing that the French, generally Catholic and following the direction of a clergy that shaves itself with so much care, should nearly all wear long beards; and he would have wished to know the reason of such a contradiction. No one tried to explain it to him, but I thought I might take up the defense of the beard with the aid of the following arguments, which should touch a man nourished on the reading of a Bible of which he carried a copy in his hand.

I begged him to lend me this Bible, and after having opened it at chapter XIX of Leviticus, I showed him verse 27, in which God, by the mouth of Moses, formulates the following precept:

"Ye shall not round the corners of your hair, and ye shall not shave your beard."

Now nothing is more precise and more clear than this prescription, with which the Jewish people always conformed with respect.

Jesus Christ came: He had come not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it. He modified numerous articles of it, and these modifications, all relative to charity, were the basis of that great, immortal, and fruitful institution that from His name was afterward called Christianity.

Now, not only did He not modify verse 27 of chapter XIX of Leviticus, but He always wore the beard and the hair long as they had been worn since the beginning of the world; and since Jesus Christ, for eight centuries, it came to no one's mind to change anything whatever in that usage created with Adam, in the image of God, in the earthly paradise, and consecrated, sixteen hundred years later, on Mount Sinai, by the divine word itself.

It is true that, in the ninth century, Pope Leo III thought he ought, by having himself shaved, to distinguish himself thus from the Greek schismatics. Was he well inspired in renouncing, on this point, the merit of orthodoxy? That is what a Catholic has not the right to decide; but as the Catholic religion has adopted the use of the razor only for the priests, without prescribing it to the laity, and as it has even judged it fitting to authorize the French priests not to shave in Algeria, just as it has permitted the marriage of priests and bishops in Lebanon, one must therefore see in it only a prescription of simple discipline that a pope could change just as easily as a pope had given it.

The American appeared surprised to find himself thus, with all his coreligionists, in contradiction with his book, and he did not insist.

I appealed besides also to physiological considerations: God, in creating the beard, had for His aim — this seems evident — to furnish channels of outflow to the excesses of magnetic fluid ceaselessly produced by the powerful voltaic pile that our anatomical organization so faithfully represents. The accumulation of this fluid in our brain must therefore produce many more apoplexies among shaven men than among those who have shown themselves more faithful observers of the biblical precepts.

I thought I might even, without attaching great importance to it, hazard this consideration of an inferior order:

Why should the poodle dogs — that most intelligent and most devoted race of all those that attach themselves to man — why should the poodles have almost completely disappeared from our society, if the ridiculous usage of shearing them instead of washing them had not deprived them of organs essentially electric and necessary to their conservation and their reproduction?

I tried finally to raise the discussion by the following considerations:

Volta, in creating the pile that has led the physicists to so many admirable discoveries, did he not produce before his eyes — without suspecting it perhaps, and by the effect of a second sight — the portrait of his own vertebral column?

Volta's pile is the union of metallic couples of different densities, superposed one upon another, separated by disks of spongy tissue and moistened by an acid, alkaline, or salt fluid.

The vertebral column is the union of bony couples of different densities (the diploic and spongy substances), superposed one upon another, separated by disks of spongy tissue (the cartilages), and moistened by an acid, alkaline, or salt fluid (the synovia).

Thus disposed, these couples give rise to currents of electric fluid.

These currents, in the metallic piles, are demonstrated by sparks that escape from conducting wires, metallic also, attached to the extremities of these piles, and demonstrated again under the pneumatic machine by the influence of these sparks in the composition and the decomposition of a great number of chemical combinations.

In the vertebral column, these currents — of which one can, without destroying the general life, arrest a few by the simple section of a nerve-thread — these currents are demonstrated likewise, wherever these conducting threads end, by the phenomena relative to the reproduction of beings, and by those to which we owe the generation of ideas as well as the transmission and the exchange of these ideas in social relations.

This necessity of the marriage of two different substances has received applications so far very restricted in the metallic piles; but, in the animal piles, it shows itself even into the most tenuous divisions of the nervous system.

Everywhere — not only in the bones, but in the brain, in the spinal marrow, and in all the nerves — there shows itself ceaselessly the coupling of substances of different densities and colors, the one white, the other gray, couples always linked together by an intermediary tissue, symbol of the universal necessity of a trinity in the divine operations of nature, and above all in those that have for their object the circulation of the generative intellectual fluid, the electric, magnetic, or nervous fluid.

Just as there must be the marriage of two different substances to form the elements of a voltaic or anatomical pile, so likewise there must be the union of two piles to produce generative phenomena.

This union is found manifestly in the human organization: the vertebral column, divided vertically, in thought, is evidently a double pile that creates, on the right and on the left, identical manifestations.

At its upper extremity, in the brain, this pile really separates into two lobes or piles which, by the exchange and the combination of their electric sparks, engender thought and communicate it to the exterior by the organs of the senses, all double also.

They communicate it — this thought — to other piles, to other similar organisms, and exchange it with them, at distances more or less near, with commotions like those that have been named in physics electric discharges, and that have been so well and instinctively characterized in language by these words: the power of gestures; the bursts of the voice; the contractions of the face; the knitting of the brows; the flashes darted by the eyes and the shock of opinions — electric phenomena that characterize all the operations of generation, those of matter as well as those of sentiments and ideas.

But it is there too, drawn and accumulated ceaselessly in the brain, that the electric or nervous fluid, when it no longer finds (it must be repeated) — neither in the hair that flees old age, nor in the beard that Pope Leo III has cut from us — any of the channels of outflow, any, or too few, of those lightning-rods that the good God had given it, produces, in passing from one lobe to the other, just as between the earth and the clouds, those thunderclaps that kill with the rapidity of lightning, and to which one has so judiciously given the name of fulminating apoplexies.

One objects, it is true, that grave diseases of the brain have been cured by the suppression of long and thick beards; but such exceptions — still, besides, very little explained — do not destroy the so natural rule we have just expounded. One will perhaps find the cause of these exceptions in certain diseases of the vertebral column, little studied until now, and during which the electric fluid, insufficiently furnished to the brain, needs to be conserved there longer by means of the momentary suppression of its channels of outflow.

Our American had yet another preoccupation; he belonged to the temperance society and, moreover, to that of the vegetarians, and he desired to know my opinion on these creations of Anglo-American wisdom and sensibility.

I testified to him my approval of the ideas that had inspired the creation of the temperance societies, while regretting that humanity was still backward enough that, instead of temperance, one was obliged to preach and to exact the absolute abstinence from fermented drinks, whose moderate use is so evidently useful to the maintenance of health from the double point of view, material and intellectual.

As for the abstention from the flesh of animals, no reason seems to me to justify this manifestation of sensibility.

From the point of view of religion, the Bible, in a hundred places, settles the question by direct teachings and prescriptions of the Creator.

His will has manifested itself no less clearly in the creation, for man, of organs that evidently exist only to help him obey the law of his conservation by assimilating animal substances.

His teeth — symbols of so many things, offering the union of the three forms adopted by God for this part of animal organization — prove that all that lives upon the earth was destined for the alimentation of the human race.

It is true that the four teeth called canines, and which prove once more the kinship of our race even with that of the carnivorous animals, seem at first, by their relative smallness, to place the former at an inferior degree.

But the superiority reappears as soon as one reflects on the immense difference that exists between the use of cooked meats and the use of raw and bloody meats.

Now, if it entered into the designs of God to realize in man, upon our earth, only a synthesis of the preceding creations, He has marked by too many material and intellectual conditions the supremacy of His last creation for our belief in a superior destiny not to be fully justified.

But this belief must not lead us to deny and to reject the conditions that still bind us to the inferior degrees. However humiliating it may appear to certain elevated minds to descend, for the maintenance of our material existence, to the multiplied details of the butchery and the kitchen, and however revolting it may be to think with the heart that the dinner must have passed through the sufferings and the horrors of the slaughterhouse, it is nonetheless indispensable that they resign themselves, under pain of suicide, to this first law of their existence.

They allege, it is true, that man can, without killing, live very well on milk, eggs, and vegetables; but they forget that to live on milk one must steal the share of the young of the animals, and they forget above all that in the egg there is a living germ, and in plants, as in animals, a life and a sensibility which, though less appreciable by our relatively coarse senses, are nonetheless, for our intelligence and our reflection, real, evident, and susceptible of suffering.

We have seen also, from Plato down to us, minds that revolted at the idea of the intervention of the material principle in questions of sentiment, and that made themselves ostensibly the apostles of platonic love.

All these eccentricities prove organizations in which the intellectual principle dominates essentially over the material principle; organizations in which the equilibrium no longer exists between the two principles and which, drawing nearer and nearer to the ethereal life, feel the need to reject what remains to them of their inferior envelope in order to rise at last and freely toward God.

Our American, already strongly shaken on the question of the beard, appeared disposed to believe in that sweet and wise word: "Good wine rejoices the heart of man," and to be reconciled with the idea of a roast beef and a chicken cooked to a turn and intelligently seasoned, provided that he, a superior organization, had the right to leave to organizations still inferior the details of these preparations, and that these should present themselves to him only under forms that might at least justify, in the eyes of his conscience, the resignation with which he was to accept them.

These conversations — for the memory of which I claim all the reader's indulgence — these conversations, joined to a few readings (that above all of M. de Tocqueville's excellent book) and to the care of noting what passed before my eyes and in my mind, filled hours that might have become tedious in the presence of pictures almost always magnificent, but with no other changes of scenery than hideous clearings made here and there in the forests to effect the cutting-down, in the midst of which the trees — corpses stripped of their bark and blackened by fire — remain standing until, worn by time, they have no longer the strength to resist the efforts of the tempest.

The Mississippi, like the Arkansas, offers a continuous succession of great basins which all, framed on each side by thick forests, appear, when one is in the middle, so many little lakes whose entrance and exit one no longer distinguishes, covered as they are by the undulations, by the continual folds of the river; and when these fine effects, ever the same, have repeated themselves a hundred and a hundred times and without interruption, it becomes the story of the eel-pie of our good La Fontaine, and satiety is not slow to dry up that source of admiration one had believed inexhaustible.

Besides, carrying myself back in thought a few thousand years, into the midst of the fine rivers of our old France, and remaking for them the savage toilet of their primitive times — that, for example, of our magnificent palace of the Louvre, when in its place one saw a thick forest serving as shelter to the Normans when they came to attack the fishermen of the hamlet of Lutetia — I thus found again, on the Loire and on the Seine, those rivers of a hundred bends, the same eternal basins encumbered with debris that already caused me so much ennui in America.

And what proved to me that God did not create the earth for it to remain in that state of disorder and monotony of which painters alone can love the study, along with that of rags and thatched cottages — it is that a few days later, when I traveled by railroad, for nearly four hundred leagues, the borders of the great lakes and the banks of the Hudson, I saw civilization sow more and more, amid those forests, and border all those waters with great cities, fine villages, and pretty country-houses; there, then, my attention, more and more excited and sustained, no longer let itself be surprised into closing the eyes and slumbering.

From the 19th of September until the close of the evening of the 20th, we had touched at Raleigh, Randolph, Fulton, and Troy, other towns of Tennessee; then at Little-Prairie, Mont-Pleasant, New-Madrid, and Baldwinsville, villages or towns of Missouri; then at Mills-Point, Columbus, and Norfolk, towns of Kentucky; and finally we reached Cairo, the city of Eden of the novelist Dickens.

There we left to the east the mouth of the Ohio and to the west the Mississippi, on which our young friends of the college and the school of medicine of Saint-Louis continued their journey with our embalmer, after having shaken our hands.

After having passed a good night in a very fine and comfortable hotel that replaces the cabin of Martin Chuzzlewit, we mounted into the railroad at half past nine in the morning, on the 21st of September, and made straight for the north, for a hundred and forty leagues, across Illinois, toward Lake Michigan and the brand-new and already great city of Chicago, where we arrived at midnight.

I had passed within a hundred miles of M. Cabet's colony — that city of Nauvoo built by the Mormons in Illinois, on the left bank of the Mississippi. They had sold it to him when, driven out for the fourth time by their neighbors, they had been forced to go five hundred leagues farther, into Utah, on the banks of the Great Salt Lake, to create for themselves that new fatherland whence their too absolute spirit of independence will very probably have them driven out again, if they have not at last the good sense to renounce their ridiculous insurrection against the general laws of the country, where their liberty is so little hampered. I should have liked to go visit this double ruin, but time failed me.

A few weeks before, a convoy of eighty Mormons, traveling with considerable matériel, had crossed Texas and bivouacked near Dallas. It was the product of the preachings of the unfortunate Pratt. The first of these new saints had set out from New-Orleans, under the conduct of another preacher expressly left behind, who, gathering successively along his route the converts prepared by his chief, was to arrive in a few months with them at the holy city. If these convoys served as refuge to many not very honorable adventurers, the majority however was composed of families that the religious sentiment, joined to a great ignorance, delivered too easily to the seductions of clever missionaries who, addressing themselves to all the native passions of man — the love of liberty and of well-being in all things, ambition, and above all the attraction of the marvelous — lead them thus toward the holy city that possesses the miraculous golden Bible of the impostor Joseph Smith.

After having slept for five hours in a magnificent hotel — a rest of which we had the greatest need, and for reasons I shall set forth at the end of the journey — we resumed the railroad which follows, in the State of Indiana, for about twenty-five leagues, as far as New-Buffalo, the southern shores of the lake.

This part of the railroad, built most of the time on piles, several meters above the level of the lake, sometimes brings its rails to within less than a meter of the edge of the track and without the least semblance of a parapet. However cuirassed one may be against fear after the hundred and fifty leagues one has just traveled, it is not without a certain emotion that one shares one's admiration between this bold track and the vast horizon that Lake Michigan presents.

From New-Buffalo, and as far as Detroit, on Lake Saint-Clair (that transparent lake where Cooper placed the moving scenes of his novel entitled The Pathfinder), the railroad crosses from west to east, for a hundred and ten leagues, the State of Michigan, and offers the travelers, on perfectly well-laid rails, all the comfort it is possible to desire, and which one finds on no track of France in so complete a manner.

The cars contain, in the transverse direction, on the right and on the left, two rows of divans, separated by an aisle that permits one to circulate from one to the other, to traverse the whole car, to approach a stove when it is cold, to go out, and, by means of bridges very ingeniously thrown from one car to another, to traverse the whole convoy, and thus to vary the relations of neighborhood.

The divans, with movable backs, are so disposed that by turning over one of these backs, two divans face each other and compose a kind of little salon where four persons can very agreeably give themselves to the pleasure of conversation.

Refreshments, cakes, books, and newspapers circulate frequently between the two rows and permit one to await more patiently the great stations.

Finally, there is not, in these convoys, a legitimate desire that, instead of being a suffering, cannot find immediately its just satisfaction.

At Detroit, on the 22nd of September, at two in the afternoon, we crossed, on a ferry-boat (a steam ferry, a steam-barge), the strait that joins Lake Saint-Clair to Lake Erie, and that separates the United States from Canada.

On the Canadian bank, which recalled to me so many French memories, and sadly, among others, that which the Marquis de Montcalm had left there after the capitulation of Fort William-Henry, we mounted into the cars of the English railroad, and we traveled, for ninety leagues thus, as far as the falls of Niagara, and in seven hours, the lands of Queen Victoria.

During this journey, my worthy friend Captain Ellis, nudging me lightly with his elbow and indicating to me with his eye and with a sly smile a group placed at some distance from us, said to me in my ear: "Had you seen faces like those during your journey across the United States? — No, I answered, those faces are the faces of degenerate Englishmen, whom I have seen only in France in the caricatures of our draftsmen or on our stages. In the United States, whiskey has not yet thus swelled the bellies, inflated, blotched, blotch-reddened, and caricatured all the features of the face; but that proves — for you are the children of the same fatherland — how important it is not to neglect the warnings of the temperance societies. — You have spoken very well," he said to me, laughing.

The Canadian railroad yields in nothing, as regards comfort, to the one we had just left; and I should not be surprised if the English — older than their brothers and more advanced in the arts and sciences — had offered them models that emulation hastened to imitate.

The same day, at eleven at night, below the falls of Niagara, on a suspension bridge whose boldness is more admirable than reassuring, the convoy crossed the strait that joins Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, and that separates, there again, Canada from the United States; and we descended at the Monteagle hotel, which, outside and inside, recalls perfectly one of those vast and sumptuous castles of the Middle Ages that dominate, at intervals, in France, the banks of the Loire.

The next morning, before six, leaving — according to our agreement of the eve — my traveling companion to sleep, I had myself driven to the cataracts.

There, in the middle of the strait, is an island formed of an enormous mass of rocks, into which one penetrates by a light bridge thrown over the torrent, and round which one makes the tour in fine alleys bordered with clumps of Virginia junipers.

When one is placed at the southern point of the island, facing Lake Erie, one sees, hurling down from a distance of several miles and bounding among the thousands of rocky masses with which the strait is sown, the pressed waters of the five great upper lakes; and one must look right and left to make sure that this seething waterspout, finding issue on both sides, will content itself with squeezing the island between its two arms and will not drag it along in its course.

Then, this reassuring verification made, if one transports oneself to the diametrically opposite point, one sees this waterspout — the more furious as it finds more obstacles in the relative narrowness of the two passages by which it has been able to dig itself a way — one sees it, I say, hurl itself right and left and sheer down, into a gulf of two hundred feet depth, with sounds of thunder that complete a spectacle on the edge of which it is difficult not to feel vertigo.

But when one has been able to tear one's gaze from the thundering depths of that abyss — where all the rays of the prism play at sunrise in the thick layers of eternal fog that envelop these cataracts, and that the waters produce, sifted by their immense and perpetual fall — one perceives afar the same waters, henceforth appeased, majestically forming the blue sheets of the fine Lake Ontario and, joined to those of Lake Horican or Champlain, going to throw themselves into the sea by the river and the gulf of Saint Lawrence.

When one has thus rested one's gaze afar, one descends to the bottom of the abyss by a little path that winds through the crevices of the rock; and the spectacle seen from below then — and giving less vertigo — gains perhaps in grandeur and majesty. The roar of those mountains of water that crumble down ceaselessly and that bound one upon another in the abyss has something profound, whose wholly new sensation has nothing in common with any of those of which one has been able to keep the impression and the memory.

There, in that low bottom, one had the idea of raising a tower, a kind of lighthouse some ten meters high, on the platform of which, when one has climbed it, one finds again, with the tendency to vertigo, new aspects and new thunders that complete a series of sensations whose fairy memory must be henceforth ineffaceable.

I began these ordeals over twice, and it needed a real effort of reason and will for me to tear myself from that spectacle — the only one which in my life has far surpassed the idea I had formed of it beforehand.

Returned to the hotel, I breakfasted with the excellent Captain Ellis; then we parted, alas! never to see each other again, probably, in this world. Our separation was cordial as that of two old friends. I carried away of him a memory the more grateful for all the affectionate and so useful cares he had had for me during our long journey, that those cares, contrasting with the phlegm and the ordinary stiffness of the Americans' first approach, proved to me that everywhere, and whatever the envelope, the good instincts of the human heart can, without egoistic interest, love to radiate toward others and find happiness in sympathizing with them.

This separation, which, for the first time in three years, left me absolutely widowed of all affectionate relations, made me think, under an impression of profound sadness, that Providence had not created me for those continual ruptures of relations to which one is condemned during long journeys, but rather for the constant and uninterrupted affections of an associated rural commune like those of which Fourier has left us the admirable constitution.

The captain was leaving on a steamboat of Lake Ontario, to rejoin his family on a piece of land belonging to him between Oswego and Syracuse.

And I, taking the Northern railroad which follows the borders of the lake as far as Rochester — leaving on the right the lakes Cayuga and Seneca (this last name recalling to my memory a sympathetic memory of France), then on the left Lake Oneida and the town of Cicero — I traveled, passing through Syracuse, Rome, Utica, Fonda (one sees that Italians too have sown thereabouts some of their memories), then finally through Amsterdam and Albany, the last hundred and twenty leagues that separated me from New-York.

The greater part of this journey is made on the left banks of the Mohawk and the Hudson. Their magnificent waters, wide and deep, traversed in every direction by a multitude of boats and ships of every sort; their banks covered alternately with thick forests, towns, villages, and dwellings resplendent with whiteness — all this composes pictures very superior, to my eyes at least, I repeat, to the monotonous and ceaselessly repeated aspects of the savage forests and rivers.

At noon, on the 24th of September, I arrived at New-York; and after having passed there ten days with excellent friends, attentively visited that great and active city, and been admitted into the family of two ladies, doctors of medicine, to whose conversation, full of interest, I owed one of my best evenings, I went on board, on the 4th of October, the steam-ship Ariel, one of the steam-packets of the Vanderbilt company, which promised to debark us directly at Le Havre.

The sea-packets, save their masting and their much lesser elevation above the waterline, much resemble in their arrangements the packets of river navigation. There is therefore nothing more interesting to say of them.

Besides, eighteen days passed in cold, rough, and rainy weather in a thick atmosphere very difficultly renewed left me, as well as most of my traveling companions, impressions before which the luxury of the establishment and the service lost much of its worth.

I had time to pass over again in my memory all that could help me fix my opinion on the American character, and it is by this appreciation that I shall end my journey.

The American nation has offered me, during these three years, the aspect of a numerous family in which, the father and mother being dead, there remain many children of different ages, whose education and government offer to a few elder brothers difficulties numerous and each day renascent.

These difficulties are the greater in that, by an anomaly that would be very singular in a family, all these children — whatever their instruction, their experience, their intellectual age in short — are all emancipated and bear only in a very restricted manner the share of direction they have been willing to leave to their elders in the general affairs.

What characterizes childhood is thoughtlessness, the promptness of judgments, the contempt for the experience acquired by the elders, the peremptory tone of decisions, the obstinacy in sustaining a thesis once posited, the love of liberty and at the same time the leaning toward despotism and the abuse of force, the passion for imitation, the infatuation for all one sees in others, the irresistible impatience to satisfy that infatuation, its satisfaction in spite of everything — without rule, without measure, and despite the absence of the true conditions of that satisfaction; an extreme blindness to all the dangers into which certain acts may lead, the contempt for those dangers for oneself and for others, the love of noise, of tinsel, of the marvelous, and finally the proud pretension of doing better than everybody, without too much understanding and without too much examining the moral value of the means. All this, mingled with eminent qualities to which we owe, for example, the initiative of the applications of steam — all this is found in the American character and in its works.

I have already shown how the love of liberty had led the Americans to tolerate almost none of the institutions protective of individual safety, and how each is obliged to be always armed and to be his own police against the attacks to which man and property are exposed.

When one is born under these conditions, they have passed, from birth, into the habits; and each, having always at hand instruments of attack and defense, makes so much the less effort to master the transports of passion, in that the survivors almost always find, in the institution of the jury and in the necessity of its unanimity in criminal matters, the means of escaping true justice. It is rare that before the American tribunals the absent are not in the wrong. Murder, assassination are therefore common, very common, and almost always unpunished.

It is not doubtful that in societies more advanced in civilization, the children who so love to play at war, at robbers and gendarmes, who arm themselves with wooden swords and delight in the explosions of crackers and little cannon — it is not doubtful, I say, that they would not come later to sad realizations of all these things, if, like the Americans, deprived of paternal tutelage, they were emancipated before the age.

The deputies of the various counties assemble at the State capitals; the representatives of all the States assemble at the capital of the general government, at Washington; and, far from bringing into their assemblies the sentiment of a dignity of character that ought to serve as an example to their fellow-citizens, one sees too often some who, like children, give themselves to violent disputes and to assaults, and come at last even to the assassination that remains unpunished.

Such are, in individual relations, the effects of that so-vaunted liberty, which, after some time of residence, does not fail to become somewhat fatiguing for peaceable people who, born under other governments, had been accustomed to circulate, to sleep, to live in peace on the faith of institutions that watch ceaselessly for them and that dispense them from being ceaselessly on their guard.

The Americans, fearing for their liberty the abuses that may have resulted in other countries from the institutions of police and regular armies, systematically and almost completely repel both the one and the other.

They tolerate, in the great cities, semblances of surveillance; but, destroying with one hand what they build with the other, they depreciate, in their newspapers and their speeches, those same institutions, accusing them of being much more favorable to malefactors than to honest citizens.

They will have no armies, but they love to play at being soldiers themselves. Their companies of militia and of firemen rival each other ardently in costume, in good bearing, and in resounding music; but these rivalries, which no unitary command moderates or regulates, degenerate into hatreds and let few days pass without revolvers resounding in the cafés and the streets, at the risk of bespattering the passers-by.

The fire companies above all furnish numerous and sad examples of these rival hatreds. They have very fine uniforms. Their engines, masterpieces of mechanics, are perfectly well maneuvered; but although these companies are supposed to be subject to the direction of a chief engineer of the city, and although they show a great zeal in running to the fire, they hardly let themselves be directed except by themselves, in hostility one against another, and the aim of their institution cannot fail to be more than once compromised by it.

Instead of running silently to the fire, as our French firemen do, the American firemen run to it uttering, in a lugubrious rhythm, kinds of howled chants that they have learned from the Indians perhaps, and which, above all at night, for the citizens awakened by this barbarous music, make them resemble bands of enraged savages more than troops of reasonable people hastening for a public service.

The locomotives, like the railway cars, the fire-engines, and so many useful inventions for agriculture, do the greatest honor to the industrial genius of the Americans; but certain parts of their railways — such as the hundred and forty leagues from Cairo to Chicago — prove perfectly the thesis I posited at the beginning, namely: that the terrible children of this great family recoil before no difficulty, before no danger, to satisfy, as soon as conceived, their ambitions of indefinite progression.

When real children escape for an instant the surveillance of their parents, one sees them hasten to reproduce, to imitate with the first materials that fall under their hand, bridges, boats, carriages, all that has been able to strike their attention, and thus often to create, without suspecting it, real perils for themselves and for their comrades.

If the contractors of all these great American works — and, in particular, of that line of a hundred and forty leagues — had not been led also, which is much less excusable, by what is called the fever of the dollar, the sacred thirst for gold, as the ancients said, could we see in the establishment of this line anything but a child's work? Rails thrown down almost without leveling and without consolidation in the midst of quagmires and marshes where the convoys are at every instant threatened with overturning, now on one side, now on the other, and where the joltings are such that the travelers are obliged to cling to their benches so as not to be thrown and bruised one against another and against the walls that enclose them — and this torture lasts almost without respite for a dozen hours: such are, at the origin, the works of the Americans.

All this will be rectified later, as it has been for the other lines previously established, when the hopes shall have been justified by success. The essential thing, one always answers, is to create first a line for trying fortune on it. If fortune does not come to it, one will have done well to spend on it as little as possible; and one consoles oneself thus for the terrible accidents that these cold calculations of cupidity have so often produced.

On the rivers, the steamboats, abandoned without surveillance to the speed-struggles of an unbridled competition, explode, tear apart or drown hundreds of travelers, and the next day one begins again.

Near New-Madrid, on the Mississippi, we met the half-burned corpse of one of those great steamboats. This disaster was quite recent. What had become of the crew and the passengers?

No authority, no law protects the citizens against the consequences of these mad works at which the wise — the elder brothers of the nation — groan, and against which they have no right, no possibility of intervention.

The presidents of the States and those of the general government are assuredly indeed the elite of the wise and enlightened men of the nation. Public notoriety has long since designated them to their fellow-citizens. They are elected with enthusiasm, and the national pride is far too vivacious for those choices — to which the other nations accord a serious attention — to be able to be abandoned to sentiments less elevated than that of a high and real dignity.

But immediately after this satisfaction given to a noble human respect, the elite men whom one has thus justly raised become, even to the detriment of the interests of the Union, the object of the pettiest distrusts. They are there for four years — a time far too short for a man of genius to be able to realize the plans he might have conceived in the interest of his country; and these four years are employed too often by the nation and by its representatives in the councils in suspiciously haggling (as we see today on the occasion of four or five thousand men whose addition to the army President Buchanan asks), in pettily haggling with the power, I say, the means without which it risks compromising, at the same time, the fate of the army of fifteen thousand men it disposes of and the dignity of its government.

Ah! if this government, letting itself be taken in tow by the daredevils of the republic, would — at the risk of falling out with Europe — openly lend support to adventurers to attack and revolutionize Canada, the island of Cuba, Mexico, and, like Walker, the States of Central America; oh! then it would find, in the inexperienced, impatient, and invasive majority of the nation, a favor that is far too much refused it for works of reason and prudence.

Despite my respect for the ladies (that better half of the human race), the interest of truth requires that — without forgetting the law of exceptions — I give a large place to the American women in this so numerous series of children of which the nation is composed:

All the men, without exception (for the exception would be justiciable of Lynch law[^xviii_dallas]), all cease to be children when it is a question of the respect and the deference to which women have a right. Here is an example: in the long and wide omnibuses that circulate on rails in the streets of New-York, never does a woman ask in vain for a place. The omnibus always stops for her; the woman gets in; all the places are occupied; but at the instant one or several men rise; the woman sits down; the man whose place she has taken remains standing, and so on successively. The omnibuses are happily wide enough that I never saw a man obliged to get off.

But do the men who give so remarkable and so constant a proof of courtesy find their reward in a word, a gesture, a smile, or at least a grateful glance? Oh! no, never; save very rare exceptions, all the women — as children might do in France who have not learned to say thank you — all receive such services, and every kind of service, in the coldest, the most disdainful even, manner, and without ever lowering themselves to the least sign of gratitude.

Who knows, after all, whether they are not right to act thus? What have the women gained, in France, by showing themselves so grateful for the accomplishment of such duties? They have brought the men (I no more forget here the law of exceptions) to believe that it might be very legitimate to abstain from them. What man today, for example, yields the first place to a lady at a spectacle? What man, in the pit, remembers that he was formerly within his right not to tolerate that a man remained in the first row when a woman was behind? What man still, short of the intervention of some police, will abstain from smoking before women? What man does not prefer today tobacco, cards, and absinthe to the conversation of the ladies? And these — in far too great number at least — from concession to concession (if I dared, I should say: from cowardice to cowardice), have descended, not only to living in an atmosphere infected with tobacco, but even to making themselves gamblers, and (last degree of that sad scale) to smoking themselves; forgetting thus that the contact and the absorption of nicotine — that venomous and stupefying substance — destroy the teeth, alter the vital energy, and lower all the intelligences below their normal state, in proportion to the quantities absorbed.

It is true that in France no woman chews tobacco, nor blows her nose without the intermediary of a handkerchief; but it is nonetheless to America that one must go to find really — in substance more even than in form — that gallantry of which we were so proud, and to which the American ladies are perhaps right to hold so severely the bridle high and short.

But it is in commercial relations that there shows itself still more evidently the absence of authority and influence of the elder brothers of the family. Nowhere in the world has Punic faith shown itself more unceremonious, more dishevelled, more audacious, and more unpunished.

We saw, in 1855, on the ship that was transporting us to America, a population of two hundred emigrants treated — contrary to all the conventions and promises made before departure — with the most revolting bad faith and harshness, by a captain and a lieutenant almost always drunk. We saw these two men, under the pretext that a poor German woman had lice, have this woman seized and stripped — a pregnant woman — have her thrown naked into a vat and have her brushed, curried thus for half an hour, and that by their sailors.

It is true that, arrived at New Orleans, a complaint could be lodged before a tribunal from which one would have obtained some punishment. Respectable Americans, who blushed at this shame thus and so often imprinted on the character of their nation — those Americans, noble eldest sons of that family still so young, they whose examples alone can teach that great nation how it ought worthily to realize its great destinies — those Americans urged us not to remain inactive in this circumstance; but the victims had hastened to set out, each on her own side, for their various destinations; and we knew besides that, if need were, the guilty, by re-embarking immediately on other ships about to sail, would have withdrawn themselves by flight from the action of justice, and would have assured themselves an impunity on which they count and which almost never fails them. We had therefore to abstain.

An honorable passenger of the Ariel related to us a fact that must not be passed over in silence, and of which he had had recently a direct and irrefutable knowledge.

One of his fellow-citizens — a man of color, a rich merchant of Haiti, married, father of a family, and of an exceptional stature and strength — had embarked fifteen years ago on an American ship to go to New-York, whither the affairs of his commerce called him.

The captain of the ship, instead of making straight for the north, landed at New Orleans, where, after having had his passenger seized and chained by his sailors, he audaciously sold him as a slave for the price of two thousand dollars, and re-embarked at once.

The poor Haitian merchant, taken into the interior of the country, remained there fifteen years subjected to the rudest labors. At the end of that long slavery he had at last been able to escape through a thousand dangers, and to return quite recently to Haiti.

But already for three years his wife had been remarried. She had waited for him twelve years, and everyone, with her, had ended by not doubting his death.

Though received in the most affectionate manner by that doubly desolated family, which put itself at his mercy, the poor escaped slave would no longer remain in the presence of memories so cruel. He set out, with henceforth no other aim than to seek everywhere and to kill the one whom he rightly called his assassin.

One more fact before ending this already so long and too long history.

To engage my passage on the Ariel, I betook myself with a friend to the offices of the Vanderbilt company. They showed us the plan of the ship. They indicated to us a good cabin number. They assured us that this cabin was for only two berths, and that the Ariel itself, without intermediary, would debark me at Le Havre.

The ticket delivered to me in exchange for eighty dollars for a first-class place[^xviii_frais] contained the clause of direct debarkation. It made no mention of only two berths in the cabin, and it would not have come into my mind to doubt the word of the honorable gentlemen who contracted such engagements toward me.

However, on arriving on board, the cabin assigned to me had three berths and was already occupied by two Englishmen, whose baggage left no more the least place for mine.

People who have made such voyages know how much two berths, in so narrow a space, offer already of inconveniences, and will understand my desire to maintain the condition I had asked and which had been promised me. I addressed myself to the steward (maître d'hôtel), to whom there remained nothing better to give me.

As I insisted, expressing my just dissatisfaction, he showed me a cabin where I could be alone, no one wishing or having wished such a dwelling.

This cabin, just as comfortably arranged as the others, is the object of the general repulsion, because its window is masked by one of the ship's wheels, and because, backed against the steam-engine, it leaves little chance of sleep to most nervous and delicate organizations.

For me, who possess the excellent faculty of reading, writing, and sleeping in the midst of the greatest tumult, and who, somewhat fatalist, never think of the accidents, explosions, shipwrecks, or others that might supervene, I took possession with happiness of this cabin, where I should be, at least, sole master during the crossing.

I found there a happiness more, on which I had not counted, and which I should willingly recommend to the composers who might be preoccupied with the idea of an infernal music. I do not believe there exist in the world sounds with which the steam-engine of the Ariel did not rejoice my ears during the fifteen long nights of October I passed side by side with it. From the detonations of artillery, of thunder, and the bursts of the gong or tom-tom, down to the roulades of the nightingale and the cooings of the turtledove — all the noises, all the bellowings, all the gratings, all the howlings, all the barkings, all the mewings, all the roarings; then voices of men, voices of women and children, then the organ, the violin, the flute, complete orchestras, all the noises in short, alternately or together, and ceaselessly, furnishing their note to that admirably diabolical concert — all this mingled with the effects produced before the window by those turning paddles, sifting the light amid the sheets of water they raise and drag along: all this is worth the trouble, assuredly, of being heard, listened to, analyzed at least once in the course of life.

Only, in my quality of physician, I urge persons disposed to vertigo or to bad dreams to deprive themselves of this pleasure.

On the 17th of October we entered the Channel, and on the 18th we were in sight of the Isle of Wight. We had been warned, at New-York, that the ship, before going to Le Havre, was to touch at Southampton to deposit the letters there.

But, at six in the morning, we were boarded by a ferry-boat, into which (the Ariel having stopped) the forty-four passengers destined for Le Havre saw, despite their protests, all their baggage put down, which they were obliged to follow through a beating rain, to which they remained exposed without shelter during the two hours that still separated them from Southampton.

As for the Ariel — whose administration had had the precaution, from the very day of departure from New-York, and under the pretext of inscription in the ship's register, to withdraw from all the passengers their tickets (entrance-cards containing the receipt of the sum paid, and the condition of direct debarkation at Le Havre) — the Ariel, having motives of economy for stopping neither in England nor in France, continued tranquilly, and laughing at our too just maledictions, its voyage as far as Bremen.

To the two hours passed standing, under an icy rain, we soon joined two other hours passed shivering at the customhouse of Southampton; and it was only after these four hours of real torment that we could at last, at one in the afternoon, go to dry ourselves, to thaw ourselves, and to breakfast in a hotel.

The Le Havre packet, arrived the next day, left Southampton at midnight and touched at last the coast of France on the 21st of October, at nine in the morning — all this very nearly, it is true, at the expense of the Vanderbilt company.

The first Frenchman who came on board after the pilot was a gendarme, who asked us for our passports.

Though I should be once more accused of chauvinism, I will avow that — under the impression of so many months passed in America with the fatiguing obligation of counting on my individual safety only under the protection of a revolver always at hand; then under the impression too of those good American commercial tricks like the one the Ariel had played us the day before — I will avow, I say, with a sort of happiness, though without completely forgetting the possible abuse of the best things, that the sight of the gendarme was for me the first symbol of that security to which the just and peaceable man has a right upon the earth. In handing him my passport, I discharged with pleasure an incontestable duty of reciprocity, that of telling him who I was, in exchange for the protection of which his uniform was for me the first sign. For the atmosphere of the fatherland, and the love one has preserved for it, are also, after three years of absence, a very deep source of quietude, of benevolence, and of hope.

<div align="center">THE END</div>

Back matter (not translated). The 1858 volume closes with a table des matières (chapter list), then a Table — an alphabetical subject index (pp. 331–339) of French keywords with page references — followed by a list of the author's other works. All of this is transcribed in full in french_clean.md; the index, being a French keyword→page apparatus, is left untranslated. The table of contents confirms the chapter titles, including ch. VIII Les serpents et les insectes and ch. XV M. Vincent Cousin (the manager's forename). A printer's footnote at the foot of the index confirms that "the true name of M. Willemet is Thuvignon."

[^xviii_reunion]: Not to be confused with the associative establishment which M. Cantagrel, forced to remain between the forks of the Trinity, had at least placed in an intelligent and happy manner.

[^xviii_dallas]: At Dallas, the rumor had one day spread that a Belgian emigrant had beaten his wife. A crowd — not of women, but of men — had not been slow to gather before his house, and would have given him a bad time had the woman not come (sublime devotion) formally to deny the fact of which her husband was accused.

[^xviii_frais]: Savardan's footnote, giving "for the persons whom the account of travel expenses might interest," his expenses over the five thousand leagues traveled: Le Havre to New Orleans, 130 dollars; New Orleans to Houston, 21; stay in those three cities, 40; Houston to Réunion, 30; Réunion to Fort Smith, 100; at Fort Smith, 10; Fort Smith to Napoléon, 20; Napoléon to Cairo, 15; Cairo to Niagara Falls, 22; Niagara to New-York, 12; at New-York, 25; New-York to Le Havre, 90. — Grand total: 515, or 2,678 fr.