Unlikely Allies Page 8

  That afternoon Parsons met with Silas Deane and Colonel Samuel Wyllys, all members of the Connecticut Committee on Correspondence, to plan an attack on Fort Ticonderoga. They knew that the British intended to send reinforcements, and so speed and the element of surprise were vital. To finance the attack, Deane withdrew three hundred pounds from the Connecticut colonial treasury on behalf of the Committee of Correspondence. Deane considered it a “loan,” though he had no authority to borrow money from the colony, and there’s no evidence he repaid it. Obviously, if Deane had asked the Assembly for authorization, the plan would be uncovered. An attack by Connecticut militiamen on a British fort was treason ous, but Deane believed his actions in defense of the colony were justified by the exigency of the moment. With this financial backing, a dozen Connecticut militiamen left the next day from Hartford for Bennington, Vermont. There they met at Stephen Fay’s tavern with Ethan Allen, the legendary leader of the Green Mountain Boys, to plan an attack. Captain Arnold also met with the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, which the British had outlawed. The Committee of Safety elevated Captain Arnold to the rank of colonel and commissioned him to raise a militia to take the fort.

  Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold agreed to lead the charge jointly—Arnold, in a scarlet dress uniform with gold braids, led about one hundred Massachusetts volunteers, and Allen led about eighty Green Mountain Boys, in their deerskin and homespun. On the night of May 10, 1775, they crossed Lake Champlain in darkness and silently crept up the side of the embankment around the fort’s battery, then made their way under the ramparts and through a large unguarded gap in the south wall. When the single sentry at the gate tried to fire at Allen, his gun jammed, and he ran away. The entire contingent of colonists entered the fort unhindered, aimed their guns at the barracks where the British troops were sleeping and shouted to wake them. Only one guard tried to attack, and Allen knocked him to the ground with the flat of his sword. Not a single shot was fired, and there were no casualties. Within ten minutes two hundred untrained and lightly armed citizen-soldiers had seized the symbol of the British Empire’s conquest of North America.

  As soon as the fort was captured, chaos broke out. Ethan Allen and his men began looting the premises. They threatened to kill the terrified British men, women, and children they held captive. Arnold tried to impose order on the marauding Green Mountain Boys, but Allen refused to control his men, whom he felt were entitled to take whatever booty they wanted, which was mostly alcohol. Arnold was outraged at this undisciplined behavior. He fiercely defended the safety and property of their British captives. When one of the Green Mountain Boys tried to steal a woman’s sewing table, Arnold fought back, literally grabbing the table away. Allen’s men continued their looting for several days—just long enough to finish off all the British liquor—and then stumbled home to Vermont, leaving the fort in a shambles under the command of Colonel Arnold.

  Despite the absence of resistance and the humble condition of the fort, the capture of Ticonderoga was an extraordinary symbolic, psychological, and strategic boost to the Americans—the first victory in what became a long struggle for independence. It sent a shock wave through the colonies, cheering patriots, assuaging the doubters, and worrying the Loyalists. Most significantly, the capture of Ticonderoga provided some arms that were desperately needed to defend Boston. Captain Arnold quickly dispatched the fort’s ample supply of cannons and ammunition.

  News of the capture of Ticonderoga sailed down the Hudson at about the same time that the delegates were beginning to gather for the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Even before the news reached the delegates, there was a palpable sense that something extraordinary was about to happen. Deane and the other New England delegates were mobbed by well-wishers the whole way to Philadelphia. As they approached the city, a large parade of about two hundred men on horseback and many more uniformed militia-and riflemen on foot, with swords drawn and bayonets fixed, greeted them. Deane could not believe the sight: “rolling and gathering like a snow-ball, we approached the City,” where they were met by enormous crowds, larger than any he had ever seen. “[T]he bells all ringing and the air rent with shouts and huzzas. My little bay horses were put in such a fright that I was in fear of killing several of the spectators.”

  When a letter reporting Captain Arnold’s triumph at Ticonderoga reached the Congress on May 17, the delegates erupted with cheers. They credited their colleague Deane as one of the strategic architects of this victory. Though Deane had clearly violated the law by misappropriating money from the Connecticut Treasury to underwrite Arnold’s mission, he was now hailed by the delegates. He had risked being charged by the crown with treason to defend the colonists against British tyranny. His grateful colleagues even called him “Ticonderoga” as an expression of their admiration for his cunning and bravery.

  For one sunny moment, Silas Deane basked in the light as one of the heroes of the struggle against British tyranny. Deane was elated to share the reflected glory of this iconic victory with his neighbor Benedict Arnold. But the warm sun of approbation soon slipped behind a dark cloud of jealousy.

  SEVEN

  THE CHEVALIER

  London and Paris, April-September 1775

  After his meeting with Foreign Minister Vergennes in April 1775, Beaumarchais departed at once for London to negotiate with the Chevalier d’Eon. To avoid detection, he had chartered a small boat from Boulogne on his own and rowed all night. A strong east wind held him off the English coast. After seventeen hours on rough waters he landed far south at Hastings on the coast of East Sussex, and from there he journeyed north to London, still feeling a bit queasy.

  In London he pretended to be engaged in his own private business. Rather than pursue the chevalier overtly, Beaumarchais waited patiently for the opportune moment to meet him. He expected that d’Eon could be an intransigent negotiator, and he did not want to appear too eager or to make his intentions obvious. He did not have to wait long.

  D’Eon knew Morande, the blackmailer with whom Beaumarchais had maintained a friendship since his previous mission to London. On April 20, 1775, the very day that British troops fired on militiamen at Lexington, Massachusetts, d’Eon asked Morande to introduce him to the famous playwright. D’Eon had read Beaumarchais’s “Memorials” attacking the French judiciary, which gave d’Eon “reason to suppose, judging by the boldness of his style and opinions, that there was still a man left in Paris.” D’Eon, himself a cult figure who boldly challenged convention, was curious to meet the man who had revolutionized timekeeping, satirized the aristocracy, and exposed a corrupt judiciary. “Both of us probably felt drawn to each another by the kind of natural curiosity found in all extraordinary animals,” d’Eon later explained. More to the point, d’Eon also had a hunch that since Beaumarchais had been sent once before to London to pay off Morande for his false libels, he might have authority to buy back the king’s papers from d’Eon. Morande directed d’Eon to Beaumarchais’s flat.

  D’Eon arrived at Beaumarchais’s door at Ploone Street without an appointment. Even at forty-seven, d’Eon cut an athletic figure. He was short and trim, with thick light-brown hair, smooth skin, sparkling blue eyes, and fine features. He wore the green-and-crimson uniform of a captain in the king’s regiment of dragoons. On his chest he displayed the Croix de Saint-Louis, France’s highest honor for military service, which Louis XV had awarded him for his service as an officer and a spy. He introduced himself in French. Despite years in the diplomatic service, d’Eon still spoke with the soft provincial accent of Burgundy.

  The chevalier’s poise did not disguise his anxiety. After they exchanged pleasantries, and d’Eon acknowledged his admiration for Beaumarchais’s writing, he bluntly announced that he had come to open negotiations with the king. Beaumarchais feigned ignorance. He claimed that he was visiting London on personal business; he was no longer in the king’s employ, and he had no commission to negotiate on the king’s behalf. The chevalier did not believe him and
insisted that Beaumarchais, who, after all, had paid off the vulgar libeler Morande, surely must have something to offer an officer and minister plenipotentiary who had loyally served his king. The chevalier assured Beaumarchais that he had come to him in good faith, but Beaumarchais replied that he “was not seeking either his friendship or his trust.” D’Eon could beg him to accept the former, but he could not force him “to be the repository of the other.”

  The playwright clearly was toying with him, and they both knew it. D’Eon was profoundly shaken by Beaumarchais’s sangfroid. D’Eon had come believing that Beaumarchais was in London to end his estrangement from his king and country. His voice began to quaver as he told Beaumarchais that if Versailles had been willing to talk, “I would have been back in my country a long time ago . . . and the King would have received all the important papers relative to the secret of Louis XV, which must not remain in England.” For a man as proud as the chevalier to be reduced to begging a convicted criminal for help was a sign of his growing desperation. Deserted by the king he had served faithfully, d’Eon felt “like a drowning man abandoned . . . to the current of an infected river.” Morande had warned him that Beaumarchais was a tricky negotiator, and d’Eon knew better than to trust the playwright. But he also knew that his only chance for rescue depended on Beaumarchais, and so d’Eon begged Beaumarchais to help him. As d’Eon remarked years later, he grabbed hold of “the boat of Caron [Beaumarchais] as I would to a red-hot rod of iron.” In the end, he came to regret his dependence on Beaumarchais. “Although I took the precaution to protect my hands with gauntlets, I had my fingers burnt after all.”

  As d’Eon became more agitated, Beaumarchais remained implacable. Beaumarchais was not going to make it easy on the chevalier. He persisted in pretending that he had no idea what d’Eon was asking, and he denied that he had any authority to act as an agent for Louis XVI. The more Beaumarchais demurred the more intensely d’Eon entreated him to save him. Beaumarchais coolly moved to end the interview, but the chevalier refused to leave his flat.

  After years spent dodging his creditors and hiding from the king’s agents sent to capture or kill him, d’Eon could take no more abuse. He was at the end of his rope. Everything he had done was in the service of his king, and all he asked for was a chance to retire in dignity. It was too much for the chevalier to bear. He became hysterical resisting Beaumarchais’s efforts to show him the door. He began to sob uncontrollably. Suddenly, he exclaimed, “Je suis une femme malheureuse!” (“I am an unhappy woman!”)

  FOR A MOMENT, Beaumarchais was stunned by d’Eon’s sudden admission. Of course, Beaumarchais had heard the rumors that d’Eon was a woman, but he did not necessarily believe them, and, in any event, he surely would not have expected her to confess her gender to a complete stranger. Yet, as the chevalière collapsed in his arms, weeping, there could be no doubt of her gender. She had a woman’s voice. Her face was smooth, her hands and feet were small for a man, and though she showed her age, she retained something of her beauty. Beneath her military uniform, she felt small and light, nothing like a man. Despite the strong odor of tobacco and the medals on her chest pressing against Beaumarchais, she had a sweet vulnerability. How was it possible that this decorated officer, diplomat, and spy could be a woman?

  As d’Eon later explained in her Memoirs, her older brother had died before she was born, and her father desperately wanted a son to replace him. D’Eon was the youngest of two daughters, and her disappointed father insisted on baptizing her as a boy. She was christened with the names of five male and one female saint. According to d’Eon, her mother acquiesced in her father’s decision only because her grandmother, a wealthy noblewoman, promised her mother the sum of 12,000 livres if she had a son.

  From d’Eon’s early years she was as good at athletic pursuits as any boy. She quickly realized at a young age that, dressed as a man, she had greater opportunities than she would as a woman. She “would prefer to keep my male clothes because they open all the doors to fortune, glory, and courage.” As she watched her older sister’s life constricted by her gender, d’Eon was keenly aware of the ways that she was spared an unhappy fate. She excelled at fencing and riding, while her older sister could only watch. “Dresses close all those doors for me. Dresses only give me room to cry about the misery and servitude of women,” d’Eon later mused. It was not a life for someone who was “crazy about liberty.” D’Eon had dressed and behaved as a man for four decades. The only hint that she was different from other men was her apparent indifference to women.

  As Beaumarchais held her in his arms, he smiled to himself, certain that he knew how he would persuade her to surrender the king’s correspondence. He would now regain the king’s confidence and a position at court. At last, Beaumarchais had found his salvation, and it was a woman.

  EIGHT

  THE CHEVALIER’S GHOST

  London, June-October 1775

  At least since she had left her home in Burgundy, d’Eon had never told anyone that she was female. Beaumarchais was deeply moved by her naked vulnerability. He wrote to Louis XVI that “When one thinks that this creature, so much persecuted, belongs to a sex to which one forgives everything, the heart is touched with a sweet compassion.” Beaumarchais was already ensnared in d’Eon’s emotional web. He could not disguise his feelings towards the chevalière, but he felt sure that he could capture both her heart and the king’s papers. “I do assure you, Sire,” Beaumarchais wrote to Louis, “that in taking this astonishing creature with dexterity and gentleness, although she is embittered by twelve years of misfortune, she can yet be brought to enter under the yoke, and to give up all the papers of the late King on reasonable conditions.” Though he sounded confident Beaumarchais underestimated the will of this determined woman.

  In June, Beaumarchais returned to Versailles to discuss with Foreign Minister Vergennes the terms for resolving d’Eon’s blackmail threat. Beaumarchais informed Vergennes that d’Eon wished to return to France with a guarantee of her safety and freedom, but first she insisted on having a formal audience with George III to bid farewell in her capacity as minister plenipotentiary. Beaumarchais realized that she was quite capable of saying anything and that it would be impossible to control her behavior in such a situation. Allowing d’Eon to appear before the British monarch as the emissary of Louis XVI would risk embarrassing both France and England. Beaumarchais suggested to Vergennes that if d’Eon were required to declare openly that she was a woman, it would make it impossible for her to continue to claim she were the minister plenipotentiary. She would have to admit that she was a fraud, and she would be compelled to return to France quietly without a formal meeting with George III. In this way, a potentially embarrassing diplomatic scene could be avoided.

  Vergennes agreed that if d’Eon admitted publicly that she was a woman, it would no longer be an option for her to have an audience with the king of England. “If M. d’Eon is willing to adopt the costume of his sex,” Vergennes advised Louis XVI (unsure of his pronouns), “there will be no objection to his return to France. But under any other circumstances, he should not even express that wish.” Over the last decade of her public battle with the French government, the chevalière had offended a number of prominent Frenchmen, particularly her rival, Ambassador Guerchy. Vergennes worried that if d’Eon returned to France as a man, d’Eon’s enemies would seek revenge, but if d’Eon returned as a woman, there would be no need to settle old scores. “If Mr. D’Eon wanted to wear women’s clothes, the matter would be over.”

  There was another, more important reason for demanding that d’Eon acknowledge her feminine identity: Vergennes and Louis XVI had every reason to fear that even if d’Eon returned the correspondence to Beaumarchais, d’Eon would still be in a position to continue blackmailing Louis XVI with the knowledge that his grandfather had planned to invade London. The only way to silence d’Eon permanently—short of murder—would be to compel her to declare publicly that she was female. Once d’Eon was fo
rced to admit she was a woman disguised as a man, who would believe anything she said? She would have no credibility with which to threaten Louis XVI in the future.

  D’Eon must have realized that if she publicly acknowledged she was female, she would lose her power to threaten the king in the future as well as any hope of returning to government service. On the other hand, there is evidence that long before Beaumarchais had arrived in London, d’Eon had been preparing the way for coming out as a woman. Years earlier, she had begun purchasing corsets, jewelry, and other female garments, presumably for her own wardrobe. And she may have started the rumors herself about being female. Her actions suggest that perhaps she was tired of dressing as a man, and Beaumarchais presented her with the opportunity to free herself from the bonds of her male disguise. If that were the case, then perhaps she only resisted Beaumarchais’s proposal that she declare herself female in the hope that she could squeeze more money out of Louis XVI.