Unlikely Allies Read online

  By July, Beaumarchais reported to Vergennes that he had almost concluded his negotiations with the woman he affectionately called his “Amazone.” That was an exaggeration. In fact, negotiations had barely begun, and d’Eon was enjoying Beaumarchais’s attention too much to allow him to bring the negotiations to a rapid conclusion. As a gesture of her good faith, d’Eon presented Beaumarchais with the key to an iron chest in which she promised she had deposited her secret correspondence with Louis XV. D’Eon gave the chest to her friend Lord Ferrers for safekeeping while she did her utmost to prolong their negotiations.

  By personality and expediency the chevalière and the playwright were two contradictory individuals uniquely suited to each other. Both were brilliant social outlaws and, at the same time, social climbers; both duplicitous secret agents of the monarch and yet they saw themselves as champions of the common man; both charming raconteurs who were loathed and discredited by many powerful people. Beaumarchais and d’Eon each needed the other in their quest to win the king’s approval. Without d’Eon, Beaumarchais would return to France without title, property, or the rights accorded citizens. Without Beaumarchais, d’Eon would remain in political exile, impoverished, unwelcome in her own country. Thus began a strange courtship.

  WHILE NEGOTIATIONS BETWEEN Beaumarchais and d’Eon dragged on, half a world away events were coursing swiftly toward revolution. In June, two thousand British regulars attacked Massachusetts militiamen holding Breed’s Hill over Boston Harbor. The British succeeded in capturing the heights, but lost half their men. This battle, known popularly as “Bunker Hill,” was the first significant military confrontation between British and American forces. In response, the Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia established the army of the United Colonies, which later became known as the Continental Army and selected the Virginian delegate George Washington as commander-in-chief in June, 1775.

  At forty-three, Washington was painfully aware of his own limitations as a military commander. He had no formal military education and only limited military experience two decades earlier. Despite Washington’s shortcomings, John Adams nominated him as commander-in-chief in order to win support from other southern delegates for independence. After assuming command of the ragged Continental Army camped in Cambridge across the Charles River from Boston in July, Washington wrote, “Could I have foreseen what I have experienced and am likely to experience, no consideration on earth would have induced me to accept the command.”

  Though Washington had been promised an army of 18,000 men, he had barely 13,000 men, including nearly 600 drummers and fifers. It was an army in name only. The colonists were undisciplined and inexperienced. Beyond the deficiency in training and numbers of men, Washington’s army lacked the most basic implements of war. Supply shortages, combined with Congress’s routine failure to pay the soldiers what was due them, would lead to mass desertions, further undermining the army’s strength. Colonists without guns, bullets, uniforms, or boots practiced playing soldier with broomsticks. At the time Washington took command, the Massachusetts regiments had only 36 barrels of gunpowder, less than half a pound per man, and there were less than 100 barrels of gunpowder in all of the colonial militias combined. If the British attacked with their vastly superior forces, each man could fire at most nine times before the entire stock of powder in rebel hands would be exhausted. Moreover, the colonies had no capacity to manufacture significant quantities of gunpowder or muskets. All of the army’s ammunition and guns would have to be imported—around the British blockade.

  Back in Philadelphia, in July 1775, the delegates adopted the Olive Branch Petition, appealing for reconciliation with Britain; but when the petition was presented to George III, he refused to even accept it. Instead, the king declared the American colonies were in open rebellion. Recognizing the military weakness of the colonies, the British were determined to settle the dispute once and for all by force of arms.

  THROUGH THE AUTUMN of 1775 Beaumarchais and d’Eon danced a curious pas de deux. Beaumarchais sought to win her trust using every masculine charm and artifice. He boasted to a friend that he could offer “a head, a heart, two arms and no tongue” with which to persuade d’Eon. For a master of the game of seduction like Beaumarchais, the chevalière posed an interesting challenge. Beaumarchais was d’Eon’s frequent companion and confidant. Both were seen out in London as regular guests at the homes of prominent Whigs, many of whom, like d’Eon, were Freemasons at the Lodge of Immortality at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand. For her part, d’Eon continued in her masculine disguise, alternately intransigent or vulnerable, threatening or plaintive. How far could she push the playwright? And how far would she permit him to go without offending either her feminine modesty or her masculine honor?

  That autumn, rumors again began circulating in Lloyd’s and other London coffeehouses that d’Eon was a woman. There were even whispers of an affair between d’Eon and a certain unnamed French playwright. Indeed, it may be that Beaumarchais started these rumors for reasons that became clear only later.

  D’Eon was flattered by Beaumarchais’s apparent interest in her, but she was also amused that a forty-seven-year-old soldier could touch the heart of the handsome younger man. What she saw in her looking glass was not a blushing ingénue but a tough battle-scarred veteran, a daring spy, and an aging diplomat. As one of her contemporaries noted, her sinewy arms looked better suited for carrying a sedan chair than a fan. But d’Eon appreciated and encouraged Beaumarchais’s attention. She called him her “guardian angel.” She gave him her portrait as a token of her affection and asked for his in return.

  Was Beaumarchais genuinely attracted to her? We cannot know for sure. Most of Beaumarchais’s biographers dismissed the idea that he was romantically interested in d’Eon, but it was not impossible. D’Eon was no longer an androgynous beauty, but her wit and charm were undiminished. Beaumarchais was just three years younger, and he had already shown a preference for middle-aged women. If his wife were still alive, she, too, would be in her forties. Beaumarchais’s correspondence with d’Eon was often affectionate and playful: “I am giving over the evening to Venus,” the goddess of love, Beaumarchais wrote to d’Eon, “when do you want me to embrace Minerva?” Minerva, the goddess of war, would seem to refer to his chevalière. On another occasion, after one of their arguments, Beaumarchais wrote to d’Eon that he looked forward to seeing her “with all my heart and I will consider myself so happy if I can still contribute to your future happiness.”

  Regardless of how Beaumarchais really felt about d’Eon, she was obsessed with him, and her writing suggests that she had formed a deep emotional attachment. For d’Eon, who all her life had denied herself any opportunity for love, Beaumarchais had changed everything. “My heart which has been closed to other men,” she wrote to him, “naturally opens in your presence, like a flower spreading itself out in a ray of sunshine.” She teased Beaumarchais affectionately. In one letter he was “the shrewdest and nicest monkey” she had ever met. She even quoted back to him his own writing: “I repeat what Rosina says in Le Barbier de Seville, you are made to be loved!”

  Beaumarchais acknowledged to Vergennes that “Everybody tells me this madwoman is crazy about me.” He could not deny the humor in it: “[H]ow on earth could I imagine that, to serve the King zealously, I would have to become a gallant knight to a captain of dragoons?”

  Some biographers have suggested that d’Eon was merely manipulating Beaumarchais’s ego with flattery, but d’Eon was not a cold calculating woman. She was highly emotional and romantic, even when her sentiments worked to her disadvantage, as they often did. If d’Eon had been better able to control her emotions in the first place, she would have avoided alienating the French king and his advisers, and she could have kept her diplomatic job. It was precisely because d’Eon was so readily swayed by her heart’s desire, rather than by rational self-interest, that she found herself in this predicament.

  By the end of October 1775, a
fter months of negotiating, cajoling, threatening, and wooing, Beaumarchais had finally persuaded d’Eon to return Louis XV’s correspondence. Their agreement, which they referred to as “the Transaction,” was part legal contract, part narrative, and part apologia. It stipulated that d’Eon would receive from Louis XVI an annual pension of 12,000 livres (about $92,000 today) for her past military and diplomatic service. In addition, Louis XVI would assume most of her debts from the time she was minister plenipotentiary. She agreed to surrender her military uniforms and arms to Beaumarchais, and she was promised an allowance of 6,000 livres (about $46,000 today) to pay for a new feminine wardrobe. She was allowed to keep only one complete uniform of her regiment—with her helmet, saber, pistol, rifle, and bayonet—as a souvenir of her military service, and she was permitted to wear the distinguished Croix de Saint-Louis on her dress as a tribute to her gallantry.

  In exchange, the agreement provided that d’Eon, a “spinster of full age,” would surrender all of the king’s papers and abandon “that disguise which has hitherto hidden the person of a woman under the appearance of the Chevalier d’Eon.” Beaumarchais was at pains to absolve d’Eon of any moral culpability for her deception by specifying in the agreement that her “parents alone are guilty.” The document somewhat incongruously praised “the rare example of this extraordinary girl,” who, like Joan of Arc, “bravely fulfilled all the dangerous duties” of a professional soldier “in man’s attire,” and recognized her “modest and virtuous, though vigorous and manly, manner in which she has always conducted herself in her adopted garb.” The time had come, therefore, to resolve “the uncertainty about her sex, which up to now has been an inexhaustible subject of indecent bets and salacious jokes.” To appeal to her vanity, Beaumarchais added that by assuming women’s clothing “it can only make her appear more interesting in the eyes of both sexes which her life, her courage and her talents have equally honored.” In addition to paying her pension and debts, the king guaranteed her safe return to France. At d’Eon’s suggestion they agreed that the contract would be back-dated to October 5, her forty-seventh birthday, signifying her rebirth as a woman. In a dramatic flourish, the playwright exhorted “the ghost of the Chevalier d’Eon” to “vanish forever.”

  Beaumarchais soon learned that ghosts are not so easily exorcised.

  NINE

  THE JUDGE

  Philadelphia, June-December 1775

  In June, the weather in Philadelphia turned tropical. It was an effort just to breathe the thick, moist air, and enormous black mosquitoes tormented the delegates, who were soon covered with itchy red welts. In their black wool stockings, powdered wigs, and waistcoats, the delegates were ill prepared to face summer in Philadelphia. They met on the first floor of the handsome redbrick Pennsylvania State House, which would later become known as Independence Hall. The delegates sat at small tables in pairs on assorted dark Windsor chairs. Each table was covered with a green cloth, and running from left to right the tables were grouped into New England, mid-Atlantic, and southern colonies. They faced a large fireplace and a raised platform where the president of the Continental Congress sat at a long table. The three tall double-hung windows on the front and back of the building were kept closed and shuttered much of the time to preserve the secrecy of the proceedings. As a result, the room temperature hovered between eighty and one hundred degrees much of the summer.

  Among the men sweltering in the Assembly room were the most distinguished leaders of the colonies. There were prominent financiers and statesmen, large landowners with long pedigrees and famous attorneys noted for their brilliant oratory. Silas Deane, by contrast, was a shopkeeper and the son of a blacksmith from a small New England town. He was less well known and less politically experienced than any of the other New England delegates. Among such glittering company, Deane might have been expected to sit quietly in the background, as the young Virginian Thomas Jefferson was inclined to do. Yet, after the victory at Ticonderoga, Deane quickly emerged as one of the leaders in Congress. His stout support for independence and his intellect impressed many, and Congress acknowledged Deane’s abilities by selecting him for numerous important committees. Among other assignments, he was appointed to the Committee on Trade, the Committee of Ways and Means, which he chaired, and, most important, the Committee of Secrecy, which had the critical responsibility of obtaining gunpowder, cannons, muskets, and uniforms from Europe. This committee, better known as the “Secret Committee,” became the primary source of funding for arming the military.

  It soon became clear that Deane was gifted at building coalitions across regional lines. John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, that Deane was “a very ingenious Man and an able Politician.” Adams remarked that “There is scarcely a more active, industrious, enterprising and capable Man, than Mr. Deane.” On a typical day, Deane would rise at six, write letters to his wife and business associates for an hour, and then dress and eat. He would start his committee work at eight, for a couple of hours before Congress convened at ten. Congress continued right through lunch until four, when he would dine with several of his colleagues and discuss the day’s work. After dinner he would spend several hours at more committee meetings. He would have a light supper before going to bed at eleven. Congress exhausted him. “My time is all taken up,” he wrote his wife. “Well as I love the busy scenes of politics, . . . I have had more than my share of such business.”

  Deane’s hard work and popularity bred jealousy among some of the delegates. His ceaseless energy and his close relationships with the leading figures in Congress—Adams, Franklin, and Washington—probably made some of the other delegates self-conscious about their own modest contributions and influence. They saw his fierce commitment to independence as an excess of ambition. Some of the delegates—especially among the New England Puritans and the southern planters—were inherently suspicious of members of the new mercantile class. To these delegates, Deane epitomized the new wealth that arose not from land or craft, but from foreign trade. For them, thrift was a religious virtue, and Deane’s taste for luxury evidenced a character flaw.

  Ever since his time at Yale, Deane had worked hard to be well liked, and he was overly sensitive to the opinions of some delegates. “People here, members of Congress and others, have unhappily and erroneously thought me a schemer,” Deane lamented to Elizabeth.

  My principles are (the eyes of my God knows them, and the most envious eye of man or the bitter tongue of slander cannot find anything in my political conduct to contradict them) to sacrifice all lesser considerations to the service of the whole, and in this tempestuous season to throw cheerfully overboard private fortune, private emolument, even my life,—if the ship, with the jewel Liberty, may be safe. This being my line of conduct, I have calmness of mind which more than balances my external troubles, of which I have not a few.

  One of Deane’s chief troubles was Judge Sherman, who became increasingly jealous of Deane’s growing influence in Congress. Partly it was a matter of personality. Deane radiated good cheer and a ready wit. He spoke sparingly, but when he did, his speeches were punchy, practical, and persuasive. The judge, by contrast, glowered. He had no patience for friendly banter among delegates. Sherman, in John Adams’s words, spoke “often and long, but very heavily.” Sanctimonious and often rude, he was “the Reverse of Grace,” Adams joked. Adams thought that Sherman seemed ill at ease, as if his body were a compressed spring ready to pop. He would stand up to speak with his right hand holding his left clenched tightly into an angry fist. At random intervals, he would jerk his arms upward with his fist still clenched. Adams described Sherman’s manner as “Stiffness and Awkwardness itself. Rigid as Starched Linen or Buckram. Awkward as a junior Bachelor or a Sophomore.” While most delegates may have respected Judge Sherman, nearly all would have preferred to dine with Deane.

  Underlying the differences between Deane and Sherman were class and regional conflicts. In the 1600s, New Haven had been the headquarters of the New Haven colony�
�separate from the Connecticut colony. The two colonies later joined, and for a time New Haven and Hartford were co-capital cities. By the 1770s, Hartford had eclipsed New Haven as the provincial capital. The two cities bitterly vied for influence in the colonial Assembly. Sherman was one of the leading politicians in New Haven, and he saw Deane as embodying the Hartford elite. Deane was far better educated, more politically prominent, and financially more successful than the judge. Deane felt sorry for Sherman, whom he regarded as irritating but harmless. Sherman, by contrast, could not distinguish their regional rivalry from their personal differences. For Sherman to succeed, he believed, Deane had to be crushed.

  A bitter division between Deane and Sherman arose over the appointment of officers to the Continental Army from Connecticut. Following Washington’s commission as commander-in-chief, Congress appointed four major generals under him. For political reasons, Congress set aside one of these top posts for an officer from the Connecticut militia. The Connecticut General Assembly had voted to recommend Connecticut’s Major General David Wooster for the post, and Sherman, who was Wooster’s friend and neighbor, strongly favored him. Deane, however, thought Wooster, at sixty-six, too elderly to serve as second in command of the Continental Army. In Deane’s eyes, Wooster’s religiosity, his oversized wigs, and his ill-fitting hats marked him as old-fashioned and eccentric. Deane found Wooster “totally unequal to the service” and said so openly before Congress. Deane preferred Captain Israel Putnam, a tough-talking tavern owner and a hardened soldier-farmer from northeast ern Connecticut. Putnam was beloved by his men, who affectionately called him “Old Put.” Though he ranked below Major General Wooster in the Connecticut Militia, Putnam was a more experienced and more successful officer than Wooster—or even Washington. In Congress, Deane led the fight to appoint Putnam over the objections of Sherman and the Connecticut Assembly. While he recognized the political risk, Deane did what he thought was right for the army. He wrote to Elizabeth that “[I] am determined to do my duty, and will on no occasion sacrifice the good of my country to the whim of any old man, or old woman rather, or their sticklers.” Persuaded by Deane, Congress unanimously endorsed Putnam. It was a stunning victory and evidence of Deane’s growing influence in Congress. But Sherman and Wooster were furious, and Deane was savagely attacked by the friends of Wooster and Sherman in the Connecticut Assembly.