For many years, as I liked to tell my friends, I led a life of crime, though ­part-­time only. By day, I taught ­18th-­century English literature at the University of California, Davis. By night, I wrote somewhat lurid paperback detective novels for Bantam Books. I did my scholarly research in my office or the quiet stacks of the library. The research for my detective novels I carried out in low bars and ­off-­duty cop haunts in the mean streets of the San Francisco Tenderloin. Once I even enrolled in a special course in the California Highway Patrol Bomb Squad ­School.

But one morning in 1988 my publisher at Bantam, a man named Steve Rubin, whom I had never actually met, called me. After a few minutes of cheerful small talk, he cleared his throat and said rather ominously that he didn't much like detective novels, even mine. That produced a long, painful silence at my end of the line, as I waited to hear the whistle of the ax falling. Instead, Steve went on to say that, since I was a specialist in the 18th century, he wanted me to give up crime and try my hand at a historical novel set in that period. Specifically, he wanted me to write a novel about Thomas ­Jefferson.

The dumbest idea I had ever heard, I told him. In my opinion, Jefferson was a character completely unsuited for fiction. He was not a dramatic man of action, but a man of the pen and the ­book—­his life had been crowded with incident and accomplishment, but there was no obvious 

 to it, such as a novelist seeks. (I mentioned, by contrast, Lincoln, the subject of innumerable novels, who was a kind of American ­Hamlet—­witty, melancholy, framed forever against the titanic backdrop of the Civil War, assassinated at the moment of victory in a public theater.) Jefferson had lived a long, untheatrical life, seemingly little tormented by inner conflicts, and died in bed at the age of 83. Moreover, he was famously enigmatic. Almost everyone who had ever known him used the same words to describe him: elusive, reserved, aloof. (The word that turned up most often to characterize him, as I later learned, was “feline.”)

But Steve kept telephoning, and eventually, after another detective novel or two, I came around. I told him I would write a novel about Thomas Jefferson on two conditions: that he would cover the costs of my research, and that he would allow me to focus on Jefferson’s life in the years from 1784 to 1789. Yes, yes, he said, somewhat impatiently, of course he would pay my research expenses. He imagined (I know because he has since told me so) that these would be chiefly some books, some photocopying, perhaps a short trip to Monticello. Then, as an afterthought, he asked why I had chosen those years. Because, I said, that was when Jefferson served as the American minister to France, and my research would have to be done in Paris. This time, the long, painful silence was at his end.

There are essentially two kinds of historical novels. One you might call simply a “costume drama”—the kind of story with swords and muskets and powdered wigs, but no real pretense to telling the reader anything significant, or even true, about authentic historical figures or events. The best examples of this kind of historical novel are those by the great Rafael Sabatini, author of such stirring adventure yarns as 

 (1921) ­and—­my nomination for one of the two or three best titles in ­fiction—­

 (1922). A more recent and far more elegant example is Patrick O’Brian’s series of seafaring novels set during the Napoleonic Wars, astonishing in their realistic detail but centered on two entirely fictional heroes, Captain Jack Aubrey and ship’s surgeon Stephen ­Maturin.

Alas, I had agreed to write, not a new version of 

, but the other kind of historical novel: a sober, factually accurate story about an actual historical figure. Steve Rubin had set out few guidelines, but he made it clear that, because the general outlines of Jefferson’s life and character are so familiar and established, it would be imprudent to take many liberties. Whatever I wrote would have to be, in a very strict sense, faithful to the ­facts.

This raised a fundamental question. I knew Sabatini, I knew Alexander Dumas, I knew 

—­but what, in fact, is a serious historical novel? In a literal sense, what does it look like? Trained as an academic, I naturally decided to seek out the authorities and establish a working ­definition.

There is surprisingly little scholarship concerned with historical fiction, but all colleagues and bibliographies agreed that the place for me to start was a book called 

 (1962) by the Marxist critic Georg Lukács. This turned out to be a thick, impenetrable work of literary theory, propounding the idea that historical fiction began with Sir Walter Scott and, at its best, always concerns the conflict between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. As a theory of class consciousness, I suppose it was impressive. As a guide to a practicing novelist . . . well, here is a sentence from the preface: “No serious Marxist genre theory is possible unless an attempt is made to apply the theory of reflection of materialistic dialectics to the problem of the differentiations of genres.” I put down Lukács, reminding myself that Dr. Johnson had called theory “speculation by those unversed in practice.”

I turned, then, to the one authority who, for a writer, comes before any other. Telling serious, dramatic stories about great historical events, about vanished ways of life and departed heroes, is a literary exercise at least as old as Homer. Indeed, as I sat in Paris with my suitcase full of books about Jefferson open before me, I realized that there were three basic principles I could take from the ancient poet and apply, almost as rules, to my modern historical ­novel.

First, no matter how much an author concentrates on the foreground of character and action (the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles in the 

, for example), a serious vision of the past requires a larger thematic background, which we might call the “history of the tribe” (in Homer, why Troy would fall; in Virgil, how Rome began). In the historical novels I knew, this was plain. Kenneth Roberts’s wonderful novel 

 (1933) focuses on a single long march and battle in 1775, but opens a window on the whole American Revolution. William Styron’s 

(1967), though about one dramatic episode in 1831, seems to set in motion the coming Civil ­War.

Second, serious historical fiction rarely chronicles a life or story from beginning to end, as an academic historian might. It likes to choose instead one or two crucial moments and begin in medias res. Long as it is, the Iliad covers only the climactic last year of the Trojan War, just as Gore Vidal’s splendid novel 

 (1984) deals not with the president’s life from cradle to grave, but with his four heroic years in ­office.

And third, the scale of a serious historical novel is generally wide and crowded, not narrow and focused like that of a detective story. It ranges from the top of Mount Olympus to the gloomy, dismal gates of the Underworld, and its cast of characters is similarly large and varied, from Zeus the Thunderer down to the wretched, beggarly Thersites. The form, like the effect, is ­epic. 

The ultimate goal of the novelist, any novelist, is not “creation” or “creativity,” as those words are so carelessly used. The goal is ­mimesis—­imitation so complete and faithful to experience, so widely connected to the larger order of things, even of sun, moon, and stars, that imitation at its furthest point of accuracy passes over and becomes ­truth.

I saw at once the difficulty I would have in devising a clear plot in such a sprawling literary form. Jefferson arrived in Paris in August 1784, as John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were preparing to leave. (Famously, Jefferson declared that he had come to succeed Franklin, since no one could possibly replace him.) For the next five years, as American minister plenipotentiary, he would be concerned with everything from promoting the sale of American tobacco in France, to squelching the Barbary pirates in North Africa, to advising Lafayette on the incipient French Revolution. Amid the complex and unending political episodes that dominated his public life, Jefferson also found time for a romantic interlude with young Maria Cosway, the wife of the fashionable and repellent English portrait artist Richard Cosway (whose sideline, I was fascinated to learn, was making pornographic snuffbox lids for the nobility). And in 1787, 14-­year-­old Sally Hemings arrived in Paris as the slave companion to Jefferson’s daughter Polly.

As I crawled through volume after volume of Jefferson’s letters and the huge biography by Duman Mallone, one questino was with me constantly: How was I to find a 

 for such an overwhelming abundance of ­material?

For some years, I've been convinced that the late novelist John Gardner was right when he said that there are only two basic plots in fiction: someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. In fact, that’s only one plot, seen from two different points of view. Gradually, I came to recognize that my plot was really the story of Jefferson’s journey from the forests and villages of America to the world city of Paris, with all the sophistication and glamour that magic name evokes. Jefferson, after all, had grown up on the virtual edge of the Virginia wilderness, outside the little settlement of Charlottesville, among Indians and grizzled old ­sulfur-­mouthed trappers and mountain guides. His father had been a frontier surveyor and planter. Before Paris, the largest city he had ever seen was Philadelphia, which, with about 18,000 inhabitants, was really only a small town. Suddenly, at the age of 41, Jefferson, a widower, alone except for his daughters, was transported to the very heart of civilized ­Europe.

From the point of view of the Parisians who met him, including Maria Cosway, there was the drama of encountering a highly intelligent stranger from an exotic background who rapidly became one of them. As Franklin was fond of saying, Paris changes everybody. For the first time in his life, Jefferson was exposed to complex architecture, to concerts, to galleries of paintings, to kings and queens. He learned to move according to the graceful, stylized rituals of a polished aristocratic world, and at the same time the author of the Declaration of Independence confronted squalid peasant huts and the almost feudal oppression of the poor, practically outside his door on the Champs-Elysées. (The quintessentially American house at Monticello is an especially visible result of his education. He used to sit in the Tuileries gardens and watch the construction on the Left Bank of the Hôtel de Salm, now the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur. When he came home to Virginia, he swept aside the existing plans for his house and redesigned it to include the beautiful white dome of the hotel.)

My plot, I decided, would be this journey and transformation, and the tribal history behind it would be the clash between America and Europe, perhaps the oldest and richest theme in our national ­literature.

The earliest occurrence of the term “historical novel” known to me dates from 1804, when an obscure English sailor named John Davis published an imaginative account of the ­17th-­century romance between Pocahontas and Captain John Smith and called it 

The First Settlers of Virginia, An Historical Novel

. Not long afterward, in 1814, the true modern version of the genre was inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott with Waverley. To the general principles found in Homer, Scott added two: He gave us the idea that a novel is “historical” only if its action takes place at least half a century before its publication. And he insisted on a complete and uncompromising realism, a nearly archaeological fidelity to historical research and antiquarian ­detail.

The impulse is not so much to recreate time as to halt it in its tracks, to suspend mortality, on a canvas or a page. At its core the impulse to write realistic, truthful historical novels, to bring the past to life, is the same impulse that drove Keats to sit down before his unchanging Grecian urn, or Shakespeare to pray “That in black ink my love may still shine bright.”

In Paris, I came to see that to employ these principles, a historical novelist would require two very different aids, so to ­speak—­a bridge and a telescope. The bridge is needed to provide, for the contemporary reader, a way over and into the past, and it usually takes the form of a character, real or invented, who has something of a modern sensibility, someone who, in his attitudes and voice, is more like us. For my purposes, after some trial and error with Jefferson’s two daughters, I settled on his ­real-­life personal secretary and fellow Virginian, William Short, who adored Jefferson but, inoculated with the ideals and energy of the French Revolution, broke almost bitterly with him on the issue of ­slavery.

Meantime, the telescope was ready to hand. While living in Paris and reading everything I could about Jefferson’s life there, I also went to see the old convent on the rue de Grenelle where his daughters had gone to school. I sought out the buildings (still there) in the Latin Quarter where he had bought his books. I found the house where John Adams had lived, and studied the view Franklin had enjoyed from his residence in Neuilly. I pored over old maps, newspapers, paintings, snuffbox lids. “Research rapture,” as the novelist Oakley Hall calls it, is an occupational hazard of the historical novelist, the overwhelming temptation to include everything you've learned and recorded on your three-by-five index cards, just because the learning was so much ­fun.

I discovered, for example, in a s house: “The truth was, Short couldn't be irritated long at anything French, not even the weather. From wig to calf the footman was beautifully dressed in Jefferson’s red livery, with gold buttons, gold epaulets, and even an inch of ­too-­expensive, dandified white lace at the collar and cuffs, but in place of shoes this sophisticated Gallic being had strapped on his feet . . . a pair of huge white soapy scrub brushes. He looked exactly as if he were standing in all his glory barefoot on two melting cakes of snow. Lace and epaulets aside, however, he was merely Jefferson’s official 

, the servant assigned to polish and wax the wooden floors, which, with inimitable French gaiety he did by putting on his brushes and gliding up and down the hallways, hands behind his back, like a skater on a pond.”

But there is another sense in which the writer of historical fiction wants to be realistic. Perhaps the single most interesting and suggestive fact I know about novels is this: When he was writing 

 Henry Fielding set a scene on November 28, 1745, not long after sunset, as, according to the novel, the full moon rose. Historical records show that there was indeed a full moon on November 28, 1745, and that it rose at just the time Fielding had it rise. In his biography of the novelist, Wilbur Cross confirms that “Fielding, in his aim to give an air of perfect reality to 

, actually consulted an almanac for his sun and moon.” This is an amazing thing to ­ponder—­why would Fielding go to so much trouble? What difference could it possibly make to a reader? Who but the most obsessive and meticulous scholar would ever ­know?

One answer may be that the ultimate goal of the novelist, any novelist, is not “creation” or “creativity,” as those words are so carelessly used. The goal is ­

—­imitation so complete and faithful to experience, so widely connected to the larger order of things, even of sun, moon, and stars, that imitation at its furthest point of accuracy passes over and becomes ­truth.

Another way to put this is to recall the expression often used in talking about historical novels: “They bring the past to life.” We don’t say that a writer such as John Updike “brings the present to life.” The contemporary novelist sees ordinary things, familiar to us all, and animates them with a figure of speech, a driving plot, a telling observation. The historical novelist tries to do this too, but, without familiar things at hand, reaches for some curious but concrete fact about the daily past, such as the 

in Jefferson’s Paris house, which is sometimes sufficient all by itself to surprise a lost time back to ­life.

But this phrase suggests something more profound and universal than a simple trick of craft or research in an almanac. It is worth thinking for a moment about why you want to bring the past back to life at all. Perhaps for the reason offered by Edmund Burke, that we have a moral duty to keep history warm and alive in our minds, to brood over it, because the past is an organic thing growing into us, or, to change the image, because it is the soil we are rooted ­in.

There are other reasons, of course. Henry James spoke of the mysterious, irresistible charm of what he called “the 

past,” which he regarded as the past of not more than a generation or two ago. Characteristically, voyeuristically, he likens this charm to peering over a wall into someone else’s garden. And he added that, for him, the Byronic era of 

 offered the perfect inviting balance of strangeness and intensity. Mark Twain, on the other hand, wrote historical novels such as 

 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court 

(1889) because he was so disgusted with the present that he could imagine nothing more delightful than to escape ­it.

If you incline, as I do, to the Burkean view, there is a beautiful poem by Richard Wilbur that perfectly exemplifies it. In “This Pleasing, Anxious Being,” he describes his family around the dinner table when he was a ­boy:

In no time you are back where safety was,

Good family faces drink the ­candlelight

Father has finished carving at the sideboard,

And Mother’s hand has touched a little bell,

So that, beside her chair, Roberta ­looms

With serving bowls of yams and ­succotash.

And then he asks the poignant question “When will they speak or stir?” He answers it himself: “They wait for you to recollect that,/While it lived, the past was a rushed present, fretful and unsure.”

—­love for what has been, what has gone, elegiac love for what cannot truly be brought back. And love requires, in the end, not plot, not research, not craft, but ­art.

Later in the poem Wilbur describes a painter, perched before his easel at the seashore, watching the waves come in and crash, one after the other, and imagines that the ­painter

Seeks out of all those waves to build a ­wave

That shall in blue summation break ­forever.

With my research in Paris at an end, I had to face the actual process of writing, long delayed, much dreaded. (I agree entirely with Red Smith’s observation that writing is a very easy thing to do—“You just sit in front of a sheet of paper while drops of blood form on your forehead.”) Yet before I could begin I had to deal with the single most important decision a novelist makes. It is a grammatical decision: In which person should I ­write?

The beginning novelist is always told to narrate in the first person, and it is undeniable that the first person has its ­attractions—­among them immediacy, ease, an automatic involvement of the reader. Most of my crime stories had been in the first person, the logical point of view when the detective is a kind of surrogate novelist, figuring out (in both senses) the plot. As a bonus, there is virtually no risk of writer’s block. I have yet to meet the writer who tires of saying “I.”

But the limitations of the first person are obvious in a long novel. You cannot range about, you cannot easily develop subplots, you open the door to monotony or tedium. Most historical novels are, in fact, written in the third ­person—­one might say the third-person “epic”—and from many points of view: a minimum, perhaps, of three, as in Gore Vidal’s

(1987), or as many as a dozen, in Thomas Flanagan’s 

 (1967). And this is because of that important first Homeric principle. If a novel tells the story of the tribe and the tribe is to be completely represented, you have to include the obscure and the downtrodden as well as the heroic. You need to have the old swineherd Eumaios there to greet Odysseus when he returns to Ithaka. You need Sally Hemings alongside the Master of ­Monticello.

For me, there was an additional reason to avoid the first person. I had agreed to write about Thomas Jefferson, a man whose life and ideas are known in such detail by millions of ­people—­and who is a personal hero to so many of ­them—­that it would be arrogant, not to say foolhardy, to try to write in his voice. How could I dare?

In the end, I couldn't. I adopted what I called a carousel of voices or points of view revolving around ­him—­those of his secretary, William Short; his lover, Maria Cosway; his slave and cook, James Hemings; his rival, the great ­one-­legged roué Gouverneur Morris. Whatever else they did in Paris, as the historical records showed, all of them were concerned with the same problem that had bothered me from the first: How are we to understand Jefferson’s elusive, enigmatic, contradictory personality? How do we get close to him and know ­him?

I telephoned Steve Rubin in New York to explain my plan. And I added that this method, with all its untidiness, had at least the virtue of being realistic, a historical novel faithful to the established facts. We would hear Jefferson’s voice in his own words, culled from his own s character I had found the form for my ­novel.

Then I picked up my pen and sat down to ­paint.

 a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Davis is the author of the historical novels 

. A version of this essay was delivered as the Bliss Carnochan lecture at Stanford University this spring. 

5543154356_7daa032665_o.jpg

Thomas Jefferson was an enigma to everyone he met. A century and a half after his death, one writer strives to understand, if not the man himself, then at least the world as it knew him. 

The Brief History of a Historical Novel

There is reason to believe that Herman Melville modeled his Captain Ahab after the perpetually furious, sublimely obsessive seventh president of the United States, Andrew ­Jackson.

It is an easy association to ­make—­Ahab, the man of “fixed purpose” and an “iron soul,” Jack­son the “Iron President,” as his con­temporaries called him, not only for his triumph over physical infirmities (he was probably the only presi­dent to endorse a patent medicine), but also for what one eulogist described, without irony, as his “amazing inflexibility of will.”

Ahab was stark, staring mad, of course, hurling defiance at the Almighty and the Whale, imagining the day his own head would turn slowly to solid metal, a “steel skull . . . that needs no helmet in the most ­brain-­battering fight.” In Jackson’s case, though plenty of his enemies thought him crazed and even insane, those closer to him suspected that underneath his ferocious glare and temper Old Hickory was a calculating politician, fully rational and in ­control.

Jon Meacham is something of a connoisseur of contradictions. A native of Tennessee who resides in New York City, a working journalist with a schol­arly bent, he has written extensively in ­

—­where he is the ­editor—­on the tension between faith and reason in American life. He is also the author of an elegant and sensitive study of the friendship between the cool, secretive Franklin Roosevelt and his mighty opposite, the warm, transparent Winston ­Churchill.

It is no surprise, then, that his book about An­drew Jackson’s years in the White House should stress the antithetical quality of Jackson’s personality. “Commanding, shrewd, intuitive yet not especially articulate, alternately bad-tempered and well-mannered,” Meacham writes in his prologue, Jackson “could seem savage, yet he moved in sophisticated circles with skill and grace.” More than one of his contemporaries had an experience like that of the New Orleans hostess who dreaded inviting the “wild man of the woods” for dinner, yet afterward found her guests breathless with admiration: “Is this your backwoodsman? He is a prince!”

He is a prince, Meacham makes clear, who began as a pauper. The first chapter of 

 provides a concise account of Jackson’s wretched early life in the Carolinas after his birth in 1767, beginning with the deaths of his parents and his two brothers and his cruel boyhood service against the British in the Revo­lution. A few more pages take up his move to Tennessee, his fiery courtship of Rachel Donelson (separated but not yet divorced from her first husband), his duels, his Indian wars, his glorious victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans in ­1815.

But Meacham is eager to get to the presi­dency and what he sees as Jackson’s permanent transformation of that office. After a journalist’s appreciative glance at the ­so-­called Corrupt Bargain of the 1824 election, when John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay apparently collaborated in secret to defeat the Tennessean, he begins his narrative proper with Jackson’s revenge on Adams and his triumphant election in ­1828.

If, as is sometimes said, Thomas Jefferson was the great theoretician of democracy, envisioning a smiling republic of sober, learned farmers like himself, Andrew Jackson, storming like a comet out of the west, was the great coarse, brawling, uns carriage was rolling sullenly north toward Boston, Jackson’s rampageous followers, in what Meacham calls a “legendary scene in American history,” were crowding by the hundreds into the president’s mansion for a chaotic victory celebration, quite literally trashing the White House. The “

,” wrote the horrified Jeffersonian Margaret Bayard Smith, “had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob of boys, negroes, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping” had taken its ­place.

Meacham is clearly fascinated and moved by what the French call the grand lines of ­history—­here the violent, torrential expansion of democracy in the early 19th century, the nearly apocalyptic clash of vision and social classes that would soon bring the Union to the brink of permanent dissolution. He has a gift for clarity and the telling quotation, and he does a wonderful job of breathing life into his long-silent actors. But first he must rehearse, like all students of Jackson’s administrations, that most curious of presidential scandals, the Eaton ­Affair.

Rachel Jackson died shortly before Jackson took office, driven to her grave, so he believed, by slander and gossip about her first marriage and divorce. When his secretary of war, John Eaton, married the former barmaid Margaret O’Neale, many in Washington, including Jackson’s own niece and nephew, thought that in the past Margaret had been (in the curious Victorian phrase) no better than she should be, and they treated her with a disruptive coolness. Jackson, however, saw only another slandered woman (“She is as chaste as a virgin!”), and official Washington quickly divided into Puritans and Cavaliers. Then, for more than two years the wheels of government rocked back and forth, so mired in rumor and ill will that some cabinet members and their wives refused to speak to each other. Hard as it is to picture now, social and political gatherings at the White House were ­conducted—­or ­dissolved—­in an atmosphere of paralyzing rectitude and disdain. In April 1831 all but one of Jackson’s cabinet resigned in frustration, and suddenly, as Martin Van Buren put it, “the Eaton malaria” was ­past.

From this point on, Meacham’s narrative builds in tension and speed. He is particularly good on the ominous battle between South and North over tariffs, a prelude to civil war marked by South Carolina’s shrill and repeated threats of secession. (South Carolina, the ­anti-­secessionist lawyer James Petigru once mused, was “too small for a republic, and too large for a lunatic asylum.”) He lays out with saintly clarity the intricacies of Jackson’s long populist struggle to reduce the power of the United States Bank and its president, Nicholas Biddle. And he writes with compassion and anger—and a baffled sense of ­paradox—­about Jackson’s decision to forcibly remove Cherokees and other Indians from their homes in the South to reservations west of the Mississippi, which resulted in the infamous “Trail of Tears”: Jackson “could be both unspeakably violent toward Indians and decidedly generous.” But Meacham comes very late to a discussion of Jackson’s chilling view of slavery, noting perhaps too judiciously that the president was “blinded by the prejudices of his age” (there was no shortage of abolitionist voices in Jackson’s America). In 1837, at age 69, unapologetic and as combative as ever, Jackson left the White House, to be succeeded by Van ­Buren.

Biographer Jon Meacham sums up Andrew Jackson's antithetical personality: "commanding, shrewd, intuitive yet not especially articulate, alternately bad-tempered and well-mannered."

As a running counterpoint to politics, Meacham draws an intimate picture of the ­ever-­shifting, ever-dramatic Jackson household, both in Washington and back in Tennessee. In particular, Jackson’s niece Emily Donelson, official hostess for many of his White House years, emerges as an utterly charming if ultimately tragic figure. A foreign diplomat compli­ments her dancing with undiplomatic condescension: “I can hardly realize you were educated in Tennessee.” To which, according to the story, Emily smoothly replies: “Count, you forget that grace is a cosmopolite, and like a wild flower is much oftener found in the woods than in the streets of a city.” She died of tuberculosis in Nashville in 1836 at the age of 29, with neither her husband nor her uncle ­present.

Few readers will disagree with Meacham’s central premise, familiar to scholars, that Jackson “expanded the powers of the presidency in ways that none of his six predecessors had.” He is thinking of Jackson’s bold use of the veto and his unblinking assertion that the president was elected by all the people, not just the states, and therefore had priority over ­Congress—­a clear reversal of the Founders’ ideas. He is also thinking of Jackson’s direct appeals to the people through newspapers (the “media” of 1828), his extensive and private circle of advisers known as the “Kitchen Cabinet,” his melodramatic and compelling ­personality.

A surprising number of Jacksonian issues are with us ­today—­the recklessness and arrogance of bankers, the rise of the evangelical Right—­but none more central and important than the expansion of presidential power year after year, and the parallel dwindling away of Congress to a series of transoms through which lobbyists submit their bids. Jack­son’s expansion of executive power was much admired by later presidents, particularly the two Roosevelts and Truman, and Meacham is surely right that most of it is irreversible. But though he tries to view this development calmly, even philo­sophically, the distance between iron will and tyranny is not easy to measure. “The Bank . . . is trying to kill me,” Jackson once cried out in rage, “

Apart from some material on the Donelson family, little here is new, but everything is so carefully and brilliantly set out for the general reader that Meacham’s book should now become the biography of choice. He concludes with Jackson’s retirement to Nashville and his late conversion to church membership just before his death in 1845. An epilogue on the famous equestrian statue of Jackson across from the White House offers a warm and reassuring image of the old hero as a strong-willed but loving father to his ­people.

Some readers will see the image differently, however. It is also possible to imagine from the evidence that Jackson’s character was less benign, founded on a dangerous core of anger that never went out and fueled by an inexhaustible ambition to dominate and control. If he was often com­pared by his contemporaries to Napoleon, it was not solely because of military ability. If he was like Ahab in his astonishing, mesmerizing energy and force of will, it is well to recall that in the end Ahab’s ship and all its men, save Ishmael, ­perished.

 Jackson (1997), Jefferson (1993), Grant (2000), 

 by Jon Meacham, Random House, 483 pp, 2009.

14940858604_e27302edb3_k.jpg

Max Byrd says that biographer Jon Meacham sums up Andrew Jackson's antithetical personality: "commanding, shrewd, intuitive yet not especially articulate, alternately bad-tempered and well-mannered."

Captain America

In the melancholy year 1882, Robert Louis Stevenson was 31 years old and in poor health. Though he had published by then, as he modestly said, “little books and little essays”—including 

 (1879), the immortal tale of his tour through central France—his burning ambition was to write and publish a novel. He had actually begun a great many novels, from the age of 15 on, but none were ever finished. They all seemed to go along for a while, he observed, then suddenly quit, “like a schoolboy’s watch.” Meanwhile, his essays and books earned him not quite £200 in a good year, which was far from enough to support a family. That summer, he and his wife were forced to go and live with Stevenson’s parents in the mountains above Pitlochry, Scotland.

Then his bad health drove him farther north, to a retreat at Braemar. And there, as an escape from the Highland rain, he passed a great deal of time indoors as friendly companion to a local schoolboy, home for the holidays, who had a passion, not for literature, but for watercolors. Some days the two of them would spend whole afternoons standing side by side painting together. Soon enough, doubtless in a fit of jealousy, the Muse of Fiction looked down and took a hand. “On one of these occasions,” Stevenson recorded in the most charming possible understatement, “I made the map of an island.” Few readers will need to be told what happened next. The shape of the map, he said, “took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance 

Stevenson is the only novelist I know of who was inspired by imaginary inlets and hills and harbors to begin a book. He wrote the story, as he cheerfully confessed, “up to the map. The map was the chief part of my plot.” But he is hardly the only novelist to have drawn a map of his fictional creation. William Faulkner drew at least two maps of Yoknapatawpha County, one for the first edition of 

 published in 1936, and a slightly different one 10 years later for 

. J. R. R. Tolkien sketched several maps of Middle Earth for 

 (1937); his son Christopher made the ones for the subsequent

 volumes. James Michener is said to have painted a map of the setting of each of his many novels. And if you had read Thomas Hardy’s 

 (1878) as a magazine serial first, then later picked up the three-volume novel version, you might have been surprised to find opposite the title page a very somber-appearing “Sketch Map of the Scene of the Story,” drawn by the very somber author himself.

Hardy may have had several reasons for adding the map. For one thing, he was proud of having observed a classical unity of place, confining the whole story to a single setting, the fictional Egdon Heath. For another, the novel itself concerns characters so psychologically disoriented and lost—adultery, mother-son estrangement, and two drownings figure in the plot—that he may have been projecting for the reader a kind of graphic key to its themes. But surely at bottom was the motive that underlies all such fictional maps: the drive for realism, verisimilitude, mimesis—the nearly perfect representation of reality that makes a fiction seem to be true.

We trust a map. It describes the known physical world, the most certain knowledge we have, and in such detail that we can easily check its accuracy. If a map sometimes reveals things we didn’t know—for example, that Italy, as seen from above, is the shape of a boot—that only increases its air of authority. Some part of our mind is probably always aware that the map is not the real thing itself, or even always truthful—certain Soviet maps used to omit from the city plan of Moscow the streets where the KGB was headquartered. But usually, staring with studious frown at the folded squares of paper or the colored grid on our dashboard screen, we assume the map to be an authentic, reliable guide to reality. And if you are making up a story that you want people to believe, even if just for a moment, you take all the reality you can get.

Something like this was certainly in Daniel Defoe’s mind when he included a map of the world in the fourth edition of 

 (it was published nine times in 1719), with dotted lines inked in by the novelist himself to show where Crusoe had voyaged. And a desire for verisimilitude undoubtedly led Jonathan Swift to include five quite plausible maps in 

 (1726), including one that tacked the fictitious land of Brobdingnag on to the actual coast of northern California. These are maps to persuade readers of what mere, unreliable text has already described: This story is true. It happened here.

Such authenticity, many novelists believe, is so important that it can be felt, like the submerged nine-tenths of an iceberg, even when it isn’t seen. Though there was no map in the finished book and no one was likely to check, James Joyce wrote the “Wandering Rocks” chapter of

, his friend Frank Budgen said, “with a map of Dublin open before him on which were traced in red ink the paths of the Earl of Dudley and Father Conmee. He calculated to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a given distance of the city.” Even so romantic and mythopoeic a novelist as Herman Melville tried to anchor his fiction in an invisible but not irrelevant reality: Using a naval sea-chart that showed the migratory patterns of the sperm whale in the Pacific, he worked out exactly when and where in his story Ahab and Moby-Dick might plausibly meet.

Now let me contradict myself. Deep down, we recognize that a map is not to be confused with reality. A map is not a mirror. Even where there is no intent to deceive, as there was in the Soviet maps of Moscow, every map ever drawn is incomplete, and incompletely truthful. On any map, some things must be included, and most things must be left out. The 

 of selection will vary, depending upon the purposes of the mapmaker—roads and towns will be shown for a gas station foldout, but not necessarily elevation or topography. Like novels, maps have points of view (literally “orientation”). Their details are selected for a particular effect or use, like the details a novelist chooses in describing, say, Crusoe’s island. Even purportedly truthful maps can be embellished with imaginary details. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, for example, maps often showed the location of Eden off to the east, or sea serpents, or fire-breathing dragons and a caption: “Here Be Monsters.” Robert Louis Stevenson understood instinctively that a map is a setting. A map is a fiction.

Fictional maps, like the one of Brobdingnag in Gulliver's Travels, are intended to persuade readers that a story is true. It happened here.

Indeed, when it is not a fiction, the result is so completely realistic as to be absurd, unimaginable. In the story “A Universal History of Infamy,” Jorge Luis Borges describes a map of the “Empire” that is constantly being revised and enlarged by a team of mapmakers for precision and accuracy. With each revision, it grows larger and yet more accurate, down to the least rock and tree and tuft of grass, until at last the map becomes precisely and exactly the size of the Empire itself.

To complicate the matter, we can add that quite often novels contain maps that are obviously not “real” maps at all and contribute nothing whatsoever to verisimilitude. This is true, for example, of that very large category of maps that appear in fantasy novels such as 

 (1968), depicting lands (sometimes drawn by the author, sometimes supplied by the publisher) that the reader knows from the start are perfectly nonexistent. Maps in many science-fiction novels likewise superimpose a fiction upon a fiction, or occasionally a fiction upon a reality—for his Red Planet stories, Edgar Rice Burroughs drew maps that showed cities and canals on Mars, and for Tarzan and Jane he located the land of Pal-ul-Don, with its striped lions and hairy-tailed men, in the present-day Republic of Zaire.

There is yet another category of unreal maps, more suggestive if less imaginative. The earliest map in a novel of which I am aware appears in Madeleine de Scudéry’s 10-volume romantic tale 

 (1654)—her “Carte de Tendre” (Map of Tenderness) shows, among many other topographical features, the Lake of Indifference, the River of Inclination, and the Dangerous Sea, which evidently borders the Unknown Land of Matrimony. This, one may object, is not really a map, but simply a diagram or a chart meant to help us understand the story—stripped of allegorical labels, it would resemble something like that staple of genteel detective novels, the bare schematic rooms in an English country house where Hercule Poirot has come to solve a crime.

But landscape and allegory have a strong affinity. In a different vein, many editions of 

 (1678) contain maps very like Scudéry’s chart. And these maps not only show the moral world of the story but also summarize its narrated action: In my own copy, Christian, the everyman protagonist, begins on the bottom far-right-hand side of one page at the City of Destruction and proceeds through Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond all the way to the Delectable Mountains and the Place of Deliverance, on the top of the facing page.

Carrying this idea to its logical extreme, there are maps that tell a story but do away with the written text altogether. They consist only of geographical features, names, and captions. An 1868 single-sheet evangelical handbill published in St. Louis, “Two Roads From the Cradle to Eternity,” has no more than a few exhortative quotations from Scripture and two diverging paths heading toward the “Sweet Fields of Everlasting Green” or, alas, the “Deep Gulf of Fire and Brimstone.” The quite wonderful 1908 “Gospel Temperance Map” has no quotations or exhortations at all, only railroad tracks that rise to the Beulah Land of Sobriety, or else drop like a stone through “Rum Jug Lake” and “Broken Home” in a pretty straight line toward “Suicide Tunnel.” Here, we may think, we have reached the ultimate point—two meanings of “plot” have simply folded into each other: The plot of ground or space where the story happens has become, without any intervening narrative words, the plot or action that is the very story itself. The map stands alone.

I have left two obvious questions for last. First, after he had finished his drawing of a map and stepped back to admire it, what exactly did Robert Louis Stevenson 

I don’t mean the question literally, for we have Stevenson’s testimony as to that:

As I paused upon my map of Treasure Island, the future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among the imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection. The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters.

And we have further amplification in the text of 

 itself, for the boy Jim Hawkins is clearly a version of Stevenson himself, and his thought processes are exactly like those of his author. In the story, as in real life, the map simply appears one day, full-blown, like Athena springing from Zeus’s head: Jim opens an old sea-chest—and there the island is, depicted complete “with latitude and longitude, sounds, names of hills, and bays, and inlets. . . . It was about nine miles long and five across, shaped, you might say, like a fat dragon standing up.” As Jim broods over the map, he too begins to populate it with men and creatures:

Sitting by the fire in the housekeeper’s room, I approached that island, in my fancy, from every possible direction; I explored every acre of its surface; I climbed a thousand times to that tall hill they call the Spyglass, and from the top enjoyed the most wonderful and changing prospects. Sometimes the isle was thick with savages with whom we fought; sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us.

There are doubtless a number of ways to understand how a map turns into a story. The novelist John Gardner, for example, observed that literature really has only two basic plots: someone goes on a journey, or (the other point of view) a stranger comes to town. In either case a map, seen or unseen, underlies the plot: the dotted lines over the ocean that lead Robinson Crusoe to his island, the labyrinthian tangles of London streets into which a wide-eyed young David Copperfield enters. In our mind’s eye, a map is a static space across which a story—my trip, your arrival—moves in time.

To put it another way, even more than nature itself, human nature abhors a vacuum. When we see a blank space, we give it a name such as Spyglass Hill or Victoria or Lake of Indifference, and the name suggests associations and meanings—that is why allegory and landscape have an affinity—and one way or another, we start writing a list of chapters. It may be a map of a real place or an imaginary one. What matters is that we cannot explain a map by a map. Almost at once, like Stevenson standing back from his drawing, we transform its spaces into something human, and everything human has a story.

The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer suggested that the categories by which we first organize our knowledge of the world are spatial—that is, whether things are close together or far apart, above or below each other. To this insight Jean Piaget and other students of psychology add that children in their development follow a clear progression in their early lives from spatial ideas such as proximity and distance to ideas of separation—one’s self separate from other shapes—then to mental images in which space is organized, visualized, represented.

It may be, however, that even in these theories the visual element in imaginative literature is still not sufficiently recognized. The very word “imagination” has at its core the idea of image. To imagine something is to compose a picture in one’s mind. Ford Madox Ford used to advise the novice to write as if the action of the novel were taking place directly in front of him or her, on a brightly lit stage. But most readers will recognize that this is also precisely what happens to us when we pick up a story. We see it take place before us, as if on a stage—or on a map.

The narrator Marlowe describes the effect in Joseph Conrad’s 

: “Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth.” I very much doubt that so careful a writer as Conrad was unaware of the irony of “losing oneself” in a map. (We also “lose ourselves” in a book.) Nor was he careless in dating the storyteller Marlowe’s passion for maps from childhood, for though children have no monopoly on making maps—or stories—there is surely a deep and powerful connection between a child’s imagination and the blank spaces of the earth.

Storytellers know there is a powerful connection between a child's imagination and the black space of the earth.

—the remarkable frequency with which children draw them or take pleasure in seeing them. The fascinating 

 (1973), by J. B. Post, a compilation of maps of imaginary places, gives perhaps a third of its pages over to island maps that appear in children’s books, a category that includes 

 (1874). Nor is this at all surprising. What a map of an island shows is really an entire world, set apart and comprehensible, reduced in size like the child’s world, but complete. We can take it in at a glance, from above, like a god. A child’s eye and imagination can control it.

This sense of control is all the more striking when we consider how the islands children draw and read about are linked to other microcosms they play with—model trains, miniature towns, dollhouses. A child’s sense of weakness and helplessness is overcome, for a moment at least, when he or she can maneuver powerful engines with one small hand or lift up a toy roof and rearrange the tiny world beneath it. Perhaps the most poignant of all maps of imaginary places was drawn by William Blake to illustrate the land of “Allestone,” an amazingly complete and complex world invented by a friend’s son named Thomas Williams Malkin, who died at the age of seven after a long and difficult illness and whose imagined country must have been an alternative and a compensation for the painful one he lived in. Surely he lost himself in it.

With that sad word “painful” we are back with Stevenson in the cold, wet Scottish Highlands, and my final question: Where did that map of Treasure Island come from in the first place? To answer, we need only remember that Stevenson was 31 years old, but forced by poverty to live again with his parents, like a child. That he was ill. And that he was spending his melancholy days inside, with a schoolboy, drawing pictures. His map came from the same deep source as Thomas Malkin’s Allestone—it represented an escape from that gray, dreary Scotland where he had regressed; it showed a world over which his imagination, at least, had power.

I cannot leave him there on that steep Freudian decline, however. 

 lies open on my desk to pages 66 and 67, which show one of the luminous and abiding images from my own childhood—the great map of Christopher Robin’s neighborhood that accompanies the episode “In Which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle.” It is a map of a world, complete and satisfactory as an island. It locates Christopher Robin’s House and Pooh Bear’s House, the “100 Aker Wood,” and even Eeyore grazing in his “Gloomy Place.” The feeling it gives is not one of control or escape or verisimilitude. The feeling it gives is joy—the same feeling that leaps off the page as Stevenson describes, not his retreat to childhood weakness and dependence, but his delight at having, so unexpectedly and freely, produced from his own mind a living place. Mimesis and creation are really only different sides of the same bright coin. I should not be at all surprised if, before beginning his six days’ work, the great Artist himself had first stood before his easel, smiling, and made a map.

Cover photo courtesy of Flickr/Enrique Flouret

7564213194_8736d15d38_b.jpg

Maps are not always works of dutiful representation — sometimes they are tickets to flights of the imagination.

This Is Not a Map

For many of Thomas Jefferson’s contemporaries, the greatest scandal of his life had nothing to do with Sally Hemings. It was his sudden and hasty—his enemies said cowardly—flight on horseback from Monticello on the morning of June 4, 1781, just as a squadron of invading British cavalrymen began to gallop up the little mountain toward his house.

The invading soldiers were led by Colonel Banastre Tarleton, a ladies’ man with a notoriously brutal streak. He and his men belonged to a much larger British army, commanded by Lord Cornwallis, that had been burning and pillaging Virginia for nearly six months. The capital, Richmond, lay in ashes. The state militia, almost without weapons and ammunition, had melted away, and the Virginia Assembly had retreated to Charlottesville. Jefferson, 38 years old, had just ended his second and final one-year term as governor, but his replacement had not yet been elected. To capture the governor—not to mention the author of the Declaration of Independence—would have been an enormous coup for the British, and by all accounts Tarleton’s men arrived at Jefferson’s doorstep with a great clatter of horses and sabers.

Twenty-first-century historians may lift their eyes and see on the horizon the faint white sails of Comte de Rochambeau’s French fleet, making south toward Yorktown, and off to the west the long, dark line of George Washington’s Continental Army marching to meet them and trap Cornwallis. But in early June of 1781, none of this was visible. When the shaken assembly met in Staunton a week later, it seemed to many that an irresponsible Jefferson had abandoned his post at Monticello in a time of desperate need. An angry resolution was adopted that “an inquiry be made into the conduct of the Executive of this State for the last 12 months.” Privately, there was much muttering about impeachment or censure. It was, says Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone, “the nadir of the entire public career of Thomas Jefferson.”

The outlines of this episode have long been familiar to historians. Now, marshaling the primary sources, Michael Kranish, a reporter for 

, has fashioned a brilliantly narrated account of the British invasion and Jefferson’s problematic response to it. If Kranish’s focus wobbles in the early chapters, where he devotes far too much time to a survey of pre-Revolutionary Virginia politics, he soon finds his center. From the moment the traitor Benedict Arnold swaggers onto the page, greedy, arrogant, helping to lead the British invasion, Kranish’s prose picks up speed and energy. It would be hard to improve on his novelistic images: When the whole assembly flees smoldering Richmond, Jefferson’s exhausted horse sinks under him on a country road, and the redheaded, bookish governor walks toward a nearby farm for help, “carrying his saddle and bridle on his shoulders.”

Here, as in the best novels, characters ultimately drive the plot. In the highly satisfying manner of early American history, the same dramatic and absorbing people converge on the same time and place. Confronting Arnold and Cornwallis, we have the humorless, ubiquitous Marquis de Lafayette and Baron von Steuben, the hero of Valley Forge (severely critical of Jefferson’s performance). On their heels come the great Washington, William Byrd III and his resourceful wife, Mary, the young James Madison, the still-younger James Monroe, even Daniel Boone, who makes a cameo appearance in the Charlottesville jail.

Yet on so crowded a stage, Jefferson still holds our eye. Stroke by stroke, a remarkable portrait emerges. There is the Jefferson quick to blame others when he fails to call up the militia in time. Jefferson the schemer, daringly plotting to kidnap Arnold out of the British camp. And Jefferson the hater, nursing a lifelong animosity toward Patrick Henry—the writer in him fascinated by Henry’s oratory, the politician envious and fearful. When he heard that Henry favored a tax in Virginia that would fund Christian denominations, Jefferson shockingly wrote to Madison, “What we have to do I think is devoutly pray for his death.”

A greater, nobler Jefferson also takes shape—a devoted husband and father, an executive capable of learning and changing, a firm and inspiring optimist. As for the Monticello raid, Kranish makes clear that Jefferson had no choice but to leave, and behaved reasonably, even bravely. Out of office, he reverted instinctively to the deepest part of his nature, scholar, not warrior, and consoled himself by beginning to write his one and only book,

. A year later, the Virginia Assembly found the charges against him baseless and offered the nearest thing to an apology. But the smear was impossible to erase. Twenty years later, in the presidential election of 1800, alongside charges of atheism and radicalism, Jefferson’s flight from Monticello would take its all-too-predictable place in the politics of mud and scandal.

, is president of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the author of 

 "Flight From Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War" 

by Michael Kranish, Oxford University Press, 2010. 

14600413092_93f15947a0_o.jpg

To many of Jefferson's contemporaries, his greatest scandal had nothing to do with Sally Hemings.

Man on the Run

Both inside and outside France, surely the most representative Frenchman of modern times is Charles de Gaulle, World War II hero and general, founding father, and first president of the Fifth Republic. With his magnificent Gallic horn of a nose, protruding like a great scalene triangle from beneath his brown kepi, he is a symbolic figure as recognizable as the Eiffel Tower, and almost as tall and inflexible. His very surname means “of Gaul,” and it links his identity firmly to the core national identity, that original semimythic Gaul of antiquity that Julius Caesar so neatly divided in 

It may come as a surprise, then, to recall that when de Gaulle was finally forced, partly by his own Gallic stubbornness, to leave the presidency in April 1969, he did not simply retreat from Paris to his family home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, in the heart of the Haut-Marne countryside. Most French people of a certain age will recall the very dramatic photographs snapped a few weeks later, among the last official ones ever taken of de Gaulle. They are in the customary black and white of newspaper photographs of that era, and they show him rigid and stiff backed as ever, hatless, dressed in a suit and dark overcoat, walking with a cane along a beach. A bleak gray ocean surf breaks off to his left, symbolic perhaps of his grim state of mind after his fall from power.

What most people will not remember is that the beach was near Heron Cove in West Cork, County Kerry, in the Republic of Ireland. And what almost nobody will remember is that, when asked, de Gaulle explained to a few straggling members of the press that he had come to Ireland in order to be near the cradle of his ancestors. De Gaulle himself was divided 

: That most representative and identifiable of modern Frenchmen was part Irish.

Part Irish! Franco-Hibernian! It is a notably unsettling fact—as if Sir Winston Spencer Churchill had revealed that he was really Italian. But the lineage is not in doubt. De Gaulle’s maternal great-grandmother bore the not-quite-Gallic name of Marie Angélique McCartan and was herself the descendant of one Patrick McCartan, who fled from Ireland to France in 1645, in self-imposed exile.

This McCartan was one of many Irish rebels of the mid-17th century who found their lands confiscated by the occupying English and who instinctively took refuge in France, the eternal enemy of perfidious Albion. In a second wave of exiles, after the victory of William of Orange in 1690, Patrick McCartan’s son John would join the famous Wild Geese of Ireland (

) who came to France, formed the Irish Brigade of the French Army, and settled more or less permanently into French life, though always with one murderous eye fixed on the conquerors across the Channel.

De Gaulle’s family history, however, belongs to a much greater pageant of immigration and split national identity. The Irish had been coming to France—to Paris in particular—well before 1645. And not all of the immigrants were soldiers. As is so often the case in European transplantations, there was a religious dimension.

In 1578, well in advance of the Wild Geese, Father John Lee, a priest from Waterford, Ireland, settled in a tiny building on the rue Saint-Thomas in the Latin Quarter of Paris. And there he welcomed six young Irishmen as students in what he rather grandly declared was the “Collège de Montaigu” in the University of Paris (the earliest “official” Irish outpost I know of in Paris). Like the McCartans, Lee and his six young men had fled their ancestral island because of English oppression, in their case a succession of brutal antipopery measures known as the Penal Laws, which had effectively shut down Catholic seminaries all over Ireland. The Irish church, defying the English, had sent priests like Father Lee all over the Continent to train new priests who could return, openly or not, to Ireland. There were similar enterprises in Lisbon, Prague, and Rome. Yet for whatever mysterious reasons of affinity and social chemistry, those other institutions failed to take deep root or else simply did not flourish. But the Irish in Paris were quite another story.

The Collège de Montaigu prospered so well that by 1677 a series of moves brought it, now as the Collège des Irlandais, to a spacious new setting, still in the Latin Quarter, on a pleasant, gently sloping street that would eventually become the rue des Irlandais. From here, the Irish priests and seminarians fanned out into Paris life like ducks on the Seine. They bought more and more property and rose to prestigious professorial chairs in the Sorbonne. With a cheerful disregard of the Sixth Commandment, they educated a great many young soldiers before they entered the Irish Brigade. When the Revolution came, the college’s buildings were briefly confiscated (a familiar Irish fate) and turned into a school for French boys—Napoleon’s brother Jerome studied there for a time. In 1790 students from the Irish College played a Christmas game of soccer on the Champs de Mars, using, with remarkably poor judgment, the new Altar of the Fatherland as a goal. When a scoring kick destroyed the Altar, angry French spectators would have lynched them, had not General Lafayette himself arrived with troops from the National Guard and a young orator named Patrick McKenna calmed the mob with an inspired paean to Ireland’s quest for 

The Irish in Paris maintained a certain recognizable, even stereotypical national identity.

Through it all, the Irish in Paris maintained a certain recognizable, even stereotypical, national identity. The 18th-century political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu dryly observed that the Irish students were so poor that they came to Paris bringing “nothing with them to meet the bare necessities of life, except a formidable talent for argument.” At the end of the century, in an otherwise bureaucratic report on a recalcitrant Irish-French soldier, the Revolutionary Committee of Public Safety paused to remark, with very English-like exasperation, that “republicanism does not easily penetrate into Irish heads.”

Yet argumentative and stubborn as they might be, during the latter 18th century these Irish priests and their students seemed everywhere, deeply woven into Parisian life. When the Bastille fell, there was an Irish prisoner in it, a Dubliner who had served in the Irish Brigade. The priest who ministered to its inmates, for 40 livres a month, was one Thomas MacMahon. And when the black day came, Louis XVI was given his last Communion by a cleric from the Irish College, Father Henry Edgeworth, who then accompanied the doomed king to the place de Grève and stood a few feet behind him on the platform, praying as the guillotine fell. Dr. Guillotin himself is thought to have taught briefly at the Irish College.

The question of who is French and who is not originated in a little known pre-Revolutionary law known as the 

, which can be translated roughly as the “law of windfall or good luck.” It grew out of the absolutist nature of the French monarchy in the Old Regime, and it simply stated that if a resident foreigner died on French soil, his money and property belonged thenceforth to the king. (Confiscation was not exclusively an English appetite.) The way around this was to become a naturalized citizen, but the process was long and expensive; of the tens of thousands of foreigners in France, only about 50 a year were naturalized before 1789.

The Revolution would eventually repeal the 

—not for nothing was the term “citizen” so resonant in those tumultuous years—but even earlier, beginning in 1684, the droit had beenwaived by royal decree for Irish priests and soldiers, because all of them were presumed to be Jacobites (supporters of James II and his descendants, longtime Catholic pretenders to the English throne). Throughout the 18th century, Irish merchants, the third great class of refugee immigrants, were also drawn to Paris in impressive numbers, especially in banking and the wine trade. They too were given waivers from the 

, not to mention numerous other concessions and benefits prompted by the reflexive financial support of the crown for all things anti-English. By the end of the century Paris had become, if not precisely a little Dublin, the de facto place of asylum for Irish patriots of every kind, one anchor of a great political and intellectual bridge that united two very different countries against a common enemy.

From this point on, it is astonishing how often Irish names begin to appear in the history of Paris. On my desk sits a densely printed book called 

Biographical Dictionary of Irishmen in France

, by Richard Hayes, which contains several hundred short biographies of Irish men and women who settled in and around the capital in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. (Outside Paris, their greatest concentration may have been in the wine country of Bordeaux.) In military matters, a thick and entertaining volume by the same writer, rather suggestively titled

, recounts the lives of six notable Irish generals who fought in the 

In politics, there is the famous Irish revolutionary Daniel O’Connell—“The Liberator”—who came to France as a schoolboy. O’Connell had a wide puritan streak in his makeup and was one of the rare Irishmen who did not take to the free and easy morals of Paris (“a proud but filthy city,” he called it). He left it for good on the same day that Louis XVI was guillotined, but his blazing passion had already made such an impression that many years later the great 19th-century chronicler of Parisian life Henri Balzac remarked, “I would like to have met three men only in this century: Napoleon, Cuvier, and O’Connell.” (O’Connell was the subject of a biography by Charles de Gaulle’sgrandmother, this time on his father’s side.)

Equally distinguished is the career of Patrice MacMahon, whose grandfather fled to France from Limerick in 1691 for the usual reasons. He would reach the rank of general in the Crimean War—and enter both French history and French literature with his immortal reply to the commander at Sebastopol who advised him to retreat: “

” (“Here I am. Here I stay.”) For a later victory, in Italy, MacMahon was named Duke of Magenta. And in 1873 he moved into the Hotel de Matignon on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, as president of France. He would hold the office for the next six years. Today, you can stroll from the Arc de Triomphe up the broad and elegant avenue MacMahon, stop in a pub, and raise a glass of Hennessy cognac (Richard Hennessy, royal patent 1765) in his honor.

Not only generals and politicians have represented the Irish in Paris over the past two centuries. Long before the American “Lost Generation” of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s, Irish bohemians and artists cleared a Parisian space for themselves. The great-grandmother of such bohemians, one might say—were she not the subject of one of the most erotic paintings in all of French art—was a spectacular royal courtesan named Marie-Louise O’Murphy, commonly known as La Petite Morphil. Born in 1737, she was the fifth daughter of an Irish cobbler in Rouen. At the age of 14 or 15 she became a dancer in the Opéra in Paris, where Casanova spotted her and introduced her to the painter François Boucher. Boucher thereupon painted her lying on her stomach, legs spread wide in invitation, ripe as an apple. Casanova is said to have left the painting, as a calling card, in a place where Louis XV would happen upon it. He did, and for two years La Petite Morphil held a special place in the king’s favor, until she spoiled things by trying to displace Louis’ official mistress and one of the great sexual generals of all time, Madame de Pompadour (who might also have remarked, “

More memorable still are the three great modern Anglo-Irish writers who, though astonishingly different from one another, each sought out Paris at an early age and made it their home. The first, Oscar Wilde, followed a classic trajectory and came to Paris shortly after leaving Oxford—“For Irishmen,” remarks Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann, “Oxford is to the mind what Paris is to the body”—and there Wilde was to live, on and off, for the rest of his life. He spent his honeymoon in the Hotel Wagram in a room overlooking the Tuileries Gardens. In sad and ironic symmetry, he returned to Paris for good after his scandalous affair with Lord Douglas and died in another hotel, the Alsace, in 1900, at the age of 46. He lies buried in the cemetery Père Lachaise.

The allure of Paris for Wilde—and for James Joyce and Samuel Beckett afterward—was not only its sensuality. Their instinctual Irish distrust of England was never far below the surface. To them, Paris was the most civilized possible place of exile, one that—unlike certain other cities—properly valued art and artists and gave them both freedom and 

. Or to put it another way, when else have three such splendid writers felt such repulsion from their natural literary magnet? Paris was not London—Paris was the very opposite of London. “He came to Paris to stay a week,” Ellmann writes of Joyce, “and remained for 20 years.” “I am not English,” Wilde liked to say. “I am Irish, which is quite another thing.”

Beyond these writers’ heavy-lidded, frowning distrust of the English nation lies something else: their deeply conflicted attitude toward the English language, which was at once their glorious inheritance, burden, and spur. One of the indisputable masters of our tongue, Wilde nonetheless insisted that there were only two languages in the world worth learning, French and Greek. Like Beckett, he wrote almost as often in French as English. And he once described himself with a complex irony that both Beckett and Joyce would have understood: “

Français de sympathie, je suis Irlandais de race, et les Anglais m’ont condamné à parler le langage de Shakespeare

.” (“French by sympathy, I am Irish by race, and the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare.”)

The Irish are still in Paris, a boisterous, prosperous, fully accepted presence. There may be between 10,000 and 15,000 permanent residents, according to the Irish Embassy. The casual tourist is struck by their voices on the streets and by the number of Irish pubs scattered throughout the city. Father Lee’s ancient college on the rue des Irlandais sits just a few blocks southeast of the Pantheon and serves now as the Irish Cultural Center, with a busy “multimedia center,” a chapel, and a large dormitory for students. A reader who runs his eye down the pages of the Paris equivalent of the social register will still pause in surprise at names such as O’Gorman and MacCarthy. (My own French teacher on an early visit was a native Parisian named Alice Mahoney.)

Why this should be remains a mystery, to me at least. Beyond religion and a certain Celtic admixture, do the Irish and French share something else? The same sensual and tragic view of life? Does the Irish gift for language—no small part of de Gaulle’s inheritance—fit them especially well for the passionate and lyric power of French at its best? Or is it perhaps simply no great surprise that, with the help of a common enemy, the two most talkative and argumentative races in Europe should find each other so compatible?