USA > New York > New York City > History of New York city from the discovery to the present day, V. 2 > Part 5
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escaped only to be proscribed and hunted down like wolves. Auguste de Singeron made his way to L'Orient, took passage to the United States, and landed at New York without a penny in his pocket. His whole inven- tory consisted of a cocked hat, a rusty suit of black, a cane, a small-sword, a white pocket-handkerchief, and shirts, if I am justified in speaking of them in the plural, the exact number of which cannot now be known, as he never chose to reveal it, but looked as if they had never been brought acquainted with the nymphs of the fountains. He at first betook himself to the usual expedient of teaching French for a livelihood; but it would not do. He lost all patience at correcting, for the twentieth time, the same blunder in the same pupil; he showed no mercy to an indelicate coupling of different genders; and fell upon a false tense with as much impetuosity as he had once rushed upon the battery of an enemy. But if he got into a passion sud- denly, he got out of it as soon. His starts of irritation were succeeded by most vehement fits of politeness ; he poured forth apologies with so much volubility, and so many bows, and pressed his explanation with so much earnestness and vigor, and such unintelligible precipita- tion, that his pupils became giddy with the noise, and, at the end of his lesson, were more perplexed than ever. In short, to apply the boast of a celebrated modern instructor, his disciples were so well satisfied with their progress, that they declined taking lessons a second quarter, and the poor Frenchman was obliged to think of some other way of getting a living. But what should it be ? He had no capital, and scarcely any friends. Should he become a bar- ber, a shoe-black, a cook, a fencing-master, a dentist, or a dancing-master ? Either of these occupations was better than to, beg, to starve, or to steal, and the French nobility have figured in them all. The flexibility of the national character adapts itself in mature age to any situation in
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life with the same ease that people of other nations accommodate themselves to that in which they were born. French marquises have sweltered in the kitchens of Eng- lish private gentlemen, in greasy caps and aprons ; French counts have given the polish to the nether extremities of the stately dons of Madrid ; and French dukes have taken German ones by the nose. The graceful courtiers, who led down the dance the high-born dames of France, have exhausted themselves in the vain effort to teach Yorkshire- men to shuffle cotillions ; the officers of his Most Christian Majesty's household have drawn teeth for cockneys; and the chevaliers of the Order of St. Louis have given lessons in the use of the broadsword to men who afterward figured as Yankee corporals. In the midst of his perplexity, a mere accident determined the future career of Monsieur de Singeron. He had politely undertaken to assist in the manufacture of some molasses-candy for a little boy, the son of his host; and, after a process attended with some vexations, during which the lad thought, two or three times, that his French acquaintance would swallow him alive, he produced the article in such delicious and melt- ing perfection, that his fame was quickly spread abroad among the boys of the neighborhood as an artist of incom- parable merit. He took the hint, got his landlord to assist him with a small credit, turned pastry-cook and confectioner, set up at first in a small way, enlarged his business as he got customers, and finally took a handsome shop in the street I have mentioned. The French have as great a talent for comfits as for compliments; and the genius that shines in the invention of an agreeable flat- tery displays itself to no less advantage in the manufac- ture of a sugar-plum. Auguste Louis de Singeron was no vulgar imitator of his clumsy English and Dutch brethren in the art. I speak not of the splendor of his crystallizations, of the brilliant frost-work of his plum-
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cakes, nor of the tempting arrangement he knew how to give to his whole stock of wares, though these were admi- rable. But the gilt gingerbread I used to buy of him- instead of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba-was graced with the stately figures of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; the queen standing bolt-upright-as became the conqueror of hearts and the mistress of the finest king- dom in the world-and the monarch holding her hand, with a delicate inclination of his royal body, as if acknowledging the empire of beauty. He, I believe, first introduced the practice of stamping the New-year's cake with figures of Cupids among roses, and hearts transfixed by an arrow in honor of la belle passion. His marchpane bore an impress of the facade of the Tuileries, with its pilasters, columns, and carvings; and his blanc-mange was adorned with a bas-relief of warriors in bag-wigs and cocked hats, tilting fiercely at each other on its quivering and glancing surface.
" I shall never forget the courtly and high-bred civility with which M. de Singeron used to welcome me to his shop, and bow me out of it. I have since seen the nobles of the court of Marie Antoinette, and was no longer at a loss to account for the graceful manners of my old friend, the confectioner. It was not, however, quite safe to pre- sume too much upon his forbearance, for he knew no medium between the most violent irritation and the most florid politeness. He had no patience with these people who stood in his door on a keen windy day, and would neither come in nor go out. They always got from him a hearty curse in French, followed, as soon as he could recollect himself, by something civil in English. 'Peste soit de la bete,' he used to say, 'fermez don't la-I beg pardon, sare, but if you vill shut de door, you shall merit my eternal gratitude !' The fellows who went about the streets cry- ing ' good oysters,' and ' fine Rockaway clams,' avoided his ill-omened door in the winter months, taught by bitter
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experience, and sundry ungracious and unexpected raps on the knuckles. He at first tried the plan of making them come in, shut the door, and deliver their errand, and then sending them about their business. This not suc- ceeding, he tried the shining old lignum-vitæ cane, with which he used to promenade in the gardens of the Tuileries, and with much better effect. On one occasion, however, he happened to bestow it rather rudely upon the nasal organ of a sailor. The fellow's proboscis was originally of most unnatural and portentous dimensions ; it swelled terribly from the effect of the blow ; and, meeting with a pettifog- ger, who told him it was a good case for damages, he brought an action against the confectioner. Monsieur de Singeron in vain offered an apology and a plaster of bank- notes ; the sailor was inexorable, and insisted on produc- ing his injured member before the seat of justice. He did so, but unluckily the effect on the jury was rather ludi- crous than pathetic, and the impression it made was against the plaintiff, who got only ten shillings by his suit. M. de Singeron thought it was not enough, and gave the fellow a five-dollar note besides, which he had the meanness to accept, though I believe he blushed as he did it.
" Monsieur de Singeron afterward sold cakes and con- fectionery in William Street, and then in Broadway, and finally was one of that joyful troop of returning exiles that flocked back to France on the restoration of the Bourbons. He was provided for by being made a colonel of cuiras- siers, and in the decline of his life his gallant and courte- ous spirit was no longer obliged to struggle with the hardships and scorns of poverty. I have lately heard, though indirectly, so that I cannot vouch for the fact, that he has been promoted to be one of the marshals of France.
" There was another Frenchman of distinction, also of the old school of French manners, but less fortunate than
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Monsieur de Singeron, and who used daily to take his soli- tary walk through Broadway. I allude to Admiral Pierre de Landais, a cadet of the family of a younger son of the youngest branch of one of the oldest, proudest, and poor- est families in Normandy. He had regularly studied in the École de la Marine, and was thoroughly instructed in the mathematical theories of sailing and building a ship, although, like the rest of his countrymen, he always found some unexpected difficulty in applying his theory to prac- tice. For a Frenchman, however, he was a good sailor ; but, in consequence of his grandfather having exhausted his patrimony in a splendid exhibition of fire-works for the entertainment of Madame de Pompadour, he had nei- ther interest at court nor money to purchase court favor. He was therefore kept in the situation of an aspirant, or midshipman, until he was thirty-two years old, and was kept, I know not how many years more, in the humble rank of sous-lieutenant. He served his country faithfully, and with great good-will, until, in the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI, a page of the mistress of the Count de Vergennes came down to Cherbourg to be his captain. While he was boiling with indignation at this affront, the war between England and America broke out, and he seized that opportunity to enter the service of the United States. There he at once rose to the command of a fine frigate, and the title of admiral. Soon afterward came the brilliant affair of the Serapis and the Bon Homme Rich- ard, in which Paul Jones, by his impetuous and undisci- plined gallantry, earned the reputation of a hero, and poor Landais, by a too scrupulous attention to the theory of naval science, incurred that of a coward. I believe that naval authority is against me; but I venture to assert, wieo periculo, and on the authority of one of my uncles, who was in that action as a lieutenant to Paul Jones, that Landais erred, not through any defeet of bravery, but
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merely from his desire to approach his enemy scientific- ally, by bearing down upon the hypotenuse of the precise right-angled triangle prescribed in the thirty-seventh 'ma- nœuvre' of his old text-book.
" The naval committee of Congress, unfortunately, understood neither mathematics nor French; they could not comprehend Landais' explanation, and he was thrown out of service. After his disgrace, he constantly resided in the city of New York, except that he always made a biennial visit to the seat of Government, whether at Phil- adelphia or at Washington, to present a memorial respect- ing the injustice done him, and to claim restitution to his rank and the arrears of his pay. An unexpected dividend of prize-money, earned at the beginning of the Revolution- ary War, and paid in 1790, gave him an annuity of one hundred and four dollars, or rather, as I think, a hundred and five; for I remember his telling me that he had two dollars a week on which to subsist, and an odd dollar for charity at the end of the year.
" Although Congress, under the new Constitution, con- tinued as obdurate and as impenetrable to explanation as they were in the time of the Confederation, the admiral kept up to the last the habits and exterior of a gentleman. His linen, though not very fine, nor probably very whole, was always clean; his coat threadbare, but scrupulously brushed; and, for occasions of ceremonious visiting, he had a pair of paste knee-buckles and faded yellow silk stockings with red clocks. He wore the American cock- ade to the last ; and on the Fourth of July, the Day of St. Louis, and the anniversary of the day on which the Brit- ish troops evacuated the city of New York, he periodically mounted his old Continental navy uniform, although its big brass buttons had lost their splendor, and the skirts of
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the coat, which wrapped his shrunken person like a cloak, touched his heels in walking, while the sleeves, by some contradictory process, had receded several inches from the wrists. He subsisted with the utmost independence on his scanty income, refusing all presents, even the most trifling ; and when my naval uncle, on one occasion, sent him a dozen of Newark cider, as a small mark of his rec- ollection of certain hospitalities at the admiral's table when in command, while he himself was but a poor lieu- tenant, Landais peremptorily refused them, as a- present he could not receive, because it was not in his power to reciprocate.
" He was a man of the most punctilious and chivalric honor, and at the same time full of that instinctive kind- ness of heart and that nice sense of propriety which shrink from doing a rude thing to anybody on any occasion. Even when he met his bitterest enemy, as he did, shortly after he came to New York, the man whose accusation had destroyed his reputation and blighted his prospects, whose injuries he had for years brooded over, and whom he determined to insult and punish whenever he fell in with him, he could not bring himself to offer him an insult unbecoming a gentleman, but, deliberately spitting on the pavement, desired his adversary to con- sider that pavement as his own face, and to proceed accordingly.
" Thus, in proud, solitary, and honorable poverty, lived Pierre de Landais for some forty years, until, to use the language of his own epitaph, in the eighty-seventh year of his age, he : disappeared' from life. As he left no property behind him, and had no relations and scarcely any acqaintances in the country, it has always been a mat- ter of mystery to me who erected his monument-a plain white marble slab, which stands in the church-yard of St.
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Patrick's Cathedral, in New York, and on which is read the following characteristic inscription :
À LA MÉMOIRE de PIERRE DE LANDAIS, ANCIEN CONTRE-AMIRAL, au service DES ÉTATS-UNIS,
Qui Disparut Juin 1818, Agé 87 ans.
" Who would suppose that the exploded science of alchemy had ever its professors in the United States, where the easy transmutation of the soil of the wilderness into rich possessions renders unnecessary the art of con- verting dross into gold ? Yet such is the fact. Every- body who has been a frequent walker of Broadway, in any or all of the forty years preceding the last five, must recollect often meeting a man whom at first he might not have particularly noticed, but whose constant appearance in the same part of the street at the same hour of the day, and the peculiarities of whose dress and person, must at length have compelled attention. He was a plump- looking man, somewhat under the middle size, with well- spread shoulders, a large chest, a fair, fresh complexion, a clear but dreamy eye, and a short, quick stride, and had altogether the signs of that fullness of habit which arises from regular exercise and a good appetite, while a certain ascetic expression of countenance at once forbade the idea that it owed anything to festivity or good cheer. His
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age, which never appeared to vary, might, from his looks, be estimated at five years, on the one side or other, of fifty. His dress was that of an old-fashioned, respectable citizen, educated before the age of suspenders, pantaloons, and boots, and who had never been persuaded to counte- nance those innovations of modern effeminacy. Notwith- standing its obsolete cut, it showed no signs of poverty, except, perhaps, to those, and those only, who occasionally met him sweltering, with a laudable contempt for the weather, in a full suit of thick Prussian blue, or Dutch black broadcloth, in a hot August day ; or striding through a snow-storm in nankeen breeches and white cotton stock- ings in December. His name was Jan Max-Lichenstein ; he was a Pomeranian by birth, who, early in life, going to Amsterdam to seek his fortune, became employed as a clerk in the great Dutch banking and commercial house of Hope & Co., where he proved himself a good accountant, and rendered himself useful in their German and Swedish correspondence.
" Afterward, by some accident or other, he found him- self an adventurer at St. Petersburg. What led him to that city I cannot say; I have never heard it accounted for among his acquaintances in this city ; at Amsterdam I forgot to inquire, and St. Petersburg I have never visited. But thither he went; and, having the good fortune to become known to Prince Potemkin, received an employ- ment in his household, and finally came to be intrusted with the management of his finances. The prince, as everybody knows, like many others who have millions to dispose of, had constantly occasion for millions more ; and, as everybody also ought to know who knows anything of his private history, when his funds were so reduced that he had nothing left but a few millions of acres and a few thousand serfs, took most furiously to gambling and alchemy. These liberal employments were divided be-
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tween him and his treasurer. The prince rattled the dice-box in the gilded saloons of Tzarzko Zelo; and the Pomeranian, in spite of his remonstrances and his own better judgment, was set to compounding the alkahest, or universal menstruum, in the vaults under the north wing of Potemkin's winter palace. We soon get attached to the studies in which we are obliged to employ ourselves, and Lichenstein gradually found his incredulity yielding, and a strange interest stealing over him, as he read the books, and sweltered and watched over the operations of alchemy. The result was, that at length he became a believer in the mysteries of imbibition, solution, ablution, sublimation, cohabation, calcination, ceration, and fixation, and all the martyrizations of metals, with the sublime influences of the Trine Circle of the Seven Spheres.
" Lichenstein, however, with all his diligence and increase of faith, could neither coin gold nor get it out of the prince's tenants in such quantities as it was wanted, and he was now destined to learn how much the favor of the great depends upon the state of their stomachs. One morning Potemkin, after a run of bad luck, plenty of good champagne, a sleepless night, and an indigestible breakfast of raw turnips and quass, called upon him for an extraor- dinary sum, and, not finding it easily furnished, flew into a passion and discharged him on the spot. As the prince never paid any debts but those of honor, Lichenstein knew that it would be in vain to ask for his salary, and walked into the streets without a penny in his pocket. The late Chief-Justice Dana, of Massachusetts, then our Minister at the Court of St. Petersburg, was about to return to America . Lichenstein had heard the most flattering accounts of the prospects held oat in the United States to active and intelligent adventurers from the Old World and readily believed all he heard, which, for a believer in alchemy, was no great stretch of credulity. He had some
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little acquaintance with the American Minister, in conse- quence of once or twice negotiating for him small bills on the bankers of the United States at Amsterdam. He threw himself upon his generosity, and requested a passage to this country-a favor which was readily granted. Here he was fortunate enough, almost immediately on his ar- rival, to be employed in the first mercantile house in New York, to answer their Dutch, German, and Northern cor- respondence, with a salary which, though not half so large as that allowed by Prince Potemkin, he liked twice as well, because it was regularly paid. He had scarcely become well settled in New York, when his old dream of alchemy returned upon him. He carefully hoarded his earnings until he was enabled to purchase, at a cheap rate, a small tenement in Wall Street, where he erected a fur- nace with a triple chimney, and renewed his search of the arcanum magnum. Every day, in the morning, he was occupied for two hours in the counting-room ; then he was seen walking in Broadway; then he shut himself in his laboratory until the dusk of the evening, when he issued forth to resume his solitary walk.
" Year after year passed in this manner. Wall Street, in the meantime, was changing its inhabitants ; its burgh- ers gave way to banks and brokers; the city extended its limits, and the streets became thronged with increasing multitudes-circumstances of which the alchemist took no note, except that he could not help observing that he was obliged to take a longer walk than formerly to get into the country, and that the rows of lamps on each side of Broadway seemed to have lengthened wonderfully toward the north; but whether this was owing to the advance of old age, which made his walk more fatiguing, or to some other unknown cause, was a problem which I believe he never fully solved to his own satisfaction.
" Still, the secret of making gold seemed as distant as
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ever, until it presented itself to him in an unexpected shape. His lot in Wall Street, which measured twenty eight feet in front and eighty-seven in depth, and for which he had paid three hundred and fifty pounds in New York currency, had become a desirable site for a newly-char- tered banking company. One day Lichenstein was called by the president of this company from his furnace, as he was pouring rectified water on the salt of Mercury. He felt somewhat crusty at the interruption, as he hoped, by reverberating the ingredients in an athanor, to set the liquor of Mars in circulation ; but when this person had opened to him his errand, and offered him twenty-five thousand dollars for the purchase of his lot, his ill-humor was converted into surprise. Had he been offered five thousand, he would have accepted it immediately ; but twenty-five thousand ! the amount startled him. He took time to consider of the proposition, and the next morning was offered thirty thousand by a rival company. He must think of this also, and before night he sold to the first company for thirty-three thousand. He was now pos- sessed of a competency ; he quitted his old vocation of clerk, abandoned his old walk in Broadway, and, like Ad- miral Landais, 'disappeared,' but not, I believe, like him, to another life. I have heard that his furnace has again been seen smoking behind a comfortable German stone house in the comfortable borough of Easton-a residence which he chose, not merely on account of its cheapness of living, nor its picturesque situation, but chiefly, I believe, for its neighborhood to Bethlehem, where dwelt a Mora- vian friend of his, attached to the same mysterious studies, and for its nearness to the inexhaustible coal-mines of Lehigh.
"" As I write, my recollections of the past, both ludi- crous and melancholy, crowd upon me. I might amusc my readers with a history of the 'Doctors' Mob,' which
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happened some forty years ago, when the multitude, indig- nant with the physicians and surgeons for having, as was supposed, violated the repose of the dead, besieged them in their dwellings, with an intention to inflict justice upon them according to their own summary notions, obliging them to slip out at windows, creep behind beer-barrels, crawl up chimneys, and get beneath feather-beds ; and when the grave gentlemen of the healing art were fed in dark places, like hunted rebels or persecuted prophets, for three days and three nights. I might give my readers a peep into the little dark room in Pine Street, where Brown used to frame his gloomy and interesting fictions without any aid from the picturesque, and entangle his heroes in one difficulty after another, without knowing how he should extricate them. I might show residing in that part of Pearl Street now enlarged into Hanover Square, but then a dark and narrow passage, the famous General Moreau, who, when told that the street was not fashiona- ble, replied that he 'lived in de house, and not in de street '-a conceited grammarian, talking absurdly of that science, and magnifying his supposed discovery of three thousand new adverbs, but otherwise gentlemanly, intelli- gent, and agreeable, and fortunate in his beautiful and accomplished wife. When I spoke of great men, I might touch upon the tragic and untimely end of one of our greatest-Hamilton-brought over from the fatal spot where he fell to expire in the hospitable mansion of Mr. Bayard, on the green shore of the Hudson. I well recol- lect the day of his death, a fine day in July; and the bright sunshine, the smiling beauty of the spot, the cheer- ful sound of birds and rustling boughs, and the twinkling waters of the river, contrasted strangely and unnaturally ·with the horror-struck countenances and death-like silence of the great multitude that gathered round the dwelling. I will not attempt to describe the scene.
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