Free 1876 by Gore Vidal

able to hold his head up or keep his eyes open. It is maniacal.”
    “Is there so much to do at Albany?”
    “Not so much that he couldn’t get others to do most of what he now does, which is to study every line of every bill as if it were—” Bigelow stopped again; plainly fearful that he had told me too much about his chief.
    I was as reassuring as I could be. “But that is his nature. That is how he became a successful lawyer.”
    Bigelow took the plunge; told all. “The point is that he’s sixty-one, and his health has never been good. Even as a young man when we first knew him ...”
    “You knew him then. I didn’t.”
    “Well, he has a tremor of the hands—”
    “Who does not—at our age?”
    “Cannot digest most food. Constant dyspepsia. Spells of weakness, of costiveness. All made worse by overwork. You know that we’re supposed to be working together on his address to the legislature in January. Well, he is writing it all ...”
    “But does he do it well?”
    “Well enough.”
    “Better too much zeal than what we have been accustomed to in high office.”
    “But can he live through a presidential campaign?”
    “Power is, they say, a supreme tonic. He intends to run?”
    After a moment’s hesitation, Bigelow nodded. “But I have said nothing to you, Charlie.”
    “Of course not.” I gave him the packet that I had brought with me. “I know that you are his principal adviser in foreign affairs, but he did write me, some months ago, asking my views on our relations with France, Italy, England.” I did not mention Germany, since Bigelow is a devotee of all things Prussian and I am not.
    “That’s good of you. Very good of you. I’ll take them with me to Albany tomorrow.”
    I asked when the Governor would be back in the city.
    “He’ll certainly be here for Christmas. You know, his house is just there. At Number Fifteen.” Bigelow’s gesture seemed to take in all Gramercy Park. “I’ll let you know. He’ll want to see you, to thank you himself.”
    “I’d like to do whatever I can to ensure his election. I told him as much when we met at Geneva.”
    I think Bigelow and I have reached an understanding, and like most understandings between politicians it was not expressed in words.
    If I do my part, provide information, work to explore the corruption of General Grant and whoever is chosen to succeed him as leader of the Republican party, then I will get my heart’s desire—which Bigelow has known, since he himself achieved it ten years ago—the legation at Paris. I can think of no better way of spending my last years than as minister to the country where I have lived so happily for more than a third of a century.
    We spoke wistfully of Paris. I recalled the party that Bigelow gave to celebrate the Fourth of July, some three months after the murder of President Lincoln. Although my wife and I seldom saw much of my fellow countrymen at Paris, we pitched in as best we could, hiring the Pr é Catalan restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne.
    Every American in the city was invited—some five hundred men, women and children. It was a splendid evening with music and dancing, a wizard for the children, “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the patriotic, followed by fireworks as only the French can contrive them. Our fête ended with a sky-filling American eagle (looking suspiciously like the Napoleonic bird) and the legend “The Union Now and Forever, One and Inseparable.”
    “What a marvellous day!” Bigelow was misty-eyed. “Thanks to you and Emma. Mrs. Bigelow will be calling on her soon. But such a sad time, too, with President Lincoln dead and ...” He stopped. Two weeks after the f ê te in the Bois de Boulogne, his young son Ernest died of fever.
    It was time for me to go. At the front door Bigelow helped me into my overcoat.
    “What ... who are the Apgars?” I asked.
    Bigelow was noncommittal. “There are a great many of them in the city. Loyal Republicans. Mostly