Truth to say, Schurz never wholly adjusted himself to political
conditions in the United States. He once said to me in one of the
querulous moods that sometimes overcame him: “If I should live a
hundred years my enemies would still call me a—Dutchman!”
It was Schurz, as I have said, who brought Lamar and me together. The
Mississippian had been a Secession Member of Congress when I was a
Unionist scribe in the reporters’ gallery. I was a furious partisan in
those days and disliked the Secessionists intensely. Of them, Lamar was
most aggressive. I later learned that he was very many-sided and
accomplished, the most interesting and lovable of men. He and Schurz
“froze together,” as, brought together by Schurz, he and I “froze
together.” On one side he was a sentimentalist and on the other a
philosopher, but on all sides a fighter.
They called him a dreamer. He sprang from a race of chevaliers and
scholars. Oddly enough, albeit in his moods a recluse, he was a man of
the world; a favorite in society; very much at home in European courts,
especially in that of England; the friend of Thackeray, at whose house,
when in London, he made his abode. Lady Ritchie—Anne Thackeray—told me
many amusing stories of his whimsies. He was a man among brainy men and
a lion among clever women.
We had already come to be good friends and constant comrades when the
whirligig of time threw us together for a little while in the lower
house of Congress. One day he beckoned me over to his seat. He was
leaning backward with his hands crossed behind his head.
As I stood in front of him he said: “On the eighth of February, 1858,
Mrs. Gwin, of California, gave a fancy dress ball. Mr. Lamar, of
Mississippi, a member of Congress, was there. Also a glorious young
woman—a vision of beauty and grace—with whom the handsome and
distinguished young statesman danced—danced once, twice, thrice, taking
her likewise down to supper. He went to bed, turned his face to the
wall and dreamed of her. That was twenty years ago. To-day this same
Mr. Lamar, after an obscure interregnum, was with Mrs. Lamar looking
over Washington for an apartment. In quest of cheap lodging they came
to a mean house in a mean quarter, where a poor, wizened, ill-clad
woman showed them through the meanly furnished rooms. Of course they
would not suffice.
“As they were coming away the great Mr. Lamar said to the poor
landlady, ‘Madam, have you lived long in Washington?’ She said all her
life. ‘Madam,’ he continued, ‘were you at a fancy dress ball given by
Mrs. Senator Gwin of California, the eighth of February, 1858?’ She
said she was. ‘Do you remember,’ the statesman, soldier and orator
continued, ‘a young and handsome Mississippian, a member of Congress,
by the name of Lamar?’ She said she didn’t.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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