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By Root 1652 0

and large houses that contain actual Americans in their natural surroundings, as well as poorer but more vibrant neighborhoods of Germans and Italians. Though I could walk to that metropolis in half an hour, I gather that would be to break some sort of secret code. The indigenous culture of the city has curled in upon itself because it knows it is dying, even though it is in itself quite new, by European standards. But these sequences run quicker here, partly because of a mania for destroying and rebuilding, and partly because the land itself, a bend of miasmic and mephitic swamp between the river and the lake, appears to me a sink of dissolution, which has accelerated all natural processes of corruption and decay.

So far I have kept this opinion to myself. At least I am attempting to do so. But perhaps some of my prejudices have already leaked out. This evening, for example, I addressed a local scientific society on the subject of an experiment into the nature of electricity, and in particular the electrical impulses in the brains of rats and monkeys. Afterwards I answered questions from the audience. It is an infuriating and pervasive characteristic of this tour that these questions by no means have confined themselves to the subject of my demonstrations. A few days ago, a gentleman in Chicago asked me my opinion of the weather in the coming week—I might have predicted it would rain forever! And tonight I answered several questions about the theories of Mr. Charles Darwin.

The religiousness of these people does not cease to astound. After my second attempt at reconciling what cannot, after all, be reconciled, I allowed myself a joke, although I did not smile. “Perhaps,” I suggested, “it was our simian ancestors that inhabited the Garden of Eden, as none of the activities described as taking place there would have required a brain much larger than an ordinary potato. It was in the land of Canaan, surely, that we began our inexorable descent, guided by the process of natural selection.” The most foolish beasts, I meant to imply, have the wit to copulate, and our development as a species, and as individual moral beings, could commence only at the moment we had turned our back on God.

I was speaking in response to an enquiry about “reverse evolution,” an absurd and backward theory that has nevertheless found nourishment here in the superstitions of the inhabitants. During the ensuing silence I was tempted to mention your own observation that since God is reputed to have created man in his own image, then perhaps the early migration of Africans to Europe is evidence of man’s fall. Contrasting your and my complexions, you once observed how Lucifer’s supposed “brightness” might be more properly translated to emphasize the pallor of his skin, at least in comparison with God himself. But that would be a joke too painful to express in this crude nation. As you know, I am sometimes irritated by how the Continental newspapers can scarcely mention my work without including a line or phrase that concerns my “Moorish grandmother,” a lady whom I never had the privilege to meet. In Paris, a small amount of African or even Hebrew blood is considered a mark of distinction, perhaps of genius, at least in intellectual or artistic circles. That is not so here. If my history were well-known, my lectures would attract a different audience entirely, such as might buy tickets to observe a chimpanzee solve quadratic equations in the zoo.

Ah, my love, the hour is late. The rain against the casement rattles like escaping steam. Soon I will close the humid curtains, climb onto the lumpy bed. If you were here in my exile, I would embrace you, and you would no longer complain that I was diffident or shy. I would run my fingers down the buttons of your back, and lower still. Doubtless we would converse, if at all, in the language of the angels in paradise, at least if our current scientific thinking is correct . . .

(Addressed to Mme. Solange Baziat, May 23, 1888—unsent)

2. LATER THAT NIGHT: “I DO NOT DWELL UPON MY FAILURES . . .”

. . . Why do