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him off from day to day by one excuse after another: Foy had not yet submitted his recommendation to the minister; the recommendation had been received but a synopsis had to be written; the synopsis had been written but Montalivet had not yet seen it. During one particularly aggravating period Morse called eight or ten times at the bureau and was unable to see even the secretary. At times he doubted that Louis-Philippe would ever get to see his telegraph: “some of the most essential improvements have lain for years in the portfolios of the Ministers.” But he kept hoping for a summons from the Palais-Royal, which would be decisive: “If I could but once get them to look at it, I should be sure of them, for I have never shown it to anyone who did not seem in raptures.”

The problem, Morse believed, was not one person or another but the French mentality. “I find delay in all things, at least, so it appears to me, who have too strong a development of the American organ of ‘go-ahead-ativeness’ to feel easy under its tantalizing effects.” The shipment from London of some new clockwork for his telegraph took more than two weeks, going through a dozen customs officers, commissionaires, and administrators demanding papers, receipts, drawings, sureties. The ponderous bureaucracy was only a sign of the larger, moral problem: “there is no such thing here as conscience.” Knowing themselves to be untrustworthy, the French had no confidence in others. They did not delegate authority to subagents, certain that it would be abused—“consequently the regular military muster-roll mode must supply the place of conscience, and all its circumlocutory, cumbrous powers…. Happy, thrice happy America!”

There were other frustrations as well. While waiting to hear from Montalivet, Morse also awaited word from home that Congress had passed the $30,000 appropriation bill. No news arrived. Hoping to goad the legislators into action, he wrote to the House Committee on Commerce describing his success abroad. Several European governments, he said, had in view adopting an electrical telegraph. And in France the “American Telegraph” was being recommended as the best: “I am at this moment awaiting the orders of the Minister of the Interior.” He implied that a similar interest in his apparatus existed among capitalists in America. He needed to know the government’s wishes because they would determine for him whether to go public, committing his telegraph to “the control of associations of private individuals.” The pressure on Congress, he hoped, might also work the other way, exciting action in the Paris bureaucrats: “I should be exceedingly glad to hurry these people by telling them that my services are wanted at home.”

A new possibility opened for Morse when he was called on by a director of the St. Germain railroad, a twelve-mile line outside Paris. This official inquired whether a telegraph could be contrived to report the location of the company’s trains along the road. Morse worked out a detailed plan featuring small electromagnetically operated bell towers that would register the arrival of the cars at a given point and notify every station over the whole route. He took a brevet for his new invention and made a working model.

The directors of the railroad, however, failed several times to show up for the demonstrations Morse arranged at his lodgings. “They are famous here for not keeping appointments,” he told Smith; “I have only to exercise patience and wait.” He needed more than patience. When the directors finally came they approved his plan—all but one of them, who objected to the enormous cost of building a trial line, an estimated 60,000 francs. Morse proposed an economy: instead of stretching the wire circuit underground, in protective tubes, it would be laid down above ground in grooved bricks. He waited for a reply, but heard nothing. Like the rest of France, the railroad officials proved to be “as dilatory as the Government.” In the end the company simply dropped the project.

Morse also tried to interest the French military, although his efforts