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By Root 6385 0

ran from January to March. Their quarters on the first floor of Bemont’s Hotel were just below those taken by Tracy and his wife, Harriet. The two couples would often spend evenings or weekends together, and Tracy often tagged along with Henry and Frances when his wife was on one of her frequent trips to their home in Buffalo. He joined them on walks, shopping trips, and excursions with the children. “He is a singular being,” Frances confided to Lazette. “He certainly knows more than any man I ever was acquainted with.” His conversation, she marveled, “reminds me of a book of synonyms. He hardly ever makes use of the same words to express ideas that have a shade of difference.”

Capitalizing on Frances’s hunger for companionship, Tracy insinuated himself into the private emotional world she once shared only with her husband. He spoke with her freely about his quarrels with his wife. He invited her into his sitting room to read poetry and study French. They talked about their battles with ill health. “I believe at present he could convince me that a chameleon was blue, green or black just as he should choose,” Frances admitted to Lazette. Following one extended absence, Frances announced unabashedly that she was “very glad to see him as I love him very much.” Though there is no indication that Frances and Tracy ever shared a physical relationship, they had entered into something that was considered, in the subtle realm of Victorian social mores, almost as shameful and inappropriate—a private emotional intimacy.

The following summer, Seward left his wife and family in Auburn to accompany his father on a three-month voyage to Europe. While his aging father’s need for companionship provided a rationale for the sojourn, Seward relished the opportunity to see foreign lands and observe new cultures. Father and son traveled extensively through England, Ireland, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and France. “What a romance was this journey that I was making!” Seward recalled years later. Everywhere he went, however, his thoughts returned to America and his faith in his country’s unique future.

“It is not until one visits old, oppressed, suffering Europe, that he can appreciate his own government,” he observed, “that he realizes the fearful responsibility of the American people to the nations of the whole earth, to carry successfully through the experiment…that men are capable of self-government.” He hungrily sought out American newspapers in library reading rooms, noting with regret ubiquitous reports of “malicious political warfare.”

While Lincoln, Chase, and Bates would never visit the Old World, Seward, at the age of thirty-two, mingled comfortably with members of Parliament and received invitations to elegant receptions and dinner parties throughout Europe. In France, Seward spent a long weekend visiting with the Revolutionary War hero General Lafayette at his home, La Grange.

In Seward’s absence, Frances corresponded frequently with Tracy. When Judge Miller noticed a letter in an unknown hand awaiting Frances on the mantelpiece, he demanded to see it. Frances did not know what to do, she explained to her sister. “I handed it to him and he very deliberately commenced breaking the seal for the purpose of reading it. My first impulse was to jump up and snatch the letter from his hand, which I did and then apologized by saying I would prefer reading it myself first. He appeared very much astonished that I should be so unreasonable.”

As Tracy’s letters multiplied, the deeply religious Frances began to contemplate the perilous shift in their friendship. Mortified in front of Henry, now returned from Europe, she proffered the letters, asking him to determine if Tracy was endeavoring to break their marital peace. At first Seward refused to read them, unwilling to impute such dishonorable intentions to Tracy. When a further letter arrived that caused Frances to collapse in tears, believing herself dishonored in both Tracy’s and her husband’s eyes, Seward resolved to confront him.

The next time the two men met in Albany, however, Seward