Au Japon. Amedee Baillot de Guerville
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father (though certainly a relation), Paul Louis Amédée Baillot de Guerville, was in dire straits, in the courts for bankruptcy after stinting several students of the French lessons he had been paid to teach.4 It’s conceivable that the elder de Guerville was one of a contingent of continental exiles following the upheavals of 1848. In any case, though this was still nearly fifteen years before our A. B. de Guerville’s birth, it gives us the first indication that A. B. de Guerville had cosmopolitan roots, and based on his later career probably grew up speaking English and French fluently. London is where we first hear the Baillot de Guerville name; it is the last place as well.
We have no specific information regarding A. B. de Guerville’s childhood or early adolescence but it would have no doubt been infused with that sense of fatalism that pervaded the lives of so many Frenchmen in the years following the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). It was this war that put a dramatic and humiliating end to almost a century of French material grandeur and empire. Though the flame of imperial glory and national honor would be kept kindling with its mission civilisatrice in far-off Cochinchina and Panama, and the closer shores of North Africa, names that became intimately familiar to a whole generation of Frenchman of de Guerville’s time, French prestige and amour-propre never fully recovered from the debacle (as Émile Zola properly termed it) of Sedan and the 1871 declaration of a German Empire in the Palace of Versailles.
To a man of de Guerville’s background and temperament—educated, ambitious, adventuresome, young—it was the American frontier that beckoned rather than the tired old lands of Europe with their perennial rivalries. And it was to America that the young Amédée fled when he was barely out of childhood. The exact circumstances that would inspire such a young man to abandon home and hearth remain concealed, but whatever the causes, the act itself certainly reveals a strong-headedness and precocious independence, even for a time when children grew up faster to the world.
Perhaps one may look at de Guerville’s flight to America in the same way one regards the flight to Greece and Italy of an earlier generation of youth. The young Louis Napoleon, who went on to rule France as Napoleon III, had nearly gotten himself killed in the Italian Wars, where he had fled seeking the vanished glory of his uncle’s day. A later generation of young idealists—if the expression is not redundant—sought meaning in the Spanish Civil War and the struggle against fascism. In short, it was a quest more than a voyage, and it is likely that America held for the young de Guerville all the hope and potential his homeland seemed to lack.
There was another factor. As de Guerville would relate later, from an early age he suffered from that great killer of the age, tuberculosis. The typical nineteenth century remedy for the consumptive (as with de Guerville’s compatriot and exact contemporary André Gide), besides generous portions of cod liver oil and open windows, was a change of scenery, specifically to a drier, more arid locale away from the vapors of wetter or lower altitudes that were thought to congest the lungs. In his own irreverent fashion, Mark Twain had recommended a stint in the American West as a palliative for diseased lungs. Robert Louis Stevenson (also a consumptive) found great relief during several months’ residence in Napa Valley, California. De Guerville’s tuberculosis may also have played a role in his solitary flight from his homeland for the America West in 1887.
Figure 1. Milwaukee Women’s College at the time of de Guerville’s employment there (1890). Milwaukee-Downer College. Records, 1852-1964. Milwaukee Manuscript Collection L. Wisconsin Historical Society. Milwaukee Area Research Center. Golda Meir Library. University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee. Used by permission.
The final two decades of the nineteenth century saw a virtual flood of European immigrants to the United States, primarily from Ireland and the states of southern Europe. It was among these boatloads, though probably traveling in a bit more comfort, that de Guerville arrived in the United States in 1887, at the age of eighteen. He numbered among the very first immigrants to witness the Statue of Liberty—a gift from his native France—welcoming the huddled masses into New York Harbor. The statue was placed on its new granite pedestal in 1886, thanks greatly to the fundraising efforts of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.
Of his first years in the United States little at all is known, save that he first sought his fortune in the American West. We know this only because de Guerville reminisced years later, writing about anti-Semitism in France, “I shall never forget that years ago, when a boy of eighteen, struggling for a living in the far West, and suddenly taken ill, a German Jew extended his hand to me, and in those dark days proved the truest, most devoted, most generous of friends.”5
A period photograph shows de Guerville sitting for a group portrait with his students at Milwaukee College. He is not an especially handsome man. His face is long, eyes close set, and ears small but notable by their protrusion. His glance is focused and intelligent, and he seems most like a gentle and resigned figure, like someone who had already suffered much despite the gangliness that still betrays his youth.
Figure 2. A. B. de Guerville and his students at Milwaukee Women’s College (1890). Milwaukee-Downer College. Records, 1852-1964. Milwaukee Manuscript Collection L. Wisconsin Historical Society. Milwaukee Area Research Center. Golda Meir Library. University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee. Used by permission.
Though he claims in 1892 to be an American—both in heart and on paper—de Guerville’s trail is frustratingly difficult to trace in these early years. Unfortunately, data from the 1890 census (the only one de Guerville would have participated in) was destroyed through fire and neglect. Nor does de Guerville’s name appear among the lists of naturalized citizens of New York City. In fact, de Guerville seems to have left hardly a trace in the bureaucratic records of the United States.
But from 1889 the outlines of de Guerville’s life take on greater clarity. That year found him in Milwaukee, where he was able to secure a position teaching French at the small and nondescript Milwaukee Women’s College, one of dozens of small private colleges beginning to train middle class women in the sciences and modern languages. There he taught French during the day while spending many a Milwaukee evening directing the city’s French club, le Cercle Français, in public performances. He was an able teacher and manager, and local papers lauded both his pedagogical and dramatic skills.
Figure 3. A flyer announcing a public performance by de Guerville’s “Cercle Français” in Milwaukee (1890). Milwaukee-Downer College. Records, 1852-1964. Milwaukee Manuscript Collection L. Wisconsin Historical Society. Milwaukee Area Research Center. Golda Meir Library. University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee. Used by permission.
Though barely twenty-one, in Milwaukee de Guerville became a central figure in the city’s Francophone community. In 1890 he founded the city’s Courrier Français, a small French weekly much like the other Courrier Français papers in other American cities. He would continue to edit and manage the modest weekly until leaving Milwaukee in 1892. If the small college atmosphere (Milwaukee Women’s College enrolled 120 students in 1890) was intimate it was also likely stifling, judging by how quickly de Guerville departed once the opportunity arose. One tends to forget, picturing de Guerville lecturing in French, that he had only just entered his twenties, and was likely younger than many of his students. In this respect, his restlessness may be easily understood.
By all indications, de Guerville’s background and tastes were not such as could be long restrained in Milwaukee. Even in 1890, while living and working in that city, he was moving back and forth between the United States and his native France. In the summer of 1890 he passed through Washington, D.C. en route to Paris, staying in the luxurious Willard Hotel, and “highly recommended to General McCook, visited the Capitol, and before departing . . . shook hands with President Harrison.”6
Even considering de Guerville’s rather worldly air, in 1892 he took what is by any account quite a momentous step—from lecturer in French and editor of a minor paper to Honorary Commissioner for the World’s Columbian Exposition, planned as