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13 TO DIE SILENTLY, AS A GENTLEMAN MUST Charles Macomb Flandrau, one of America’s rising young authors in the late nineteenth century, now was an anachronism. “Our last defender,” someone said, “of the genteel essay tradition.” Somewhere , perhaps at Majorca, Paris, Vernon, or St. Paul, he lost not only the will to write but the will to live. He spent springs and summers of the early 1930s in seclusion at Le Petit Saint-Paul — often reading through the night, rising at midday, writing letters, gazing out at his gardens and orchard, “two lemon-coloured butterflies have just wobbled down on a mauve iris.” Prohibition ended in April 1933. “It is glorious to find our great land once more adorned and all but submerged in beer signs of every possible kind,” he reported to Grace. “I also like the return of the good old word ‘Tavern.’ Everywhere — everywhere one sees that comfortable, homelike, simple, yet adequate expression over wayside doorways.” Despite the veneer of light humor he always gave the subject in essays and letters, his drinking continued out of control. Returning to the United States in 1933 on the SS Ilsenstein, a passenger recalled for Grace years later “a terrific episode one evening in the bar when he [Flandrau] got himself well tanked over the objections of his bodyguard [Clark] and proceeded to give a long discussion about a bedpan, ending up by declaring that he was a How unreal it all is! For if we look back, we discover very few traces of our flight. Our lives float away like the clouds. George Moore dying albatross.” He was preoccupied with ill health. “In my retirement from the great world,” he wrote Blair, who was suffering from seizures in late 1933, “there is really little or nothing to say. Of course, if I were socially inclined I could take in a funeral every afternoon.” For the first time in years, money was a concern. “He received dividends from investments which he was childishly incapable of understanding ,” wrote Gray in Vagabond Path, “all with very gratifying regularity.” In 1932 he rushed home to St. Paul from Vernon (according to Grace) with the wild fear that his hometown First National Bank was about to go under. He even telegraphed the bank to stop deposit of a large dividend check. The Depression also had shrunk the dollar abroad, making France more expensive for expatriate Americans. By 1933 he was losing thirty dollars for every hundred he drew on his letter of credit in France. Two years later the dollar, once worth thirty francs, bought only fifteen. In March 1934, after five months of another Minnesota winter, he toyed with the idea of escaping with Clark in the “dashing Buick” to New Orleans, then catching a steamer for Veracruz . It would have been his first visit to Mexico in twenty-one years, but he abandoned the plan, perhaps because of ill health. One day in late June, Clark drove him the mile or so from home into downtown St. Paul to watch (ever the spectator) the Shriners’ parade, where they became ensnared in a traffic jam for almost three hours. The sun’s glare was too much for Flandrau’s eyes. All of a sudden, like a “thief in the night,” he was seized with fear he would faint or die on the spot. Despite his frailty, and vomiting caused by drinking, Clark agreed to drive him to Yellowstone Park in August, back to where he had been a surveyor for a summer in 1900. They stopped at the Occidental Hotel in Buffalo, Wyoming, where Owen Wister’s “Virginian” got his man. Clark let it be known that Wister and Flandrau were acquaintances , and Charlie was “laden with affectionate messages for him from octogenarian ex-cow punchers.” At Yellowstone, a five-hundredpound bear named Rosey managed to insert herself halfway through the door of their cabin. By his account, he banged her over the head with his cane, slammed the door, drank half a glass of whiskey, and went to bed. His health deteriorated in the spring. “I scribble this from my pallet of pain,” he wrote old Harvard classmate and novelist Arthur Pier, “to which I was obliged to betake myself with a stomach that isn’t really a stomach, but an agonizing, seething cesspool. I am convinced 206 T O D I E S I L E N T LY , A S A G E N T L...

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