A Chance for Glory

By Constance Wright

First published in 1957, A Chance for Glory is a wonderful biography of Dr. Justus Erich Bollman, the German physician who played a colorful part in the life of the Marquise de Lafayette, the young wife of the French aristocrat and military officer Marquis de Lafayette.

Dr. Bollman studied medicine at Göttingen, and practised in Karlsruhe and in Paris, where he settled at the beginning of the French Revolution. He accompanied Count Narbonne, who fled to England in 1792, and in London fell in with Lally-Tollendal, who induced him to go to Austria and endeavor to find out where the Marquis de Lafayette was being confined. He established himself as a physician in Vienna. Learning that Lafayette was a prisoner at Olmütz, he formed a plan to rescue him with the assistance of Francis Kinloch Huger (1773-1855), a young man from South Carolina who was in Vienna while traveling through Europe. Communicating with the prisoner through the prison surgeon, the two fell upon his guards while he was taking exercise in a carriage, and succeeded in getting him away on a horse; but he rode in the wrong direction and was recaptured. Bollman escaped to Prussia, but was handed over to the Austrian authorities, who kept him in prison for nearly a year, and then released him on condition that he should leave the country.

“Dr. Justus Erich Bollman felt that he had been brought into the world for more than the practice of medicine in Hanover. Though Bollman was a more diligent charmer than a doctor and managed to get what he wanted through the right contacts, his major goal was in line with the cause of freedom. This was the rescue of Lafayette, imprisoned when his form of revolution proved too limited for the Paris powers of the Terror. Bollman’s attempts to effect escape were remarkable and as the scene shifts all across Europe and to America, there is the pace and drama of a good novel.”—Kirkus Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Jan 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789123517

Constance Wright

Constance Wright was born and raised in Southern California and lives in Dallas, Texas. She has three daughters and her passion is writing from His heart. The Legacy is the first book of a trilogy. constancewrightbooks.com

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Text originally published in 1957 under the same title.

© Borodino Books 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

A CHANCE FOR GLORY

BY

CONSTANCE WRIGHT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

FOREWORD 5

PROLOGUE—The Very Identical Man 6

PART ONE 9

CHAPTER I—Paris Prelude 9

CHAPTER II—A Dangerous Assignment 15

CHAPTER III—A Little Like Jean Jacques Rousseau 19

CHAPTER IV—Yet Another Journey 25

PART TWO 30

CHAPTER V—A Doctor’s Consultation 30

CHAPTER VI—Dr. Bollmann Writes an Important Letter 44

CHAPTER VII—Encounter in Vienna 49

CHAPTER VIII—Dr. Haberlein Called In 53

CHAPTER IX—If Possible, an American 58

CHAPTER X—The Son of a Soldier 62

PART THREE 67

CHAPTER XI—Presence of Mind 67

CHAPTER XII—And Courage in Distress 72

CHAPTER XIII—Chained 77

CHAPTER XIV—The Road to Hof 82

CHAPTER XV—The Verdict 87

PART FOUR 92

CHAPTER XVI—Double Strategy 92

CHAPTER XVII—A Land of Many Tongues 97

CHAPTER XVIII—Dr. Bollmann Meets a President 102

CHAPTER XIX—Eyes on America 107

CHAPTER XX—A Reward for Valor 113

PART FIVE 119

CHAPTER XII—The Return of the Hero 119

CHAPTER XXII—An Adventurer, Though Noble 125

CHAPTER XXIII—Colonel Huger Pays an Early-Morning Call 131

COMMENTS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 134

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 148

DEDICATION

TO MARGARET, WHO LIKES

HISTORY AND TRUE STORIES

FOREWORD

A TRUE STORY FOLLOWS, true in the sense that it is based entirely on recorded fact. If at times it has the look of fiction, that is only because it has been thought best to let the narrative run smoothly, without halt for discussion of moot points or conflicting evidence. In this footnote to history moot points are surprisingly few, and most of the evidence dovetails neatly!

For those who are interested in origins and in a little superfluous information about the characters and events described, there is a commentary at the end of the book in which authorities are quoted and ifs and perhapses underscored. It can be read as a separate section, or piecemeal, since it is divided into chapters. Or it need not be read at all.

PROLOGUE—The Very Identical Man

IN THE YEARS 1824 and 1825 the Marquis de Lafayette paid his fourth and final visit to the United States. He had not been seen in the land of his adoption for forty years, and almost half a century had gone by since, an adventurous youngster of nineteen, he had first set foot on the American continent. In the interval his life in France and elsewhere had been hazardous. Lafayette had seen—and survived many changes; he had been extravagantly loved and at times extravagantly hated. Only in America had his popularity never declined. If anything, it had risen with the years, and the welcome that was given to Lafayette when he was sixty-seven years old by the sons and grandsons, the daughters and granddaughters of men who had fought beside him in the American Revolution was so spontaneous, so resounding, that faint echoes of it still live on to this present day in names of streets and towns and counties, in legends of infant ancestors who were kissed by the hero, in treasured fragments of ball dresses and gimcrack souvenirs and goblets that the lips of Lafayette had touched.

The popular state of mind in regard to Lafayette in 1824 can be gauged by the reactions of an individual American, Samuel F. B. Morse, who was lucky enough to have a private interview with the marquis-general by appointment in Washington. Morse, who one day would invent the telegraph, was at that time a busy portrait painter. He had just got the commission for a Lafayette portrait to be hung in the New York City Hall, and had been told in advance that he would find his sitter ugly, with a retreating forehead, bulging eyes, and a bulbous nose. Morse, however, was most agreeably surprised. Though none of the general’s features could be called handsome, they were harmonious, and the face that Morse was to paint was very noble, he thought, and very winning. He fell into a kind of frenzied ecstasy as he described in a letter to his wife his thoughts on meeting Lafayette.

This is the man now before me [he wrote], the very man who suffered in the dungeon of Olmütz, the very man who took the oaths of the new [French] constitution for so many millions…the very man who spent his youth, his fortune and his time to bring about (under Providence) our happy Revolution; the friend and companion of Washington, the terror of tyrants, the firm and consistent supporter of liberty, the man whose beloved name has rung from one end of this continent to the other, whom all flock to see, whom all delight to honor; this is the man, the very identical man!

Morse was weak with emotion as he took the hand that Lafayette held out to him.

Before leaving home to come to Washington, the artist had read aloud to his wife one of the many timely biographies that had been rushed into print, and this was the source of his information as to the chief events of Lafayette’s career. Incomplete though his listing was, it is notable here that the very first item that sprang into Morse’s mind as he dashed his eulogy down on paper was the fact that Lafayette had at one time been a prisoner, that he had suffered in a dungeon. It was a point that all the contemporary publicists and speechmakers were hammering home. Over and over the guest of honor at banquets and receptions had been greeted as the Prisoner, or the Hero of Olmütz. The odd-sounding name of the Austrian town where Lafayette had once been held captive was known all up and down the Atlantic seaboard and westward to the banks of the Mississippi. It was pronounced—or mispronounced—by thousands who a short time earlier had never even dreamed of its existence.

And why, one may wonder today, was the subject so frequently brought up in 1824? It could not have been a very pleasant one to the hero of that particular hour. Lafayette himself in later life seldom spoke of his imprisonment. It had robbed him of what might easily have been the most rewarding years of his life—years which he had intended to spend as a private citizen, for, at the end of 1791 and when only thirty-four years old, he had thought to imitate his beloved General Washington by retiring from public life to live with his family on his estate at Chavaniac in Auvergne. He had thought that France’s conversion from absolutism to constitutional monarchy, the second revolution in which he had played a prominent part, was over.

But in the spring of 1792 France declared war on Austria and Prussia; Lafayette was recalled to command an army division. He was with his troops encamped at Sedan, near the Belgian border, during the crucial days when the regime that he considered the most workable form of democracy in France was crumbling under pressure from without and erosion from within. With dismay he noted the rise to power of the more radical element in the National Assembly that he had steadfastly opposed, the growing authority of the Jacobin Club. On June 20 a mob invaded the Tuileries, and Lafayette hurried back to Paris to lodge a futile protest. In July the commander of the Allied Armies threatened to destroy Paris if a hair on the head of royalty was harmed, thus sealing the fate of the French monarchy. On August 10 came the final catastrophe: the sack of the Tuileries, the imprisonment of the royal family, the proclamation in due time of a republic. Nine days later Lafayette was a fugitive. He had tried to rally his troops for a march on Paris, but they had refused to follow him. He had been declared a traitor by the Assembly and knew that it would be suicide to return to stand trial before a body that was now dominated by his enemies. On August 19 he and a group of his officers and men rode across the border into Belgium and were taken prisoner by the Anti-French Coalition.

Such was the traumatic beginning of an ordeal that had broken Lafayette’s life in two and all but killed him. No wonder then that he who in youth and age was abnormally buoyant should shrink from such a depressing memory. Yet here were his American hosts, a generation later, insisting on it—in verse and prose—in florid tributes spoken with shining eyes and glasses raised to the Prisoner of Olmütz. The truth of the matter was that Americans, as they toasted Lafayette, liked to be reminded that he had had a darkest hour, since in that hour America had not entirely forgotten him. The word Olmütz suggested to them an exciting story in which every American could take a personal pride. Not all of its features were well defined—far from it—and not all of them were beautiful, but, like the features of Lafayette’s face, the total effect was somehow noble. Here, it seemed to them, was one more illustration of the optimistic view of human nature that was the major premise of American democracy.

Nowadays the word Olmütz has meaning only to the readers of Lafayette biography—and often they know little more than was common property in 1824, many writers on Lafayette having played follow-the-leader in perpetuating some of the grotesque mistakes of such early versions as were being read aloud in American families at the time of Lafayette’s visit. These biographical accounts are, of necessity, brief, at most a single chapter in a chunky volume. In all of them the figure of Lafayette is just where it ought to be: squarely in the foreground, but obscuring many minor points of interest and even some of major importance to an understanding of Lafayette’s career.

A new approach seems indicated, and here, in the pages that follow, the story of Olmütz will be told again in greater detail and from a slightly different angle. Lafayette is still the overshadowing personality, the pivot about which all revolves, but he is no longer the principal actor and he is often absent from the stage. The leading roles have been assigned to less illustrious persons than he, who were fired by his example, who learned to love him from a distance, and whose lives were profoundly altered by their contact with him.

To begin at the beginning, the scene must be shifted from peaceful, nineteenth-century America to revolutionary France; and a long step backward must be taken from the date of Lafayette’s American tour to the year 1792, a year of defeat and frustration for the very identical man whom Samuel Morse was to meet some thirty years later in Washington.

PART ONE

CHAPTER I—Paris Prelude

ON A FEBRUARY MORNING in 1792 a young man descended from the diligence that had come direct from Strasbourg to Paris, a stocky, solidly built young man, Teutonically blond of hair, his large blue eyes looking out on the world through a pair of spectacles. The young man was twenty-three years old, his name was Dr. Justus Erich Bollmann, and at the moment he was weary, disheveled, and probably unshaven, for he had come through from Strasbourg, a four days’ run, with little pause for sleep or rest. This had been the cheapest means of conveyance, and Dr. Bollmann was very short of cash. In fact, he had had to borrow some money for this, the final, stage of his journey.

It had been a journey long in time if not in space. In June of the preceding year Bollmann had left his native town of Hoya in Hanover, where his father was a much respected businessman. Georg Bollmann was hard-working, too, for he had a numerous family to support. One daughter—he could thank God—was already married, but there were seven sons, the oldest, the cleverest, and the most promising of whom was Justus Erich. Justus Erich had once heard his father say that it seemed as if his first-born had been brought into this world for some unusual purpose. He had never forgotten the saying.

When he went away to school at the gymnasium in Karlsruhe he was given a code to live by: he was told to be a good boy, to work hard, and to keep a pure heart and mind. After Karlsruhe came a course in medicine at the University of Göttingen, where Bollmann specialized in diseases of the eye. His father had been quite willing to provide a professional education for such a good student, though he had pointed out that he must also give a start in life to Ludwig, Friedrich, Jürgen, Andreas, Wilhelm, and Carl, for all of whom he planned some sort of business career that might carry them far from home. Georg Bollmann had fully expected that his son would settle down to practice somewhere in Hanover. As soon as the boy had found himself a few patients, he would find himself a wife, and, with a nice little income of three hundred thalers a year, he could look forward to a useful, obscure life of service to his family and his community.

But there was something fundamental in Justus Erich that shied away from both obscurity and daily drudging. Though he loved his father—more, perhaps, than most boys do—and wanted to please him, young Bollmann had been quick to seize the first opportunity for escape.

It had come from Father’s brother, also a merchant, who had spent some twenty years in England and who had made a fortune. Heinrich Bollmann was unmarried and had always taken an interest in his brother’s big family, writing to them from time to time and sending them small gifts of money. As soon as Justus Erich had got his degree at Göttingen, Uncle Heinrich offered to set his nephew up in practice somewhere else than in little, provincial Hoya. They would meet in Paris and spend some time there before going on to England. There was no need for the young man to hurry; he could make a Wander Year of it and stop off on his way to France in Würzburg, Mainz, Karlsruhe, and Strasbourg.

A delightful program. Bollmann had taken literally the suggestion that he was not to hurry. He was very sociably inclined and everywhere he went in the Rhineland he found interesting friends, both male and female. Local doctors gave him what amounted to a postgraduate course in medicine; local ladies put a final polish on his manners and gave him lessons in gallantry. He was welcomed everywhere and was a guest at many tables—but how expensive it was to travel! The two hundred thalers that his father had given him at parting, enough to finance a whole year of study at Göttingen, slipped through his fingers like sand. He made the mistake of trying to recoup his fortunes by playing billiards for money, lost, and would have had to write home to confess just how spendthrift he had been if he had not been able to borrow from a cousin in Karlsruhe, an older woman with whom he was on terms of affectionate intimacy and whom he had adopted as a foster mother, his own mother having died while he was at the university. The loan was negotiated ostensibly for a mutual friend who was in distress, and though part of it had been so used, Bollmann had kept part for himself.

With the memory of this transaction lying heavy on his conscience, and realizing that somehow the debt must be repaid, Bollmann took his first look at Paris. It was not the city of broad avenues and lovely distances that was to delight so many later travelers. To Bollmann it seemed completely foreign and vaguely hostile; he felt for the first time a twinge of homesickness. The arcaded shops of the Palais Royale, crammed with beautiful objects, beautifully displayed, appealed to an inborn, undeveloped taste for luxury in the sight-seer, but most of the city seemed to him dismally congested and poverty-scarred. The streets were narrow and dirty; the tall houses leaned out over them. The press of traffic was so great that it was as much as your life was worth to stop to look at anything along the way. When a carriage appeared—and they drove fast in Paris—you had to jump for a doorway.

Bollmann’s first meeting with his uncle, whom he found waiting for him in a Paris tavern, was also something of a shock. He had already begun to suspect that the benevolent relative was stingy, for, when hard up on his travels, he had written asking for funds, and the meager response had been long in coming. But Uncle Heinrich, it soon developed, was worse than tight-fisted; he was garrulous, bad-tempered, domineering—and just a little mad. He wanted his nephew to get to work at once, even before taking time out to look around him and to brush up on his French. There was no necessity for laying out good money for instruments or for a suitable apartment in which to receive patients. Bollmann had to share the same hotel room with his uncle. From the time he woke up in the morning until he went to sleep at night he was sprayed by a constant stream of talk and fault-finding. If he had chatted with a lady next to whom he sat at the theater—Bollmann never overlooked an opportunity of picking acquaintance with one of the opposite sex—his uncle said that he was lewd. Even the way this recent graduate of Göttingen spoke German was criticized unfavorably.

Bollmann, whose father had always treated him as a friend and a rational human being, was not used to being bored or bullied by his elders and he did not put up with Uncle Heinrich’s tyranny for very long. At the end of a few weeks and after an exchange of unpleasantries they parted, the uncle leaving Paris. He had given his nephew a cheap suit of clothes, a cast-off hat, and a bundle of rapidly depreciating French currency. When the money was gone, it would be sink or swim.

Sink it might well have been if Bollmann had not managed to make a few connections of his own in the short time that he had been in France. En route to Paris he had collected introductions to a variety of people. Among others, he had met a young Alsatian named Friedrich Heisch, who had a job with the banking firm of Cottin, Giradeau and Company. Heisch was a gentle, unsophisticated youth who, during a seven years’ apprenticeship in Strasbourg, had been silently and hopelessly in love with the wife of his boss. He could not mention her name even now without a blush. This romantic sensibility appealed strongly to Bollmann. He himself was self-consciously romantic and at the gymnasium and the university, he had always had at least one intimate male friend to whom he could confide his emotional ups and downs. After Uncle Heinrich’s exit Heisch and Bollmann set up joint housekeeping in one of the tall, craggy buildings that overhung the narrow streets of Paris.

Heisch was out all day and Bollmann had the apartment to himself. Goaded by his uncle, he had already put a notice in the paper, saying that he would accept free patients as a first step toward building up a regular practice. Seven hopeless and unremunerative cases presented themselves. Then an abbé, presumably rich, turned up in the consulting room with a crooked toe, the result of an old fracture. Bollmann proposed cutting off the toe for a fee of