When I reached New York I found that the situation behind the hasty call to come on and write a life of Napoleon was pressing. The Napoleon Movement, which I had been following in Paris for two years, had reached the editorial desk of McClure’s Magazine in the form of a permission to reproduce a large and choice collection of Napoleon portraits, the property of a distinguished citizen of Washington, D.C.—Gardiner Green Hubbard. Mr. Hubbard was popularly known as the father-in-law of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. He was as well the father-in-law of the telephone since it was largely through his faith in the invention before it was recognized as a practical utility, and his shrewd and indefatigable work in securing patents, in enlisting supporters, and in fighting rival claimants, that the telephone had been developed and secured for Mr. Bell and his family.

Mr. Hubbard had long been a Napoleon collector. The revival of interest in the man in the early nineties had made him feel that his collection ought to be reproduced for the public. But he insisted a suitable text—that is, one he liked—must go with the pictures. Mr. McClure had secured something well written from an able Englishman, Robert Sherard, a great-grandson of Wordsworth; but it was so contemptuously anti-Napoleon that Mr. Hubbard would not allow his pictures to go with it. And here it was August, and Mr. McClure with the headlong speed in which he conducted affairs had announced the first installment for November.

I was both amazed and amused by the idea that a popular American magazine would think of such an undertaking. Why? I asked myself. I had seen the Napoleon Movement start and grow in Paris in 1892 and 1893. I had read everything that came along in the way of fresh reminiscences, of brilliant journalism, particularly that of Figaro, and I had tucked away in my clippings a full set of the Caran d’Ache cartoons which so captivated Paris; but I looked on the Movement as political, an effort of the Bonapartists to revive the popular admiration for the country’s most spectacular figure. If the revulsion against the Panama brand of republicanism could be kept alive, fed, might there not be a turning to Bonaparte? Just as the anarchists took advantage of the situation by hurling bombs, so the Bonapartists turned to blazoning France with the stories of the glory that had been hers under the Little Corporal. It is an amazing record of achievement, and one had to be a poor Frenchman, or poor human being for that matter, not to feel his blood stir at its magnificence.

But write a life of Napoleon Bonaparte? It was laughable. And yet how could I refuse to try?

In passing through New York in June I had given Mr. McClure the right to call upon me, promising to join his staff after my vacation. He would give me forty dollars a week—more money than I had ever expected to earn. With care I could save enough to carry me back to Paris, and at the same time I could learn more of the needs of the McClure organization.

The forty dollars a week was a powerful argument. Moreover, I had been talking largely about devoting myself to French Revolutionary history. If this wasn’t that, what was? But there was something else. This man had pulled France out of the slough where she lay when Madame Roland lost her head. I had a terrific need of seeing the thing through, France on her feet. Napoleon had for a time set her there and brought back decency, order, common sense.

I would try, I told Mr. McClure, at his expense, but I should have to go back at once to Paris. Where else could I get sufficient material? That idea of getting to Paris encouraged me to try, but first we all agreed I must go to Washington and talk with Mr. Hubbard, look over the collection. Promptly an invitation came from Mrs. Hubbard to come at once to their summer home out Chevy Chase way on Woodley Lane not far from the Rock Creek Zoo. President and Mrs. Cleveland had their summer home on the Lane, and the Maclean place, where Admiral Dewey was to go when he returned the conquering hero from the Philippines, was across the way. Twin Oaks, as the Hubbard place was called from two big oaks just in front of the house, was the finest country estate in the Washington district, as well as the most beautiful home into which I had ever been admitted. Mrs. Hubbard herself was a woman of rare taste and cultivation, a really great lady, and what she was showed from end to end of that lovely sunny house. Maids, butler, gardener, all took on something of her dignity and gentleness.

Mr. Hubbard was a man of some seventy years then, wiry, energetic, putting in every moment of his time serving his friends and family and in worshiping Mrs. Hubbard. I think he tried her preference for quiet and dignity and for people of her own kind. It must have made her a little uneasy to have a strange woman with a meager wardrobe and a preoccupied mind drop into her carefree, gaily bedecked society; but she took it all in the best nature and with unvarying kindness and understanding. I liked her particularly for the way she accepted Mr. McClure in the days to come. He would burst unexpectedly into the house at any moment which suited his convenience, his bag loaded with proofs of the Napoleon prints, and almost before he had made his greeting the bag was open and the proofs spread helter-skelter over the carpet. Being very much on my good behavior I was a little horrified myself, and then I did so want them to like and appreciate Mr. McClure. When I tried to apologize for the dishevelment he wrought Mrs. Hubbard laughed. “That eagerness of his is beautiful,” she said, “I am accustomed to geniuses.” And so she was, as I was to find.

It did not take me long to discover that there was plenty of material in Washington for the Napoleon sketch. Mr. Hubbard had the latest books and pamphlets. It was easy to arrange that I have proofs from Paris of two or three volumes of reminiscences that had been announced. In the State Department I found the full Napoleonic correspondence published by the order of the French Government. Files of all the leading French newspapers of the period were in one library or another. In the Congressional Library there was a remarkable collection of books gathered by Andrew D. White when he was minister to Germany from 1879 to 1881, the bulk of them in German, French, and English. An item of this collection not to be duplicated was some fifty volumes of pamphlets in several different languages made in Germany during the Revolution and covering the Napoleonic era. They were for the most part the hasty agitated outbreaks of vox populi—protests, arguments, prophecies, curious personal adventures—but among them were rare bits. Taken as a whole they reflected the contemporary state of mind of the people of Europe as did nothing I had ever seen.

Convinced of the adequacy of material, I reluctantly gave up Paris and settled down to work in the Congressional Library. It was not so easy to find a writing table there in the early nineties, and it took some persuasion to convince the ruler of the place, Ainsworth Spofford, that I was worth the effort, that is that I was there to use his books day in and day out until my task was done. Certain of that, he tucked me in, though stacks of books rising from floor to ceiling had to be moved to find room.

I wonder if students in the United States know how much they owe to this man. He gave his life to making a library first to serve Congress, for he held the firm conviction that Congressmen generally needed educating, and that books handy in which he could find materials for their committee work and their speeches would contribute to the process. He made it his first business to provide them as near on the instant as possible with what he thought they needed. In return for this service he used every opportunity to wheedle, shame, beg money from them, money for books, equipment, an increased staff, and always for better accommodations; for Mr. Spofford had a great vision of a national library, educating not only Congress but the people. To realize that vision he had become what he was when I knew him, a devoted, domineering, crabbed czar of his realm. He worked incessantly, doing everything, knowing everything. He paid little attention to the irritated criticisms of those who saw only the inconveniences and dust and overcrowding of the old rooms, and who charged him with inefficiency and tyranny. His mind was on the arrangement and administration of the marble pile already under way across the square. This was what he had been working for—a worthy place for books. His sharp, irritated, “There, maybe you can find something in that,” banging a dusty volume on my table, has often sounded in my ears as in later years I worked at the commodious desks of the library he had dreamed, and which to my mind is a monument to him more than to any other man—naturally enough since he was the only man I ever knew who had anything to do with its existence.

Six weeks, and I had my first installment ready. I had done it with my tongue in my cheek. Impudence, it seemed to me, to write biography on the gallop. I had kept myself to it by repeating in moments of disgust: “Well, a cat may look at a king. I’ll sketch it in, and they can take or leave it.” But Mr. Hubbard liked what I had done, and that meant Mr. McClure hurried it to the printers while I in hot haste went ahead with my sketching.

I expected nothing for myself from it more than the forty dollars a week, and the inner satisfaction of following the thrilling drama from the terror of ’93 down to St. Helena. That satisfied me. But to my surprise I did get the last thing in the world I had expected, the approval of a few people who knew the field. John C. Ropes wrote me he liked the treatment: “Come and lunch with me when you are in Boston and see my Napoleon collection.” I couldn’t believe my eyes. Of course I went.

Charles Bonaparte, the grandson of Jerome Bonaparte, and Mrs. Bonaparte invited Mr. Hubbard and me to lunch with them in Baltimore to see their collection. Curious the little things one remembers of long-ago experiences! Out of that visit I recall only that Mrs. Bonaparte told me that in the garret when she came into the house where Jerome and his American wife, Elizabeth Patterson, had lived, there were literally barrels of string, short lengths neatly rolled, accumulated by the sister-in-law of Napoleon. Why remember that when the home was full of treasures on my subject? Probably because I have never been able to throw away a string without a pang.

Something better worth remembering was the startling resemblance to Napoleon in a certain pose of Charles Bonaparte. As he stood talking unconsciously, hands behind his back, slightly stooped, he was the counterpart of Raffet’s Napoleon, the most natural of them all.

A bit of consolation for my hasty work came from the last source I would have expected: William Milligan Sloane, the author of an elaborate study, the outcome of years of research, recently published by the Century Magazine. That was the way biography should be written, I told myself: years of research, of note-taking, of simmering and saturation. Then you had a ripened result. I said something of this once to Mr. Sloane.

“I am not so sure,” he replied, “that all the time you want to take, all the opportunity to indulge your curiosity and run here and there on bypaths, to amuse yourself, to speculate and doubt, contribute to the soundness or value of a biography. I have often wished that I had had, as you did, the prod of necessity behind me, the obligation to get it out at a fixed time, to put it through, no time to idle, to weigh, only to set down. You got something that way—a living sketch.”

I couldn’t have listened to more consoling comment. There must have been something in his characterization of “living,” for now, over forty years since it first appeared in book form, I still receive annually a small royalty check for my “pot-boiling” Napoleon!

What really startled me about that sketch was the way it settled things for me, knocked over my former determinations, and went about shaping my outward life in spite of me. It weakened my resolve never again to tie myself to a position, to keep myself entirely footloose; it shoved Paris into the future and substituted Washington. It was certainly not alone a return to the security of a monthly wage, with the possibility that the wage would soon grow, that turned my plans topsy-turvy, though that had its influence. Chiefly it was the sense of vitality, of adventure, of excitement, that I was getting from being admitted on terms of equality and good comradeship into the McClure crowd.

The “Napoleon” had given the magazine, now in its second year, the circulation boost it needed. My part in it was not exaggerated by the office or by me. We all agreed that it was the pictures that had done it, but the text had framed the pictures, helped bring out their value, and it had been done at a critical moment.

The success of the “Napoleon” sketch did me a good turn with the Scribners, who had had my manuscript of “Madame Roland” for some time. They were hesitating about publishing it. There was no popular appeal. I was entirely unknown, but the “Napoleon” work gave me sufficient backing to persuade them. At least that was the explanation the literary head of the concern, William C. Brownell, gave me. Thus my first book was my second to appear. My reward for writing it came from my interest in doing it, what I learned about how to go at a serious biographical study, certainly not in royalties. My first check was for forty-eight cents. I had used up my share of the small sales in corrections of the proofs and gift copies.

I must stay with them, declared Mr. McClure. And the more I saw of Mr. McClure and his colleagues, the more I wanted to stay. Of my first impression of S. S. McClure in Paris I have spoken. Closer views emphasized and enlarged that impression. He was as eager as a dog on the hunt—never satisfied, never quiet. Creative editing, he insisted, was not to be done by sitting at a desk in a comfortable office. It was only done in the field following scents, hunts. An omnivorous reader of newspapers, magazines, books, he came to his office primed with ideas, possibilities, and there was always a chance that among them was a stroke of genius. He hated nothing so much in the office as settled routine, wanted to feel stir from the door to the inner sanctum. And he had great power to stir excitement by his suggestions, his endless searching after something new, alive, startling, and particularly by his reporting.

He stood in awe of no man, but dashed back and forth over the country, back and forth to Europe interviewing the great and mighty. He brought back from his forays contracts with Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Kipling. It was something to find yourself between the covers of a book printing a Jungle story. They all came out in McClure’s in those years and were followed by “Captains Courageous” and “Stalky” as well as many of the greatest of the short stories and poems—“The Ship That Found Herself,” “The Destroyers,” the “Recessional”—things that left you breathless and gave to a number the touch of genius for which the office searched and sweated.

Mr. McClure was always peering over the Edge of the Future. It was this search for what was on the way that brought to McClure’s the first article in an American magazine on radium, the X-ray, Marconi’s wireless, Lilienthal’s and Octave Chanute’s gliders, Langley’s steam-driven air-runner and in time the first article on the Wrights’ flying machine.

In my field of biography and history the Edge of the Future meant to Mr. McClure the “unpublished” or the so poorly published that its reappearance was equal to a first appearance. The success of a feature spurred him to effort to get more of it, things which would sharpen and perpetuate the interest. He was ready to look into any suggestion, however unlikely it might seem to the cautious-minded. He was never afraid of being fooled, only of missing something.

His quick taking of a hint, his warm reception of new ideas, new facts, had its drawbacks. If they were dramatic and stirring Mr. McClure was impatient of investigation. He wanted the fun of seeing his finds quickly in print. At one point in the publication of the Napoleon he caused me real anxiety by his apparent determination to print a story for which I could find no authority.

Among the contributors to the Syndicate at that time was a picturesque European with a title and an apparently endless flow of gossip. He pretended to have been a member of the Court of Napoleon III and in the confidence of the Emperor. This relation accounted for his having been invited to join a strange secret party made up by the Emperor, who was worried over a rumor that the body of Napoleon I did not lie under the dome of the Invalides. It was not known who did lie there or what had become of Napoleon. To reassure himself the Emperor decided to go with a few chosen friends and open the tomb. They gathered in the dead of night. The tomb was opened. There lay Napoleon, unchanged. The Emperor’s mind was at rest. He swore the group to secrecy, but took affidavits to be used in case of political necessity. The fall of the Empire seems to have made the gentleman feel that his oath was no longer binding, and that he could cash in on his adventure.

I did not believe the story, but when I expressed my doubt all I could get out of Mr. McClure was a severe, “What a pity you do not know something about Napoleon!” No new idea to me, since it was the first thing I was thinking every morning when I went to work. What I did not know, as I worried over the possible publication of what I believed a fake, was that in spite of his quick and enthusiastic acceptance of a good story, S. S. McClure cared above all for the soundness, the truthfulness of the magazine. Good stories—yes. But they must hold water, stand the scrutiny of those who knew. Moreover, he knew what I did not as yet, that he could go the limit in his enthusiasms since he had at his side a partner on whom he counted more, I think, than he then realized to balance his excitements.

This happened now. The story was in type, scheduled. Mr. McClure was going to Europe. “While you’re over there, Sam,” said his partner quietly, “you better verify that Napoleon story. We’ll hold it until we hear from you.”

A few weeks later came a laconic postal card. “Don’t publish the story of the opening of Napoleon’s tomb. It wasn’t opened.”

I never heard the matter referred to after that. By the time he returned he had forgotten what to me was a near tragedy, to him a joyful bit of editorial adventure.

I came later to feel that this quick kindling of the imagination, this untiring curiosity, this determination to run down every clue until you had it there on the table, its worth or worthlessness in full view, was one of Mr. McClure’s greatest assets; but it was an asset that would have landed him frequently in hot water if it had not been for the partner who had saved him from the Napoleon hoax, John S. Phillips—J. S. P. as he was known in the office.

Living in Washington as I had been doing, I had seen little of Mr. Phillips, only heard of him, for his name was the one oftenest on Mr. McClure’s tongue. His calm and tactful handling of the “General,” as the office called Mr. McClure, in the ticklish Napoleon story delighted me.

“Here’s a man,” I told myself, “who has a nose for humbugs as well as one who knows the power of patience when dealing with the impatient.”

As time went on and I spent more and more of it in New York, finally settling there at the end of the decade, I had better opportunities to watch Mr. Phillips in action. I was not long in learning that he was the focus of every essential factor in the making of the magazine: circulation, finance, editing. Into the pigeonhole of his old-fashioned roll-top desk went daily reports of bank balances, subscriptions received, advertising contracts to be signed, books sold. I doubt if he ever went home at night without having a digest of those reports in his head. He knew their relation to the difficult problem of putting the undertaking on its feet.

It was largely Mr. Phillips’ love of fine printing and his habit of keeping track of the advances in printing processes that led McClure’s late in the nineties to set up its own plant. It included all of the new miraculous self-feeding machines, automatic presses, folders, binders, stitchers.

It was the first magazine plant of the kind in the country and had many visitors. Among them was Mark Twain. Mr. Phillips tells an amusing story of his visit. As they stood watching the press perform, a sheet went awry on the bed. The press at once stopped and rang a bell calling for the pressman, who immediately came and helped the big automat out of its plight.

“My God, man!” cried Mark Twain, “That thing ought to vote.”

It did more than cast votes for McClure’s. It saved the money which finally balanced the budget—and then some.

To those of us on the inside it was always a marvel that John Phillips found time to be an editor, as well as a focusing center for everything that went on. At the bottom of his constant editorial supervision was, I think, a passion for the profession. He was unmistakably the most intellectual, as well as the best intellectually trained, person in the office. After graduating at Knox College in Illinois he had taken a degree at Harvard and later spent two years studying literature and philosophy in the University of Leipzig. When he came to the magazine he put all his training into the professional problem.

He was an invaluable aid to the group of staff writers the magazine was building up. He was no easy editor. He never wheedled, never flattered, but rigidly tried to get out of you what he conceived to be your best, taking it for granted that you wanted to make the most of your piece and it was his business to help you. I never had an editor who so quickly and unerringly spotted weaknesses, particularly in construction. He had a fine feeling, too, for the right word, took the trouble to search for it, often bringing in a penciled memo of suggestions long after you had decided to let it go as it was. He knew the supreme value of naturalness, detested fake style. “A kind of disease,” I have heard him say, quoting somebody.

It always disturbed a few of us that nobody outside of the office knew what an important part in the making of McClure’s John Phillips played. He had that rare virtue—the willingness and ability to keep out of the picture if thereby he could make sure the picture was not spoiled in the making.

The one member of the staff besides Mr. McClure whom I knew, when I began to find myself so to speak absorbed, was already by virtue of his unusual gift for comradeship a friend as well as a species of boss—that was Auguste F. Jaccaci, a brilliant artist and art editor as well as one of the most versatile and iridescent personalities I have ever known. I first met Jac, as he was called by everybody, in Paris, when as an advance agent of the new magazine he was sounding out possibilities for writers and illustrators. He took me out to dinner and paid the addition. We talked until late, then he simply put me on my omnibus and let me go back to the Latin Quarter alone. Here was established the modus operandi for our frequent visiting in the future, in Paris, in New York, in Washington—with one revision. After that first dinner I paid my share of the check, save on special occasions when Jac, a knowing epicure, selected the dinner and treated me.

It was he who showed me the first copy of McClure’s, that of August, 1893, showed it to me at five-thirty in the morning, at a café across the square from the Gare Saint-Lazare where he had ordered me by cablegram from London to meet him. For nobody in the world excepting a member of my family should I have been willing at that hour to cross Paris. But I couldn’t afford to show a lack of interest. Moreover, I must confess that this preposterous order flattered me a little. It was taking me man to man, I said to myself. And so I was there. He had to bully the garçon to get a table out on the sidewalk and make us coffee.

All this was a good basis for a comradeship which lasted to his death. It lives in my memory as something quite apart in my relations with men. Jac had a certain superior appreciation and wisdom never quite put into words, but which you felt. I for my part was always straining to understand, never quite reaching it. Part of his charm was his confidence in his own superiority and his anxiety lest we didn’t quite realize it. And then there were his rages. They came and went like terrible summer thundershowers. He would roar down the corridor of the office while I sat and watched him enthralled. Those rages, whether directed at me or somebody else, never made any other impression on me than that of some unusual natural phenomenon.

Here then were the leaders in the crowd to which I had been admitted by virtue of a hasty sketch of Napoleon Bonaparte done on order.

Thank God I had sense enough to realize that here were three rare personalities, and that to miss such associations would be sheer stupidity. Also to know that I was an unusually lucky woman to be accepted.

Then there was the magazine they were making. There was something youthful, gay, natural about it which captivated me. Often, too, it achieved a most precious thing. Mr. Phillips called it a “lift.” To be youthful, gay, natural with a “lift”—that was an achievement.

And then I found the place so warmly and often ridiculously human. Mr. McClure was incapable of standing up before a hard-luck story, with the result that he brought into that overcrowded office a string of derelicts ranging from autocratic scrub ladies to indigent editors—brought them in and left them for J. S. P. to place. But J. S. P. was not far behind in his sympathy for those who were down and out. I watched him more than once rescue an author who perhaps out of sheer discouragement had taken to drink and landed in jail. Mr. Phillips saw that he was bailed out, his debts paid, work given him. I never ceased to wonder that these two men loaded with work and responsibility should seemingly consider it part of their daily job to rescue the wastrel and the disheartened.

There was reason enough for me to stay with McClure’s.