Chapter 210: Next Door (3)
Chapter 210: Next Door (3)
“This is the press guidance our embassy is providing to the reporters.”
“Press… guidance?”
“To make the process of interpreting from French into English a little ‘easier,’ we have personally translated a few terms.”
“I-I see.”
Embassy staff came out and personally slipped a sheet of paper into the hands of the reporters one by one, but no one had the spare attention left to care about a scrap of paper like that.
One minute after the French diplomat called Talleyrand dropped his bombshell declaration and handed out the sheet called press guidance, the area in front of the French Embassy in the United States had become a battlefield.
—The former Finance Minister is coming to America.
The reporters, who had risen unusually early and had been yawning, slapped their own cheeks awake and hurriedly scribbled in their notebooks.
Some, determined not to forget the contents at all, began reciting them aloud as they ran into the street and started hailing carriages. Since there were not many carriages operating at four in the morning, only a lucky few managed to catch one and race off.
For everyone else, it truly became war in the literal sense.
Dozens of men poured into the streets in a wave of human bodies, each raising his purse high in the air as he sprinted toward the carriages.
“Driver! Driver!! Pick up a fare over here, quick!!”
“No! I’ll pay double, so take me instead of him!”
“Mister driver! You think double is enough right now? I’ll pay quadruple! …Good, now hurry to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette office!”
A colossal scoop.
There was no need to use newsboys today. All they had to do was print the paper and put it on the newsstand, and it would sell itself.
So now it was a race against time. Whoever could load this blazing bomb into the cannon called an article and fire it into the firepit called the people first would determine how large a share of the pie called readers they would get.
“And who knows? Our readers might even change which newspaper they want to read from now on.”
“Sir, we’ve arrived.”
“Here. You can keep the change. There’s no time to wait for it.”
“Oh my! Thank you kindly!”
The reporter hurriedly jumped out of the carriage, yanked open the newspaper office door, and rushed inside.
After that, it all went smoothly. The editor in his fifties first hugged him and danced around with joy, then, realizing how short on time they were, summoned even the lowest accounting clerk and made him grab hold of the printing press handle.
“But listen.”
“Hm? What is it?”
“This… title, Finance Minister—how are we supposed to translate that into English? Ordinary people can’t read French.”
“Mmm. What do the British call a Finance Minister?”
“They don’t have an office called Finance Minister. They do have the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
“There was that press guidance on interpretation from the embassy. Why don’t we look at that?”
“Let’s see… It says to translate Contrôleur général des finances as President of executive.”
“Well, a Finance Minister is, in a way, the head of the executive branch too, and it doesn’t sound particularly strange, so let’s just use it as is.”
“Okay. Let’s print it immediately.”
And so, in mid-August 1794, newspapers spread across the United States with articles saying that the “former President of France” would be visiting America.
Once upon a time, there lived a little Guillaume.
Little Guillaume dearly loved a comfortable, human sort of life and rest. Wearing primitive sunglasses, Guillaume would lie on the warm beach of Louisiana, laughing and chatting and having a truly wonderful time.
Then one day, a diplomat like dual-wielding Varian appeared and stole little Guillaume’s small moment of rest away!
Guillaume was very sad, but he resolved to be brave.
The next day, little Guillaume crossed the sea, crossed the river, climbed to the embassy, and tried to stab that diplomat in the gut.
“Let go! Let go, damn it!”
“Your Excellency, calm yourself!”
“Please, just let me stab him once!”
“My apologies, Minister. But the one who caused the disturbance must bear the responsibility for it. I, Talleyrand, shall humbly accept that responsibility and return to Louisiana for the time being in your place—”
If only he couldn’t talk, he wouldn’t be so hateful—no. Even if he said nothing, he’d still be hateful.
“Fuck. Life really is goddamned miserable.”
Curses and a long sigh spilled out of my mouth on their own. It felt like being overrun by an Infested Terran while some bastard who had buried fair play and public ethics in the ground stood there smirking.
No. Since the one who had set off the bomb didn’t blow himself up and only blew me up instead, he wasn’t an Infested Terran.
Then… yes, let’s call him Samir Duran. Talleyrand, you Duran-like bastard.
“Minister, you still haven’t given us an answer. So what do you intend to do now?”
“What do you mean what do I do? Those bastards from the Federalist Party or whatever it is are running wild without the slightest gratitude, aren’t they?”
I rubbed my dry eyes and spoke to Edmond-Charles Genêt, the French ambassador to the United States.
“How the fuck do those rotten bastards dare say such things while standing over the puddles of blood our soldiers spilled?”
“…Do you have a plan?”
“What plan is there? That Duran—no, Talleyrand—already seems to have laid out the whole board and left.”
As I said that, I tapped the front page of a newspaper from a few days earlier.
“Former President Guillaume! Makes sudden visit to the United States! Will a meeting between the two Presidents, George and Guillaume, take place? Since when exactly did my office become Pre-sident? Pre-siiiiident?”
That man Talleyrand, whose mind turned as fast as mine, had not thrown this to the hyenas called reporters without thinking.
“Welllll, thanks to that, haven’t those Federalist bastards shut their mouths? Ha, ha, haha…”
As Ambassador Genêt said, after the reports came out that President Guillaume would be visiting, the Federalists had kept their mouths tightly shut.
At first they had demanded a “national-level apology” and all that, but once an actual former head of government showed up, it was practically the same as their demand being accepted. If they continued attacking France after that, then to ordinary people the Federalists would simply look like whiny children throwing a tantrum even after getting everything they asked for.
And as for the Democratic-Republicans—yes, that Democratic-Republican Party led by Mr. Jefferson—they were no longer the pitiful drenched puppy caught in the rain, but had suddenly transformed into people saying, “See? France respects our United States enough to send even a former President. That’s very different from the Britain you all love so much, isn’t it?”
One might ask whether public opinion could really reverse itself so completely just because I had merely set foot in Philadelphia—but then again, wasn’t it even stranger that a country which had won independence from its former colonial master only ten years earlier was already trying to curry favor with that same former master?
As someone who still vividly remembered Koreans grinding their teeth every time there was a Korea-Japan football or baseball match, that struck me as the stranger thing.
Anyway, our clever little Samir Talleyrand hadn’t kicked up a fuss for no reason.
With one bout of Talleyrand’s contrariness, France became the magnanimous great power that, though displeased by America—its blood ally that had once shed blood with it—constantly sending love calls to an enemy nation, still willingly apologized for the discourtesy committed.
Talleyrand himself became the righteous man with a hot heart, moved to tears by an ally disregarding French sacrifice.
And I, despite the title of former head of the executive branch, became the first foreign statesman to personally visit the United States.
That seemed to strike Americans rather deeply. I heard that back in the colonial period, when Benjamin Franklin personally led the Continental Congress delegation to Britain to seek broader self-government, neither the king nor the prime minister even showed him their faces and coldly sent him away. It seemed Americans still carried some resentment from that incident.
Of course, the Federalists grumbled that my visit had deprived them of a good club with which to beat the Democratic-Republicans, but I also heard that someone on the Democratic-Republican side snapped back, “Why don’t you go say that at the grave of the late Benjamin Franklin!”
I didn’t know who had said it, but that was a damn fine line. Ten points to the Democratic-Republicans.
In any case, the Federalists transformed from men trying to uphold American pride against mockery from a foreign diplomat into bad men who had tried to strike a magnanimous great power in the back—but with mitigating circumstances because they had still put America’s national interest first.
And the Democratic-Republicans became a patriotic group who, though pro-French, nevertheless refrained from contacting the French when national interest required it.
Was this ridiculous reversal really possible from one little bonfire Talleyrand set off? It swelled the chest with emotion… and made me increasingly determined that a man like him should be locked away in the Foreign Ministry and never let out until the day he died. Yes, that’s how it should be. Just wait until later.
“Minister, you still haven’t answered. So what exactly do you intend to do now?”
“…Didn’t Americans say I’m a President?”
“Th-they did, yes?”
“Then I’ll be a President.”
“…What?”
“Where are the graves of our French soldiers who died in the War of Independence?”
There was nothing in this world more entertaining than hitting someone who had already been put in a checkmate.
United States, Virginia.
In the twenty-first century, South Korea was a fairly successful country. There were hundreds of countries on this earth, so if you ranked within the top ten among them, wouldn’t that count as successful?
Anyway, South Korea, the tenth most successful country in the world, received state guests from abroad every year befitting its status, and most ceremonial itineraries included a joint visit to the memorials of the UN troops who had fought in the Korean War.
Of course, even if I, an ordinary person and not a diplomat, could not fully grasp the deep strategic thinking of high officials, I still knew very well what it meant to have stood back to back in war and shed blood together.
If you spent two years suffering on a front-line outpost without even being able to go home, even the comrades you had once found awkward became close before you knew it. If you were the sort who had watched each other’s backs on the battlefield, then there was no need to say more.
“For our first official schedule together to be a visit to the resting place of the fallen veterans… As a soldier who once stood on the same battlefield as they did, I find my heart uneasy. …We all fought together, yet this insignificant old man remains alive while those young men are buried over there. It pains my heart.”
“…Seeing the United States grow into such a fine country, I’m sure they, too, are resting easy.”
“Thank you even for saying so, President Guillaume. Welcome to America.”
“Thank you for the warm reception, President Washington.”
I met the giant of a man over 190 centimeters tall—the Father of the United States, the man destined to enjoy the honor of giving his name to the future capital being built in Columbia—and as the leader of an allied nation who had crossed the distant Atlantic to meet him, I clasped both his hands in mine and we shook them together.