When the story appeared in the following spring the reverberations in my Paris circle were encouraging and useful. I even heard of it from “the other side,” as we called the Right Bank, for Theodore Stanton (at that time the head of the Associated Press in Paris) came with Mrs. Stanton to call on me and tell me he liked the story.
The most important fruit was that Mr. Burlingame looked me up when he made his annual spring visit to Europe. Here was my chance to tell him about Madame Roland, to ask if he thought his house would be interested in such a biography if it turned out to be a good piece of work. “The suggestion would have to be considered in New York,” he replied. But he promised me it would be considered. And it was, for not long afterwards he wrote me that the house was interested in my project, certainly wanted to see the manuscript.
This was enough to settle finally a struggle that had tormented me for many weeks. I had come to Paris determined to fit myself for magazine work along historical and biographical lines; but once close to the world of the scholar, surrounded by men and a few women who lived stern, self-denying lives in order to master a field however small I was seized with an ambition to be a scholar. It was a throwback to my old passion for the microscope. I would specialize in the French Revolution—I would become a professor.
But Mr. Burlingame’s answer to my inquiry as to whether the Scribner company would be friendly to a biographical study of my lady settled the matter; which shows, I take it, how shallow my scholarly ambitions really were.
The Scribner connection was not the only one putting heart into me. Among my early trial balloons was one marked for McClure’s Syndicate, New York City. It carried an article of two thousand words with a catchy title—“The King of Paris”—cribbed from a French newspaper. It was the story of Jean Alphand and his services to the city. The balloon reached its destination. The article was promptly accepted with a promise of $10 when it was published, also a suggestion that they would be glad to consider other subjects if I had them to offer—which I did. Indeed, I gave them no time to forget me; not that they took all I hustled across the Atlantic, but they took enough to make me feel that this might be a stable and prosperous market for short and timely articles. When suggestions finally began to come from them I felt the ground firmer on my feet. One of these suggestions led me into an especially attractive new field, and in the long run had important bearing on my major interest, Madame Roland. It was that I try a series of sketches of French women writers. There was a respectable group of them, and I asked nothing better than to look them up.