Spying on the South by Tony Horwitz

Author:Tony Horwitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

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Like Olmsted, I approached the Texas capital with pleasant anticipation. Austin routinely placed at or near the top of national surveys—most livable city, most economically vibrant, most appealing to millennials, among other metrics. For decades, it had also ranked as one of the nation’s fastest growing. Since 1970, when Austin’s peers in population were Akron and Wichita, it had become the nation’s eleventh largest city and the center of a metro area of over two million.

Growth this explosive was rarely kind to urban planning, and I spent an hour inching through exurbs and suburbs to reach the city center. However, in contrast to the flat, formless straggle of Houston, Austin still had a core anchored to its hills and river and rising, as in Olmsted’s day, toward the lofty capitol grounds.

Before exploring the downtown, I was lured off the gridlocked interstate by a sign for the French Legation, a quaint relic of Austin’s brief reign as capital of an independent republic. Texas established diplomatic relations with all comers, including Hanseatic city-states, the short-lived Republic of Yucatán, and a handful of European nations that opened consulates in Austin.

“This place was meant to impress, and show what La France was all about,” said the Legation’s irreverent tour guide, Mary Braunager-Brown. In 1840, when Austin was a newborn capital of dirt streets, the French envoy to the republic constructed an elegant two-story house with a wine cellar, perched on a hill “so that he could literally look down on the Texans.”

Alphonse Dubois de Saligny was also a fraud: a faux nobleman who paid bills with counterfeit currency, or didn’t pay them at all. This sparked a bizarre international crisis when de Saligny and an innkeeper went to court over unpaid expenses and an additional matter: the envoy’s servant had killed the hotelier’s roaming swine.

De Saligny, in high French dudgeon, claimed diplomatic immunity and called on his superiors in Paris to intervene, with force. The so-called Pig War of 1841 ended peacefully when the consul fled his post after only a year.

“He probably had PTSD, living here instead of in Paris,” Mary speculated, “and realized he didn’t want to stay.” The legation soon passed into private hands, but the survival of a property known as the “French Legation” remained a source of confusion. “A French tourist in Texas contacted us; he’d lost his passport and asked if we could issue a new one,” she said.

In her view, the story of the Legation and its roguish envoy was illustrative of Texas’s early history. “Ours is not a genteel heritage,” she said, recommending I also visit the nearby Texas State Cemetery. “We’re kind of proud of our scoundrels.”

I followed her advice, walking a few blocks to a rolling meadow established in the 1850s as a burial ground for notable Texans. Those interred or honored with monuments included more than two thousand Confederates, the author James Michener, and Tom Landry, who coached the Dallas Cowboys to five Super Bowls.

Then, on a rise called Republic Hill, also known as the Hill of Heroes, I came to a scoundrel of the sort the Legation guide had mentioned.

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