JOHN DICKSON CARR
THE GENTLEMAN FROM PARIS
Carlton House Hotel
Broadway, New-York
14th April, 1849
My dear brother:
Were my hand more steady, Maurice, or my soul less agitated, I should have written to you before this. All is safe: so much I tell you at once. For the rest, I seek sleep in vain, and this is not merely because I find myself a stranger and a foreigner in New-York. Listen and judge.
We discussed, I think, the humiliation that a Frenchman must go to England ere he could take passage in a reliable ship for America. The Britannia steam-packet departed from Liverpool on the second of the month and arrived here on the seventeenth. Do not smile, I implore you, when I tell you that my first visit on American soil was to Piatt’s Saloon, under Wallack’s Theatre.
Great God, that voyage!
...