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and I will follow it come what may.” He concluded with a Latin saw:
“Video melior protoque, deteriora sequor”
(“Though I see what the better things are, even so I follow the worse”). 30
    He was dutiful to his father, to whom he wrote regularly, even while he was in Washington pursuing his objectives within the presidentialambience. He had been taken to the Congressional Gardens by a friend, and found that the outing, and a dinner he had eaten, redeemed Washington from being “dull and wearisome—and as hot as ever.” He said he would rather be with “the female child and her child.” For by now Teresa, “the female child,” had joyfully come to term and given birth to a daughter, Laura, to the vast excitement of the Bagiolis and their Italian-American friends. Given his busy-ness, Dan was not present for the birth, but he sent Teresa a poem, which she cherished. “As I entered the room,” wrote an Italian friend to Dan, “Teresa was calmly sleeping, the worst was all over. . .. I then looked at your babe. Oh, what a delight! . . . To find it so perfect—although not a boy.”
    His frank father did his best to get Dan to come back from his lobbying in Washington, regretting that he was still there “in neglect of every matter in which you have an interest.” Dan’s relationship with George would survive many such hearty statements of disapproval. Two of Dan’s notes were due that week, George warned, one for $475 and another for $250. “Now it is hardly fair you should entirely neglect your personal affairs to help out others—and to ask me to fill the breach.” George reminded him that as generous as it was to help out Gus Schell, his friend who wanted to be appointed collector of the Port of New York, this should not be achieved at the cost of sacrificing his own name and that of his father. 31
    President Pierce may have been lucky to have such busy importunings as those of Dan to distract him. For on January 5 that year, before the inauguration, he had been traveling with his wife and his thirteen-year-old son, Benny, on the Boston & Maine Railroad, going home to Concord, New Hampshire, when the axle of their passenger car broke. The carriage fell down an embankment, dragging other coaches with it, and although President-elect Pierce and Mrs. Pierce suffered only bad bruising, they saw as they picked themselves up in the splintered and chaotic wreckage that part of the superstructure of the car had crushed Benny’s head. Mrs. Jane Pierce had thus come to the White House as a ghostly, inconsolable figure, and although she dutifully fulfilled theofficial functions of a President’s wife, she did so with a smile that contained all the dolorous weight of bereavement. The death weighed obviously but less visibly on the President himself, but he had the duties of office to absorb his conscious mind. 32
    This charming but desolate President, Franklin Pierce, was indirectly about to involve the Sickleses in international diplomacy.

II
    I N M AY 1853 , P IERCE CAST ABOUT FOR someone to represent the United States in Great Britain, and approached that Democratic notable from Pennsylvania Senator James Buchanan, known affectionately in the party as Old Buck. Buchanan had enjoyed an august career as Secretary of State for four years under Presidents Jackson and Polk, and before that as a representative and a senator, as well as the minister of the United States at the Court of St. Petersburg. He had sought the presidential nomination in 1852, but it had gone to Pierce. Most people thought it was his last chance. Though Buchanan was in many ways still impressive—he had a clear complexion and large blue eyes, and stood over six feet—he might prove to be too old for that ultimate prize, which he had sought for a quarter of a century. Some physical defects had already begun to assertthemselves: he had a nervous twitch that caused his head to jerk more visibly and frequently the older he got, and he was