Almost all the postpaleolithics aboard were over six feet, some of them huge. The paleolithics had small men among them, but these, with their massive bones and muscles, did not have to be so tall. De Marbot was the pygmy among them, only five feet four inches high, but Sam Clemens liked him and admired his feistiness and courage. Sam also liked to hear stories of de Marbot’s campaigns and to have people under him who had once been generals, admirals, and statesmen. “Humility is good for them, builds their character,” Sam said. “The Frenchy is a first-rate commander, and it amuses me to see him ordering those big apes around.”
De Marbot was certainly experienced and capable. After joining the republican army of France when he was seventeen, he rose rapidly in rank to aide-de-camp to Marshal Augereau, commanding the VII Corps in the war against Prussia and Russia from 1806 to 1807. He fought under Lannes and Massena in the Peninsular War, and he’d gone through the Russian campaign in the War of 1812 and the terrible retreat from Moscow, and, among others, the German campaign in 1813. He’d been wounded eleven times, severely at Hanau and Leipzig. When Napolean returned from his exile at Elba, he promoted de Marbot to general of brigade, and de Marbot was wounded at the bloody battle of Waterloo. De Marbot was exiled by the Bourbon king, but he returned to his native land in 1817. After serving under the July monarchy at the siege of Antwerp, he was rewarded some years later by being made a lieutenant general. From 1835 to 1840, he was in the Algerian expeditions, and at the age of sixty was wounded for the last time. He retired after the fall of King Louis Philippe in 1848. He wrote his memoirs, which so delighted Arthur Conan Doyle that he used him as the basis of his fictional character, Brigadier Gerard. The main difference between the literary and the real-life character was that de Marbot was intelligent and perceptive, whereas Gerard, though gallant, was not very bright.
When he was seventy-two years old, the brave soldier of Napoleon died in bed in Paris.
It was a measure of Clemens’ affection for him that he had told him about the Mysterious Stranger, the renegade Ethical. Today the riverboat was docked while Clemens interviewed volunteers for a post aboard. The hideous events after the right-bank stones had failed were two months behind the crew, and The River was now free of the stench and jampack of rotting bodies.
De Marbot, clad in a duraluminum helmet topped by a roach of glue-stiffened fish-leather strips and a duraluminum cuirass, looking like the popular conception of a Trojan warrior, walked up and down the long line of candidates. His job was to preinterview them. In this way, he could sometimes eliminate the unfit and so save his captain time and work. .
Near the middle of the line he saw four men who seemed to know each other well. He stopped by the first, a tall muscular dark man with huge hands. His color and very wavy hair could only mean that he was a quadroon, and he was.
At de Marbot’s polite inquiry, he said that his name was Thomas Million Turpin. He’d been born in Georgia sometime around 1873—he wasn’t sure just when—but his parents had moved to St. Louis, Missouri, when he was young. His father operated the Silver Dollar, a tavern in the red-light district. In his youth Tom and his brother Charles had purchased a share of the Big Onion Mine near Searchlight, Nebraska, and worked it, but, failing to find gold after two years, had roamed the west for a while before returning to St. Louis.
Turpin had settled down in the District and worked as a bouncer and piano player, among other things. By 1899 he was the most important man in the area, controlling the music, liquor, and gambling. His Rosebud Cafe, the center of his little empire, was famous throughout the nation. Downstairs it was a tavern-restaurant and upstairs/a “hotel,” a whorehouse.
Turpin, however, was more than a big-time political boss, he was, according to his own statement, a great piano player, though he admitted he wasn’t quite as good as Louis Chauvin. A frontiersman in syncopated music, he’d been known as the father of ragtime in St. Louis, and his “Harlem Rag,” published in 1897, was the first ragtime piece published by a Negro. He’d written the famous “St. Louis Rag” for the opening of the world fair there, but that had been postponed. He died in 1922, and since he’d been on the Riverworld had wandered up and down.