“Good treatment makes me think I am admired, beloved. . . . So I dismiss my guard and grow weak, silly, vain,” he had once written in his youth, in the throes of painful self-evaluation. Now he was in the full embrace of people who, as he said, made compliments a form of art. “French gentlemen. . . . said that I had shown in Holland that Americans understand negotiation as well as war. . . . Another said, ‘Monsieur, vous êtes le Washington de la négociation.’ ”
