Excerpt from The Remarkable Courtship of General Tom Thumb by Nicholas Rinaldi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Sure, jump out of my shoes, that I could do. But the sky, that was something else. And Zatagatooz—I knew all about that. It was everything that was inside out and upside down, everything strange and hard to figure—things bent and curled, snarly and unexpected. Life is wrinkled, and it does confuse. Yet I came to see that sometimes, oddly, awkwardly, it could be fun—full of bonbons, galloping horses, cherry trees, and crowds of people applauding as if you were some kind of god, even though you were just you.

Toward the end of our first year abroad, Barnum took me off salary and made me a full partner, sharing equally in the profits. It was a windfall for my parents and they were more than pleased, as was I. But when we were alone in our hotel room, my mother nodded cynically. "See? See? He's scared to death some other agent will steal us away from him."

The money was bigger than my father had ever expected to see in his lifetime. But he was still drinking. There were days when he reached for a glass early, right after breakfast, and by noon he had an odd way of walking, as if afraid the floor might play a trick and suddenly leap up at him. But he stayed on his feet and went on drinking, sampling the different labels.


After a year in the British Isles, we departed in March and traveled to Paris. Barnum had brought my tutor along, Professor Kwink, mainly to prepare me for France. By the time we reached Paris, I could manage a bit of conversation in French, and was able to sprinkle my act with French jokes and French songs. The result was sheer magic. If the excitement in England had been a craze, what developed in France was nothing less than a mania.

I was Tom Pouce. On a busy boulevard in Paris, a new café opened, the Café Tom Pouce, with a life-size wooden statue of me above the door. King Louis Philippe invited me four times to the Tuileries and gave me a large emerald brooch encrusted with diamonds. In shop windows, there were Tom Pouce statues made of plaster—or of chocolate, or sugar. Someone wrote a play in which I performed, and I was made an honorary member of the Association des Artistes Dramatiques Française.

Barnum was ecstatic. My mother was happy. My father sampled all the French wines. Every night I went to bed exhausted. In many of my dreams, I spoke French, and often, when I woke, I wondered who I was, and where I was, and was afraid to close my eyes again.

After three months in Paris, I had long stands in many other cities across France. Then Barnum brought us down into the south of France, where we rested for a while and enjoyed the atmosphere—trees, orchards, vineyards thick with ripening grapes.

A week of that, then we crossed over into Spain, to Pamplona, where Queen Isabella was eager to see me. Three afternoons I spent with her. Beautiful brown eyes, she had. She was fourteen, and I was seven, yet we felt very comfortable with each other, as if she weren't a queen and I not a dwarf who was getting more than my share of public attention.

Excerpted from The Remarkable Courtship of General Tom Thumb by Nicholas Rinaldi. Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas Rinaldi. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.