To avoid the violent city still in the madness of the gold rush, James' French mother, from a family of Irish Catholic exiles named Hickey, took him to live in Paris, which was then an Empire under the rule of Napoleon III.

The nephew of Napoleon I left his mark on James by making France a wild, flamboyant stage for ornate theatrical displays and public works, and mystifying ceremonies.

On November 10, 1878, Harden-Hickey first published the newspaper Triboulet, named for a jester of King Louis XII, eight years after Napoleon's fall from power.

Two of the novels are borrowed from Michael Strogoff by Jules Verne and another is based on Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

James was made a baron of the Holy Roman Empire (which legally ceased to exist in 1806) for his strong defense of the church in his works and in practice.

His novels include the following, all published under the pen name Saint Patrice: Sometime after, James Harden-Hickey divorced his first wife and renounced Catholicism; he acquired an interest in Buddhism and Theosophy.

This was a turning point in his life, and he took the opportunity to travel around the world, staying a year in India, learning Sanskrit and studying the philosophy of the Buddha.

Harden-Hickey noticed that the tiny island of Trinidad in the South Atlantic Ocean had never been claimed by any country and was, legally, "res nullius".

Trinidad was seized by Great Britain, however, in 1895 as a telegraph cable-relay station, and James I was forced to surrender it to them, leaving him with only a homemade crown, and a schooner.