by Max Byrd
“Lafayette,” Short told him, “we understand is en route. If the winds are good, we expect him to arrive next week, with satchels of letters and news, of course. He’s been touring in America six months at least—I saw him there myself.”
“The Marquis de Lafayette,” said Madame Brillon thoughtfully. Her fingers tapped the back of Short’s hand. “A very odd man. He has a head shaped exactly like a pineapple.”
“Well—” he blushed. He knew he blushed. Both French and English deserted him like court spies.
“Well.” Madame Brillon mocked with a smile. She was no longer young, but she was still shapely, still flirtatious, with an indefinable vivacity that Short had decided was the birthright of Parisian females alone. Her dress was cut as low as those of the younger women beside her, so low that—Short fashioned a complicated sentence in French—“le moindre mouvement faisait sortir du corsage le bout des seins.” He had been told it was of her, dressed in a generous morning chemise, that the withered old poet Fontenelle exclaimed, “Oh, to be seventy again!”
“I want you to tell me about Monsieur Jefferson,” she demanded, rising.
Across the muddy hallway the dining-room doors were swinging open. Against the candles Short could see the bustling angular figure of Abigail Adams pushing the last chairs into place herself.
“He is the author—” Short said (pompously, he knew; he blushed all the harder).
“Of the famous Declaration of Independence that changed the world. All men—but not women—are created equal. Yes, yes. It’s been translated over and over in Paris, everyone’s read it.”
Madame Brillon held his sleeve with two fingers. John and Abigail Adams notoriously ignored the French practice of formally leading guests, according to their social rank, in to the table. Pell mell was the rule here, Adams liked to say. People were beginning to drift now in small chattering groups toward the hall and the dining room on the other side. “He’s a great statesman,” she said. “He was a governor. Chastellux visited him at his house on a little mountain and tells everyone he lives like an ancient philosopher.”
“Well …”
“Well. Does he like music?” Madame Brillon was considered a gifted musician—for a woman a genuine prodigy. A young genius named Boccherini had dedicated six wonderful sonatas to her.
“Mr. Jefferson loves music. He plays the violin an hour every day. He buys volumes of music at the Quai des Grands Augustins.”
“He has a child but no wife.”
“Mrs. Jefferson died two years ago.”
“So. He is not as fierce as Monsieur Adams, obviously, or as … what should we call it? As free as Franklin?”
“Votre chèr papa,” Short said, risking the freedom himself. Madame Brillon was celebrated for having sat in Franklin’s lap during a court dinner at Versailles (scandalizing the two Adamses, whose eyes had almost popped). She called the good doctor “mon chèr papa” and stroked his bald head, but then, so apparently did half the titled ladies in Paris.
“No, not at all. Monsieur Jefferson is not ‘papa’ material, however much you young men worship him.”
She released his sleeve and smiled again. Her own gray eyes, Short thought, were absolutely gorgeous—pools of smoke.
“He really must find a position for you,” she added, with the same abrupt thoughtfulness she had used in speaking of Lafayette, “before all your lovely money vanishes.”
The door to the study swung open again, and behind them the triumvirate of American commissioners was passing to the dining room: Franklin first, waddling slowly, using his cane and bowing; Adams, with a face like a pasty white ball, working his narrow mouth up and down in impatient expressions of greeting; and Jefferson last, hesitating at the threshold as if he might change his mind and retreat back to the shelves of books. At the door to the dining room his arms folded across his chest like a cross.
“I shall demonstrate,” Franklin announced to the table at large, “how to flirt.”
Smiling benignly, he turned in his chair and reached for the ornamental fan that the woman on his left hand placed beside her plate. Still beaming, Franklin picked up the fan between two fingers and opened it with a snap. Then, grinning, he began to turn it rapidly back and forth in front of his face—at each turn simpering like a girl or stopping the fan in midflutter and peeping over the top with huge coy eyes at one of the men.
“Oh, lord.” Madame Brillon laughed until she began to choke.
Franklin peered over his fan in a moony way at sour John Adams all the way down the table.
“To flirt,” Franklin said. “A splendid old English word meaning a quick jerking motion. I flirt this fan.”
In the general laughter Short found himself thinking that two rules had been broken at once—first, the French custom of speaking at a meal only to one’s neighbor; and second, Franklin’s own rule of never starting a topic of conversation. Poor Richard was famous for sitting quietly in his chair and speaking only when spoken to.
“But why does she have a fan in January?” whispered the young woman to Short’s left. An Adams voice of fascinated disapproval. The pell mell of the table had thrown Short leeward, toward his host and, as it turned out, the nineteen-year-old Miss Nabby Adams, who was a softer and prettier version of her mother Abigail.
“It’s warm where she is, by the fireplace,” he said, noting that up and down the table each Frenchman had, true to form, placed his hat beside his plate. Rumor had Miss Adams recovering from an improper romantic attachment to a Harvard wastrel with the implausible (and very un-Adams) name of “Royall” Tyler. Had the canny Abigail steered her toward Short tonight for a reason? “Even the flowers in your centerpiece are melting,” Short told her.
Miss Adams was studying doubtfully the plate a maid had just slipped in front of her, but she raised her head quickly. “The centerpiece. We went to a dinner in the Louvre Palace, Mr. Short, where the centerpiece was a huge model winter landscape made out of artificial frost. It was by the fireplace, too, and during the meal the frost slowly began to melt, and underneath it you suddenly saw miniature trees and houses and little flowing streams, and just as dessert was served, hundreds of tiny blossoms sprang up on wires to symbolize spring!”
She was actually a charming girl, Short thought, if too serious.
“This is a new dish someone has invented in Paris,” she said, toying with the dark mass on her plate. “Mama and I weren’t sure—it’s called pâté de foie gras. The liver of a fat goose. Don’t ask how it’s made. Dr. Franklin loves it.”
At the middle of the table, liberally spreading his pâté on toast, Franklin was now telling a joke. One of the French gentlemen, speaking English with a slow syrupy accent, asked Franklin if he really intended to ascend in a hot-air balloon that summer, as rumor had it. Franklin beamed again and squinted through his spectacles down the table.
“Mr. Jefferson,” he said, finding him almost in the corner, next to Abigail Adams, a tall, tranquil figure, dressed in the latest French tailoring but unmistakably, in his clear skin and long, slouched frame, American. “Mr. Jefferson is the very man to ascend in a balloon. I am too old—”
A little clatter of disagreement, led by Madame Brillon. But Franklin was eighty if a day, Short thought.
“—and not much given to travel anymore. As you know.”
Everyone nodded in more or less solemn sympathy. Franklin’s constant battle with the bladder stone was widely known. He moved about in great torment, usually drank only mineral water, and sometimes had himself carried in a litter like an Oriental sage to this or that noble lady’s house. In fact, Short considered, the cult of Franklin in Paris was astounding—Jefferson had warned him: down to the servants in a house, everyone knew about him, his bons mots were quoted and reprinted everywhere, there were paintings and engravings of him in shops and on mantelpieces, even on paper fans. At a gallery near the Palais Royal a woman sold plaster dolls of him, complete with famous wire spectacles and tiny fur hat.
Franklin nodded. “Somebody will,” he said. “Eventually.” He turned and smiled genially in the direction of Adams, who was stabbing the pâté with his fork. “I’ve seen every balloon, you know. The first was two years ago—before you arrived, Brother Adams. The Montgolfier brothers sent up an unmanned balloon made out of red silk from the Champ de Mars, even though it was raining torrents. It flew for nearly an hour and came down ten miles away in a village.”
“Where the villagers,” said Madame Brillon, “promptly destroyed it with their pitchforks.”
“They thought it was the devil,” Franklin agreed.
“But the next—”
“The next balloon,” he said, “had a wicker basket hanging below the hot-air stove, and in it the Montgolfiers put a sheep, a duck, and a rooster, all of which returned unharmed after a tour over the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Then at the end of the year—it was ’83—they launched from the Tuileries, and this time one of the brothers rode in the basket where the sheep had been, far above Paris. Later he told me his first thought when he cleared the rooftops was ‘What a wonderful sight!’ ” Franklin peered over the tops of his spectacles, toward Colonel Humphreys, it seemed. “And does anyone know what his second thought was?”
Humphreys shook his head.
“ ‘How priceless this would be in a battle!’ ”
At which moment the servants arrived, noisily passing out courses of fish and game, and the conversation broke apart into tête-à-tête. Short strained for a moment to catch a glimpse of Jefferson, but against the flickering candlelight and the mountainous, not to say snowy landscape of powdered wigs ranged down the table, he could hardly make out the commissioner’s face. But pale, melancholy, Short thought; not well, even at a distance.
Miss Adams entertained him with a long, breathlessly indignant description of Franklin’s particular friend whom they did not invite to dinner—a Madame Helvétius, who lived with two young priests and a bachelor philosopher (respectively ten, twenty, and thirty years younger than herself) and who, her papa swore, had used her chemise to wipe the floor when her lap dog had wet it. By the time dessert had arrived—the wilting flowers in the centerpiece stayed just as they were, failing to metamorphose into anything at all—the entire party was light-headed and gay. In the midst of it, reverting to his customary silence, Franklin seemed to watch benevolently, like a small pink-faced balloon, but as the servants began to remove the cloth and bring the wine, he nodded expectantly toward Adams.
There was an inevitable delay while Adams stood and rapped on the table with his knuckles. The French misunderstood his signal and talked more loudly, Abigail Adams bustled dishes and bottles herself to the kitchen in a whirl of aprons, but then Adams’s cool New England twang began to bore through the hubbub. He was delighted so many of them would brave the rain that day to come to his home—he remembered a poem in a single verse written by a newcomer to describe the Paris climate: rain and wind, and wind and rain. But the Baron de Grimm had complained it was too long by half: “Wind and rain would have said it all.”
Adams wiped his lips, put down his napkin, and laced his fingers behind his back.
“Now. The other two American commissioners wish me to make an announcement tonight, of general interest. As all of you know, we arrived in France originally to sign our treaty with Great Britain—that was the doctor, Mr. Jay, and your humble servant. Mr. Jay has long since returned to America, and while the doctor and I have stayed on to negotiate other, commercial treaties, and Mr. Jefferson has joined us—nonetheless Fortune turns her wheel.”
He stopped and repeated everything in slow, correct French (as stiff as buckram, Short thought; not one to board in Saint-Germain, John Adams studied French in a ponderously formal way at home—he had shown Short the copy of Bossuet’s Funeral Orations that was his text).
“Fortune turns her wheel,” Adams said once more. “The doctor observes that he travels very little now, but he has authorized me to announce to you that in the spring of this year he means to relinquish permanently his post here and travel back to Pennsylvania.”
The outburst was all that Franklin would have wished. The ladies groaned, the French gentlemen sprang from their chairs, a general bilingual lament rose from the length of the table. Adams remained standing, hands still clasped behind him. “I guessed,” Miss Adams whispered to Short. “All those letters and meetings. He wants to go home to die.”
In the drawing room afterward, while servants passed around bits of orange and nuts and sweet red wine, a trio of musicians played Scottish and Irish melodies—Franklin’s favorite kind of music—and he himself gave a brief demonstration on his own glass-and-finger instrument, the famous and briefly fashionable “armonica,” which he had invented twenty years ago in London. And then, before Short was at all prepared for it, the party was ending. John and Abigail Adams handed guests into coats and cloaks, carriages ran up through the interminable rain, and footmen splashed in and out of the hallway with their boots and umbrellas. In the confusion Short found himself face to face with Franklin as they waited for a carriage to move.
“Mr. Short.”
“I saw your likeness yesterday, sir, in the shop at the Palais Royal and was amazed at the resemblance.”
Franklin chuckled, like a great elf, Short thought. “Yes.” He leaned on his cane, smiling. “I like to say that I have been i-doll-ized in this kingdom.”
“Your popularity, sir—”
Franklin had the old man’s habit of finishing young men’s thoughts. “My popularity is a source of great amusement to me. Do you know that when I first arrived in Paris and was being made much of, the king grew so prickly about it that he presented the Countess de Polignac with a Sèvres porcelain chamber pot, and my portrait at the bottom of it.”
Franklin chuckled again and looked around. From the drawing room Adams and Jefferson were slowly advancing, heads down in conference. “You’re serving him as secretary?” Franklin asked.
“Informally. There’s no salary or title—”
“So you don’t know how long it can last. He’s a very deep man, very deep. Mr. Jefferson doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve.” Madame Brillon was two steps away, holding up Franklin’s gray hooded cloak and chattering over her shoulder in rapid French. Franklin patted Short’s wrist in an unexpected gesture. His hand was as soft and skittering as a mouse. “Now, of course, you’re thinking what my departure means politically for him—and you.”
“My plans—”
Franklin bent forward confidentially. Short expected him to warn against Adams, or to recommend “Poor Richard”-fashion some sly mixture of prudence and horse sense. Instead, he cocked his elfish head and looked past Short’s arm and into the darkness of the hallway, nodding as if he were seeing a familiar, harmless ghost. “France will change him,” he said quietly. “It changes everyone. Whatever he was, he will turn out different. Whatever you are”—the old man straightened and grinned—“flirt like the devil,” he said.
In Virginia, Short reminded himself, the beds were very small and people slept more or less sitting up, propped on cushions and pillows. In France, however, the fashion now was to sleep “lying flat,” stretched out full length over the whole bed.
He rocked his chair back on its legs, looked over the desk to the odd, extra long, very comfortable French bed, and yawned. In the tall frame of his window the afternoon rain had slowed to a fine gray curtain of drizzle. Jefferson had left hours ago to visit his daughter Patsy at the convent across the Seine, where she boarded as a student; Humphreys had mounted his horse at noon and ridden out to John Adams once more at Auteuil. As for his own duties—Short lowered his eyes to frown at the portfolio of letters he was supposed to translate or copy for Jefferson, just as if he were a real secretary and this would all last, Paris, and Paris beds, and Paris winters.
He stood up abruptly,
poked once at the little pyramid of sea-coal burning in his fireplace, and then crossed the room to the window. From his third-floor apartment he could see the rooftops of the neighboring Chaussée d’Antin, bright sloping quadrangles and chimneys of wet tile and soaked gray stone, and beyond them the distant black horizon of Auteuil. With another, briefer yawn he thought of the dinner party the day before. If he were to fly in a hot-air balloon, floating high over rooftops and gardens and carriages, there would be no speculation about how to use it in a battle. Leave that to Colonel Humphreys. In a balloon you would be able to comprehend all Paris at once, take it all in at once. In his mind’s eye he saw the rooftops themselves coming away like little lids on boxes, himself peering down into every room, every secret. An odd question occurred to him. No one had ever flown in the sky like that before: What would the old poets have written—what would Virgil or Horace or Spenser have said if they could have seen the world from three thousand feet?
Below the windowsill, on the street, a thoroughly earth-bound water carrier was staggering under the weight of his two wooden buckets, which he had carried up from the river to deliver somewhere. Short watched the stocky little man disappear around a corner. The other day Jefferson, standing at his own study window, had characteristically worked out for Short that a strong porter beginning at nine o’clock in the morning could complete thirty round trips a day, coming as far up the Boulevards as the rue Taitbout.
Short made a wry face. No dreamy questions about dead poets and balloons. Jefferson’s mind worked in its own way. Never—not in a thousand years—would anybody else have thought to calculate such a fact.
Memoirs of Jefferson—2
THE TARLETON AFFAIR COULD ONLY BE understood in the light of what came after … and before.
It is no disgrace, certainly, for a man to fall into a period of despair or even a kind of paralysis in his own affairs. So vital and energetic a person as John Adams confessed that more than once in his life his “demons” (good Puritan word) had brought on fevers, headaches, “anxiety” (his own word too), and general collapse. In the spring of 1781, two months before Banastre Tarleton thundered into Charlottesville, Governor Jefferson received another of those blows that hammered him throughout the Revolution. His wife, a widow when he married her, had brought to their marriage a young son, who died soon after. Their own first child, Martha, also known as Patsy, was healthy and even robust (inheriting, it was clear at a glance, Jefferson’s big, lanky frame); but a daughter and a son had subsequently died; a second daughter, Mary, also survived, but in April yet another infant daughter, Lucy Elizabeth, succumbed. The governor was sufficiently battered by this loss, but his wife—his wife now entered a period of melancholy and paralysis all her own.