Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  “Anton Mesmer,” John Adams told Jefferson. “Viennese quack.”

  “Faith healer,” Abigail added, carrying in a tray, Short guessed at once, of James Hemings’s patented macaroons. “In the last century we would have hanged him for a witch in Massachusetts.”

  “Well, he likes to play my ‘armonica,’ ” Franklin said pleasantly. He folded the tails of his coat neatly over his breeches and lifted his head, like Jefferson, to the spring sunshine. “He uses it as background music for his séances, so I was quite well disposed to like him.”

  “You are disposed to like everyone, Franklin.”

  “I am told,” Abigail Adams said, “that he chiefly uses his tricks to prey on young women.”

  “He is,” Madame Brillon said in emphatic French, “a very handsome man. He is as tall as Chefferson and very forceful. He cures every kind of illness.”

  “You would enjoy his scientific pretensions, my learned friend,” Franklin said to Jefferson. “At Mesmer’s séances you sit, about thirty of you altogether, around a long oaken case a foot or so high, specially carried in from Vienna.”

  “Le baquet,” Madame Brillon translated.

  “This baquet is filled with a layer of powdered glass and iron filings, then with dozens of bottles arranged symmetrically. Then he places a lid on the trough. Each patient takes an iron rod supplied by an assistant, and he inserts the rod through one of the holes in the lid. Meanwhile Mesmer walks around the trough tying every one to each other with a cord at the waist. Now they are linked to ‘the magnetic fluid’ of the atmosphere.”

  “He always wears a coat of lilac silk.” Madame Brillon pulled her black scarf aside and revealed more dirty gauze and an impressive bosom. A kitten appeared at the edge of Franklin’s mound of cushions, and Madame Brillon dangled the end of the scarf on its pale triangular nose. “Dr. Mesmer carries another, very long iron wand himself,” she added.

  “With which he touches the diseased parts of your body.” Franklin looked frequently to Jefferson as they talked, not anxiously, Short thought, but with an affectionate curiosity that he himself had yet to understand. The two had met over a decade before at the Second Continental Congress in 1775, that legendary gathering of immortals, as Short thought of it, and apparently from that moment had been mutually devoted. No two men could be more different—plump, earthy Franklin, with his liking for sweet food, flirtatious women, constant joking; Jefferson, as tall and thin as Franklin was short and stout, reserved, serious, sternly unattached to women of any stripe. All that they shared were politics and scientific ideas, and even there Franklin tended to joke and tinker while Jefferson studied systematically and gravely. “In an election,” Franklin had told Short once, “I always think the tallest candidate should win. I took one look at our Virginian and said, ‘What he writes, I will sign.’ ” In his mind’s eye Short drew an imaginary family tree—Franklin the father to Jefferson the son; Jefferson the father to Short the son.

  “Now, he also touched other parts, I am reliably told.” This was Colonel Humphreys, passing onto the terrace from the house and carrying—incongruously—an armload of cut flowers.

  “The military mind at work.” Franklin smiled at Humphreys as he smiled at everyone else. The secret of so much smiling eluded Short. Franklin simply never quarreled or criticized. Jefferson said that he had learned from Franklin the one great lesson of his life: always to nod and walk away when another man disagreed angrily with him.

  “Colonel Humphreys,” Franklin told them, “refers to the titillations délicieuses of the famous doctor. From time to time, it is true, Mesmer will place himself en rapport with a patient by seating himself opposite him—or her—and pressing foot against foot. Even, ladies, knee against knee. They all go off into a kind of trance.”

  Jefferson stirred and folded his long arms across his chest. “But as I recall, sir, your official investigation determined Mesmerism to be a fraud.”

  “Ah. Our skeptical committee did indeed say that. The language struck me as strong—the benevolent Dr. Guillotin wrote it—you should ask him about his ideas on humane execution, by the way, learned Thomas. He has a new machine—ghoulish. But yes, we all concluded that Mesmer’s magnetic fluid is a hoax—he’s since taken to Mesmerizing trees and animals. Patients are cured—if they are cured—by their own imaginations, which are far more powerful than a baquet of bottles.” Franklin leaned to one side and patted the sulking Madame Brillon on her shoulder. “If I thought Dr. Mesmer could make vanish the little gravel quarry in this old stony body, my dear, I would roll naked in his trough like a baby.”

  At the great front doorway of the house Abigail and Nabby kept Short to one side while Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams stood by the old man’s litter. The three commissioners talked in low, businesslike voices. Abigail was concerned for Jefferson’s health. Nabby stood cradling a single long-stem rose and remarked archly that if reports were true, Mr. Short’s health should be their real worry.

  “The poor man must be exhausted. I hear,” she said, “of the ‘Pomona’ of Saint-Germain, who is your tutor in French; the ‘little opera girl’; the ‘fair Grecian,’ who is Madame de Tott—”

  “Stop,” Short said, both hands high in protest.

  “The Ace of Spades—”

  “Good heavens!”

  “Mr. Short will have need of Dr. Mesmer himself,” Nabby told her mother. “C’est la vie sportive de Paris.”

  “Nabby, go in the house.” Abigail studied the huge bay mare that the footman had led from the stables for Jefferson. “You know, Mr. Short, we part for London in three days.”

  “We shall miss you.” Short never knew quite what tack to take with the formidable Abigail. In her New England mob bonnet, with her unfrizzled brown hair, her sharp nose and sharper voice, she seemed the most hopelessly provincial woman in Paris; like all the Adamses, however, she specialized in surprises.

  “And we you,” she said briskly. “Mr. Adams, of course, will miss the politics, but he despises Paris. Do you know what I shall really miss, Mr, Short?”

  Short began a halfhearted gesture toward the massive house and its forty beds.

  “The ballet,” she said firmly.

  Short opened and closed his mouth.

  John Adams’s raised voice drifted over the grass. “Hic autem perturbationibus …”

  “It is astonishing to me,” Abigail said, ignoring it. “The first dance I ever saw in my life—dragged to it by Madame Brillon, as you might guess—it absolutely shocked me. In Boston—well, my delicacy was wounded. Girls clothed in the thinnest silk and gauze, petticoats short, springing in the air and showing their garters and drawers.”

  Short felt his face warming.

  “The truth is,” she said, “their motions are light as air; I go every week now, and when you watch for a while, the spectacle becomes astonishingly beautiful, and you begin to think of it all as a charming, innocent art.”

  “We attend the concerts,” Short said, stupidly.

  The white cap bobbed. The brown eyes turned liquid. For an instant Short saw past her dry middle-aged face to the softer face of a young girl, as young as Nabby. “Now I find myself asking,” she said slowly, “have I been wrong all along? Is it really innocent? Or is daily example merely the most subtle of poisons?”

  “Well—”

  “Well, I wanted to say before the men break off.” She glanced toward Franklin, now easing himself backward, with the help of two servants, into his Roman litter. “I have brought six children into the world, Mr. Short, and followed two of them to an open grave. I know what it is.” She nodded once, sharply, at Jefferson. “Mr. Jefferson,” she said, “is one of the choice ones of the earth.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You watch him.”

  “Mr. Short,” John Adams said, breaking away early from the sight of Franklin’s struggles. Thumbs in his vest, head cocked, he walked toward them like a Braintree farmer out to inspect his manure. “Quicquid erit, melius
quam nunc erit.”

  “Horace?” Short guessed.

  “Ovid.” Adams grinned with a schoolmaster’s pleasure. “ ‘Whatever happens will be better than what’s now.’ Come to see us in England, Mr. Short.”

  “The Ace of Spades,” Jefferson said when they entered into the Bois. He stretched his long torso forward and adjusted the headstall of the bay.

  This time Short’s face genuinely burned.

  “I have acute hearing,” Jefferson reminded him. His expression was as mild and smiling as Franklin could have wished, but to Short’s ears his tone was icy thin in disapproval.

  “Sir—”

  “I also see that you receive more letters from Preeson Bowdoin.”

  Short automatically touched the pocket where he had placed Abigail Adams’s packet of letters. “Yes, sir.”

  “Brother Adams will tell you that French life offers more than enough temptations to a young, agreeable gentleman,” Jefferson said, “without actually seeking a guide to them. Preeson Bowdoin comes from a good Virginia family; he has parts. For the sake of your old friendship I was glad to entertain him at the rue Taitbout. But he is led about by the strongest of all human passions. He has an uncontrollable voluptuary streak. I trust we agree that in his grand tour of Europe so far he lacks serious application. Time spent in his company is time pretty well lost.”

  “Yes, sir.” Short spurred his horse to keep up with the energetic prance of Jefferson’s great bay. In his mind’s theater Preeson Bowdoin was being hanged and slowly quartered.

  “It is only,” Jefferson said, lifting his chin, looking straight ahead, “that I have such high hopes for you.”

  At Neuilly they threaded between the numerous and chaotic sites of new construction that dotted the riverbank as far downstream as the Isle of Swans—Jefferson leaning far out of his saddle, peering critically at foundations and casements—and finally came to a halt by the bridge. He would cross here, Jefferson explained, and deliver certain messages from Franklin and Adams to Lafayette on the Left Bank. Short, on the other hand … Short hastily assured him that he was heading home, straight to business. Jefferson nodded somberly. They parted with a quick, flat-palmed wave Virginia-fashion, and Short wheeled his horse around with both spurs digging.

  His route took him parallel to the river, and then by a northward turn up to the newest avenue in Paris, the broad, dusty Champs-Élysées, where Jefferson had recently talked of moving.

  At the corner of the very property Jefferson had in mind, by the rue de Berri, Short paused to rest his horse. Along the riverbank they were building houses. On the Right Bank the government was just completing a long enormous wall, twelve feet high, made of thick masonry and iron spikes, which would serve as a customs barrier around the city. Here, on the Champs-Élysées itself, the Farmers-General had erected a fortified toll gate, likewise built of masonry and iron, that spanned the entire road between the ends of the wall.

  Short backed his horse to one side. Even at this late hour in the afternoon a line of carts and wagons stood in front of the central turnstile, the only one open, and the drivers waited stoically, arms folded, while the tax collectors, the hated gabelous, unpacked their loads, examined each bundle, and calculated the tax. The hands—or pockets—of the Farmers-General were everywhere, Jefferson liked to say. To enter Paris with merchandise of any kind—milk, eggs, silk, salt—you had to pay a duty; there were similar gates and collectors all around the city, at every gate in the wall. In Virginia, Short thought, the collectors would have been lynched, the walls long ago blasted into democratic rubble. Here, he knew from observation, by dawn all four turnstiles in the gate would be open and the lines of patient carts would stretch miles down the road.

  He glanced at his gold watch. Five o’clock, the dinner hour.

  He would keep Preeson Bowdoin’s damnable letter in his pocket unopened. He would place it sealed on the mantel in his room. Look at it every day, morning and night, as a memento moriae. A reminder of Folly.

  He spurred his horse viciously back into the road. How the devil did Jefferson, of all men, know about the Ace of Spades?

  “Colonel Humphreys sent a message he wouldn’t be in tonight, sir. Mr. Williamos gone to stay in Versailles.”

  James Hemings closed the door and decided against practicing his French on Short this night. You gauge them like a strange horse, he thought, no matter how many times you’ve seen them. Horse you’ve known all your life still can kick. Short the politest man on earth, but he walks in flushed like a field hand, chewing his mouth, cords in his neck tight as a whip. James watched him scrape his boots hard on the floor. Woman trouble, one thousand—one million to one.

  “Williamos gone again?”

  James nodded and took Short’s hat and his light outer riding coat, mentally noting that the hat should be brushed for dust and that the coat smelled of manure.

  “Not back till when?”

  James shrugged. “Didn’t say, sir.” Williamos was another of Jefferson’s unofficial boarders, a n’er-do-well drifter with nothing to recommend him but a hangdog look and a fund of stories about the Revolutionary War. They would come for a week, stay for months. The young men keep me young, Jefferson would say.

  “Nobody called then?” Short asked, looking into the study.

  “Nobody did.” Dropping the sir out of sheer piss.

  “No messages, letters?” Short was tapping the pockets of his neat silk jacket. Fine white powder shook from the curls of his hair like a little cloud of snow.

  James shook his head slowly. No powder, no snow.

  “I’ll be upstairs tonight. I don’t need dinner. If somebody does call—anybody—I’m not in.”

  Not in. Working. Showing SERIOUS APPLICATION.

  Short crossed the room to adjust his curtains. Even in April the light lasted longer here than in Virginia. Across the horizon the sun still cast a low orange glow; the houses on the next street held a tenuous silhouette. If they moved to the Champs-Élysées, they would look out on the wall, soldiers, tax collectors. From his present window he could see only the occasional spark of horseshoe against stone. Not even a light in the arching réverbères over the rue Taitbout. Vandals stole the oil and candles so often that the city lit them now only on completely moonless nights, four or five times a month. In western Virginia, Short thought, beyond the Chesapeake plantations you could stand by a window every night for years on end and see no réverbères, no carriages, no buildings at all, only the endless oceanic forest along whose black bottom you seemed to crawl like some warped species of fish, deaf or blind.

  Mesmerism and manure.

  Abruptly he let the curtain drop and turned to his desk. Across the length of it, between two new candles, he had arranged stacks of letters to file or else to copy in diplomatic code (Jefferson loved to write in code); printer’s proofs of the book, six well-sharpened pens in a row. By the time Jefferson returned, Short would have done a week’s worth of work, disciplined his mind to a fine, hard edge. He rubbed his hands together briskly and sat down.

  Memoirs of Jefferson—3

  IN THE RUGGED WESTERN FRONTIER OF Virginia, no man ever achieved a more spectacular reputation for physical strength than Peter Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s father.

  Our Jefferson, then a boy of nine or ten, remembered his father once striding out into the barnyard of the old Tuckahoe plantation, in the fierce heat of a July noon, and waving aside the party of slaves who were struggling to lift upright a spilled shipment of tobacco barrels. Peter Jefferson was well over six feet tall and muscular even beyond his extraordinary height. While the admiring blacks squatted in a circle and looked on, this Virginia Samson gripped one hogshead of tobacco in his right hand, a second hogshead in his left, and started to pull. His face turned red, the veins sprang out on his neck and forehead; the left barrel rose, then the right, and with a final grunt he pulled them both straight up on their ends. His son later weighed a similar set of barrels and found that each one came
to more than five hundred pounds.

  On another occasion, when Jefferson was twelve or so (with his father’s height but never his bulk—“Tall Tom,” the slaves called him), his father came upon three timberjacks trying to pull down a ruined shed near the James River. After watching them heave fruitlessly for five minutes at their girdle of ropes, Peter Jefferson pushed them away, seized one end of a rope himself, and dragged the whole shed down in an instant.

  Years later, visitors to Monticello would be surprised to find the great statesman tinkering with a machine (of his own invention), made of levers and weights, that measured strength. It was Jefferson’s habit, in fact, even after he retired from the presidency in 1809, to challenge the younger men to strong-arm contests on it. Thomas Mann Randolph, his luckless son-in-law, was never able to beat the old man. I was still in my forties, Jefferson in his sixties when I came to Monticello to inspect some neighboring property. Should I say how uncomfortable and embarrassed I was when, after being shown a prize copy of Piers Plowman more than two hundred and fifty years old, I was led back into the entrance hall and had my hand and forearm slapped into the machine’s main lever, this to pull with all my strength while a marker rose up the wall? Should I add that Jefferson beat me?

  Odd thought: Jefferson’s cool, measured, amazingly lucid prose, likewise impossible to match, has often struck me as made of levers and weights, like his machine. He can lift an idea higher than anyone else.

  Short drew an inky line across the blotter on his desk. The first letter on his stack was addressed to John Jay, the secretary for foreign affairs in Philadelphia. It concerned the enthralling matter of the Comte de Vergennes and tobacco duties. Jefferson’s code consisted of a little booklet of ciphers for which Jay had the key, and it was Short’s task to encode all proper names and whatever words he thought important. He glanced at the open booklet. For the word by Jefferson had devised the symbol “1461.” Short dutifully dipped his pen in the inkwell again. A bead of ink formed at the tip, like a drop of blood.