Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  “Were you there for General Washington’s ‘great conversation’? No, I can see you’re too young. I want to meet an American who was there—perhaps Monsieur Clever?” She bent her head to indicate Jefferson, who stood ten feet away in the center of the group.

  “Monsieur Jefferson was not actually in the Continental Army …”

  “Washington,” said Madame de Tessé, “is supposed to have put his arm around our Gilbert and said, ‘Please think of me always as a friend and father.’ ”

  Short raised an eyebrow. The idea of Washington placing his arm around anyone staggered the imagination. There was a story about Washington and the one-legged roué Gouverneur Morris—

  “From that point on Gilbert was happy.” Madame de Tessé was gathering her skirts and beginning to look around the room. “You know his real father was killed in the Battle of Minden. Gilbert was two. Then his uncle, who was his guardian, fell at the siege of Milan. So to have a general for a father—a live general!”

  She started to walk away, leaving Short by the fireplace, but with the casual coquetry of the middle-aged and homely, she looked over her shoulder as she left. “You are Monsieur Short?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know Madame de Tott?”

  “Your protégée, yes. She’s very charming.”

  “Come to see us at my estate in Chaville, both of us. We shall talk politics and revolution.”

  He nodded to the back of her wig and then pinched the bridge of his nose. A servant had pulled back the curtains, so that the cobblestone courtyard now shone before them, a carpet of snow under a radiant moon. Everyone else was going to a performance at the new Théâtre Français—Racine’s Les Plaideurs, a play so baroque and boring that Short had instantly pleaded jaundice-inspired weakness; and in fact he meant to go straight back to the new, luxurious quarters on the rue de Berri and fall asleep.

  By the opened curtains Lafayette had begun a complicated explanation of their order of departure, his big horse teeth flashing as he spoke, eyes turning greedily from face to face. Short took a moment to study him: the hunter of the hyena, the aristocratic friend of all rebellion. His politics were brave and Jeffersonian, but there was always something about Lafayette that just missed being truly impressive, that turned at the last moment desperate or comical. His appearance worked against him, of course: the huge teeth, the spiky red hair that no coiffeur could tame. But his deeper flaw, as Jefferson had written Madison (in code), was “a canine appetite for popularity.” Doglike, puppyish. For a would-be hero, Short could think of no more devastating adjective.

  Beside Lafayette now his wife Adrienne was looking up adoringly while the rest of the company were busily throwing on coats and hats as they listened. Which of the various ladies present, Short wondered, was Lafayette’s mistress this week? Jefferson, as smooth in movement as Lafayette was awkward, gallantly adjusted the shoulders of Adrienne de Lafayette’s cloak. Not immune, not by any means immune to the physical charms of women, but as far as Short knew, absolutely, resolutely chaste, even in Paris.

  Even in Paris. Short began to follow the crowd to the doors—held open, he saw, by yet another American Indian in costume. The ladies passed before him, chattering, laughing, jingling (he considered the image) like kittens with bells. Jefferson frequently said that domestic happiness constitutes the highest form of human bliss. What did he think of an atmosphere like Paris, where infidelity was so commonplace, the flesh so ripely displayed, where a gentleman, however adoring his wife, would as soon go into society without his sword (a better image) as his mistress?

  At the door, back to the inevitable draft, shoulders hunched like a scarab, he waited on shifting feet to make his excuses again. Adrienne Lafayette looked grave and mouselike. An Indian brave held out his cloak.

  “I think,” Jefferson said behind him, “that Vergennes may yet insist that the king’s contract with the Farmers-General is already so advanced for the year—he won’t reopen the question of tobacco.”

  Lafayette squeezed his long face into a frown.

  “But the king, I believe,” Jefferson added as they moved to the door, “also has the right to strike out any single item he chooses from the contract.”

  “He never uses it,” Lafayette muttered.

  Outside, Short walked alone across the courtyard. Snow crunched under his boots. Cold moonlight swam on the distant river. The shapes of boats and barges could be dimly seen bumping with the current. At the stables on the far corner of Lafayette’s house, he leaned against the iron gate while a grumbling stableboy saddled his horse. Overhead, from this angle, the roof blocked the moon and the whole eastern sky blazed with a long trail of brilliant white stars.

  Like God’s white beard, Short thought, more light-headed than ever. God would wear a gigantic beard of flickering stars, would He not? and stroke it from time to time with His even more gigantic moonstruck hands? He watched the stableboy curse the leather straps and disappear under the horse’s belly. Short could still taste the coppery red wine, of which he had undoubtedly drunk too much. Had God ever been young like him? And then grown old and sad in a foreign country?

  In the salon of Lafayette’s house the last few guests were awaiting their carriages. By the fireplace Madame de Tessé, muffled from chin to ankle in a wrap of silver fox, stood with the quite beautiful young wife of the decidedly older Duc de La Rochefoucauld.

  “So, now, Rosalie,” said Madame de Tessé indifferently, “you must come to Chaville and visit me, as soon as the roads are clear again.”

  Rosalie drank tea from a cup, not wine, and watched the servants bustling around the room. “Who was the young man you were talking with, here?” Shyly, she indicated the fireplace and the two great frames above it.

  “Ah. Monsieur Short. Jefferson’s personal assistant. You don’t know him?”

  And then, as she so often did, Madame de Tessé supplied her own answer. “Not yet, you don’t.”

  Memoirs of Jefferson—5

  THERE IS A SECOND EPISODE IN JEFFERSON’S life for which, like the flight from Banastre Tarleton, two contradictory versions exist. In order to approach it, however, I need to fall back several years and set the scene.

  Friends of Jefferson during his student years—and these include his early twenties, when he was still an apprentice lawyer—all speak of two distinct traits. First, Jefferson could study longer and harder than any other student who ever entered William and Mary College. Fifteen hours at a crack, said his friend John Page, and then he would get up from the books, stretch his long arms over his head, and disappear for a two-mile run in the forest. Second, he was most interested in girls.

  We have everybody’s word for it. We have, in fact (thanks to Page and another amused friend, William Fleming), a number of letters that Jefferson wrote, starting around age seventeen, that dwell on the female question. For that matter, we have (I have) Jefferson’s own rather wry memory of certain youthful “turbulences” and his confession that during these years, unable to sleep, he often lay in his bed formulating “love and murder novels” that he intended to write in his spare time. (Love and Murder, by Thomas Jefferson!)

  The ambivalence of “love and murder” is nice. And ambivalence is what he felt (I am sometimes tempted in these pages to say that ambivalence was the core of the Jeffersonian character; only there are so many things—democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of speech—about which he felt no ambivalence whatever).

  The letters that Page and Fleming saved all have to do with a sixteen-year-old beauty to whom Jefferson refers as R.B., Becca, Belinda, Campana in die, and best of all, Adnileb, which is Belinda spelled backward. This Proteus of young womanhood was in reality Rebecca Burwell, whose father served as governor back in the days when Peter Jefferson reported to Williamsburg with his famous map of Virginia; by the time Jefferson met her, she was an orphan, under the care of her uncle William Nelson (one of the horse-racing Nelsons from York, famous for piety and bloodstock), and he, Jefferson, wa
s twenty or so, still studying at Williamsburg and the favorite of Dr. Small, who taught him philosophy and mathematics, and Dr. Wythe, who taught him (it is said) to dislike slavery.

  Page claimed that Jefferson wanted to marry her; that he rehearsed long speeches he intended to make to her (stood outside the Apollo Room in the Raleigh Tavern and quoted swaths of poetry to himself); that he told Page he would die if he lost her; that at last he declared he would buy a boat (the Rebecca) to sail the world in and cure himself of love. Always the reluctant speaker, he missed asking for her hand once because a mysterious case of “red-eye” kept him at home during a crucial month. He missed winning her (perhaps) anyway when he finally told her that (stammering) he had thought out a life-plan that included her, but before he could ask her, it was absolutely necessary that he go abroad on a trip to England and Europe for a year or so, as part of his education: Rebecca wouldn’t wait, would she?

  Rebecca wouldn’t. While Jefferson was still seesawing between love and study, marriage and freedom, Belinda and Adnileb (his old love of code), she simply married Jack Ambler.

  James Monroe has told me that the day he received the news was the first time Jefferson ever suffered one of those terrible “megrim” headaches that attacked him periodically all the rest of his life and left him sprawled in his bed, unable to work for weeks.

  Rebecca Burwell rejected him in 1764. From that time on he devoted himself to studying the law and then to building his house at Monticello, where he was finally to bring a bride, Martha Wayles Skelton, on New Year’s Day 1772.

  But—and now I approach my two contradictory stories—around the year 1768 the man who considered himself Jefferson’s “best friend” came to him with a request. John Walker had been at school with Jefferson from the age of fourteen, five boys cooped up in a log cabin on the Reverend James Maury’s shabby place in the South-West Mountains, and afterward had gone to William and Mary with him. Their fathers had been close friends: In his will, in fact, Peter Jefferson named Thomas Walker his chief executor. When he married, John and his new wife Betsy had settled at Belvoir, about six miles downriver from Shadwell, where Jefferson still lived. So it was natural enough that John ride over one day and announce that because he was traveling to Fort Stanwix to negotiate a treaty with the Indians, he had made a will himself (the Indian wars, even at that date, were brutal affairs) and in it he named Jefferson chief executor. Jefferson bowed. And therefore, as Jefferson’s best friend, John Walker asked him to keep a close eye on the health and safety of Betsy and their little baby daughter while he was away. Doubtless Jefferson bowed again.

  All agree that the executor kept too close an eye on Betsy.

  Weekly visits became daily. John Walker lingered four months in Indian territory. Jefferson was twenty-five, unmarried, strong, and vigorous. At some point in the four months, he has admitted (but with a lawyer’s distancing, indefinite nouns), “I offered love to a handsome woman. I acknowledge its incorrectness.”

  What happened?

  Betsy Walker told her husband her version—but not until many years later, when Jefferson was about to leave the country and set out for France as commissioner. And John Walker in his turn waited to dictate his grievance to Henry Lee (never a friend to Jefferson) until 1802 or 1803, when Jefferson was president and Walker had become his bitter political foe. These are Walker’s own words:

  In 68 I was called to Fort Stanwix, being secretary or clerk to the Virginia commission at the treaty with the Indians there.

  I left my wife and infant daughter at home, relying on Mr. Jefferson as my neighbor & fast friend, having in my will made before my departure named him first among my executors.

  I returned in November, having been absent more than four months.

  During my absence Mr. Jefferson’s conduct to Mrs. Walker was improper, so much so as to have laid the foundation of her constant objection to my leaving Mr. Jefferson my executor, telling me she wondered why I could place such confidence in him.

  At Shadwell, his own house, in 69 or 70, on a visit common to us being neighbors & as I felt true friends, he renewed his caresses. He placed in Mrs. Walker’s sleeve cuff a paper tending to convince her of the innocence of promiscuous love.

  This Mrs. Walker on the first glance tore to pieces.

  After this we went on a visit to Colonel Coles, a mutual acquaintance & distant neighbor. Mr. Jefferson was there. On the ladies retiring to bed, he pretended to be sick, complained of a headache & left the gentlemen, among whom I was.

  Instead of going to bed he stole into my room where my wife was undressing or in bed.

  He was repulsed with indignation & menaces of alarm & ran off.

  In 71 Mr. Jefferson was married and yet continued his efforts to destroy my peace until the latter end of the year 79.

  One particular instance I remember.

  My old house had a passage upstairs with a room on each side & opposite doors.

  Mr. Jefferson and wife slept in one. I & my wife in the other. At one end of the passage was a small room used by my wife as her private apartment.

  She visited it early & late. On this morning Mr. Jefferson knowing her custom was found in his shirt ready to seize her on her way from her chamber—indecent in manner.

  In 83 Mr. Jefferson went to France, his wife died previously.

  From 79 Mr. Jefferson desisted in his attempts on my peace. All this time I believed him to be my best friend & so felt & acted toward him. in Williamsburg, when I had just started out on my brief, unsatisfactory career as a lawyer. He was a short, squarish man, florid and patchy of complexion, ineffective, intellectually dim. Walker looked ten years older than Jefferson; rumor whispered that he had lost half his plantation because of poor management and debt; he wandered Duke of Gloucester Street talking compulsively to anyone he saw. By contrast, the month after Walker returned from Fort Stanwix, Jefferson had been elected overwhelmingly, triumphantly, to the House of Burgesses. Shortly thereafter he had gone to the Continental Congress, written pamphlets—written the Declaration of Independence—then served two terms as governor, then secretary of state; when the Walker story appeared, he was President. Why wouldn’t she say those things? In her own (poisonous) way Betsy Walker had made it known to the world that, insignificant as her husband might be, nonetheless one of the great men of Virginia had found her irresistible. Whatever else happened, the celebrated writer and statesman and paragon of virtue Thomas Jefferson had once fallen under her mesmerizing spell. If her husband was a cipher, she counted.

  Do I defend Jefferson too vigorously? I doubt it. As long as men stand for elections, scandals like this will follow. And as for that other Jefferson scandal, that one—what can I truly say about its “incorrectness”?

  Light-headed, trembling slightly with fever, Short forced himself to get out of his chair and cross to the window.

  When he had left Lafayette’s house an hour ago, the moon was just rising over the river. Now it stood directly above the rooftops, bathing the Champs-Élysées in a blue-white glow. From the window of his new bedroom in the Hôtel de Langeac he could see, as he had predicted, every detail of the massive customs wall and the Farmers-General toll gate, called these days by the innocent name Grille de Chaillot, after the little tree-covered hill that sloped away westward behind it.

  Short glanced at his watch. Past nine. Jefferson and the others would have just sat down at the theater. A movement below caught his eye, and he snapped the watch lid closed. At the nearest turnstile a peasant was struggling to replace a tottering stack of in Williamsburg, when I had just started out on my brief, unsatisfactory career as a lawyer. He was a short, squarish man, florid and patchy of complexion, ineffective, intellectually dim. Walker looked ten years older than Jefferson; rumor whispered that he had lost half his plantation because of poor management and debt; he wandered Duke of Gloucester Street talking compulsively to anyone he saw. By contrast, the month after Walker returned from Fort Stanwix, Jefferson had been elected ov
erwhelmingly, triumphantly, to the House of Burgesses. Shortly thereafter he had gone to the Continental Congress, written pamphlets—written the Declaration of Independence—then served two terms as governor, then secretary of state; when the Walker story appeared, he was President. Why wouldn’t she say those things? In her own (poisonous) way Betsy Walker had made it known to the world that, insignificant as her husband might be, nonetheless one of the great men of Virginia had found her irresistible. Whatever else happened, the celebrated writer and statesman and paragon of virtue Thomas Jefferson had once fallen under her mesmerizing spell. If her husband was a cipher, she counted.

  Do I defend Jefferson too vigorously? I doubt it. As long as men stand for elections, scandals like this will follow. And as for that other Jefferson scandal, that one—what can I truly say about its “incorrectness”?

  Light-headed, trembling slightly with fever, Short forced himself to get out of his chair and cross to the window.

  When he had left Lafayette’s house an hour ago, the moon was just rising over the river. Now it stood directly above the rooftops, bathing the Champs-Élysées in a blue-white glow. From the window of his new bedroom in the Hôtel de Langeac he could see, as he had predicted, every detail of the massive customs wall and the Farmers-General toll gate, called these days by the innocent name Grille de Chaillot, after the little tree-covered hill that sloped away westward behind it.

  Short glanced at his watch. Past nine. Jefferson and the others would have just sat down at the theater. A movement below caught his eye, and he snapped the watch lid closed. At the nearest turnstile a peasant was struggling to replace a tottering stack of boxes (chickens?) on a wagon bed. Nearby, a fille, holding her skirt high to show her legs, tried to attract the attention of a guard. The wind blew a dusting of snow from the trees. The girl dropped her skirt and disappeared into the darkness.

  In Virginia, Short thought … His mind swung back to the bare-shouldered ladies at Lafayette’s. In Virginia things were at once more open and more Puritanical in matters of the sexes. Black women were available, exotic, dependent. Young southern cavaliers were encouraged to be predatory, ruttish. In the free and easy Chesapeake where he had grown up, they used to say that a virgin was a girl who could outrun her uncle. But after marriage everything changed. After marriage Virginians kept to a strict, suffocating, churchly decorum. No mistresses, no infidelities. No French tolerance. His mind swung again. Who was the beautiful young woman at Lafayette’s house who had stared so intensely at him that night?