Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  By the Grille de Chaillot the prostitute had returned. One of the gabelous had built a small fire a few feet from his guardhouse, and she stood close to it now, skirt hiked up to her thighs, warming herself and calling something in a raucous voice that carried all the way to Short’s window.

  Wearily, Short smiled and turned away. The Old World and the New. Everyone in Paris was aware that for the first years of his marriage the king had been impotent. Despite careful instruction, despite a whole wall of indecently explicit pictures lining the corridor to the queen’s bedroom, stout, myopic, butter-brained Louis XVI had got it into his head that you simply inserted yourself in the woman, lay perfectly still for a minute or so, then withdrew and politely took your leave. The queen had raged and complained incessantly—adding to her reputation as a nymphomaniac from whom no footman was safe—until her brother, visiting from Austria, had sat down with Louis in exasperation and examined the royal equipment. A quick surgical cut on an abnormally tight and elongated foreskin, and the king at last experienced pleasure and the queen ceased to complain.

  In the corridor leading to Jefferson’s study Short passed the silent figure of James Hemings. They each raised their candle in pantomime salute. Their shadows crossed, split. Short entered the study and walked to Jefferson’s desk to make his nightly inspection. Pens, ink. The big folio letterbook lay open on the blotter, the letters sent and received that day already noted in its columns and followed by a three-line summary of contents. Beside it was the leather-bound account book in which Jefferson recorded every franc, livre, and sou that he spent, an astonishingly complete tabulation, day by day, that Short tried faithfully to emulate (but the money went so fast).

  On the seat of the swivel chair Jefferson had placed six more copies of Notes on Virginia to be wrapped and mailed.

  Letter files, books of addresses, bank records. Short searched a moment before finding the pocket-size notebook in which, to his complete and abiding amazement, Jefferson wrote down the temperature each morning when he awoke, as well as his notations of the weather generally and his sightings of various plants and flowers, when they first bloomed, when they died.

  Finally, he checked the copy-press machine that Jefferson used to duplicate most of the letters he wrote. It was a clumsy drum-shaped contraption the size of a wine cask, which exacted daily tributes of ink and mashed human fingers. Short disliked the machine—Jefferson loved it—but then, Short disliked most machines, most mechanical cleverness. He himself could barely sharpen the points of his pen satisfactorily, while Jefferson kept a little tool box beside his desk and in spare moments amused himself, like Louis XVI, by devising ingenious locks and keys.

  Different minds, Short thought. He himself understood politics so poorly; Jefferson’s mind analyzed, judged, noted with extraordinary clarity. Why would the king put up with such an obviously clumsy and inefficient tax-collecting system as the Farmers-General? Short had asked. Jefferson had looked up in his mild way and put everything into political perspective. The Farmers-General, he told Short, formed a huge protective shield between the monarch and the people. Their sullen, growing anger about taxes was deflected from the remote figure of the king and onto the ubiquitous gabelous and private financiers, who seemed to work for themselves alone.

  At the study door he paused, holding his candle shoulder-high, yawning. His mind drifted. Lafayette. Lafayette’s mistresses. The shy young woman at Lafayette’s house, dark eyes, raven-black hair, staring at him. Why did the French never introduce themselves? In Lafayette’s dining room the clubfooted Abbé of Saint-Denis, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, had been pointed out to him. Talleyrand had a mistress, Short knew, who lived in an apartment in the Louvre with her very French, very tolérant husband. When she had recently given birth, she had named the child, with her husband’s bemused approval, Charles.

  His candle transformed him into a ghost on the window.

  Short inhaled and smelled the tart filament of wick and smoke. After his fever lifted, after he regained his fleshly existence, perhaps he would be Parisian—or Virginian—enough to find out the dark young woman’s name.

  “In America,” said the Comte de Buffon. He paused and looked up and down the long dinner table. An extraordinarily ugly little man, Short thought; big head, stumpy legs and brown and wrinkled as a nut. He had come to Jefferson’s dinner party dressed not in the usual lace shirt, jacket, and knee-breeches, but in slippers and a yellow robe with white stripes and blue flowers, excused from ordinary formality by his great age and fame.

  “In America,” repeated Buffon when he was sure he had everyone’s attention, “as I have shown many times, the temperatures are lower on average, the air colder, the climate more moist than in Europe. It stands to reason that animals and men in such a climate grow to a smaller size than here.”

  “Well.” Jefferson had seated himself opposite Buffon in the center of the lavish table. In fact, unusually enough in Short’s experience, Jefferson himself had laid out the seating arrangement for the whole table, huddling with his maître d’hôtel Marc and even checking the place cards twice before the guests arrived.

  “Now, Monsieur le Comte.” This was Nathaniel Barrett, a Boston merchant and sailor whom Jefferson had met somewhere. He carried himself like a bluff farmer but spoke a surprisingly good French. “It’s an interesting theory you have. But in the first place, where is the evidence that temperatures are colder in America? I’ve survived some forty-five Massachusetts winters, man and boy, and I can tell you that they were nothing compared to the last few months in France.”

  Buffon turned his gnomish little head and nodded to the Abbé Raynal, who sat several chairs farther down, toying with his food. “Many studies,” Raynal said. Despite his reputed wealth, the abbé wore an unfashionably plain black suit and a blue cloth cap like a turban, instead of a wig. Buffon was rumored to have his hair curled three times a day, like a woman, but the priest Raynal had the blunt, ascetic air of a soldier. “A great many studies, some of which I have had the honor of conducting myself, all establish the differences in temperature and moisture. It is indisputably a fact.”

  “Well,” Barrett persisted, scratching his head, “even if it were a fact, how precisely does it work, that heat and moisture can change the size of animals?”

  “And men,” Raynal said.

  “And men.”

  “I sent you a panther skin, Monsieur le Comte,” Jefferson said.

  “Yes, and also a copy of your interesting study of Notes on Virginia. Our friend Chastellux here delivered the book and the skin to me at Montbard. You were quite kind.” The old man’s eyes twinkled. He refused to be drawn into further comment on the panther skin, which had smelled like moldy blue cheese and which Short had personally watched James Hemings wrap and then had delivered himself to Chastellux. Short thought the old man was enjoying his game with Jefferson immensely.

  Jefferson slouched in his chair and smiled. “To tell the truth, I actually hoped that the size of the pelt might convince you that nature, in our part of the world, is no less vigorous than in this.”

  Buffon spread his tiny hands. Paws, Short thought; from the moment the comte had arrived at the rue de Berri, Short had seen him as a diminutive talking forest creature, complete with curls and spectacles. “My dear sir,” Buffon said genially. He turned to include Chastellux in the debate. “One pelt does not a species make.”

  “No.” Jefferson imitated Buffon by gazing up and down the table, fourteen guests, seven on a side, all men for once. In the usual French custom each man had brought his own manservant to stand behind his chair and change plates and glasses, so the effect was more like an overcrowded lecture hall than a dining room. “Well, in any event I’ve asked some friends in New England to hunt down a few more panthers and also some moose skins and antlers and send them on, for your cabinet of objects. Now the moose, which is native only to America, you will find a gigantic creature, much larger, for example, than your European reindeer.”
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  Buffon nodded cheerfully, reminding Short of a mouse-size Franklin. “It would help your case more, Monsieur, if you would also furnish additional skins of the so-called mammoth.” He turned to the Abbé Raynal again. “Monsieur Jefferson believes that the mammoth, whose bones he has examined in America, is in truth a different creature from the elephant. Naturally I don’t.” He looked directly at Short and, behind the little glass disks of his spectacles, actually seemed to wink.

  “What disturbs me most, I suppose, in your theory,” Jefferson said, “is the idea that nature in America is somehow less energetic, less active than life in Europe. As if,” he added with a tone of controlled sarcasm, “both sides of the earth were not warmed by the same genial sun.”

  “In America,” said the Abbé Raynal, in a tone as lofty as Jefferson’s had been sarcastic, “it is the case that even when animals are transplanted from here to there, they in fact degenerate in size.”

  “And men,” Jefferson said, still slouched in his chair and staring up now at the ceiling. “I believe you argue in your books that all races are smaller in America, red, black … even white men whose fathers came over as settlers from Europe.”

  “And men,” agreed the abbé.

  “I wonder.” Jefferson straightened, smiled, looked from one end of the table to the other. “I see that we have by chance arranged ourselves so that all the Frenchmen are on one side, all the Americans on the other. Perhaps we could just stand up and test the theory?”

  He slowly rose from his chair, all six feet two inches of him. Barrett rose. Short, a second merchant, William Bingham, the other three American guests. None was smaller than five feet nine or ten.

  On the other side of the table, smiling, the gnomish Buffon stood. Then Raynal, three inches shorter than Barrett. Of the seven Frenchmen only the man opposite Short matched any of the Americans in height or bulk.

  Jefferson smiled serenely. Barrett burst into cackling laughter.

  “Your friend Jefferson has an unfortunate habit of never facing the person he addresses. He looks like a fox.”

  Short moved a step closer to the fireplace and frowned. Charles-Louis Clérisseau was the Frenchman with the bulging eyes and sardonic voice he had so often encountered but never officially met until tonight, and then thanks only to Jefferson’s place cards had he learned his name.

  “He always gazes to one side, or up at the ceiling,” Clérisseau said. “It makes him appear insincere, or”—he switched from French to English and mouthed the next word with exaggerated delicacy—“sly.”

  “Ah.” Short made a point of looking straight into Clérisseau’s great saucer-shaped eyes before twisting his head to locate Jefferson. “He’s a reserved, diffident man, really.” At the other end of the room Jefferson was displaying some of his books to Buffon.

  Clérisseau shook his head. “Diffident like a fox. I believe that trick he played at dinner was first done by Franklin years ago.”

  “You think—”

  “Moreover,” Clérisseau said, “I find it suggests another disturbing trait.”

  “Which is?”

  “He makes his defense of America too personal. As if, when Buffon and Raynal propose their theories, he himself is being criticized. Look at him—six feet tall, broad-shouldered. What does it matter to him if the moose is large or small? What does it matter to him how big the mammoth is? Is it a personal contest? Your Monsieur Jefferson has a very thin skin.”

  “He has a very strong sense of place, in fact,” Short said, wondering if Clérisseau had just said something painfully insightful. No, he thought. Not at all.

  “Ah well, place; setting; atmosphere. The sine qua non of an artist. I am an architect, you know, Monsieur. When he asked me to dinner, I sat down and read the description of his mountaintop house, in Chastellux’s Traveld. Monticello. A marvelous name. A marvelous idea—to clear off a whole mountaintop and put up a house.”

  “He originally meant to call it the Hermitage.” Flushing, Short put his wineglass down on a table. Hermitage sounded foxlike.

  Clérisseau smiled and said nothing.

  By the tall French doors, under a handsome crystal chandelier that Jefferson had bought last week at auction, Buffon held up an engraving between his tiny hands, shook his head, and replaced it in the folio Jefferson opened for him.

  “No, no, Monsieur Jefferson,” he said. He looked up at Short and twinkled a greeting. “There we must agree to disagree too. You think that this so-called science of ‘chemistry’ is bound to lead to new and brave discoveries, to unlock the secrets of nature—your words?” Jefferson nodded. “Whereas I,” said Buffon, beaming at all of them, “think chemistry is merely cookery.”

  As Jefferson, objecting vigorously, reopened the folio and began a second defense, the Abbé Raynal moved back a step from the group and squeezed out a square inch of smile for Short.

  “I suppose that you, also, Monsieur Short, grew up among Indians and slaves?” Like all the French abbés whom Short had met, Raynal had an impressive repertoire of pleasures. One hand clutched a large glass of Jefferson’s excellent sauternes; the other hand raised a cakey gray mound of snuff to his nose. But the effect of good humor was spoiled by the little dark worms of wax now streaking his cheeks, makeup melted by the heat of the fire.

  Short took a new glass of wine from a passing servant and steeled himself to answer diplomatically.

  “Slaves, yes. Everybody in Virginia lives among slaves. But I’ve seen few Indians in my life, and then mostly in the towns along the Chesapeake Bay, rarely in the forests or their own villages. Monsieur Jefferson, however, lived much among them when he was a boy. His father traded with them and took them as guides on his map-making expeditions. He seems at home in Paris, as you see, but his boyhood was spent in the wilderness.”

  “With savages.” Raynal smiled a great deal, like Clérisseau, but Short felt it a cooler, more condescending smile.

  “I doubt if he would agree. Monsieur Jefferson has a high regard for the Indians he knew. In his Noted on Virginia—”

  “I have not seen the book,” Raynal said.

  “Well. There he quotes a wonderful speech by a Mingo chieftain named Logan, a speech the Indian wrote himself when he was accused of breaking a treaty. Jefferson says the speech is worthy of comparison with Demosthenes and Cicero—”

  Raynal’s smile became a sneer. With his wineglass he touched Short’s sleeve, a polite signal for interruption.

  “Not,” he said with Gallic precision, “Demosthenes and Cicero. Surely not. Monsieur Jefferson’s penchant for exaggeration carries him too far.”

  “Logan?” Jefferson said behind them.

  “Monsieur Short has been quoting your praises of Logan.” Raynal looked complacently about him. Barrett drew closer, chewing a stick of bread. Buffon lowered himself into a chair and folded his hands in his lap.

  “I was saying,” Raynal continued, “that you surely give too much credit when you compare a half-naked savage to Demosthenes.”

  “I don’t accept the word savage,” Short said doubtfully, shaking his head.

  “Logan was a splendid figure,” Jefferson said. “But if you are interested in Indian oratory, I remember another great chief.” He looked down at the floor, then toward the fireplace. “This was a famous warrior from the Cherokee tribe, named Outasette. He was frequently my father’s guest in our house at Shadwell. In about the year ’62—I was still a student at William and Mary—Outasette came to Williamsburg to see the governor and to embark on a trip to England, at the invitation as he called it of his white Father’ the king.”

  “He had his portrait painted by Joshua Reynolds,” Barrett said through his breadstick. “I saw it in London. The damned English made such a fuss about him—they love the brutes. Oliver Goldsmith wrote it up in a book.”

  “Well, I saw him,” Jefferson said, “not in London, but in his camp outside Williamsburg, before he sailed. About two hundred Cherokee braves had marched in to see hi
m off, and the last night he assembled them out in the forest and made a farewell oration. The moon was in full splendor, I remember, and Outasette stood above us on a cliff, in his feathered headdress and buckskin, and made a speech directly to her, as if they understood a common language.”

  Short’s fingers itched for a pen. When the mood was on him Jefferson could speak for hours in absolutely perfect sentences and paragraphs. One needed only write them down, as from dictation.

  “His prayers were for his own safety during the voyage, first, and that of his people during his absence. I remember his sounding voice, his distinct, beautiful articulation, the solemn silence of his people sitting at their scattered fires—all that filled me, a boy of twenty or so, with genuine reverence and veneration.” Jefferson raised his head to smile wryly at Raynal. “Although, of course, I confess that I didn’t understand one word in the language he uttered.”

  The abbé had sniffed most of his little gray mound of snuff. Now he wiped the back of his hand across his nose and glanced sideways at Buffon.

  “Charming, picturesque memories,” he said. “The scene—you, Monsieur Jefferson, on your knees beside an Indian campfire, the full moon, the orator in his costume—yes, yes, very good, very American. But my dear sir, my dear friend, these impressions have nothing to do with history or science, our previous subjects. They only show how quickly the white man falls under the spell of savages—not Demosthenes—and how quickly the white man will then … degenerate.”