Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  “And the officers wept,” Jefferson said softly.

  As they shook hands with Hoffman and started down the stairs, loaded with samples of printing, Cosway turned back, grin pasted in place once again, and told Jefferson that of course they accepted his invitation for dinner. “Which I can read, you see, without spectacles.”

  Beside him on the staircase Maria stiffened with embarrassment and looked away. Jefferson and Trumbull had lived so seriously compared with them, compared with her. At the street she tried to think of a comment on Trumbull’s story, something wise, true.

  “So General Washington took no advantage of his situation,” she said; “he was self-sacrificing, yes?” As she spoke she saw Jefferson fumbling with his papers. On the Boulevard des Italiens a carriage careened too close, spraying mud and straw, and everyone scattered, shouting, turning in a whirl of bright skirts and hats. She stumbled backward into the doorway, furious, and swiped with her fan at a stain. Then in her hand she saw the second card that Hoffman had printed.

  “I think,” Jefferson said, settling back into the carriage seat beside her. The coachman, evidently well instructed beforehand, set off down the rue Coqhéron without a signal. In her lap, for reasons she could not explain, Maria Cosway’s hands trembled like birds. “I think,” Jefferson repeated, “that after two years I must have seen every form of wagon and voiture that there is in Paris.”

  “And made a list of them, I’m sure.” In honor of the excursion to the Désert de Retz, Maria had chosen a new straw bonnet with two long trailing blue ribbons, a full skirt of blue silk to match the ribbons, and a bodice of silk and Venetian gauze, finer than lace. Some instinct had led her to prepare secretly a little portmanteau of other things—Richard had walked through her room without even glancing at it—and hand it to the coachman. At no point in her life, she thought, gripping the edge of the bench, had she ever felt so unhappy and anxious.

  “Not a formal list,” Jefferson said, smiling.

  She touched his wrist with the tip of her fan, a gesture all the more daring, she thought, because they seemed so utterly alone in the coach.

  “Well,” he laughed, “not a written list, in any case.”

  “Bien. Let me guess.” She held up the fingers of her left hand, swaying slightly with the motion of the wheels, and began to count. “I’ve been here only a month. But there are remises, cabriolets, phaetons, fiacres, wiskeys, turgotines—” She stopped and frowned, and Jefferson raised his own hand to indicate a little brown carriage going past in the opposite direction, bobbing like a cork. “And désobligeantes,” she said, “but I never know why they’re called that.”

  “Ah. Because you cannot seat another person next to you, as we are. It disobliges them.”

  Maria smiled much more brightly than she had intended.

  In another moment their own carriage—Jefferson’s phaeton-calèche, with its crimson wheels and blue roof—entered the Place Louis XV, boiling as always with wheels, horses, clouds of dust. The Tuileries appeared on their left, then the equestrian statue of the king on their right, and Jefferson was pointing and saying something about the statue, lost in the noise. Maria nodded but looked past his hand toward the top of the square, where a pair of tall buildings framed the pillars of a handsome new church whose name she suddenly could not remember.

  “Now those are the public, commercial voitures,” Jefferson explained. “They’re not on my list. They go from here to Versailles or Saint-Cloud, and you pay the driver a fee each way.”

  Maria leaned toward his window to see, grazing his shoulder, inhaling, not the thick cologne that Richard always wore, but Jefferson’s lemony soap. The three long carabas that stood on the west end of the square all had ornate blue fleurs-de-lys painted across the doors, but otherwise they looked like gigantic mud-stained loaves of bread on wheels. The nearest driver lounged on his seat, shirtless and dirty in the morning sun. He stared goggle-eyed as they rattled past, while his bony horses shifted on their hooves in front of him and a line of waiting passengers snaked along the pavement. She shuddered and sat back in the carriage.

  “We have much less elegant ones in America,” Jefferson told her, amused. “I’ve climbed out many a time and helped push a wheel over a ford.”

  “But not today.”

  “Today,” Jefferson assured her, with a sudden lifting of the chin that made him look still taller, “will be perfect.”

  The Désert de Retz was a celebrated garden in the style anglochinois. It lay about four miles from Saint-Germain, twenty miles from Paris. To reach it was an all-day excursion that required them to pass along the right bank of the Seine to Passy, then cross the Pont de Neuilly—Jefferson’s favorite bridge—and take the broad, dusty highway for Saint-Germain.

  “You’ve invented a new word,” Maria told him as they left the bridge. She had turned to face him in the carriage, holding her lips in a light, half-mocking smile that she knew he liked, but her eyes were on the trees lining the highway. “Americanism,” she said. “Mr. Short told me you invented a new word, Americanism, but he was very unclear what it meant.” Behind Jefferson, in the blink of an eye, the leaves of the trees had transformed themselves into living claws. Snapping, waving, like the hands of a great yellow-green devil in their hundreds and thousands, they swung down toward the carriage window. Maria’s heart pounded like a drum. Her scream died in her throat.

  “I used it in a letter,” Jefferson said, “that William happened to copy. He was quite taken with it, but I only meant it to describe a position of political sympathy with the United States—‘Lafayette’s Americanism is never in doubt.’ Not a very good word,” he added doubtfully.

  “English is so curious,” she said. In another fraction of a second, as always, the metamorphosis had reversed itself, the leaves were retreating into their natural shape, God’s shape. She told no one about her visions, never. Especially not Jefferson, whose mind was so rational and masculine. Not since the day Trumbull had showed his paintings at the Hôtel de Langeac had either of them mentioned her Catholicism. But what else were her visions if not spiritual signs? They had come to her because of the danger she ran, because of the nurse leaning over the cradle, reaching. How else would God speak to an artist?

  “Are you all right? Are you well?”

  Maria brushed the air with her fan. Life came to a point. Things came to a point. “I’m very well. Very well.” She took a breath. “I was only thinking of Mr. Short. Poor in-love Mr. Short pining away for that pretty Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld. Rosalie. Did you see how he followed her from room to room two days ago? So white and pale—I felt sure he would drop to his knees on the spot and declare himself.” She fanned the ribbons of her bonnet. “And the duc may be old and preoccupied—the right word, yes?—but he notices.”

  Whom was she trying to warn? Herself? If he saw the parallel, Jefferson chose to ignore it. His expression was distant, impenetrable. “I had noticed nothing,” he said.

  “Oh, well.” She flushed and beat the air with her fan, making the silky ribbons fly.

  Before Saint-Germain they had to pass Marly. Although they had come out two weeks before, in one of Trumbull’s groups, to see the château and the king’s famous water machine, Jefferson insisted that they stop again and stroll, while the driver rested the horses. These were machines, she knew, after Jefferson’s own heart. He had made the whole parry walk up the sloping hillside to admire what Louis the Magnificent had wrought—an actual mountain of soil moved, an uphill aqueduct that rose nearly six hundred feet from the Seine to carry river water into a reservoir. From the reservoir—Jefferson had recited each number with an engineer’s precision—the water turned fourteen great ironwork wheels that worked two hundred and twenty-five pumps that forced eight thousand tons of water every twenty-four hours into more aqueducts and pipes, which in their turn supplied the jet fountains and waterworks of both Versailles and Marly. He deplored (he said) the king’s wastefulness, the outrageous expenditure of money sim
ply to create a fine joujou for the Court; but she could see in his eyes, his stooped attention to every detail of the clattering pumps, how much he really liked it. Anything mechanical, she thought, any little device held his attention like a magnet. A practical man, rational, unlikely to see visions. And yet at this very moment he was gripping her arm and pointing rapturously with one broad hand at the long, disappearing line of rainbows, inexpressibly beautiful, thrown up by the spray of the whirling pumps.

  The Désert de Retz, an hour farther away, had likewise been created by an engineer, but an engineer, Maria thought, trapped in a feverish dream. She had seen buildings in England that were purposely built, from the very start, as ruins—it was all the rage (a bizarre expression, English was such an angry language); Horace Walpole’s estate at Strawberry Hill, where Richard had once tried to charm a commission or two, contained a striking Gothic chapel, half its roof caved in, one stone wall crumbling to the ground, the whole thing constructed just two years before as a conversation piece in which Walpole and his guests could wander and indulge their sense of fashionable melancholy. As always, however, in matters of fashion, she decided, the French went far beyond the English.

  At the entrance to the Désert they paid their fees by a shiny grotto, scooped like a giant black seashell out of a hill, and then, tickets in hand, pushed forward to see what Jefferson dryly announced as “the latest ruin.” It was in fact not a simple chapel in the garden as at Strawberry Hill—it was the house of the owner himself, a massive ruined column sixty-five feet in diameter, four stories high, built of limestone and plaster, and Jefferson’s dryness of tone was no more than a momentary pose. With barely a word to his coachman he sprang from the carriage, turned with boyish energy to hand her out, then started down one of the winding paths toward the base of the column. As they walked, he gestured broadly, eyes on the high broken roof before them, long legs moving so rapidly that Maria found herself almost trotting to keep up.

  Monsieur de Monville, the engineer-owner, had lavished a considerable fortune to achieve the effect he wanted. When they drew up to a grassy space in front of the column, Maria gasped in surprise. Closer, from the carefully designed overlook, the column expanded to fill the sky. Its jagged roof seemed to disappear by strange, irregular steps into the clouds; its windows, set back in the flutings of the column, stood open to reveal an interior of delicate gold and damask furnishings, a spiral staircase, filmy white curtains, everything new, everything in the latest style, in total, brilliant contrast to the gray unadorned stone walls around them.

  “The idea,” Jefferson said.

  “The idea is grand, grandeur.” She clapped her hands together. “It makes you see in a new way—so huge, melancholy, such power in stone cut away and humbled. On s’est extasié!”

  Jefferson spoke again, softly, and it took her a moment to realize that he was quoting verse.

  “Say it again.”

  She had heard from Trumbull that Jefferson never made speeches in public if he could help it—his voice became reedy like a boy’s, from sheer nerves—but here, suddenly, to her complete amazement he lifted his head toward the column roof and repeated the poem in a strong, mournful chant.

  “ ‘Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers. They have but fallen before us: for one day we must fall. Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy towers today; yet a few years, and the blast of the desart comes; it howls in thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield. Let the blast of the desart come!’ ”

  “Ossian!” she cried.

  “You know Ossian?”

  “Ossian is my favorite of all poets.” Maria seized his hand between her two hands, forgetting Richard, the garden, the other visitors strolling the paths. “You all talk about Pope, you and Trumbull and Short—Pope! I hate Pope!—and Latin and Greek, and I feel so ignorant I could scream. But Ossian—I know every poem by Ossian. The first painting I ever exhibited at the Royal Academy was a scene from Ossian—Darthula showing herself to Caibar, her lover.”

  Jefferson was smiling down at her. Somehow his other hand now covered hers. They stood facing each other in the cool shadow of the broken column. From the house, she thought, from the garden, to other eyes they would seem to have struck an attitude of two lovers absorbed in each other. But they were, she thought, discussing art.

  “You’ve met the Marquis de Chastellux?”

  Maria nodded, conscious against her will of the warmth of his hand; both their hands.

  “He came to Monticello, it must have been four years ago, and stayed with us for a week. One night after my wife had retired to bed, he and I sat down by a bowl of punch and talking of this and that came to the subject of poetry. He asked if I had ever read the poems of Ossian—it was a spark of electricity that passed between us. I quoted a verse, he quoted another. I called for the book to be placed by the bowl, and we sat till past midnight reading aloud and quoting.”

  “Richard calls Ossian a fraud.”

  Jefferson shook his head. “I have heard people say—in England—that Ossian never existed. They claim the translator MacPherson actually wrote the poems himself as a hoax, but I know no reason to believe it. I corresponded with MacPherson, in fact. Ossian was an ancient Gaelic poet, the Homer of our climate; his every word was sublime. Sublime.”

  Maria lowered her eyes. Their hands slipped apart like ribbons. “Was your wife also fond of his poems?”

  But Jefferson had begun walking along the path, toward the yew hedges that led to the formal gardens.

  The hand that created the tower had not hesitated to scatter more ruins across the acres and acres of land surrounding it. As they wandered along the brown gravel paths, laid out in the “natural” English fashion rather than along the geometrical lines of French gardens, Jefferson kept a running count: no fewer than twenty-six buildings of various styles, eras, functions. They paused at a small ruined Gothic church that put Maria in mind of Walpole’s estate. (Determined to show herself intellectual and cheerful, she repeated Walpole’s famous bon mot: “The world is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think.”) Jefferson smiled acknowledgment and pointed out to her a Chinese orangerie planted incongruously just beyond the church. At the orangerie they plucked one of the hard little fruits and proceeded with it, peeling the skin, holding the sticky pulp for each other to taste; at the next ruined structure, a temple de répose (according to Jefferson’s guidebook), they could sit on a stone bench and look across a lake to an Egyptian obelisk.

  “This is,” Jefferson said, “a genuinely silly country. I’m fond of it; I am—most of the time—glad to be here. But it is undeniably a frivolous country.”

  Maria drew her skirt to one side. “What is the ‘silliest’ thing you have seen?”

  Jefferson had finished the orange and was wiping his fingers with one of the white handkerchiefs he carried. He answered slowly, tilting backward on the bench and clasping one knee in the casual pose that Trumbull had told her looked like a human jackknife, whatever that was.

  “When I first arrived in Paris,” he said, “I was invited to Dr. Franklin’s house in Passy, where he wanted to introduce me to Parisian society. The first woman I met—and I still remember her name, the Baroness d’Oberkirsch—wore her headdress extravagantly high. She was short, I may say a very short woman, so that her headdress rather than her face looked me straight in the eye while we talked. At first I saw only a white powdered expanse, sprayed with starch my nose told me, wrapped in a kind of white muslin. Suddenly—I was just bending my head to hear better—out of the headdress sprang five or six fresh flowers, each one held by a little spring and a vial of water concealed in her hair. The effect, she told me—I must have looked as if I had seen an apparition—was ‘Springtime in the Midst of Snow.’ ”

  Maria laughed, leaned toward him.

  “Now you,” he said. “The most frivolous, silliest thing.”

  “Besides Richard’s re
d coat?” she said, and for a long moment, the beat of a heart, the loud flap back and forth of her silk fan, both of them were silent. Then Jefferson was wiping her own fingers delicately with his handkerchief and saying softly, behind a mask of light and shadow, “Oh, yes, even besides Richard’s coat.”

  Kindness always won her more than wit. She laughed gratefully—to her own ear, much too loudly, a coquette’s laugh—and cocked her golden head as if in thought.

  “Do you know the décrotteurs?” she asked.

  Jefferson released her fingers. He shifted on the bench, out of the sun, so that his long, serious face seemed closer than ever. “The décrotteurs,” he said, “are the boys who stand at street corners and scrape your shoes after you cross the street.”

  “Because of the mud. The horrible, terrible, smelling Paris mud, it ruins your shoes, your dress, everything.”

  “Which is why you ladies take carriages or ride in sedan chairs. Walkers like me come home every day splattered up to our knees.”

  “The third day in Paris,” Maria said, “a storm broke—we hadn’t met you, I had nowhere to go, Richard was far away painting. I sat at the window and watched the rain. Then an enormous old lady came out of the door opposite—a duchesse at least, I’m sure, dressed beautifully, jewels, cape, silk—but she had to cross the street, she had no carriage. So she simply stood at the door, waved to a décrotteur—a husky boy about twenty—and when he reached her, she paid him a coin and hopped on his back!”