Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  Jefferson threw back his head and laughed.

  “Like a sack of feathers!” Maria said. “He carried her all the way down the street and out of sight. The ‘silliest’ thing I’ve seen.”

  Still laughing, Jefferson stood and took her arm. At the last sight in the garden, an ice house shaped like an opaque glass pyramid and filled at this time of year with nothing but damp straw, he bought her tea from an old woman and presented her, from his pocket, a little sketchbook and pencil to use in her art—but only on American subjects, he cautioned, when she came to visit him (with Richard) at Monticello and could draw the Natural Bridge, the Falling Spring, the sublime passage of the Potomac through the western Blue Mountains.

  Maria listened, smiling. In her imagination she pictured a scene like Italy, populated with cypresses and animal stockades and tall, glowing churches whose heavy doors slammed shut behind her.

  In the carriage she resolved to tell him that she was truly Catholic, that foolish and sinful as it seemed, she still dreamed of being a nun. Hadn’t she begun life by almost becoming a martyr? Therefore—But her hands had started to tremble again, like frightened birds, and she shoved them away, into the blue recesses of her skirt. Jefferson took her right hand and stroked it into stillness. You would have needed a heart blinder than stone, she thought, not to know what lay in the air between them.

  He studied her fingers and spread them one by one in her lap. “I’ve sent for my daughter Polly,” he said, pretending to measure and count her rings while he talked. Why did he think her hands trembled? She was a married woman, her husband wore absurd silk coats. “But my sister delays and delays and puts me off, and to tell the truth I fear a sea voyage for her almost as much as I do leaving her over there, in Pennsylvania, to grow up without me.”

  “You are very lonely then?”

  When he looked up, Jefferson’s smile had become tender, melancholy. “This is not a world to live at random in. Everything is a matter of calculation. The art of life is the art of avoiding pain. Am I happier to leave her an ocean away, safe with another person? Or to risk everything and bring her to me? The Head and the Heart are always locked in combat, you see.”

  “I am not at all clear,” Maria said boldly, “that we are speaking of Polly.” But she spoiled the effect of boldness by turning away quickly toward the green-and-brown blur of the flying landscape, so that she was not even certain that he had heard her.

  At the inn of the Trois Couronnes, a mile or so past Marly, Jefferson had arranged a dinner for them, the dinner of his engraved invitation—his servant Petit, in fact, had traveled out separately, supervised the table, and then melted away discreetly as they entered their private dining room.

  The windows opened onto a meadow, and beyond the green band of its horizon a careful eye could just make out the six pointed rooftops of Louveciennes, a casino built years ago for the old king’s greedy mistress Madame du Barry.

  “Say nothing in criticism of its architecture,” Jefferson joked, offering her a glass of the sparkling white wine Petit had poured. “A king’s mistress has royal powers. Do you know that old man DeLatude who comes to take soup with me sometimes?”

  Maria shook her head. Among the many contradictions of Jefferson’s character was his habit of talking to workers or peasants—his lanky aristocratic figure literally stooping to hear them—or inviting odd, rather disreputable figures into his home.

  “DeLatude spent thirty-five years in the Bastille and the dungeons at Vincennes, and that for the sole crime of making four verses on Madame de Pompadour. I remember the verses:

  ‘Sans ésprit, sans sentiment,

  Sans être belle, ni neuve,

  En France on peut avoir le premier amant:

  Pompadour en est l’épreuve.’

  ‘Without wit, without sentiment, without beauty or youth, in France one may still have the greatest lover; Pompadour proves it.’ He escaped three times and wrote his memoirs.”

  “You like a rebel,” she said.

  He poured more wine into her glass. “Dr. Franklin was once playing chess with Madame Helvétius, and happening to place her in checkmate, he reached across the board and snatched her king away, quite gleefully. ‘In France we don’t take kings in that way,’ she told him. ‘In America,’ he replied, laughing, ‘we do.’ ”

  At table, with the window to her left, the soft rolling landscape in a golden twilight, she could see past his shoulders to the private staircase that led to the second floor of the inn; her portmanteau had long ago disappeared with the coachman.

  “I think,” he said, spooning a delicate sauce, pink and rich, to cover the fish on her plate, “that I have now quoted poetry twice in one day—something I must not have done since I was a student at William and Mary College hundreds of years ago.” In the candles’ light his fair skin had taken on a reddish flush; his hands, she saw with surprise, now trembled as much as hers. “You paint, you sing, you restore a friend’s youth. How can there be any contest between Head and Heart?”

  Maria seemed to float above herself, a cloud looking down on dolls at play.

  “You are a famous statesman,” she blurted out, to the last a creature of tremulous impulse, not knowing why she said it.

  “What I have become,” Jefferson said, and afterward, recalling his tone of voice, the intensity of his face lowering toward hers, she understood he was making a gift of himself, exposing himself; she was certain he had not spoken to anyone else like this, not even his wife, not ever his wife. “What I have become,” he said, “the times made me become.” Like her, he made no move to taste his food. “As a young man I thought of myself as a poet and scholar. I read and wrote twenty hours a day, I breathed literature. I wanted only to live on my mountaintop surrounded by my family, reading and farming. I gave up the practice of law when I was very young; I had no ambition beyond my books and my home. If the Revolution had not come, and duty, duty—shall I tell you what I think? I think politics has distorted my nature. Politics has made me retire within myself, defensively, all the while I stand publicly open to every gaze. I cannot bear to stand up in public, I cannot bear to be seen as I really am, except by the eye of friendship.”

  She felt herself moved by every word, every pulse of her heart. She wanted to repay him somehow by explaining that she too had not become what she should have been, her nature too had been distorted by the times—had her father not died, her four baby brothers, had her mother not sold her on the auction block of London society to the highest bidder, to Richard; her visions, her belief were what lay at her core, and unlike him she could not make a gift of them.

  “Then you are lonely” was all she could say.

  Jefferson lifted her hand to his lips.

  As they rose from the table, she remembered at last the name of the new church they had passed that morning in Paris: the Church of the Madeleine, named after a sinner.

  He drew her toward the stairs.

  “It’s much too late to be working,” Clérisseau said from the door.

  Short jumped in his chair and dropped his pen. Beside Clérisseau, who was holding his gold watch up to his ear, James Hemings shrugged and made a Parisian moue of resigned annoyance. “I told him you said no visitors.”

  Clérisseau snapped the watch shut and waved him away with effusive thanks. “He said you were writing, and I said that was preposterous. You Americans are always writing, you and Jefferson. I call it the American disease. Spillers of ink. Furor scribendi. I was traveling past, bored, nothing to do, so I appointed myself physician to scribbling Americans. Jefferson, by the way, has the ill manners not to be home yet.”

  While he talked, Clérisseau strolled about Short’s sitting room, inspecting furniture, lifting curtains, running a finger across the marble mantelpiece over the fire. Now he stopped in front of the desk and raised one significant eyebrow at Short. With exquisite timing James reappeared, this time carrying a tray of brandy and glasses.

  “A disciple of Hebe, cup
bearer to the gods.” Clérisseau took the tray in his own hands. “Bless you.”

  Short cleared a space on his desk and locked away his letters in a drawer. When he sat up again, Clérisseau had filled two snifters to the brim and James was just closing the door behind him.

  “Is it true, my dear Guillaume, that in Virginia you give slaves the names of Greek and Roman gods?”

  Short held the snifter under his nose and thought about the question. Beware of Frenchmen in ebullient moods. It was true, in fact, that at Monticello Jefferson had a trusted manservant named Jupiter, and another one named Great George, sometimes called George the Ruler or King George by the family.

  “Not true,” he said firmly.

  “I don’t believe you.” Clérisseau pulled up a chair beside the desk. “What were you writing?”

  “Letters. Dispatches. Business.”

  Clérisseau twirled his own brandy under his unmistakably French nose, inhaled with his big eyes closed, then opened them and shook his head. “Because it would make a certain ironic sense, of course, to name the most powerless people after the most powerful. I am convinced that you do.”

  “You yourself have been making the rounds of powerful people tonight. Or at least their tables.” Short indicated the wine stains on Clérisseau’s ruffled shirt.

  “She’s not the model for his snuff boxes, you know. Vous savez. Our Maria.”

  “I know.”

  “But I enjoyed your expression when I said it. Do you know the other rumors? That Monsieur Monkey, her husband, is fond of men as well as women? I have it on the authority of d’Hancarville, our phallic expert. Or that the Prince of Wales seduced Mrs. Cosway—as who could blame him? that halo of golden curls, those ribbons!—seduced her and had a secret passage built between her house and his palace. The monkey was rather proud.”

  “Clérisseau, it’s late.” Short’s own watch lay face-up on the desk, hunting case open, hands pointing to half past ten. He turned it for the Frenchman to read.

  “And finally, in London she tells five hundred intimate friends that she secretly longs to be a nun. She intends one day to enter a convent in Italy. By a secret passage, I suppose.”

  Short rubbed his hands across his face. Even through his closed windows he could hear the rumble of wagon wheels at the Grille de Chaillot and nearby, in Jefferson’s garden, the song of a bird that he had recently learned to identify as the nightingale, unknown in America, the staple of every French love poem.

  “Jefferson has spent the day with her, yes?”

  Short was impatient. He waved the question away.

  “The ways of Paris conduce,” Clérisseau said blandly, refilling his snifter. “Is that an English word? Conduce?”

  “ ‘Are conducive to,’ ” Short said.

  “Yes. The ways of Paris are conducive to pleasure between men and women. Even scribbling Americans might notice. There is the king and his mistress to set an example, of course. The Marquis de Lafayette and his squadrons of ladies, Talleyrand and the delightful Madame de Flahaut, whom you certainly must meet—her mother was a royal mistress before her, it’s rather by way of being a family career. In Paris we think in terms of scandal, which is entertaining, but not shame, which would be frivolous.”

  “C’est bien la vie sportive,” Short said, managing to his ear a reasonable semblance of Parisian nonchalance.

  “And how is our charming friend the Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld?” Clérisseau asked.

  Short choked on his brandy.

  “If I were about to leave,” Clérisseau said, grinning, “instead of staying to finish my drink and greet Jefferson, I would depart with a wonderful exit line. Do you know the great mot of Beaumarchais? ‘To drink when we are not thirsty and make love in every season—Madame, these are the only things that distinguish us from the animals.’ ”

  He raised his glass.

  James Hemings remembered an excellent sentence in one of his books: “Les rues sont l’image du chaos.” The streets are the picture of chaos.

  Swaying, he gripped the smooth iron shaft of the streetlamp and stared through the crowd at the butcher. If you stayed up by Jefferson’s house and the Boulevards, you never saw anything like this. You saw animals, of course, horses and oxen and little herds of fat white French cattle being driven through the streets, shitting and bellowing and knocking down fences and walls; you saw horses racing full speed over the pavement, huge dogs in front of carriages clearing the way, poultry, geese, wagons full of rabbits and ducks in cages. But in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel you saw life the way it was, coming apart in bright red explosions of blood.

  “Un joli boeuf,” the Frenchman next to him said.

  James nodded. In front of the crowd the butcher had now wrestled the steer down to the filthy cobblestone street. The butcher lifted a club the size of a brick and hammered it down in one straight overhead swing, so hard that even thirty feet away, pressed between dozens of chattering Frenchmen, James heard the skull crack and the steer’s head bounce against the pavement.

  The crowd sighed. The steer writhed on its side and moaned.

  With a bound the butcher had straddled its massive neck and pulled out of somewhere a long curving knife that glinted in the sun like a fish before it darted suddenly down toward the outstretched throat. The blood pumped horn-high in brilliant jets.

  The butcher jumped back—skating on blood—then hurdled the steer’s flank and dropped on his knees by the belly. James saw his back, his head dipping, his red arm plunge. The steer roared and kicked its back legs high in wild convulsions. The crowd pushed forward, murmuring, watching intently as the butcher’s hands started to yank the entrails out, pink slithering ropes of skin that a boy caught and coiled in his arms. But James’s eyes never left the animal’s face. As the butcher sliced and pulled, James fastened his gaze on the brown snout, the great black wondering pupils. Each roar, each feeble shake of the horns drew him closer. The steer twisted his neck, raised his head in anguish. In the corner of his vision James saw the butcher’s hands again, then the red heart beating, then the knife.

  Chaos to the steer. Order to the butcher.

  Every Monday he had the day off, no cooking lessons, no household duty. In the spring months he had wandered the Boulevards until he knew every inch, stopping in like a regular at all the white men’s cafés, reading British newspapers at the bar, ending the day (or night) at Denis’s three-room bead-curtained brothel with young Marcella, she of the squirming black limbs. But come the hot weather and the long days he had taken to wandering east, far past the Opéra and the Boulevards and all that Jefferson, fancy, silk-swaddled Paris. Faubourg Saint-Marcel, the city’s anthill, that was where he came now, every Monday, drinking brandy for breakfast and watching animals die.

  The Frenchman beside him wanted to parley—“Vous êtes noir? Vous êtes noir?”—but James shook him off, tucked his bottle under his coat, and started to walk. On the Quai de la Feraille they sold birds, men, and flowers—the men were young country drunks hauled staggering up to an army recruiting booth by a bounty-hunter, the birds and flowers were offered to servants and couples passing from the markets or over the bridge to Notre-Dame. James had seen the flower merchants follow a customer half the length of the quai and, if he refused to buy, cover him with mud. The recruiting officers lounged under posters and crooked little fingers at him like a girl.

  You’ll come back dead, Adrien Petit had warned him; one of these days you’ll walk down an alley in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, and a Savoyard will drag you back here on a litter, dead as a rock, knifed through the throat. The Savoyards were the errand boys of Paris. They clustered in groups at street corners, wearing soft caps down over one ear and culottes held up by cloth belts sailor-fashion. They lounged and waited for work, anything from scraping shoes or putting down planks over the mud—Paris was the City of Mud—to carrying letters or parcels right to your door. Rough, loutish boys mostly, but they ran their groups with such severity—no robbery, no
drunkenness, no knives—that people entrusted them with the most amazing errands. In James’s presence Petit had once handed a Savoyard a package of money for Jefferson’s banker and sent the boy off without asking so much as a receipt. Petit was right, they would carry his corpse home piggyback … as long as Jefferson paid them.

  By nightfall, he had reached the seventh stage of the seventh stage of drunkenness, as his mother used to say. He was slumped in one of the smoky tripots next to the Bastille and pushing cards across a table with a crew of broken-toothed, red-eyed soldiers, playing a game he didn’t know, by rules that changed with every new bottle. At some point the soldiers disappeared, and he found himself outside on the streets again, weaving along the mossy wall of a building and breathing in sharp foreign smells—French straw, French spices, the cadaverous dead-geranium odor of a nearby church. Jefferson never went to church, but once in a while, remembering the slave houses at Monticello and the Sunday services halfway down the hill, James would go by himself into a Paris church. The trouble was, the French left their corpses in them overnight, before the funeral, so many corpses, so few windows, the churches smelled like wet boneyards, you gagged and choked the minute you entered.

  Jefferson.

  The man bathed his feet in cold water every morning—to keep off diseases, he said. James knew. Each day he carried the basin upstairs as soon as it was light and put it down by the bed, and Jefferson was always already awake, dressed except for his shoes, reading or writing something by candle.

  “Vien ici, James. Je vais vous donner quelque chose à boire, du café.”

  James blinked himself—it seemed—to a sitting position. Braced each hand on the arm of a chair, watching a skinny white man with greasy hair pour him a stream of coffee, right out of a pewter pot.

  “You’re a slave, James.”

  “I know what I am, you stupid old man. In Paris I’m a free man.”

  “I mean you’re a slave to that.” The Frenchman pointed to an empty bottle of cognac, emerald-colored and twisted wrong somehow at the neck like the body of a plump green chicken, and James made a point of looking in the other direction, still blinking, forcing the walls to stand still. It was Le Trouveur’s little one-room apartment, upstairs, off the rue de Charonne, and James had been there half a dozen times, sober once, drunk the rest, talking earnestly in French with the filthy old man, who carried a five-sided bull’s-eye lantern wherever he went, even in his room, and made his living finding things in the street. Le Trouveur, the Finder. In daylight he set up a little stall near the Pont Neuf where people could come and see his display of found objects. At night he took his lantern and crept over the slimy pavement like a big white rat. The streets, James thought, were the image of shit.