Jefferson

by Max Byrd

He took Short’s list from his pocket. Still to write: letters to R. and A. Garvey regarding a new copy press. To Wilt, Delmestre & Co. on tariff regulations, to Vergennes on tobacco, to Elizabeth Eppes, Francis Eppes. The last letter on the list was for Eliza House Trist, the comfortable, unpretentious young widow with whom he and Madison and Edmund Randolph had lodged eleven years ago in Philadelphia. A personal letter, not part of the official business of a minister plenipotentiary. Rain drummed its white fingers against the window.

  Jefferson dipped his pen in the inkwell; placed his right wrist gingerly on the blotter. Twenty lines of gossip, which Mrs. Trist loved; compliments. For a moment he curled his right hand gentry around his throat, as if to guard his voice. Then: “I of ten wish myself among my countrymen, dear Madam, as I am burning the candle of life without present pleasure, or future object. A dozen or twenty years ago this scene would have amused me. But I am past the age for changing habits. I take all the fault on myself, as it is impossible to be among people who wish more to make one happy. Yet living from day to day, without a plan for four and twenty hours to come, I form no catalogue of impossible events. Laid up in port, for life, as I thought myself at one time, I am thrown out to sea, and an unknown one to me. By so slender a thread do all our plans of life hang!—My hand denies itself further, every letter admonishing me, by a pain, that it is time to finish.…

  Rain became sunshine, dense blue sky.

  At eleven the next morning Short looked up curiously when James Hemings announced Mr. and Mrs. Bentalou from South Carolina. Jefferson unfolded himself from his desk and signaled to Short that he should stay.

  Mrs. Bentalou, massive in a new bell-shaped jupe and bustle, required an armless chair; James was dispatched to fetch one. Both of them accepted Jefferson’s offer of coffee (but no pastry, “Lord, no, not another crumb,” Mrs. Bentalou sighed, patting her hips), and James was dispatched again.

  Paul Bentalou exported rice from his plantation in South Carolina—or would, if Vergennes and the Farmers-General ever put into practice the theoretical reforms Jefferson had made last year—and at first Short assumed (one eye on his stack of waiting correspondence) that the visit concerned the all-important, all-dreary subject of tariffs.

  Bentalou crossed his legs, rubbed the toe of his new silver-buckled shoe. His wife explained between bites (having changed her mind about the pastry, which James cooked himself) that they had spent three days and three fortunes at least in the shops on the rue Saint-Honoré before coming to trouble his Excellency.

  “Please, please.” Jefferson waved away the title. As always, Short noted, when conversation from strangers touched him personally, he parried with a schoolmasterly fact. “Did you stop at Mademoiselle Bertin’s dress shop?” he asked. Mrs. Bentalou nodded and fluffed the jupe; her husband made a noise like a man shot. Mademoiselle Bertin had gained a European fame for the cost and frequency of her fashions, which she announced by mailing to her customers small wax dolls dressed in models of her newest outfits. “Well now, here’s a curious thing,” Jefferson said. “Her shop is on the north side of the street, as you saw, but she told me once, when I went with a friend”—he paused—“she told me her rent is much higher, and her prices, too, than if she were on the south side of the street. I couldn’t think why.”

  Bentalou was a compact man with a farmer’s spade-sized hands. He used them now to shift his legs and pinch the toe of the other shoe.

  “I don’t know about cities,” he apologized.

  “But the fact is,” Jefferson persisted, “it has to do with the sun—we’re both farmers—it has to do with how much sunlight comes in her big glass windows. On the north side of the street you get the winter sun; it keeps the shop warmer, displays the goods better. In Paris, rent’s always higher on the north side of a street.”

  Bentalou rubbed his chin. “We have a problem, your Excellency … a consultation.”

  Jefferson sank back in his chair in the “jackknife” pose that Short could have drawn with his eyes closed: sitting on his bony hip, knees up, left shoulder higher than the right. Despite the sling, the fingers of both hands touched in a steeple.

  “We’re traveling, you know, for ten months or a year, and we brought our servant with us.…”

  “Just a boy,” Mrs. Bentalou deprecated. “He runs errands, keeps Mr. Bentalou’s clothes.”

  “He is Negro,” Jefferson said.

  “Two or three days ago,” Bentalou said, “in our hotel one of the guests, a Dutchman he was, told us that in this country, legally, a servant is free; you can’t keep him if he wants to go. Nobody said that when we arrived at Le Havre, but this Dutchman insisted this was so. So we came to you, as our … ambassador. Can we keep our slave?”

  Short made himself invisible at his desk.

  Jefferson tapped gently the tips of his steeple. For a long moment Short heard only the rustle of Mrs. Bentalou’s new crinoline, the asthmatic rasp of her husband’s breath.

  When he finally answered, Jefferson was lawyerlike, neutral. “The laws of France do give him freedom if he claims it, and in such a case it would be difficult if not impossible to interrupt the course of the law. Slavery is illegal in France, no matter what the status or nationality of the owner may be. Nevertheless, I have known an instance where a person, bringing in a slave, and saying nothing about it, has not been disturbed in his possession.”

  “Ah.” Bentalou sat back in his chair and nodded, not a farmer but a man of the world.

  “If the boy is young, he will probably not think of claiming his freedom,” Jefferson added.

  “It wouldn’t be natural, would it?” Mrs. Bentalou probed for reassurance. “Claiming his freedom?”

  But the Roman stared at a point hidden in the wall and, though Short would have waited for hours, made no move to disagree.

  On January 17, 1787, Jefferson received the first of his visits from the family Valdajou.

  “Rebouteurs,” Adrien Petit explained to Short: “bone-setters. The most renowned bone-setters dans toute la France.”

  Together Short and Petit stood beside the stairs and watched the bone-setters troop up to the second floor in solemn file, three brothers, one ancient father, all dressed in black wool suits, with hair curled and set in pigtails, followed by four servants likewise in black, each carrying on a cushion a polished wooden box of, presumably, medical implements.

  Presumably, because French medicine, Short had learned, liked to keep its methods very much in the guild, secret. The useful and most intimate instrument called a “forceps,” now the rage in all fashionable lyings-in, had actually been invented by another family of French doctors some fifty years earlier, so Short’s informants claimed, and kept a profitable secret until the last decade. Who knew what bone-crunching devices the Valdajous carried in their boxes? Like the inventor of the forceps, they strictly banished all visitors and friends from the invalid’s chamber.

  The last servant’s heels disappeared at the landing. Petit cocked his head and pursed his lips in the universal French sign for skepticism, stared at Short, and then marched away to his office above the kitchen. After a moment, fingers (if not wrist) sympathetically aching, Short returned to the study and his stacks upon stacks of Jefferson’s correspondence.

  By four that afternoon, it was already midwinter dark. Lafayette, onstage as always, carried a second candle to the table beside Jefferson’s chair, rubbed his hands together briskly like a servant, and glanced around.

  “You have books in every room,” he said accusingly. “This is the salon, not the library.”

  “An American custom,” Short told him solemnly from the other side of the fireplace. “A Virginia custom. As far as books are concerned, Virginians believe all rooms are created equal.” In his chair, wrist so thickly bandaged by the Valdajous that it might have been a fat white lapdog, Jefferson smiled and looked faint. Behind him James Hemings continued to sort out his tea tray. Beside Short, who stood, sat a pale young man named John Banister, Jr.
, knees apart, jaw slack, eyes (Short thought) like a pair of bloodshot buttons.

  “Ah well, in that case.” Lafayette bowed to the nearest shelf of books, as one American to another; then from a table picked up a metallic instrument shaped like a draughtsman’s compass, with an inflatable rubber bulb at one end. For a moment Short’s mind turned wildly to the Valdajous.

  “That is my hygrometer,” Jefferson said. “In between doctors I’ve been experimenting with a way to measure the moisture in the air, to improve on Monsieur Buffon’s calculations.”

  “Always Buffon,” Lafayette said enigmatically. “If poor Buffon said everything was bigger in America, you would Love his calculations.” He put down the hygrometer and picked up a padded rectangle two feet long and lined with blue felt trays.

  “Seashells.” Jefferson shivered though he sat no more than a yard from the fire. “They were found in a Virginia quarry, not far from Charlottesville. One of my neighbors at Monticello gathered them in support of my theory that the ocean once reached far inland, as far as the Shenandoah Mountains, perhaps. This one, for example—”

  While Jefferson stretched his good hand to show Lafayette the shell, Short stole a glance at young Banister. Another of Jefferson’s charity cases—was he one himself? Short wondered—Banister had come to Europe for a Virginian’s version of the Grand Tour, promptly got himself poxed in a Marseilles brothel, and collapsed into near-bankruptcy at the hands of quacks and gamblers. For months his father had been writing Jefferson to ask for help, and at last the prodigal had staggered into Paris and the Hôtel de Langeac, where he now occupied Williamos’s old room on the third floor, next to Short’s. An unlucky conjunction, Short thought; when (and if) he recovered from his pox, someone would have to take the boy aside and explain about sheepskin condoms and other precautions; not Jefferson, obviously. Short studied the writhing fire; perhaps the Ace of Spades.

  “I’ve brought you a present,” Lafayette said, replacing the shell in its tray.

  “Not more cheese, I hope.” Jefferson made a wan face at Lafayette, now towering over his chair, arms folded together. In the previous summer a group of New Hampshire farmers, stirred by patriotic hindsight, had decided belatedly to honor Lafayette for his services in the Revolution. The result: a five-hundred-pound yellow cheese, shipped across the Atlantic and delivered on September first to his doorstep at the rue de Bourbon. For months Lafayette had been bringing huge slices to the Hôtel de Langeac, on the supposition that Jefferson ought to help to dispose of it.

  “No cheese.” Lafayette accepted a cup of tea from James Heinings. “Gossip, news. While the frères Valdajou have been steering your bones into port, Versailles has been steering the nation into open seas.”

  “You mean the Assembly of Notables.” Jefferson came to life as he always did at the mention of politics, especially rebellion.

  “The notables,” Short whispered under his breath, the latest Parisian joke about the extraordinary assembly of dukes, generals, bishops, citizens, and courtiers called by the king, like a miniature parliament, to gather at Versailles and address the increasingly urgent question of King Louis XVI’s finances. It would be the first Assembly in a hundred and sixty years.

  “I know all about it,” Jefferson said. “The papers are full of nothing else. You will recall I even predicted something like it.”

  Lafayette was wandering, as usual, from object to object in the room. He paused at the mantelpiece over the fire, next to Short, and clicked his big teeth like a horse. “You did, you did. After we met with the Farmers-General, you said the king’s budget was so extravagant that sooner or later he would have to call for help, even the king.”

  Jefferson made a point of addressing young Banister, as if there were an analogy of budgets. “The Assembly of Notables,” he explained, “was chosen by the king on the last day of the year.”

  “December 29,” Lafayette corrected, wandering away from the fire. “At his Conseil des Dépêches, a complete surprise to everyone except Calonne and Vergennes.”

  “For years,” Jefferson told Banister, “the king’s revenues have fallen far short of his expenditures, especially at Court. The few ministers who tried to rein in his expenses were all summarily dismissed.”

  “Monsieur Necker,” Lafayette said gloomily, now standing before twenty-four leather-bound volumes of the Encyclopédie, Franklin’s copy, which Jefferson was to ship to him in Philadelphia in the spring. “You put it best, my friend, you said in Europe we’ve divided ourselves into two classes, the wolves and the sheep.”

  Jefferson turned in his chair to follow him, and Short observed the ripple of pain across his face. No French room was ever really warm. The cold January air must have cut into Jefferson’s poor wrist like a knife.

  Opposite him young Banister sat up straighter and made an effort to look interested. “When I was in Marseilles,” he told Lafayette, “I saw poor people everywhere, worse off than niggers, but the nobility, they rode in carriages covered with gold.”

  Lafayette was pulling open one of the great oversize volumes of the Encyclopédie (to Jefferson’s polite distress) and peering at an illustration. As if Banister had never spoken, he asked over his shoulder, “Do you know—I went to the Palais Royal the other day, to the new gallery of wax models—what did I see?”

  Short thought of the anatomically correct Zulima but said nothing.

  “Frederick the Great.” Lafayette slapped the book closed. “Already a wax statue of Frederick, and he only died in August. I saw him last year, you know. I traveled to Prussia, and he sat me down at a banquet next to Lord Cornwallis, of all people in the world. And as I always do”—Lafayette made a quick, insincere gesture of self-deprecation—“I began to praise America. I said in America the ideas of liberty and equality reigned supreme, sublime. I said there would never be nobility or royalty in America, no wolves and sheep like here. Cornwallis sniffed and smirked, of course, and chewed on his bottom lip the way these cannibal Englishmen do, but Frederick—Frederick roused himself from his royal torpor and told me, ‘Sir, I knew a young prince who visited a land of liberty and equality and then tried to go home and establish it in his own land. Do you know what happened to him?’ ‘No, sire; what happened?’ ‘Sir, he was hanged.’ ”

  Banister snorted, then glanced at Short. A joke? But Lafayette rarely joked.

  “This is the state of mind,” he told Jefferson, circling now in front of Jefferson’s chair, carrying the book with his finger mashed between the pages; “the state of mind Louis must face, France must face, if any change is to come.”

  “Frederick was a formidable wolf,” Jefferson said neutrally.

  Lafayette put down the book, picked up the hygrometer, and squinted through it at the ceiling, where Jefferson’s picture of a sunrise flickered like a second shadow. “Frederick allowed no women to set foot in his palace, did you know that? Men only.” He shuddered; like a Frenchman, Short thought. “For love, he would choose his palace guard personally, tall, husky young Germans, the finest physical specimens; then he would summon one of them whenever he felt like it, punch him around a bit schoolboy-fashion, and finally motion him to the sofa behind the screen in his study. He himself was the filthiest old man I’ve ever seen. He wore a foul crimson dressing gown night and day, covered with tobacco; he had his boots split on the sides so his gouty feet could fit. He always had one of his Italian greyhounds nuzzling under his legs—they were all killed and buried with him—and Voltaire used to claim he seasoned his food with gunpowder.”

  Lafayette replaced the hygrometer and returned to his point.

  “But my news, my dear sir, is that another death is imminent.”

  “Calonne is ill, I know.” Jefferson referred to the king’s latest inept minister of finance.

  “Not Calonne. Vergennes. I spoke with his physicians two hours ago—hopeless. They give him a week to live, less.”

  Jefferson sat back in genuine surprise.

  “The rising gout,�
� Lafayette said by way of explanation, thumping his hand against his flat stomach. “Comes on like a fire. They say his lips are already black and his flesh smells like pus. He spat half a quart of blood this morning into his soup.”

  Jefferson addressed young Banister as if in a tutorial. “Vergennes is a great and good minister,” he said, “in charge of the king’s foreign policy, including trade. If he dies, the Assembly would have to be put off, delayed indefinitely.”

  “Without a doubt,” Lafayette said.

  “And the longer the time between the announcement and the Assembly, the greater the chance for dissension and opposition to come together. Already you hear stories—”

  “The people”—Lafayette used the insulting French phrase le peuple, so utterly different, Short thought, from the expression Jefferson had inserted at the beginning of the Declaration: “one people.”

  “Le peuple,” Lafayette said, taking up his tricornered hat from a table, “misunderstand the whole idea of the Assembly—fishwives are petitioning Calonne for divorces, beggars and cripples have Versailles practically under siege; cripples, mountebanks, filles de joie—in the Dordogne an abbey of monks wrote asking to be released from their vows!”

  “My own news,” Jefferson said, coming to his feet slowly as Lafayette started to leave, “is less dramatic. The Family Valdajou prescribe six weeks of the waters at Aix-en-Provence, to heal these bones”—he held up his bandage like a trophy—“and I think I shall leave in a week.”

  Short put down his teacup sharply, caught off guard. Lafayette, however, in the act of sliding his huge hat under his arm, merely nodded. “Of course. The waters at Aix, a lovely prescription in the dead of winter. If I were not so ‘not-able’ myself”—he paused to show his teeth; Short thought of a row of tombstones—“I would go with you. But as it happens, my name appears on the king’s list.”

  “As naturally it would.” Jefferson made no allusion to the fact—notoriously discussed in the Mercure de France—that Lafayette’s name had been stricken from the original list of 144 notables, restored, cut, restored again, a process that might have gone on for weeks if his aunt Madame de Tessé had not intervened. It was not only Frederick who disliked the Young Hero’s views on equality and freedom.