Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  In the hallway Short waited courteously (shivering) while Lafayette was helped into his blue greatcoat, a beautifully tailored version of Washington’s own uniform at Valley Forge.

  “Madame Cosway comes again, yes?” Lafayette asked, cocking his head. From the study Jefferson could be heard singing faintly.

  Short busied himself with the door. “I know nothing about her plans myself,” he murmured.

  “When the queen had her first child,” Lafayette said, striking off onto one of his tangents of irrelevancy, “I was not in the audience myself. My uncle was. You know, she gives birth in a public room at Versailles, there must be two or three hundred people crowded in to watch, suffocating, terrible. The physician was a Monsieur Vermond, and he could barely fight his way through to the bed. His fee, if the baby was a boy, was to be an annual pension of forty thousand francs.”

  Short was fascinated in spite of himself. “And if it was a girl?”

  Lafayette shrugged. “A single payment of eight thousand francs.” He nodded to Petit, who opened the door to a wall of icy black air. “And it was a girl, of course.”

  “The Salic law,” Short said, referring to the legal anomaly that made France the only country in Europe where a woman could not reign.

  Lafayette pulled up his collar. “Not really. I think in the end it is simply that girls always cost much more.” He grasped the door handle and allowed himself a trace of smile. “But she is charming, yes? the little Cosway?”

  Number 105 of the Palais Royal arcades housed a celebrated gallery called the Spectacle des Pygmées français, a collection of exquisitely crafted objects in miniature.

  The day after the bone-setters’ visit, Short paused and peered myopically into its window. This month’s display was a plaster replica of the entire city of London, three feet square, tilted up on a wooden stand so that the passerby could see at a glance the glossy river Thames (made of a curving green mirror), Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, a tiny marching regiment of Beefeater guards, and in the exact center St. Paul’s domed cathedral, the size of an egg. On wires, floating above the city, a trio of kilted angels held a Scotch plaid banner that read in English: LONDON, FLOWER OF CITIES ALL.

  “What a pleasure for us ladies,” said Madame de Tessé behind him. As he turned in surprise she tapped his wrist with her lorgnette. “To encounter by chance Monsieur Short in the arcades. A handsome gentleman who likes to study the shops. Much better than a husband.”

  Beside her, chin tilted high in the air, stood Madame de Tessé’s protegee, the “fair Grecian,” scholarly Madame de Tott. And next to her Rosalie de La Rochefoucauld.

  “I am myself bored to tears by Anglomania,” declared Madame de Tott. Despite her unnervingly clear and piercing eyes, Madame de Tott likewise carried a lorgnette, tiny eyeglasses on a handle, the season’s latest fashion, and she used it now to dismiss once and for all the miniature London. Madame de Tessé made a chirping sound of protest that Short scarcely heard. He had seen Rosalie de La Rochefoucauld a dozen times at least since the afternoon she and her husband had called on Jefferson. Each time he had felt the blood rush to his face, his cheeks burn like fanned coals. Each time, recklessly, indifferent to her husband’s presence, to Jefferson’s frown, he had come closer and closer to making an utter and perfect fool of himself.

  “On the other hand,” said Madame de Tessé briskly, turning back from the window. “Much as I like English gardens and English woolens, I suppose I should be true to my political principles. Je suis une ‘américaine.’ The enemy of my friend is my enemy.”

  “Have you been here at the Palais long?” At the last moment Short remembered to lift his eyes from Rosalie’s soft, flawless face and to address the question to all three women.

  “Long enough to grow hungry and cold.” Madame de Tott trained her lorgnette on Rosalie like a pistol. “Rosalie dear, whenever we encounter Monsieur Short, you always fall very silent. He must think you rude.”

  “I could never think that,” Short said hastily. He felt his face grow even redder. No one in the history of Paris had ever made a more fatuous compliment.

  “We have just come from the crystal shop on the other side.” Madame de Tessé nodded at the sunlit central garden and the row of shops under the opposite arcade. All four of them began to move away from the window and into the stream of brightly dressed pedestrians strolling before the shops. “But for once we left a boutique empty-handed.” She smiled the odd little grimace that smallpox had stamped on her mouth and indicated the packages under Short’s arm. “Unlike yourself, Monsieur Short.”

  Rosalie spoke for the first time. Her voice was so soft that Short found himself bending down till their heads almost touched. “It is the ladies’ rule in the Palais Royal,” she told him, “that all purchases be explained and displayed.”

  “Over chocolate, of course,” said Madame de Tott, sweeping forward. “Chocolate and cake. Shall we cross to the Grand Vefour?”

  Opposite the Grand Vefour restaurant, her bare shoulders goose-bumped in the January cold, an unmistakable fille publique lounged on a bench. When Madame de Tessé glared through her lorgnette, the whore grinned and parted her legs. Short was halfway to their table before he recognized the Ace of Spades’s young coarse-haired maid.

  “You must show us exactly what you have bought,” the fair Grecian drawled as he sat down, “according to the rules.” Shyly, Rosalie took his nearest package and tugged at the string. With a flourish of bracelets Madame de Tessé reached in and pulled out a set of stoppered glass vials labeled in Gothic script. Madame de Tott pushed aside her chocolate cup and held up, doubtfully, a chemist’s balance, complete with weighing pans and brass weights.

  “I’m afraid,” said Short, “that a friend of Ambassador Jefferson’s in Virginia incautiously wrote that chemistry sounded like an interesting subject.”

  “And Monsieur Jefferson instantly sent you out to buy all the chemicals in Paris and ship them to him.” Madame de Tessé nodded, sparrowlike, as she greedily spooned white lumps of sugar into her chocolate. “The man himself. The first time he saw my gardens at Chaville, he promptly brought me fifty packets of seeds from Virginia.”

  “He leaves this week, does he not?” Madame de Tott had removed her hat and shaken out her curls. Tall and handsome and stony of expression, she lived apparently on the charity of Madame de Tessé and cultivated a reputation for man-killing scholarship. “Madame” was a courtesy title, since she was unmarried at thirty and was unlikely to be, Short thought. When Jefferson had recently presented her with a set of Homer in Greek, she had promptly repaid him with a lecture on art that corrected (correctly) his misunderstanding of a fashionable painting. Next to her the diminutive Rosalie glowed like a star; Short forced himself not to stare.

  “He goes on a trip to Aix, for the waters, and then he plans to tour all the way into Italy. But he’s waiting to leave until the Assembly of Notables holds its first meeting.”

  “Assembly of sheep,” snorted Madame de Tessé. “Notable moutons. Apart from my nephew Gilbert”—Short was delighted to hear Lafayette called Gilbert—“there’s not a true reformer in the lot.”

  “Monsieur Jefferson makes a long journey,” Rosalie said.

  Short attempted to meet her eyes. He ignored the two older women and let his fingers brush the silky flame of her sleeve. “Three months at least. And when he returns,” he added quickly, “we expect his other daughter to have arrived—he hasn’t seen her for three years. She’s only eight.”

  But Madame de Tessé was far from finished with the subject of politics.

  “Yet how impossible, wonderfully strange it must seem!” She wiped a moustache of chocolate from her lip. “Your country, little unformed America, able to gather its Congresses, declare its rights, throw off a tyrant, snap, snap, snap—and here is France, sinking into bankruptcy, unable even to assemble its leaders.”

  “We’ve had our setbacks, of course.” Short pulled his hand away from Rosal
ie’s and thought of the forthcoming constitutional convention in Philadelphia. But Madame de Tessé was intent on the contrast between the two countries.

  “Here a monarchy, paralyzed; a society founded on inequality, repression. There a republic, vigorous; founded on the revolutionary idea that all men are created equal.” She dropped her spoon, square little face tense with feeling. “I tease him, you know, ‘Monsieur Clever’—his plants, his chemistry—but your Jefferson is a great man. His ideas are enlightened. He believes in freedom, he trusts human beings to make mistakes and still progress. He thought it all out before a shot was fired. Washington gave you the army,” she told Short, “but Jefferson gave you the ideas. His ideas invented America.”

  “Were you there, Monsieur?” Rosalie asked, raising her eyes. “When he wrote the Declaration, I mean.” Then she blushed and looked toward Madame de Tott. “But what am I saying? He’s much too young, he must have been only a boy.”

  “I’ve asked him what happened,” Short said, “and all the other Virginians who were there—”

  “You ought to write it down,” Madame de Tott said with a cool tone of mockery, “before the next Revolution.”

  But Short was addressing Madame de Tessé, whose enthusiasm had transformed her little pockmarked face. “You have to picture to yourself, Madame, the city of Philadelphia first, which would fit into a small corner of Paris. Every building made of red brick, farms practically at your door, no customs walls or gates. Streets paved with pebbles in the middle, frog ponds between houses, Quakers in black suits, Yankees in beaver hats, frowzy buckskinned political delegates everywhere, from every backwoods town and colony, nothing at all like this—” He gestured toward the window, which opened onto the brilliant arcade, a moving toyshop of swords and wigs. The Ace of Spades’s fille passed on the arm of a soldier.

  “The Virginians were the leaders, yes?” Madame de Tessé was certain.

  Short nodded. “In 1775, at the Second Continental Congress, the Virginians rode into Philadelphia like Roman centurions,” he said, and sat back in his chair, remembering what he had never seen.

  Memoirs of Jefferson—9

  THEY CAME ON SPLENDID PRANCING horses, attended by slaves, preceded by rumors; realms and islands were as plates dropped from their pockets. As in previous years the others were already there, waiting, grumbling—round-headed, portly John Adams, who looked like a series of cannonballs stacked on top of each other. His cousin Sam Adams, too, the stout, palsied, slightly mysterious failure in business who had earlier organized with brilliant military precision the Boston Tea Party, directing his “Mohawks” like a general as they lifted the 340 chests of tea (each one weighing three hundred pounds) with block and tackle, then shattered the bottoms and shoveled the leaves over the side (there was so much tea, it piled up above the gunwales of the three ships—next day small boats had to be rowed through the mush to clear paths in the harbor). John Dickinson, the self-styled “Pennsylvania Farmer,” nearest thing to an American equivocator, likewise waited in his palatial farmhouse Fairhill (every stone and hinge imported from England), eager to woo the Virginian princes.

  Physically they were remarkable. As they climbed down from their horses and phaetons to go into Mifflin’s Tavern, there was the “orator” Richard Henry Lee, stylish and chilling, who wore a black silk handkerchief highwayman-fashion around his left hand, where he had blown away his fingers with a rifle; the two Falstaffian giants Peyton Randolph and Benjamin Harrison, both of them given to table-buckling feasts and good-humored exaggeration (the four-hundred-pound Harrison said he would have “walked” to Philadelphia for this Congress); and above all—separate from all, silent where they were hyperbolic—the unapproachably dignified and monumental Colonel George Washington, who was supposed to have vowed he would raise an army on his own if Congress would not. When Abigail Adams finally met him—not ever in her life inclined to hero-worship or hyperbole—she grew girlish, spoke of Washington’s “dignity” and “ease,” and even quoted (to John’s disgust) poetry:

  Mark his majestic fabric; he’s a temple

  Sacred by birth, and built by hand divine.

  The one delegate nobody noticed, though he arrived a spectacular six weeks late, in a beautiful phaeton with two spare horses, was Jefferson.

  They knew of him, of course. His Summary View pamphlet had been passed from hand to hand, wildly praised for the bold brilliance of its prose (Dickinson shuddered). And because he was the youngest delegate (at thirty-two) and already celebrated for his pen, they assigned him at once to tedious committee after committee and watched with satisfaction as his reports and letters came flawlessly in, precisely on schedule. But Jefferson the man—he never spoke; there is no record at all of his ever speaking in Congress; in committee, Adams said, he was prompt, frank, decisive, but no one else seems to remember. Once or twice he brought out his violin at Philadelphia dinners. Otherwise, from June to October, Jefferson played the role of spectator—silent in a different way from Washington, whose long periods of taciturnity suggested enormous strength marshaled within, a dense mass; the silence of a statue. Jefferson’s was the sly silence of reserve, of elusive private guardedness; when someone approached, he folded his arms across his chest like a gate. Visionary, in short, as always; looking past the day’s committees and reports and squabbles to a far-off pattern that only he saw emerging.

  He had a little box, designed by himself, that unfolded into a compact portable writing desk and served him as the equivalent of an orator’s rostrum. “I wonder what in fifty or a hundred years,” John Dickinson said to him one day, fretting, swatting at a fly, “will we have accomplished here by our ‘revolution’?” Characteristically, Jefferson made no answer at the time. But that night he took out his little desk and wrote a long essay describing what he thought they would have accomplished—a free government, a free people, governing themselves by reason; a revolution that would transform and uplift the condition of men all over the globe; life, liberty, justice, everything achieved by reason: “the world’s best hope.” He sent it by post, and Dickinson carried it in his pocket and read it to every delegate he met.

  Memoirs of Jefferson—10

  LIFE MUST BE LIVED FORWARD, I HAVE read somewhere, even though it can only be understood backward.

  I am now, in this rainy summer of 1826, a biblical three score and seven; sixty-seven years old. Casting my mind backward, it is remarkable how little I remember of the past twenty years—a softly turning blur of indistinguishable days and nights, a feeling somehow of gathering speed. Of my years in France with Jefferson, on the other hand, I remember whole days at a time, preserved and hardened in memory as if in amber. Do I, at all, begin to understand?

  One memorable day among hundreds: The week before Jefferson set out on his tour of southern France in February 1787, to take the waters at Aix-en-Provence for his still unmended wrist, he and I rode up the highway from Paris to Versailles, battling every foot of the last two miles through an enormous, noisy throng of soldiers, peasants, carriages, and mere foot-slogging citoyens, come to Court like us to see the opening day of the long-postponed Assembly of Notables.

  I remember with perfect clarity the building where the Assembly was to be held—not the king’s palace, but a giant cube of a warehouse across the road, with the unofficial name “Menus Plaisirs,” trifling pleasures, because the king ordinarily used it as a storehouse for ballroom costumes, candelabra, furniture, dried flowers, lanterns, theatrical flats, whatever served as ornament for the Court’s endless festivities. Jefferson, of course, was fascinated by anything architectural, so we had to stop outside the visitor’s door, in the cold February sun, and examine exactly what had been done to such an unpromising barn. Not much, was the answer. The Notables needed a meeting room large enough for two hundred delegates, plus the Court retainers and inevitable crowd of ambassadors and hangers-on who would flock to observe. The palace chapel was briefly considered and rejected; likewise the Hall of Mirrors. Final
ly, with time running out, the royal architect had simply taken one outside wall of the Menus Plaisirs and to it joined three new temporary walls of thin wood and plaster, making a hollow box three stories high. The doors were little more than boards on hinges; the entrance was unpainted and bare, and except for a series of tinted skylights in the roof, there were no windows at all. The whole thing, Jefferson told me, studying the roof in frowning disapproval, had been built in less than a month.

  When we had looked our fill at the exterior, Jefferson presented our tickets to a soldier behind a cordon and we pushed our way through a genuine Babel of other foreign guests, up a set of makeshift stairs, and onto a wooden viewing platform.

  The next moment he took me utterly by surprise with a question.

  Bending close, cupping his mouth to be heard over the din of voices: “William. You are a man of sensitive observation, great alertness. What singular fact do you notice about this assembly?”

  In those days, when I was younger than anyone else in the world, Jefferson’s questions always threw me into a momentary fright. I was on trial, exposed. A bad answer would stamp me (for good) as a fool in his eyes.

  “What do you see?” he asked, and I looked about, half panic-stricken.

  Our platform was a vast, jostling crowd of shoulders and faces. We were too far from the front edge for me to make out clearly where the king’s party would sit and the delegates conduct their business. I blurted the first thing that came into my head: “I don’t see any women!”

  My usual good luck. He smiled, nodded, drew me forward through the crowd. A cubic acre of Frenchmen, jammed by the hundreds and hundreds into every space and cranny, and for once in that endlessly stylish, fashionable, chattering nation, not a female in sight.