Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  Jefferson bent close to my ear. “By the king’s orders,” he said. “He has forbidden all women from attending the ceremony today. I take it as a sign of political seriousness.”

  Even now I remember the firmness with which he said this, and the confusion with which I heard it. Jefferson belonged to the school of Virginia gentlemen, already old-fashioned when I was young, that treated women with mild, iron-fisted courtesy. He was a benevolent tyrant to his daughters (poor Patsy, who lived in her father’s house till her own children were grown), a strict believer in woman’s limited sphere. I was present at the Hôtel de Langeac the day he told young Anne Bingham not to wrinkle her pretty forehead with politics. (She wrinkled it with something else.) He once lectured Alexander Hamilton’s beautiful, ambitious sister-in-law Angelica Church for half an hour: The tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion, he said; ladies should be content to soothe and calm their husbands when they returned ruffled from political debates.

  “Gratifying seriousness,” he repeated now, leading me forward again to the very edge of the platform. I blinked away women and seriousness and examined as best I could the spectacle unfolding some thirty feet below.

  It was not, I remember thinking dazedly, the congress of centurions in Philadelphia. An eye-popping show of color greeted us. Below the platform stretched a long open space, brightly lit by the skylights, populated by several hundred milling Notables, each in his most resplendent, luxurious costume. Wigs rose like snowy mountains, Alp after Alp. Entering from one side, a line of be-jeweled, bespangled courtiers had begun to wend their way over a blue carpet. Before the ornately gilded throne, at the far end of the hall, bishops and cardinals of the church strolled about in scarlet cassocks and caps; noble gentlemen pulled at their knee-length Burgundy coats, or their silk breeches, or cravats, or else carefully straightened (before a mirror held by a servant) the sweeping plumes of their ceremonial hats.

  Jefferson’s mood changed in an instant. “Fops, dandies,” he said under his breath. I strained to hear him. “Even without women to distract them—how can such a parade of peacocks expect to reform?”

  “There’s Lafayette.” I pointed toward the red-headed prince of pineapples walking slowly, hand on sword, toward the raised throne, which was surrounded, as far as I could tell, by a cascading mountain of candy-colored cushions on which, presumably, the royal party would lounge.

  Jefferson ignored him. “The minister of police in Paris,” he told me, intense, confidential despite the noise, “declares there are more than ninety thousand people in the city without a home, sleeping in the streets or in hovels by the river. Yet here …” He waved his hand in disgust.

  Before I could reply, trumpets had begun to sound by the door. A master of ceremonies was escorting someone (“the keeper of the seals,” Jefferson muttered), and the Assembly was under way. Then soldiers, mace bearers, princes of the blood were filing toward the dais. Louis XVI himself, a blur of blue and gold, was lowering his vast royal bottom to the throne and two lackeys were placing warm bricks under his feet. The tide of spectators surged. For a moment Jefferson’s tall profile disappeared, and I was alone in the crowd. The king removed his hat, replaced it, spoke something in a high, slow voice that carried badly, and the keeper of the seals bowed, bowed, bowed and advanced a step, bowed all the way to his knees in abject homage. When I could see him again, Jefferson’s arms were folded tightly across his chest. Two spots of red burned on his cheeks.

  “From the race of kings,” he said as I came close, “good Lord deliver us.”

  In the carriage returning to Paris, Jefferson held a whale-oil lamp in one hand and read aloud from John Adams’s most recent letter, much of it describing a violent uprising in western Massachusetts two months before, a protest against taxes led by a farmer named Daniel Shays.

  “Alarming news,” I said automatically, watching the lights of Paris approach along the curving river. I tried to think of an incisive political comment. “With such instability, no wonder they plan a new constitutional convention.”

  But Jefferson shook his head. In the swaying carriage, by the flickering lights, he had never looked so much like an angry hawk. “In fact, I hope they pardon Daniel Shays, whoever he is. The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable in a people that I would wish it to be always kept alive. Better to exercise it in the wrong than not exercise it at all.” He stretched his long legs and twisted three-quarters length on the hard carriage bench. “John Adams wants to see them punished, as you hear. Abigail says make a stern example of them.” The hawk’s smile grew thin, grew faraway serene. “But I like a little rebellion now and then,” he said softly. “It’s like an electric storm in the atmosphere. It clears the air.”

  Alas, my mind was never truly formed for politics. As we sat bouncing in the carriage, moving back toward the city I loved best in all the universe, I found myself thinking, not of constitutions and rebellions, but of Jefferson’s strong dislike of forward, ambitious women.

  Now, so many years later, I find myself wondering how much it explains of his subsequent, cruel treatment of poor Maria Cosway.

  “This style, Monsieur,” said the shopgirl behind the counter, “is called ‘Telltale Moans.’ ” She held up a length of silky blue lace and draped it across her bosom.

  Short cleared his throat, nodded slowly with the solemn air (he hoped) of a connoisseur, and permitted himself to steal a sidelong glance at Rosalie de La Rochefoucauld, whose eyes were lowered modestly but whose lips were turned up in a smile.

  “No. No. Perhaps not quite.” He plunged his hand at random into the bolts of fabric on the counter and pulled up another spool of lace, rich scarlet (like his face) and decorated with tiny flecks of pink ribbon. “And this one?”

  The shopgirl used one hand to spread it across her left breast.

  “It is called, Monsieur, ‘Muffled Sighs.’ ”

  With a muffled sigh of his own, Short let drop the end he was holding. Rosalie had already turned away and begun walking down the counter, toward stacks of dresses, bedsheets—he had no idea. In two steps he caught up to her.

  “I am still so surprised to see you,” she said, in fact not looking at him, “here, in a ladies’ shop. And in Versailles. We all thought you were staying in Saint-Germain.”

  He touched her elbow with the tops of his fingers and steered her away from the amused stare of the grisette. “I was, I am; but I had to come to Versailles on business, and I thought while I was here I might pick up a gift, a something for Miss Jefferson.” He listened to the lies flow easily from his tongue—it was simplicity itself to lie in French—and watched Rosalie’s soft cheek, the gentle swell of her décolletage as she allowed him to guide her toward the door.

  “She is how old, Miss Jefferson?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “And in a convent school?”

  “At Panthemont.”

  Rosalie smiled at the floor. “Somehow I don’t believe the good nuns of Panthemont will let her wear ‘Muffled Sighs.’ ”

  “Actually.” They had reached the door of the shop, and Short gripped her elbow more firmly, stopping them both at the threshold. One part of his mind was noting for the fiftieth time how perfectly they were matched in height—she was much too tall for her elderly, stoop-shouldered husband. The other part was taking a deep breath, consciously, deliberately crossing a line. “To tell the truth, I was riding out from the Hôtel des Affaires Étrangères when I saw you.” He swallowed, relaxed his grip. “And I followed you here.”

  Rosalie had put her hand on the door handle. Now she removed it. Just beyond them, on the busy street, one of the huge public carriages known as a carabas, holding at least twenty passengers and pulled by six horses, was passing in front of the shop window.

  “I am surprised you could see me so well,” she said, so softly that he could barely hear her voice over the noise of the wheels, “since you haven’t yet taken my advice about eyeglasses.”


  “Rosalie.”

  “Did you know,” she said, lifting her head at last as the carabas disappeared, “the king is also shortsighted like you, but by royal protocol he’s not allowed to wear spectacles?”

  “I can recognize you at any distance,” Short said. Her hands were trembling, he was sure of it. His own hands were shaking as if they were freezing. He had seen Rosalie de La Rochefoucauld at every gathering of “Américains” at Lafayette’s, every diplomatic entertainment Jefferson had arranged, but never once before had he found her alone, without her husband or her female friends or her vast retinue of aged relatives who circled about her like so many dried-up, gray-faced little moons about a radiant white star.

  “Rosalie.”

  “Your Monsieur Jefferson is still away, is he not? On his curative trip to the south? I think he’s gone two and a half months. Do you hear from him? Did he make you ambassador in his absence? I never believe the waters at places like Aix can truly heal a person.”

  Somehow they had arrived on the pavement outside the shop, in the bright glare of the May afternoon, and though she was talking much too rapidly, averting her gaze much too often, nonetheless she was there, he was there, and the brush of her arm and shoulder against his was unmistakable and thrilling.

  “Are you staying at Chaville?” he asked, hardly daring to hope. Chaville was the country home of Madame de Tessé, two or three leagues outside Versailles, and a place Rosalie was known to visit often, without her husband the duc.

  “You may ask my hostess,” Rosalie said, and at the cautioning note in her voice he looked up to see coming toward them, out of the chaotic French traffic, a handsome black phaeton with the glittering family crest of Madame de Tessé on the door and the puckered face of its owner peering at them through the inevitable lorgnette.

  “William, the lost secrétaire, enchantée de vous rencontre. And in Versailles. Rosalie, come in.” Madame de Tessé signaled her coachman to halt the slow-moving vehicle. Short stepped up to the window and bowed as she poked her wig and head perilously far out.

  “I have a letter from Jefferson,” she told him in her rushed, emphatic way. “A quite wonderful letter that I insist you hear.”

  Short made himself bow again and murmur some words of thanks, but Madame de Tessé rarely paused for little politenesses. “Today, yes? In two hours? Tea? Only ladies are at Chaville this week, I’m afraid. We’re having one of my English book readings afterward, but you can hear Jefferson’s letter first, and perhaps”—her quick little eyes took in everything—“Rosalie can show you the gardens.”

  Rosalie sat back in the phaeton, an arm’s length away.

  “Our group is reading a love novel,” Madame de Tessé added as the phaeton began to roll again. “But a tragic one, of course. The hero goes too far and is killed in a duel.”

  In two hours more, precisely at five, tugging the points of his vest and struggling for composure, Short entered the great nine-windowed parlor at Chaville. Madame de Tessé beckoned him at once toward an empty chair beside her. He had visited the estate before, with Jefferson of course, and even sat in the inner circle by the fire while Madame de Tessé read breathlessly aloud from whatever English book was in fashion. For the life of him, however, he couldn’t remember now the name of the aged female cousin shuffling toward him, or the two young girls, scarcely older than Patsy Jefferson, who sat and spread their yellow skirts at Rosalie’s feet.

  Madame de Tott rose to make him an ironic curtsy. “We are deep into Richardson’s Clarissa, you know, which is much too sentimental for a man. But by way of a prologue—”

  “This is Jefferson’s letter.” Madame de Tessé held a white envelope high in one hand, with the other waved everyone to their places. “Monsieur Short won’t care for our novel, I’m sure, but he’s come to hear a perfectly wonderful letter. Your master,” she told him, nodding briskly, “writes for the ages. He writes”—she used the latest English word—“like a genius. No, I’m wrong. Every word in place, clear, strong. He writes like a Roman, yes? Perfect.”

  Here I am, madam, [he says,] in the old Roman town of Nîmes, gazing whole hours at the ancient Maison Carrée, like a lover at his mistress. The stocking-weavers and silk spinners around it consider me an hypochondriac Englishman, about to write with a pistol the last chapter of his history. This is the second time I have been in love since I left Paris. The first was with a Diana in the Beaujolais, a delicious morsel of sculpture by Michael Angelo Slodtz. This, you will say, was a rule, to fall in love with a fine woman: but with a house! It is out of all precedent! No, Madam, it is not without a precedent in my own history. While at Paris, I was violently smitten with the Hôtel de Salm, and used to go to the Tuileries almost daily to look at it. The chairwoman, inattentive to my passion, never had the complaisance to place a chair there; so that, sitting on the parapet, and twisting my neck round to see the hotel, I generally left with a torticollis.

  “What is a torticollis?” demanded Madame de Tott, always the scholar.

  “A sore neck.” Short accepted a cup of tea from a maid and thought that he had never once seen Jefferson with a sore neck.

  “The waters at Aix did nothing for his wrist.” Madame de Tessé flipped through the letter. “It’s still as bad as ever. But he sees so many antiquities, he hardly cares—you understand why I call him a Roman, Monsieur Short?”

  “The very word,” Short assured her. “Roman or Rebel.”

  “No.” Madame de Tessé was, as always, decisive. “I’ve thought much about his character. The man lives with one foot in the past, he rebels by precedent. The most profound revolutionary is the enlightened conservative, is he not? Listen to this passage. ‘Were I to attempt to give you news,’ he says,

  I should tell you stories one thousand years old. I should detail to you the intrigues of the courts of the Caesars, the oppressions of their praetors, their prefects, etc. I am immersed in antiquities from morning to night. For me, the city of Rome is actually existing in all the splendor of its empire. I am filled with alarms for the event of the irruptions daily making on us by the Goths, the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Vandals, lest they should reconquer us to our original barbarism. If I am sometimes induced to look forward to the eighteenth century, it is only when recalled to it by the recollection of your goodness and friendship.

  “Charming.”

  “Architecture and friendship, yes, but nothing about the Assembly of Notables?” Madame de Tott arched one black eyebrow. “Nothing about politics? That scarcely sounds like Jefferson, or you, maman.”

  “In his letters to me”—Short felt obscurely jealous; he put down his cup and came restlessly to his feet, automatically turning in Rosalie’s direction before he corrected himself—“which are mostly business, of course, he asks often about the Assembly of Notables. He says the king has a great opportunity to reform the government and go down in history. He says the Assembly should divide itself into two chambers and meet annually, like a Parliament. And one chamber would be chosen by the provincial administrators rather than the king.”

  Madame de Tessé had also risen, a look of mischievous delight on her face. “In other words, voted by the people. A democracy.”

  “Well, filtered through the people. He is a limited kind of democrat. A Roman democrat.”

  The whole party had by now abandoned their teacups and begun to move toward one of the tall windows that opened like a door into the garden. As he paused to let the ancient cousin pass, Short remembered (with a wry smile of his own) that Jefferson had also written Lafayette a letter on politics, advising the marquis to learn the condition of things by going incognito into the huts of his peasants, sampling their food, testing their very beds. Short treasured the image of Thomas Jefferson of Monticello stooping to enter somebody’s hut, lolling on somebody’s rat-gnawed pallet of straw.

  In the famous (endless) gardens themselves Madame de Tott attached herself unexpectedly to Short and Rosalie and proceeded to speak with her usual bante
ring irony. “One day,” she told Short, leading them to the edge of a thick grove of willows, “you must read us something you’ve written. After all, Jefferson’s protege must write like a genius, too, I think.”

  “Do you also write?” Rosalie began.

  “My suggestion,” Madame de Tott went on, “would be something in the manner of Mr. Boswell’s new book about Samuel Johnson. Give us a Life of Jefferson, yes? With dialogue like a novel and personal habits and long intimate description.”

  “I have sometimes thought—”

  But Madame de Tott was in no humor to hear his thought. She glanced left, where Madame de Tessé had fallen back a hundred yards to inspect a new bed of plantings. The others were scattered far and away across the broad expanse of green lawn, gravel paths, and rigid geometrical shrubbery that radiated in spokes from the great château. Short, following her glance, had begun to register, as he nearly always did, how different such a scene, any French scene, was from Virginia—Virginia a dark, wild, gauzy landscape now of memory alone, uninhabited, unshaped by human touch; a cobwebbed landscape of dreams only. But before he could turn back, ever polite, to hear Madame de Tott’s next tedious salvo of irony, she had surprised him utterly.

  “At the foot of the grove,” she whispered to them both, in a voice almost as soft as Rosalie’s, “there is a little summer house. It’s unlocked this time of year. If you follow the path on the right, afterward …”

  And without a word more she stretched one thin arm to touch Rosalie’s wrist for an instant; smiled with unparalleled sweetness at Short; walked away.

  Time stopped. Clouds stopped, wind, voices, sun. The birds in the willow trees went silent, all sounds in the garden ceased. When Short met Rosalie’s eyes at last, she too was smiling with unparalleled sweetness.

  “I can be there tonight, at ten o’clock,” she said. “But only for an hour.”