Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  “Like their own,” Jefferson said, never once looking her way. “George rex. The English have spun so many lies about America for so long, they now probably believe them. We have had very little in the way of rebellion and anarchy, if the facts be known. Calculate. One rebellion in thirteen states in the course of eleven years is but one per state in a century and a half. What country ever before existed a century and a half without rebellion? And, to be frank, of what significance are a few lives lost in a century or two? I am an old gardener. The tree of liberty should be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

  Against her will Maria shuddered. So serene, so bloody. Jefferson’s two hands, the one strong, healthy, open; the other crooked and weak. Symbols of—what?

  “You hate kings that much?” The old countess was wrinkling her brow, offended. “We have kings in France.”

  “I hope”—Jefferson smiled diplomatically—“America may be spared them.”

  “But a country needs a king. The people need to be guided.”

  “Have we found angels in the form of kings to govern us?” Jefferson’s smile never wavered. “I think in America we have embarked on the world’s last, best hope—to govern ourselves, freely, by the light of reason alone.”

  “England will settle the new constitution,” Lafayette said, clicking his teeth like castanets, drinking his wine. “America is still under England’s sway. I speak as a patriot and admirer—but your language, your trade, all your history and laws—hopeless.”

  Jefferson nodded. His eyes followed James Hemings and the procession of maids behind de Corny’s chair, carrying plates. “America is indeed chained to England by circumstances,” he agreed. “You may say we enact the old Roman fable of the living and the dead bodies bound together. We embrace what we loathe.”

  Maria rose abruptly from her chair, spilling her wine, and rushed from the table.

  In the hallway, scarcely seeing what she did, she fumbled with the outside door, a key, then stepped back to let the footman pass. The snow had turned to rain. A servant appeared for an instant—a white spot of a face—then vanished. From the dining room Clérisseau’s voice came and went, and then Jefferson was behind her, holding the soft lambswool cloak—Richard’s present—she had arrived in. “My dear friend,” he murmured. Did he ever apologize? “You’re upset. I’ve made a mistake—too many people, we’ve been dull on politics.” Then bending closer: “I will come to breakfast tomorrow before you leave.”

  She shook her head but kept her eyes fixed on the door. “I’m merely confused, distracted.” Taking a deep breath, she turned to look up at him. “You are all brilliant, wonderful.” Then formally, coldly, to pierce him, “I hope our correspondence will be more frequent and punctual than our meetings have been.”

  Jefferson nodded and stood close to fasten the cloak at her throat. Behind her the door blew open again and the wind gusted. He was a public man, with ambitions; a jealous daughter; a hand like a claw.

  “I will arrive at seven,” he said, adjusting the cloak. James Hemings was holding the front door ajar. Jefferson’s lips were warm, polite on her outstretched fingers. “And then escort you all the way to the Porte Saint-Denis, just as before.” From behind his back, surprising her yet again, with the gentlest possible smile he held out a second delicate primrose.

  “Just as before,” she repeated, seeing the flower through tears.

  The next morning, as Short watched from his bedroom window, Jefferson left the Hôtel de Langeac at half past six.

  An hour later, from the second-floor study, Short saw him return. He opened his watch in surprise, then squinted down at the street. Jefferson’s face, as best he could tell, was calm and impassive. But his shoulders were high and loose, like those of a man relieved of a burden.

  At midmorning, without having reappeared, Jefferson departed again, this time for his room at the hermitage. In the office Short filed letters and balanced their ledgers. Petit, passing the open door, brought in the miscellaneous papers he had found in Jefferson’s room and laid them carefully on the letter table. When he had gone, Short got up slowly, walked to the table, and since it was his usual task, began to leaf through the stack. The last letter was an unsigned note, in an envelope, written in a tiny, feminine script.

  Friday night, December 7

  I cannot breakfast with you to morrow; to bid you adieu once is sufficiently painful, for I leave you with very melancholy ideas. You have given my dear Sir all your commissions to Mr. Trumbull, and I have the reflection that I cannot be useful to you; who have rendered me so many civilities.

  It had begun to rain softly again. Short stood for a long moment, reading the letter, pondering the strange, cool, not un-Jeffersonian word civilities. Then, without thinking, he turned over the envelope and ran his thumb along the seal. On the inner flap, so faint as to be almost invisible, was a pen-and-ink drawing of a small unhappy female face, imprisoned inside a pillar, like a caryatid on a temple. He held it up to the light. From the drawing room downstairs came the thin, distant notes of the harpsichord, one of the girls, Patsy or Polly, playing a waltz.

  “He will never, ever promote your interests while you remain here.”

  Having delivered his opinion, Gouverneur Morris sat back in his chair—not with an air of self-satisfaction, Short thought; a better word to describe Morris would be composure. Or complacency, self-assurance, arrogance, charm—Short gave it up. Morris had arrived in Paris two months ago, on February 17, 1789 to be Jeffersonian and precise, and Short still had no idea how to take his measure.

  “If he wants you to resume the law, and in Virginia”—Morris shivered delicately, as one might shiver in disgust at a rat—“then he has made up his mind, and it won’t do to cross him. You hate the law?”

  Short nodded. It was pointless to correct Morris, who misunderstood Jefferson willfully and completely.

  “But not Virginia?” Morris shook his head in wonder.

  In fact, Short wanted to say, Virginia too; but Morris had begun to wag his empty glass significantly at the nearest garçon.

  “A cold well easily runs dry,” Morris said. He tilted his big, handsome head toward the window, where pedestrians were clattering by, bundled and gloved and hatted like white-faced bears. “I read today that the winter of 1788–89 has been the coldest winter in French history.”

  “In my history, certainly.”

  “But you found a warm enough little bolt-hole, yes? I like this very much.” While the boy refilled his glass with wine, Morris looked approvingly from one side of the room to the other. The Café du Parnasse, Short had warned him, lacked some of the ton of the Palais Royal, but it was precisely the kind of Parisian café Short had come to like best: on the Right Bank just beyond the Pont Neuf, with a view of the river; coffee from the Isles; an informal but prosperous clientèle who watched the street and played endless games of dominos while the owner, a stocky Champagnois named Charpentier, wandered among the tables in his round wig, his muslin cravat. Short squinted: Today, to battle the cold, Charpentier also wore a bright red vest and a blue wool coat, so that he looked like the flag of France. In the corner near the fire his black-eyed daughter sat buttering bread for her new fiancé.

  “Well, I thought you would like it better at least than the Club des Colons,” Short said.

  Morris made a face. The Club des Colons, just above the Café du Grand Véfour at the Palais Royal, was a gathering place for young Parisian liberals. Short had made the mistake of taking the aristocratic, distinctly unliberal Morris there for their first meeting.

  “Your trip,” Morris said. “As I understand it you left Paris last fall.”

  “September.”

  “And you made the Grand Tour with two other young Virginia bucks with the nautical names of Shippen and Lee.”

  “And Jefferson’s friends Mr. and Mrs. Paradise.”

  Morris made another face, but this time Short couldn’t be sure whether it was because of
the wine he had just tasted or the mention of Jefferson’s name.

  “Two quacking ducks. I met them in New York.” Morris had, as far as Short could tell, met everyone in the world. “The old man dithers on about the pronunciation of modern Greek and the old woman opens and closes windows hysterically all day long. Am I right?”

  Short smiled. It was as concise and accurate a description of the. Paradises as could be imagined. “The lady,” he said, “was widely thought here to have an infatuation”—for? on? he had forgotten English after speaking French so long—“for Jefferson.”

  “Humph. I’m going to write an essay one day about the way names start us off on the great career of lying. You, for example, are not Short. An hysterical, window-slamming old lady is not Paradise.”

  “You are not a guv’nor.” Short gave it Morris’s own clipped pronunciation.

  “Nor a senator nor President. But so. You took your Grand Tour, to acquaint yourself with Europe.” Morris adjusted himself in his chair and glanced over his shoulder at the round-wigged host; drained his glass. “I will surmise that you took it to bolster your credentials for a diplomatic post, yes? Instead of returning to the knobby red soil of Virginia and practicing law, you decided to make yourself acquainted with all the great European Courts, so that Congress, when it finally establishes its diplomatic service, will think at once of Mr. Short.”

  “I would rather stay in Paris than anywhere else, including the rest of Europe.”

  “And,” Morris said, “you hoped that a little breathing space would ease whatever tension—oh, the tiniest, the most invisible of tensions—there was between you and Ambassador Jefferson.” He flourished his empty glass at the garçon and stared through the window at a gust of snow now obscuring everything on the street. By the Pont Neuf a team of horses burst out of the swirl like a fist through a sheet of paper. “Good God,” Morris said, “and this is the middle of April.”

  “You remind me of Colonel Humphreys, who used to hate the Paris weather.”

  “I have met Humphreys,” Morris said. “A saturnine son of a bitch.”

  “But there is no tension between Jefferson and me.”

  “And I further surmise,” Morris said, ignoring this, “that you, who are a very intelligent though hero-worshipful young man, looked far enough downstream to see that when Thomas Jefferson returns to his slaves and swamps, someone will need to replace him here, in Paris. And who better than Mr. Short, who already knows the work inside and out?”

  “I am content as I am,” Short murmured.

  “And I finally surmise,” Morris continued, “in fact, I don’t surmise, I know it—you went on your trip in part because some people regard you as too attentive to a certain married lady and Jefferson thought it would cool your blood, if not hers.”

  Short felt his ears and cheeks burn, not cool. Morris had a formidable, bantering way of speech that he thoroughly enjoyed until he himself became its target. “Those are unfounded, slanderous rumors,” he said as stiffly as he could, “which I resent.”

  Morris smiled. He inspected the newly refilled glass and swallowed a gulp of red wine. He looked at the fireplace and the young couple beside it, the girl now feeding her fiancé bits of bread with her fingers.

  “I am a cad,” Morris said, “even to repeat them.” He straightened his powerful body in the chair and extended his left leg until the stump of the amputation was visible above the wooden peg he used for walking. “Did you ever hear how I lost my leg?”

  Despite himself, Short gazed in fascination at the wooden peg. The French believed, to a man, that Morris had lost his leg heroically in the Revolution, fighting at his patron George Washington’s side. In fact, as Short knew very well, Morris had lost it in Philadelphia one early morning in 1780 when a jealous husband had returned home unexpectedly and Morris had overturned his carriage galloping away. According to gossip, it was far from his first (or last) such adventure. “I am almost tempted to wish he had lost something else,” John Jay had written to Washington.

  “I have never heard the story,” Short lied.

  Morris was thirty-seven years old, scarcely seven years older than Short, but he had an assured bearing—a sophisticated Horatian levity—that made him seem much older. Levity rather than gravity, Short thought; a delightful man, but certainly not a great one. Morris swung his stump around with one hand and allowed his teeth to flash in an ironic grin. “You will make a splendid diplomat, Mr. Short,” he said.

  For her part, ironic or not, Patsy Jefferson liked Morris’s banter almost as much as Short did. And it was no disadvantage, moreover—she decided to be brutally honest with herself—that Gouverneur Morris was one of the handsomest men she had ever seen. She stopped at the door of the carriage and waited while her father and Morris came down the steps together. Her father, lanky, loose-jointed as ever, wearing clothes altogether too casual for the street; Morris, powerfully built, like a soldier, beautifully dressed in fawn trousers and green coat, hopping down the steps on his wooden leg with an air of unconcern, brave nonchalance that made her heart go out to him.

  “Your little sister,” Morris said, pausing in front of her, “is the first young lady of my acquaintance eager to return to school.”

  In the carriage Polly slid farther away from the door and made herself into a ball.

  “She loves Sister Amelie and the other nuns,” Patsy told him. It was a lie; Polly hated the school.

  “I like old Sam Johnson’s remark to the abbess of a convent,” Morris said, turning to her father. “ ‘Madame, let us be honest. You are here, not from the love of virtue, but the fear of vice.’ ”

  The two men laughed, her father shaded his eyes against the sun—sun at last in Paris!—and when they said nothing more to her, Patsy climbed into the carriage and sat down by Polly. Sally Hemings peered inside with a puzzled frown, then closed the door.

  “I had this carriage specially built for me in London,” Patsy’s father told Morris. He put his head through the window and blew a kiss to each of them. Withdrawing: “John Trumbull made all the arrangements, down to choosing the harness.”

  “I know John Trumbull,” Morris said as the carriage began to roll.

  Patsy looked at Polly, who had begun to bite at her nails again. Automatically she pulled her sister’s hand from her mouth and, at the same time, glanced at the little round outside mirror Trumbull had added as one of the carriage’s special features. In the glass Morris and her father had been joined by Short, all three of them undoubtedly talking politics, riots, French craziness. Patsy watched the sycamore trees dip in and out of the mirror. On the other hand, despite his charm, Gouverneur Morris was definitely, to her ear, not truly nice to her father. He used a droll, ironic tone of voice—and people were never ironic with Papa, only Clérisseau, who was French—and there was something, a hint, of condescension or dislike; disrespect. And whatever else you felt or happened to think, Papa was never a person to be used with disrespect, either.

  “Have you told him yet?” Polly asked from her corner.

  “Shush. Tais-toi.”

  Polly shrugged and made herself into a tighter ball. Polly disliked the school, her classmates, and Paris, and every Sunday afternoon when they returned to Panthemont she retreated into glum eleven-year-old sulks, worse than tears. They bounced and rattled down the green Avenue des Tuileries, among the sun-dappled trees, and swung over toward the river. Polly took her nails out of her mouth and began to read from the folded-up sheet of music that Mr. Hopkinson had sent them all from Philadelphia, where she used to live.

  No comfort the wild woods afford,

  No shelter the trav’ler can see—

  Far off are his bed and his board

  And his home where he wishes to be.

  His hearth’s cheerful blaze still engages his mind,

  Whilst thro’ the sharp hawthorn still blows the cold wind.

  When they had played the song on their new harpsichord for Papa, Polly had burst out cry
ing. Even now her eyes were dry but red.

  “Do you miss Philadelphia that much, Polly?”

  “I miss Aunt Eppes. And my cousins. And I hate Paris.” She folded the sheet of music carefully and tucked it into her school bag. “When are you going to tell him?”

  At the Pont Royal they crossed to the Left Bank and made the familiar turn onto the rue de Grenelle. In the school itself Polly went off, clutching her music, to her dormitory room, and Patsy proceeded to the smaller rooms on the third floor where the oldest girls lived. Julia Annesley, who was English and very short and who had gone riding with them twice in the Bois on her father’s invitation, was waiting by their door.

  “Did you say anything?”

  “No.”

  “You won’t.”

  Patsy walked past her, down the hall, and into the gloomy little reading room that they were permitted to use for extra assignments or, once in a great while, tea. One of the nuns had tried to stock the shelves with books and magazines from foreign countries, but they were always disappearing and in any case nothing from Protestant countries (except America) was allowed at all; several times her history sister had asked Papa for a copy of his Notes on Virginia, but somehow it had never been delivered.

  There were three desks, three chairs, three bookcases. Trinities. Patsy sat down at the desk nearest the window. Because it was spring, the sun now stayed overhead until six or seven in the evening—Papa would have recorded it exactly—and the little gardens below seemed to have turned green overnight. Patsy adjusted her quill, her inkwell, the sheet of fine vellum paper. Mrs. Cosway—the thought came completely unbidden into her mind—was Catholic.

  “Patsy, ma chère, have you spoken to him yet?”

  Patsy looked up to see the thin, beautifully complexioned face of Madame de Mézières studying her from the door.

  “No, Madame. We had visitors. My sister was unwell. She cried a good deal. And my father was worried about his congé and the calling of the Estates-General and, and—politics. Those dreadful riots in Aix and Marseilles.”