Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  Madame de Mézières came into the room and used her thumb to tamp down one of the unlit candles on the desk. She wore a tailored gown of deep purple and red, lace sleeves and collar, and a plain gold crucifix on a black moiré ribbon; because she was the director of the whole school, she was excused from the usual gray wimple and hood that the other nuns wore.

  “It is always so serene and peaceful here, is it not?” she said.

  “Always. When I see the frivolous life—at the Théâtre des Italiens there was a woman with two men, and her dress was cut low enough to show everything, she nearly popped out”—Patsy stopped, blushing, aware that she was talking too fast and, no doubt, about subjects she ought not even mention.

  “Flippant, frivolous,” Madame de Mézières agreed. “But Father Edgeworth asked me distinctly this morning if you had acted.”

  Patsy looked down at the blank sheet of paper on her desk. Father Edgeworth had come to the school six months ago from Ireland and was even more handsome than Gouverneur Morris.

  “You are seventeen years old,” Madame de Mézières said, less gently. “You need to take your own situation in hand. Your father leaves for America in three months.”

  “Or more.” Patsy knew she had her father’s liking for accuracy of dates. “He has asked for leave, but Congress hasn’t replied yet, because of the new constitution, and he probably can’t go to America until the summer, and then only for five months. So he would be back by January certainly. To cross takes only four weeks in summer.”

  Madame de Mézières, as everyone understood, never permitted herself to dispute anything with her girls. She simply smiled the sharp, tight-lipped, unsmiling smile that meant she was about to give an order. “If you finish your letter to him tonight,” she said, “even though it is Sunday, Father Edgeworth and I will see that it goes into the post.”

  Patsy nodded and took up her quill. When Madame de Mézières had closed the door, she dipped it into the brass inkwell, then stopped. The inkwell had DEO GRATIAS engraved on both sides, joined by two silver-painted crosses in relief. From the chapel downstairs came the high, peaceful sounds of the choir. She closed her eyes. Mr. Short was always writing. What would Mr. Short say?

  Slowly, with little tears of joy and terror running down her cheeks, she opened her eyes and began to write.

  “At the Constitutional Convention,” Morris said, “we took up at one point the question of whether the President should be capable of being impeached.”

  “For misconduct?” Jefferson asked.

  Short stopped on the muddy gravel path and waited for the two men to catch up to him.

  “For misconduct or any other reason. The question was simply, should there be a clause declaring him capable of being impeached by the Senate.” Morris stumped up beside them and balanced expertly on the wooden leg. Short forced himself not to stare. Morris wiped his brow with a silk handkerchief and squinted down the Champs-Élysées as if he were about to start a race.

  “In the convention I was given to strong and frequent statement of my views,” Morris said dryly, putting away the handkerchief. Jefferson looked sideways at Short. According to Madison’s letters, Morris had never stopped talking. “On this occasion I demanded in my strongest terms that the President not be impeachable, for the sake of having a strong executive. At which point our venerable friend Dr. Franklin, who was sitting quietly in the first row with his hands folded over his cane, cocked his head at me and said in his mild way, ‘Well, the President would either be impeachable or he’d be assassinated.’ I looked down at him and said at once, ‘My opinion has changed.’ ”

  Jefferson laughed loudly, pleased at any story about Franklin, and Morris grinned and looked about with enormous self-deprecating charm.

  “You know, in 1784 before I left for here,” Jefferson said. They resumed walking along the path, Morris fanning his cheeks with his big tricorn hat. “In ’84 some pioneers on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains wanted to form a new state and call it simply Franklin State. They proposed that in his honor taxes would be paid only in deerhide or whiskey.”

  Morris hobbled a step behind them. “Well, it’s ’89 now, but there will be a new state there one day, many new states.”

  “Many.” Jefferson was now lingering by a white-blossomed shrub—when the snows stopped, everything had bloomed at once—and he paused to snap off a leaf while he talked. “Meanwhile, as we put together a nation, our hosts are hard at work taking one apart.”

  “Lafayette is late.” Short held up his watch.

  “Has he reached a decision as to the orders?” Morris had amazed Short by the speed with which he absorbed the French political situation. Lafayette was a delegate to the great, repeatedly postponed Estates-General, the new assembly that was to address the linked questions of the king’s seemingly endless debts and the continuing bread riots in the provinces. For weeks he had been agonizing over whether the three orders—nobles, clergy, commoners—should vote as blocs or as individuals. The latter choice, as Morris had instantly understood—and denounced—was tantamount to pure, unprecedented democracy.

  “Lafayette inclines to the individual vote,” Jefferson said. “All of the liberals do. I do.”

  “Sheer folly,” Morris said firmly. Short prepared himself to observe how Jefferson, whose cheeks had gone dull red, would respond to such blunt contradiction. But before he could speak Morris was looking past him and was raising his hat: “Et voici enfin notre génèral. Bonjour, mon ami. Vous êtes tellement en retard, nous avons déjà marché quelques ligues sur la route.”

  Morris’s French was so easy and fluent that the hurrying Lafayette answered distractedly in the same language, forgetting for once his sworn allegiance to all things American. He was en déshabillé, he explained, puffing and flapping the skirts of his corduroy coat, because of politics, because of meetings, declarations, speeches, petitions, everything. He could only stay a moment—“Tell me, my dear friend,” he begged Jefferson. “What should I do?” He ran one hand over his high, sloping brow, making red bristles of hair stand up like a brush. The great teeth flashed like cannons. “Should I speak at the first meeting? This is the question. La Rochefoucauld says no, wait, de Corny says speak. And should I speak often? Sparingly? How to decide?”

  Morris had an answer before Jefferson. “Not at the first meeting.”

  “Which will be all ceremony,” Jefferson murmured.

  “The King, the Keeper of the Seals, Necker—” Morris knew the sequence exactly. “By the time they’re through, no one would listen to you. Wait.”

  “Yes, yes.” Lafayette crossed in front of them both, laying a hand on Short’s shoulder by way of greeting, farewell, benediction.

  “Speak only on important occasions,” Morris said. The four of them were now proceeding slowly down the gravel path, treading their shadows, lifting their faces one at a time to the chilly sky.

  “Be patient, dignified,” Jefferson said.

  “But Mirabeau will speak for hours—everybody fears it, the man is mad.” Lafayette wrung his hands and used the odd new English word that had just appeared for the first time in Madison’s Federalist. “He has no responsibility.”

  Short glanced left at the speeding carriages and horses of the Champs-Élysées, let his mind drift. They could talk politics, repeat themselves, inflame themselves for hours, everyone in Paris could. As what the journals now openly called la révolution lurched and stumbled forward like a great shaggy beast—he pulled at his collar and let the thought lurch to a stop. Paradoxically, in the midst of a revolution, Short found that his own mind recoiled more and more from politics. He heard Washington’s name pronounced in quick succession by Lafayette, Morris; “constitution,” “human rights.” Below them, off to one side of the snowy blossoms, small boys were pushing wooden boats across a pool of filthy water. In Williamsburg, when he was a boy, the men had played cards with ivory chips shaped like fish and they kept them in leather indentations on the table, cal
led “ponds.” Why had he thought of that?

  “Dr. Franklin,” Morris was saying beside him, reverting to what Short privately described as Tales of the Constitution, “used to urge us to compromise on everything. He said when he was a young printer in Boston he went to see Cotton Mather once and he had to stop outside the study door, because it was so low and crooked. Mather watched him for a moment and then pointed one hand at the floor—‘Bend! Bend!’ ”

  With a guffaw and a Gallic flurry of handshakes Lafayette departed as hurriedly as he had come, and Jefferson proposed that the remaining three of them continue to the Palais Royal, where a new machine for automatically drawing one’s portrait had just been put on display. Frowning, Short pulled out his watch again—suddenly, sharply aware, in the very act, of who had first noticed his habit, and when. His face reddened.

  “You have a social engagement,” Jefferson said in a tone as neutral as November ice.

  The part of Gouverneur Morris that understood French life so well merely grinned and appeared, in the glare of the afternoon sun, to wink.

  “You look at your watch,” Rosalie de La Rochefoucauld said, touching his hand with two fingers and gently closing the case, “first, because you want to be precise, like him. He is your hero. And second, because he has in effect ordered you to go home. You think about how little time you have left here.”

  “I am almost thirty,” Short said.

  “My husband is sixty-five.” Rosalie’s fingers remained on the watch lid, exquisitely brushing his skin. “He says that for him every day goes by like a whizzing arrow.”

  Short put away the watch, brusquely. He had little interest in hearing the duc’s brilliant metaphorical sayings. This was the fourth time (to be precise) he and Rosalie had met alone since Chaville, or almost alone—he looked up quickly from the bench to see whether anyone else had yet arrived at Madame de Tessé’s town house—and he felt that every moment came and went with the speed … of a whizzing arrow.

  “Where is the duc now?” The watch sat in his pocket like a red-hot egg. It was five forty-five. Madame de Tott had agreed to signal from the window when the first carriage appeared. “With his soldiers again?”

  Rosalie nodded and leaned closer to pick at a spot of lint on his sleeve, close enough to allow him a breath, a lover’s stolen inhalation of the perfume she wore, the scent of lemon verbena that reminded him of childhood days, his sister and his mother crushing the leaves between their fingers and laughing. “He took his regiment to Versailles to patrol around the Menus Plaisirs, because somebody wrote a letter threatening to burn it down.”

  Short made a little grimace of understanding. The Estates-General was to be held in the same building as the Assembly of Notables two years ago, but since there would be almost three times as many delegates this time, the whole structure was being demolished and rebuilt, although not without threats, speeches, little local riots between democrats and monarchists. Lafayette had moaned for days over the decision to build separate meeting rooms for the clergy and the nobility, so that each order would be cut off from the others.

  “You also look at your watch because people will arrive in ten minutes.”

  “Five.” He looked at his watch again; in his mind he stood up and heaved it like a flaming bomb into Madame de Tessé’s garden.

  “And when they do …” Rosalie’s hair was dark, her throat milk white, exposed by her dress down to the point, the line, the miraculous finger’s width that divided her breasts; his hands curled and ached.

  “We must transform ourselves into creatures of discretion.” Miserably, he finished her sentence. He started to say more, discovered that his mind was an absolute blank, empty of thought.

  She had lowered her eyes to her hands in her lap. “The last time we met I could hardly speak to anyone for hours later,” she confessed, so softly that he could scarcely hear. “I made myself stand by the window, with the light at my back, so no one could see my face.”

  Short nodded. They had become more artful than politicians, masters of the eliding glance, the unseen, subtle pressure of a handshake, the furtive brush of skin as they passed. Three days ago they had arranged to walk together, publicly, in the Cours la Reine. (The very spot where Jefferson had snapped his lovesick wrist, a sardonic inner voice broke in.)

  “I don’t care what people see,” Short said recklessly. “I kept your note.”

  Rosalie blushed, shook her head, studied her lap. He touched the back of her hand with the tip of one finger and, leaving it there, began to quote: “ ‘Je t’adore, mon chèr, chèr ami. Je ne t’abandonnerai jamais.’ ”

  She jumped to her feet, looking at the house and shaking out her skirt at the same time. “Arrivé!”

  In the window the tall, conspiratorial figure of Madame de Tott could be seen waving a hand. Without another word Rosalie was gone, a flash of blue muslin, black hair, the ghost of a breath of lemon verbena. Short reached for his hat, lying beside the stone bench, patted his left pocket—opposite the watch—and felt for the key. In another moment he was walking briskly in the opposite direction, through Madame de Tessé’s elegant roses and white columbine, toward the rear gate, where the gardeners and servants entered.

  In the alley he paused to scrape dirt from his shoes, then proceeded along the stone wall of the garden until he reached the rue de Varenne. At the corner of the wall and the street he took out the iron key, dropped it in the vase Madame de Tott had shown him, and looked up to see, peering out of his carriage window, the handsome, smiling, completely intelligent face of Gouverneur Morris.

  At precisely the same moment Jefferson also looked down at his watch.

  In the diagonal beam of the new skylight the hands showed just a moment before six. James Hemings handed him his black hat with silver trim. Sally Hemings started to open the door, but Petit, lips pursed as always, cheeks faintly rouged, stepped in front of her and followed Jefferson down the outside stairs and across the cobblestone sidewalk to his waiting carriage. When Jefferson had climbed in, Petit closed the door, looked up to the slouching driver, and clapped his hands twice.

  On the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré Jefferson took out an envelope and from it slipped a twice-folded letter.

  MY DEAR, DEAREST PAPA,

  You are the best father. I have made it my study to please you in everything. My happiness can never be compleat without your love and approval, and I hope that I can have them both now as I take a great, wonderful step forward into life. You know how happy I have been in the convent. I believe I have a calling to become a nun, and Father Edgeworth and Madame de Mézières agree, so that, with your loving approval, I wish to make my abjuration of the world and take the ceremony of the laying on of the veil, which you remember we witnessed once with Mr. Adams and which was so beautiful—

  There was more—two pages more—but Jefferson refolded the letter and replaced it in his pocket. The carriage skidded over wet pavement, sending a spray of mud and straw from the wheels. On the edge of the street a trio of beggars scattered, shouting, a squadron of red-plumed soldiers appeared; the carriage jolted through a logjam of wheels, leather, horses, and bounced free again before the great Gothic jumble of the Tuileries Palace, where more soldiers lounged in front of barricades and a ragged tide of pedestrians and carts flowed around them, downhill toward the Seine.

  At the rue de Grenelle the driver turned right; at Panthemont braked to a noisy halt.

  From her window Patsy had seen the carriage coming for half the length of the street. Before her father could even step down to the pavement, she was pushing through the wicket of the huge wooden door and taking his arm. How would he be? Once near Gum Spring in Virginia they were crossing the James River and the two ferrymen started to quarrel—drunkards—and the boat swung headfirst into the current and toward the rapids, and her father rose up with a face of absolute fury and roared (the only time in his life) that they had better row for shore before he pitched them over the side like sacks.

>   “Patsy.” He took her hand and covered it with his own. “Patsy. You have the blue eyes of your mother and the foolish red hair of your father.” His smile was never more gentle. Inside the school he patted her hand again, then walked away in the direction of Madame de Mézières’s office.

  In the corridor, conscious only of flitting shadows, whispers, Patsy waited with her hands clasped in prayer. A servant walked by, then a dog, shaking its ears. Patsy was taller than Mrs. Cosway, than Madame de Corny, than Madame de Tott, but she felt like a small child sitting on a floor, surrounded by giants. When her father emerged from the office, he was still smiling, but the sensation she suddenly felt was fear, climbing her throat like a bird.

  “I have paid all your bills at the school,” her father said, “and Polly’s too.”

  “But—”

  “The servants will pack your trunks and bring them tomorrow. Polly is on her way.”

  “Papa—”

  “And we will never speak of this again.”

  “I want to stay,” Patsy protested feebly, willing the blue eyes of her mother not to cry.

  “I have bought you a wagonload of new linen and dresses. And tomorrow we will go down the rue Saint-Honoré, just the two of us, and buy all the lawn and cambrics you can carry.”

  She clenched her fists until the nails pierced the skin.

  “You see,” he said gently, bending close until his face filled her whole field of vision, as in truth it always had. “You see, I am one of those parents who mean to rule exclusively by love.”

  She burst into scalding tears.

  Memoirs of Jefferson—12

  THREE VEHEMENT PUBLIC QUARRELS.

  For so ostensibly peaceable and benevolent a man as Jefferson, whose unofficial motto was always to “take things by the smooth handle,” it seems a very high number indeed. (I omit those lesser, rather poisonous or smoldering grudges with Patrick Henry and John Marshall.)