Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  “But you were, I am told, very busy at making the new American Constitution.”

  “He was a delegate from New York,” Short put in. “A colleague of Colonel Hamilton’s.” (Feeble; he ran a finger around his collar and looked back at Jefferson, who had started, slowly, in their direction.)

  “More than that, surely.” Madame de Tessé continued to stare.

  “I was in fact the humble penman of the Constitution,” Morris admitted. “When the convention had agreed on all the articles, I was assigned as a committee of one to write the actual document. Which I did.”

  “So you are the author of the Constitution.” A flat, uninflected statement. Morris bowed again. “Which explains why you don’t hesitate to differ with your minister to this country. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, you wrote the Constitution—neither of you is in awe of the other.”

  “Mr. Jefferson,” said Morris, grinning as Jefferson somehow appeared among them with perfect timing, “is a person of whom I should always be in awe.”

  Jefferson acknowledged the compliment with mock gravity.

  “Today we are discussing theories of government,” Madame de Tessé told him. “Monsieur Morris is so alarmed by our riots that he wishes to see the king act with a firm hand.”

  “The king has been very moderate to this point,” Jefferson said. “But in any case it looks to me like a case in which the king and the parliaments are quarreling over the oyster, while the shell will be left, as always, to the people.”

  “Monsieur Morris does not share your enthusiasm for reform.”

  “Oh, my dear lady”—by comparison with Morris, Jefferson’s French was stilted and cold, the strange Scottish burr more pronounced than ever—“I hold an office that prevents my taking sides in your political battles. Mr. Morris is a free, private citizen.”

  “The monarchical author of a republican constitution.” Madame de Tessé smiled to show that she still observed the French rule of disagreement without positive abuse.

  “I have come to admire Mr. Morris’s Constitution very much,” said Jefferson, with an attempt at a distracting pun that took Short by surprise. Morris’s splendid athletic figure was much talked about in Paris. Houdon was so impressed that he had asked him, wooden leg and all, to stand as the model for his full-length sculpture of General Washington. More than one Parisian lady, according to rumor, had shared Houdon’s impression.

  “You are not disturbed by the riots?”

  Jefferson smiled at Madame de Tott, inclined his head very slightly toward Short. “I like the remark by one of the members of the Third Estate—was it Launay?—that there is no form of disorder that is not preferable to the funereal tranquillity arising from absolute power.”

  Madame de Tessé beamed and looked up defiantly at Morris, who was in the act of taking a glass of wine from a servant’s tray. He stumped sideways an awkward step. His big face, unwigged, twice the width of Jefferson’s narrow one, flushed crimson with anger. “And in my turn I like the word funereal. Abstract, Latinate, unconnected to reality. It is my understanding that in the riots that destroyed Monsieur Réveillon’s house and factory, some three hundred citizens met with a final, funereal tranquillity. In plain language, Madame, they were murdered.”

  “Surely not three hundred,” Jefferson demurred.

  “Three hundred or three, it was unnecessary. It was—undemocratic.”

  Madame de Tott had stationed herself protectively next to Jefferson. “Your two servants were caught in the middle, were they not?”

  Jefferson nodded, to Short’s eye as calm and unruffled as if Morris had never spoken. Diplomacy was deafness. “James and Sally Hemings,” he said. “They had gone to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine for some reason—a visit—when the riots broke out. Sally came back unharmed, right away; James was considerably bruised and shaken. He said he hid most of the night in a building near Réveillon’s house.”

  “These are brother and sister, your servants?”

  Before Jefferson could reply, Morris had thrust himself in the center of the little group. The flush of anger had been replaced by a smiling pallor that looked like ice beneath powder. “Let us call things by their right names, by all means,” he said. “These are not Mr. Jefferson’s ‘servants.’ They are his slaves.”

  For a single unguarded instant Jefferson’s head snapped back as if he had been struck. In the long, palpable silence that followed, the only sound that could be heard was Morris’s wooden leg grinding hard into the waxy floor.

  “One concession to theory I did make, my dear friend,” Morris finally said, addressing Madame de Tessé. “At the Constitutional Convention I supported with every fiber of my being the elimination of slavery. I regard it as the curse of heaven on my country.”

  “On any country, surely.” Madame de Tessé rallied faintly. “Surely.”

  “And in July 1784,” Morris said, “five years ago, together with John Jay and Aaron Burr, old friends of our friend Mr. Jefferson here, I founded the New York Manumission Society for the abolition of slavery. This was practice, not theory. If I had slaves, I would free them. I am unable, for the life of me, to see how men can profess to be republicans and reformers and yet profit from the tears and blood of their fellow men.”

  Morris drained his glass. His voice had kept all its usual smoothness and urbanity, but there was no mistaking his passion. And Jefferson’s? Short’s mind was echoing with arguments on Jefferson’s behalf. He too despised slavery. He too had acted boldly, years ago. In the Declaration he had denounced the “ebony trade” in terms so strong that Congress had instantly struck them out.

  “A Frenchman has recently established a society to promote worldwide emancipation,” Morris said.

  “Brissot de Warville.” The Roman remained as calm as if whale oil or tobacco duties were the subject. “He asked me to join, but of course I could not.”

  Morris was less than Roman. “Of course,” he drawled sarcastically.

  But Jefferson held his gaze. When he replied, it was with an offhand eloquence that made Short long to reach for pen and paper. “Nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition not only of the trade,” he told them, “but of the condition of slavery. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise in despotism on the one hand, and degradation on the other. But I am here in France as a public servant, and those whom I serve have not yet spoken against it. For me to join, without serving the cause here, might render me less able to serve it beyond the water.”

  Morris took another glass, arched one eyebrow in a diabolical hook. “To the causes beyond the water,” he said, raising the glass close to Jefferson’s white face.

  Outside, on the path to the stables, Morris gripped Short good-humoredly by the elbow. “Come with me to the Louvre tonight.”

  Short pulled free. “You were unfair back there. You know he can’t speak freely for himself, even here.”

  “Ah, my dear young-old, tall-short ami.” Morris’s breath was pungent with red wine, his nose flecked with broken veins. “I could have done much worse than that. I could have reminded our red-haired hypocrite of one Virginian, close by, who had nobly freed his slaves—in practice, not theory.”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  Short felt the back of his neck burn, as if the pale monk’s head of a sun above them had focused on him alone. “They were merely inherited, not even a dozen. My brother and I—.”

  “I could also have said”—Morris was raising his big hand, signaling the nearest groom, and carriages were starting to roll over the gravel, so that he bent close again, all blue-white eyes and cracked nose, and repeated himself with deliberate, malicious clarity—“I could have also told Ambassador Jefferson what he certainly does not know, that at least one American public servant in France, in Jefferson’s very home, has been bold enough to pay his forty-eight-franc dues and join Brissot de Warville’s society contre la traite de nègres.”

  The carriage
wheels crunched to a halt inches from Short’s foot. A horse stamped, sending up a spray of gravel that he did not feel, though he watched his hand brush it away; he heard his voice ask in French, “How do you know that?”

  “Because it’s true. Come to the Louvre and meet my friend the Comtesse de Flahaut.” Morris bounced on his good leg, twisted his shoulders awkwardly, jumped and somehow arrived on the bench of his carriage, looking down at Short. “You will like her,” he said, breathing hard. “She is the mistress of the Bishop of Autun, although she thinks she keeps it a secret from me. She writes lurid novels, also secretly, and pretends to be optimistic and political, when she is in fact tragic and principled, but you would insult her cruelly if you said so. She reminds me, in other words”—Morris swung the door of the carriage wider—“of you.”

  In the carriage Short tried again. “If you knew the extent to which debts have shackled him …” The word was idiotically chosen. Shackled. Morris arched his brow again. “He inherited his father-in-law’s enormous debts,” Short continued passionately; he knew this well because, in the dim, shapeless past that was Virginia he had done his earliest legal work on John Wayles’s complex estate. “And when the Revolution wiped out our paper money credit, he had to pay the debt all over again, twice in effect. If he were to free his slaves, he would be ruined financially, he would have nothing left to give his daughters.”

  “On whom he dotes.”

  Short thought of the nearly grown Patsy, more Jefferson’s partner than daughter since she had left the convent; the frail Polly, the sole member of the household who had been given the free run of Jefferson’s books. He had walked in two days ago to find Polly cheerfully writing her name in the margins of a Dutch folio while Jefferson printed a letter for her on his copy press. “Yes. On whom he dotes.”

  “Choose blood,” Morris said ambiguously.

  “And in any case, you don’t know Virginia, you don’t know blacks. To free them without provision is like abandoning children. They steal, they beg, they idle. Their money disappears, they become slaves all over again.”

  Behind Morris’s shoulder were passing houses, uniformed soldiers, cheeselike wedges of gray sky. Morris grinned his amiable, charming grin. “Choose freedom,” he said.

  In another moment they had reached the Pont Neuf and begun the clamorous trip across it, through butchers’ stalls, tents, carts, swarms of beggars, squads of soldiers. When Short had first come to Paris (a lifetime ago!), the bridge had been dominated by singers and hawkers and roaring pitchmen—as your carriage squeezed between them, you could have leaned out and purchased anything in the world: dogs, pistols, flowers, glass eyes, wooden legs (he glanced at Morris), fruit, jewelry, false teeth, candy. An open-air dentist worked at one end, giants and puppets cavorted at the other. Now politics—“la révolution”—had changed even the bridge. Gone were most of the boutiques and stalls, replaced by unsmiling soldiers, ranting speechmakers. The hawkers specialized in pamphlets and obscene songs about the queen; the beggars cackled political slogans as they pounded your carriage door, snapped at the horses’ bridles, peered in the window boldly to see who you were.

  Morris stared grimly out until they reached the far side of the bridge, turned left past the Café du Parnasse, and started to follow the quai along the broad, grime-streaked facade of the Old Louvre.

  In another minute they turned right, through a stone vault, and into a courtyard that looked like the home of a republic of artists. On strings or flat against damp walls hung brightly colored canvases, prints, black-and-white engravings by the hundreds, the work of the resident painters. Above them, clinging precariously to flat stone, the painters had added wooden balconies to the windows of their little apartments; then flowerpots and makeshift charcoal stoves. In the very center of the courtyard, like a gypsy encampment, rose a conglomeration of crooked shanties, hen coops, dog houses, tented laundries, and soap-making vats. In one corner kerchiefed women stood with their arms folded, washtubs at their feet. Near the entrance children squatted, half naked, by dirty puddles, laughing and shouting as if the old Pont Neuf had somehow been transported inside, safe behind the king’s walls.

  “She lives through there.” Morris pointed toward another, lower vault, and the carriage rattled across the paving stones and into a smaller, more elegant courtyard, where the carriage stopped, and then Morris led him across yet another little square. Through a grille Short glimpsed traffic and the two stiff rows of chimneys that always made the Palais Royal look like a sow on her back.

  “And up here.”

  Stumping loudly with his wooden leg, Morris mounted the stairs, coat flapping, paused at a landing, squinted down a window. At the third landing he straightened his coat with a sharp tug and knocked once, loud as a shot.

  The next two hours passed for Short as a dream. Jefferson’s circle of friends—apart from Saint-Germain, Short’s circle too—was limited to political liberals, “les américains,” and visiting merchants. On his own, by force of charm alone, Morris had somehow found his way into a different Paris. The lady novelist Adèle de Flahaut, as beautiful, easily, as Short imagined, bore no resemblance at all to the brisk, modest matrons of the Hôtel de Langeac, whose chief role was to ornament and admire. When he followed Morris into the drawing room, the maid continued on ahead, pulling open a second set of doors, and then a third. Abruptly they entered Madame de Flahaut’s boudoir itself, where their hostess stood before a mirror, dressed in a diaphanous pink shift, extending her hands like a Delphic priestess while another maid powdered her lovely arms.

  Morris greeted her with relaxed urbanity, sat down on a shabby couch beside the mirror. Short was introduced, seated, ignored in rapid fashion. Over her shoulder Adèle spoke in languorous, extremely colloquial French to Morris. The two maids, heads together, draped and redraped the gauzy shift.

  Blinking to focus, Short saw just to his left a Chinese screen and behind it one corner of a brass tub. He bent. The tub was filled with warm milk and water, and when he looked up again his nose told him that the priestess three feet away had just emerged from it.

  “ ‘Belinda sees no charm that’s not her own,’ ” Morris quoted cheerfully from the couch.

  “Parlez français,” Adèle told the mirror.

  “ ‘Cois tibi paene videre est,’ ” he said, “ ‘ut nudam.’ ”

  “I speak Latin,” she informed him, “and you cannot see through my dress.” In the mirror her heavy-lidded eyes shifted to Short. “Can you, Monsieur Chort?”

  In the parlor they were joined briefly by a bandy-legged older man in English lounging coat and twill jodhpurs. He nodded at Short, mumbled to Morris, and wandered into another room.

  “The Baron de Flahaut has his apartment downstairs,” Morris explained. He drew Short to one of the Louis XV chairs beside the fireplace, and both of them watched as Adèle, now fully clothed in a green-and-white gown, herself exited through a different door. “They live here on his pension and whatever salary he makes as director of the king’s gardens.”

  “Buffon’s old post.”

  “Buffon’s old post, but hardly Buffon.”

  Short looked around the room. The walls were hung with engravings of country scenes, the fireplace was stuffed with cheap wood, not coal, crackling and spitting as it burned; mirrors between engravings, fine chairs worn at the back and arms and leaking cotton; a long threadbare rug of no distinct color, rumpled across a stone floor. Jeffersonian, Short registered the fact automatically: no books.

  “Nil admirari,” Morris murmured.

  When Adèle returned, she was followed by a handsome blond woman obviously her sister, a tall, hawk-nosed Frenchman dressed in ruffled court finery, and last—most striking of all—a man of medium height, middle age, with a thin, mocking expression and a ponderous club foot encased in black leather that thumped more loudly than Morris’s leg and swept back and forth like a pendulum under the folds of his cape. As Short got to his feet, even with his poor eyesight he had no t
rouble recognizing the former Abbé of Saint-Denis, now the Bishop of Autun, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the most worldly and libertine of all French reformers; if he were only a believer, Mirabeau had joked, Talleyrand might be the conscience of the Revolution.

  No introductions this time, not even from Morris. The three new arrivals took their places around the fierce little fire and began to eat and drink whatever the procession of maids carried to them.

  “We have come from Versailles,” began Talleyrand, and Morris, peeling an orange, nodded.

  “Have some of this conserve,” the sister urged, passing a jar of green jelly to Morris. “Cela vous purgera trois fois.”

  Morris smiled and handed it to Short. By the fireplace Adèle had taken up another Delphic pose, equidistant between Talleyrand and Morris, arms along the mantel but inclining her head to Morris. In spite of himself, Short stared at her heavy-lidded eyes, the smooth face full of complex, sensual defects.

  Talleyrand was now questioning Morris. “You saw the opening of our theatrical season?”

  “He means the Estates-General,” Adèle said.

  Morris was grave. “Madame de Tessé gave me an extra ticket. She hoped it would make me less a royalist and more a democrat to observe the excesses of power.”

  “You’re no royalist,” said the hawk-nosed man. It was his one and only contribution to the evening.

  “Nor democrat either. But I confess—is that the right word, my dear bishop? Confess?” Talleyrand raised two crooked fingers and made a sign. “Thank you,” Morris said. “I do confess, in all the pageantry your king and queen made a brilliant showing. I sat at the back of the Menus Plaisirs, where I could see everything, even your ecclesiastical ermine, sir, and hear nothing. The king appeared to read his speech well. Necker read well. The applause of the Third Estate—well, should I admit that at times tears came to my eyes? But the poor queen was so altogether alone and unpopular.”