Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  “By all means, admit it,” drawled Talleyrand. His eyes came around, indifferently, to Short.

  “The King of England,” Adèle informed them, her finger now deep in the jar of conserves, “has gone mad again, you know. This time he claims to be George Washington. They say his doctors follow him everywhere but don’t dare speak unless he speaks to them first, because that would violate royal protocol.” She placed the finger in her mouth. “The only book they allow him to read, I’m told, is, of all things, King Lear.”

  “Which in English literature,” Talleyrand said, “curiously enough exists with two different endings, Shakespeare’s and the revised, happy version of some modern hack. Do we know the king’s choice?”

  The conversational banter flew. Morris stretched his leg and his stump, rolled his eyes, joined in with a fluent, insinuating French that made Short feel suddenly a hundred years old. He took brandy from a maid. Talleyrand brought out a fat gold tabatière from the folds of his cape and offered him snuff. Morris told how Houdon had made him pose for Washington’s statue and asked his advice about the bust he was now making of Jefferson, at Jefferson’s request.

  “Jefferson leaves soon for America, does he not?” asked Talleyrand.

  “He has written for permission, but heard nothing.”

  “And will he return?” The sister, whose name was Julie, had joined Adèle at the fireplace.

  “He will return, of course,” said Talleyrand without bothering to look up at her. “Poor Lafayette will need him to spell Rights of Man or whatever childish declaration our fevered marquis decides will save the nation.” Adèle shifted her skirts by the firescreen, and the bishop reached up, as casually as if he were plucking a fruit, and kissed the inside of her wrist.

  Morris stretched his wooden leg. Another six inches, Short thought, fascinated, and the wooden leg would meet club foot. He raised his eyes to find Adèle’s fixed on him.

  “I think,” said Morris seriously, “you underestimate our red-haired minister. To my mind, it is unthinkable that General—or rather President Washington—will form a new government without Jefferson. He is too aloof, reserved, I grant you, to be a great politician. But he is a man of infinite subtlety.”

  “I saw Jefferson once,” Adèle said. She smiled at Morris but spoke to Talleyrand. “From your carriage, at the Tuileries. I distrusted his face, hated it. He is obviously a man faux et emporté.”

  Flushing, bewildered, Short translated her phrase: a man false and passionate. But he had no chance to object—no chance even to absorb Morris’s remark, which could mean only that Jefferson, once gone, would not return to France as minister. The bishop was rising to his feet. In a corner Julie was whispering to her sister.

  At the stairs Talleyrand lingered to say good night to Adèle, and Morris, Short in tow, bowed and walked on. In the courtyard his carriage was already waiting—Short had the sensation of being surrounded by hundreds of invisible wires, each one manipulating a hidden part of the scene. Morris sat back on the bench and folded his arms across his waistcoat while the horses backed and clattered.

  “Emporté,” he said softly. “ ‘Passionate.’ A nice word for the ever-amiable, ever-distant Mister Jefferson.”

  Prudence collapsed in a rush. “He said nothing to me,” Short blurted, “about not returning. I assume that he returns in five months.”

  Morris looked at him coolly. “You’re worried about your future, yes? If he remains at home, you think you might replace him here.”

  Short made an involuntary, deprecating gesture; took refuge in consulting his watch, whose face, in the bouncing darkness, he could not see. The carriage joined the river of wheels on the rue Saint-Honoré.

  “I would not,” Morris said carefully, “place my trust in Jefferson. He would not recommend you.”

  “He would.”

  “He thinks all young Americans should flee the temptations of fleshpot Europe,” Morris said, “as you well know.” He gripped the leather strap by his window and leaned close enough for Short to smell wine, sweat, the faintest possible scent of milk and water. “You have become far too French for him, my dear fellow. Let us face it. You are one of his ‘sons,’ but the most wayward, alas. Madison and Monroe busy themselves day and night with politics, they advance the great cause of the father. Meanwhile, you neglect everything for the sake of your pleasures.” Morris tapped Short’s knee with one finger. “He thinks you have formed a scandalous attachment.”

  Before Short could do more than bristle, Morris had leaned back again; his grin flashed in and out of a streetlamp. “I name no names,” he said.

  “Jefferson would not—” What was the word he needed? Deceive? Betray?

  But in his peremptory way Morris had decided to change the subject completely. “The Bishop of Autun has offered to take me to an impotence trial,” he said cheerfully. “Do you know the custom? When a French woman wishes a divorce, the Church in its militant wisdom grants it only if the husband can no longer perform his conjugal duties. Sometimes he agrees. Sometimes, for reasons of property or pride, he elects to demonstrate—shall we say his ‘competence’—before witnesses? The bishop will take me as his guest, he says. He claims the rate of failure is remarkably high. Quod est demonstrandum.”

  Short could only shake his head.

  “The bishop means me to understand his invitation allegorically,” Morris said, sounding in his irony precisely like the bishop. “That is, I am to stay away from Madame de Flahaut.”

  “She is very beautiful.” Short watched the Champs-Élysées appear on his left, a dark mass of trees and gravel. When had Morris given instructions to the coachman? More wires.

  “Her nose is too big,” Morris said. “Her sister Julie left her husband when she was twenty-five, did you know that? And traveled for months with the Cardinal de Rohan, dressed in the clothes of a boy acolyte. Jefferson may be right about the corruptions of old Europe on youths like you and me.”

  The carriage was wheeling through a crowd of other carriages, en route to the theaters. Beggars and soldiers had suddenly popped up, gopherlike, on opposite sides of a corner.

  “Not, of course,” Morris added slyly, “that the celebrated friend of the celebrated Mrs. Cosway should be the first to cast stones.” He sniffed in mock alarm. “I seem to speak in nothing but biblical terms after I see the demonic bishop.”

  Short could only shake his head again and pinch the bridge of his nose. Morris was watching with lynx eyes. “Jefferson has fooled you,” he said flatly. “He won’t openly denounce your ‘attachment,’ you know—that would be despotic, and Jefferson is the apostle of freedom. But he will do what he thinks best for you, not what you want. He will maneuver you round and round till you go home. Little gestures, little coldnesses, favors. Look at his poor browbeaten daughters, caught like fish in his nets. Look at poor Maria Cosway. What a subtle old domestic tyrant he is. He professes freedom, our Jefferson, but he keeps slaves.”

  Morris placed his whole hand on Short’s knee this time. “Shall I tell you another allegory, mon chèr Chort? Religious, too, curse the bishop. There was a priest a hundred years ago at a village near Mézières, much beloved by his parishioners for his saintliness. He consoled them, comforted them, led them daily to God; an exemplary Catholic priest. When he died, he left a will and some letters to Voltaire confessing that for the last thirty years he had secretly been an atheist and had never believed a word he preached.”

  He gave Short’s knee a final push. “Here is Jefferson’s house,” he said.

  In the late afternoon of Sunday, July 12, Jefferson was returning home in his new English carriage from a visit to the Palais Royal, where he and his daughters had been taking tea.

  To avoid the soldiers and wagons now permanently jamming the rue Saint-Honoré, they crossed below the Louvre and rolled west along the river until they reached the Place Louis XV. For Jefferson this was nearly the most familiar of Parisian landmarks. Those mornings when he did not ride through t
he Bois de Boulogne he customarily gave over to a walk from the Grille de Chaillot to the life-size equestrian statue in the center of the Place, exactly 820 double steps, he had calculated, from his own front door.

  With a gesture as automatic as Short’s he opened his watch, but ignored it and stared straight ahead at the Place. Around the statue, drawn up in battle formation, stood more than a hundred German cavalry, part of the king’s hated mercenary guard. Behind them foot soldiers—Swiss, also belonging to the king—flags up and bayonets glinting in the sun.

  The carriage swerved, jolted to a halt.

  Scattered through the square were piles of stones, large and small, intended for the new bridge under construction, and behind the stones, damned up like a flood, hundreds and hundreds of grim, blue-shirted citizens were massed and waiting. Jefferson cranked down his window and called to the driver. They rolled another few yards and stopped. Where the Place was usually alive with carriages and horses and noise, there was now only a weird, unearthly silence and a wide empty space. A German horse stamped its hoof against pavement. An officer’s voice carried like the crack of a whip.

  Jefferson ordered the driver to go forward.

  They clattered noisily into the center of the Place. The gray-green equestrian statue slid by their window, the tense white faces of the cavalry, plumes, boots, a blue and red German flag.

  Ten yards past the statue a German officer, horse prancing, sword vertical in a gesture of command, pulled into their path. Patsy sat up straight and cocked her head, as if listening to the voices now coming from somewhere behind their carriage. Beside her father Polly began to cry.

  Jefferson stretched his arm to pull Polly toward him.

  The officer bent from his saddle and peered inside, but only for a moment—the noise of the huge crowd was sweeping closer in a rising growl, the horse was edging sideways. Jefferson spoke in French, the officer pointed his sword toward a lane between piles of stones, leading directly into the Champs-Élysées, then shouted something unintelligible to the driver, who shook the reins wildly and yelled. The carriage shot forward and they galloped through a parted sea of angry faces. To the rear, seconds after they passed, the crowd was surging into their wake, heaving stones and bricks at the cavalry, which was backing, wheeling, turning.

  Patsy stuck her head out the window and looked back on a tumultuous roaring mass. The mob had surrounded the soldiers, stones flew in geysers. A man’s body dropped from a roof like a falling sack. Before the trees and dust cut off her view, she saw the German flag dip and fall, the first puffs of smoke, and then, catching up, came the sharp slap of air against ear that was the sound of muskets fired in battle.

  “The king,” Lafayette groaned, pacing straight toward the window as if he would crash through it. “The king, the king, the king.”

  “The whole riot,” Jefferson said mildly, “was set off by the king’s dismissal of Necker. That and the use of foreign troops to guard French soil.”

  “I know it, I know it.” Lafayette turned sharply at the last moment and stopped in front of Patsy. “I know it. Sheer madness to dismiss him. The only minister in the cabinet whom the people Liked.” He pulled the curtain and looked out, then shook his head at Patsy with a puzzled frown. “I cannot get used to the fact that the Grille de Chaillot is gone.”

  Patsy leaned to follow his gaze. Three weeks ago she and Polly had stood at the same window and watched while a combination of mob and soldiers had dismantled the customs barrier and most of the stone wall of the Grille de Chaillot. Since then, with the soldiers gone, their house had been burglarized twice and her father’s favorite ormolu clock stolen. Now they had bars and bells on the windows and a private guard in the garden.

  “Here is your Declaration of Rights again,” her father said. He held out a paper, and Lafayette bounced halfway across the carpet to take it. “I’ve ventured a few suggestions, as you asked.”

  “We look to you, I look to you,” Lafayette muttered. With another turn of his heels he was back almost to Patsy’s perch by the window and holding the paper up to the light. “You’ve changed the first sentence, the list of essential rights?”

  Patsy rose and looked over Lafayette’s shoulder, quickly translating as she read. Where Lafayette, in his large looping handwriting (exactly like Polly’s), had written “Declaration of Rights—Every man is born with some inalienable rights, such as the right to property, the care of his honor and his life, the free disposition of his person”—around these words her father had placed thin, square brackets and drawn a line, eliminating both property and honor from the list of inalienable rights.

  “ ‘Honor,’ ” her father said with a stiff motion of his bad wrist, “is the main principle on which monarchical government rests—it creates those charades and ceremonials that keep the aristocracy obligated to the Crown. I take the idea, in fact, from Montesquieu.”

  “Montesquieu,” Lafayette repeated and stared blankly at Patsy, as if trying to remember a face.

  Behind him William Short slipped into the room and took a seat at his desk. Patsy smoothed her skirt against her legs. She had not seen Short in almost a week, thanks to the mobs and riots. But where Lafayette had been racing with his troops from Versailles to Paris or back, or coming constantly to see her father, pleading for help, Short had been away attending to the Duc and Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld, whose country house in La Roche-Guyon he seemed to think was exposed to the wildest kinds of threats and attacks. He looked completely, totally exhausted, Patsy decided, worse than she had ever seen him. Good. It served him right.

  “And as for ‘property,’ ” her father said. Short propped his head on his fist and looked up at him. “I had originally written ‘life, liberty, and property’ in the Declaration of Independence, you know.”

  Lafayette, who could have known no such thing, nodded.

  “But I revised it to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”

  Lafayette studied his text for such a revision.

  “Indeed”—her father was now in the full tide of reminiscence, a mood she always loved to see in him, even when she had no knowledge at all of the people or places—“I think we did retain ‘property’ in the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, but I have always regarded property as a means to human happiness, not an end in itself. My old law teacher George Wythe used to distinguish between natural and civil rights, and property belonged to the second.” He saw Lafayette’s worried expression and broke off.

  “I will study the changes and take them to my committee,” Lafayette said. He put away the sheet of paper and reached for his three-cornered general’s hat (uncharacteristically stained with dust and mud, Patsy noted), which he had dropped on a chair as he entered.

  “You’ve erected a superb edifice,” her father said, walking with him toward the door. “The essential principles are sound, the reforms well in hand. Have courage.”

  “If you had been injured, or your daughters—”

  “Now I will own one apprehension,” her father said with great serenity. “Not that one, because we have been walking the streets otherwise in perfect safety. But the refusal of the National Assembly to accept trial by jury as a right, this troubles me. Trial by jury is the only anchor by which a government can be held to its principles. Individually or in groups, judges can be biased, or bought; but twelve honest men, chosen at random—”

  For once Lafayette interrupted. “Today there have been riots not one league from here at the monastery of Saint-Lazare, all afternoon. I must beg you to stay in.”

  “Are they demanding bread?” Patsy asked. Now that she was out of Panthemont, Patsy went everywhere in the city, observed everything. She had walked down the rue Saint-Honoré with Sally Hemings earlier that day. They had seen bakers’ shops boarded up or looted and smashed to splinters. Bands of armed men stood at corners selling stolen flour from wagons.

  “Bread, always bread,” Lafayette sighed. One of his multiple duties, she had read in t
he Journal de Paris, was escorting shipments of grain into the city. He patted her absentmindedly on the shoulder and spoke to her father. “Paris has less than three days’ supply of bread—but in the last few hours the mobs have grown much more organized. They’re marching from Saint-Lazare to every armory they can find. The leaders want to be armed against the king’s guard.”

  “Short and I warned you weeks ago about the effect of foreign troops on the mobs.”

  “You did, you did. You were both so practical.” Lafayette grinned suddenly, feebly. “So Anglo-Saxon. You must despise our Latin wildness. How did you find our friends in the country? Safe? Well?”

  Short had now joined them at the study door. He had found the duc and the duchesse well but anxious, he told Lafayette. The peasants in their district were loyal so far. On the other hand, rioters roamed the countryside everywhere, especially in Normandy, torching the houses of the nobility. As he talked on with his typical good-natured earnestness, Patsy wondered whether to believe a word of it. As far as she was concerned, Short and Rosalie de La Rochefoucauld were behaving disgracefully. Everyone could see it. Her father disapproved sternly, that she knew; he never invited the duc and duchesse to his house anymore if Short would be there, and when they met at other people’s parties, he watched Short with narrowed eyes.

  Not, she told herself, making an effort to be scrupulously honest, that the two of them actually did anything; they only talked and looked in a certain obvious way, and walked up and down a room for hours together, heads almost touching. She listened to Short say something clever about the riots. The duc was old enough to be Rosalie’s grandfather. When she was married, Patsy had already decided, if she couldn’t live in Paris, she would live with her husband in her father’s house at Monticello.

  Short asked a question she didn’t hear, and smiled at her. Had he and Rosalie, she wondered, ever really—?