Jefferson

by Max Byrd

“The duc is changing his politics.” Lafayette shook his head; his huge teeth were as big as flagstones.

  “In fact,” Short said, “the duc begins to think the mobs pose a greater danger than the king. I told him he sounded like John Adams.”

  Her father’s hand was on the study door. He laughed and pulled it back. “Mr. Short refers to an old debate between Adams and me. Our little Shays’s Rebellion out in western Massachusetts had a great and sobering effect on him, you remember. In politics, we used to say, Mr. Adams fears the many, I fear the one.”

  Her father was pulling open the door. In the hallway facing them stood James Hemings, hands on hips, scowling. As usual, her father walked past him without a glance. “You know, Adams once told me he had read through all of Plato and learned only one thing,” he said to Lafayette. “That sneezing is a cure for hiccups. Did you ever hear what Franklin said about Adams?”

  Lafayette shook his head. Slowly James Hemings began to unfasten the door, newly barred against burglars.

  “He said Adams was ‘always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, in some things, absolutely out of his senses.’ ”

  Lafayette gave only a distracted laugh. As James Hemings drew the door open with a grunt, he clapped the hat on his head and looked out to the street, where three soldiers waited on horses. Beyond them, over the dark green trees of the Champs-Élysées, low clouds walled off a sullen sky.

  “Tomorrow,” Lafayette said, “the mob intends to march to the Invalides for powder and guns, but they won’t find any powder there.”

  In French, to Patsy’s utter amazement, James Hemings asked the Marquis de Lafayette: “Where do they keep their powder then?”

  Lafayette appeared unsurprised. His left hand was steadying his scabbard, while his right hand shifted to the hilt of his sword. “They keep it in the Bastille,” he said.

  The next morning, Gouverneur Morris noted in his journal that the wind was still from the southwest, something unusual in his experience of Paris, and that the streets were covered with puddles and mud, something entirely familiar. Showers had fallen during the night; leaning from his hôtel window he could see the same heavy black clouds of yesterday, now lowered almost to the treetops and chimneys.

  When he went for his accustomed early morning walk, the streets were already thronged with angry crowds, “moblets,” he wrote, enjoying the play with words. Moblets of soldiers in uniform, moblets of chattering laborers now often called sans-culottes, wearing the revolutionary cockade of red and blue in their hats; moblets of boys, muddy Savoyards, hysterical, speech-making women.

  He returned to the hotel for his carriage but found that the driver and groom had both disappeared. When he had finally hired another, he set off for his banker’s to discuss the complex tobacco loan that had originally brought him to Paris, but twice his carriage was stopped and searched for firearms, and at their offices the French bankers were plainly too nervous to carry on business. As he reconstructed it later, about the time he had taken his chair and spread out his papers—noon, or a little after—Éthis de Corny was leading a ragtag army of citizens up to the very mouths of the cannons guarding the Invalides, where they demanded powder, bullets, and the thirty thousand muskets stored deep in the arsenal. Behind the cannons stood gunners holding lighted candles. Four hundred yards away, mounted but not stirring, a detachment of the king’s Swiss and German guards waited for orders. Inside the Invalides a few crippled pensioners worked halfheartedly to remove firing pins or triggers from the guns. By the time de Corny’s men marched scornfully past the cannons, the pensioners had disarmed all of twenty muskets.

  But the guns were no good without powder. In answer to de Corny’s question, the governor of the Invalides replied that his powder, some 250 pounds of it, had been transferred a week ago to the Bastille.

  Morris was dining in his hotel when the mobs passed by again, now heading directly (though he could not know it) for the huge eight-towered fortress that dominated the eastern edge of Paris, not far from the burned-out shell of Réveillon’s house. Morris had never seen the Bastille. He had heard of it only as a prison notable for its endless underground dungeons and its one celebrated inmate, the curious and learned Marquis de Sade, who liked to stand at his window and shout long-winded obscenities at passing strangers. Morris finished his meal—“a very bad one,” he wrote—closed his journal, and proceeded on foot to the Louvre. There he joined Adèle de Flahaut and (for once) her elderly husband, both of them peering out of their own windows like the Marquis de Sade and listening to the distant thunder of gunfire and explosions that had become the punctuation of every Parisian dialogue.

  At tea, while the old baron paced and listened, Morris amused Adèle with stories of his house in New York—Morrisania—on which he lavished all his money and care. “I am like Jefferson in that,” he told her. “I’ve fallen in love with my house, a relationship much more dangerous than the love of women.”

  “Don’t be like Jefferson.”

  “I will be like Hamlet then.” He placed the tip of his finger on the smooth ball of flesh beneath her right thumb. “ ‘Every man has both business and desire.’ ”

  They were speaking in English, which the baron did not understand. Adèle shifted in the chair to incline slightly in Morris’s direction. “I have heard—don’t ask from whom—that you also write poetry impromptu, to charm the women.”

  “That would be most romantic of me, if it were true.”

  The musket fire grew louder. The baron had come close to their chairs and now stopped, head tilted toward the window. Adèle silently handed Morris the wooden escritoire she had been holding; a sheet of paper, and a pen, which she carefully dipped first in a brass inkwell shaped like a lion’s claw. Morris dipped the pen a second time as if for inspiration, then quickly scratched out two quatrains.

  In fever, on your Lap I write,

  Expect then but a feeble Lay,

  And yet in every Proverb’s Spite

  Tho’ ’tis in Verse, believe I pray.

  No Lover I. Alas! too old

  To raise in you a mutual Flame.

  Then take a Passion rather cold

  And call it by fair Friendship’s Name.

  When he handed the paper back to Adèle, her husband looked down for the first time. “Now the shots come from the Hôtel de Ville,” he said in French, “or else the Place de Grève. What have you written, Monsieur?”

  “He writes,” Adèle said, ignoring the pinched, gray expression on her husband’s face, “that he is too old to be a lover.”

  Across the city later that day, Jefferson and Short, waiting at de Corny’s house, learned that the Bastille had been taken in a great blast of cannon fire, musket fire, blood. A hundred citizens were dead. Thirty or more Swiss guards had been hanged indiscriminately by the mob. The wretched commander of the prison had been dragged through the streets to the Hôtel de Ville, spat upon, kicked, pummeled every step of the way. When a member of the crowd—a pastry cook—approached him for some reason, the commander lashed out with a wobbly kick. Instantly a dozen knives were plunged into his chest, the body was rolled over and over through the mud to a gutter, and two pistols were fired directly into the skull. Then the pastry cook took a pocketknife from his apron and painstakingly sawed away the commander’s head, which was jammed onto a soldier’s pike and thrust up to the roaring crowd.

  For two more days the mobs roamed the streets almost at will. In Versailles the king made a conciliatory speech. In Paris he rode in procession, escorted by Lafayette, to the Hôtel de Ville, where he received (no one knew why) the keys to the city and placed on his royal hat the blue-and-red cockade that made him too a “sansculotte.”

  Jefferson watched the procession from a borrowed apartment on the rue Saint-Honoré. He told Short, when the king’s carriage passed, followed by thousands of citizens armed with pikes and swords and pruning hooks and scythes, that liberty had been bought at a low price. Below them the crowd was chanting o
ver and over, “La-fayette! La-fayette!” and when the marquis saw them, he rose in his saddle, turned his horse in a gallant, prancing circle, and waved his cockaded hat at Patsy and Polly.

  Two days later Morris dined at a table d’hôte in the Palais Royal. At just before five in the afternoon he was walking alone in the arcades, waiting for his carriage. On the street in front of him yet another crowd began to pass, waving the inevitable scythes and pruning hooks and muskets and carrying in triumph the severed head and shredded torso of a nobleman whom he recognized, though the jaw and mouth were stuffed with clumps of filthy straw and mud. In his journal Morris wrote in the mesmerizing present tense, in a tone as close as he ever came to outrage:

  The Head on a Pike, the Body dragged naked on the Earth. Afterwards this horrible Exhibition is carried thro the different Streets. His Crime is to have accepted a Place in the Ministry. This mutilated Form of an old Man of seventy five is shewn to his son-in-law, and afterwards he also is put to Death and cut to Pieces, the Populace carrying about the mangled Fragments with a Savage Joy. Gracious God what a People!

  “Has anyone told you the anecdote about the Duc de La Rochefoucauld’s witty reply to the king?” Clérisseau grinned expectantly at Short, with only the faintest trace of malice.

  “Many people,” Short said untruthfully.

  “It is a legend already, is it not, my dear?” Clérisseau turned his grin toward Rosalie de La Rochefoucauld, who stood at least three feet away from them in the dark shade of a sycamore. Without waiting for an answer Clérisseau turned back to Short. “On the night the Bastille fell—was it really only a month ago?—the duc rode out to Versailles and demanded to see the king in his private apartments. Naturally the guards resisted—it was nearly midnight, the king was asleep; but the duc pushed his way through all the same, right up to the royal bedside.

  “ ‘Sire, I have just come from the city,’ the duc said.

  “ ‘Is it a revolt?’ said the king.

  “ ‘No, sire, it is a revolution.’ ”

  Clérisseau chuckled. “Perfectly French, that story. When I was a boy learning my grammar, we were always taught that there are three main qualities of the French language. The first is clarity. After that is clarity. And the third is also clarity. I do not think,” he added after a moment, “the king has quite understood it yet.”

  “We have been strolling about in the gardens.” Rosalie emerged from the shadow of the sycamore. “To escape the heat.”

  “And our friend has been reading aloud from diplomatic dispatches, I presume. Very romantic, very charming.” Clérisseau let his round eye draw their eyes, in the French manner, toward the sheets of paper Short held in his hand. Short looked down gloomily. He had counted on half an hour alone with Rosalie before anyone else arrived. But Clérisseau was now living temporarily in the old Duchesse d’Enville’s town house and had immediately followed them—tactlessly or deliberately—into the gardens.

  “No.” Rosalie placed herself between the two men and began to walk. Today, for escaping the heat, she wore a white linen dress with billowy muslin skirt and a neckline scooped low enough to show, almost, the two pink coins of her nipples. “Monsieur Short has taken Madame de Tott’s suggestion and written a little history of the great Declaration of Independence. He was just reading parts of it to me. It’s very brilliant.”

  “Have you given us, à la Jefferson, the temperature and the weather each hour and day of the great event?” Clérisseau took Rosalie’s arm with his right hand, Short’s arm with his left, and beamed on Rosalie’s décolletage.

  Short folded the papers in half. In fact, he had written that the temperature on July 4, 1776 was 68° at 6 A.M., 76° at 1 P.M., information he had copied from Jefferson’s own memorandum book. He had also written, not brilliantly at all, an account of how Jefferson’s original version had been “mutilated” (Jefferson’s word) by the Continental Congress. And then how John Dickinson had walked nobly out of the hall so his delegation could vote for independence without him, and old Joseph Hewes of North Carolina jumped up as if out of a trance and stretched out his arms and shouted, “It is done! by God, it is done!” And he had ended with a long, stupid, truly pompous meditation on how “All men are created equal” was the most important sentence ever written in the history of political thought. He folded the paper again. His prose was not witty in the least.

  “Someone is here at last.” Rosalie smiled and turned to wave at Madame de Corny, descending the steps of the house fifty yards away. Clérisseau clapped his hands and started toward her.

  “You look beautiful,” Short whispered to Rosalie.

  She took a step along the gravel path, toward the nearest flower bed. “I don’t. It’s so hard to think of one’s personal life now. These politics and riots—”

  “You three were wise to come out of the house.” As she approached, Madame de Corny made an exaggerated fanning motion with the silver lorgnette she carried. “So hot in there. And your grandmother”—she nodded to Rosalie—“so old-fashioned. She won’t hear of leaving the doors open to the garden.”

  “We were just discussing the Declaration of Independence,” Rosalie said.

  “Comparing a good revolution to a bad.” Clérisseau stooped to pick up a fallen rose from the gravel and grunted with the effort as he straightened again. “Though as an architect, of course, I approve of the destruction of buildings, since they must all be replaced by new ones.”

  “You’ve lost your liberalism,” Short said.

  “The bloom is undoubtedly gone,” Clérisseau agreed. He frowned comically at the rose, then tossed it away. “But as for the Declaration of Independence, you know I saw John Trumbull’s sketch for his giant painting of it when he was here. He had Jefferson, Franklin, Adams all lined up like choirboys in front of a desk, pens in hand. The first historical painting I ever saw without corpses or horses.”

  “You’ve changed all your opinions,” Madame de Corny scolded. “You’re just like the Duc de La Rochefoucauld.”

  “There was never a signing,” Short said with pedantic gruffness. “The Continental Congress passed the resolution for independence on July second, and that should be the day we celebrate. They approved the wording of the Declaration on July fourth, but nobody signed anything until August second, and then they just trickled into the clerk’s office when they felt like it. The whole so-called signing took more than a week.”

  “Ah.” In the bright afternoon sunlight Madame de Corny’s smile was tentative and puzzled. Clérisseau played with his coat buttons and said nothing. After a moment, Rosalie took the other woman by the arm and steered her toward the shade, saying something over her shoulder that Short missed completely. His hands, he saw with surprise, were still folding and refolding the pages of his manuscript.

  “Lady talk, of course,” Clérisseau commented. “And the younger lady looks particularly enchanting today, does she not?” Short made no reply. He added, “Your employer was very kind to send me the gift of that silver coffeepot. I’ve written him a note.”

  “He’s still awaiting his official permission to leave.” Short folded the papers one last time and stuffed them into his pocket. In his mind’s eye he could see the painting Trumbull would finally make of the signing—destined, he was now morosely certain, to set a great historical lie in motion. “But he’s prepared to sail the moment it arrives. The house is filled with packers and trunks.”

  “Hence his absence today. The ambassador who cannot wait to be home.”

  Short watched the two ladies strolling tête-à-tête down the lane of trees that bordered the old Duchesse d’Enville’s garden. The house itself belonged to Rosalie’s husband the duc, but in some twist of French custom his mother continued in every real sense to possess it. Short studied the Palladian facade, the carefully raked gravel paths, the mossy pond at the wall that separated the estate from the rue des Petits Augustins. Nothing he saw reminded him of home. Home was a fictitious painting, scraps of folded p
aper.

  “He will return when?”

  “He plans a six-month leave.”

  “And you serve in his place?”

  “I will be chargé d’affaires.”

  “I sometimes think of emigrating to America myself.” Clérisseau began to walk again, drawing Short along.

  “Ah, don’t do that,” Short said jokingly. “Stay in France. I would.”

  It was Clérisseau’s turn to be suddenly gruff. “Of course, you would. You’re a foreigner. To you it’s all an art gallery and a distraction. You’re not a victim—of this.” He flapped his baggy sleeve toward the ancient stone wall, the massive trees, the distant flat spires of Saint-Sulpice, meaning to indicate, Short knew, the mad, ceaseless upheaval going on all over Paris, all over France. “Yesterday they”—Clérisseau used the French word cohue, the nobility’s contemptuous name for the mob—“they threw stones at the Duc de La Rochefoucauld’s carriage; they nearly killed him, one of their true friends.”

  Short looked up quickly in Rosalie’s direction, decided the news made no difference. Since the day of the Bastille the mobs changed heroes constantly, for no clear reason. Even Lafayette, the man of the hour in July, was being hissed in August.

  “By contrast, I see America as a vast open space.” Clérisseau dropped his left arm and rubbed it hard with his hand. “A last glorious chance to let human nature mature in freedom. I see thousands and hundreds of thousands of Europeans like me flowing into it, filling it up, marching to the edge of the continent. Fleeing this insanity.”

  “You see it the way Jefferson does.” Short could hear the irony in his voice but could do nothing about it. In fact, he himself now saw the future of American history as nothing but tragic, the great unstoppable flow of immigrants coming long before anyone had learned what to do with freedom, how to claim it without blood and violence and revolution. A Jeffersonian phrase came back to him: It was the nature of human nature.