Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  “Jefferson would be a great man,” Clérisseau said, “if he did not own slaves.”

  “He is free to free them,” Short said slowly. How had their roles become reversed? he wondered idly. Clérisseau now the voice of optimism, himself more cuttingly ironic with every sentence. Europe changed everyone. Revolution changed everyone.

  “My dear old American William,” Clérisseau said, and brought them to a halt by the mossy pond. Closer, it turned out to be choked with weeds and oily green mud; a dead goldfish floated on its side like a rag. “You’ve never really seen us as we are. Your particular friend”—he nodded toward the distant Rosalie and held up a palm to stop Short’s protest—“let me be frank. She is French. You’re not. She is the niece of her husband—did you know that?—and the granddaughter of the old duchesse, her mother-in-law. You haven’t the requisite insincerity for our games. You don’t enjoy her, you won’t have her. She will no more leave her husband than”—Clérisseau’s big-nosed, saucer-eyed face broke into a familiar grin—“than I will leave all this for the buffalo plains of Virginia.”

  On August 25 Lafayette sent them a frantic note, begging that Jefferson would break every engagement and give a dinner next day for himself and seven other members of the National Assembly, who desperately needed to agree together before everything plunged—here Lafayette’s pen skittered dramatically to the edge of the page—into civil war.

  Promptly at three on the twenty-sixth, Short ushered them into the dining room, bowed, and started to leave; but Lafayette, clutching at everything American, grabbed his elbow, someone else drew up another chair. At the head of the table Jefferson smiled and signaled to James Hemings. In another moment Short found himself taking a place at what Lafayette grandly announced as a “Symposium unparalleled” of statesmen.

  It was a symposium that began slowly and badly. Jefferson had decided to serve the meal Virginia fashion, which meant that no wine would be poured until after the table was cleared of food. The French statesmen twirled the stems of their empty glasses, glanced at the clock. Meanwhile, Lafayette, clearly nervous, described at greater and greater length, as if he had forgotten the purpose of the meeting, the horrors he had encountered at the siege of Yorktown, when the British fought back so fiercely that the allies nearly broke. “We used to clean the wounds in the trenches, you know,” he suddenly told Short in English, “by urinating into them.” One of the Frenchmen looked up and raised an eyebrow. “Pisser dans les blessures,” Lafayette obligingly translated, and the Frenchman put down his glass.

  “The gallant French soldiers of today,” Jefferson began, evidently intending some compliment that would open the discussion. At the door James Hemings now hovered with his tray of bottles.

  Lafayette ignored his cue. “Nothing compared to Yorktown. My friend, you know Alexander Hamilton?”

  Jefferson nodded. “He is to be secretary of the treasury in Washington’s new government.”

  “I’m surprised to hear it.” Lafayette picked up a last forkful of food and left it suspended. “At the beginning of ’81 Hamilton was Washington’s aide-de-camp, a post he always hated, and they quarreled more than once. I was present in February, in New York, when Washington called Hamilton on some errand, and Hamilton delayed until, when he finally appeared, the general rose in a towering fury—‘Sir, you have kept me waiting at the head of the stairs these ten minutes. You treat me, sir, with disrespect’—‘I am not conscious of it, sir,’ says Hamilton cooly, ‘but since you have thought it necessary to tell me so, we part.’ And he left. This was the man I had serving under me the day the British—” He saw James Hemings at last and broke off. “I’m sorry,” the Prince of Pineapples said with a dignity that surprised Short. “It is a fault in a soldier to dwell in the past.”

  “Aux armes,” said one of the Frenchmen sardonically.

  When the wine had been poured and the cloth taken away, Lafayette stood, raising his glass, clearing his throat. The question to be resolved, he said, and looked up and down the table, was whether in a new French constitution the king would have an absolute veto over the Assembly, as some members wanted, or no veto at all, as others did. This was the sticking point, the symbolic wall between those who favored monarchy and those who favored republicanism. “I need not remind you of the state of things. Without agreement among us, the leaders, the Assembly will fall into utter chaos, the nation will explode again in geysers of blood. I have my own opinion.” He extended his glass toward a sour-faced man in a huge white wig, sitting at Jefferson’s right hand. “Monsieur Mounier has his.”

  Jefferson motioned to Short, and the two of them pushed their chairs back, as a gesture of invisibility. The Americans were to be silent observers only. The Frenchmen hardly noticed. Mounier, having lifted his white wig with both hands and pulled it down again like a bowl, was now also standing and speaking in rapid French; the others were likewise speaking or raising their hands. Lafayette sank back into his chair, waving his glass as if he had launched a ship.

  At half past six, after more than three hours at the table, the symposium declared a brief recess. Most of the members wandered into the garden, where Jefferson’s yellowing Indian corn still stood in plowed furrows. Short started to follow, reached the hall, then came to an abrupt halt. James Hemings was standing before a mirror, arms straight, fists at his side, mouthing words silently. Short hesitated; cleared his throat. In the glass James’s eyes flashed yellow. In another moment, glaring as he passed, he had vanished down the corridor.

  Short frowned and pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers. At the door to the study he looked in and discovered two of the Frenchmen deep in conversation with Jefferson.

  “Come in, please.” Jefferson saw him at once. “Our guests asked to see my paintings, but most of them are already packed.” He indicated the maze of trunks and shipping boxes that covered the floor. “This one,” he said, holding up a picture of Herodias with the head of John the Baptist, “I intend to hang over the parlor fireplace at Monticello.” He propped it against a chair leg and then from an open box by the desk pulled out three small paintings in thin gilt frames. “And these are for my library.”

  “Fran-cis Bacon.” The sardonic Frenchman squinted to read a label.

  “Bacon, Newton, and Locke,” Jefferson said. He arranged the paintings on the cluttered copy-press table for them to admire. “The three greatest men who ever lived. In my opinion,” he added politely. “I had my friend John Trumbull commission them to be copied in London. My original idea was to place them all together in one frame, so.” He quickly sketched on the copy press a large square containing three ovals. “But Trumbull said the effect would be awkward, so I mean to hang them separately.”

  “They are”—the Frenchman squinted again—“all atheists, are they not? Your three greatest men?”

  Jefferson shook his head briskly and straightened the nearest portrait—a very bad one, Short thought, of John Locke, who had emerged from the painter’s brush looking like a blue-haired horse.

  “Locke wrote an essay against ‘enthusiasm,’ ” Jefferson conceded, “which you know is the English term for religious fanaticism. But he was a Christian, certainly. Bacon and Newton too. Newton spent the last twenty years of his life calculating the exact date of the Day of Judgment. The three of them together laid, I believe, the foundation for all modern physical and moral science.”

  “But you yourself,” the Frenchman persisted. His voice was disapproving and suspicious. “You are known to be an atheist, yes? There was a joke you made about the Church. When the commoners walked out of Versailles and met at the Church of Saint-Louis, you said, ‘This is the first time that churches have been made good use of.’ ”

  Jefferson folded his arms across his chest; his eyes slid to Short.

  “Well, as to my own beliefs, of course,” he said carefully, “I keep them private; you must judge of my religion by my actions.”

  “Should an atheist be tolerated”—the Frenchma
n gestured toward the dining room—“in our new constitution? This is another question.”

  Short had never known anyone so reluctant to reveal his feelings—some feelings; unpolitical feelings. Jefferson turned away almost rudely and began to wrap Isaac Newton in a sheet of waxy green paper. “To my mind,” he said, using his bad wrist to hold down the paper, “it is an easy question. The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as actually injure others. Not to matters of conscience.”

  “But to protect the truth—”

  Jefferson’s eyes remained on the vanished Newton. “We arrive at truth,” he said, “by trial and error, reason and experiment. That was Bacon’s contribution in my little trinity. Do you gentlemen recall that in France the potato was once forbidden as an article of food, because it wasn’t mentioned in Aristotle? Or that Galileo was sent to the Inquisition for calling the earth a sphere? It is only error that needs the protection of government.”

  Lafayette poked his anxious face through the doorway, blinking.

  “In fact,” Jefferson said, but so softly that only Short could hear, “I am no atheist.”

  At ten o’clock the symposium at last pushed back its chairs and adjourned. In the hallway Short made himself busy gathering coats and directing grooms and coachmen. When he turned to say good night to the first of the statesmen, he saw, not French wigs and ruffles, but James Hemings again, dressed now in a plain cotton jacket, standing rigidly with his hand on the door to Jefferson’s study.

  “Excellent pastries, James, excellent meal today.” Short stared at the mulatto’s scowling face. No servant ever went into Jefferson’s study uninvited. “Beautifully cooked.”

  “Mr. Jefferson through yet?” Sullen, angry.

  From the dining room French voices rose and skipped, followed by Lafayette’s bray. When Short looked again, James Hemings was gone.

  “It has been,” Jefferson said, entering the hallway, “a dialogue as fine as any in antiquity, anything by Xenophon or Plato: A feast of logic and chaste eloquence.”

  “We have agreed,” Lafayette told Short, as if he had not been present for all six hours of debate, “on a suspensive veto, capable of being overturned by a two-thirds vote.”

  “Have you further wise thoughts for us, Monsieur?” The disapproving Frenchman had planted himself squarely before Jefferson. He cocked his head like a belligerent terrier.

  Jefferson composed his face into a grave neutrality. “No. No, you have seen everything to perfection, you have penetrated to the mother principle that governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people.”

  “The American Revolution is our Bible,” the Frenchman said.

  “Then you will convert me yet,” Jefferson said, suddenly grinning; and laughing, Short pulled open the door.

  Forty minutes later, not laughing but scowling, gripping too hard the brass handle behind his back, James Hemings closed the study door with a bang.

  At his desk Jefferson put down his pen and looked up. Looked mild. Looked calm. As he always, always did.

  “I received your note,” Jefferson said, rising from the desk and making a vague, polite gesture of welcome. “As the guests were leaving.” His long arm went completely out of the circle of light cast by the whale-oil lamp; as he stepped around the desk, his face floated in the shadows like a ghost.

  James bumped his way between boxes and stopped at an open black leather trunk that had just arrived the day before, specially built for Jefferson in London.

  “Is it about the packing?” Jefferson was invariably polite to everybody, black or white; James had never seen him really lose his temper, though he had often seen him turn ice-cold in an instant, le roi de glace.

  “If it’s about the packing,” Jefferson said, and he walked idly toward the same black trunk, “as you know, I haven’t received permission to leave yet. I haven’t even booked our passage to Virginia. So there should be plenty of time to finish”—the right hand appeared in the light—“all this.”

  “Not about the packing.” James licked the inside of his front teeth, probing quickly with his tongue for brandy. Two glasses were the limit, his sister had said, and kept the bottle squeezed tight in her lap, right between her thighs.

  “Not about the packing,” he repeated.

  Jefferson ran his hand along the smooth lid of the trunk and said nothing.

  “I can read, you know,” James said. More brandy would have stopped his hands from trembling. “Sir.”

  “You have been able to read for many years, I think. My wife saw to it you learned.”

  “And here, I can read French too.” James looked at the blank square on the wall where the portrait of Washington had hung. “A little.”

  “Something you have read upsets you.”

  James had rehearsed his speech for three weeks while he cooked, while he carried armfuls of clothes to boxes, while he skulked up and down the ruined, smoking rue Saint-Antoine, in and out of mobs and soldiers, looking for Le Trouveur. Now, of course, every single word had gone. His eyes shifted to the books glinting on the dark shelves. He took a deep, brandy-laced breath.

  “In the French law,” he said, “nobody can be a slave. Under the law I’m a free man as long as I stay here. Sally too. Virginia law don’t matter one bit here.”

  Jefferson floated almost entirely into shadow; outside the study window the clop of passing horses echoed on the pavement, soldiers going somewhere; free.

  “That’s what I read. And I know a man, a Frenchman, who can make a petition, and if I give it to the government, I am free.”

  Jefferson had moved all the way to the other window, next to Short’s desk. From where he stood by the black trunk, James could see the faint crescent of red in the lamplight that would be his hair. It was too dark to tell, but James knew for a certainty that his arms were folded across his chest and his face and his eyes looked like ice.

  But when he finally spoke, Jefferson’s voice was as mild as it had been at the start. “This time of year, this time of night,” he said, “it would still be hot at Monticello. You and I would be in our shirt-sleeves instead of these heavy French coats.” He paused. The last of the horses passed by and faded into the distance. “When we arrive, it will be early November probably, still time to see the leaves turning color and bring in the last vegetables from the garden. I’m looking forward to being home,” Jefferson said. “Virginia is home.” His sleeve rustled in the shadows. “If you file your petition, James, you can never go home.”

  “I can get a piece of paper that says I’m free.”

  “It will do you no good in Virginia. In Virginia you will be a slave again, but you will have a family, a home. Here you will have nothing.”

  “I can get along.”

  Jefferson was back in the light, shaking his head. “James. You’ve been in nothing but fights and trouble and drunken brawls ever since you got here. Last year I paid your French teacher extra money because you lost your temper and ripped his coat to pieces. I’ve paid for your quarrels at the cooking school and stopped the owner who wanted to sue you. I’ve taken care of you. And your sister.”

  James looked down and saw that he too had folded his arms across his chest.

  “Your sister’s no more than a child.”

  “She wants to be free.”

  For a long moment the two men were silent. In the flickering shadows they seemed to be posing, standing face to face, mirror images of each other. Jefferson started to speak again—“In this revolution and unrest,” he said, “your chance of finding employment”—then, as if giving up the argument, he simply stopped.

  James felt the brandy fading out of his blood; the tips of his fingers and toes were ice-cold. He shifted on his feet. Jefferson moved slowly to the desk and sat down.

  “Let me think on this,” he said at last.

  Now the whale-oil lamp was just to Jefferson’s left, so that while half his face was sharply illuminated, half was still
in shadow. James Hemings had known Jefferson all his life. Automatically he recognized in the narrowed eyes and red furrowed skin the first stage of one of his famous headaches. There were worse things than headaches.

  “I mean to be free,” James said.

  Wearily, Jefferson looked up. The light bisected his face. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate,” he said, then stopped once more. “I will think on it.”

  “In London,” said Gouverneur Morris, settling back into the carriage seat, “I made the acquaintance of the divine, enchanting, splendidly golden-haired Maria Cosway.” He snapped the window shade and peered out. “You were extremely good to meet me at the gate, my dear Short. But Paris looks serene tonight. Not a mob in sight.”

  “You called on her?” Short crossed his legs and spoke (he told himself) with Parisian serenity. But his mind had jumped with apprehension—Morris and Maria Cosway?

  “I carried a letter to her from Jefferson. I entered into the bosom of her household. She told me, in all innocence, that she was in love with me, as she is in love with all American men. For some days I was afraid that her husband, in his own special way, would repeat the compliment.”

  “And you saw her often?”

  “We had many a tête-à-tête. One day she told me a very funny story about your leader.”

  “I would not take seriously any story,” Short began, shaping his face into a judicious frown.

  Morris glanced back from the window, amused. “Evidently they met for the first time at the Halle aux Bleds.”

  “Trumbull introduced them.”

  “Yes, the blind painter, and subsequently—this is the story—Maria tried to introduce Jefferson to her particular English friend in Paris, the celebrated Miss Perdita Robinson, and Jefferson quite mysteriously, quite stubbornly, refused.”

  Short focused on a wine-yellow streetlamp, refined his frown, and said nothing.

  “Because you see, as it turned out, Perdita Robinson, once the mistress of the Prince of Wales, had come to Paris with her new lover, and if Jefferson met her, he would also, perforce, meet the lover.”