Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  The streetlamp bounced away like a burning ball.

  “Whose name,” Morris continued gleefully, “was Colonel Banastre Tarleton, late of his British Majesty’s army in America. Now Perdita, as you may know, is occasionally an author, and she was here helping the good colonel to write his memoirs of his American campaign, about which poor Maria was at the time completely ignorant.”

  “Colonel Tarleton was in Virginia.”

  “Colonel Tarleton was in Virginia and, according to himself, chased Governor Jefferson off the top of his hill like a scared rabbit.”

  “There are two versions to that story,” Short said stiffly.

  “As there are two versions to every story I have ever heard about Jefferson. But what I liked was the amazing coincidence of rabbit and hound turning up ten years later, on the arms of two such charmers. Imagine the scene if they had met—Jefferson frigid as a monk, Tarleton suave and bloody British. ‘How is your fine house at Monticello, sir?’ They both have red hair.”

  “You saw Tarleton?”

  “No. But I did see the new book Perdita has written and Maria has illustrated. I quite liked the title: The Progress of Female Virtue and Female Dissipation.”

  In spite of himself Short smiled.

  “I shall give a copy to the Bishop of Autun,” Morris decided.

  In another moment the carriage swayed to a halt on the crowded rue de Richelieu, opposite Morris’s hôtel, and Morris began to lower himself, wooden leg first, to the pavement. Half-way down he looked back over his shoulder. “After eleven hours in the Chantilly coach, I intend to have a steaming hot bath and then a bottle, possibly two, of good Burgundy, which you cannot buy or steal this year in London, à cause de la révolution. Can I repay you for the ride with a little supper? Say nine o’clock?”

  “Your club?”

  “The elegant Club Valois.”

  At half past nine, diplomatically late, Short pushed through the crowd of filles de nuit and their masculine admirers and climbed the stairs to the second floor of the Palais Royal. The Club Valois occupied a set of rooms next to the Chess Club of Paris and looked down on the long, beautiful, still twilit gardens between the arcades. From his table Morris looked down on the filled de nuit, turning their skirts in a languorous parade of color.

  “That is the very tree,” he told Short, pointing past the women, “where Desmoulins made his speech.”

  “The cockade speech.” Short sat down and watched Morris pour, with steady hand, from an already half-empty bottle of Clos de Vougeot. Two days before the Bastille was taken, a student named Camille Desmoulins had jumped on a table before the Café de Foy and worked the crowds to a fever pitch. At the climactic moment of his speech he had first pointed a pistol at his head—a sign of his readiness for martyrdom—then snatched a handful of leaves from a chestnut tree and proclaimed them the green cockade, the color of hope. For weeks after that every citizen without a cockade in his hat or his hair had run the risk of revolutionary justice.

  “But all that”—Morris moved his big head restlessly—“everything like that is over. The Polish general over there”—he nodded discreetly toward the leathery dark recesses of the club—“tells me Paris has been quiet for weeks. The king has even been given a suspensive veto by the National Assembly.”

  “Jefferson helped arrange it. At a dinner at his house.”

  “Paugh,” Morris said. “Not a word about Jefferson, not a word about this misguided revolution of nothing.”

  But in fact, through a five-course supper and three bottles of wine (“small ones,” Morris murmured; “the British use bigger bottles”), they had talked of little else. When the table was cleared they were talking of Lafayette—“his passion to shine,” Morris grumbled; “ ‘his canine appetite for popularity,’ ” Short quoted Jefferson—and when they finally emerged into the garden downstairs, they were talking of the ominous calm that had gripped the city; the lull, they agreed, before a greater storm.

  “Come and stroll,” Morris said, beginning to stump along the path. He moved ahead briskly three steps, faltered, and caught at the arm of one of the filles, who steadied him, giggled, whispered in his ear. By the famous tree they found a bench, and Short helped him sit down.

  “ ‘For this relief, much thanks,’ ” Morris said, leaning back. “As the preacher said in the brothel.” His head rested on the tree trunk and his white wig tilted askew. In the light of the Japanese lanterns hanging from the nearest arcade, they could see the filles, revolution or no revolution, hard at work plying their trade, and the same perpetual, inexhaustible stream of men flowing out of the cafés and restaurants that lined the eastern side of the garden.

  “I’m told,” Morris said, breathing heavily, “that the revolutionaries have taken to shaving the heads of debauched women.”

  Short nodded; useless, he thought, in the darkness. “They do, some of them. The women are ‘impure.’ ”

  “Ah, like the queen.”

  “Jefferson says without the queen there would be no revolution. Marie-Antoinette bullies the king and provokes the people.”

  Morris ignored the reference to Jefferson. He watched a beautiful young woman pass through the nimbus of lanterns, followed by a nobleman in a mulberry-colored coat. “But I’m also told that when they have their executions, amorous couples in the crowd”—he worked his hands in an expressive gesture.

  Short’s eyes tracked the blurred figure of the prostitute and the nobleman till they disappeared in shadows. “I’ve heard that too.” His mind spun suddenly, back to his first days in Paris, while the vague, muzzy outlines of the trees and lanterns metamorphosed into rocking faces. Where was the Ace of Spades now? John Adams? Her little servant, who had shown up that day when he and Rosalie—? In the distance a girl was now running, they heard a muffled shout. In his whole life, he thought, abruptly sad, nothing had ever been as sensual and exciting as those first months in Paris. He could inhale now, this moment, anytime, and bring back the first smells of the outdoor markets, the mixed aromas of green mud and perfume, horses, the cut flowers on every table and every bosom.

  “Give the whores a suspensive veto,” Morris muttered.

  Short nodded without actually hearing. The first months in Paris he had never been so conscious of women before—so many arms, wrists, turning necks, rising breasts, so much pressure of flesh against silk, as if the women of Paris had been pumped like balloons every morning into their clothes. Everywhere he had looked he was conscious of flesh, the very buildings were creamy and white, swollen, ripe. He had rubbed his way through the streets as he might rub his way through a harem. When he returned to Jefferson’s house each day, he was sweating like a sultan.

  “I will tell you something in confidence,” Morris whispered. The big man was obviously drunk, but in a Morrisian way, every word under strict constitutional control.

  “No.” He was thirty years old, Short thought, pinching the bridge of his nose, and no further along in life than when he had landed five years ago. No career, no wife. He blinked at Morris’s thick face and moving lips. No friend.

  “One day,” Morris said, “when I had drunk rather too much, I asked Madame de Flahaut to compare the Bishop of Autun and myself in the Cyprian rites. She reverted to a learned language, I was impressed to see. The bishop, she said, was suaviter in modo, while I was fortiter in re.”

  “I cannot imagine,” Short began, not imagining what he could not imagine.

  “I cannot imagine Jefferson doing this,” Morris said. “Sitting on a bench at midnight and companionably watching the whores. You are a son of man, my dear Short. Jefferson is a son—”

  “It is not his nature.”

  “Ice is his nature. But you don’t think so.”

  “My view is complex,” Short said pompously, thinking that it truly was. In vino veritas. In the manuscript he had started he would lay out once and for all the shifting, multifaceted history of his view. “I began, certainly, as a hero-worshiper. I was a boy
—”

  But Morris had come back from London accustomed, like the English, to interrupt. “He is much too hard in his judgments of people,” he rumbled. “He does not form just estimates of character. He assigns too many people to the humble rank of fool, but the gradations in life are really infinite. He is a democrat in theory only.”

  “He departs in a week.” Short was struggling to his feet. He had heard enough. He was tired of Morris; he was afraid of Morris.

  “And when he arrives in Virginia, he will be secretary of state.”

  Short stopped where he was. He concentrated on the swaying lanterns, the light breeze that had sprung up, carrying Parisian smells.

  “I had a letter in London.” Morris had also come to his feet. Short stiffened.

  “Jefferson had a letter, rather. From Madison.” Morris had taken his arm in kindly, avuncular fashion and was now leading him, with his awkward stump-step rhythm, toward the arcades and the carriage gate. “Jefferson had a letter from Madison in August informing him of Washington’s nomination. You didn’t see it?”

  Did he shake his head? Short had no idea. In broken stages he saw his hand waving the question away. Morris was speaking again, but Short’s mind was spinning forward, this time away from Paris and the past, toward Paris and the future.

  “He’s known for weeks,” Morris said with disgust. “Too secretive to tell you.”

  Short was slowing his steps, adjusting. “If he is to be secretary of state”—they had reached the Galerie d’Orléans, which led to the rue de Richelieu and Morris’s hôtel—“then he will not be returning to Paris.”

  “He would begin at once.”

  “But he may not accept—”

  Morris laughed out loud and steered them through an archway that echoed to shoe and stump like the bottom of a cave. At its far end, carriage lanterns floated in watery darkness. “Not accept,” Morris repeated scornfully. “He talks about retirement to his farm, he does retire when he sulks, but he’s as ambitious as Lafayette. I know politicians. He’ll take secretary of state, and he’ll be scheming every moment to be president after that. Jefferson plays for the long view. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he had dropped the charming Mrs. Cosway just to avoid a scandal later on.”

  They had reached the rue de Richelieu, twenty steps from Morris’s hôtel, and servants were descending the steps, holding little bull’s-eye lamps.

  “Ask him if he’s coming back,” Morris challenged.

  Short’s hand passed through squares of light. “He’s been confined to his bed with a headache for two weeks, and now he’s packing in a frenzy to leave—”

  “I told you he’d never look after your interests, not over here. You think he’ll appoint you Minister to France in his place, yes? Here’s what Jefferson will tell you, my friend. A tactful compliment first. ‘You speak perfect French, you’re excellent at business, people like you—oh yes, dear William, you’d be ideal as a diplomat.’ Then the shrug, the cool apology.” Morris mimicked Jefferson’s voice. “ ‘But I’m only a humble public servant, of course, without opinions of my own. And alas, you’re not very well known to Washington or Hamilton or Congress, who may have other plans, to which I am not yet privy.’ Besides”—Morris resumed his normal tones—“let us be honest. Jefferson thinks you’ve become more French than the French. He wants nothing more than to get you back to the healing, wholesome moral climate of America.”

  “The secretary of state can name whom he wants.” Short’s voice was small, full of foreboding.

  “And he will,” Morris said, dropping his arm, “and it won’t be you.” In the yellow light his teeth flashed like a wolf’s. “It will be me.”

  On the sixteenth of September, as Short sat in his shirt-sleeves on the third floor and filed letters, he heard the gong sound in the downstairs hallway.

  When he peered over the banister, he could see the tops of three heads—Jefferson’s, red as a carrot in the morning light; Petit’s pigtail; and the oversize white wig of Madame de Tessé. By the time he reached the hallway, they had been joined by two husky footmen, who had just tilted upright in one corner a narrow wooden crate.

  “Not for the voyage to America,” Madame de Tessé said, twinkling. Short bowed to her protégée Madame de Tott, now materializing in another corner. “For your return, Monsieur.”

  Jefferson made polite murmurings and stepped forward, over discarded slats, to see what the workmen were uncovering.

  “The idea came on me,” said Madame de Tessé, “when I saw the bust Houdon did of you in this year’s Salon.”

  “Houdon has been very busy forming American faces,” Jefferson said, smiling at Madame de Tott and placing one hand flat on the back of his neck. “Dr. Franklin started it, but then there was Washington, Lafayette, Paul Jones.”

  “Who multiplied himself like a rabbit,” said Madame de Tessé. “He ordered a dozen copies of his own bust, I know.”

  Ever the precise record-keeper, Jefferson shook his head. Short thought the past two weeks of painful illness, worse than the long “seasoning” of his first year, had cost him weight but given him dignity. The habitually mild expression had an edge to it, the long chin thrust harder still in profile. “Eight copies only,” Jefferson said. “He’s asked me to distribute them to friends in America.”

  “Mistresses,” sniffed Madame de Tessé.

  “Ah, look.” To be helpful Short had positioned himself beside one of the footmen. As the last cotton wrapping came loose, he snapped it back with a flourish.

  “My friend! Madame!” Jefferson came to attention like a soldier, spread his arms like a Frenchman. “This is too much, this is far too kind!”

  “To put under Houdon’s bust,” she said delightedly. The tall wig dipped perilously forward. Madame de Tott raised her lorgnette.

  “This is … beautiful,” Jefferson said, and Short nodded in vigorous agreement. The kneeling footmen were pulling away the last scraps of paper and cotton from a marble pedestal five feet high, snow white, with a smooth circular top. Around the edge of the top ran a series of alternately smiling and weeping cherubs, and beneath them, in a broad spiraling band down the column, a set of carvings that Short recognized as the twelve signs of the zodiac.

  “I ordered an inscription,” said Madame de Tessé.

  Jefferson stepped over the wrappings and bent to read. “ ‘Summo rerum moderati / cui tandem / Libertas Americae…’ ” He translated aloud. “ ‘To the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, under whose watchful care the liberties of North America were finally achieved.’ ”

  Madame de Tott finished the translation. “ ‘And under whose tutelage the name of Thomas Jefferson will descend forever blessed to posterity.’ ”

  Jefferson took Madame de Tessé’s tiny hands in his. Tears glinted in the corners of her eyes; the little pockmarked cheeks were tremulous beneath the absurd wig.

  “My dear friend,” Jefferson said with the slow, stiff formality he adopted when moved, “I am never so conscious of my littleness as when praises are bestowed on me which I do not merit. I feel like a thief, running away with the property of others. My conscience binds me to make a small alteration in the last line.”

  Short glanced at the pedestal. Nomen Thomas Jefferson.

  “Let it be changed to say ‘Nomen de Noailles, comitissa de Tessé.’ ”

  In her fiat voice scholarly Madame de Tott retranslated. “ ‘The name of the Countess of Tessé will descend to posterity.’ ”

  “You are a true, devoted friend of Liberty,” Jefferson said, still holding her hands.

  At the door to the dining room James Hemings appeared, arms loaded with folded sheets.

  “When you return to Paris,” said Madame de Tessé, “I will see that the bust is installed on it properly.”

  “We shall place it here in the hall.” Jefferson’s voice was gentleness itself. He moved out of James Hemings’s path without appearing to see him and indicated, over the customary Jeffersonian litter o
f trunks and boxes, the cleared table in the dining room. “Every other room has been metamorphosed into a packing shop for the voyage. But come in here and take a glass of wine with me this morning.”

  Madame de Tott, the fair Grecian, said something quite loudly in Greek, with a lilting musical accent completely different from her usual dry tone. Jefferson looked around with an amused twist to his mouth.

  “What did she say?” Madame de Tessé arched her right eyebrow to the edge of the wig.

  “She quoted the end of the second book of the Odyssey,” Jefferson said, “when Telemachus makes a sacrifice of wine and oxen before he embarks on a long sea voyage.”

  “What prodigies I know,” said Madame de Tessé comfortably.

  “Alas, we have run short of oxen.”

  “I defer the pleasure. When you return from America”—she craned her head to include Short in the remark—“you will find us all prodigies, I hope; democratic prodigies.”

  “Those who still have their heads left on their shoulders,” Short said, far more sharply than he intended.

  “Monsieur Short,” said Madame de Tessé. She stopped on the threshold of the dining room and frowned with displeasure. “You’ve grown as antirevolutionary as Monsieur Morris.”

  “It’s only the mention of sea voyages that makes him anxious,” said Madame de Tott, a step behind her.

  “Ah yes, I remember.” Madame de Tessé’s frown relaxed; she nodded with maternal tolerance. “Monsieur Short hates the water. He won’t sail if he can help it, will he?” But at her side Jefferson’s frown remained sternly in place.

  An hour later, when the ladies had departed, he entered Short’s room without ceremony, with only a peremptory rap on the open door, and reached Short’s desk in three long strides.

  “The tone of your remarks about the revolution,” he said before Short had gotten to his feet, “has for some time given me pain.”

  “Sir?”

  Jefferson glanced around the room, then turned and stepped back to close the door. “Your remark this morning to Madame de Tessé.”