by Max Byrd
“I meant,” Short began, not quite truthfully, “only a jest.”
“This revolution is a great event, a very great event in the history of liberty. This country has already begun steps to abolish its aristocratic titles, to establish a free and republican government. I am a friend to it.”
Short had come around to the front of his desk. As always when he was frightened, a part of his mind took refuge in exact, obsessive observation. Jefferson wore his usual costume of blue coat and gray trousers, his neck wrapped in a blue scarf; anger had dug long lines across his brow and his chin—prognathous—stabbed to a hard marble cleft.
“You think, like Gouverneur Morris, like Clérisseau, that the violence of the revolution invalidates the revolution. Where there is such excess, you think, such bloodshed, there is no freedom. I think otherwise. Many guilty people have fallen in the last six months without a trial, and some innocent people too. These I deplore as much as anyone, and shall deplore to the day of my death. But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle. To make a revolution here it was necessary to use the arm of the people, and that is a blind instrument.”
“Very blind.” Short spoke firmly, but his mind came up with no other words. Feebly he repeated himself. “Blind indeed.”
Jefferson had meanwhile turned his back and walked toward the single window in the room, which looked out at the decaying garden. “Was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?”
What could Short answer? He saw blood one way—crimson smears on pavement, cold rags of flesh. Jefferson saw everything—how? Abstractly? In a blind vision?
“Some of those martyrs,” Jefferson said, “I knew personally, and I have been wounded, in spirit, by their loss. But rather than let the revolution fail, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country”—he spun on his heel and looked back at Short—“and left free, it would be better than it is now.”
In the distant, recording part of his brain Short was remembering: Mr. Jefferson is much given to hyperbole. But he said nothing and was conscious, shamefully, that he had lowered his eyes and face in something like abasement. All his life, he thought, the one great thing he had envied in other men was not wealth or learning or physical strength, but passion.
At the door Jefferson stopped and cleared his throat. Virginia reasserted itself, courtesy reasserted itself. “If I speak too warmly, William,” he said, paused, started over. “The preparations for our trip have made me impatient, too much so. Finding a ship, booking a passage for so many people …” He waved his stiff right hand at one of the packing boxes that had invaded Short’s neatly organized room. “The confusion.”
Short felt the back of his legs touch his desk. Suddenly, almost against his will, he could think of nothing except Gouverneur Morris’s cruel prophecy. “Have you made your bookings yet for the return to Paris?”
The stiff hand disappeared into the blue coat. The smile was Roman, a thin crease of dignity and frost. “That will be much easier to arrange in Virginia.”
“But you will be back in the spring?”
“I will be back, of course,” Jefferson said, with his other hand on the door.
“It is only,” Short began. “It only occurs to me to ask—” And then he stopped. Morris’s voice rang in his head. The urge was overwhelming to ask Jefferson directly, confront him even—If you don’t return, will you recommend me? Will you fix me in this place? Give me what I want? His heart thumped like a cannon under his ribs. What if he asked? And what if Jefferson answered?
At the door Jefferson waited, his hand still on the handle. Slowly his expression softened. “You were going to ask?” he said.
Short saw him as if at a great distance, in the hazy shadow of memory and fear. Even to ask would be to mistrust. He had known Jefferson’s quiet, fatherly voice all his life, he thought, longer by far than he had known Morris. Jefferson would never deceive him.
With the bittersweet sensation of having made an irreversible choice, he shook his head. “No.”
On the morning of Jefferson’s departure Short awoke early, much earlier than anyone else in the house. When he lit his candle and opened his gold watch, the spidery hands pointed to ten minutes before five.
He dressed quickly and crossed the room to pull back the shutters. Pointless. The garden and street were completely dark; not even a flickering réverbère along the Champs-Élysées. His candle’s tongue made the only sound.
No lights. He felt the cold smooth glass of the window against his forehead. The year that he was six, his father had taken him one night up the side of Loft Mountain in Albemarle County, to watch a ceremony of Indian signal fires. The two of them had sat on the cold, smooth wagon bench listening to animals and night birds while his younger brother dozed behind them on a burlap sack. The Indians had set piles of wood every two miles apart straight up and down the Shenandoah range, and at midnight, far to the north, they lit the first one. Then the next hilltop south lit its fire in relay, and the next, and the next. From where he stood, held upright by his father on the wagon, it had looked to Short as if a great red bird of flame were flying from hill to hill.
He yawned and rubbed his cheek and watched a single lantern appear somewhere along the banks of the Seine. He had no desire whatsoever, he thought, to return to Virginia.
On the stairway going down to the kitchen he could hear stirrings from another part of the house. Then a door opened and a voice carried softly down the stairs. Jefferson, singing.
In the kitchen itself a footman was asleep on a stool. Petit stood in front of the fireplace warming a piece of bread. When he saw Short he tilted his head to indicate the silver coffee service on the table.
“James has just taken him his breakfast and his bowl of cold water for his feet.”
“We’re all up early.”
Petit shook his head sorrowfully. “He wants to leave in two hours, but I told him the servants would never load the carriage properly by then.”
“Not all those trunks, and the girls, and the extra horse.”
Petit pursed his lips and spoke with Gallic melodrama into the fire. “He is le rot des maîtres.”
The king of masters. An undemocratic sentiment; unrevolutionary. Don’t let the master hear. Short picked up the coffee service and, on this morning of mornings, carried it himself to his room.
By now, as he closed the door with his foot, the sun was casting pink and gray lines of light into the eastern sky. Rooftops, church steeples, fresh lanterns; moving lights on a river barge. A paradox: Europe, older by two thousand years, seemed young and new in comparison with the endless dark, mossy, tangled, impenetrable forests of the New World. Yes? No? He would find some way to work the idea into his manuscript.
His manuscript. Petit’s acid black coffee burned his tongue, churned his stomach. Short glanced with dislike from the window back across the room to the desk, where sheets of paper lay in faint white squares on the blotter. The Life of Thomas Jefferson, in the Manner of Mr. Boswell. Unfinished, unreadable. Last night he had labored for three hours trying to write the story of Jefferson’s governorship in the Revolutionary War, and in the end everything he had written was contradictory or inconclusive. Colonel Tarleton either chased Jefferson like a rabbit over Carter’s Mountain, or else Jefferson waited bravely until the last minute and rode away, and though he had worked until his head ached, Short still had no idea which version was true. He had wadded up his paper and thrown it away.
When they had departed this morning he would return and try his hand at something else: Jefferson and Mrs. Walker; Jefferson and his rival Patrick Henry. He poured a second cup of coffee from the silver spout, watching the liquid black stream turn silver itself in the rising dawn. Everything was metamorphic, ambiguous. Every day he learned a new incongruous fact. Morris, grinning wickedly, had informed him that Patrick Henry’s mad wife had actually been John Paul Jones’s lover first—what use could he
make of that? He raised the coffee cup to his lips. The truth was, he had begun too soon; he could work for years and years and still reach no conclusion about Jefferson, Jefferson’s life, or the distant, fire-signaling country to which Jefferson, far more than he, belonged. Better to wait, he thought. Better to wait two decades before he tried again. Better, when they had departed this morning, to ride in the opposite direction, toward Rosalie.
By nine-fifteen, Jefferson’s carriage was fully loaded and waiting outside the front door on the rue de Berri. The servants were assembled on the pavement, and Jefferson, who had wanted to drive away quietly with no farewells, was walking stiffly from group to group, murmuring a few words in French.
“When you see me next,” Patsy told Short, “I shall be seventeen years old.”
“She wants to be married,” Polly said as she climbed into the carriage. She poked her head out the window and added, “I don’t.”
“Say au revoir for me—to everyone.”
“I will only say à bientôt.”
“When we are both old and married,” Patsy said, “we shall speak French to each other, at Monticello.” Her long, narrow face assumed a Jeffersonian solemnity. And then, contrary, he was sure, to all her resolutions, she suddenly embraced him in a rush and planted a loud, tearful kiss on his cheek.
In another moment the girls were joined in the carriage by Sally Hemings, resplendent in a new green traveling robe, grinning from ear to ear at the prospect of going home; James Hemings, no less resplendent (but scowling) in a blue-and-gold coat and new boots, climbed a mountain of trunks and settled onto the bench beside the driver.
Beside Short, Madame de Tessé waited with a handkerchief pressed to the corner of one eye. “I have such prémonitions,” she whispered over and over, until both of them looked with relief at the gay, roguish figure of Gouverneur Morris stumping up the Champs-Élysées.
“I’ve been at the National Assembly, listening to Necker and Mirabeau,” he announced cheerfully, “but thought I would stop by for le grand départ.” Jefferson bowed to the last servant in his personal gauntlet, pressed a coin in the man’s hand, and joined them.
“A few letters, my friend,” Morris said, handing him a set of envelopes, “which I beg you to deliver as convenient. One is to General Washington.”
“I heard you mention Necker.”
“An extinct volcano of a man. No longer a power. You may quote me on the other side.”
Jefferson smiled and placed the letters in the outer pocket of his blue jacket. “You make it sound as if I’m about to cross the Avernus rather than the Atlantic.”
“Your classical allusion would turn Virginia into Hades.” Morris winked at Short. “Much my own view, of course.”
Jefferson appeared not to have heard. “I will send you shiploads of new plants for Chaville,” he told Madame de Tessé, “in meager return for the pedestal.” He bent to take her hand, kissed it gallantly, then straightened his tall frame as if to look around once more.
“Dieu vous protège,” whispered Madame de Tessé.
“You will be late reaching Le Havre,” Short said.
The Roman grasped his hand and covered it with both of his. In the glare of the French sunlight Jefferson’s strong features somehow slipped in and out of focus. Symbolic, Short thought ironically; of something. He clung to the solid grip of Jefferson’s hands. Then Petit appeared, leading Jefferson’s horse, and Jefferson turned to wipe its neck with a handkerchief.
There would be no whip today. He swung easily into the saddle, and they all followed the carriage into the Champs-Élysées, even the servants, where, standing dangerously in the midst of passing wagons and coaches, they waved their hats and handkerchiefs over their heads. From one side of the carriage Sally Hemings leaned out and waved back; from the other side the two girls did the same. Dolphinlike the carriage rose over a hump of light in the road and dropped out of sight. At the last moment, so far away that Short could hardly be sure, Jefferson’s horse broke into a gallop.
Memoirs of Jefferson—13
THE MORNING JEFFERSON WAS INAUGURATED as President for the first time, March 4, 1801, he walked down Pennsylvania Avenue with a group of friends from his boardinghouse and entered the still domeless new Capitol building under construction (he had a hand, and more, in choosing the design) to give his speech.
Inaudible, of course, beyond the first two rows. When people read it later, they learned that he had extended the olive branch to his enemies—“We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists”—and even called on the “Infinite Power” to guide him, a mild shock for the New England delegations, which habitually referred to him as “Atheist Tom.”
After he finished his speech—I was in Europe still, but I heard the story a hundred times—he walked back to Conrad’s boardinghouse and found that all the comfortable places at the head of the table, by the fireplace, were already taken. Nobody offered the new President his seat, until a Mrs. John Brown, wife of a senator from Kentucky, shyly stood up. Jefferson refused, with exquisite Virginia politeness (and shrewd Republican simplicity) and took his usual chair at the very foot of the table.
He was to keep up this pose—not pose but fact—of Republican simplicity all eight years of his presidency. The President’s House was barnlike and unfinished most of the time he lived there. The roof leaked, the East Room had no paint or furniture (Abigail Adams had used it for her laundry), and the master of the house, though he entertained constantly, generally received daytime visitors in his old slippers and threadbare red waistcoat, just as if he were at home in Monticello. In private, when he was under no obligation to extend the olive branch, he liked to sit with a bottle of his good French wine and describe his election as the “Revolution of 1800.”
That was in the beginning. That was when he pushed success after success through the Congress—sent off his gunboats to beat down the Barbary pirates (something he had dreamed of doing since Paris); sent off his agents, secretly, to make the Louisiana Purchase (the most acquisitive man in the world, Clérisseau had said; in 1812 Jefferson wanted to march into Canada and annex it too). Sent off his secretary Meriwether Lewis to explore Louisiana pretty much as the king had sent Peter Jefferson fifty years before, to survey the Fairfax Line. For a time, among the common people, Jefferson was as popular, almost, as George Washington.
Did I bring him bad luck? Does a part of me like to think so?
I returned to America in the summer of 1802, not rich and not married, in the pursuit of happiness. At almost the same moment a frustrated office-seeker and journalist, one James Callender, reported in the Richmond Recorder the “fact” that Jefferson kept a slave concubine at Monticello, a “black Venus” named Sally Hemings, who had so far borne him five mulatto children.
I still have copies—filed away in my office, for whatever motives—of some of the virulent, unspeakable effusions that followed. The New England newspapers, always staunchly anti-Jefferson, could hardly restrain their glee. The President kept a “Congo harem,” they wrote in Massachusetts; he rushed back from Washington at every chance to sink between Sally’s “mahogany thighs.” A thirteen-year-old New York boy named William Cullen Bryant won applause with a poem called “The Embargo”
(“Go wretch, resign the presidential chair”). The Philadelphia Port Folio published a poem to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”:
Of all the damsels on the green,
On mountain or in valley,
A lass so luscious ne’er was seen,
As Monticellian Sally.
Yankee doodle, who’s the noodle?
What wife were half so handy?
To breed a flock of slaves for stock,
A blackamoor’s the dandy!
Did I believe it?
Is one’s answer the key, the ultimate clue to Jefferson’s character?
In the early autumn twilight of a September afternoon, in the not-so-distant year of 1819, long after Jefferson had surrendered the presidency to the
next Virginian in line, I walked up the steps of the east portico at Monticello and the servant who opened the door and took my hand and greeted me in French (I recognized her instantly) was Sally Hemings.
Patsy was next, tumbling on Sally Hemings’s heels, trailing grandchildren, speaking French, too, reminding me with Jeffersonian tenaciousness of memory that she and I had promised each other in Paris that one day we would speak French in Monticello, but who could have guessed it would take us twenty-five years?
She led me into the entrance hall, where I stood, flabbergasted first at the clutter (not for nothing had I fled the South forever), then, as I sorted it out, the nature of the clutter.
Where anyone else would have had a coatrack, a bench, and a table of hospitable flowers, Jefferson had created, higgledy-piggledy, a private museum. There was a ceiling-high weekly calendar and clock on my left, constructed out of old cannon balls, pulleys, and ropes. There were moth-eaten buffalo heads on the walls, framed maps (Peter Jefferson’s map of Virginia among them), paintings of various subjects, curios. One table held a scientific collection (I suppose) of rocks and fossils, neatly labeled. Another had horns and antlers from every cornute creature on the planet (I thought of Clérisseau à la mode de moose). In front of the fireplace reclined a life-sized marble statue of Ariadne with a serpent coiled around her naked arm. Indian bows and arrows and painted skins covered every other available space.
Sally Hemings took my hat and cloak. Patsy introduced me to her husband, Mr. Randolph. I craned my head to look up at the balcony that circled the second floor, where dozens (it seemed) of wide-eyed children stared down like owls on a perch. And then from the door on my left, the library, Jefferson entered.
He was seventy-six years old by then, growing deaf, growing (that fine red hair) quite gray, but otherwise unbowed by time. He wore his presidential slippers, his old red waistcoat (likewise growing gray), and octagonal reading spectacles, which he promptly took off and held as he conducted me on a guided tour of the hall. The fossil table was much depleted, he explained, since he had recently sent a shipment to the Museum of Natural History in Paris; claiming yet again, as if Buffon had not been in his grave these thirty years, the preeminent size of American mammals over European. The Indian artifacts reflected his latest interest; in his spare time he was making a dictionary of tribal languages.