Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  In Paris, Jefferson was nervous and garrulous about arrangements to bring Polly to him from Virginia. “My anxieties on this subject could induce me to endless details, but your discretion and that of Mrs. Eppes saves me the necessity,” he wrote Francis Eppes. “I commit to Mrs. Eppes my kisses for dear Poll, who hangs on my mind night and day.”

  Then a simple letter arrived. “Dear Papa,” read the one-sentence missive, “I want to see you and sister Patsy, but you must come to Uncle Eppes’s house.”

  Jefferson found himself in debate with a seven-year-old: “I wish so much to see you that I have desired your uncle and aunt to send you to me,” he wrote Polly. “I know, my dear Polly, how sorry you will be, and ought to be, to leave them and your cousins but your sister and myself cannot live without you.… In the meantime you shall be taught here to play on the harpsichord, to draw, to dance, to read and talk French and such other things as will make you more worthy of the love of your friends. But above all things, by our care and love of you, we will teach you to love us more than you will do if you stay so far from us.”

  He could console himself in dark moments with the optimism evident in a recent letter from Charles Thomson: “I will venture to assert, that there is not upon the face of the earth a body of people more happy or rising into consequence with more rapid stride, than the inhabitants of the United States of America. Population is increasing, new houses building, new lands clearing, new settlements forming and new manufactures establishing with a rapidity beyond conception.”

  Jefferson was counting on it.

  TWENTY

  HIS HEAD AND HIS HEART

  We are not immortal ourselves, my friend; how can we expect our enjoyments to be so? We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  SHE WAS, A CONTEMPORARY WROTE, “a golden-haired, languishing Anglo-Italian, graceful … and highly accomplished, especially in music.” Born near Florence in 1759—she was sixteen years younger than Jefferson—Maria Louisa Catherine Cecilia Hadfield was the daughter of an expatriate English merchant who ran an inn popular in Italy with the rich and the wellborn. Growing up in a world suffused with money, art, and religious fervor, Maria was barely rescued from the ministrations of a murderous nurse who had killed four of Maria’s siblings from the conviction that she was mercifully returning the children to the arms of God. “Dear little thing,” the nurse was overheard saying to Maria, “I have sent four to Heaven before you and shall send you also.” Spirited away to safety, Maria was educated in convents, simultaneously pursuing the visual arts (she was elected to the Academy of Fine Arts at Florence in 1778) and the life of the church (she was organist for the Monastery of the Visitation).

  Taken to London by her mother after her father’s death, the beautiful young Maria was introduced to the glamorous artistic and literary circles inhabited by the writer James Boswell, the painters Sir Joshua Reynolds and Angelica Kauffmann, and the collector Charles Townley. She met and married Richard Cosway, an eccentric, charming, and successful miniaturist. He was, one observer wrote, “a well-made little man” who was nevertheless “very like a monkey in the face.” Flamboyant and ambitious, Cosway won the patronage of the Prince of Wales and held court in elegance in Pall Mall, where he set up housekeeping at Schomberg House, once home to the eighteenth-century sex therapist Dr. James Graham. “His new house Cosway fitted up in so picturesque, and indeed so princely, a style that I regret drawings were not made of each apartment, for many of the rooms were more like scenes of enchantment penciled by a poet’s fancy than anything perhaps before displayed in a domestic habitation,” wrote the antiquarian John Thomas Smith. Furniture was ornately carved, gilded, and covered in “the most costly Genoa velvets”; there were ivory cabinets and mosaic tables with the feet of lions and eagles. Huge musical clocks made of tortoiseshell and ormolu ticked away, and screens of “old … Japan” sat atop Persian carpets.

  Surveying this eclectic scene, the English man of letters William Hazlitt wrote that the Cosways “kept house in style, in a sort of co-partnership, of so novel a character as to surprise their new neighbors … and furnish wonderment for the table-talk of the town.” Horace Walpole, the writer and politician, once saw Mademoiselle la Chevalière d’Éon, known in her day as a transvestite-diplomat-spy, teaching fencing to the Cosways’ guests in the midst of a party. One Cosway friend whom Jefferson got to know, Pierre-François Hugues, was the illustrator of the erotically explicit Monuments de la vie privée des douze Césars and Monuments du culte secret des dames romaines.

  In Paris the late summer of 1786, Hugues and the Cosways met the artist John Trumbull—and, through Trumbull, they were to make the acquaintance of the American minister to France.

  Jefferson was in a marvelous mood. He was doing what he loved to do: moving through Paris on a relaxed, high-minded yet practical mission to explore the art of architecture with an eye toward adapting the most brilliant innovations of Europe for America.

  With Trumbull, Jefferson called on the men who had designed the dome of the Halle aux Blés, the grain market in Paris. The architects Jacques-Guillaume Legrand and Jacques Molinos had built a wood-ribbed dome punctuated with glass. The effect was wondrous, allowing light to pour through the glass sections. Jefferson, who thought it “the most superb thing on earth,” was eager to learn more. Hence the call on Legrand and Molinos at No. 6 rue St.-Florentin, where Jefferson and Trumbull met the Cosways.

  Maria, twenty-seven, enchanted Jefferson, then forty-three, from the first. She had voluptuous lips, startling violet-blue eyes, and fashionably coiffed golden hair. His infatuation with her appears to have been instantaneous. In a way, he disappeared into those eyes and did not emerge for air for nearly a month.

  Hungry for her company, he put the rest of the world at bay. Engaged to dine that day at the Duchess de la Rochefoucauld’s, Jefferson lied—not very inventively—and sent word to the duchess that diplomatic dispatches had arrived that “required immediate attention.” Everyone else in the party joined in the conspiracy: “Every soul of you had an engagement for that day,” Jefferson wrote. “Yet all these were to be sacrificed, that you might dine together.”

  The day was nearly perfect. Maria spoke many languages, but her English was not particularly fluent, which may have made Jefferson’s conversations with her all the more exotic and charming. Jefferson, the Cosways, and Trumbull had dinner together in St.-Cloud, took in a fireworks display, and called on Johann Baptist Krumpholtz, the composer and harpist.

  At last came the hour for parting. For Jefferson and Maria, however, this was only the opening act in a very brief but intense drama in which Jefferson showed every sign of having fallen in love. Richard Cosway may or may not have noticed, and if he did it is difficult to say whether he would have cared. Flirtation, if not more, was part of the world in which the Cosways lived, and it was not unknown in Jefferson’s. The pursuit of the seemingly unavailable was something he knew from his experience with Betsy Walker. He had done this kind of thing before.

  The early autumn of 1786, however, was the first time he was able to undertake a romantic adventure with so little risk of censure from the world around him. The most perilous element for Jefferson: that Maria, if James Boswell was to be believed, treated “men like dogs.”

  He was willing to risk it. Day after day as August gave way to September, the two made Paris their own. From St.-Germain to the Pont de Neuilly, from the hills along the banks of the Seine to a number of elaborate, secluded gardens, for Jefferson “every moment was filled with something agreeable.” They had a fondness for getaway spots. Bagatelle was a neoclassical domed folly built by the Comte d’Artois, brother of the king. The Désert de Retz was an expansive garden that included a forested four-floor apartment built in a fanciful ancient column by François Racine de Monville; statues of nude satyrs stood guard at the grotto entryway.
(“How grand the idea excited by the remains of such a column!” Jefferson said. “The spiral staircase too was beautiful.”) Jefferson and Maria were in a private world. “The wheels of time moved on with a rapidity of which those of our carriage gave but a faint idea,” he said. “And yet in the evening, when one took a retrospect of the day, what a mass of happiness had we travelled over!”

  Jefferson dislocated his right wrist in this period; he was mysterious about exactly how he had come to be injured. (“It was by one of those follies from which good cannot come, but ill may,” he told William Smith in October 1786.) The episode—perhaps a faux-heroic leap over a fence—occurred sometime on or shortly before September 18, days after the delegates gathered back home for the September 11, 1786, opening of the Annapolis Convention.

  Writing him as he tried to recover, Maria said, “I only mention my wish.… I would serve you and help you at dinner, and divert your pain after dinner with good music.”

  He was honest about how much his hand hurt. “I have passed the night in so much pain that I have not closed my eyes,” Jefferson wrote Maria. “It is with infinite regret therefore that I must relinquish your charming company for that of the surgeon whom I have sent for to examine into the cause of this change. I am in hopes it is only the having rattled a little too freely over the pavement yesterday. If you do not go today I shall still have the pleasure of seeing you again. If you do, God bless you wherever you go.… Let me know if you do not go today.”

  Maria, who was due to leave Paris, replied quickly.

  I am very, very sorry indeed … for having been the cause of your pains in the [night].… You repeatedly insisted it would do you no harm, I felt interested and did not insist.… I shall write to you from England, it is impossible to be wanting to a person who has been so excessively obliging. I don’t attempt to make compliments, they can be none for you, but I beg you will think us sensible to your kindness, and that it will be with infinite pleasure I shall remember the charming days we have passed together, and shall long for next spring.

  On October 9, 1786, came a note from John Trumbull in Antwerp: “Mr. and Mrs. Cosway arrived this morning at 3 o’clock having rode all night in the rain.”

  Saying good-bye had been, he told her later, his “last sad office.” The result was a long, revealing letter dated October 12, 1786. “Seated by my fireside, solitary and sad, the following dialogue took place between my Head and my Heart,” began the more than four-thousand-word essay (for it was more an essay than a conventional letter). In it Jefferson, writing with his left hand, shows himself to be a shrewd student of the human character in general and of his own in particular.

  Head. Well, friend, you seem to be in a pretty trim.

  Heart. I am indeed the most wretched of all earthly beings. Overwhelmed with grief, every fiber of my frame distended beyond its natural powers to bear, I would willingly meet whatever catastrophe should leave me no more to feel or to fear.

  Head. These are the eternal consequences of your warmth and precipitation. This is one of the scrapes into which you are ever leading us. You confess your follies indeed: but still you hug and cherish them; and no reformation can be hoped, where there is no repentance.

  Heart. Oh my friend! This is no moment to upbraid my foibles. I am rent into fragments by the force of my grief! If you have any balm, pour it into my wounds: if none, do not harrow them by new torments. Spare me in this awful moment! At any other I will attend with patience to your admonitions.

  Head. On the contrary I never found that the moment of triumph with you was the moment of attention to my admonitions. While suffering under your follies you may perhaps be made sensible of them, but, the paroxysm over, you fancy it can never return. Harsh therefore as the medicine may be, it is my office to administer it.…

  Heart. May heaven abandon me if I do! …

  Head. I wished to make you sensible how imprudent it is to place your affections, without reserve, on objects you must so soon lose, and whose loss when it comes must cost you such severe pangs. Remember the last night. You knew your friends were to leave Paris today. This was enough to throw you into agonies. All night you tossed us from one side of the bed to the other. No sleep, no rest.… To avoid these eternal distresses, to which you are forever exposing us, you must learn to look forward before you take a step which may interest our peace. Everything in this world [is] a matter of calculation. Advance then with caution, the balance in your hand. Put into one scale the pleasures which any object may offer; but put fairly into the other the pains which are to follow, and see which preponderates. The making [of] an acquaintance is not a matter of indifference. When a new one is proposed to you, view it all round. Consider what advantages it presents, and to what inconveniences it may expose you. Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it. The art of life is the art of avoiding pain: and he is the best pilot who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which he is beset. Pleasure is always before us; but misfortune is at our side: while running after that, this arrests us. The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, and to suffice for our own happiness.… A friend dies or leaves us: we feel as if a limb was cut off. He is sick: we must watch over him, and participate of his pains. His fortune is shipwrecked: ours must be laid under contribution. He loses a child, a parent, or a partner: we must mourn the loss as if it was our own.

  Heart. And what more sublime delight than to mingle tears with one whom the hand of heaven hath smitten! To watch over the bed of sickness, and to beguile its tedious and its painful moments! To share our bread with one to whom misfortune has left none! This world abounds indeed with misery: to lighten its burdens we must divide it with one another.… When nature assigned us the same habitation, she gave us over it a divided empire. To you she allotted the field of science, to me that of morals. When the circle is to be squared, or the orbit of a comet to be traced; when the arch of greatest strength, or the solid of least resistance is to be investigated, take you the problem: it is yours: nature has given me no cognizance of it. In like manner in denying to you the feelings of sympathy, of benevolence, of gratitude, of justice, of love, of friendship, she has excluded you from their control. To these she has adapted the mechanism of the heart. Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the uncertain combinations of the head. She laid their foundation therefore in sentiment, not in science. That she gave to all, as necessary to all: this to a few only, as sufficing with a few. I know indeed that you pretend authority to the sovereign control of our conduct in all its parts: and a respect for your grave saws and maxims, a desire to do what is right, has sometimes induced me to conform to your counsels.… If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads instead of its hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman’s. You began to calculate and to compare wealth and numbers: we threw up a few pulsations of our warmest blood: we supplied enthusiasm against wealth and numbers: we put our existence to the hazard, when the hazard seemed against us, and we saved our country: justifying at the same time the ways of Providence, whose precept is to do always what is right, and leave the issue to him. In short, my friend, as far as my recollection serves me, I do not know that I ever did a good thing on your suggestion, or a dirty one without it. I do forever then disclaim your interference in my province. Fill paper as you please with triangles and squares: try how many ways you can hang and combine them together.… We are not immortal ourselves, my friend; how can we expect our enjoyments to be so? We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce.

  So which won, the Head or the Heart? Jefferson gave the Heart both the last word and the highest accolade he could bestow when he credited it with victory in the American Revolution.

  The immediate recipient of the
letter was not sure how to react. “Your letter could employ me for some time, an hour to consider every word, to every sentence I could write a volume,” Maria wrote Jefferson, before lapsing into nonsensical English. They conducted a friendly, if sporadic, correspondence for the rest of their lives.

  Jefferson’s letter represents his most extensive literary attempt to reconcile competing human impulses. His categories of reason versus emotion here are useful but too tidy. The heart, for instance, can be driven by affection, appetite, or some combination of the two. Were his feelings for Maria rooted in his soul, or in his glands, or—most likely—both? The truth appears to have been murky even to Jefferson.

  What is clear is that he was self-aware and prepared to live with unresolved contradictions, approaching the crises of life with a sense of hope tempered by a recognition that he, at least, was not fated to live to see the end of heartbreak, failure, disappointment, and death. “We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy,” he had written—as the Heart, not the Head. “It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce.” Jefferson believed that the future could be better than the past. He knew, though, that life was best lived among friends in the pursuit of large causes, understanding that pain was the price for anything worth having.

  TWENTY-ONE

  DO YOU LIKE OUR NEW CONSTITUTION?

  Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  DEBT-RIDDEN, FRANCE FACED A supreme test. In the mid-1780s, partly because of its spending on the American Revolution, the Bourbon government of Louis XVI was in a long-term financial crisis, exacerbated by widespread hunger and by anger over the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Jefferson was shocked by the poverty he saw among ordinary Frenchmen; Patsy always remembered the beggars who surrounded their carriage as they first traveled to Paris.