But no, it seemed that Wm was the one who was deceived, for it was the dark young woman to whom they were presented as the Duchess.
She held out her hand to him. ‘Oh, but we are so wet,’ she said and there were drops of water still running off the hairs of her slender forearm and her little hand was damp, like the hand of a child who has just come in from playing. ‘We are such bad rowers, monsieur. Madame d’Astorg was sure we would drown.’
‘Nonsense,’ the fair lady said, ‘I had every confidence in you, Rosalie.’
‘You must be an expert oarsman, monsieur?’
‘No, madame, I fear not. In my country we leave the canoes to the Indians, they are so much better at it.’
‘Ah, then you must despise us. I am sure you think that rowing is not a suitable occupation for ladies.’
‘I think nothing of the sort, madame.’
‘Oh, you have to call me Rosalie, everyone does. My true name is Alexandrine Charlotte, but Rosalie is so much prettier, don’t you think?’
Rosalie sounded a little winsome to Wm’s ear, but he said nothing and bowed an amiable assent.
‘We are trying to match the informal m-manners of you Americans, you see,’ the Duke said, but he did not ask Wm to call him Louis-Alexandre. And it was clear that his ill humour was not entirely melted, for he could not resist telling his wife that she should not have asked the servants to bring the canoe all this way since they and the cart on which it had been loaded were needed urgently at the farm. She took the rebuke negligently, like a child who is already thinking of something else and is in any case certain of her parents’ affection.
But the Duke persisted: ‘They must have started before d-dawn to get here and they will not be home until long after nightfall. It is too b-bad, my dear, and it is even harder on the horses.’
‘But Pierre wanted so much to see Versailles – did you not? – and Jeannot too.’ The men turned from loading up the canoe on the wagon and gave blushing grins of agreement.
‘Well, it must not happen again. In any case at home we have our own dear Seine to paddle in. Monsieur Short, you must come and teach my wife how to row in running water instead of a stagnant pond.’
Wm said that nothing would give him greater pleasure. He rather liked the Duke’s style of dismissing these magnificent waterways. All the same, how could she be his wife? He must be twice her age at least. Of course he knew of elderly men back in Virginia who had taken much younger wives, usually to breed children or to join up adjoining estates. Old Mr Popkiss had married Sarah Topping when he was sixty and she was barely twenty-one, but Sarah was born matronly. But when Rosalie took her husband’s arm and beseeched him not to stay angry with her, she seemed more like a wheedling daughter than a full-blown duchess.
‘You will come, won’t you? Tell Mr Jefferson he cannot come without you, to La Roche-Guyon I mean. You will love it and you will teach us all to row.’
‘But you must believe me. I have never rowed so much as a skiff back home.’
‘You Americans are so modest.’ She did not seem to listen much to what a fellow said to her, but that was no great matter. He had met girls like that before. When they were on the wing, it was as much as you could do to keep up with them.
‘It will be quite a large party. We are celebrating your war of independence, you see, so Monsieur de Lafayette will be there. And then we very much hope Monsieur de Condorcet will be of the party too, but he is so elusive. You know Monsieur de Condorcet, everyone knows him, though he says he is so unsociable.’
‘I fear I have not yet had that pleasure.’
‘Oh, but you must have. I am sure you have seen him, he looks so.’
She hunched her shoulders and tried to make the most of her modest height by walking on tiptoe with a strange stilted gait, at the same time drawing her skirts round her like folded wings.
‘My wife is less fitted to m-mimic Monsieur de Condorcet than anyone I know,’ said the Duke, laughing. ‘He is nearly two yards tall and looks like a vulture. That is why we call him le Condor, after the great vulture of Peru.’
‘Travellers have seen them in the far west of our own country too, I believe.’
Wm professed a great longing to meet this enchanting vulture and it was a sincere profession, for it would be Rosalie who would bring about the meeting and nothing could be more pleasant than to watch this dark sprite dancing around these tall solemn men, like the little girls he had seen dancing round the marble statues in these shrubberies.
The sun had gone off the great glassy stretch of water and big bruised clouds were gathering over the woods.
‘You will soon learn, Monsieur Short, that the s-sun never shows his face too long in the Ile-de-France,’ the Duke said, looking up at the broody skies.
Behind them they could hear the slam of the cart’s back board and the rattle of the iron pegs and chains slipping into their holes. In a couple of minutes Jeannot was geeing up the sleepy nags to make their way back to La Roche-Guyon.
Wm felt a sudden gloom descend on their little group. He had a sad face, the Duke, when it was in repose. Mr Jefferson too had that look when he had just finished expounding his latest enthusiasm, as though returning to a natural melancholy which only his restless curiosity could keep at bay and which his recent bereavements had deepened.
They roused themselves to make sprightly goodbyes, brightened by plans and promises to meet again in no time, at La Roche-Guyon, at the Opéra, at the new embassy (Rosalie could scarcely wait to view the famous water closet that Mr Jefferson was installing). This was only an intermezzo, no, an overture to an endless fête.
They turned back towards the great palace, all six of them walking a little quicker on the return journey up the great green carpet. The long façade had lost its golden glow now the sun was off it, and it suddenly looked grim and heavy.
III
Chalkface
HE CAME TO know the road so well that years later when he was far away, in Spain or Holland or back in Philadelphia, he could unwind it in his head like one of those child’s panoramas that turn on a spindle. And he could single out from all those later occasions the very first time he travelled it. It had been in the early days of summer when the white candles were still on the chestnut trees and the lime leaves had not yet lost their shimmer. He could recall, so sharply, the quiet rumble of the carriage wheels through the forest of St Germain, the huge canopy of the ancient trees, then the sudden bright light as they came out to the edge of the river and the louder rumble of the wheels on the wooden bridge they crossed to cut off the bend. He leant forward and pressed against the dusty window to see the curve of the Seine and the chalky cliffs following it round to Mantesla-Jolie. He could just see the twin towers of the cathedral the other side of the river, like a plainer Notre Dame set down in the countryside.
The sun was fully out now over the bosky meadows, but it would not have mattered if he had been looking out on dreary ploughland under heavy rain, for his heart was so brimming with hope that it seemed capable of flooding the universe. Even the jolting of the carriage and the smell of the minister’s newly waxed leather seats felt as though they were part of some vast conspiracy to make him happy.
Mr Jefferson was talking about air balloons. ‘It is my distinct impression that the form of a pear is best suited to catch the upward currents. The more globose shape of Monsieur Robert’s balloon appeared to dwell in the air more securely, I agree, but that may have been the effect of the hydrogen. I gather that Monsieur Montgolfier still prefers hot air.’
‘Indeed, sir, does he so?’ Wm hazarded dreamily.
‘It may be that some gas as yet unknown will bear aloft the Montgolfiers of the future, when they shall be our charioteers not merely from one side of Paris to the other but from Paris to Philadelphia.’
‘Monsieur Blanchard managed to find his way across the Channel, did he not?’
‘Yes, but he was merely carried by the prevailing wind. I had the honour of conv
ersing with Monsieur Blanchard when he visited Philadelphia and he explained to me that …’ But the particulars of Monsieur Blanchard’s explanation were lost in the rattle of the traffic as they came into a village, which was packed solid with carts and carriages. At first Wm thought that it must be market day. But he spied a procession coming out of the parish church and he heard a bell ringing from the tower. A village wedding perhaps, but then he saw the sturdy youths in plum-coloured doublets and breeches carrying a sort of wooden howdah decked with flowers on which a female statue in a scarlet-and-gold robe juddered precariously.
‘This, I fancy, must be the festival of Sainte Geneviève de la Rivière,’ said Mr Jefferson, taking out his notebook. ‘She is said to have been martyred on this spot and her remains thrown into the river for refusing to surrender her virginity to the invading pagans, Goths or Huns I forget which, although the Encyclopédie tells us that no such person ever existed and that, as is so often the case, the Christian myth merely enshrouds some earlier custom, no doubt one involving human sacrifice.’
Wm thought he preferred the story of Ste Geneviève, whose simulacrum was now being carried across their path. All the men in the crowd had removed their hats as she passed and although Wm was out of sight behind the dusty windows of the carriage, he took off his hat too. Mr Jefferson paid no attention and continued to discourse upon the tradition of river sacrifice, which he said had probably been brought to France by the Gauls. But again his words were drowned as the crowd began to sing a dirge. The four sturdy youths were now taking the howdah on to a rickety flight of steps leading down into the river. They waded into the water at a deliberate pace until it was up to their waists. Then they released the saint and she began to float in an erratic motion downstream, the howdah now transformed into an ark. Within a minute or two she was lost to sight behind the willows that leant out over the water.
The flowers that had been strewn about her came away from her conveyance and drifted across the river in long straggling wreaths, some snagging on logs or overhanging branches and waving lazily on the current long after Ste Geneviève herself had gone to her watery grave.
‘She’ll sink inside five minutes,’ the coachman said. He had hopped off his seat and was leaning against the wheel enjoying the scene and smoking some foul tobacco in his pipe, the fume of which was curling through the open window.
Wm knew that he would remember the sight for ever: the juddering ark, the stiff little saint in her scarlet-and-gold robe, the flowers waving in the water and the coachman’s tobacco. Even Mr Jefferson stopped taking notes and put his head out of the window alongside Wm.
It was not much above an hour after Ste Geneviève that the road took a sharp turn up the hill into the side of the chalky cliff, then twisted back towards the river through a larger, more prosperous-looking village, and the coachman leant back and shouted to them that this was La Roche-Guyon. In a minute they could have seen that for themselves because as they came round the bend in the village street there, unmistakably, was the great chateau, its creamy turrets and colonnades standing proud of the bare chalk. It was virtually in the middle of the village, there was no park to separate it from the humbler dwellings, and in another minute or two there they were in the castle yard with the white chalk directly above them and the plain Duke with his big nose and sad scarred face trotting out to meet them. And there she was in her straw hat, carrying under her arm a rough wooden basket full of spring flowers as if she were going to strew them before her guests.
‘There, you see, we are t-t-troglodytes here,’ the Duke said, gesturing at the great cliff of white chalk above them, almost too dazzling to gaze at in the midday sun, and indeed on an upper ledge further along there were openings cut into the chalk with dusty wooden doors let into them.
‘You are most gracious to welcome us so,’ TJ said.
‘You mean, to c-come out? Ah yes, when I was in Norfolk Mr Coke came to his gate to meet us and I thought that we must learn to do the same service in France.’
All the same, there was a constraint about his greeting, as though he were acting under orders. And it was with some continued awkwardness that he led them under the arch and up a winding stair. He might have been a newly employed footman who did not yet know his way about the place.
He brought them into a great chamber, a gloomy room hung with vast tapestries that had a shabby look to them, or perhaps it was the bright light outside that made it seem so tenebrous. Wm’s eyes took some minutes to adjust so that at first the figures congregated at the far end looked like mourners in inky black. They seemed preternaturally tall too, or it might have been the little Duchess skipping ahead of her husband like a frolicsome puppy who enhanced their stature.
There were introductions. The other Duke, Liancourt, they knew already. Then there were a couple of learned abbés who had not the advantage of the English tongue but speedily complimented Wm on the excellence of his French, prompting Mr Jefferson to remark that Mr Short was the true ambassador because he was the only one who understood what people were saying to him. Which sentiment Mr Short himself heartily (but silently) endorsed, since he it was who had to issue the visas, write the letters of introduction for distinguished visitors, compose the greater part of the official dispatches, persuade the bankers of the Low Countries to stretch out the repayment of the enormous American loans (the most important business of the lot), and into the bargain proof-read the text of TJ’s Notes on Virginia, while His Excellency himself strolled about Paris (never neglecting to enter his pedometric readings into his journal), bought rare books and made botanical and architectural excursions.
Wm was so pressed for time that he ventured no commentary upon the content of TJ’s Virginia notes as opposed to their punctuation and spelling (never his master’s forte). He passed over in silence Jefferson’s remarkable assertion that in reason Negroes were much inferior to whites and in imagination dull and tasteless. According to TJ, no black had ever uttered a thought above the level of plain narration, although he was prepared to admit that ‘in music, they are more generally gifted than whites with accurate ears for tune and time and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch’ (William wondered if Mr Jefferson had ever listened to the melodies that wafted up the hill from the vineyard huts at Monticello). And this inferiority could not, so the great liberal statesman and trumpeter of equality averred, be ascribed to the manifold injustices attendant upon slavery. It was not the condition of the Negroes but nature that had produced the distinction. These airy sentiments took Wm’s breath away, but he knew there was no point in contesting them, even if he had had the leisure for it. On matters of principle TJ was hard to budge.
Now they were being presented to the elderly lady seated in the high-winged fauteuil at the far end of the room. She had a bright look in her eye and a crinkling smile, which promised more than mere courtesy.
‘This is my dear m-maman,’ said the plain Duke. The Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld d’Enville put out her hand to Mr Jefferson, who shook it warmly in the American style and then in turn introduced his secretary Mr William Short.
Again she held out her hand, but Wm – possessed by what whim he could not calculate either then or afterwards – bent low and kissed it with an address he had not thought himself capable of.
There was a ripple of what? Astonishment perhaps, then lighthearted applause.
‘You see, madame, how fortunate I am to possess a secretary who is so frenchified already, although I was arrived here before him.’
Wm thought he detected a hint of aigritude in Mr Jefferson’s tone, though his words were amiable enough. He could not be sure whether his master deplored his lapse from the frank and manly manners to be expected of Americans or whether he did not much care that Wm should be the centre of attention, perhaps a little of both.
‘You are most welcome, sir. My granddaughter has told me that you are an adept in the art of canoeing.’
‘Your granddaughter, I fear—’ he ba
bbled.
‘Ah, I see I have confused you,’ the Duchess said. ‘My granddaughter is also my daughter-in-law. It was for all of us a great happiness when my daughter’s child consented to marry my son. He had been on his own so long after his first wife died. I could not have imagined any greater good fortune than that she should come here to console my lonely widowhood.’
‘My dear maman, you know less of s-solitude than any woman in France,’ the plain Duke said, waving a long bony hand at the assembled company, which must have been fifteen or twenty strong.
‘You are all very kind to come so far to amuse a poor old woman,’ Madame d’Enville said, clearly not meaning a word of it. ‘Rosalie,’ she called out, beckoning her granddaughter/daughter-in-law, ‘you must not allow me to bore Monsieur Short. Let him first kiss some other more delightful hands.’
Rosalie took him over to the group standing by the long window, through which he caught a glimpse of the orchards leading down to the river, which meandered in parallel with the sandy road. The members of this group all had their backs to this entrancing view and were listening intently to a tall, beaky-nosed, sandy-haired young gentleman who seemed to like the sound of his own voice. At least that was how a stranger might have described him, but Wm was not a stranger, for he had first met Monsieur de Lafayette back in Virginia when they were both nineteen years old.
How had he viewed the great hero then? With admiration certainly, for his dash, his pluck, his readiness to give his life for the cause of liberty. Lafayette was, after all, very nearly the richest young man in France. Brought up as an orphan by adoring women deep in the country, he was so surrounded by servility that when he crossed the boundary of his own huge estates he was amazed that the peasants no longer raised their caps to him. He could have frittered away his life in all the amusements that Paris had to offer. Instead he chose to cross the seas in search of revolutionary glory, at the risk of a squalid death in an American ditch. All this Wm could only admire and, to be frank, envy.
The Condor's Head Page 8