The Condor's Head

by Ferdinand Mount

  ‘I shall pray that you be forgiven, sir. I am sure it is but a venial sin.’

  ‘She will too, you know,’ Mr Cosway muttered in Wm’s ear.

  ‘Will what?’

  ‘Pray, sir, pray. She is a very religious woman, more’s the pity. You might not think it to look at her, but she became a nun as near as dammit.’

  ‘Really? I would not have guessed.’

  ‘Still wears a crucifix the size of a horseshoe between her bubbies,’ Mr Cosway said, pointing a fork.

  ‘Ah yes, I see,’ murmured Wm, peering directly at the locus indicated.

  ‘Tell me, Short, how long have you been in this fair city?’

  ‘Oh, getting on for two years now.’

  ‘Then you’ll know your way about the place. Tell me, where do you go for a good fuck these days?’

  ‘Well, ah, I do, er, happen to know of a place.’

  ‘I knew you would, sir, I could see you were a knowing sort of fellow. If the Frenchwomen fuck half as well as the Italians, you must be a happy man. There’s nothing to touch an Italian woman. I promised myself while I was there that I would never fuck an Englishwoman again if I could help it.’

  ‘Tell me, Mr Cosway, if you will forgive me breaking in upon your learned discourse,’ said Mr Jefferson from the far end of the table, ‘would you esteem Titian as great an artist on canvas as Raphael or a greater?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll take the pair of them, sir,’ said Mr Cosway, not at all discommoded by the change of subject thrust upon him. ‘For colour there is no man to beat Titian, but for serenity of sentiment and perfection of design Raffaello is the master. There, sir, write down the particulars.’ While continuing to converse with his host on the relative merits of the Old Masters, he thrust a pencil and an open sketchbook at Wm.

  In the days that followed Mr Cosway was almost always of the party, showing no impatience at being separated from his easel, while Mr Jefferson showed Maria the sights of the city and its suburbs and environs. For Jefferson these days whirled by in a blur of happiness. All the loneliness and despondency of his widowerhood melted like morning mist. He experienced the full truth of Dr Johnson’s dictum that there was no happiness on this earth like that of driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman. There was not a noted spot that they did not visit in those giddy days: the Bagatelle, that reckless folly of the Comte d’Artois, with its model of an American fort on the Indian frontier, the Château de Madrid in the Bois, the exquisite pavilion at Louveciennes, the great Machine at Marly, that hydraulic miracle which provided the millions of gallons needed to supply the fountains of Versailles, and of course the Désert de Retz.

  How they had marvelled at the broken column, with what excitement they had skittered like schoolchildren up its ingenious spiral staircase, and with what sighs of pleasure they had wandered across the Chinese garden and rowed across Monsieur de Monville’s lake to his Isle of Happiness. They had talked of Rousseau, of course, and Monsieur de Monville, an ever helpful and ever present guide, had drawn a most apt comparison between this island and the Ile de St-Pierre as described in Monsieur Rousseau’s fifth reverie. Monsieur de Monville had told them about the rabbits too, and they had all exclaimed on the charming thought of the little colony multiplying undisturbed by the cruel world, though Mr Jefferson, his practical bent never quite obscured, could not help speculating whether the species might not degenerate through inbreeding if confined to so small an island. But in general he esteemed Monsieur de Monville a most ingenious and delightful fellow.

  ‘And a great swordsman too, I understand,’ said Mr Cosway, chewing a chicken leg, while they sat at table at Ruggieri’s.

  ‘Is that so?’ said Mr Jefferson, leaning forward eagerly over his plate of macaroni.

  ‘They say he has had every royal mistress of the last two reigns.’

  ‘It is hard to credit,’ said Mr Jefferson.

  ‘The story goes that when the King, I mean the late King, complained to Madame d’Esparbes that she had slept with all his subjects, she demurred, fluttered her eyelashes and the King said, “Well, you have had the Duc de Choiseul,” and she said, “But he is so strong.” And the King said, “Then you had the Maréchal de Richelieu,” and she said, “Oh but he is so witty,” and the King said, “And you had Monville too,” and she said, “But he has a beautiful leg” – though I wonder whether leg was the limb she really meant.’

  Mr Jefferson laughed heartily, as he did at all Mr Cosway’s scabrous anecdotes. True, TJ could never have been described as a prude, but he had always possessed a fine discrimination and where the free and easy shaded into the coarse he did not care to follow. Or had not, until the Cosways arrived. Indeed, Wm began to categorise his master’s mental state into two eras: before Cosway and Anno Dominae.

  In Paris they walked, how they walked. There were never such pedestrians, certainly none whose mileages were so lovingly tabulated. Mr Jefferson’s pedometer played Cupid to their ramblings, and the day’s accomplishment was recorded in his notebook and rehearsed that evening or the next day to gasps of amazement.

  ‘Five miles and a quarter! My dear Mr Jefferson, I do not believe it. The milestones would have flown past if there had been any in that delightful lane up to what was the name of that dear little village, Montmartre, that was it.’

  ‘Tomorrow I suggest that we might revisit the Tuileries. It will be your last opportunity to—’

  ‘Oh, my friend, do not speak of last, I cannot abide last. Why cannot our walks continue for ever until we have girdled the globe? Why cannot the Duke of Orléans father more children for my husband to paint?’

  ‘He is doing his best, even if they are not all his wife’s.’

  Wm preferred to absent himself from these excursions. He did not care to see Mr Jefferson in this spoony mood. Jefferson awkward, serious and somewhat out of kilter with the world, that was the Jefferson he loved. Jefferson flirtatious and sentimental, no.

  So he was not of the party when the American ambassador escorted Mr and Mrs R. Cosway along the raised walk that divided the gardens of the Tuileries from the banks of the Seine. It was a fine September morning and the party’s high spirits were only a little damped by the thought of the Cosways’ impending return to London.

  ‘Oh, how clumsy of me.’

  Maria had dropped her reticule, an embroidered silk pouch so small it could scarcely have held so much as a handkerchief. It had fallen among the daisies in the rough grass the other side of a low trellis fence.

  ‘Don’t worry, my dear, I shall retrieve it.’

  And going at it sideways, Mr Jefferson vaulted the insignificant obstacle, or attempted to. But his unpractised legs, shambling limbs at the best of times (not a patch on Monsieur de Monville’s elegant shanks), failed to clear the top of the fence and he toppled over into the daisies, throwing out his hands to break his fall. He tumbled down in a sprawl and at once experienced an intense jarring pain in his right wrist, the most agonising sensation he could recall in his whole life. By chance one of the royal doctors happened to be walking nearby and instantly pronounced the wrist to be badly broken, though it needed no doctor to see the bone protruding from Mr Jefferson’s pale flesh.

  He was not a good patient. The pain remained excruciating, especially at night, so bad that the surgeon had to be sent for twice but had no remedy to offer beyond a sleeping draught, which had little effect. Wm’s own work was doubled, since he now had to act as TJ’s amanuensis and maintain his indefatigable correspondence as well as his own. He had to write such a quantity of stuff that he began to wonder whether the repetitive stress might not be doing some injury to his own right wrist.

  There were all the letters to Mr Barclay about the Algiers business and an interminable letter to Mr Jay on that same subject, the text of the Treaty with Morocco, all twenty-five clauses of it; and then he must write to Monsieur de Langeac about the rent on the embassy; the American consular agents must be written a circular letter reminding them of the
import duty on rice; Mr Bondfield’s office had to be instructed on the procurement of powder and muskets for the State of Virginia; then they must respond to Lafayette’s complaint that he (TJ) should not be importing harness from England rather than buying it from French saddlers and loriners; and perhaps most irksome of the lot, Wm must specify to Mr Macarty a fresh order of table china with detailed measurements of every dinner plate and salad bowl down to the last half-inch. All this dictated by Mr Jefferson in his rambling but unstoppable vein, then read over and endorsed with a few trembling squiggles from his unimpaired left hand.

  For the first few weeks the pain was too bad for the patient to venture forth at all. So it was also Wm who must personate His Excellency at the important events of that crowded season, not least the unveiling of the bust of Monsieur de Lafayette at the old hôtel de ville amidst a host of notables, including Monsieur Houdon, the sculptor of the work in question, and the radiant Marquise de Lafayette. The great man himself was down in his native Auvergne, mending a few political fences before the forthcoming meeting of the Assembly of Notables. Perhaps, too, he did not care to have his own magnificence eclipsed by its marmoreal simulacrum. There is something demeaning about posing beside one’s own likeness. But Adrienne was a brilliant substitute for her husband. She enjoyed the reflected glory of the ceremony so much that Wm wrote back to Virginia, ‘I am persuaded that she did not receive more pleasure on the night of her marriage.’

  Already the Virginia Assembly had commissioned Monsieur Houdon to carve a bust of Lafayette to stand in their own Capitol, but on further, even nobler thoughts they decided to commission a second bust to be presented to the city of Paris in honour of the nation from which the young Marquis had so gallantly sprung.

  How Monsieur Houdon prospered. He already had two fine studios, one at the King’s Library and another near the Foundry in the faubourg du Roule. And his busts were everywhere, in the Salon, of course, and in any self-respecting great hotel or Chateau, not to mention the Commonwealth of Virginia for which he had done Franklin and Captain Paul Jones and General Washington at full length before he embarked on his first Lafayette. Gouverneur Morris, that wily one-legged tobacco agent from New York, had commissioned one of himself. It seemed as though the heroes of the age all had to be buffed and chiselled in marble, and by Jean Antoine Houdon and nobody else. For their part the La Rochefoucaulds had commissioned a splendid bust of their adored Monsieur de Condorcet, an unpromising subject, perhaps, but it was not the least part of Monsieur Houdon’s genius that he could make the moral virtues of his subjects shine through, a double chin or a fleshy nose being no impediment. Every visitor to the rue de Seine felt compelled to admire the bust that stood upon the marble table in the salon: its lofty aspect, its piercing gaze, the sheer intelligence that glowed from the cold stone. Everyone agreed that this was the Condor to the life, no, better than life.

  Mr Jefferson was sitting by the fire when Wm returned to the Hôtel de Langeac. He seemed broody and made only the most perfunctory enquiries as to how the ceremony had gone.

  ‘Is the wrist painful?’

  ‘Oh, it is nothing, I am scarcely aware of it. Are there no letters for me?’

  ‘A note from Mr Stephens Smith about the printing press, he says it has been forwarded, but the harpsichord will be delayed until Dr Burney returns from the country.’

  ‘Much use I shall have for a harpsichord with this wrist, though Patsy is in need of an instrument to practise on when she comes from the Abbey. Nothing else?’

  ‘Nothing of note.’

  ‘Nothing from Mrs Cosway?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She is a woeful correspondent, she confesses it herself.’

  Mr Jefferson looked into the fire with such an intensity as though he hoped its flames might have the power to douse his melancholy.

  ‘Shall I send to her that you would greatly like to see her?’

  ‘Oh, you must send to Mr Cosway as well.’

  ‘Well then, to both of them?’

  ‘No, no, it would not do, they will be too occupied in preparing for their departure.’

  ‘Ah yes, tomorrow, is it not?’

  ‘So Mr Cosway intends. He is impatient for London, which she detests. She hates the fogs, she says, and the bells tolling every five minutes as though one were perpetually at a funeral. She has a fine gift of expression, has she not, and she is as fluent in Italian as in English.’

  Early the next morning Wm heard the tinkle of the handbell that Mr Jefferson had adopted to summon him during his indisposition. Wm came into his master’s bedroom, which was also his study, to find TJ waving a paper at him.

  ‘Pray dispatch this to Mrs Cosway.’

  It was characteristic of Mr Jefferson that he forbore to fold even this tender billet, being contemptuous of all concealment. In any case it would have been a difficult manoeuvre to execute with only one good hand. So once out in the hall with the door closed behind him, Wm was able to digest the meagre contents almost at a single glance.

  I have passed the night in so much pain that I have not closed my eyes. 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 that it is only the having rattled a little too freely over the pavement yesterday. If you do not go to day I shall still have the pleasure of seeing you again. If you do, God bless you wherever you go. Present me in the most friendly terms to Mr Cosway and let me hear of your safe arrival in England. Addio Addio.

  Let me know if you do not go to day.

  Was ever a love letter so stilted and circumspect, so much to be read between the lines and yet so much felt? How poignant were the wavering lines of the script and the laborious almost childish forming of the letters. And how dejected the orphaned postscript straggling down towards the corner of the page. This was, so far as Wm knew, the first letter that Mr Jefferson had attempted with his left hand and it was a sorry sight.

  But the Cosways did not go that day. Mr Cosway had unfinished business to attend to, whether artistic or of some less publishable nature, and it was a full week before they went. Mr Jefferson insisted on seeing them off at St Denis. When he returned to the embassy and Wm enquired after the farewell, he was too overcome to speak but went upstairs and shut himself in his bedroom. There he remained all that day and most of the next.

  It was late afternoon when the handbell rang again. Mr Jefferson had taken to his bed and was sitting under the sheets bolt upright in his nightshirt. He looked pale but somehow relieved, like a feverish patient who has passed the crisis.

  ‘Here, Will, take this vapid screed and fold it for me, would you?’ ‘Shall I dispatch it also for you?’

  ‘Not under separate cover. I have a note for Trumbull here and you must enclose it with that.’

  Perhaps TJ was no longer as innocent of the arts of concealment as he thought. After all, he had shown no compunction in making a mendacious excuse to Madame d’Enville whom he professed to worship.

  ‘If you are quick about it, you might just catch the night coach.’

  Wm hastened down to his own cubbyhole behind the stairs. As he was running down the stairs he was at the same time running his eye over the single sheet addressed to Trumbull.

  … she promised to write to me. Be so good as to take charge of her letters, and to find private conveyances for them, or to put them under cover to Mr Grand Banker, rue neuve des Capuchins à Paris. Or she will do the last herself. All letters directed to me are read in the post offices both of London and Paris.

  And, he might have added, read too by my confidential secretary, Mr William Short. But then as an adoptive son, perhaps William scarcely counted as a distinct being, being little more than a pane of glass through whom Mr Jefferson perceived the world and communicated with it. It had, in fact, been William who had explained to his then innocent master that every word he wrote would be scrutinised in the post office if he sent it
via the public mails and William too who had arranged for important letters to be sent via his bankers.

  So, acting strictly in his official capacity as pane-of-glass-in-residence, Wm set about skimming the cream off this other epistle. It was a regular ten-miler of a letter. The three sheets, when folded up in the usual manner, amounted to twelve closely written pages, four or five thousand words in total, Wm hazarded. He would have to be quick if he was to catch the six o’clock mail. Meanwhile …

  My dear Madam [still so formal, but that was hardly surprising, Mr Jefferson was of the old school],

  Having performed the last sad rites of handing you into your carriage at the Pavillon de St Denis and seen the wheels get actually into motion, I turned on my heel and walked, more dead than alive, to the opposite door where my own was waiting for me. We were crammed into the carriage, like recruits for the Bastille and not having soul enough to give orders to the coachman, he presumed Paris our destination, and drove off. After a considerable interval, silence was broken with a ‘je suis vraiment affligé du depart de ces bons gens’. This was the sign for a mutual confession of distress. We began immediately to talk of Mr and Mrs Cosway, of their goodness, their talents, their amabilité …

  Amable indeed, but why bring Mr Cosway into it? Not only was he anything but amable, in Wm’s eyes at least and he suspected perhaps in his wife’s too, but the mention of such a coarse fellow detracted from the touching image of Mr Jefferson too close to tears to speak except of his beloved Maria. Wm began to wonder whether his employer had ever written a love letter in his life.

  … Seated by my fireside, solitary and sad, the following dialogue took place between my Head and my Heart …

  Wm scanned on ahead and over the page. The whole letter appeared to be taken up with this infernal Socratic dialogue. First the Heart moans, ‘I am indeed the most wretched of all earthly beings, overwhelmed with grief, every fibre of my frame beyond its natural power to bear etc. etc.’ – which was admirable except that this lover’s lament was immediately succeeded by a schoolmaster’s report from the Head: ‘These are the eternal consequences of your warmth and precipitation. This is one of the scrapes into which you are ever leading us.’ Back comes the Heart in fine voice: ‘Oh my friend! This is no moment to upbraid my foibles. I am rent into fragments by the force of my grief.’ But the passion is instantly doused by the Head: ‘Harsh therefore as the medicine may be, it is my office to administer it. You will be pleased to remember that I never ceased whispering to you that we had no occasion for new acquaintance.’