The Heart then scores a hit by pointing out that it was only the Head’s concern with domes and arcades and other such architectural arcana that brought about the fateful meeting at the Halle aux Blés. Unabashed, the Head then digresses on to its plans to build a new public market in Richmond on the lines of Legrand and Molinos’s corn exchange, with a noble bridge to be thrown across the Schuykill to improve access thereto (and this is a love letter? wondered William Short). Anyway, it was the Heart that caused the to-do by insisting that all previous plans for the day were to be cancelled. Unabashed in its turn, the Heart eggs on the Head to recount the transactions of that day, and then itself recalls those of the day they went to St Germain, to Marly, to the Bagatelle, to the Desert.
How grand the idea excited by the remains of such a column! The spiral staircase too was beautiful. Every moment was filled with something agreeable. The wheels of time moved on with a rapidity of which those of our carriage gave but a faint idea, and yet in the evening, when we took a retrospect of the day, what a mass of happiness had we travelled over!
How well Wm knew those feelings, how rapidly the wheels of time had spun when he and Rosalie had travelled the same route! TJ was an unexpectedly dab hand at the conjuring of romantic atmosphere. Yet here comes the Head again, reproving the Heart for ‘imprudently engaging your affections under circumstances that must cost you a great deal of pain’ – more especially if the lady had ‘qualities and accomplishments belonging to her sex that might form a chapter apart for her, such as music, modesty, beauty and that softness of disposition which is the ornament of her sex and charm of ours’.
Then another thousand words of sententious philosophising before the Heart is allowed to return to happier topics ‘… the greater part of life is sunshine. I will recur for proof to the days we have lately passed. On these indeed the sun shone brightly! How gay did the face of nature appear! Hills, valleys, Chateaux, gardens, rivers, every object wore its liveliest hue! Whence did they borrow it? From the presence of our charming companion. They were pleasing, because she seemed pleased.’
At last! After a good three thousand words of solemn academicising, a direct and unmistakable reference to the person of Maria in her own right, and with no yoking of the brutish Richard. Alas this romantic passage proves but a brief intermission. The Heart is the guilty party this time, swerving off into an improving homily on charity and the satisfactions of giving alms even to incorrigible beggars and worthless drunkards: ‘tho we cannot relieve all the distressed we should relieve as many as we can …’
The sound of horses’ hooves in the courtyard reminded Wm that he must catch the mail and he hastened on to the conclusion of this strange enormity of an epistle.
As his eye sped down the final page, he caught sight of a few phrases that would do at a pinch in a love letter:
If your letters are as long as the Bible, they will appear short to me. Only let them be brim full of affection … my health is good except my hand which mends slowly, and my mind which mends not at all, but broods constantly over your departure.
No, thought Wm, as he carefully folded the sheets and folded them again, it is not that TJ is incapable of opening his heart, and certainly it is not that he lacks the art to set down his feelings – no man in America had a more expressive genius. But there is a mulish pride about him that insists on demonstrating, even in the extremities of passion, that reason is still in the driver’s seat. That is what holds him back, his prizing the capacity for self-restraint above all other virtues that he possesses. Well, Wm concluded, he was ready to follow his master almost anywhere, but down that path he would not. For what was life without a loose rein and a full gallop now and then?
November was well advanced before TJ’s right hand was back in action and, much to Wm’s surprise, Mr Jefferson’s spirits rose as fast as the pain subsided. He had not forgotten Mrs Cosway, certainly not, and he did write to her (Wm no longer had access to the contents but the sealed envelopes still passed through his hands). Yet their separation appeared to cause him no deep inconvenience.
Wm came to think that their affair, if it could be so called, was more in the nature of a liberation. It was just five years now since Martha Jefferson had died, though not yet two years since the death of little Lucy. Jefferson thought of them both every day, Wm was sure of that, but there were now respites from the grief when he could for an hour or more enjoy what the world had yet to offer. And it was Maria who had freed him from the sharpest, most unrelenting pangs, there was no doubt of it.
In fact, his friendship with Mrs Cosway now provoked him to seek and kindle friendship with other women who were not in the least like her. There was Madame de Tessé, for example, the enthusiastic pock-marked lady with a nervous tic that twisted her mouth into a grimace, whom Wm had met on his first visit to La Roche and who went into raptures over probability and who was celebrated for her reading parties, at which fashionable people dozed while she or some literary light read from Tristram Shandy. Wm was fond of this motherly personage and called her Aunt Tessé. She treated him like a scapegrace nephew and ticked him off about his friendship with Rosalie, in which reproof he was conceited enough to detect a hint of jealousy.
With Madame de Tessé and half a dozen more such ladies Mr Jefferson enjoyed conversation without commitment, friendship without passion. He seemed to ask no more of life than this. The Head appeared to have the Heart neatly harnessed up and the Heart, so far as Wm could see, was content with the arrangement.
Mr Jefferson was thus as free as he wished to be and no more. He unbent so far but his joints were not fashioned to bend further. When Patsy came back from the Abbey to visit her father, she was pleased to find a warmer welcome at the Hôtel de Langeac. But she was not long sitting with her father in the big oval room where he both worked and slept before he was quizzing her on her progress in mathematics and reproaching her for using a crib to construe Livy. Nor was her programme of education to be confined to the academic syllabus. She was soon to return to Virginia and learn needlework and other domestic skills, which would prove edifying distractions after she was married, for life on a plantation was seldom free of tedium.
Mr Jefferson did not, it seemed, envisage the free and easy life of the Paris salon as a suitable future for his own daughter. Patsy was annoyed that just as she was beginning to get the hang of French (she knew not a word when she arrived) and finding her feet at the Abbey, her father should be talking of plucking her away.
Wm admired his master still. Their old family ties were as unbreakable as Mr Jefferson’s services to the nation were imperishable. Yet it could not be denied that TJ’s views of his duties as Minister were elastic, to say the least. No sooner had the great Assembly of Notables opened at Versailles in a sludgy wet February than he decamped to the South of France on the pretext that he would bring back models of classical architecture to beautify the new capital of the young republic. This Assembly, the first such to be called in a century and a half, was the only hope of raising the revenue to meet France’s steepling debts. So it was Wm who had to trudge down to the Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs to listen to this gathering of fogeys and popinjays denounce the Americans for costing them a fortune to liberate. Tax reform after tax reform was chewed over ad nauseam and then spat out, and there was TJ writing from the blue skies of Provence, seated with his sketchbook beside some picturesque classical remains, expressing his unbounded confidence that the Assembly was on the verge of achieving not only national solvency but a first-rate constitution on British lines (he was experiencing one of his periodic fits of enthusiasm for the institutions of his old enemy).
At the same time Mr Jefferson had not lost his faculty of disapproval: ‘William, I have had occasion before to call into question the wisdom of your close acquaintance with madame de La Rochefoucauld, Rosalie as you call her. Madame de Tessé tells me that you were at the opera with her twice last week, and then once at the Italian comedy. We are of course on cordial terms with the
La Rochefoucaulds, who are the most estimable people and of the most liberal views, and I am aware that the duke is content that his wife should show you the sights. All the same, I doubt whether it is wise for a secretary of legation to gain the reputation of a cavaliere servente.’
‘Aunt Tessé only tells you all that in order to watch your disapproving face. She doesn’t mind a bit herself.’
‘I do not care to hear you refer to her so disrespectfully.’
‘All the young Americans call her Aunt. I think she rather likes it, she’s a sport.’
‘Well, I don’t care for it.’
If he had been like TJ and a loving friendship had been all he wished for – an amitié amoureuse as they called it over here, which sounded so much more languorous – then that summer with Rosalie would have come close to perfection. Mr Jefferson and Mrs Cosway were opposites, that was what struck the sparks between them. But with Wm and Rosalie there was no such chiaroscuro. Except in the colour of their hair, they were much the same in everything: both slender and slight, both twenty-eight years old, quick-witted but also reflective, so that their conversation was like a series of near-echoes, each reverberation returning the pleasure of the one before. And anyone who saw them out walking would have thought how well matched they were, this fine-boned miniature couple, and in that easygoing society would have assumed that they must be lovers.
But they were not, nowhere near it. And in a curious way their not being lovers was because they were so alike. Wm had kept his resolution to give up the pleasures of the Green Dolphin. There was in him a natural pudeur which coexisted with his healthy Virginian appetites, and if Rosalie was going to be his special girl, as they said back home, then she had to be the only one. But for her in her position that same modesty, which she possessed as fully as he did if not more so, meant that she could not admit even the thought of going beyond friendship. As the friendship became more intense, it was even more important to her that it should not stray by so much as an inch into forbidden territory.
When they first met, she would take his hand to lead him down one of the bosky paths in the shrubbery at La Roche and when he made her laugh, which he could, she laughed like no other woman he knew in Paris, full-throatedly, holding nothing back, and she would fall against him clasping his shoulder with both hands in mock fear that her hilarity had rendered her incapable of staying on her feet without assistance. And he remembered, too, how her little hand had pulled him up the last few steps of that chalky labyrinth to the fortress at La Roche.
But now she positively avoided physical contact with him, he was sure of it. If he put his hand on hers in a casual gesture of affection, she would with a soft unobtrusive movement remove her hand and find some object of interest that required her to take a few steps away from him. Often she would insist that her brother Charles should come with them. Charles and Wm had become friends just as Rosalie had hoped, not least because he was so like his sister in his quick wit, his mischief and occasional flashes of temper, which passed as quickly as a summer shower. If there had been no Rosalie in the world, Charles would have been a delightful consolation. But as it was, what was the French for gooseberry?
Wm could not see that she undertook these precautions because she feared that they were in too deep together and if she slackened her guard there would be no going back. He began to think that she might, au fond, be as frigid as duchesses were supposed to be and that, when it came down to it (and how was he supposed to keep it out of his mind?), he was her plaything and not much more.
They were reading together Monsieur Rousseau’s great novel, La Nouvelle Héloïse, in the English translation to improve her English. She knew the book almost by heart in the original and she hoped that her memory of it would prompt her when she was at a loss. William, who alone of all sentimental young men in Europe had not read it, was taking the part of Saint-Preux, the adoring and high-minded lover. She was sitting on a pile of logs. They had wandered deep in the Bois. Rosalie had promised that they would soon come out upon the river bank, but the trees seemed to go on for ever. So she sat down while he roamed up and down declaiming,
While I wandered in ecstasy through these obscure and lovely places, how were you occupied the while, my Julie? Had you forgotten your friend? But forget Julie? I could rather forget my own self, and how could I ever be alone for a moment, I who am nothing except through you? When I was sad, my soul took refuge with yours and sought consolations in those places where you were. When I was happy, I could not enjoy the pleasure alone and so I called you to my side to share it with you. I took you everywhere with me. I never admired a view without hastening to show it to you. All the trees I passed lent you their shade, every patch of grass was your resting place.
‘So you see, if I understand Monsieur Rousseau correctly, you need not actually be present for me to take a walk with you, though I am very glad that you are.’
‘Oh, but I am not Julie, I am too faint a being for your imagination to summon me up.’
‘On the contrary, my imagination is too feeble to do the summoning. In any case, I prefer flesh and blood.’
‘But it is a beautiful passage, is it not?’
Wm agreed that it was but did not add that it was her influence that made him think so. Before he came to France he would have considered such fancies too high-flown for his taste, but now, here in these dappled glades with her there was room for the imagination to work its insidious magic. That was the key to it: the room, the space, the time, above all the time. America had physical space, miles and miles of it, endless untravelled acres, mountains and torrents every bit as picturesque – no, more so – but there was no time to enjoy them. They were there solely to be worked, tamed, exploited. That was what God had created Americans for, to do the working. If Wm had been back home in his backwoods in Surry, he would have ridden off straight away to enquire of the woodman why he had left those logs to moulder in the plantation instead of taking them down to the sawmill. But as it was …
‘I think it is even more beautiful in English,’ she said. ‘But perhaps it is because I know the language so poorly, it sounds more mysterious and romantic.’
‘How does the story turn out?’ Wm asked.
‘Oh, you must not run ahead. It will spoil the pleasure.’
‘Please, I would love to hear you tell the story and then I can see if Monsieur Rousseau tells it as well as you do. But you must do it in English, that will be your test for today.’
‘Well, if you insist.’ She laughed. ‘Then afterwards we shall change places and you will tell me an English story in French.’
She rose from the logs and began to stride up and down with big steps in imitation of him, turning to him now and then with her mischief-brimming smile. And he thought of the first time they had met, beside the canal at Versailles, where she had imitated the Condor. And he knew that he would never forget this moment either, her striding up and down with man’s steps and him lying back on the logs feeling the sun on his face and the ridges of the bark through his shirt.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘as you know, Julie and Monsieur Saint-Preux yield to their passion, but they are consumed with remorse because her father would never allow them to marry. He thinks of suicide but is saved by the offer of a place on the ship on which the Admiral Anson is about to begin to, how do you say, circumnavigate the world. While he is away, Julie obeys her father and marries Baron Wolmar. He is an elderly foreigner, twice her age almost, but he is kind and thoughtful, and she is not unhappy with him. Then when Saint-Preux returns after all those years at sea, the Baron invites him to stay with them, because, you see, he trusts that they will be loyal to him. And he makes Saint-Preux tutor to their children and they live together in virtue and contentment.’
‘Except that he loves her still and she loves him as much as she ever did, am I not right?’
‘Yes, but they struggle against their passions and they remain virtuous until she dies – is untimely the word? – an untimely
death.’
‘It is a tragedy then.’
‘Well, it has a sad ending. But it is not really a tragedy because virtue triumphs and that is not what happens in a tragedy.’
‘In her situation would you have behaved like Julie?’
‘I could not imagine being in such a situation.’
‘You do not think that—’
‘I do not think anything, William. I know that I love my husband.’
‘And you are not unhappy together. Is that enough, is that all you want, a husband who is kind and thoughtful and who makes you not unhappy?’
‘You are presuming too far, monsieur. If you are my friend, you will leave this topic.’ She shut the book with a frantic slamming as though to prevent something noxious escaping from its pages.
‘I cannot leave it, Rosalie, you know I cannot without saying how much, how deeply I love you.’
‘You are not to say such things, you know you must not. You must take me home.’
‘If I have—’
‘Take me home and do not say another word. You have ruined the day. If you understood one-tenth of what Rousseau understands about the human heart, you would never have talked so.’
She was on the verge of tears, hot and flushed in the face, and so magnificently angry that he was all the more in love with her. They plunged back through the coppices in search of the gate where they had left the horses. The saplings whipped at him as though they were in league with her anger. When they found the little gate and the horses quietly cropping, he gave her a leg-up into the side-saddle and she rode off without a word, scarcely gathering the reins before kicking the horse into a feverish trot. He followed, sitting morose and low in the saddle, wondering whether he really deserved to be compared so unfavourably to Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, as she herself had pointed out, had spawned several illegitimate children and abandoned them to the charity of an orphanage.
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