The Condor's Head

by Ferdinand Mount

  She did not turn round and throw him a word during the entire return journey. And when the gates of the Hôtel de La Rochefoucauld opened to receive her, she cantered through into the courtyard as

  though fleeing the attentions of a bandito.

  *

  The next morning there came a brief note for him:

  After our conversation of yesterday I think it better if we do not meet again. I reproach myself for allowing such a misunderstanding to ruin our friendship. If I had read my dear Rousseau with more care, I would have realised the dangers that must inevitably arise in such a connection. Do not write to me. R.

  What a fool he had been, falling for a hopeless prospect like a French duchess. Anyone with a grain of sense could see how impossible it was that she should ever entertain any serious regard for him. He was no more than salon fodder, a useful bachelor to fill the last place at table, to hail the carriages and buy the ices while her husband was preoccupied with affairs of state. To her friends she probably spoke of him in pitying terms: ‘my little American’. Madame de Tessé was right, Mr Jefferson was right, everyone could see it but William Short. His mooning after her must be the joke of the season.

  He stumped out of the Hôtel de Langeac and marched along the new wall that girdled the whole of the inner city now, the ‘farmers’ wall’, as they called it, though there were no crops or cattle anywhere near it, except what were impounded by the officials who manned the fancy pavilions that were set in the wall at every gate. They ran the biggest racket in history, these so-called farmers, had their grip on every indirect tax on the books: salt, tobacco, leather, ironware, soap. You name it, they controlled it. And as if they were not sure enough of their unconscionable profits, they had built this unconscionable wall so that nobody could smuggle anything in or out. Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant, as the wags put it, ‘the wall walling Paris makes Paris wail’. This infernal wall had Paris by the throat. Its stranglehold was ruining the health of the city’s inhabitants by blocking out the country air, which alone could blow away the foul pestilences of the place. Millions of cubic feet of fresh air were stolen from the poor people who were thus in the pulmonary as well as the financial clutches of these bloodsuckers. Nor were visiting Americans entitled to feel detached from this hideous robbery, for it was the huge debts run up by the Americans in their war – more than a billion livres and almost all of it in loans – that had generated this frantic hunt for the last sou of revenue. The freedom of the Americans had been bought at the cost of enslaving the French.

  The worst of it was that the bloodsuckers were not greasy lower-class villains like tax collectors in most other countries. On the contrary, some of the farmers lived the most elegant lives, were received in the best society and had their own houses crammed with pictures by Boucher and Fragonard, and ormolu furniture from the finest German maîtreébénistes. Lavoisier, the greatest profiteer of the lot, was the most famous scientist of the age, admired by one and all, and had just been painted amid a scene of domestic felicity by none other than Monsieur David.

  As for the pavilions, they were built to the most ingenious modern designs by Monsieur Ledoux, each one different: one an undersized Parthenon, the next a rotunda modelled on the Pantheon in Rome, then a pastiche of the Little Trianon plumped down in the middle of the high road. Yet there was something about each of them that betrayed that they were built strictly for business rather than pleasure. The windows were small, like the windows of a prison or a barracks. There was a certain grim massiveness in miniature about the stonework, for they had to protect the little garrison in each pavilion against the potential indignation of the mob.

  All the hot day long Wm relentlessly walked off his humiliation, striding past now the inside, now the outside of this bizarre circumvallation, noting, though grudgingly, the ingenuity of Monsieur Ledoux in building each of his fifty ‘Propylaea of Paris’ as he called them in a different shape and manner. The paint was still fresh on some of the window frames, and at the newest barriers there were workmen sanding the stone on the rusticated lower courses. They all seemed to be in a diabolical hurry to complete the work before – before what?

  As the shadows of these fiscal fortifications lengthened, so Wm’s disgust grew, not just at these monuments of greed but at the whole display of competitive extravagance that obsessed the nobility of this city. Was there really much difference between this necklace of pavilions and all those follies – those fake temples and pagodas and ruins and grottoes that he and Rosalie had visited? Pavilions and follies alike were built on the sweat of the labouring poor who could barely keep the roof on their own hovels while they tiled and thatched and slated these exquisite buildings that were intended to house nobody at all, except a countess or two who came to take tea with her coterie when the weather was dry.

  Good God, who were these people who preened themselves on their progressive views and who threw away their fortunes on fripperies and regarded useful work as fit only for the bourgeoisie?

  By the time Wm had circumnavigated Paris, his nostrils crammed with stone dust, he was as tired as Admiral Anson must have been after doing the same to the globe, and he was looking forward to a hot tub and a glass of claret. But as he came into the hall of the embassy, he was met by the chirruping of children and the sound of running feet.

  ‘She is here, Will, here at last! Is it not a marvel to have both my little chickens under our roof?’

  Mr Jefferson was standing at the foot of the stairs, half laughing, half crying as the two little girls ran in and out of the rooms, Patsy pointing out to Polly all the crannies and byways of the house. Behind them following rather uncertainly in their wake was a coloured girl, not much older than Patsy. She was clearly dog-tired after the journey and she was looking about her with big brown eyes, shy and bemused, as though waiting to be told if she were doing wrong.

  ‘And this’, said Mr Jefferson, ‘is James’s sister Sally. She has been looking after Polly on the voyage, though I must admit I had forgotten how young she was. How old are you, Sally?’

  ‘Going on fifteen, sir.’

  ‘The journey must have been very strange for you, too. You remember Sally from Monticello, don’t you, Will, or was she too small to be noticed when you visited last?’

  It was some time later that Mr Jefferson told him how Polly had been induced to cross the Atlantic. She and her cousins had taken an innocent-seeming excursion to visit a ship lying at anchor. The party had spent a fine couple of days romping on the ship’s decks and playing hide-and-seek in the cabins until Poll seemed quite at home there. Then, when she had fallen sound asleep the cousins, acting under instructions, had crept away ashore. By the time Polly woke up, the ship had set sail for its five-week voyage. Mr Jefferson seemed to find nothing amiss in the stratagem and he made light of Polly’s tears on the voyage, which had been copious. Her companion, Sally Hemings, had wept too, but she had no voice in the matter.

  VI

  Falls

  WILLIAM SHORT HAD seen a dead body before. He had seen his father lying stiff and small on the parlour table at Spring Garden before they took him off to the coffin maker. And as a child on the Tidewater he had seen through the tall reeds the body of a planter who had killed himself after the tobacco blight, but his nurse had pulled him away before he could get any closer.

  The little huddle of blue rags outside the Hôtel de Langeac was worse somehow. At first he thought it was a bundle of some peasant’s belongings that had fallen off a country cart, but then he saw the feet sticking out, swollen and purple, the heels just breaking the surface of an icy puddle. Wm stood there by the gate, staring, irresolute. A couple of young men scuttered past, muffled and hunched against the cold. One of them gestured at the corpse and the other turned his head, but only briefly. They did not stop.

  Wm turned away to call for Vendôme the coachman. Vendôme would know what to do.

  Everyone expected the winter to be a hard one, each winter nowadays seemed
to be harder than the last, as though providence was testing how much they could endure. In July there had been hailstorms in the Beauce, stones so big they had killed partridges and hares, and withered the grapes along the Loire. The price of a loaf of bread had doubled, trebled in some places. But the worst famine was the cash famine. The beggars were everywhere, sleeping rough under the colonnades of the Palais-Royal, besieging the gates of the smartest hotels in the Marais, however fiercely the porters beat them off, a dirty great tide of misery that came back again and again in the hope of a crust or a couple of sous, which they might in the end get if the owners wanted to be rid of them before a dinner or a ball. But the beggars weren’t the only ones. Half the aristocracy were mortgaged up to their eyebrows. And as for the royal debts, you would need one of Montgolfier’s balloons to see how far they reached. The Assembly of Notables had dribbled into inanition in its last few weeks surviving only as a butt for the Paris wits. The Parliaments in Paris and most other places too would not countenance a single new tax worth having. The moment the King sat down to business, his ministers would besiege him with urgent requests, warnings, threats: it would be a calamity if the Queen bought Saint-Cloud, the two royal stables would have to be amalgamated, at least one pack of wolfhounds would have to be disbanded, not to mention the falconers, sixteen royal lodges and lesser Chateaux would have to be auctioned off.

  No wonder His Most Christian Majesty preferred to shut himself up in his workshop, hammering away at his locks and nautical instruments, before sitting down to another gut-swelling breakfast, then rushing out to hunt until dusk, anything to avoid the terrible insistent question: where was the cash to come from?

  They were not in much better case in the American legation. Mr Jefferson had the devil’s own business to persuade the Congress to disgorge his salary, let alone the thousand dollars per annum that was due to Mr Short and which TJ had so far met out of his own pocket. The Minister protested stoutly that his furniture, carriage and apparel were all plain, but plain was not exactly the word to describe the twenty-piece table silver that he had commissioned of Matthew Boulton or the silver-plated English harness to which Lafayette had taken such exception. Meanwhile the infant republic trembled as close to bankruptcy as the antique regime of France. Every message from across the ocean harped on the same string: how was the loan to be repaid, could not Mr Jefferson use his fabled powers to persuade the Dutch to ease the terms? And for Mr Jefferson read mostly Mr Short, who had perforce to become overnight an expert in finance. To his surprise he warmed to the work, when only a year or two previously he would have found it dry stuff.

  But then he had few other consolations now. In the last months of that summer, the Hôtel de Langeac had been, all too briefly, a place of brightness and laughter. The two little girls rushed in and out of their father’s room without ceremony. They skipped down the stairs to badger Wm in his cubbyhole, swinging on the new revolving bookcase of which he was so proud and generally making nuisances of themselves. If other amusements failed, they would rush off to flush the water closet until they exhausted the water tank, which provoked the most thunderous lecture from their father on the importance of water conservation and their duty as Americans to set an example of seemly conduct. And always behind them would be Polly’s supposed keeper, the young coloured girl who seemed scarcely older than Patsy and much less sure of herself. She would hang at the door while the other two pestered Wm. When he caught sight of her round face, pale for a Virginia negress, and her big dark eyes staring at him, he would beckon her in and tell her not to be shy. But even then she would stand a little apart, her hands clasped behind her back, watching their antics with what emotion Wm could not decipher.

  Down in the kitchens, though, Sally was more at her ease. She came into her own helping her brother stir his sauces and beat the butter and flour for the cakes and pastries he had made a speciality of the house. There, the roles were reversed. She would laugh with James and tease him about his lack of girlfriends, while Polly and Patsy sat on the cook’s bench and watched them solemnly as though they were at a play. And Wm saw that this kitchen chatter was the nearest thing to home for the two motherless girls and thought how often they must have sat in the kitchens at Monticello and listened to James’s and Sally’s mother Betty as she prepared the simple Virginia dishes that Mr Jefferson liked then, though his tastes had amplified since coming to Paris.

  Wm had heard the rumours that Sally, and perhaps James also, was the child of old John Wayles, Martha Jefferson’s father, who had bequeathed the Hemings family plus a hundred and thirty other slaves to TJ when he died. Certainly she was pale, but then every light-skinned Negro was whispered to be his master’s offspring. Mr Jefferson knew the rumour too, Wm was sure of that, but he never alluded to it. Was that because he believed it to be an absurd fabrication, or because he believed it to be true? Undoubtedly it would have been painful to him that one of his slaves should be his own sister-in-law. Yet would he have written those acerbic passages about the mental capacities of the Negro race if he knew (and might one day have publicly to acknowledge) that he was so closely allied to members of that race? Most probably he had put the rumour out of his mind five minutes after he had heard it and never recurred to it thereafter. TJ was good at that. He did not brood. He moved on. That was the secret of his greatness. And when it came to the point, he was not much incommoded by sentiment. When it was time to send Patsy back to the convent, this time accompanied by Polly and Sally too, he did not hesitate. ‘You had not thought of engaging a tutor instead?’ William asked.

  ‘They will be better taught at the convent. And as for their spiritual education, there are as many Protestants as Catholics there and not a word is spoken in the classroom on the subject of religion.’

  ‘No, it is just that they seem so happy here.’

  ‘Happiness is not everything, William.’

  Wm did not think to remind his master that the Declaration of Independence gave a different impression.

  So the three girls went off to the rue de Grenelle and the Hôtel de Langeac was left to the widower and the bachelor. Only a month after that sad day Wm was alone in the rue de Berri, while Mr Jefferson decamped to the Rhineland in order to investigate the varieties of grape that might be transplanted to Virginia.

  Before he went, though: ‘I have had a letter, William, from Monsieur Brissot de Warville. He wishes me to join his new society, for the friends of the blacks.’

  ‘Ah yes.’

  ‘I have declined his invitation. The object is an admirable one, but I fear it would not be right for me to become a member, seeing that the nation I represent has not yet pronounced upon the matter.’ Wm detected a certain extra convolution in Mr Jefferson’s syntax, always an indication of some unease. ‘I cannot see how it would help the cause in France and it might render me less able to serve it at home.’

  ‘Er, would those considerations apply to me also? Only the thing is he asked me too and I have already accepted.’

  ‘Have you now?’ Mr Jefferson paused for thought. He did not seem best pleased. ‘Your enthusiasm does you credit, William, though you might perhaps have consulted me first. Still, I do not see that it would matter greatly that a secretary in our legation should demonstrate that he possesses a liberal heart.’

  Somehow this approval did not raise Wm’s spirits. A secretary indeed.

  ‘Besides,’ Jefferson added, brightening somewhat, ‘it would be useful that we should be kept aware of what this new society is about.’

  ‘I cannot attend as a spy, sir.’

  ‘My dear Will, the line between diplomacy and espionage is a fine one. But all I suggest is that you should keep in touch, that’s the thing. It might be best, though, that James and Sally should not be made aware of your membership.’

  ‘There is no reason that they should know anything of it, sir.’

  This was not the first time that Mr Jefferson had shown a certain sensitivity in this connection. For if James and
Sally had known the rules, they could have declared themselves liberated the moment they stepped ashore at Le Havre whether their master liked it or not. He stood to lose an excellent cook and a nursemaid who might still be a little green but who enjoyed the affection of Patsy and Polly and represented a precious link with Monticello. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

  So Wm went off by himself to the first meeting of the Société des Amis des Noirs. It was held in Madame de Tessé’s drawing room in the rue de Varenne. He arrived early. Aunt Tessé herself had not yet come down. There was only one other person in the salon.

  It was the Duke. He was seated at a rosewood bonheur du jour, his bony knees straddling the little desk like a jockey on an awkward nag. He was reading some documents with his habitual care, his big bony nose poking into them as though it was an auxiliary organ for classifying the material. He did not hear Wm come in through the half-open door but at the creak of his footsteps on the floor he turned and got up, half knocking over the desk in his anxiety to show the warmth of his welcome. ‘Ah, my dear f-friend, Mr Short. William,’ he added with the appearance of the christian name requiring some official endorsement before use. ‘It is far too long since we met. This society will be most valuable if it enables us to keep our friendships in repair – although I do not of course mean that this should be its principal object.’

  ‘No indeed, sir. I am delighted to see you here too.’

  ‘If only R-Rosalie were here also. She would love to see more of you, you know. I had hoped that you might accompany her to this and that while I am so busy with the new constitution, but then you must be very busy too, now that Mr Jefferson is away again.’