‘I am rather, but—’
‘I tell you what, you must come on to dine with us when this is over. I am sure that Madame de Tessé won’t mind a bit.’
Wm’s heart beat so hard against his ribs that he could scarcely find the words to greet the other members of the new society as they straggled in – among them Lafayette, Condorcet and of course Brissot, bustling Brissot with his pamphlets and his travel books and his causes and his societies and his unstoppable tongue. Brissot had been all over the place. He had been jailed for debt in London, skipped in and out of trouble in Brussels and Boston and Berne. He was the son of a pastry cook, and he lived by his wits and seemed to be a perpetual-motion machine. His eager, bright little face popped up everywhere, his wet red lips never still.
When he took them through the agenda, it was more like the voyages of Jacques-Pierre Brissot. He seemed to know from personal experience every steamy tropical island and every plague-ridden jungle where slaves were groaning in their chains – French chains sanctioned, if not actively forged, by His Most Christian Majesty (though when it came to forging, the King was as dab a craftsman as any professional). How could it be right that there should be a single slave in France’s colonies when there were none, by law and custom, in France itself?
William looked around the room and realised that he must be the only man there who had ever owned slaves. Plenty of those present had profited from that peculiar institution through investments in the plantations and in the sugar and tobacco they produced. But actually to have owned another human being, that was his fate alone, or rather had been his inheritance. He would always remember that strange feeling of his own liberation when he said goodbye to the last slave at Spring Garden, old Isaac, who was going to Mr Grant’s but who died two weeks later before he could be transferred. He, William Short, was free even if his former slaves were not. Mr Jefferson by contrast still owned two hundred slaves at least, two of them being here with him in Paris. Looking round the eager faces in Madame de Tessé’s salon, Wm began to think that Mr Jefferson had been right to decline membership after all. Even Wm himself could not escape moral taint. If he had told his personal history in this company, he could see how Brissot’s supple lips would twist it and insinuate (as even dear Rosalie had) that he had merely sought to absolve himself by turning his slaves into cash. Was trafficking in human beings any lesser a crime than putting them to labour in the fields?
How he longed to be out of this conference and sitting opposite Rosalie again. She would not know, could not know, how bleak and long those nights had been, listening to the last carriages going home and the creaking of his narrow bed and the palpitations of his heart. In those comfortless hours there was no consolation he could grope for. He felt condemned to utter sterility, the cold sweat on his body like the foretaste of the grave. Towards dawn he sought relief in the old way and his prick bolted like a cabbage stalk and its sour juices spilled over him and he felt more desolate still.
There were other young Americans in Paris, idlers mostly, living off the backs of Boston or Philadelphia fortunes such as Tom Shippen and Johnny Rutledge. Wm enjoyed the occasional frisk with them but when they proposed to round off the evening at Madame Juppé’s or that other place they went to down in the Marais he pleaded pressure of work and didn’t care if they thought him a prude. They knew about Rosalie of course. Every fool straight off the boat seemed to know about his obsession with the little Duchess. But they did not see why that should inhibit him from taking his pleasures elsewhere too. This was Paris, after all, not Boston or Philadelphia. They could imagine (and envy) a young American enjoying a dalliance with a bored aristocrat, but what they could not figure out was that the young American might be so desperately in love that he had resolved to live as chastely as a medieval knight if he could not have her.
‘My dear, I brought William Short home with me. I thought it was far too l-l-long since we had seen him. Madame de Tessé released him, though I have to say with rather an ill grace.’
She jumped up from her chair, white in the face. That was all he thought at first, how pale she was and frightened-looking. The paleness and the alarm made her more beautiful still. He had not remembered quite how beautiful she was, which he also thought was an odd thing to think because how could he have been in love with her, so constantly in love, if he had not thought her beautiful?
Then the colour came into her cheeks and the startlement left her eyes, and she managed to greet him more or less calmly as an old friend who had been out of touch for some tedious practical reason.
He knew now, in that moment, standing at the Duke’s side a little apart from her, that he would never be free of her. He had suspicioned it before, but now he knew it. And he was pretty sure too that the same went for her. However it all turned out, happily or badly, together or apart, there would never be anything else like this for either of them.
They did not say much, hardly a thing. They did not have to, because the Duke had quite a deal to say.
‘It was a r-remarkable day, my dear. I shall not easily forget it. The undertaking is such a noble one. Madame de Tessé’s salon may become immortal for having given birth to it. We had d-difficulties of course. Should we call ourselves the Amis des Noirs or the Amis des Nègres? Which title would be the less offensive to those we were intending to help? We were most grateful to William for his assistance on this point.’
‘I said noirs had more of a ring to it and nègres was a tad too close to nigger, which they don’t much cotton to.’
‘Then there was the question whether we should intend to achieve the abolition of the trade in slaves or of the condition of slavery itself in our colonies, or both, or if not both, which should come first. Young Brissot really is a remarkable fellow, he has been everywhere, you know.’
The Duke went on, and the afternoon light came in through the long windows, a dusky lemon light that softened everything and made the real world seem remote and powerless to touch them. The Duke paused and went over to the little bell on his desk to call for refreshments.
She came round the sofa and took his hands in hers. ‘I am so glad you are here. It is stupid that we have not seen each other for so long.’
The Duke’s back was not turned and there was nothing furtive about the way she spoke or held his hands. She could have done the same to an old general who had come to tea. But it was enough. ‘It is so brave of you to join,’ she said later when the lemonade had been brought. ‘For my husband and his friends it is a gesture that costs nothing, but you may make enemies back home.’
‘You know I have no slaves myself.’
‘Yes, you sold them, but that will not stop your neighbours in Virginia thinking that you have, how shall I say, betrayed your class.’
‘Oh, they won’t find out and even if they do I’m not sure how much I care. They’ll come round in time. Slavery cannot endure in the long run.’
‘But while it does? Mr Jefferson is a little more cautious than you, I think.’
‘Now then, you are not to provoke me into criticising my master.’
‘I do not think that I can make you say anything that you do not wish to.’ The Duke looked on their conversation with something like pride, as though he had trained these two players in the game. Had he any conception of their feelings, Wm wondered and thought not. In fact, he doubted whether La Rochefoucauld really understood very much about his wife. He admired her beauty, he swam happily in her affection and responded to the sharpness of her wit. But was she anything more to him than an engaging puppy who had come by arrangement to brighten his widowerhood? He seemed to overlook or actively to brush aside her deeper qualities – her lively apprehension of danger, for example, and her understanding that the ideals they all shared might be only tenuously connected to reality. But then that was too much to expect, perhaps, when he was twice her age and, being her uncle, had known her since she was a child.
All at once, as they stood there sipping their lemonade, w
hich looked almost colourless in the hazy lemon light, Wm was overcome by a sensation that could only be described as dread, not so sharp as the dread when you put a horse at a stiff fence, no, this was a more insidious apprehension of uncertainty. Did they know, any of them, what they were letting themselves in for? The Duke moved across to the tall glass doors that gave on to the court and he pointed out to Wm the gravel walk and the little oblong parterre that Rosalie had laid out to relieve the severity of the yard: a criss-cross pattern of box and lavender bushes with slips of rose newly planted in the middle. The skimpy fledgling plants shivered a little in the breeze that had got up. Wm shivered too and she took his hand again. This time the Duke had his back to them.
William’s time of solitude was over. But another kind of ordeal was only just beginning. They saw each other almost every day now and the intimacy between them ripened in every way except the most obvious, the most natural, the most fundamentally human.
She had spelled out the rules in a quick flurry of sentences, which he was sure afterwards she had rehearsed. It was the third time they had met since the breach between them had been repaired. They were walking along the cours la Reine, the little road between the Tuileries and the Seine where Mr Jefferson had taken his nasty tumble.
‘You know how it must be between us, don’t you? I am very fond of my husband and he I think of me, and I owe him so much and I would do nothing to hurt him or my grandmother for he is her son and we are everything to her. I want nothing more in the world than for the friendship between us to grow and grow deeper but there must always be limits to it, you do understand that, don’t you? And I can trust you to observe those limits, observe is such a pompous word, it sounds like a legal edict, doesn’t it, but you know what I mean. It is much to ask, do not think I do not know that, but you are the only person I have ever met whom I could ask it of.’
There was not much that he could say to all this, except what he did say, which was that he entirely understood and respected and admired her feelings, which were just what he would have expected of her, and he only hoped that he could prove himself worthy of those feelings. As he was making this speech, he reflected on the bright side, viz., he was now allowed to say how much he loved her so long as he did not trespass beyond the bodily frontiers, and she now allowed herself to respond in every way except the aforementioned. But God, how much had to be conceded in return. It was child’s play to commit oneself to liberating every nigger in America, but how on earth could he hope to spend hour upon hour in her company without laying a finger on her, without so much as bussing the little dark curls behind her ear or stroking her cheek, let alone sliding his hand along the inside of her peachy thigh or – but anyway that was how it had to be … well, for the time being. She might imagine that they could go on indefinitely keeping company in this chaste twilight, like that milksop Saint-Preux and whatever her name was, but he had other ideas. You could not live your life like a character in a novel. Old Rousseau certainly had not, otherwise how come he had all those bastards? But the strain was certainly beginning to tell on him.
Even Johnny Rutledge noticed. ‘How’s your little Duchess then? She refusing you your oats? I’d say you looked a touch sickly. Don’t you think he do look sickly, Tom?’
‘He surely does, John. I think Mr Secretary needs a holiday. Why don’t you come on with us down to the south and on to Italy? We can compare the wines and the women. We need your experienced eye.’
‘Well, I don’t know about that. I’m pretty much tied here in Paris.’
‘She really has you all strung up then?’
The odd thing was that he didn’t mind their coarse wisecracking. It was a relief from his afternoons with Rosalie. Each time he came away from the long room in the rue de Seine, he was more in love with her than ever, but more in despair. He began to fancy that the servants knew his secret and beneath their politeness were all laughing at him. Even the great marble bust of Condorcet on the buffet seemed to be sneering at him.
Mr Jefferson, too, the next coolest thing to a marble bust, had spotted something. ‘You do not look well, William. I begin to wonder whether your train of life in Paris is entirely healthy. Perhaps I should dispatch you back to Virginia to look for a wife. Or you might find profit in exploring Europe a little.’
‘I find Paris very much to my taste, sir.’
‘Certainly its distractions are delightful. But all too often I fear they offer only moments of ecstasy amid days and months of restlessness and torment. Our native soil furnishes steadier pleasures, I think, because they are founded upon fidelity and modesty.’
Wm thought that he would not mind a few moments of ecstasy in exchange for the restlessness and torment that he was already suffering. What an irony it was that these none too subtle reproaches should be addressed from one monkish celibate to another.
‘Besides,’ TJ continued, ‘I am conscious that my repeated absences have thrown the labours of Hercules upon your shoulders and that it is time I take my turn to mind the shop. There are so many questions that I failed to resolve during my excursion to the south. You would be able to fill up the gaps in my geography.’
‘What exactly had you in mind, sir?’
‘Whether the grapes of the Italian hills might be suitable for our own southern climate, and the rice too, which I understand is now the staple crop in the valley of the Po. I am allured, too, by the project of tasting macaroni at home such as we have delighted in at Ruggieri’s and am eager to know the secrets of its manufacture. Then there are the architectural models of classical Rome, which we might build upon. Our new Capitol surely will have much to learn from the old one. It is a source of regret to me that I but tiptoed into Italy and failed to see the beauties of Rome or Florence or Venice.’
‘But in these tumultuous times ought I not to remain here?’
‘My dear William, you should not be so ready to believe old wives’ tales. As yet the tumults have not cost a single life according to the most sober testimony we have been able to collect. Nine-tenths of Paris believe that two hundred were killed at Grenoble where there was in truth but one officer wounded. I am sure it will end in calling the States-General next year, in May or thereabouts. And that I think will secure the reformation of their constitution without bloodshed. I wrote to Johnny Rutledge to tell him so last night. It is a pity that Tom and he should already have gone off to the Netherlands. But I believe they still mean to go on to Italy later and you may make a rendezvous with them there. But even thus far you need not travel alone. The Paradises are off to visit their daughter at Bergamo.’
‘Sir, I do not—’
‘Mrs Paradise tells me that she and her husband would like nothing better than to have you as their companion.’
‘Sir, I do not think that Mrs Paradise and I, in the close confines of a post-chaise, well, I do not think that we should get along.’
‘William, I had expected better of you. Lucy Paradise may have her faults. She is a little volatile for some tastes but she has her troubles. John Paradise possesses a fertile mind. I derived much profit from my conversations with him in London. No man in Mayfair peppered his talk with more Greek phrases, but he is not an early riser, he attends to business fitfully and their debts have mounted. Lucy tells me that every hogshead of their tobacco that comes ashore at Wapping is mortgaged to their creditors and on poor terms. I am doing what I can to help her but—’
‘Sir, you have not seen Mrs Paradise in her moods, she can be a virago.’
‘William, she is a Ludwell from Williamsburg. We have obligations of kinship to her and if you object further to the proposal that you should travel together, then I shall be bound to conclude that you do not wish to leave Paris at all and I shall know the reason for it.’
On 17 September 1788 he set off with the Paradises in a post-chaise, with the aid of £35 10s borrowed from Mr Jefferson (who could ill afford it, being not much less indebted himself than the Paradises).
But first he h
ad to tell Rosalie. ‘Mr Jefferson insists that I should go. He wishes me to act as his scout.’
‘Scout?’
‘To study the Italian varieties of grapes and rice and architecture, for use back in Virginia, you understand.’
‘I do not understand, William. Surely there are vines enough in Champagne and by the Loire. As for porticoes and colonnades you have only to look out of the window. Be honest with me, you are going because you wish to be as far away from me as possible. If you did not wish to go you would find a way of wheedling Mr Jefferson round to your point of view. He is very fond of you, I sometimes think that you do not understand how fond.’
‘Oh, I know that well enough and will always be grateful for it in the depths of my heart.’
‘But in the depths of your heart there is no room for me, that is what you wish to say, isn’t it, but you do not quite dare. Well, I don’t blame you. I have asked too much of you, I know I have. It was a stupid idea, that we could go on like this for ever. It was my fault entirely. I have been reading too many silly novels. Real life is not like that, real men are not like that. Why should they be? Perhaps if I had spent more time with people my own age, I would have learnt more of life.’
‘Rosalie, you must not be so understanding. I would almost prefer it if you were angry. I do not think I can bear your forgiveness.’
‘No, really, it is time I tried to be grown up for once. I have nothing to forgive you for. Anyway I am quite angry, or at any rate I am suffering from a severe case of injured pride, though why should I think I am the only woman in Paris who is entitled to have an admirer without giving him anything in return? Well, perhaps I am not the only one, or was not I should say. There may be other spoilt women like me. We could found a society like your society for the blacks, a Society for the Friends of Unsatisfied Lovers.’
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