Wm smiled. It was hard sometimes not to smile at TJ’s unquenchable optimism and hard, too, not to share in it and wish to be part of it. Great events were gathering pace, in the life of both nations and, who knew, in his own life too perhaps. He found a shabby albergo by the sea and ordered a glass of Lacrima Christi, the wine he had tasted on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius and taken a fancy to. And he wrote her a letter. He scarcely knew what he wrote – a weird mixture of apology and love and regret and hope, chaotic, tumbling out of him, nothing like his usual orderly progression from A to B. As he wrote with the February sunshine coming in through the grubby windows and the smell of the sea and the rotting dock smells coming in through the albergo’s door that would not shut, he felt a happiness flooding through him that he was sure could never be equalled.
He must hurry back to Paris. That was the place where all his hopes were parcelled up together. They did not entirely curtail their Grand Tour. For once Johnny Rutledge dug in his heels and insisted that they complete pretty near the whole itinerary they had originally projected. But they certainly put on a spurt. Florence, Pisa, Leghorn, Lucca, Lerici, Monaco, Marseilles – all passed in a blur, accompanied by squawks and protestations from Johnny, who was as avid a notcher up of sights as he was of women.
‘Hey, amico, we haven’t seen the Campo Santo yet, the frescoes are supposed to be quite something.’
‘Damaged beyond repair, my dear Johnny, not worth a minute of your time.’
In Nîmes they did make a pause in order to give a proper salutation to the Maison Carrée. Wm was pleased to confirm to Mr Jefferson that they agreed it to be ‘the most perfect remains of antiquity which exist on earth’, a judgement that pleased TJ hugely since by now William had seen three times as much Greek and Roman stuff as his master. And it was there too, sitting on the steps of that weathered old temple, that the two of them read Monsieur Necker’s report convening at long last the long awaited States-General. They hugged each other.
‘This is the moment, amico,’ Johnny said. ‘France is going to have her own revolution, just like ours only a darn sight better.’
‘For once you may even be right,’ said William Short, with a double rapture swilling around inside him.
They travelled by cabriolet and post horses all the way back to Paris. Even so they were a week too late to see the opening of the Estates-General, that gorgeous festival in which the last gasp of the past was to mingle with the insistent clamour of the new.
Mr Jefferson had not missed a minute of it. With the one-legged tobacco agent Gouverneur Morris stumping along beside him complaining of his sunburn, he saw the procession of the Holy Sacrament to the cathedral in Versailles: the King and the nobles wearing the most amazing specially designed hats in Henri Quatre style with the brim turned up in front, preceded by the royal falconers on horseback, each carrying a hooded raptor on his wrist, then the heralds blaring away on their silver trumpets with purple banners, and after all this garish pageantry the Third Estate dressed severely in black with white muslin cravats and not so much as a sword between them, looking like a congregation of Puritans that had strayed into a coronation procession.
The next day, the day of the opening session, Jefferson and Morris had left Paris at six in the morning to be in their seats by eight. As they arrived in the Salle des Menus Plaisirs (what an odd name for a room whose contribution to history was to be neither slight nor unmixedly pleasurable), there was a sense of utter disorder. Nobody seemed to have the least idea who was to go where or what was to happen next. Three thousand people were packed in between the Gobelins tapestries (a few of the more indecent scenes had been removed out of respect to the clergy), shoving and jostling, with only a dozen frantic ushers to find them their assigned seats. Which Estate was to sit with which and which separately had been at the heart of the argument from the start and should have been sorted out long ago.
The King, that clumsy, myopic little man, was of course incapable of giving a lead. He could not even get the business with the hat right. First he doffed his great plumed chapeau to the audience and the nobles took off their hats in the usual fashion but then some of the Third responded puckishly by putting their hats on and slowly removing them again, inducing the King to do the same, which the nobles did too. Then the Queen, rattling her fan in her irritation, could be heard whispering into his ear to put his hat back on. ‘If the ceremonial requires these manoeuvres, then the troops are not properly drilled,’ the sardonic Gouverneur murmured to Jefferson. Then Monsieur Necker spoke, for an eternity. He was inaudible. The King spoke. He was inaudible too, though the words ‘much exaggerated desire for innovations’ were faintly to be heard. ‘I fear the King is insensible to the pang of greatness,’ Gouverneur murmured.
But Mr Jefferson was not be cast down. ‘On the whole, I thought it went off very well,’ he reported back to Wm. ‘And I am much encouraged by the progress of the debates in the Commons, as I call them. The meetings of the nobles are impassioned affairs, even our friends such as Monsieur de La Rochefoucauld find it hard to calm their tempers, but the Third Estate are always rational in debate. I have urged Lafayette to work out a compromise by which the three Estates would transform themselves into two, the lower house made up of the Commons and an upper comprising the nobility and clergy.’
‘Like the English system you mean? But would the nobles stand for it?’
‘It is the only way, Will. But they cannot do it without a constitution.’
‘And how is all this to happen?’ queried William.
‘Why, I declare you are as much an unregenerate sceptic as that one-legged Yankee.’
Wm was not without respect for Gouverneur Morris (who had lost his leg in a carriage accident but did not demur when people assumed he must have lost it in the revolutionary wars), but he did not care to be lumped together with him and he persisted in asking Mr Jefferson how these high-flown ambition were to be realised.
‘We are to go down to Versailles tomorrow and draw up the documents with Lafayette and Monsieur Rabaut de St Etienne to speak for the Third Estate. Rabaut has the right ideas but he needs bridling.’
‘But we are Americans,’ stammered Wm.
‘Just so. We are the only people on this earth who have had the good fortune to throw off the tyrant’s yoke and learn how to govern ourselves. Who better to advise the best men in France?’
‘No, but I mean, our vocation is diplomacy. Surely we ought not to meddle in such ticklish business.’
‘My dear Will, liberty is the business of every man whose soul is not dead. If we Americans cannot teach the world how to be free, what are we good for? I have here a few preliminary notes. I should be glad if you would look over them for me.’
And so William Short, still catching his breath after the whirl of his grand tour, found himself the scrutineer of the first draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. At least his sores had healed, although there was a vestigial itching in his groin as he sat in his cubbyhole at the Hôtel de Langeac savouring the fine phrases that TJ could whip up as effortlessly as James Hemings could now spin sugar. How odd it was, he thought, that a recently poxed Virginian still in his twenties should be charged with editing the text that was to guide the most powerful nation on earth.
Even Mr Jefferson was not without a qualm or two. As Wm handed him back the scribbled draft, the Minister said, tapping the paper with his long bony finger, ‘Nobody is to know of this, mind. You are not to breathe a word of it to anyone in France. If anyone enquires as to the author, Lafayette is to have all the glory, which as you know he will not dislike in the least.’
When they set out the next morning, with the precious draft stowed in Wm’s wallet, they went by a side road through the forest and Jefferson wore Vendôme’s old driver’s cloak to avoid attention. Wm had muffled himself up too in the travel-worn heavy coat he had crossed the Alps in. It was a glorious June morning and by the time they came out of the Bois he was dripping with sweat.
&
nbsp; ‘Must we wear these coats the whole way? After all, there can really be no offence in two Americans taking a ride to Versailles to see the sport.’
‘No breath of suspicion must attach to us, Will. The less our participation is known or guessed at, the more posterity will have to thank us for.’
In practice, though, as they trotted along the back roads Wm came to be grateful for their modest disguise. Beyond the city limits there were bands of men hanging around at the edge of the forest and in village squares, men with hollow eyes and filthy clothes. One or two of them waved sticks as they rode past. Mr Jefferson could not help acknowledging these salutations as though he were decked out in full ambassadorial fig, but Wm thought there was more menace than camaraderie in their waving. How mean and starved-looking they were up here in the north. Even the squalor of Naples was not so pinched and bitter.
The four of them met at an inconspicuous inn behind the royal stables well away from the tumult of the Salle des Menus Plaisirs. As Lafayette opened the window of the stuffy upstairs room, the noise of the crowd swilling around the palace gates came in but only faintly, like the noise of starlings in a distant wood.
Wm would always remember that quiet conclave in the bare room with the old wooden bed in the corner: Rabaut, the Protestant pastor with his grating voice, always trying to insert a denunciation of the nobles or another assertion of the unique sovereignty of the Third Estate (‘the nobles don’t even deserve to be citizens, they are cockroaches, vermin, leeches on the nation’, at which point TJ broke in to ask if Wm could have some lemonade sent up); Lafayette, ever enthusiastic, contentious too but essentially good-humoured – ‘Oh, that is a splendid phrase, I like that, that would sound fine’ – and he would repeat the phrase listening to himself sounding fine – and his master who had brought him along on this vaunting business. How at ease Mr Jefferson was here, although his French was a little stiff, and now and then he had to turn to Wm for a word or to have one of Rabaut’s intemperate splutters translated. All the awkwardness that disconcerted strangers on social occasions was absent from this intense drafting session. He calmed Rabaut, nudged Lafayette in the right direction and encouraged William to make his own contributions, deferring to him with great courtesy: ‘That was how we did it in Virginia, was it not, William?’ or, ‘I seem to remember that in our Declaration we found it advisable to …’ – Our Declaration, as though Wm had had a full hand in that glorious effusion and not been a sixteen-year-old schoolboy at the time. There were moments when Mr Jefferson’s greatness was not to be questioned.
As the afternoon crept in, the distant tumult faded to insignificance. The only sound was the buzzing of some insect in the corner of the room and the scratching of Wm’s pen as he took down the latest revisions.
‘Well now, gentlemen,’ said Lafayette. ‘I think we have gone as far as we can. I suggest that we leave it to our American friends to put the finishing touches. Be in no doubt that when France has finally secured her place among the free nations she will always be grateful to both of you.’ And he spread out his hands to them in a priestly benison. William found this little speech (delivered in Lafayette’s squawky but serviceable English) very moving and he felt tears pricking behind his eyes, but he managed to hold them back. Wm could not help feeling that this sandy-faced, beaky-nosed show-off was a great man too and might yet save France.
Afterwards Wm was hard put to identify exactly what phrases he had himself contributed to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Was it the bit about liberty consisting in the power of doing whatever does not injure another? Or the decision to call the rights of man ‘imprescriptible’ rather than TJ’s preferred ‘inalienable’? But whatever he had or had not added to or subtracted from the document, he had been there at the making of it, the first modern declaration of what it was to be a human being (it was to be a couple of years yet before Mr Jefferson succeeded in tagging on something of the sort to their own constitution).
As they rode back to the Hôtel de Langeac, Wm was seized with an irrepressible exhilaration. If he had not been with Mr Jefferson, he would have burst into song. Even the gangs of hollow-eyed men gathering in the village squares at dusk had no power to damp him off.
Mr Jefferson too was in high spirits. Wm heard him humming a tune as he passed his master’s bedroom/study the next morning. He heard too the creaking of TJ’s latest copying machine, a marvellous little contraption of wood and brass that could produce two copies together and dispensed with the drudgery that had tortured secretaries since the beginning of time. Then a mere quarter of an hour later Mr Jefferson called him to look over the final draft of the ten-point declaration and if he liked it to send the copies straight away to Rabaut and Lafayette. As Wm left the room, Mr J picked up his violin and (his wrist long since restored to its pristine wiry state) began to play the melody he had been humming.
Why should he not be cheerful? Patsy and Polly (and Sally) had come back from the Abbey in April while Wm was away and one of the upstairs bedrooms had been subdivided into two smaller rooms for them. Sally had to make do with a folding bed in the little vestiaire next to Wm’s bedroom, which was itself by no means spacious, for the Hôtel de Langeac had been built as a pleasure house, a place for show, not a family home with all its ramifications. As TJ put it, it was like a Philadelphia melon, all shell and no flesh.
He had hauled his girls back from the Abbey, partly because he loved to have them with him – they were the consolations of his solitary state. He also was beginning to worry that the nuns were not stretching Patsy’s sharp wits enough. But above all he had brought them back because in a month or so, just as soon as everything was ready, they were going home. Only for six months, for the official leave that TJ felt was his due, long overdue, in fact. The Jeffersons would return to Monticello, to the capacious bosom of their sprawling clan of cousins: the Wayleses and the Eppses, not to mention Uncle Field Jefferson and his larky quiverful of sons and grandsons. And trusty William, secretary par excellence, would mind the shop, which Wm did not mind so long as he was officially named chargé d’affaires, for he knew by now how much these things mattered in the great world.
So Mr Jefferson was in a fever of anticipation. His natural optimism had been reinforced by the prospect of seeing Monticello again. Each fresh twist of events in Paris only buoyed him up further. When the guards fired on the rioters at Monsieur Réveillon’s wallpaper factory and killed a hundred or more, he wrote to Mr Madison that ‘this execution has been universally approved’. Anyway, how could a revolution begin with wallpaper? Then, when the price of bread went sky-high after the dreadful harvest and the arctic winter, he reassured the nervous Monsieur Necker that the grain ships from America would remedy the situation in no time. And when the Third Estate took the country into its own hands and swore their famous oath in that shabby old tennis court behind the palace, he reproved the ever-sceptical Gouverneur for saying that the French were sure to overshoot the mark. On the contrary, he assured Mr Secretary Jay back in America that the crisis was over and he would not have anything interesting enough to trouble him with.
William could not resist the usual contagion of his master’s enthusiasm. In any case, he was himself brimming with expectation. Not only was he on the verge of becoming a quasi-ambassador, he was also on the verge of acquiring the perquisite of every ambassador, a beautiful and high-born mistress. Of course he was an idealistic young Virginian and not a cynical Yankee like Gouverneur, so he did not express his hopes, even to himself, in quite such coarse terms. But there was no mistaking the feeling behind her last letter. That moment he had dreamed of so long could surely not be far off. And as he wandered idly amid the excited throng at the Palais-Royal and listened with an indulgent smile to the gesticulating orators outside the Café Foy (how ridiculously young they were, a couple of them no more than boys), she was always in his mind.
But she was in the country waiting on her grandmother who had not been well. She did not come up to Paris till
June was over and the Estates-General had broken up in riotous enthusiasm because the King, as usual stubborn at first, had given way also as usual and allowed the Third Estate to call itself the National Assembly or whatever other fancy title they wished. For the King was in no state to care very much about anything, and the Queen even less so, because it was only three weeks since the little Dauphin had died. They said that it had turned Marie Antoinette’s hair grey, or perhaps it was just easier to see what colour it was now that she let it fall over her shoulders like a citizeness (already they were calling each other by those cumbrous terms). And it was partly because of the dead Dauphin (only seven years old) and the grey hair that they shouted ‘vive le roi’ and even, though not many of them, ‘vive la reine’.
But the troops were still massing – Hungarian hussars who spoke weird guttural French, gawky young guards from the Pas de Calais, rough German dragoons camping in huge numbers on the Champ de Mars and up on the Buttes de Montmartre – twenty-five, thirty thousand of them, nobody was sure how many. And standing nervously at street corners there were small detachments of the Paris garrison, with their officers looking anxiously up and down the boulevards, without a clue where the trouble would come from, their minds as bewildered and loyalties as torn as their men’s.
He went on foot to meet her. It would have been crazy to risk the carriage with the mob on the lookout for anything to tip over and smash up. Down the first stretch of the Champs-Elysées it might have been any Sunday in July. There were families sitting under the trees. At the Rond-point he saw a man with a torn red shirt singing a patriotic ballad to a jovial little crowd. But as he came down towards the place Louis XV the crowd thickened and its mood was surlier. On the far side of the enormous space, beyond the dust and the commotion that filled most of it, he could see the German cavalry drawn up in lines sitting very still, only the horses now and then tossing their heads.
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