He was in great heart now, the cadaverous Condor. To everyone’s amazement he had swooped down and carried off the beautiful and brilliant Sophie de Grouchy who was half his age. Gossips claimed that the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, still besotted with the savant, had tipped him a dowry of five thousand livres a year, because Sophie had none of her own. But in truth Condorcet was, for the first time in his life, rolling. He had five thousand livres a year from the Mint, three thousand as perpetual secretary of the Academy, eleven thousand from his uncle’s estate, two thousand from his father’s. He could do without the Duke’s charity, if ever it had in fact been offered.
So there he was in his finery that September evening, standing to welcome them on the steps of the great Hôtel des Monnaies on the quai Conti with its freshly minted statues and gleaming Ionic columns. And at his side La Belle Grouchette with her big black eyes and her retroussé nose and saucy smile and tumbling hair, not to mention her gently swelling stomach. A Condor chick was due the following spring.
‘People say,’ Monsieur de Condorcet remarked in his weak, grating voice, after passing on this remarkable news, ‘that women should be denied the right to vote because they are liable to become pregnant or because every month they are subject to passing indispositions, but we do not deny men the vote on the grounds that they may suffer from gout or catch cold in the winter.’
‘No, indeed, that is very true.’
‘And as for the supposed ignorance of the sex, if we were to permit only men of high intelligence to take part in public affairs, our parliaments would be but ill frequented, would they not?’
‘Quite so,’ said Wm, joining in the dry snigger that Condorcet was wont to emit after a remark he considered especially cutting, a noise not unlike the rustle of dead leaves on a pavement.
‘Shall we go in, my dear?’ said La Belle Grouchette, gazing up at him with adoration.
Wm followed his host up the great marble stair to the piano nobile. Condorcet’s head was still hunched into his neck and he still drew his cloak about him as a great vulture gathers his wings, but there was a spring in his gawky legs and a general sense of potency that Wm had not noticed before.
Despite Condorcet’s new magnificence, Wm in his Virginian innocence had still expected his table to be a plain one, as befitted a high-minded philosopher and economist. So he was dazzled to find himself in a huge dining room, a good forty feet long, lit by a thousand candles and filled with a glittering throng all talking at a giddy rate. He recognised only a few faces: Mr Bache, Franklin’s grandson; Dr Cabanis the brilliant doctor of psychophysiology who had married Sophie’s sister; the playwright Beaumarchais who had written those wicked comedies that had made the court uncomfortable and who was now collaborating with Condorcet on bringing out the complete works of Voltaire. If there was anywhere in Paris that you could call the intellectual centre of the city – well, to be frank, the centre of the world, because where else was there? – then this was it. Wm braced himself for the inexorable brilliance of the conversation and scoured his head for something to say to his neighbour at table, a handsome, slightly plump woman in her thirties, with an unnerving beady look in her eye.
‘She is very beautiful, is she not, Madame de Condorcet. I had not seen her before,’ he lamely offered, conscious of how far below the required standard he had begun.
‘Who? Oh, La Grouchette. She is pretty enough, I grant you, if you like that vapid sort of face, but she has no more brains than a flea, and as for tact …’
‘Oh, really?’
‘When the two of them became engaged, she had the impudence to suggest that if anything should happen to Monsieur Suard – he was not well at the time – we should share Condorcet between us.’
‘How very strange.’
‘Not as strange as all that,’ she said tartly. ‘Surely you must know that there was a time when Condorcet was head over heels in love with me. But I could not think of abandoning Suard, that was when I was still in love with him of course. Later on I told Suard I had fallen quite out of love with him. Oh, he said, don’t worry, your love will come back. But I love another, I said. Oh, he said, that will pass. The conceit of men! That’s him over there, look.’ She pointed to an elderly fellow with a long nose and a sly expression who was telling a joke with every sign of enjoying it.
‘So that is Monsieur Suard, the editor?’
‘The hack, you mean,’ his wife said merrily. ‘He’ll write anything to keep the roof over our heads. He even agreed to edit the Official Gazette though Choiseul had given him strict instructions that it was not to be the slightest bit amusing. He was dying of boredom when luckily Choiseul was thrown out.’
‘So were you distressed when Monsieur de Condorcet got married?’
‘You’re a nosy one,’ she said with a laugh. ‘Yes, I certainly was, wept buckets, in fact. I thought he still loved only me, but the truth is that he prefers them young. Ugly men often do, I don’t know why. When he was lodging with us, he even dared to run away with my niece though she was barely eighteen and her mother had just died. We had to move heaven and earth to get her back, but at least she did love him, the silly goose. I am afraid the Grouchette is just in love with his fame.’
‘Are you sure? They seem very happy.’
‘I think I know a little bit more about the situation than you do.’
‘Of course, madame.’
Madame Suard had a sharp tongue but she seemed a genial sort and instructed him to call her Amélie, everyone did and they were not at court now. It was not hard to see how the Condor could have been in love with her, but how could she ever have cared for him?
Though he was some way down the table, Wm could still pick up snatches of that strange voice which, now that he had taken a glass or two, sounded more like a saw sawing wet timber.
‘Yes, these are Breton sardines, I would countenance no other. And the pike comes from the Loire or to be exact from a tributary that I do not expect you to have heard of, I shall keep it as my secret, no, not the Cher. There is a mill on this modest stream that for some reason leaks corn into the millpond and fattens up the smaller fish that the pike feed on, giving them, I think you will agree, a remarkable sweetness and removing that muddy quality which may otherwise creep into even the best-made quenelles. And the wine, Mr Jefferson, I am sure you will guess.’
‘Oh, from the Loire too, I do not doubt.’
‘Ah, what pleasure it is to entertain a true savant,’ Condorcet cackled. The Inspector of the Royal Mint was leaning back in his chair now, the candles shining on his beaky nose and giving it a peculiar translucence. ‘Yes, it is a Pouilly, the unsmoked kind, always to be preferred with any fish worth eating, the other sort drowns the taste so.’
‘How lucky Condorcet is,’ grumbled Madame Suard, ‘he eats like a pig and drinks like a fish but he never gets fat. Look, see how your master is falling for La Grouchette. You Americans have no taste at all.’
Mr Jefferson, being a minister plenipotentiary, was seated next to his hostess. His face too shone in the candlelight as he bent forward to talk to her, his head a little to one side as was his way when making up to a pretty woman.
‘He is probably discussing constitutions, he usually does when he meets a woman for the first time. It’s his way of breaking the ice.’
‘Oh, then he will surely find his way to her heart. She is quite a bluestocking. She tells me that she intends to help her husband with his speeches in the Assembly, ha.’ There was satisfaction as well as bitterness in her laugh at the thought of Condorcet, who was notoriously fussy about his prose, fending off his wife’s interpolations.
‘Will you tell us, please, Monsieur Condorcet’ – it was Franklin’s grandson, young Bache, asking in his slow French the sort of question that Americans always asked – ‘what does the Assembly intend to do about titles of nobility?’
‘It will abolish them of course,’ said the Inspector with some asperity, this being a subject he had not himself chosen to
introduce into the conversation.
‘I can assure you, sir, that this news will give a fair deal of satisfaction to the good folks back home. We’ll all be right behind you there.’
‘That is most agreeable to hear,’ said Condorcet, not sounding agreeable at all.
‘So you yourself will, pardon me for asking, you will no longer be the Marquis de Condorcet but plain Mr, sorry, Citizen, that’s right isn’t it, Citizen Carabas?’
‘Caritat. In fact no.’
‘No, sir?’
‘We have no intention of forcing persons to abandon the names by which they have become known. So long as there is no question of asserting any seigneurial distinction, one may continue to use any name one chooses on one’s seal or the livery of one’s servants. To avoid embarrassment or confusion I shall continue to call myself Condorcet, since it is the name under which I have, I fancy, achieved some modest renown as a mathematician and philosopher.’
‘Really, is that so? Thank you, sir, that is most illuminating,’ said young Mr Bache, his last words dwindling to a whisper as he retired in confusion.
On the other side of the table, three or four chairs beyond Wm, there was a minor commotion as a skinny young man struggled to his feet. He was struggling because old Suard, still with a foxy grin on his face, was trying to hold him down in his seat.
‘No, we must do it, I insist,’ the skinny young man spluttered. Suard gave up trying to suppress him and sat back in his seat with an amused shrug.
‘We must all drink a toast,’ the skinny young man shouted. ‘Down with tyrants!’
Most of the guests in his region of the table shuffled to their feet and obediently drank, mumbling ‘Down with tyrants’, some of them barely bothering to raise their glasses as though used to this kind of thing.
William looked up the table to where Mr Jefferson sat. Unlike his neighbours his master was standing stiffly to attention and raising his glass in a high solemn fashion.
The skinny young man – he could not have been more than twenty-two – looked along the table with a hunted glance as though expecting, perhaps inviting, a reprimand. Then, seeing no reproachful looks, he tapped his glass with his fruit knife and shouted in a much louder voice, ‘Down with kings!’
Again most of the company, with four or five exceptions, rose to their feet and made a show of draining their glasses, although by this stage quite a few of the glasses were already empty. Mr Jefferson was not among the exceptions. Although his glass too was empty, he raised it to his lips, after clearly enunciating the three words called for.
William stared at his master, astonished and not a little horrified. He knew that Mr Jefferson had no time for kings and in private conversation delighted to dwell upon the deplorable effects they had upon the moral tone of a nation, showing no hesitation in offering the character of His present Majesty as an example. According to TJ, Louis XVI was too small a man for the great role that history had thrust upon him: easily panicked, not over-bright in the head, inconstant, muddled, he could hardly have been a worse choice. The French nation would have done better to have gone out into the street and whistled up the first coachman and made him king instead.
Yet never had Mr Jefferson uttered a syllable of such views in any public forum. And here, after all, they were sitting in the King’s Mint at the table of his Inspector. It would surely be all over Paris before breakfast that the American Ambassador had drunk to the downfall of the court to which he was accredited. Was this the way to steady the ship in such stormy times?
But there was TJ, sitting as happy as a frog in a pond, whispering to La Belle Grouchette nothings that seemed to be growing sweeter by the minute, to judge by the way she tossed her tumbled hair and rapped Mr Jefferson’s knuckles with her fan.
Then Wm understood. TJ no longer cared, he did not give a damn, these were not his people, they could not vote him in or out, and he was going home to his own people who could and who might be tickled rather than annoyed if they should chance to hear that their man had drunk confusion to all kings. It was from that moment that Wm began to form the conclusion that not only was Mr Jefferson going home, he was not coming back.
And Wm was suddenly angry. This nonchalance was, well, it was too selfish, too preening. He did not fancy himself as a diplomatic personage, he had no training for it, he knew only what he had picked up as he went along. But surely there had to be some restraint.
He felt a tug at his sleeve. It was the Duke. He had come in late to dine and William had seen him, but they had not yet spoken.
‘Mr Short, William, I am so glad to see you. That was a stupid b-business, was it not. I would not wish you to think that it meant anything at all. I saw that you did not d-drink.’
‘Oh, the toast.’
‘Piece of n-nonsense, yes, but Condorcet should not have allowed it.’
‘As far as I could see, he had little choice in the matter.’
‘No, no, but it should not have happened. Did he drink himself; did you see whether he drank?’
‘No,’ Wm lied in the hope of calming the Duke. In fact, he had seen Condorcet knock back his glass with a gay cackle.
‘And Mr Jefferson? Did he drink? I am sure he did not.’
‘I think he was too much preoccupied with Madame Condorcet.’ Another lie and just as white a lie too. The Duke began to look less agitated, though his scar seemed still to throb in the candlelight.
‘Oh, Sophie, she is such a good person. We have known her since she was a little girl, you know. My m-mother is not best pleased with the match, she does not like her fledglings to spread their wings, though the Condor is rather too old a bird to be called a fledgling.’ He laughed in an agitated way, pleased to have made a joke without setting out to make one. ‘You must c-come to La Roche, it has been far too long. It will be our d-duty to console you after Mr Jefferson has gone.’
‘I fear I shall be—’
‘Very busy, yes, of course you will be. All the same, P-Paris is such a hothouse, one cannot think straight with all this going on. Besides, Rosalie would never forgive me if I f-failed to make you promise to come.’
The wound of rejection was still raw, yet the thought of going to La Roche again, the thought of her, was never quite out of his mind all that strange lonely autumn and winter, when nobody knew which way anything would turn out and the highest hopes were twined with the worst fears. Wm devoted himself to his work. He became a monk. Sitting at the desk TJ had left behind in the oval room, he toiled over his dispatches long into the night, resolving that his account of these tumultuous and tangled events should be as clear and dispassionate, yet as vivid and true to life, as any human being could make it. Nobody would be able to say in years to come that the American government was not furnished with the most accurate record. He would be the modern Thucydides.
He hoped against hope that the enslaved people of France – that was how Mr Jefferson thought of them and so did he – would somehow achieve the free government that was their right. He had hugged Johnny Rutledge for joy in the Roman ruins and he did not repent of that hug. When they dragged the King from Versailles to Paris and stuck Lafayette’s new red-white-and-blue cockade in the King’s hat, Wm’s heart was touched and he walked the length of the rue de Rivoli with that great hobbledehoy procession.
He was a witness to history. He had better things to do than run after a spoilt girl who wouldn’t know what the real thing was in a million years. If he took up that stammering old fool’s open invitation, she would think that she had him back on the string.
But then he thought again and knew there was nobody he would rather see in the world, whatever she thought of him now. Several times he began to write a little note to the Duke, then he tore it up. Once he began a note to her, then he remembered exactly what he had said to her on the day the Bastille fell and he tore that up too.
It was not until the first week in April that he found himself trotting along the old road by the Seine to La Roche-Guyon. Even the
n he felt that he was being drawn there against his will by some implacable mesmerist. To his embarrassment there was no stammering duke to greet him (he had to stay in Paris to battle with the Assembly over the Budget). There was only Rosalie standing at the gate of the courtyard and jumping up and down like a schoolgirl when she saw him come round the corner out of the village.
He had no idea what to expect from her. Yet from the moment they clasped hands he knew that it was going to be all right. It was as though all the intervening separations and misunderstanding and coolnesses had disappeared like morning dew and they were carrying on something that had started quite naturally from the time they first met.
And this was all the more intoxicating because La Roche-Guyon was in other ways oddly transformed, so that their broken, halting relationship now seemed like the one continuing thread. For one thing, Madame d’Enville was no longer in active charge. She was frailer now, kept to her room for longer periods of the day and went to bed earlier. When she did come down she no longer conducted the orchestra with her old imperious twinkle, but sat in her high-winged chair listening to rather than guiding the talk. And William, paying his first visit for a year or so, could not help noticing that the freedom they had once talked of in such high theoretical terms had now come to roost in little crannies of life at the chateau. He heard the servants gossiping among themselves as they brought in the dishes, something unthinkable before. One sunny morning he watched one of the old gardeners sitting on a bench at the end of the terrace munching his bread and cheese without a care for who might see him. Madame d’Enville’s guests too were less circumspect. There was an old Abbé he remembered from earlier visits who now sat out on the attic parapet to shave himself in the delicious spring air.
And Rosalie? The sense of release seemed to touch her too, though it was hard to say how exactly. After all, her grandmother had always loved to see her run about, more in the manner of a granddaughter than a daughter-in-law.
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