But what about Thomas Woodson Hemings? If he was Sally’s son, then he was conceived in Paris. And his mother, barely sixteen years old at the time, is known to have been in two places and two places only during the period in which his conception must have occurred: either waiting on Patsy and Polly at the Abbaye de Panthémont, where the girls were under the strictest possible supervision, or at the Hôtel de Langeac, which was a surprisingly small town house and, so far as we know, contained at the time only two young men: Sally’s brother James, the minister’s cook, and William Short – the only European around. So William becomes the obvious candidate for father of Thomas Woodson. For two centuries he has escaped being so fingered, I believe, only because he is not one-hundredth as famous as Thomas Jefferson.
If William was indeed Thomas’s father, then again Jefferson would have wished to keep the matter dark and avoid any scandal that might injure the chances of his protégé. So would William, assuming that he ever knew Sally had borne him a child. Neither man would have dreamed of mentioning the matter in their letters when Jefferson was back in America, since the mails were so avidly read by spies and censors.
If you want any further pointers, consider the strong and surprising tradition that Sally had been reluctant to return to the United States with her master. She was pregnant, unmarried, very young and, as far as we can tell, knew little or no French. Why on earth would she wish to stay behind in Paris unless it was to be with the father of her child? And who else was remaining at the legation but William Short?
Finally and rather sadly, why should William be so reluctant for the rest of his life to visit his ageing patron and adopted father at Monticello? Yes, the older he became, the more this lifelong ami des noirs kept to the northern states, hating to see the despicable institution of slavery in action. But how much more sickened might he have been to be reminded of the consequence of his own actions?
Debts and Farewells
The Condor’s head still stares down in chilly disdain on the proceedings of the American Philosophical Society in its fine old red-brick house in Philadelphia’s Independence Park. Along with Greuze’s poignant portrait of Benjamin Franklin in old age, it made an excursion in October 1997 to a little exhibition at the Frick Collection in New York. The exhibition catalogue (Franklin and Condorcet, Philadelphia, 1997) contains Johanna Hecht’s first-rate account of how the bust came to Philadelphia via William Short and his little Duchess. Since 1952 the American Philosophical Society has also sheltered the extraordinary letters between William and Rosalie, the vast majority from her to him in her firm neat hand in ink that has faded to the colour of old blood (most of his to her were burnt during the Revolution – to her great chagrin, as we have seen). Thus the head is no longer separated from the documents of the heart which brought it to Philadelphia. The correspondence has never been published in English (the translations are mine), though a selection was published in French, edited by Doina Pasca Harsanyi (Paris, 2001).
William Short never threw away a scrap of paper or an account book. The huge bulk of his papers is shared between the Library of Congress and his old university, William and Mary in Williamsburg. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania down the road from the head also has valuable Short material in the Gilpin and Dreer collections. I am very grateful to the Librarians of these institutions for allowing me to consult their collections. There is no trace left of the addresses on Walnut Street where William first lodged and in his last years built his own house.
For the story of William’s life, the pioneer was Marie G. Kimball, ‘Jefferson’s Only Son’, North American Review 133 (September 1926, pp. 471–86). This is largely superseded by the only full-length biography, the invaluable Jefferson’s Adoptive Son, the Life of William Short, 1759–1848, by George Green Shackelford (Kentucky, 1993). For William’s earlier affair with Lilite, see Yvon Bizardel and Howard C. Rice’s ‘Poor in love Mr Short’, William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 21 (1964) pp. 516–33. The same volume also contains Arthur Schlesinger’s fascinating little note, ‘The lost meaning of “the Pursuit of Happiness”’ (pp. 325–7). Notable portraits of William are by Rembrandt Peale (College of William and Mary, 1803), and in old age by John Neagle (Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1839). Bizardel and Rice, like Doina Pasca Harsanyi, assume that no serious relationship with Rosalie developed until after William’s return from Italy in May 1789. This cannot be right. As early as 1787 Madame de Tessé was criticising William’s over-frequent visits to the Hôtel de la Rochefoucauld. And the repeated references in the letters between Jefferson and Short during William’s Grand Tour show beyond a doubt how tense the matter had become and how hugely relieved Jefferson was to pack Short off to the south and then to hear that the affair had ostensibly come to an end (see in particular the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 13, p. 636 and vol. 14, p. 43 and pp. 276–7). Even Shackelford, who does not make this mistake, seems oblivious of the enormous strains caused by the great length of the courtship, from their first meeting in July 1785 to the consummation a full five years later.
What we know of William’s life in Paris outside the great love affair of his life comes largely from his correspondence with his employer Thomas Jefferson, when one or other of them was away on his travels. All those letters and a great deal more are preserved in the magnificent Papers of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Julian P. Boyd et al., 31 vols, Boston, 1940–. These volumes, more than the six volumes of Dumas Malone’s monumental biography, Jefferson and His Times (Boston, 1948–81), give a marvellous picture both of Jefferson himself in all his vigour, curiosity, benevolence, nobility and blindness, and of his young secretary, cool, diligent, ambitious, both hard-headed and sentimental. For Jefferson in Paris, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson by William Howard Adams (Yale, 1997) is superbly complemented by Howard C. Rice’s lavishly illustrated Thomas Jefferson’s Paris (Princeton, 1976).
There is no need to list here all the general histories of the French Revolution from Thomas Carlyle and Albert Sorel, through Richard Cobb and Georges Lefebvre to Simon Schama and François Furet, but certain biographies of leading figures should be acknowledged: Condorcet Un Intellectuel en politique by Elisabeth and Robert Badinter (Paris, 1988), Lafayette by Michael de la Bedoyere (1933) and Saint-Just by Norman Hampson (Oxford, 1991). The liberal aristocrats who did so much to engineer the French Revolution and shape the later French Republics have been largely erased from history. Conor Cruise O’Brien, for example, in The Long Affair conflates the two La Rochefoucauld Dukes, both pivotal figures. They are among those commemorated in Boniface de Castellane’s somewhat old-fashioned Gentilhommes Démocrates (Paris, 1891). Otherwise one must rely on the equally creaky Biographie Universelle, which is not a patch on the DNB. I must also mention the memorable account of August 1792 in François de La Rochefoucauld’s Souvenirs du 10 août 1792 et de l’armée de Bourbon (1929). Further information on Marie Antoinette’s last days is to be found in Antonia Fraser’s life. The details of Condorcet’s last days come from the meticulously recorded official depositions. For Josephine and her court the best sources are Madame de Rémusat’s Mémoires 1802–08 and the many biographical studies by Frédéric Masson and Joseph Turquan, especially Masson’s Madame Bonaparte 1796–1804 and Impératrice et Reine 1804–09.
For other Americans in Paris, there is Gouverneur Morris’s remarkable Diary of the French Revolution (2 vols, Boston, 1939) and John Paradise and Lucy Ludwell of London and Williamsburg by Archibald B. Shepperson (Richmond, 1942). For Gouverneur’s life, there is Richard Brookhiser’s Gentleman Revolutionary (New York, 2003). The best biography of Anton Mesmer is by D. M. Walmsley (1967), but a fuller picture of the whole story is given in The Evolution of Hypnotism by Derek Forrest (Forfar, 1999). The clearest introduction to the Physiocrats is The Economics of Physiocracy by Ronald L. Meek (1962).
For the architecture of the time, Anthony Vidler’s Architecture de C. N. Ledoux (Paris, 1983) provides a good conspectus of that extraordinary fantas
ist of the rational. Four of his customs pavilions survive: the rather lumpy pairs at the place de la Nation and the place Denfert-Rochereau, both sets swamped by traffic, the Rotonde de la Villette off the place Stalingrad, Ledoux at his purest neoclassical and now a haunt of dossers, and, the prettiest of the four, the Pavillon de Chartres, a charming little kiosk at the entrance to the Parc Monceau, which doubles as a public toilet. The Désert de Retz caught my fancy in John Harris’s account in his memoirs of trespassing there (Echoing Voices, 2002), but it had been first introduced to English readers by Osvald Siren in his trailblazing article in the Architectural Review (November 1949). Diana Ketcham provides an up-to-date account of the Désert’s history and present fortunes in Le Désert de Retz (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). At the time of writing, the whole demesne is closed behind high walls and fences awaiting further restoration and the resolution of a legal dispute. For a closer acquaintance with its mysterious magic and for a great deal else on this and other excursions I have to thank my wife Julia who showed me the way over the fence.
The chateau of La Roche-Guyon is still in the family. It belongs to the descendants of the Liancourt Duke, since his cousin had no children by either of his wives. There is not much to see inside except the usual crappy videos. The young American who spent the best years of his long life there is not mentioned. But you can still look out from the terrace to the meandering Seine, over Rosalie’s Jardin Anglais, now nicely replanted. And you can still climb the twisting chalky stairway to the old fortress.
Wm is far away in Laurel Hill cemetery overlooking the wooded cliffs of the Schuykill river, a few miles upstream of the city of Philadelphia. It was on this stretch of the river that Thomas Eakins painted the scullers with their scarlet kerchiefs round their heads, here that Wizz did his coxing, here too that Grace Kelly’s brother Jack trained for Henley regatta where they barred him because he was only a bricklayer’s son from Philadelphia. William’s white tombstone is right by the cemetery fence, threatening to topple over into the traffic roaring along the freeway below, his situation as precarious in death as it so often was in life. The lettering on the tombstone is, like its occupant, almost effaced by the abrasions of time. But the curator of the cemetery kindly gave me a transcript of the inscription. What it says is:
Sacred to the memory of
William Short
Born at Spring Garden, Sussex County in Virginia
on the 30th day of September 1759
Died at Philadelphia on the 5th day of December 1849.
His life, public and private, was distinguished by ability, probity and industry never questioned. HE RECEIVED FROM PRESIDENT WASHINGTON WITH THE UNANIMOUS APPROVAL OF THE SENATE THE FIRST APPOINTMENT TO PUBLIC OFFICE CONFERRED UNDER THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES AND FROM PRESIDENT JEFFERSON, WHOSE AFFECTIONATE FRIENDSHIP HE ALWAYS LARGELY POSSESSED, PROOFS OF SIMILAR CONFIDENCE. These public trusts he always fulfilled with a sincere patriotism, a sagacious judgment and a moderation and integrity which deserved and assured success.
In private life which for many years he fondly coveted he was social, intelligent, generous and urbane.
Well, nothing untrue there, nothing too overblown, at least not by the standards of tomb talk. But don’t all those capital letters protest a little too much, as though there was after all something to hide? I wonder who wrote it. That phrase about fondly coveting private life surely has a touch of William himself. He would have taken a sardonic pleasure in composing his own epitaph. And he would not have wanted his disappointments to lie as heavy on him in death as they had in life: President Washington choosing cynical old Gouverneur Morris to supplant him in Paris, for example, or the Senate voting not to send him to Russia, or Mr Jefferson’s never really lifting a finger on his behalf, or Rosalie’s refusal to marry him and come to America, that above all. Certainly Philadelphia society would have been scandalised if there had been any mention here of Rosalie except as Mrs Wm Short. ‘For many years the devoted companion of the Duchess de La Rochefoucauld’? No, good heavens no. Even putting aside the flagrant and habitual adultery, not something to be lightly put aside on Society Hill, Philadelphia did not have much truck with duchesses in any shape or form. So there William reposes in solitary eternal eminence. Far below him the scullers with their headbands still skim along the ravelled waters dreaming, if they dream at all, of Thomas Eakins or Grace Kelly and not of William Short.
Ferdinand Mount
London, 2006
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