Jefferson (11 page)

“That is,” Adams said doubtfully, “more than a thousand English guineas.”

Jefferson nodded. By this time they were all at the door, James Hemings holding it wide, and following Franklin as he hobbled toward the hallway and the carriage entrance at the cul-de-sac. “Monsieur Houdon expects us this morning to discuss the arrangements for payment and also our preference for design.”

“I favor an equestrian statue,” Adams announced as they all climbed into Jefferson’s personal brougham, a black four-wheeler, newly purchased, furnished with a smooth, leather-covered interior and a gilt eagle on the door. “A statue of the general mounted on his horse would be appropriate, artistic.”

Franklin settled into his seat opposite Short, facing the horses, and smiled weakly through the pain of his stone. “Mr. Jefferson is going to take us to Houdon’s studio, I surmise, by way of a short, educational tour of Parisian statues. That way he can instruct us a little in our true preference.” He tilted his head toward Short as the carriage began to roll. “The world missed a great professor when Mr. Jefferson took to politics instead.”

Adams stroked his round little belly with both hands, as if it were a cat in his lap. “I pride myself on knowing a bit about statues,” he said.

“There is only one statue, in fact, that I hoped you would see.”
Jefferson balanced his letters on his lap and looked diplomatically from one to the other.

“Well,” Franklin said, closing his eyes. “Let me guess. Monsieur Houdon’s studio is on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, correct?”

“Nearby. The rue du Fondary.” The carriage had reached the corner of the Boulevard and with noisy shudderings begun to wade into traffic. “But I’ve asked the driver to go by way of the Place Louis XV.”

“Ah.” Franklin nodded, eyes closed. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Short thought. “Thomas, you outdo yourself. The king’s statue as a model for our great democrat. Subtler and subtler.”

The statue of the great king, when they came in sight of it, stood at the center of a vast gray-green cobblestone square, laid out between the Tuileries Gardens and the beginning of the grandiose new development called the Champs-Élysées. At Jefferson’s command the carriage rocked and swayed into a clockwise stream of horses and wheels. Jefferson leaned eagerly forward.

“This I propose as a general model,” he said over the noise.

Short squinted. Adams jostled impatiently against him. Jefferson, Short was convinced, would never need glasses; he had the serene, crinkled expression of an old Shenandoah hunter, and in fact his legendary father had been just that.

Adams found fault. “I don’t see anything remarkable. And what’s more, I can tell you Houdon didn’t carve it. It’s too old.”

They slowed, tilted, eddied near the statue. “No,” Jefferson agreed. “It was carved by Edme Bouchardon. And it is old. But what is remarkable to me is the size.”

Adams frowned, shook his head.

“It’s life size,” Franklin said suddenly, apparently opening his eyes for the first time. “By God, it’s life size, not oversize. I never saw that before.”

“Not quite,” Jefferson said. They were all crowding forward now, cranking the window down and peering at the statue. “I took its measurements one morning. Of all the equestrian statues in Paris, this is the only one that approaches human proportions. Even so, it’s impossible to find a point of view from which it doesn’t appear too large, even monstrous, unless you come back as far as we are, and then you lose sight of the actual features on the
head. A statue is not made, like a mountain, to be seen at a great distance.”

“You took its measures, tape and pencil in hand, I suppose.” Franklin was nodding and winking at Short, as if to say the man will fall into a lecture on
any
subject. Adams, who had no artistic interest whatsoever, was rubbing his jaw in an effort to find something to say.

“So I want to propose to Houdon,” Jefferson said, “a statue of General Washington on this scale, perhaps even smaller; and I need your support to persuade the Burgesses. What’s more, I want it to show him standing, not on a horse, simply standing alone on a marble base.”

The carriage bumped and plunged into a narrow street at the top of the square. “Well,” Adams said gravely, at last able to contribute something, “that will at least be cheaper.”

Like every middle-aged Frenchman Short knew, Jean-Antoine Houdon had a pretty young wife.

She received them at the door, curtsying, smiling, chirping like a bird, and they followed her through the hallway, through the kitchen, across the garden, and into a two-story detached building that served the great man as a studio. There Houdon himself greeted them, without a servant, standing cheerfully in the midst of an enormous (truly southern, Short thought) clutter.

He bowed first and formally to Franklin, whose bust he had done in 1778 and so fixed forever, in Short’s opinion, the old man’s image in American iconography. Then he wiped his hands on his white sculptor’s smock and shook hands with them each in turn, waving them forward one by one, in pantomime and broken English, toward a row of dusty chairs along one wall.

Wheezing, Franklin sat down. Jefferson, still in the middle of the room, gestured for Short to come forward as translator. Behind them Adams had begun to stroll among the statues, head cocked at a disapproving angle, his round belly, in the French expression, two steps ahead of the rest of him.

“You discover me,” Houdon said in slow, careful French, “at work on another foreign commission.” He raised one hand—the longest, whitest hand Short thought he had ever seen, like the
flipper of a huge fish—and indicated a boy posing on a foot-high wooden box. Short had actually not seen the model as they entered, so jammed was the studio with plaster and marble figures, blocks, torsos, busts, casting furnaces, tools, paintings. Now he and Jefferson both turned to examine the boy, who was naked except for a small linen cloth tossed strategically across his thigh. He sat on another box, arms wrapped around a wooden staff, gazing unconcernedly at the ceiling. In the manner of all French salons, Houdon had decorated every square foot of wall space with shelves of busts or triple or quadruple rows of frames and paintings. So many eyes gazed down on him that, for an instant, Short stiffened to address the jury.

“A Spartan lad,” Houdon was saying wistfully. “Sitting naked in the temple. Commissioned for the King of Prussia.”

“These are
our
official commissions,” Jefferson said. The King of Prussia’s explosive sexual habits were a subject all diplomats avoided. Jefferson presented Houdon with the bundle of papers and letters that Short had arranged and translated last night. The little sculptor motioned to another boy, this one fully clothed, who appeared to come suddenly to life like Pygmalion’s dream and step forward from yet another wall of statues.

Without even glancing down, Houdon extended the papers to him. The boy opened his mouth in a vast snaggle-toothed yawn, no longer mythological, but human, and looked squarely at Short, one attendant to another. Then he winked and ran from the room.

When Short turned back from him, Jefferson had already begun in his halting French to explain his ideas. The statue should be life size or a little larger. To take Washington’s exact measurements, it would be necessary for Houdon to travel, at Virginia’s expense, all the way to Mount Vernon. Jefferson himself preferred a pedestrian pose, with Washington either walking forward or his knee otherwise bent at an angle to the pedestal. Modern dress he thought much better than the usual Roman toga or indeterminate robe; the general should be depicted in his uniform, with epaulets visible but not distracting from his countenance.

Houdon listened attentively. They were an odd pair, Short thought, scribbling notes: the stocky little Frenchman with the thinning gray hair and square, bourgeois forehead, and the towering, aristocratic Jefferson, whose face, as always when he talked
about ideas, seemed animated like a girl’s. Short glanced at Adams. Franklin, old as he was, shared the same extraordinary capacity to be
interested
. It was the mark of the genuinely great; the two of them could discuss electricity, statuary, architectural design, printing types, the geometry of wigs—any subject whatsoever that touched on the material world. John Adams had nothing of their intellectual range. He had bought yards of landscape paintings for Auteuil, but simply to please Abigail, he grumbled—you can see the sky and the hills anytime you want, he had informed Short; you just open your door and look outside. Adams had no interest in science. His mind was emotional and unpredictable and really quite limited. Out of the corner of his eye Short saw him now scowling at a small nude Diana made of bronze. As Houdon’s beautiful young wife came through the door bearing a tray of wine and glasses, Short found himself first glancing at the plump, tremulous figure she casually revealed; then thinking with something like horror: of the two of them, Adams and Jefferson, his own mind was far more like Adams’s.

The “certain project” Jefferson had mentioned was in fact a secret.

Three hours after they had entered Houdon’s studio, Short found himself on the other side of Paris, alone in the printing shop of a stub-necked, square-jawed Frenchman named Philippe-Denys Pierres, whose window looked squarely out on the rue Saint-Jacques, in plain sight of the two black towers of Notre-Dame.

“You are too late,” Pierres said rudely, taking up a position behind his table and studying Short’s coat and trousers. By contrast with Houdon’s cluttered atelier, this room was a model of Jeffersonian neatness. Presses, tables, cabinets, box after wooden box of inky types: everything had a place, every possible flat space was cleared for work. By contrast with Houdon’s serious friendliness, Pierres’s rudeness was—French, Short thought.

“And you are too well-dressed by far to do this business, Monsieur Short.”

Short placed his hat on a stool and pulled out his watch. Pierres unfolded Jefferson’s letter and read it again. “He says you are to
correct the first twenty sheets here in my shop.” He turned the letter over and then turned it face up again, scowling.

“Queries one through five,” Short told him in what he knew was impeccable French. “I can work at one of your excellent tables or”—he pointed toward the door to an inner room from which the heavy thump of a press could be heard—“I can stand directly beside the pressman.”

“Written in English,” Pierres muttered, shaking his head. “Is he coming, too, the author?”

Short flipped up the gold hunter’s disk on his watch and rationed out one crisp, ingratiating smile to the printer. “Ambassador Jefferson will call for me in his carriage at five, exactly two hours from now.”

“Much too soon,” Pierres snapped, and reached under his table for a wrapped bundle.

The first printed page was simple:
Notes on the state of Virginia
, without the author’s name or the date. Short checked the spelling, drew three lines under the “s” of
state
to indicate a capital, and turned to the next sheet, the table of contents. Why Jefferson must be so secretive about the book Short had no idea—not a word had he breathed to Adams, or even to Franklin—but then, Jefferson’s motives often remained mysterious to him, no matter how innocent the “project.” He is the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, Franklin had told him, smiling (himself, Short thought, not always the soul of penetrability).

He picked up the third sheet.

Below it Jefferson’s answer began in straightforward, fact-laden prose: “Virginia is bounded on the East by the Atlantic: on the North by a line of latitude, crossing the Eastern Shore through Watkins’s Point.…” So far as Short could see,
Notes on Virginia
amounted to nothing more than a two-hundred-page anatomy of Virginia’s geography and natural history. A modest questionnaire, Jefferson had called it two days ago, when he had spread the manuscript across his desk, to arrange for the printer. On one side the twenty-three precise queries that the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois,
secretary of the French Legation, had sent Jefferson from Philadelphia, during the last months he was Governor of Virginia. On the other side, clipped in order, Jefferson’s neat handwritten answers. Short paused at a paragraph giving the exact latitude and longitude of Mason and Dixon’s Line and made a mental calculation. Marbois had returned to France in early 1781. So Jefferson must have written out his answers while he sat all summer in the long, miserable retreat at Poplar Forest, after the disastrous flight over Carter’s Mountain.