Jefferson (30 page)

By some species of telepathy—or Mesmerism—that Short had never fathomed, James Hemings appeared in the study bearing a tray of glasses and a decanter of red wine. While he laid them out on a cleared table by Jefferson’s chair, Jefferson talked easily, serenely to Clérisseau. Short’s eye went down the list of corrections on the sheet of paper he still held. Soulé’s page numbers, followed by a sentence or two in Jefferson’s microscopic handwriting.

“You have finally become, my dear sir,” Clérisseau joked, hefting both volumes of Soulé’s
Histoire
in his hands, “European. You dwell in the past.”

“The vaunted scene of Europe.” Jefferson shook his head, smiling, and gestured to the chair opposite his. From some prick of impulse Short remained at the desk, sorting papers. “It is—seductive. But I don’t dwell in the past. No American does.”

“You know, you’ve never told me your impressions,” Clérisseau said, “despite all our conversations. You are always on your guard to spare my feelings. But I see, I observe. You throw yourself into our art, our music, even
la cuisine française
—tell me frankly, are you not converted? Are you not
happy
?”

Jefferson turned the stem of his wineglass so that it just caught the glow of the whale-oil lamp behind him. A floating crescent of red. James Hemings was a shadow in shadows; Short scarcely saw him leave the room.

“You wish me to be frank,” Jefferson said. “You’re curious to know how this new scene has struck a savage from the mountains of America.” A quick, unreadable smile in Short’s direction. “To be truthful, then, I find the general fate of humanity here most deplorable. I think often of the truth of Voltaire’s observation, that every man in this country must be either the hammer or the anvil. Or since it is Sunday evening, I will vary the image: Europe seems to me a true picture of that country to which they say we shall pass hereafter, and where we are to see God and his angels in splendor, and crowds of the damned trampled under their feet.”

Clérisseau frowned and crossed his legs. Daringly: “You went to the Bagatelle this afternoon, I think?”

Jefferson leaned forward. “Mrs. Cosway and I did tour that
exquisite château and garden—you know, in your arts, in your music, painting, building, I am almost ready to say it is the one thing which from my heart I envy. In spite of all the authority of the Decalogue, I do covet your art. But—and here is the other side of the coin—last autumn about this time of year I had to attend the king’s levee in Fontainebleau. In the afternoon I wanted to see the countryside, so I set out on one of my walks, toward the mountains, and after an hour or so I met a peasant woman on the path. She pointed me in the direction I wanted, and we talked for a time. She told me she was a day laborer at eight sous per day; she had two children to maintain; rent for her cottage was thirty livres a year—that is, she had to work seventy-five days a year to pay it—and that often she could get no work, none at all, for days at a time. Then she was completely without bread, as were her children. Since we had walked together almost a mile, I thanked her for serving as my guide and gave her twenty-four sous. Will you believe, my dear sir, that she burst into tears of gratitude? She could not utter a single word. She had probably never before received such a sum. In such conditions art is truly a bagatelle, a ‘trifle,’ for an afternoon, when the bulk of mankind in this country live in such perpetual and squalid misery.”

Clérisseau had ceased to pull at his moustache. “Well, you said you would be frank.”

Jefferson now leaned back so far in his chair that his shoulders slouched and his long legs almost obscured his face. He made a little deprecating gesture with his wineglass. “I think that reading Soulé’s history puts me in mind of home. I may confuse frankness and warmth.”

Clérisseau glanced over his shoulder. “Our friend Short is uncharacteristically silent. What does he think?”

Short shook his head firmly. What he thought first was that his hand itched to record in his journal every word Jefferson had just spoken; and second, that Jefferson’s mind must be composed of a dozen separate locked compartments, as a house is composed of separate rooms. Not a reference to his daughter’s deep anger, to the delicate question of Mr. and Mrs. Cosway, to the presence of his mulatto slave, a living symbol of the hammer and anvil, now back and refilling obediently each of their glasses.
Sans serveurs,
avec esclaves
. Aloud, he said, “Comparisons, the poet tells us, are always odorous.”

Jefferson laughed and shifted comfortably in his chair. “Mr. Short is already further schooled in diplomacy than I am.”

“He showed me today, at the Palais Royal, a copy of your bill for religious freedom.”

“My friend Madison saw it through the Assembly in Virginia,” Jefferson said modestly.

“But you were its author?”

The Roman asserted his presence. Jefferson lifted his sharp profile and nodded once, impressively. “I hope to see it distributed widely in Europe, and widely discussed. I think it might produce considerable good.”

“Because we Europeans are so mired in superstition.”

Jefferson’s eyes were on his books. “If the Almighty had begotten a thousand sons instead of one,” he said, addressing neither Clérisseau nor Short, “they would not have sufficed to free these countries from their present ignorance and superstition.”

“Mr. Jefferson,” Clérisseau said sardonically, looking at Short, “is much given to hyperbole.”

On the steps of the house, leading down to the rue de Berri, Clérisseau paused and waited for the carriage that was to carry him back to the Louvre. “You ought to have stayed with me this afternoon to see Cosway’s paintings,” he told Short.

The younger man shrugged. He had come down to wait with him out of politeness. But his mind was full of what Jefferson had said, his mild answer to Clérisseau’s sarcasm: The American people were the first and last experiment in true liberty; thus far the intervention of a wide ocean had kept them uncontaminated by European vice; they stood now on a high ground of common sense and happiness. But the only sure foundation for their future was knowledge; education alone would keep the common people free. Gently, he had laid his long fingers on Clérisseau’s wrist. Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance, he had said; in this dangerous world knowledge alone protects us.

“Look at this.” Clérisseau’s voice still had a sardonic, knowing
edge. He held out his palm. In the faint light of the door lamp Short saw a square enameled snuff box half the size of a coffee cup. The outside was covered in thin silver filigree of a typically English design.

“When Cosway is not occupied with his portrait commissions, he told me that he likes to decorate the inside of these boxes, for his friends.” Clérisseau flipped the lid with his thumb and held the box high in the light. Short’s vision transformed the painted inner lid into a blur of colors. He twisted his head slightly to focus. The lid showed a conventional English pastoral; he could make out a delicately painted tree, a blue-green hillside and a stream, a woman on her hands and knees, wearing nothing but a pink corset, and behind her, advancing, a man with an enormous naked member; in front her red mouth closed around another, its owner’s back arched in pleasure.

“It crosses one’s mind to ask,” Clérisseau said with his usual dry mockery, “do you think our friend inside would recognize the model?”

Short found his tongue. “That is
not
Maria Cosway.”

“Ah, well.” Clérisseau took one last look, then snapped the lid shut. “As to that, dear Guillaume, neither you nor I could truly say.”

Memoirs of Jefferson
—
6

A
LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: THOMAS JEFFERSON
could not endure his mother.

No one acquainted with his history could seriously dispute it. In the impenetrably smooth Virginia manner, of course, which places the golden calf of Courtesy on every domestic altar, you can always find someone to describe Jane Randolph Jefferson as mild, gentle, perpetually sweet of temper, the ideal colonial wife and mother, beloved of her family. But I knew Jefferson all together for more than forty years; in Paris I lived intimately with him for five. I have arranged and sorted his private papers, kept his accounts; in recent months interviewed (subtly, subtly) his oldest friends. In all the thousands of sheets of paper he has preserved and I have seen, his mother appears only three times. In all our thousands of hours of conversation, I never once heard him speak her name.

Reference one. At the start of 1770, when Jefferson was twenty-seven and still living mostly at home with her in Shadwell,
he wrote his friend John Page a long letter containing, in the middle, a laconic announcement:

Not a word about
her
loss,
her
cost: only “my mother’s house,” faintly chilling. When the fire destroyed his books, he had already begun building his own house ten miles away at Monticello, where Jane Jefferson would never live; as soon as a room was habitable he moved in; his mother remained with friends.

More chilling: on March 31, 1776—the great year of the great Declaration—Jefferson entered a single terse sentence in his pocket account book. Reference two: “My mother died about eight o’clock this morning, in the 57th year of her age.” And to her brother William, then living in England, he wrote offhand and brusquely a month or two later (reference three), not even using her name: “The death of my mother you have probably not heard of. This happened on the last day of March after an illness of not more than an hour. We supposed it to have been apoplectic.” More emotion comes through when he writes about the death of a horse or a slave. (Is this coldness of mother and son a Virginian trait? George Washington’s mother denounced her son publicly during the Revolution—
he gives me no money
, she complained to Congress,
he lets me starve
.) Nevertheless, at the beginning of April 1776, a few days after Jane Randolph Jefferson’s death, a few months before the final convulsive separation of colony and mother country, which he had long been demanding, Jefferson fell into another of his strange sunrise-to-sunset “megrim” headaches, bedridden and paralyzed for nearly three weeks of pain, just as he did later when Banastre Tarleton chased him off his mountain, just as he did when his infant daughter died—as if his heart had climbed up and taken revenge on its cool, tyrannical head.