Jefferson (34 page)

Jefferson threw back his head and laughed.

“Like a sack of feathers!” Maria said. “He carried her all the way down the street and out of sight. The ‘silliest’ thing I’ve seen.”

Still laughing, Jefferson stood and took her arm. At the last sight in the garden, an ice house shaped like an opaque glass pyramid and filled at this time of year with nothing but damp straw, he bought her tea from an old woman and presented her, from his pocket, a little sketchbook and pencil to use in her art—but only on American subjects, he cautioned, when she came to visit him (with Richard) at Monticello and could draw the Natural Bridge, the Falling Spring, the sublime passage of the Potomac through the western Blue Mountains.

Maria listened, smiling. In her imagination she pictured a scene like Italy, populated with cypresses and animal stockades and tall, glowing churches whose heavy doors slammed shut behind her.

In the carriage she resolved to tell him that she was truly Catholic, that foolish and sinful as it seemed, she still dreamed of being a nun. Hadn’t she begun life by almost becoming a martyr? Therefore—But her hands had started to tremble again, like frightened birds, and she shoved them away, into the blue recesses of her skirt. Jefferson took her right hand and stroked it into stillness. You would have needed a heart blinder than stone, she thought, not to know what lay in the air between them.

He studied her fingers and spread them one by one in her lap. “I’ve sent for my daughter Polly,” he said, pretending to measure and count her rings while he talked. Why did he think her hands trembled? She was a married woman, her husband wore absurd silk coats. “But my sister delays and delays and puts me off, and to tell the truth I fear a sea voyage for her almost as much as I do leaving her over there, in Pennsylvania, to grow up without me.”

“You are very lonely then?”

When he looked up, Jefferson’s smile had become tender, melancholy. “This is not a world to live at random in. Everything is a matter of calculation. The art of life is the art of avoiding pain. Am I happier to leave her an ocean away, safe with another person? Or to risk everything and bring her to me? The Head and the Heart are always locked in combat, you see.”

“I am not at all clear,” Maria said boldly, “that we are speaking of Polly.” But she spoiled the effect of boldness by turning away
quickly toward the green-and-brown blur of the flying landscape, so that she was not even certain that he had heard her.

At the inn of the Trois Couronnes, a mile or so past Marly, Jefferson had arranged a dinner for them, the dinner of his engraved invitation—his servant Petit, in fact, had traveled out separately, supervised the table, and then melted away discreetly as they entered their private dining room.

The windows opened onto a meadow, and beyond the green band of its horizon a careful eye could just make out the six pointed rooftops of Louveciennes, a casino built years ago for the old king’s greedy mistress Madame du Barry.

“Say nothing in criticism of its architecture,” Jefferson joked, offering her a glass of the sparkling white wine Petit had poured. “A king’s mistress has royal powers. Do you know that old man DeLatude who comes to take soup with me sometimes?”

Maria shook her head. Among the many contradictions of Jefferson’s character was his habit of talking to workers or peasants—his lanky aristocratic figure literally stooping to hear them—or inviting odd, rather disreputable figures into his home.

“DeLatude spent thirty-five years in the Bastille and the dungeons at Vincennes, and that for the sole crime of making four verses on Madame de Pompadour. I remember the verses:

‘Without wit, without sentiment, without beauty or youth, in France one may still have the greatest lover; Pompadour proves it.’ He escaped three times and wrote his memoirs.”

“You like a rebel,” she said.

He poured more wine into her glass. “Dr. Franklin was once playing chess with Madame Helvétius, and happening to place her in checkmate, he reached across the board and snatched her king away, quite gleefully. ‘In France we don’t take kings in that way,’ she told him. ‘In America,’ he replied, laughing, ‘we do.’ ”

At table, with the window to her left, the soft rolling landscape
in a golden twilight, she could see past his shoulders to the private staircase that led to the second floor of the inn; her portmanteau had long ago disappeared with the coachman.

“I think,” he said, spooning a delicate sauce, pink and rich, to cover the fish on her plate, “that I have now quoted poetry twice in one day—something I must not have done since I was a student at William and Mary College hundreds of years ago.” In the candles’ light his fair skin had taken on a reddish flush; his hands, she saw with surprise, now trembled as much as hers. “You paint, you sing, you restore a friend’s youth. How can there be any contest between Head and Heart?”

Maria seemed to float above herself, a cloud looking down on dolls at play.

“You are a famous statesman,” she blurted out, to the last a creature of tremulous impulse, not knowing why she said it.

“What I have become,” Jefferson said, and afterward, recalling his tone of voice, the intensity of his face lowering toward hers, she understood he was making a gift of himself, exposing himself; she was certain he had not spoken to anyone else like this, not even his wife, not ever his wife. “What I have become,” he said, “the times made me become.” Like her, he made no move to taste his food. “As a young man I thought of myself as a poet and scholar. I read and wrote twenty hours a day, I breathed literature. I wanted only to live on my mountaintop surrounded by my family, reading and farming. I gave up the practice of law when I was very young; I had no ambition beyond my books and my home. If the Revolution had not come, and duty, duty—shall I tell you what I think? I think politics has distorted my nature. Politics has made me retire within myself, defensively, all the while I stand publicly open to every gaze. I cannot bear to stand up in public, I cannot bear to be seen as I really am, except by the eye of friendship.”

She felt herself moved by every word, every pulse of her heart. She wanted to repay him somehow by explaining that she too had not become what she should have been, her nature too had been distorted by the times—had her father not died, her four baby brothers, had her mother not sold her on the auction block of London society to the highest bidder, to Richard; her visions, her
belief were what lay at her core, and unlike him she could not make a gift of them.

“Then you
are
lonely” was all she could say.

Jefferson lifted her hand to his lips.

As they rose from the table, she remembered at last the name of the new church they had passed that morning in Paris: the Church of the Madeleine, named after a sinner.

He drew her toward the stairs.

“It’s much too late to be working,” Clérisseau said from the door.

Short jumped in his chair and dropped his pen. Beside Clérisseau, who was holding his gold watch up to his ear, James Hemings shrugged and made a Parisian moue of resigned annoyance. “I told him you said no visitors.”

Clérisseau snapped the watch shut and waved him away with effusive thanks. “He said you were writing, and I said that was preposterous. You Americans are always writing, you and Jefferson. I call it the American disease. Spillers of ink.
Furor scribendi
. I was traveling past, bored, nothing to do, so I appointed myself physician to scribbling Americans. Jefferson, by the way, has the ill manners not to be home yet.”

While he talked, Clérisseau strolled about Short’s sitting room, inspecting furniture, lifting curtains, running a finger across the marble mantelpiece over the fire. Now he stopped in front of the desk and raised one significant eyebrow at Short. With exquisite timing James reappeared, this time carrying a tray of brandy and glasses.

“A disciple of Hebe, cupbearer to the gods.” Clérisseau took the tray in his own hands. “Bless you.”

Short cleared a space on his desk and locked away his letters in a drawer. When he sat up again, Clérisseau had filled two snifters to the brim and James was just closing the door behind him.

“Is it true, my dear Guillaume, that in Virginia you give slaves the names of Greek and Roman gods?”

Short held the snifter under his nose and thought about the question. Beware of Frenchmen in ebullient moods. It was true, in fact, that at Monticello Jefferson had a trusted manservant named
Jupiter, and another one named Great George, sometimes called George the Ruler or King George by the family.

“Not true,” he said firmly.

“I don’t believe you.” Clérisseau pulled up a chair beside the desk. “What were you writing?”

“Letters. Dispatches. Business.”

Clérisseau twirled his own brandy under his unmistakably French nose, inhaled with his big eyes closed, then opened them and shook his head. “Because it would make a certain ironic sense, of course, to name the most powerless people after the most powerful. I am convinced that you do.”

“You yourself have been making the rounds of powerful people tonight. Or at least their tables.” Short indicated the wine stains on Clérisseau’s ruffled shirt.

“She’s not the model for his snuff boxes, you know.
Vous savez
. Our Maria.”

“I know.”

“But I enjoyed your expression when I said it. Do you know the other rumors? That Monsieur Monkey, her husband, is fond of men as well as women? I have it on the authority of d’Hancarville, our phallic expert. Or that the Prince of Wales seduced Mrs. Cosway—as who could blame him? that halo of golden curls, those ribbons!—seduced her and had a secret passage built between her house and his palace. The monkey was rather proud.”

“Clérisseau, it’s late.” Short’s own watch lay face-up on the desk, hunting case open, hands pointing to half past ten. He turned it for the Frenchman to read.

“And finally, in London she tells five hundred intimate friends that she secretly longs to be a nun. She intends one day to enter a convent in Italy. By a secret passage, I suppose.”

Short rubbed his hands across his face. Even through his closed windows he could hear the rumble of wagon wheels at the Grille de Chaillot and nearby, in Jefferson’s garden, the song of a bird that he had recently learned to identify as the nightingale, unknown in America, the staple of every French love poem.

“Jefferson has spent the day with her, yes?”

Short was impatient. He waved the question away.

“The ways of Paris conduce,” Clérisseau said blandly, refilling his snifter. “Is that an English word? Conduce?”

“ ‘Are conducive to,’ ” Short said.

“Yes. The ways of Paris are conducive to pleasure between men and women. Even scribbling Americans might notice. There is the king and his mistress to set an example, of course. The Marquis de Lafayette and his squadrons of ladies, Talleyrand and the delightful Madame de Flahaut, whom you certainly must meet—her mother was a royal mistress before her, it’s rather by way of being a family career. In Paris we think in terms of scandal, which is entertaining, but not shame, which would be frivolous.”

“C’est bien la vie sportive,” Short said, managing to his ear a reasonable semblance of Parisian nonchalance.

“And how is our charming friend the Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld?” Clérisseau asked.

Short choked on his brandy.

“If I were about to leave,” Clérisseau said, grinning, “instead of staying to finish my drink and greet Jefferson, I would depart with a wonderful exit line. Do you know the great
mot
of Beaumarchais? ‘To drink when we are not thirsty and make love in every season—Madame, these are the only things that distinguish us from the animals.’ ”

He raised his glass.

J
ames Hemings remembered an excellent sentence in one of his books: “Les rues sont l’image du chaos.” The streets are the picture of chaos.

Swaying, he gripped the smooth iron shaft of the streetlamp and stared through the crowd at the butcher. If you stayed up by Jefferson’s house and the Boulevards, you never saw anything like this. You saw animals, of course, horses and oxen and little herds of fat white French cattle being driven through the streets, shitting and bellowing and knocking down fences and walls; you saw horses racing full speed over the pavement, huge dogs in front of carriages clearing the way, poultry, geese, wagons full of rabbits and ducks in cages. But in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel you saw life the way it was, coming apart in bright red explosions of blood.