Jefferson (37 page)

On the twenty-eighth of September, ten full days after the accident, Jefferson’s wrist had still failed to heal. Short walked through a rank of French dignitaries, most of them dressed in a dazzling show of wigs and ribbons and brilliantly colored regimental jackets, explaining to them for the sixth, tenth, twentieth time that Jefferson’s injury was indeed grave—“très, très pénible”—and regrettably prevented the ambassador’s appearing before them.

Secretly, Short thought (he moved to the top of the wooden platform built specially for the occasion and tucked his hat under his arm), secretly he believed that Jefferson’s dislike of public speaking had kept him at home quite as much as the broken wrist.

“Monsieur Chort!” the herald announced.

Short took his place next to Lafayette on the crowded platform. (“I am not yet twenty-nine years old,” Lafayette whispered to him in French, bending very close and breathing some foul combination of perfume and clove into Short’s face.)

“Nor am I,” Short said. A military band was marching into the great hall of the Hôtel de Ville, drums rattling. He deliberately looked away from Lafayette, whose enormous teeth were now fixed in a perpetual grin. In fact, it was only three days ago, while he copied down Jefferson’s dictated letter of presentation, that he had realized how young Lafayette was, how much (by comparison, for example, with a diplomat’s minor secretary) the Frenchman had genuinely accomplished already. Short bowed to Éthis de Corny and allowed himself a moment of conspicuous if false admiration for the bust, still covered at this point by a silken cloth, which he was about to present to the City of Paris on behalf of the State of Virginia.

“My wife, my aunt, my sisters and cousins,” Lafayette hissed in his ear, and as he raised his head, Short saw them all, standing in the first row of guests, beaming up at the boy-patriarch like a box
of flowers. He had begun to look around (cynically) for Lafayette’s two Iroquois retainers as well when the band struck up an anthem. The mayor stepped forward.

It was, Short later admitted, a truly grand occasion, though no one in the room except himself knew how much it owed to Jefferson’s tireless diplomatic maneuverings, from the first hint of the idea to the Virginia legislature to the last, nearly comic negotiations on his sickbed with the representatives of the king, including the popeyed
éminence blanche
Rayneval himself. No small thing, after all, to present a statue of a military hero who had helped overthrow a king to the hero’s own rather suspicious, certainly unpopular monarch. More practical by far, Jefferson had said ironically, to give Lafayette a tract of land in Virginia, which he might need one day as a refuge from said king.

When the mayor—inexplicably titled prévôt des marchands, provost of merchants—motioned Short forward, Lafayette clapped him on the shoulder and, contrary to all protocol, advanced as well, taking a place directly beside him, grinning and smoothing constantly his bright red general’s tunic (like a blazing pineapple, Short thought). In his best French, Short read aloud Jefferson’s flowery letter of presentation, the band broke into another anthem and marched around the platform, and Éthis de Corny, Jefferson’s friend and Lafayette’s former commander, replied on behalf of France, declaring in a voice that rang through the crowded hall that even the ancient republic of Rome would have been honored by such patriots as Washington, Franklin, Adams—he paused—and Jefferson. While the applause broke in wave after wave and the bust was formally unveiled, Short stood with his plumed hat under his arm, hand on the dress sword he had never drawn, and thought that Jefferson’s words, Jefferson’s irresistible phrases, had begun to color French speech as much as American. Only a fellow writer (though Short had written nothing) could appreciate the real Revolution here; the transformation of ideas through language, that had every mouth repeating “all men are created equal,” “the pursuit of happiness,” that made disobedience to kings into a civic virtue. Short glanced with sympathy toward Lafayette. Victories in battle were nothing compared to victories in language.

“Une nation libre!” de Corny concluded with a flourish. A free nation!

Afterward, having drunk far more champagne than was diplomatic, Short murmured a remark to de Corny (too loud, too
stupid
) that was to be quoted for weeks across Paris: I am persuaded on this happy day, Short said, toasting the hero’s wife, that Madame Lafayette did not receive more pleasure on the night of her marriage.

Early on the morning of October fifth, using only his left hand, Jefferson wrote out a brief note and handed it to James Hemings to deliver.

Within an hour James brought back an answer, which Short personally carried up to Jefferson’s sickroom.

And then, to the astonishment of everyone, the least impulsive man in Paris came down the stairs, fully dressed, calling loudly for his coachman.

He drove, Short afterward learned, straight to the Cosway residence on rue Coqhéron and, despite the great pain in his wrist (reset moments before by the surgeon), accompanied the two Cosways, their entourage of servants and baggage, and the heavily sighing Monsieur d’Hancarville in a crowded coach as far as the Porte Saint-Denis, where the travelers shifted to a touring carriage.

“The behavior,” Clérisseau commented cheerfully, “of a Frenchman, not an American. We have metamorphosed Monsieur Jefferson in record time. In a few years, who knows, he may become as gallant as Franklin.”

Short ran his finger over the files of correspondence that, as usual, he was sorting and arranging in Jefferson’s system, and debated whether to show it to Clérisseau.

“The picture I like best.” Clérisseau paused to raise the back of his hand to his nose and inhale a microscopic bit of snuff. It was a habit he had recently taken up, he said, to honor America. “I like the thought of the four of them crowded together in the carriage. No doubt the monkey-faced little husband sat facing the lover, knee to knee, sword to sword, while the lady blushed behind a mountain of white crinoline and Hancarville, poor Hancarville discoursed mile after mile on the antique prick.” Clérisseau made a face at the snuff and wiped his hand on his coat. “No doubt Jefferson told Cosway all men are created equal.”

Short tapped the letters into place and closed the file.

“What are you hiding?” Clérisseau demanded.

“A private affair.”

“Not if you lift it halfway out of its envelope, slide it back and forth, lift it again, and generally dangle it like a worm before a trout.”

Short allowed himself a slow grin. Clérisseau was a trout six feet tall, with an exophthalmic expression (one of Jefferson’s words: it meant pop-eyed), and a white wig and a sword. “It’s nothing. Jefferson has been writing a treatise on English prosody, but I’ve had to copy it for him, because of his wrist.”

Clérisseau lost interest at once. He sniffed delicately and waved the letter back into the file. “Poetry,” he said with well-bred distaste. “Now he passes over the line from gallantry to boredom.”

But Clérisseau, Short thought, had no idea what line Jefferson
had crossed. Upstairs, in his own room with the door locked, he spread out the file again and examined the last letter, twelve pages not only written laboriously with the left hand but then copied out all over again for the record. Record of what? If ever there were a personal, private letter, this was assuredly it. If ever Thomas Jefferson came close to abandoning his intense reserve, dropping his high fences—he had simply written, Short thought, the strangest love letter he had ever read.

Short stopped. Although he had read the letter hastily twice before—unable to believe Jefferson would keep a copy, let alone have him file it with everything else, let alone—he inhaled sharply, brought his thoughts under control; started over. How could Jefferson write to his lover in the form of a dialogue? A dialogue. Short squeezed his left eye halfway shut and tried to bring into focus the candle on the other side of the room. Dialogues had been a popular literary form forty years ago, when David Hume and
Bishop Berkeley were writing didactic philosophy; Jefferson the rebel had oddly conservative literary tastes.…

The candle remained stubbornly out of focus, a nebulous white globe against a watery background. Short switched eyes. It was typical of Jefferson to make everything, even love, into a debate, a clash of logic, head versus heart. With mild surprise Short realized that he had begun to think of Maria Cosway as Jefferson’s lover; with rather more surprise he admitted, against all the rules of French life, that this profoundly disturbed him.

A phrase tugged at Short’s memory. He turned his head sideways and watched the candle flame leap for once into perfect focus. When Martha Wayles Jefferson had lain dying in her bed, hadn’t she scribbled a few short lines that Jefferson had finished?
—Time wastes too fast: every Utter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen
. The same word.
Rapidity
. The same Jeffersonian sense of time flying, time lost.