Jefferson (45 page)

Now, so many years later, I find myself wondering how much it explains of his subsequent, cruel treatment of poor Maria Cosway.

“
T
his style, Monsieur,” said the shopgirl behind the counter, “is called ‘Telltale Moans.’ ” She held up a length of silky blue lace and draped it across her bosom.

Short cleared his throat, nodded slowly with the solemn air (he hoped) of a connoisseur, and permitted himself to steal a sidelong glance at Rosalie de La Rochefoucauld, whose eyes were lowered modestly but whose lips were turned up in a smile.

“No. No. Perhaps not quite.” He plunged his hand at random into the bolts of fabric on the counter and pulled up another spool of lace, rich scarlet (like his face) and decorated with tiny flecks of pink ribbon. “And this one?”

The shopgirl used one hand to spread it across her left breast.

“It is called, Monsieur, ‘Muffled Sighs.’ ”

With a muffled sigh of his own, Short let drop the end he was holding. Rosalie had already turned away and begun walking down the counter, toward stacks of dresses, bedsheets—he had no idea. In two steps he caught up to her.

“I am still so surprised to see you,” she said, in fact not looking at him, “here, in a ladies’ shop. And in Versailles. We all thought you were staying in Saint-Germain.”

He touched her elbow with the tops of his fingers and steered
her away from the amused stare of the
grisette
. “I was, I am; but I had to come to Versailles on business, and I thought while I was here I might pick up a gift, a something for Miss Jefferson.” He listened to the lies flow easily from his tongue—it was simplicity itself to lie in French—and watched Rosalie’s soft cheek, the gentle swell of her décolletage as she allowed him to guide her toward the door.

“She is how old, Miss Jefferson?”

“Fifteen.”

“And in a convent school?”

“At Panthemont.”

Rosalie smiled at the floor. “Somehow I don’t believe the good nuns of Panthemont will let her wear ‘Muffled Sighs.’ ”

“Actually.” They had reached the door of the shop, and Short gripped her elbow more firmly, stopping them both at the threshold. One part of his mind was noting for the fiftieth time how perfectly they were matched in height—she was much too tall for her elderly, stoop-shouldered husband. The other part was taking a deep breath, consciously, deliberately crossing a line. “To tell the truth, I was riding out from the Hôtel des Affaires Étrangères when I saw you.” He swallowed, relaxed his grip. “And I followed you here.”

Rosalie had put her hand on the door handle. Now she removed it. Just beyond them, on the busy street, one of the huge public carriages known as a
carabas
, holding at least twenty passengers and pulled by six horses, was passing in front of the shop window.

“I am surprised you could see me so well,” she said, so softly that he could barely hear her voice over the noise of the wheels, “since you haven’t yet taken my advice about eyeglasses.”

“Rosalie.”

“Did you know,” she said, lifting her head at last as the
carabas
disappeared, “the king is also shortsighted like you, but by royal protocol he’s not allowed to wear spectacles?”

“I can recognize you at any distance,” Short said. Her hands were trembling, he was sure of it. His own hands were shaking as if they were freezing. He had seen Rosalie de La Rochefoucauld at every gathering of “Américains” at Lafayette’s, every diplomatic entertainment Jefferson had arranged, but never once before had he found her alone, without her husband or her female friends or
her vast retinue of aged relatives who circled about her like so many dried-up, gray-faced little moons about a radiant white star.

“Rosalie.”

“Your Monsieur Jefferson is still away, is he not? On his curative trip to the south? I think he’s gone two and a half months. Do you hear from him? Did he make you ambassador in his absence? I never believe the waters at places like Aix can truly heal a person.”

Somehow they had arrived on the pavement outside the shop, in the bright glare of the May afternoon, and though she was talking much too rapidly, averting her gaze much too often, nonetheless she was there, he was there, and the brush of her arm and shoulder against his was unmistakable and thrilling.

“Are you staying at Chaville?” he asked, hardly daring to hope. Chaville was the country home of Madame de Tessé, two or three leagues outside Versailles, and a place Rosalie was known to visit often, without her husband the duc.

“You may ask my hostess,” Rosalie said, and at the cautioning note in her voice he looked up to see coming toward them, out of the chaotic French traffic, a handsome black phaeton with the glittering family crest of Madame de Tessé on the door and the puckered face of its owner peering at them through the inevitable lorgnette.

“William, the lost secrétaire, enchantée de vous rencontre. And in Versailles. Rosalie, come in.” Madame de Tessé signaled her coachman to halt the slow-moving vehicle. Short stepped up to the window and bowed as she poked her wig and head perilously far out.

“I have a letter from Jefferson,” she told him in her rushed, emphatic way. “A quite
wonderful
letter that I
insist
you hear.”

Short made himself bow again and murmur some words of thanks, but Madame de Tessé rarely paused for little politenesses. “Today, yes? In two hours? Tea? Only ladies are at Chaville this week, I’m afraid. We’re having one of my English book readings afterward, but you can hear Jefferson’s letter first, and perhaps”—her quick little eyes took in everything—“Rosalie can show you the gardens.”

Rosalie sat back in the phaeton, an arm’s length away.

“Our group is reading a love novel,” Madame de Tessé added as the phaeton began to roll again. “But a tragic one, of course. The hero goes too far and is killed in a duel.”

In two hours more, precisely at five, tugging the points of his vest and struggling for composure, Short entered the great nine-windowed parlor at Chaville. Madame de Tessé beckoned him at once toward an empty chair beside her. He had visited the estate before, with Jefferson of course, and even sat in the inner circle by the fire while Madame de Tessé read breathlessly aloud from whatever English book was in fashion. For the life of him, however, he couldn’t remember now the name of the aged female cousin shuffling toward him, or the two young girls, scarcely older than Patsy Jefferson, who sat and spread their yellow skirts at Rosalie’s feet.

Madame de Tott rose to make him an ironic curtsy. “We are deep into Richardson’s
Clarissa
, you know, which is much too sentimental for a man. But by way of a prologue—”

“This is Jefferson’s letter.” Madame de Tessé held a white envelope high in one hand, with the other waved everyone to their places. “Monsieur Short won’t care for our novel, I’m sure, but he’s come to hear a perfectly wonderful letter. Your master,” she told him, nodding briskly, “writes for the ages. He writes”—she used the latest English word—“like a
genius
. No, I’m wrong. Every word in place, clear, strong. He writes like a
Roman
, yes? Perfect.”

“What is a torticollis?” demanded Madame de Tott, always the scholar.

“A sore neck.” Short accepted a cup of tea from a maid and thought that he had never once seen Jefferson with a sore neck.

“The waters at Aix did nothing for his wrist.” Madame de Tessé flipped through the letter. “It’s still as bad as ever. But he sees so many antiquities, he hardly cares—you understand why I call him a Roman, Monsieur Short?”

“The very word,” Short assured her. “Roman or Rebel.”

“No.” Madame de Tessé was, as always, decisive. “I’ve thought much about his character. The man lives with one foot in the past, he rebels by precedent. The most profound revolutionary is the enlightened conservative, is he not? Listen to this passage. ‘Were I to attempt to give you news,’ he says,

“Charming.”

“Architecture and friendship, yes, but nothing about the Assembly of Notables?” Madame de Tott arched one black eyebrow. “Nothing about politics? That scarcely sounds like Jefferson, or you,
maman
.”

“In his letters to me”—Short felt obscurely jealous; he put down his cup and came restlessly to his feet, automatically turning in Rosalie’s direction before he corrected himself—“which are mostly business, of course, he asks often about the Assembly of
Notables. He says the king has a great opportunity to reform the government and go down in history. He says the Assembly should divide itself into two chambers and meet annually, like a Parliament. And one chamber would be chosen by the provincial administrators rather than the king.”

Madame de Tessé had also risen, a look of mischievous delight on her face. “In other words, voted by the people. A democracy.”

“Well, filtered through the people. He is a limited kind of democrat. A Roman democrat.”

The whole party had by now abandoned their teacups and begun to move toward one of the tall windows that opened like a door into the garden. As he paused to let the ancient cousin pass, Short remembered (with a wry smile of his own) that Jefferson had also written Lafayette a letter on politics, advising the marquis to learn the condition of things by going incognito into the huts of his peasants, sampling their food, testing their very beds. Short treasured the image of Thomas Jefferson of Monticello stooping to enter somebody’s hut, lolling on somebody’s rat-gnawed pallet of straw.

In the famous (endless) gardens themselves Madame de Tott attached herself unexpectedly to Short and Rosalie and proceeded to speak with her usual bantering irony. “One day,” she told Short, leading them to the edge of a thick grove of willows, “you must read us something
you’ve
written. After all, Jefferson’s protege must write like a genius, too, I think.”

“Do you also write?” Rosalie began.

“
My
suggestion,” Madame de Tott went on, “would be something in the manner of Mr. Boswell’s new book about Samuel Johnson. Give us a
Life of Jefferson
, yes? With dialogue like a novel and personal habits and long intimate description.”

“I have sometimes thought—”

But Madame de Tott was in no humor to hear his thought. She glanced left, where Madame de Tessé had fallen back a hundred yards to inspect a new bed of plantings. The others were scattered far and away across the broad expanse of green lawn, gravel paths, and rigid geometrical shrubbery that radiated in spokes from the great château. Short, following her glance, had begun to register, as he nearly always did, how different such a scene, any French scene, was from Virginia—Virginia a dark, wild, gauzy
landscape now of memory alone, uninhabited, unshaped by human touch; a cobwebbed landscape of dreams only. But before he could turn back, ever polite, to hear Madame de Tott’s next tedious salvo of irony, she had surprised him utterly.