Jefferson (51 page)

What did he think? In the state house no one could really tell. He sat in the back row, on an old cane chair, fanning away the flies in silence. Few people knew that on the morning of June 28, when he first had to submit the Declaration, his mind was already deeply troubled, not by the document itself (no one was a more confident
writer
) but by the terrifying prospect that he would have to walk to the front of the room, turn and face the Congress, and then read
aloud
what he had written—Jefferson, who never exposed himself by public speaking. He had spent most of the previous night nervously marking up his copy with intricate little slashes and dots intended to tell him just where to pause as he read, and for exactly how long, like a clockwork Patrick Henry. (Afterward the baffled printer would mistake his little marks for commas and periods, so that the first printed copy of the Declaration of Independence was in fact the most ill-punctuated composition in American history.) Now Congress, which had chosen him because he was a writer, was simply hacking away his most deeply felt passages, and he could do nothing but sit and smile in courteous silence.

Next to him Franklin watched with his usual droll expression. Not much about human nature escaped Franklin. He leaned over
and tugged Jefferson’s sleeve. “When I was a young printer,” he said, “I knew a hatter who made a new sign for his shop. He wrote it on a signboard: ‘John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats.’ But his friends came by—you understand friends. One said the word ‘hatter’ was redundant and struck it out. Another said ‘makes’ was unnecessary. Somebody else said,
‘sells
hats? Who expects you to give them away?’ When they were finished, his sign was reduced to plain ‘John Thompson’ with the picture of a hat.”

O
n November 3, Jefferson gave an evening party for men only.

“Monsieur Short,” said Lafayette with impenetrable courtesy, coming up to him beside the fireplace, “I believe you know the Duc de La Rochefoucauld?”

The duc bowed and did not smile. “We have met a dozen times at least, have we not, Monsieur Short? Our noble friend has grown so thoroughly American as to introduce old acquaintances to one another.” A smile arrived at last, like winter, on the due’s gray lips. “Though I believe it is my wife who has the advantage of knowing you well.”

Short was certain that his face had turned to sheets of flame. He smiled, bowed, accepted wine from James Hemings’s tray, and listened to his voice murmur perfectly truthless, perfectly civil nothings in reply. Out of the background Clérisseau suddenly appeared, grinning broadly and bringing Jefferson with him.

“I have been speaking to our host,” said Clérisseau, not hesitating to interrupt, “about horns.”

Short held his smile in a vise.

“Monsieur Short, the most attentive man in Paris, kindly let me go with him last week to the Jardin du Roi and present that old scoundrel Buffon with twenty sets of horns and a hundred dozen animal pelts from Maine. Now our Thomas says he had no idea they were coming.”

“In fact, they cost me forty-seven pounds sterling,” Jefferson said wryly, “and nearly lost me the friendship of John Adams in London. I had merely written General Sullivan many months ago and asked him to be on the watch for the skins and horns of a New Hampshire moose, if one came on the market, so that I could prove to Buffon how large our animals really grow.”

“And instead?” Lafayette was genuinely curious.

“Instead, as a former general, Sullivan made the acquisition of a moose the object of a regular military campaign. His troops sallied forth in the middle of March—much snow—a herd attacked—one killed—a road cut twenty miles through the wilderness—the carcass drawn on a cart to his house to be cleaned and packed and then shipped on to me. When he arrived in London two months ago, he presented a bill, without explanation, to Abigail Adams, who gave it to her son-in-law, who paid it, aghast, and asked John Adams for reimbursement.”

Short watched Jefferson bend down and stoke the coals in the fireplace. The Duc de La Rochefoucauld was sixty-five years old if he was a day. Rosalie was twenty-four. Short had seen her alone exactly once since Chaville—a whispered protest in the anteroom of a party, a hurried kiss, not given, not resisted. In the fairy tale the two children pushed the wicked troll into the fire.

“The
size
of the bill rather stunned them,” Jefferson said, straightening, “as it did me. And on top of that, I had already put Mr. Smith, the son-in-law, to immense trouble ordering a harpsichord to be made for me in London.”

Lafayette looked around the drawing room possessively. “Not here.”

“Not yet. It’s being shipped down the Seine from Le Havre.” With a regretful smile Jefferson held up his withered right hand. “My days of playing music are finished, I’m afraid. It will be for Patsy and Polly.”

The Duc de La Rochefoucauld took his seat unceremoniously
in one of the new blue upholstered chairs arranged before the fireplace. “I understand,” he said, “that Madame Cosway plans to hold an exhibition of her paintings in the Palais Royal.”

As if on cue, Sally Hemings came into the room to replace her brother, carrying with her a silver tray and two more decanters of wine. She had recently been given money to buy new clothes and have her long hair dressed, and Short saw the duc look up at her with something like distracted masculine interest. Then he let his eyes slide past Short’s and repeated his question.

This time Jefferson made an almost imperceptible shrug, which Short interpreted silently: He was not privy to Mrs. Cosway’s plans, he had organized his little gathering of men as a perfectly independent occasion.

“More new rooms!” Clérisseau returned from the doorway, where he had been squinting into the stairwell. He let Sally Hemings pass with an appreciative glance. “It’s ungracious of me, an architect, to say so, but how do you put up with so much
building
all the time? You’ve been in two houses in Paris and you’ve tried to remodel them both—nails, hammers,
racket
!”

“My passion is tearing down and putting up,” Jefferson said placidly. “I cannot let it alone.”

“Is it true you went a whole winter in Virginia without a roof?” This was the Abbé Morellet, who had the smooth pink cheeks of a roasting pig and held a glass of wine in each trotter.

Jefferson smiled and shook his head. He took the nearer of Sally Hemings’s decanters and began to move from guest to guest, filling their glasses. The dinner had been typical of him, Short thought; mostly vegetables (including Indian corn from his garden), very little meat, an excellent Château Haut-Brion. The Roman ordinarily followed a strict rule of no more than three glasses of wine a day, but in the past few weeks the rule had been less and less observed. When Maria Cosway had last come to the Grille de Chaillot, which was two weeks ago now, attended by the triple-chinned Princess Lubomirska and an entourage of chattering Poles, Jefferson had served champagne and duck and Maria had neither eaten nor drunk.

“You must tell us,” said the duc from his chair—Short turned his back and took a step away, which he recognized as idiotically
symbolic. What did the duc really know? Or care? More to the point, what did Jefferson know?

“You must be perfectly honest,” the duc said. “When you return to America, will you rebuild your famous Monticello? Will you make it a
maison française
?”

It was a shrewd question. The duc was a shrewd man. Rosalie would not marry a fool. Would not love a fool.

“I have plans in fact,” Jefferson said with mock pride, “to rebuild it completely
à la française
. You know the Hôtel de Salm?”

“Aha!” Clérisseau beamed.

“You wrote my aunt,” Lafayette said through a mouthful of cheese. “You said you had fallen in love with it,
‘smitten.’
 ”

“I have spent many an afternoon in the Tuileries Garden watching it go up,” Jefferson admitted. “And most of all I admire the great dome that crowns the house, a wonderful play of horizontal lines against rising curves.”

“Like the Halle aux Bleds,” said the duc.

“Exactly. The same combination of Palladian form and modern engineering.” Short handed Jefferson the sheets of ruled paper he knew were wanted and watched as he and Clérisseau began to sketch for the rest a diagram of the intricate beams that supported the dome of the Halle. The Roman could metamorphose into the Enthusiast in a split second if one of his dozen—his two dozen—special interests were mentioned. As Jefferson, now in a chair by the duc, started to draw skylights and stairs he had seen somewhere else, Short edged across the carpet to Lafayette.

“He is a man of such brilliance,” Lafayette murmured. “Purity.” With his habitual curiosity—or desire to be seen?—Lafayette pulled the curtains apart and looked out on the Champs-Élysées. “Like Washington,” he added as an afterthought.

“A Madame Townsend has been to see him,” Short said confidentially. “She brought a letter from John Paul Jones and wanted to borrow money. She
hinted
strongly that she was à daughter of Louis XV and highly placed to aid America.”

Lafayette was more interested in the dry moat that separated Jefferson’s house from the pavement of the Champs-Élysées and the torchlit customs gate, thronged as usual at this hour with wagons, merchants, lounging soldiers. “Well, it’s easy to check.”
He stretched his neck and ran a hand over his bristly red hair. “There’s a man in Versailles who has the official list of the old king’s bastards—I can give you his name—but offhand I don’t remember a Townsend.”

“Jefferson surmises she was Jones’s mistress.”

The Prince of Pineapples chuckled. “Dr. Franklin used to say that part of the American mission was to keep Admiral Jones’s mistresses happy. John Adams’s face would go black each time he said it.” He dropped the curtain and looked back at Jefferson, now folding his sketches and slipping them into his pocket. “Architecture bores me. My dear friend”—he turned his back on Short and began to walk briskly toward Jefferson—“here it is November. Have you not received the new constitution? Have you heard nothing?”

Jefferson had not. Politics displaced the Halle aux Bleds. The convention in Philadelphia was over, Jefferson reported, copies of the proposed new constitution were en route—rumored even to be in London already—but for some unfathomable reason Madison had sent nothing yet, though two packet boats had come and gone. No document, no letter. Short glanced at his watch. He privately guessed that Madison had delayed sending the new constitution because he was afraid of Jefferson’s reaction. What political horror could the assembly of demigods have dreamed up?

He lifted the curtain, peered; streaks of nothing. Clérisseau said he should go back to Virginia and make his fortune. Clérisseau said Jefferson was not a man ever to give up an idea, once he had conceived it. Short opened the lid of his watch again, the spidery hands jumped. Five twenty-three, Paris. Bleak, cold, Rosalie-less Paris. Clérisseau said that Maria Cosway had lost interest in Jefferson either because she was ambitious as an artist, trying to establish herself alone, or else because she was a deplorably prudish married woman—that is to say, English. In any case, he had added in a world-weary tone, quoting Horace,
Post coitum omne animal triste est
After love every animal is sad.