Jefferson (57 page)

Adams disappeared behind a huge puff of smoke, emerged slowly like a pink moon in a cloud. “Maybe you
are
right, Short.”

The third quarrel was with, inevitably, Washington. Adams and Jefferson had parted company over politics, and they had done it in a noisy, pamphlet-flinging kind of way; and when they were past politics and both of them retired, they took up (warily at first) their comfortable old-shoe friendship again. But Jefferson’s break with Washington was more … Jeffersonian. A slow freeze. A buildup of ice. Words behind backs. Washington’s great sin was that he failed to see Hamilton’s plans as sinister and therefore refused to denounce the Federalists. When Jefferson resigned as
secretary of state in 1793, the two simply ceased to be colleagues; then allies; then friends. Once in my hearing in Paris, Jefferson lectured little nine-year-old Polly in a way I approved of then; shudder at now: “I hope you never suffer yourself to be angry. The way to be loved is never, never to quarrel or be angry with anybody.”

“
You
never quarreled with him, did you?” John Adams demanded of me through his cloud of smoke.

T
oward the end of April 1789, John Paul Jones, with his usual mysterious efficiency, had managed to purchase eight plaster copies of his own Houdon-carved bust, which he intended to present as needed to admirers and friends; and since he was afloat somewhere on the Baltic Sea, he had naturally ordered them delivered to Jefferson’s house.

James Hemings scowled at the eight neatly stacked crates—left in the basement kitchen because Jefferson had now started rebuilding the study—and squeezed awkwardly between them; then he grabbed his sister’s arm and hurried her up the outside stairs.

On the street he made her walk quickly, keeping in front of the oncoming river of wagons and horses. At the rue de Surene somebody’s lackey shouted in French to clear the way, and a gilded carriage came tilting, speeding into sight, two huge sheepdogs bounding at full gallop ahead of the horses, a servant running on each side, people jumping, flying—the nearest dog bounced against a peddler, a blurred cannonball, knocking him flat. Sally screamed and pinned herself and James to a wall till the barking-rattling-cursing procession whizzed by in a high fan of water and straw and spinning wheels.

“You not scared of dogs?” he said scornfully, shaking her off.

“When they got teeth I am.” She showed her own white teeth in a nervous grin.

James snorted. He looked at her as she straightened her dress at the hips, tugged at her front, looked right back at him. Without waiting he turned on his heel and pushed forward again through the crowd, and she caught up just past the Place Vendôme, where Jefferson’s banker lived, the man who watched Sally when she served the wine just like a flat-eared cat watching a bird. But then, men usually looked at Sally like that.

“Where’s Petit?” She was pressing close enough behind him that he could smell both her French perfume and the tart brown soap Jefferson made them all use.

“I told you twice, Petit takes his day off on the Left Bank, by Saint-Germain.”

“Because of me,” Sally said. “He wouldn’t come with you because of me.”

James knew the other servants disliked him; they said he was arrogant and quick-tempered and always angry with his sister. Well. He stopped to peer in a tinsmith’s shop. Dozens of gleaming pans and flat cooking dishes had been stacked, à la mode de Palais Royal, with their prices written on little cards beside them. “Petit,” he said, making an effort to speak slowly and not snap, “I told you, is an
efféminé
. He don’t like any woman except the old bitch who works in the kitchen.”

“And she’s got a moustache.” Sally giggled.

“And Petit likes to go to a club on the rue Buci where men all dress up like women and dance.”

In the windowpanes of the tinsmith’s shop six separate Sallys clapped hand to mouth to stop from laughing. “Did he ever take
you?
” White teeth, bright as the tin.

James glared at the window and set out again, faster, certain that whenever he stopped, there she would be, just like a shadow, just like a burn on the back of his neck. As a matter of fact—what he would never in his life admit—Petit
had
taken him once, very drunk, both of them very drunk, and James had slumped on a bench in a dark, slate-bottomed
cave
drinking brandy while the
efféminés
danced and dipped and swirled in and out of the candlelight, cackling like witches at a ball, and when he got drunk
enough, he had danced too because they were actually beautiful-looking women, and then he had passed out and never gone back.

“You making me scared,” Sally said. “People riot yesterday in the Saint-Antoine.”

“Riots every day,” James told her, picking up his pace. And there were. The winter had been so fierce and cold—the river frozen solid for weeks, wagons camped on the ice—that most of the tradesmen had had no work since November. Ships and boats didn’t move, builders shut down, masons, carpenters, tanners, skinners, the
flotteurs
who pushed the timber rafts, everything east of the Louvre pulsed and rumbled with anger. Now he
loved
Paris, he thought, now Paris was just like him.

“Réveillon,” Sally said.

“You ask Le Trouveur. He tell you all about it. Whole point is for you to meet Le Trouveur.”

“I already know. Réveillon owns a factory in the Saint-Antoine, and he wants to drop the pay to fifteen sous a day and they tried to burn his house down last night, that’s what I know.”

But Le Trouveur, when they reached his door, had fled the quartier, and the neighbors were milling dangerously in the narrow street. James stood indecisively, gripping Sally’s wrist. Crowd on its way to a mob, he thought. He turned; turned. Sheer force of numbers began to drag them forward with a deep, tidal pull toward the rue de Charonne, where nobles were said to be passing on their way to the races.

“I want to go home!” Sally cried.

He snarled and shoved her away—the last he saw of her was her brown hair bobbing through the crowd like a cork—and elbowed his way down an alley, over a flattened wood fence. On the rue de Charonne a dozen carriages and coaches had come to a halt, surrounded by blue-shirted workmen. Somebody shouted slogans. A huge pregnant woman stood on a box making a fiery speech. In the first carriage James recognized Jefferson’s friend the Duc d’Orléans. He had climbed up beside his driver and spread his arms to the crowd.

New voices snapped like whips: “Vive le duc! Vive le père d’Orléans!”

Closer, scrambling, James could see that the carriages were blocked by soldiers and barricades. On the other side of the
barricades stood a big three-story house, iron gates, dozens of straw figures dangling from ropes, a makeshift sign painted in blood red:
MAISON RÉVEILLON
.

The duc had started to make himself heard. In furious, rhythmical counterpoint the pregnant woman pumped her fists—“Estates-General”—“Bread!”—“Patience!”—“Liberté!” The duc was looking back along the line of carriages. From one pocket of his splendid red coat he drew a fat purse, waved it over his head, then flung a dozen coins into the air.

Instantly the crowd surged, the other carriages rocked on their wheels. The noble occupants were lowering their windows. More purses appeared. Gold and silver coins sailed overhead like wingless birds, birds’ heads. The crowd pushed and roared with every toss, and James’s ears rang with the noise. To his right, where he stumbled away in self-defense, the soldiers were now lifting the barricades in front of the horses.

A shout rose and died in James’s throat. The barricades came apart and the soldiers saluted the duc’s carriage, the brilliant harnesses and plumes of the horses as they clattered through, but in the wake of the last wheels, too numerous and wild to be stopped, the still-furious center of the mob rushed forward like a wave. The barricades splintered, soldiers scattered. The iron gates of Réveillon’s house tilted, twisted, then disappeared under a flood of bodies.

For an instant James resisted, clinging to a lamppost with both hands, a man in a rapids. Then he gave it up, shot forward, rising to the crest of the mob. Objects flew past—faces, arms, a torn brick wall, limbs from an uprooted tree. When he reached the door, Réveillon’s house was already starting to burn. A running man thrust an armload of bottles toward him; fragments of chairs, sofas, the wings of a huge mahogany table all passed from hand to hand, toward a great bonfire building in the first courtyard of the house. Wine from Réveillon’s cellar went from mouth to mouth. James drank greedily from one bottle, staggered with the force of the angry crowd as it shifted, drank again from another bottle, wiped his teeth and struggled for air. The sky was black with smoke; with amazing speed the house had begun to come apart in loud, nerve-shattering cracks and then—half-drunk, dazed, whirling—James understood that the cracks were muskets. The
soldiers had re-formed their ranks, lined up across the street, and begun to fire at random.

Pandemonium struck with the first bullets. Through the stinging smoke, through the breached walls, the crowd was running in blind, frenzied panic. James lurched for the rue de Charonne, saw sparks of gunfire and dropped to the ground. Crawled, clawed toward the sidewalk, over glass, boards, a bloody leg, a trampled body unrecognizable, male or female. He staggered to his feet and pressed forward, arms outstretched, driving toward a doorway shelter. From the rooftops of the houses, tiles and stones were flying. The soldiers had marched into the center of the street in a compact square, deadly muskets turned in four directions. At every new shower of tiles and stones some lifted their barrels and fired, others charged a few feet forward, jabbing wildly with red bayonets at whatever moved, yielded, bled, or cried out.

The street had become a maze. Through choking billows of smoke James recognized Le Trouveur’s building, the door where he had begun. With a desperate lunge he covered the last few yards of pavement, dodging, tumbling, coming to a halt by the tiny stairs in the rear. Moments later, curled into a ball by an upstairs window, he looked down at the scene. His ears went dead. No sound reached him. Soldiers and mob seemed to dance in eerie, crablike motions, backward and forward across a stage grown dark and slippery with corpses. Where the fires burned or the muskets flashed, the streets were the blood red image of hell.

“What the country needs,” said Madame de Tessé with an emphatic, sparrowlike nod of her head, “is democracy. The people would never riot if they had a voice in the government.”

“The people would never riot”—Gouverneur Morris bowed slightly toward her—“if they had bread. What this country needs is a government suited to its particular history and nature, and that is not a democracy. You are not ready for a democracy.”

“You want to retain the monarchy.” Madame de Tessé faced Morris with the belligerent, hard-eyed stare of a bantam rooster. Short considered his simile, rejected it, and cleared his throat. If he could think of a witty, distracting remark, he would interpose himself between them.