Jefferson (62 page)

“Someone is here at last.” Rosalie smiled and turned to wave at Madame de Corny, descending the steps of the house fifty yards away. Clérisseau clapped his hands and started toward her.

“You look beautiful,” Short whispered to Rosalie.

She took a step along the gravel path, toward the nearest flower bed. “I don’t. It’s so hard to think of one’s personal life now. These politics and riots—”

“You three were wise to come out of the house.” As she approached, Madame de Corny made an exaggerated fanning motion with the silver lorgnette she carried. “So hot in there. And your grandmother”—she nodded to Rosalie—“so old-fashioned. She won’t hear of leaving the doors open to the garden.”

“We were just discussing the Declaration of Independence,” Rosalie said.

“Comparing a good revolution to a bad.” Clérisseau stooped to pick up a fallen rose from the gravel and grunted with the effort as he straightened again. “Though as an architect, of course, I approve of the destruction of buildings, since they must all be replaced by new ones.”

“You’ve lost your liberalism,” Short said.

“The bloom is undoubtedly gone,” Clérisseau agreed. He frowned comically at the rose, then tossed it away. “But as for the Declaration of Independence, you know I saw John Trumbull’s sketch for his giant painting of it when he was here. He had Jefferson, Franklin, Adams all lined up like choirboys in front of a desk, pens in hand. The first historical painting I ever saw without corpses or horses.”

“You’ve changed all your opinions,” Madame de Corny scolded. “You’re just like the Duc de La Rochefoucauld.”

“There was never a signing,” Short said with pedantic gruffness. “The Continental Congress passed the resolution for independence on July second, and
that
should be the day we celebrate. They approved the wording of the Declaration on July fourth, but nobody signed anything until August second, and then they just trickled into the clerk’s office when they felt like it. The whole so-called signing took more than a week.”

“Ah.” In the bright afternoon sunlight Madame de Corny’s smile was tentative and puzzled. Clérisseau played with his coat buttons and said nothing. After a moment, Rosalie took the other woman by the arm and steered her toward the shade, saying something over her shoulder that Short missed completely. His hands, he saw with surprise, were still folding and refolding the pages of his manuscript.

“Lady talk, of course,” Clérisseau commented. “And the younger lady looks particularly enchanting today, does she not?” Short made no reply. He added, “Your employer was very kind to send me the gift of that silver coffeepot. I’ve written him a note.”

“He’s still awaiting his official permission to leave.” Short folded the papers one last time and stuffed them into his pocket. In his mind’s eye he could see the painting Trumbull would finally make of the signing—destined, he was now morosely certain, to set a great historical lie in motion. “But he’s prepared to sail the moment it arrives. The house is filled with packers and trunks.”

“Hence his absence today. The ambassador who cannot wait to be home.”

Short watched the two ladies strolling tête-à-tête down the lane of trees that bordered the old Duchesse d’Enville’s garden. The house itself belonged to Rosalie’s husband the duc, but in some twist of French custom his mother continued in every real sense to possess it. Short studied the Palladian facade, the carefully raked gravel paths, the mossy pond at the wall that separated the estate from the rue des Petits Augustins. Nothing he saw reminded him of home. Home was a fictitious painting, scraps of folded paper.

“He will return when?”

“He plans a six-month leave.”

“And you serve in his place?”

“I will be chargé d’affaires.”

“I sometimes think of emigrating to America myself.” Clérisseau began to walk again, drawing Short along.

“Ah, don’t do that,” Short said jokingly. “Stay in France. I would.”

It was Clérisseau’s turn to be suddenly gruff. “Of course, you would. You’re a foreigner. To you it’s all an art gallery and a distraction. You’re not a victim—of
this
.” He flapped his baggy sleeve toward the ancient stone wall, the massive trees, the distant flat spires of Saint-Sulpice, meaning to indicate, Short knew, the mad, ceaseless upheaval going on all over Paris, all over France. “Yesterday
they
”
—
Clérisseau used the French word
cohue
, the nobility’s contemptuous name for the mob—“they threw stones at the Duc de La Rochefoucauld’s carriage; they nearly killed him, one of their true friends.”

Short looked up quickly in Rosalie’s direction, decided the
news made no difference. Since the day of the Bastille the mobs changed heroes constantly, for no clear reason. Even Lafayette, the man of the hour in July, was being hissed in August.

“By contrast, I see America as a vast open space.” Clérisseau dropped his left arm and rubbed it hard with his hand. “A last glorious chance to let human nature mature in freedom. I see thousands and hundreds of thousands of Europeans like me flowing into it, filling it up, marching to the edge of the continent. Fleeing this insanity.”

“You see it the way Jefferson does.” Short could hear the irony in his voice but could do nothing about it. In fact, he himself now saw the future of American history as nothing but tragic, the great unstoppable flow of immigrants coming long before anyone had learned what to do with freedom, how to claim it without blood and violence and revolution. A Jeffersonian phrase came back to him:
It was the nature of human nature
.

“Jefferson would be a great man,” Clérisseau said, “if he did not own slaves.”

“He is free to free them,” Short said slowly. How had their roles become reversed? he wondered idly. Clérisseau now the voice of optimism, himself more cuttingly ironic with every sentence. Europe changed everyone. Revolution changed everyone.

“My dear old American William,” Clérisseau said, and brought them to a halt by the mossy pond. Closer, it turned out to be choked with weeds and oily green mud; a dead goldfish floated on its side like a rag. “You’ve never really seen us as we are. Your particular friend”—he nodded toward the distant Rosalie and held up a palm to stop Short’s protest—“let me be frank. She is French. You’re not. She is the niece of her husband—did you know that?—and the granddaughter of the old duchesse, her mother-in-law. You haven’t the requisite insincerity for our games. You don’t enjoy her, you won’t have her. She will no more leave her husband than”—Clérisseau’s big-nosed, saucer-eyed face broke into a familiar grin—“than I will leave all this for the buffalo plains of Virginia.”

On August 25 Lafayette sent them a frantic note, begging that Jefferson would break every engagement and give a dinner next
day for himself and seven other members of the National Assembly, who desperately needed to agree together before everything plunged—here Lafayette’s pen skittered dramatically to the edge of the page—into civil war.

Promptly at three on the twenty-sixth, Short ushered them into the dining room, bowed, and started to leave; but Lafayette, clutching at everything American, grabbed his elbow, someone else drew up another chair. At the head of the table Jefferson smiled and signaled to James Hemings. In another moment Short found himself taking a place at what Lafayette grandly announced as a “Symposium unparalleled” of statesmen.

It was a symposium that began slowly and badly. Jefferson had decided to serve the meal Virginia fashion, which meant that no wine would be poured until after the table was cleared of food. The French statesmen twirled the stems of their empty glasses, glanced at the clock. Meanwhile, Lafayette, clearly nervous, described at greater and greater length, as if he had forgotten the purpose of the meeting, the horrors he had encountered at the siege of Yorktown, when the British fought back so fiercely that the allies nearly broke. “We used to clean the wounds in the trenches, you know,” he suddenly told Short in English, “by urinating into them.” One of the Frenchmen looked up and raised an eyebrow. “Pisser dans les blessures,” Lafayette obligingly translated, and the Frenchman put down his glass.

“The gallant French soldiers of today,” Jefferson began, evidently intending some compliment that would open the discussion. At the door James Hemings now hovered with his tray of bottles.

Lafayette ignored his cue. “Nothing compared to Yorktown. My friend, you know Alexander Hamilton?”

Jefferson nodded. “He is to be secretary of the treasury in Washington’s new government.”

“I’m surprised to hear it.” Lafayette picked up a last forkful of food and left it suspended. “At the beginning of ’81 Hamilton was Washington’s aide-de-camp, a post he always hated, and they quarreled more than once. I was present in February, in New York, when Washington called Hamilton on some errand, and Hamilton delayed until, when he finally appeared, the general rose in a towering fury—‘Sir, you have kept me waiting at the head of
the stairs these ten minutes. You treat me, sir, with disrespect’—‘I am not conscious of it, sir,’ says Hamilton cooly, ‘but since you have thought it necessary to tell me so, we part.’ And he left. This was the man I had serving under me the day the British—” He saw James Hemings at last and broke off. “I’m sorry,” the Prince of Pineapples said with a dignity that surprised Short. “It is a fault in a soldier to dwell in the past.”

“Aux armes,” said one of the Frenchmen sardonically.

When the wine had been poured and the cloth taken away, Lafayette stood, raising his glass, clearing his throat. The question to be resolved, he said, and looked up and down the table, was whether in a new French constitution the king would have an absolute veto over the Assembly, as some members wanted, or no veto at all, as others did. This was the sticking point, the symbolic wall between those who favored monarchy and those who favored republicanism. “I need not remind you of the state of things. Without agreement among us, the leaders, the Assembly will fall into utter chaos, the nation will explode again in geysers of blood. I have my own opinion.” He extended his glass toward a sour-faced man in a huge white wig, sitting at Jefferson’s right hand. “Monsieur Mounier has his.”

Jefferson motioned to Short, and the two of them pushed their chairs back, as a gesture of invisibility. The Americans were to be silent observers only. The Frenchmen hardly noticed. Mounier, having lifted his white wig with both hands and pulled it down again like a bowl, was now also standing and speaking in rapid French; the others were likewise speaking or raising their hands. Lafayette sank back into his chair, waving his glass as if he had launched a ship.

At half past six, after more than three hours at the table, the symposium declared a brief recess. Most of the members wandered into the garden, where Jefferson’s yellowing Indian corn still stood in plowed furrows. Short started to follow, reached the hall, then came to an abrupt halt. James Hemings was standing before a mirror, arms straight, fists at his side, mouthing words silently. Short hesitated; cleared his throat. In the glass James’s eyes flashed yellow. In another moment, glaring as he passed, he had vanished down the corridor.

Short frowned and pinched the bridge of his nose with two
fingers. At the door to the study he looked in and discovered two of the Frenchmen deep in conversation with Jefferson.

“Come in, please.” Jefferson saw him at once. “Our guests asked to see my paintings, but most of them are already packed.” He indicated the maze of trunks and shipping boxes that covered the floor. “This one,” he said, holding up a picture of Herodias with the head of John the Baptist, “I intend to hang over the parlor fireplace at Monticello.” He propped it against a chair leg and then from an open box by the desk pulled out three small paintings in thin gilt frames. “And these are for my library.”

“Fran-cis Bacon.” The sardonic Frenchman squinted to read a label.

“Bacon, Newton, and Locke,” Jefferson said. He arranged the paintings on the cluttered copy-press table for them to admire. “The three greatest men who ever lived. In my opinion,” he added politely. “I had my friend John Trumbull commission them to be copied in London. My original idea was to place them all together in one frame, so.” He quickly sketched on the copy press a large square containing three ovals. “But Trumbull said the effect would be awkward, so I mean to hang them separately.”

“They are”—the Frenchman squinted again—“all atheists, are they not? Your three greatest men?”

Jefferson shook his head briskly and straightened the nearest portrait—a very bad one, Short thought, of John Locke, who had emerged from the painter’s brush looking like a blue-haired horse.

“Locke wrote an essay against ‘enthusiasm,’ ” Jefferson conceded, “which you know is the English term for religious fanaticism. But he was a Christian, certainly. Bacon and Newton too. Newton spent the last twenty years of his life calculating the exact date of the Day of Judgment. The three of them together laid, I believe, the foundation for all modern physical and moral science.”

“But you yourself,” the Frenchman persisted. His voice was disapproving and suspicious. “You are known to be an atheist, yes? There was a joke you made about the Church. When the commoners walked out of Versailles and met at the Church of Saint-Louis, you said, ‘This is the first time that churches have been made good use of.’ ”