Jefferson (18 page)

“Proof in hand,” she whispered.

Firecrackers.

T
he king’s great palace at Versailles stood as a textbook demonstration of how to control a crowd.

From the highway to Paris, some four hundred yards below the palace gates, a narrow graveled road climbed on a slight uphill slant, bearing to the west, through a grove of trees. In mid-December 1785 the trees were already leafless and black and presented no obstruction to the gaze of soldiers in their scattered wooden sentry boxes. Behind the soldiers the first barricade ran the width of the palace, a twelve-foot high fence of iron bars topped with sharpened spearheads and snow, and it opened at two symmetrical points only, just wide enough for a carriage to pass. Inside, between the two wings of the palace itself, an icy cobblestone courtyard narrowed to a second gate, a second iron barrier. Beyond this, at the very entrance, a third iron gate, watched like all the others by the king’s enormously tall Swiss guards. Beyond
this
, still in progressively narrowing enclosures, the king’s chambers, the king’s rooms, the king’s closet, the king himself.

Jefferson walked across the courtyard in lightly falling snow. It was not yet eleven in the morning, but the guards on duty had already begun their afternoon meal, toasting long yellow baguettes
on a charcoal brazier, heating wine or punch in a copper kettle sheltered from the snow. The nearest guard squinted at Jefferson’s passport, then used one hand to lift the white bar of wood that blocked the door.

In the hall soldiers and courtiers hurried at showy, inefficient speed in all directions. Jefferson displayed his passport again, turned right, proceeded past the chapel, from which music, voices, and hammers could all be heard, and stopped finally at the east staircase to unfold his passport yet again.

In the opposite direction lay the state chambers, in which the king received ambassadors and in which, not seven months before, John Adams had presented him, bowing and kneeling far more than strictly became a Massachusetts rebel, to the great fat-bottomed, slope-browed young despot, whose hands, Adams later complained, were still streaky black with grease from his royal hobby of making miniature locks and keys. When Jefferson had taken his place beside Adams, he had read a prepared speech from a sheet of paper, praising the friendship of France and America and pledging his good will in continuing it. To the sardonic amusement of David Humphreys, who stood in the circle of guards and onlookers, at every mention in his speech of either the king’s or the queen’s name, Jefferson took off his hat and then replaced it, and the king and all his courtiers did the same.

At the top of the east staircase he paused for a last check of his papers; then a secretary led him through a series of rooms to the small private office of the foreign minister. The Comte de Vergennes rose to greet him with his watch open in his hand.

“You know Monsieur de Reyneval,” Vergennes said in French, snapping his watch closed. “Of course.”

From a shadowy corner by the window, so white-haired and pale that he gave the impression of stepping in from the snow, Reyneval advanced, bowed, grinned unpleasantly.

It was the special feature of Versailles always to be frigidly cold. Formalities over, Jefferson rubbed his hands together for warmth and took the center of three chairs that the foreign minister had arranged some ten impractical, bone-chilling feet from his tiny fireplace. On his right, Reyneval began to demonstrate at once why, in the diplomatic corps, he was known as the comte’s “eyes.”

“You have moved your residence,” he said, still grinning as he sat down.

Jefferson nodded and stretched his long legs toward the fire. “Yes, to the rue de Berri, on the Champs-Élysées. We moved in September, the whole household.”

“A charming location.” Reyneval imitated Jefferson’s gesture of rubbing his hands together. “The Hôtel de Langeac, correct? With garden, stable, marvelous furnishings—you must have received a generous lease. Or housing allowance.” He glanced at Vergennes. The first subject on which the comte had written the new ambassador, months ago, was the American Congress’s repeated, embarrassing failure to pay its promised salaries to the French officers who had fought in the Revolution. Reyneval’s pleasantries were legendarily unpleasant.

“You feel the cold, Monsieur Jefferson,” Vergennes said. “Move closer to the fire.”

“And Monsieur Short is well?” Reyneval asked. “We missed him at Versailles during the summer, but now I understand that he was traveling, sightseeing in London and the Hague.”

Jefferson smiled and inched his chair politely to the arctic edges of Vergennes’s carpet. Most of the American correspondence was written in code—by preference Jefferson even used code in his personal letters—but the “infidelities” (young Short’s tactful word) of the French post office were so gross and common that no one in the room, least of all Reyneval, was ignorant of the fact that Short had traveled to the Hague on strictly diplomatic business, to personally convey a treaty with Prussia to the hands of its foreign minister; or that his trip to London involved Jefferson’s impatient desire to organize American warships against the marauding Barbary pirates of North Africa.

“Monsieur Short,” Jefferson replied conversationally, “has been suffering from jaundice, I’m sorry to say. He stayed in Saint-Germain the whole of November, but last week he came back to the rue de Berri.”

Vergennes snapped open his watch again, holding it at arm’s length in his lap. “Your letter to me was very forceful,” he said.

“I appreciate your willingness to see me.”

“But I do not precisely take your point.” The foreign minister’s
smile was unfailingly polite; but Vergennes’s eyes were remote and stony, and his brow was almost scarred by a dark comb of deeply notched frown lines. “You wish to improve commercial relations with France—your ally, whose soldiers fought for you—yet the greatest part of American business continues to go to England, your former enemy.”

“And not yet your friend,” Reyneval added.

“Well, of course, old habits are hard to break,” Jefferson said. “Most of our merchants have traded with England all their lives, you know. They sell their goods in England and in the nature of things use their profits to buy where they sell. Now if they could sell in France, they could buy here as well, to everyone’s benefit. We could shake our dependencies on England, you could expand your markets.”

Vergennes conceded it.

“I have brought a list of American products you might consider importing.”

Reyneval stood and crossed to the fire, which he poked ineffectively with a brass shovel.

“Rice,” Jefferson said, reading from a paper. “Rice grown in South Carolina, which France now presently buys exclusively from the Mediterranean.”

“Egyptian rice,” Vergennes said, “is so much superior to American rice that I see no market.”

“Indigo,” Jefferson continued, “which you now import from your own American colonies.”

“Yes,” said Vergennes, “because it is so much better than your product.”

Flour, fish, and wood products met the same objection. Reyneval stood by the fireplace, turning slightly from time to time as if to examine his coat and wig in the full-length mirror behind him. Jefferson reached into his portfolio and produced a new sheet of paper.

“Whale oil.”

“The most romantic of all your products,” Vergennes said tolerantly. “Monsieur Adams described it to me in great detail—your heroic New England sailors, the single frail boat, and the vast animal, the solitary harpooner.”

“Leviathan to lamp,” Reyneval said.

“Well.” Jefferson consulted his notes. “At the port of L’Orient an American merchantman named Barrett has just landed with a large cargo of oil, which he proposes to exchange, one-third for money, two-thirds for French merchandise.”

Vergennes folded his hands across his lap.

“This is because of a special reduced duty on whale oil for this year only. If the duty continues at the same reduced rate next year, Barrett proposes to exchange his whole cargo for merchandise, to the clear advantage of the French merchants, who will see no coin whatsoever leave the country.”

Vergennes wore a brilliant gold insignia of rank, like two linked stars, on the left breast of his coat. Diagonally across his chest, left to right, hung a blue silk ribbon the width of a man’s hand, embroidered with delicate white fleurs-de-lys. He used his right hand to tug at the ribbon; then refolded his hands in his lap. It was obvious that he had no intention of committing himself to a continued reduction of the whale-oil duty. After a moment, without changing expression, Jefferson returned to his sheet of paper.

“Tobacco.”

“Ah.” Reyneval detached himself from the mirror. “We come to the crux.”

Jefferson raised his eyes to follow him as he paced to the window. Beyond it thick snow now swirled like the batter of a cake. Reyneval, Lafayette had warned, is no friend to America. As soon as you raise the question of tobacco—and the whole plan of meeting with Vergennes, in Lafayette’s view, was a disastrous mistake in the first place—Reyneval will sneer it to death.

“You yourself grow tobacco, I believe,” Reyneval said. Insinuation, the ghost of the ghost of a sneer. “On your farm.”

Jefferson turned his eyes and blandly addressed Vergennes. “Now, Monsieur, as you know, tobacco arrives here from various sources—Virginia, the Indies, Turkestan—the ships deposit it in barrels at all your river ports, from Bordeaux north. The Farmers-General, who have the monopoly of course, register and seal each barrel and collect a tax in the port; then the tobacco is shipped inland to another set of warehouses, inspected and sealed again; another tax. Then another stage, by wagon; for central France a
fourth or fifth stage, for the Jura even more. And at every stage the Farmers-General collect a new tax, issue receipts, allow a local sale or two. It is”—Jefferson paused—“a complicated system.”

Vergennes’s allegiance to the status quo was automatic. “You must not forget, my dear sir, that the king receives a revenue of twenty-eight million livres a year from this complicated system. If American tobacco is largely excluded, well, it is a very old and ancient arrangement. We don’t tamper with it. I might perhaps ask—”

As if drawn by the tiny fire, Jefferson had crossed his legs while Vergennes spoke and slowly slid down the back of the chair, lifting one shoulder and dropping his long right arm almost to the carpet. When he suddenly interrupted, his voice and posture were so casual that the undiplomatic effrontery of it left Vergennes blinking, his open mouth a silent O.

“I wonder if I could make a proposal, Monsieur?”

The mouth closed, the brow frowned. Vergennes sat in stiff vertical blue lines, unmoving, as if he had been slapped. In the abrupt silence of the room, snow brushed against the window in long, soft feathers; a single coal snapped into embers.

“Instead of collecting import taxes over the whole kingdom,” Jefferson said, “at five or six or even seven different stages, why not simply restrict the import of tobacco to a few designated port cities? Cherbourg, for example, and Nantes. That way, a single collector in each city could do all the work.”

Vergennes opened his mouth again, then closed it. Reyneval stood frozen, equally stiff and vertical, between the chairs and the window, one hand clasping the back of his neck, white eyes staring down at Jefferson.

“You employ some three thousand tobacco tax collectors now,” Jefferson said calmly, “and every one of them draws a salary. My plan is radical, of course. But consider. The Farmers-General’s monopoly remains, the king’s revenues actually
increase
. And American tobacco can be easily included.”

“Monsieur Jefferson,” Vergennes began, and stopped.

“It would work,” Reyneval said in a tone of complete amazement.