Jefferson (19 page)

Twenty minutes later at the entrance to the hallway, in an icy draft from the heart of Versailles, Vergennes bowed formally, tugged at his ribbon, and promised to consider Jefferson’s proposal:

“It would actually work,” Reyneval repeated, offering his be-jeweled hand. “It is a brilliantly practical idea.”

“Monsieur Jefferson is famous for his practical sense,” Vergennes said. A courtier in a greatcoat with shaggy epaulets of snow approached, and he waved him away. “You will remember how pleased I was to learn that you would replace Dr. Franklin here.”

The mention of Franklin always brought a curiously boyish smile to Jefferson’s face. He took his hat and riding coat from a waiting secretary’s arm and nodded at the nearest table, where a foot-high ceramic figurine of Franklin, complete with fur cap and gold spectacles, flew a little silk kite on a wire. “I’m afraid, my dear comte,” he said in a phrase that would be repeated for weeks at the court, “I only succeed Franklin. Nobody could replace him.”

“It would work
brilliantly
,” Lafayette declared. “Why didn’t you tell me what you were going to do? It’s
brilliant
!” He clasped Jefferson by both arms and looked as if he were about to burst into tears. Short intervened.

“He used
your
figures, of course,” he said, speaking loudly, bowing deeply, and the marquis turned his narrow face eagerly toward Short. Any mention of his role, in anything whatever, made the marquis swing like a magnet toward the speaker. “Those figures you devised for him months ago, the names of the ports you gave us.”

“Yes, yes.” The marquis was nodding and drinking from his wineglass at the same time.

“Well—” Short had reached a dead end. “Well, only
you
could have discovered them and set them out so perfectly.
You
, with your friendships and connections.”

Lafayette swiveled back to Jefferson for confirmation, and Jefferson, on cue, began speaking in his softest voice, repeating Short’s assurances. Short exhaled with a sigh and moved a step away from them. When they paid no attention, he retreated even
farther, paused at a sideboard laden with food, and then looked about the crowded room.

He had forgotten how far Lafayette’s obsession with things American had gone. To visit him now on the rue de Bourbon was to plunge into a fantasy world. At these soirées no French was to be spoken. At some point, sooner or later, the boy George-Washington Lafayette and the girl Virginie would be hauled forward to recite American poems in American English. At the drop of a hat the modest and devoted (and surpassingly dull)
la marquise
Adrienne would guide you through room after room stuffed from floor to ceiling with repellent homespun American souvenirs: woven cane baskets from South Carolina, dried leaves of Virginia tobacco, a stuffed possum shot by Lafayette himself, a brick from Mount Vernon. Tonight—procured who could guess how?—the butler passing wine among them was a full-blooded Indian, dressed for the Parisian winter in a deerskin loincloth and shirt, war paint, and a headband crowned with turkey feathers.

Short sipped his own wine and found that it had a bitter, coppery taste, the aftermath of the bout with jaundice that had driven him to bed (alone) in Saint-Germain for nearly five weeks. He edged around a group of bare-shouldered French ladies, feeling slightly light-headed and unsure if it was the décolletages or the wine. In front of the fireplace he stopped to admire the huge framed and glassed copy of the Declaration of Independence that Lafayette had hung in a place of honor.

“You must know the one by heart,” a woman’s voice said, “and the other you must think a bizarre French
jeu
.”

Short looked down into the formidable, pockmarked face of Lafayette’s cousin. The celebrated Madame de Tessé was a woman about Jefferson’s age, petite in figure, famously partisan and fiercely liberal in her politics. She pointed her silk fan at the equally huge but empty frame that hung on the wall next to the Declaration. “My cousin says
that
frame is reserved for the French Declaration of Rights, yet to be written, of course.”

Short started to reply, but she continued, “The most revealing thing I can tell you about our young Lafayette is this. When he was eight or nine years old, growing up in the dismal forests of the Auvergne, which with luck you will never visit—he dances so badly because he grew up in the provinces, it is why he took so
completely to you Americans—there was a wild dog or animal—they called it, I think, the ‘hyena of the Gevaudan’—that roamed the countryside devouring livestock. The peasants claimed it devoured women and children, too, and naturally it drank their blood. Little Gilbert used to go out every day into the woods, determined to see the hyena.”

“To kill it?” Short managed to ask.

“Certainly not. To
admire
it. Gilbert sympathizes with any outcast or hunted beast. It’s how he sees himself. He was nearly forced to leave the Collège du Plessis when he wrote an essay on ‘the perfect horse.’ He wrote that the perfect horse would buck and throw his tyrannical rider as soon as he saw a whip. The Jesuits flogged him for that, of course—a rare instance of Jesuitical humor.”

“Then—”

“Were you there for General Washington’s ‘great conversation’? No, I can see you’re too young. I want to meet an American who was there—perhaps Monsieur Clever?” She bent her head to indicate Jefferson, who stood ten feet away in the center of the group.

“Monsieur Jefferson was not actually in the Continental Army …”

“Washington,” said Madame de Tessé, “is supposed to have put his arm around our Gilbert and said, ‘Please think of me always as a friend and father.’ ”

Short raised an eyebrow. The idea of Washington placing his arm around anyone staggered the imagination. There was a story about Washington and the one-legged roué Gouverneur Morris—

“From that point on Gilbert was happy.” Madame de Tessé was gathering her skirts and beginning to look around the room. “You know his real father was killed in the Battle of Minden. Gilbert was two. Then his uncle, who was his guardian, fell at the siege of Milan. So to have a general for a father—a
live
general!”

She started to walk away, leaving Short by the fireplace, but with the casual coquetry of the middle-aged and homely, she looked over her shoulder as she left. “You are Monsieur Short?”

“Yes.”

“You know Madame de Tott?”

“Your protégée, yes. She’s very charming.”

“Come to see us at my estate in Chaville, both of us. We shall talk politics and revolution.”

He nodded to the back of her wig and then pinched the bridge of his nose. A servant had pulled back the curtains, so that the cobblestone courtyard now shone before them, a carpet of snow under a radiant moon. Everyone else was going to a performance at the new Théâtre Français—Racine’s
Les Plaideurs
, a play so baroque and boring that Short had instantly pleaded jaundice-inspired weakness; and in fact he meant to go straight back to the new, luxurious quarters on the rue de Berri and fall asleep.

By the opened curtains Lafayette had begun a complicated explanation of their order of departure, his big horse teeth flashing as he spoke, eyes turning greedily from face to face. Short took a moment to study him: the hunter of the hyena, the aristocratic friend of all rebellion. His politics were brave and Jeffersonian, but there was always something about Lafayette that just missed being truly impressive, that turned at the last moment desperate or comical. His appearance worked against him, of course: the huge teeth, the spiky red hair that no coiffeur could tame. But his deeper flaw, as Jefferson had written Madison (in code), was “a canine appetite for popularity.” Doglike, puppyish. For a would-be hero, Short could think of no more devastating adjective.

Beside Lafayette now his wife Adrienne was looking up adoringly while the rest of the company were busily throwing on coats and hats as they listened. Which of the various ladies present, Short wondered, was Lafayette’s mistress this week? Jefferson, as smooth in movement as Lafayette was awkward, gallantly adjusted the shoulders of Adrienne de Lafayette’s cloak. Not immune, not by any means immune to the physical charms of women, but as far as Short knew, absolutely, resolutely chaste, even in Paris.

Even in Paris. Short began to follow the crowd to the doors—held open, he saw, by yet another American Indian in costume. The ladies passed before him, chattering, laughing,
jingling
(he considered the image) like kittens with bells. Jefferson frequently said that domestic happiness constitutes the highest form of human bliss. What did he think of an atmosphere like Paris, where infidelity was so commonplace, the flesh so ripely displayed,
where a gentleman, however adoring his wife, would as soon go into society without his sword (a
better
image) as his mistress?

At the door, back to the inevitable draft, shoulders hunched like a scarab, he waited on shifting feet to make his excuses again. Adrienne Lafayette looked grave and mouselike. An Indian brave held out his cloak.

“I think,” Jefferson said behind him, “that Vergennes may yet insist that the king’s contract with the Farmers-General is already so advanced for the year—he won’t reopen the question of tobacco.”

Lafayette squeezed his long face into a frown.

“But the king, I believe,” Jefferson added as they moved to the door, “also has the right to strike out any single item he chooses from the contract.”

“He never uses it,” Lafayette muttered.

Outside, Short walked alone across the courtyard. Snow crunched under his boots. Cold moonlight swam on the distant river. The shapes of boats and barges could be dimly seen bumping with the current. At the stables on the far corner of Lafayette’s house, he leaned against the iron gate while a grumbling stableboy saddled his horse. Overhead, from this angle, the roof blocked the moon and the whole eastern sky blazed with a long trail of brilliant white stars.

Like God’s white beard, Short thought, more light-headed than ever. God would wear a gigantic beard of flickering stars, would He not? and stroke it from time to time with His even more gigantic moonstruck hands? He watched the stableboy curse the leather straps and disappear under the horse’s belly. Short could still taste the coppery red wine, of which he had undoubtedly drunk too much. Had God ever been young like him? And then grown old and sad in a foreign country?

In the salon of Lafayette’s house the last few guests were awaiting their carriages. By the fireplace Madame de Tessé, muffled from chin to ankle in a wrap of silver fox, stood with the quite beautiful young wife of the decidedly older Duc de La Rochefoucauld.

“So, now, Rosalie,” said Madame de Tessé indifferently, “you must come to Chaville and visit me, as soon as the roads are clear again.”

Rosalie drank tea from a cup, not wine, and watched the servants bustling around the room. “Who was the young man you were talking with, here?” Shyly, she indicated the fireplace and the two great frames above it.

“Ah. Monsieur Short. Jefferson’s personal assistant. You don’t know him?”

And then, as she so often did, Madame de Tessé supplied her own answer. “Not yet, you don’t.”

Memoirs of Jefferson—5

T
HERE IS A SECOND EPISODE IN JEFFERSON
’
S
life for which, like the flight from Banastre Tarleton, two contradictory versions exist. In order to approach it, however, I need to fall back several years and set the scene.