Jefferson (39 page)

Query: How many people in St. John’s Church that hot March morning knew that Patrick Henry, loaded down with rhetorical chains, struggling against invisible British coils like Laocoön against the serpents—how many people knew that Henry had a wife who had been insane for years, tied up in a leather strait-jacket and padlocked chains and kept in a basement room of the house, with a trap-door entrance in the hall down which Henry climbed every day to feed her?

How many people thought about what
other
kinds of chains and liberty he meant?

And query: Who can picture—for one instant—Thomas Jefferson in such theatrics?

The privacy of pen and ink was Jefferson’s medium. As President he could hardly bear the thought of standing up before an audience; apart from his inaugural address, he sent every message, including the State of the Union, in letter form to Congress. But a little-known fact, a footnote: When Patrick Henry had finished his “Liberty or Death” oration, his audience, as you might expect, lay collapsed, prostrate with emotion around the sweltering church. One man even fell to his knees at the last words, weeping, and raised his hands and shouted, “Let me be buried on this very spot!” But so absolute was Jefferson’s dedication to liberty, to the cause, that after all
that
he nonetheless had the courage to rise and walk to the rostrum himself, something he dreaded to his very core, and then he too gave a speech in support of going to war. Nobody heard a word of it. But for twenty minutes he held the floor, arguing for freedom. He told me it cost him a month of headaches afterward.

Did the sublime Henry ever acknowledge Jefferson’s greatness?

When he wrote his
Summary View
in 1774, Jefferson was too shy or diffident actually to give it as a speech before the Burgesses as it was intended to be. He set out from Monticello for Williamsburg with two copies of it in his saddlebags,
meaning
to speak. But somewhere along the road he began to suffer one of those attacks of diarrhea (like the headaches) that seemed to come to him in crises. Was he thinking perhaps of the notorious British punishment for treason: hanging, but cutting down the victim while he was still alive and ripping out his intestines, then burning them before his eyes? Or was he thinking (more likely) of the hundreds of eyes that would be staring up at him while he gave his speech? He turned back to Monticello. He sent one copy to Peyton Randolph (now a dedicated rebel), one to Patrick Henry. Randolph thought the speech was so brilliant he had it printed at once. Henry never mentioned it—“he probably left it on a tavern table,” Jefferson would say scornfully, later. “Patrick Henry was the laziest man in reading I’ve ever known.”

Hard words from Jefferson. Hardest possible words, given the books that filled every room of his house, on whose backs he always rode. But if Jefferson had chosen sides once at the age of twenty-two, by the time of the Revolution he had seen ten more years of life, and Patrick Henry, the backwoods Homer, had lost his power to charm. What kind of hero, after all, was forever playing his “fiddle” by a campfire and watching the farmers dance? (The fiddle versus the violin.) Or joked his way through his bar examination (“I never studied law six weeks in my life,” he told Jefferson, snickering)? Or rose to speak for liberty in front of any audience that would hear him, almost like an actor hired for the part, but rarely stuck around for the long, tedious committee work that followed? Henry was a geyser of rage next to Jefferson, a wild creature of ignorance and passion. When the two finally parted political company, Henry set out to ruin Jefferson with his incessant talk of impeachment and cowardice and flights from Monticello. In his turn, Jefferson stubbornly believed (without any evidence) that the great orator for liberty had plotted in the last year of the Revolution to make himself Dictator of Virginia. Even after the Revolution was over, he wrote Madison (another
mumbling, inaudible speaker) that “While Mr. Henry lives, another bad constitution would be formed and saddled forever on us. What we have to do, I think, is devoutly to pray for his death.”

Jefferson had no sense at all of the
mysterious
in life; every sense of the
uncontrollable
.

“
P
ère Grasse at our school says that God speaks perfect French as well as Hebrew. What do
you
say, Mr. Short?”

Patsy Jefferson put down the glass of wine that she was permitted to hold, ceremonially, on Sunday afternoons and made an ironic little curtsy as Short entered the parlor. At fourteen, Jefferson’s oldest daughter was already as tall as most men, but spindly as a colt. Deliberately she lifted her chin away from her father and looked at the cold November rain outside the window. It was precisely one month since Maria Cosway had departed Paris.

“You may answer in either French or Hebrew, Guillaume,” Clérisseau said from the sofa, where he lounged in front of the fire.

At Patsy’s side, holding his own wineglass in his left hand, his right hand still cradled in a sling, Jefferson smiled. “If triangles worshiped a god,” he told his daughter, “no doubt it would have three sides.”

“Montesquieu.” Clérisseau stabbed at the coals with a poker and looked up at Patsy. “Your father quotes Montesquieu and hides his skepticism behind his erudition. As a Frenchman I am flattered, as a Catholic I am outraged.”

“As a guest,” Jefferson responded, “you are hungry. We can
certainly go into the dining room now.” And he offered Patsy his left arm.

“Mr. Short,” the girl said, ignoring her father’s arm, “has been upstairs writing correspondence”—she hesitated a moment, as if to go back and edit her awkward phrase—“
his
wrist being perfectly sound and uninjured. He should lead us in, as a reward.”

“Mr. Short,” Jefferson said mildly, “is always a favorite of the ladies.” Patsy turned her back.

“I shall have wives,” Clérisseau muttered to Short as they took their places at the table, “but never daughters.”

His words or his tone caught Patsy’s ear, and she snapped her red head around to glare.

“I’ve received yet another package from John Paul Jones,” Short said quickly (a diplomat is a man who always has another subject ready). “He sends us medallions this time, you know.” Wind racing from the Atlantic up the Seine rattled the window panes, setting the candles flickering. “A new set of bronze medallions commemorating the
Bonhomme Richard
and the
Serapis
. He wants us to hold them for him in our strongbox till he comes back.”

“Admiral Jones is now commanding a squadron of Russian ships for the Empress Catherine,” Jefferson explained to Clérisseau. “He sends us, alternately, requests for money and valuable personal items to store. You know Short’s hydrophobia. I think William trembles at the very thought of anyone sailing in a ship, on the water.”

“Very wise.” Clérisseau took the decanter from James Hemings’s hand and poured for himself. “If it were up to me, the seas would be filled with wine.”

“A
commode,”
Short said. “This time, along with the medallions, Jones also sent us an enormous porcelain commode ‘of superior workmanship and quality,’ I quote—from Amsterdam; it took two men just to carry it up the steps. He wrote ‘Keep but do not use’ on the wrapping.”

Jefferson laughed, and Clérisseau arched a Gallic eyebrow. Hands in her lap, studying her wineglass as if it were a viper, the unforgiving Patsy waited for silence. “Perhaps Mrs. Cosway has painted it with her immortal brush, which makes it so valuable,” she said bitterly, eyes on her father.

Jefferson’s mildness was unruffled.

“Mrs. Cosway,” he said, “writes me that she and her husband plan to return to Paris next spring—we can ask her then.”

Patsy leaned forward, picked up her wineglass, and drained it.

Afterward, because Jefferson’s wrist made any motion painful, Short climbed (warily) into the carriage to accompany her back to the convent school at Panthemont. When their carriage crossed the Pont Royal and began to wind up the rue du Bac, he cleared his throat to break the silence.

“Number forty-six?”

Patsy kept her gaze sullenly on the rain.

“Quarante-six, faites attention.”

On her first day at the school—could it really have been two years ago?—Patsy had been assigned the number 46; it was sewn into the collar of her uniforms, tagged onto her belongings, even written across her books and drawings.

“Number forty-six, how is school? How is Miss Tufton and the dull, slow Miss Annesley of Great Britain? I haven’t heard about any of your friends lately.”

As they passed a streetlamp, Patsy’s red hair flared in the dark carriage like a match. “My father says
she
plans to come back in the spring. Did you hear him?”

Short sighed. “She and Mr. Cosway
may
come back. Nothing is ever certain.”

“She’s married,” Patsy said, spinning to face him. “That’s certain. And he spends every day he can with her just the same.”

“They visit galleries, painters. They talk about painting, everybody in Paris talks about painting.”

Patsy folded her arms across her chest in a fence-building gesture, Short decided, exactly like her father’s.

On the rue de Grenelle the carriage splashed to a halt in front of the school gates. With a voice barely loud enough to be heard over the rain, Patsy said good-bye to Short and hurried past the concierge’s booth. Once inside she shook rain from her hood, stamped her feet (like a horse, she thought, looking glumly at her shoes; tall girl, long feet). Then she climbed the familiar flight of stairs to the dormitory.

All of the girls slept in one cavernous room on the second floor. Four rows of identical beds, twelve to a row. Locked wooden
boxes at the foot of each bed held clothes, books, the few (very few) personal items the nuns permitted; no room for John Paul Jones’s commode. At one end a tall sinuous crucifix, painted a glossy white and gold, that caught the eye no matter where you turned; at the other end, near Patsy’s bed, another door leading to the salle
de bain
, more stairs.

The sister on duty looked up from her little desk, squinted over the candle flame, and acknowledged Patsy with a tiny nod. Two or three girls looked up without curiosity from their beds. On Sundays almost everyone left the school to visit. Even the three English girls were generally hauled out to spend the day with an obliging relative or family friend visiting in Paris. Patsy took off her damp hood and cape and sat on the end of the bed.

Mrs. Maria Cosway. In her mind Patsy sounded each syllable of the name. Mr. Richard Cosway. At home in Virginia wives and husbands were firmly, decisively placed; if men … misbehaved, they were unmarried men, the kind you saw lazing on the porches of taverns, or working in dirty shirts out in the sun, exuding an aroma of whiskey and sweat and tobacco as you passed. Or else they were men you sometimes saw strolling out of a slave’s house, buttoning their trousers, rubbing their whiskers. But in France—

She stood up abruptly and opened the box at the end of her bed. Nabby Adams had liked to say France changed everyone—look at her mother at the ballet, look at Dr. Franklin cheering balloons. Patsy pulled out the leather portfolio of landscape drawings she was to complete by Tuesday; her worst subject. Nabby Adams was married now—she had written Patsy a special letter signed Mrs. William Stephens Smith—and her husband worked for her father in London just the way, precisely, that William Short worked for
her
father.

“Did you have your
bain
yesterday, Jeff? Or did you get
dispense?
”

Julia Annesley, pastiest and pestiest of the three British girls, had wandered over from her bed to stare at Patsy’s things; or else simply to talk—the girls were forbidden to speak in the open rooms outside of classes and only in low voices in the dormitory, but Sunday evenings were lax. During the day the sisters all carried “clacks,” two pieces of wood that could be snapped together to bring a girl to attention.

“It was
cold
.” Julia peered at the portfolio of drawings. “And the sisters said there couldn’t be a fire yet because of the holy water.”