Jefferson (4 page)

“Wipe your shoes and wait in there with the congregation.” The hallway opened to double doors on each side. Adams pointed to the crowded drawing room on the left but stared disconcertingly hard at Short. “We’ll make our grand appearance when he’s finished in the study.”

Humphreys, as official secretary to the American commissioners, had been to Adams’s house a hundred times, but for Short it was only the third visit. He hesitated for a moment in the hallway as if to study the bright paintings and the ornate gold trellis paper that, uncharacteristically, Adams had bought to decorate his walls. New England Puritan though he might be, Short thought, there was an undeniable sensuousness in John Adams’s makeup; granite streaked with sugar. Humphreys was already striding through the guests, bowing every few feet like a mechanical doll.

“Franklin,” Adams said in a tone of disgust, reappearing somehow beside Short, “drinks only mineral water. Try the punch”—he pronounced it
poonch
. “Mrs. Adams made it.” Then he too was gone.

Short nodded obediently to empty space and took a tentative step toward the room. In front of him two dozen or more people
appeared to be frozen in a typical French tableau. The men stood in small, tight circles, their tricorne hats tucked firmly under their arms to show off their powdered wigs, their ceremonial swords poking from under their coats like silver rats’ tails; for their part, the women, equally powdered but bare-shouldered and dazzlingly colorful, sat in chairs or sofas as close to the single fireplace as they dared, hoping to catch whatever warmth the men had not managed to block with their legs.

“Monsieur Short,
viens ici
, come favor us.”

The great Madame Brillon, growing stout, growing gray, was at forty (and more) accustomed to having her way. She sat in a stuffed chair next to the fireplace holding a cup of Mrs. Adams’s
poonch
and smiling in invitation. Short made his way over the vast carpet (Persian, expensive, like strolling through a sunburst—nobody put carpets on floors in horse-foul Virginia). There were two younger French ladies flanking her, their powdered white hair piled and shaped as high above their brows as their bosoms were cut and scooped below (Short bowed low himself, thinking of cakes of snow); around them stood a ring of five or six be-powdered and be-wigged French gentlemen, hats jammed under their arms, dressed, Short thought, like celestial beetles.

“We awaited our translator,” Madame Brillon said in beautifully accented English.

Short bowed again, acknowledging his reputation as a student of French. When a French garrison had billeted at Williamsburg in the war, he had haunted their officers’ tents to practice the language. When he had first arrived in Paris two months ago, he had taken a room in the sleepy village of Saint-Germain just to perfect his accent.

“But we wondered if you would be willing to cross so much water tonight to join us.” The speaker was a man Short had seen at twenty parties—the French had a maddening habit of never introducing anyone to anyone else. He was in his late fifties, faultlessly dressed in sapphire-blue coat and white lace, possessed of two bulging Gallic eyes, a nose like a flattened horn, and a sardonic, anti-American wit.

“Monsieur Short has an aversion to ocean travel,” Madame Brillon explained serenely to the satin-clad woman on her right. “He vows never to return home by sea.”

“Monsieur Jefferson will have to part the waters for him,” the blue man murmured (but when Short looked up he affected not to have spoken).

“Ah, but Monsieur Jefferson is a monk, not a prophet. A woman looks at those cool gray eyes and knows that.” Madame Brillon placed a warm, plump hand on Short’s. “Now. Has he told
you
why we are all summoned here? Franklinet brought us our invitation”—she glanced toward a tall young man in a curled wig who stood by the fireplace ladling punch. William Temple Franklin, the illegitimate son of Franklin’s own illegitimate son, known universally as Franklinet. A brainless, harmless, perpetually slack-jawed person. It was rumored that he had proposed marriage to Madame Brillon’s daughter, just as Franklin himself had once proposed something less (or more) to Madame Brillon.

“Not a word. There were letters from home on Tuesday, and he skipped his usual Thursday evening here.”

“Unwell,” said one of the beetles significantly, and the others nodded. Jefferson’s poor health had not gone unnoticed. Which one—or three—of these encircling dandies would be the court spy? Short wondered. In the midst of all its virtues, French life suffered from a chronic, circular preoccupation with spying. The police spied on the citizens, the citizens spied on foreigners and each other, the court spied obsessively on everyone. Any unconsidered remark or gesture, however harmless, seemed to have a second life at Versailles, where Short imagined the stout-bottomed young king standing perpetual guard in a tower, a huge white-powdered ear turned suspiciously toward Paris.

“Letters from America? Letters perhaps from the Marquis de Lafayette?” The blue man was interested enough to drop his shield of irony for a moment.

“Lafayette,” Short told him, “we understand is en route. If the winds are good, we expect him to arrive next week, with satchels of letters and news, of course. He’s been touring in America six months at least—I saw him there myself.”

“The Marquis de Lafayette,” said Madame Brillon thoughtfully. Her fingers tapped the back of Short’s hand. “A very odd man. He has a head shaped exactly like a pineapple.”

“Well—” he blushed. He knew he blushed. Both French and English deserted him like court spies.

“Well.” Madame Brillon mocked with a smile. She was no longer young, but she was still shapely, still flirtatious, with an indefinable vivacity that Short had decided was the birthright of Parisian females alone. Her dress was cut as low as those of the younger women beside her, so low that—Short fashioned a complicated sentence in French—“le moindre mouvement faisait sortir du corsage le bout des seins.” He had been told it was of her, dressed in a generous morning chemise, that the withered old poet Fontenelle exclaimed, “Oh, to be seventy again!”

“I want you to tell me about Monsieur Jefferson,” she demanded, rising.

Across the muddy hallway the dining-room doors were swinging open. Against the candles Short could see the bustling angular figure of Abigail Adams pushing the last chairs into place herself.

“He is the author—” Short said (pompously, he knew; he blushed all the harder).

“Of the famous Declaration of Independence that changed the world. All men—but not women—are created equal. Yes, yes. It’s been translated over and over in Paris, everyone’s read it.”

Madame Brillon held his sleeve with two fingers. John and Abigail Adams notoriously ignored the French practice of formally leading guests, according to their social rank, in to the table. Pell mell was the rule here, Adams liked to say. People were beginning to drift now in small chattering groups toward the hall and the dining room on the other side. “He’s a great statesman,” she said. “He was a governor. Chastellux visited him at his house on a little mountain and tells everyone he lives like an ancient philosopher.”

“Well …”

“Well. Does he like music?” Madame Brillon was considered a gifted musician—for a woman a genuine prodigy. A young genius named Boccherini had dedicated six wonderful sonatas to her.

“Mr. Jefferson loves music. He plays the violin an hour every day. He buys
volumes
of music at the Quai des Grands Augustins.”

“He has a child but no wife.”

“Mrs. Jefferson died two years ago.”

“So. He is not as fierce as Monsieur Adams, obviously, or as … what should we call it? As
free
as Franklin?”

“Votre chèr papa,” Short said, risking the freedom himself.
Madame Brillon was celebrated for having sat in Franklin’s lap during a court dinner at Versailles (scandalizing the two Adamses, whose eyes had almost popped). She called the good doctor
“mon chèr papa”
and stroked his bald head, but then, so apparently did half the titled ladies in Paris.

“No, not at all. Monsieur Jefferson is not ‘papa’ material, however much you young men worship him.”

She released his sleeve and smiled again. Her own gray eyes, Short thought, were absolutely gorgeous—pools of smoke.

“He really must find a position for you,” she added, with the same abrupt thoughtfulness she had used in speaking of Lafayette, “before all your lovely money vanishes.”

The door to the study swung open again, and behind them the triumvirate of American commissioners was passing to the dining room: Franklin first, waddling slowly, using his cane and bowing; Adams, with a face like a pasty white ball, working his narrow mouth up and down in impatient expressions of greeting; and Jefferson last, hesitating at the threshold as if he might change his mind and retreat back to the shelves of books. At the door to the dining room his arms folded across his chest like a cross.

“I shall demonstrate,” Franklin announced to the table at large, “how to flirt.”

Smiling benignly, he turned in his chair and reached for the ornamental fan that the woman on his left hand placed beside her plate. Still beaming, Franklin picked up the fan between two fingers and opened it with a snap. Then, grinning, he began to turn it rapidly back and forth in front of his face—at each turn simpering like a girl or stopping the fan in midflutter and peeping over the top with huge coy eyes at one of the men.

“Oh, lord.” Madame Brillon laughed until she began to choke.

Franklin peered over his fan in a moony way at sour John Adams all the way down the table.

“To flirt,” Franklin said. “A splendid old English word meaning a quick jerking motion. I
flirt
this fan.”

In the general laughter Short found himself thinking that two rules had been broken at once—first, the French custom of speaking at a meal only to one’s neighbor; and second, Franklin’s own
rule of never starting a topic of conversation. Poor Richard was famous for sitting quietly in his chair and speaking only when spoken to.

“But why does she have a fan in January?” whispered the young woman to Short’s left. An Adams voice of fascinated disapproval. The pell mell of the table had thrown Short leeward, toward his host and, as it turned out, the nineteen-year-old Miss Nabby Adams, who was a softer and prettier version of her mother Abigail.

“It’s warm where she is, by the fireplace,” he said, noting that up and down the table each Frenchman had, true to form, placed his hat beside his plate. Rumor had Miss Adams recovering from an improper romantic attachment to a Harvard wastrel with the implausible (and very un-Adams) name of “Royall” Tyler. Had the canny Abigail steered her toward Short tonight for a reason? “Even the flowers in your centerpiece are melting,” Short told her.

Miss Adams was studying doubtfully the plate a maid had just slipped in front of her, but she raised her head quickly. “The centerpiece. We went to a dinner in the Louvre Palace, Mr. Short, where the centerpiece was a huge model winter landscape made out of artificial frost.
It
was by the fireplace, too, and during the meal the frost slowly began to melt, and underneath it you suddenly saw miniature trees and houses and little flowing streams, and just as dessert was served, hundreds of tiny blossoms sprang up on wires to symbolize spring!”

She was actually a charming girl, Short thought, if too serious.

“This is a new dish someone has invented in Paris,” she said, toying with the dark mass on her plate. “Mama and I weren’t sure—it’s called pâté de foie gras. The liver of a fat goose. Don’t ask how it’s made. Dr. Franklin loves it.”

At the middle of the table, liberally spreading his pâté on toast, Franklin was now telling a joke. One of the French gentlemen, speaking English with a slow syrupy accent, asked Franklin if he really intended to ascend in a hot-air balloon that summer, as rumor had it. Franklin beamed again and squinted through his spectacles down the table.

“Mr. Jefferson,” he said, finding him almost in the corner, next to Abigail Adams, a tall, tranquil figure, dressed in the latest French tailoring but unmistakably, in his clear skin and long,
slouched frame, American. “Mr. Jefferson is the very man to ascend in a balloon. I am too old—”

A little clatter of disagreement, led by Madame Brillon. But Franklin was eighty if a day, Short thought.

“—and not much given to travel anymore. As you know.”

Everyone nodded in more or less solemn sympathy. Franklin’s constant battle with the bladder stone was widely known. He moved about in great torment, usually drank only mineral water, and sometimes had himself carried in a litter like an Oriental sage to this or that noble lady’s house. In fact, Short considered, the cult of Franklin in Paris was astounding—Jefferson had warned him: down to the servants in a house, everyone knew about him, his bons mots were quoted and reprinted everywhere, there were paintings and engravings of him in shops and on mantelpieces, even on paper fans. At a gallery near the Palais Royal a woman sold plaster dolls of him, complete with famous wire spectacles and tiny fur hat.