Jefferson (40 page)

Patsy nodded briskly. As a veteran of two winters at Panthemont, she had learned not to think of fire or warmth until the Christmas holidays, if then. The sisters had an inflexible rule: No fires in the fireplaces before ice formed in the chapel’s basin of holy water. Meanwhile girls studied in their hoods and capes, teeth chattering, sisters taught in the whitewashed classrooms wearing gray woolen gloves and scarves and puffing smoke with every breath.

“So I didn’t have a
bain
yesterday,
à cause de la froideur
,” Julia said, now leaning forward and actually picking up some of the books in Patsy’s box. “And also”—she dropped her voice—“because Sister Yvonne was on duty, and I think she’s”—Julia swiveled her head to look at the hooded nun bent over her candle like an enormous black crow—“she’s too
attentive
.”

“Yes.” Patsy had had this conversation many times with Julia. On Saturday the girls were supposed to bathe, one by one, in a large portable tub brought into the
salle de bain
. You wore a
chemise de bain
(with your number tagged on it, of course), and the sister bathing you would reach under the chemise with a sponge and scrub. Sister Yvonne was noted for letting the sponge fall accidentally into the water and continuing to rub with her hands. “Wait for Sister Denise—elle est plus gentille.”

“ ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ” Julia read.

Patsy took the book from her hands. It was a small octavo volume bound in red Italian leather with her name “Martha Jefferson” stamped in gold on the lower cover; a gift from her father last Christmas. She tucked it away beneath the drawings and listened with only part of her mind to Julia’s bright meaningless chirpings, now turning to the subject of Romeo’s love for Juliet, his glorious romantic speeches—the passionate way Père Grasse would read them aloud; if, of course, Père Grasse knew English.

The glass of wine had made Patsy feel first giddy, then sleepy. When Julia wandered away at last to greet another returning girl, Patsy quickly ducked behind one of the dressing screens and changed into her nightdress, then dove for her covers. At the door the Sister was putting out superfluous candles, preparing for evening
prayer, which Protestant girls did not have to join in. The crucifix on the wall moved in the flickering shadows like a living person, and the two spots of red on its palms suddenly glowed with reflected light; blood, wax. Mrs. Cosway was Catholic. She was also delicate. If she were punished, she would probably sicken and die. Patsy shifted on the hard mattress and thought of punishment. The sisters were not allowed to strike the girls, though Sister Yvonne sometimes did. In the Hôpital des Vénériens, Patsy had been told by one of the French girls, patients were given a daily spanking before their dose of mercury to punish them for having caught syphilis.

She turned again in the bed. France changed everyone. Mr. Short, it was generally conceded by her friends, was very handsome; he had a “sweet
amour
”—Elizabeth Tufton’s word—in Saint-Germain, he might even (but he never smelled of whiskey or sweat) have visited one of those places where … She let the thought fade, fall into the maw of sleep. At parties and dinners, Mr. Short stared at the young, pretty Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld, and she was married. And her father watched always with a cold, stern face. A necklace of raindrops slid down the window, white pearls, into the dark. At this very moment Mr. Short was probably visiting at someone’s salon in the Louvre, bowing to the young duchesse, kissing her perfumed hand.

But at that moment Short was merely, unperfumedly holding his pen over a paper in Jefferson’s second-floor study.

“John Stockdale in London,” Jefferson said. He hugged himself with his left arm, right arm still in the sling, and stood closer to the fireplace, more sensitive to cold than anyone Short had ever known. “The map surveyed by my father, corrections, terms; also the French translation of
Sanford and Merton
he wants.”

Short scribbled two more lines on his list. John Stockdale supplied Jefferson with English books and now had written twice proposing that he publish
Notes on Virginia
for general sale.

“A volume of Homer for Madame de Tott.”

“The fair Grecian,” Short murmured. Madame de Tessé’s protégée Sophie-Ernestine was, Jefferson claimed, Greek in origin, though nobody knew for certain, since she rarely spoke in company
and (French-like rather than Greek) never answered a direct question.

“Letters to Madison, John Jay, Ezra Stiles—”

Short finished the list from his notes: “Franklin, Mrs. Trist, General Washington, Calonne, Vaughn about magnets.” As always, the sheer range of Jefferson’s correspondence exhausted Short.

“I gave you the treaty proposal to copy.”

“Yes, sir.” Short fumbled in his stack of papers. Until the wrist had healed, he had the additional duty of copying over Jefferson’s official papers in a fair hand.

“If John Paul Jones had not taken up with Our Lady of the North,” Jefferson said, turning his other side to the fire.

“He is always a favorite with the ladies,” Short said, hoping to provoke a question about young Patsy’s state of mind. But Jefferson, impenetrable on the subject of his family, had returned to his favorite theme of forming a coalition against the Barbary pirates, six nations that would support Jones and an international fleet of warships. Last year he had proposed another extraordinary venture—the elimination of national passports and political barriers, the free condition of “universal citizen” for travelers—but this had been too visionary even to merit a response from Jay or Vergennes.

“It is almost pointless,” Jefferson said, studying the fire. A jet rose suddenly six inches out of the coals, a blue ghost. “France teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, we do no better. The king—” By the strange form of mental telepathy that existed between them, he looked up an instant before James Hemings entered the room, bearing a tray with a decanter of honey-brown Madeira. While he poured a glass for them each, Jefferson worked the little copy press beside his desk, swiveled his chair back and forth, manipulated with one hand the shackle of a new miniature lock.

“As for Washington’s letter,” Short began when James had left the room again.

“On the abominable subject of the abominable Society of Cincinnati,” Jefferson said.

Short nodded, trying in fact to remember. The Society of Cincinnati, latest scheme of what Jefferson always called the monarchical
faction, was intended to perpetuate, through hereditary membership, the officer class of the Continental Army. Washington had been named, automatically, its honorary head, but Jefferson had instantly written to point out the incompatibility of a democracy and an hereditary, de facto aristocracy.

“Washington asks my advice: should he attend their general meeting in Philadelphia? I wrote him yesterday, left-handed scribble. I told him that I have not yet met a person in France who does not consider the whole plan destructive to our government. I said”—Jefferson began to quote himself in a soft, murmuring voice—“I said, ‘To know the mass of evil which must flow from an aristocracy, a person must be in France; he must see the finest soil, the finest climate, the most compact state, the most benevolent character of people, and every earthly advantage combined, insufficient to prevent this scourge from rendering existence a curse to twenty-four out of twenty-five parts of the inhabitants of this country.’ ”

He put down his Madeira and picked up a sheet of paper from his desk. “I told him, the South is already aristocratical in its disposition, as you and I have reason to know. That spirit can always spread.” He paused a long moment. “I do not flatter myself with the immortality of our governments, but I shall think little also of their longevity unless this germ of aristocracy be taken out.”

His left hand crumpled the sheet of paper into a spiky ball. “Liberty,” he said softly. “Liberty, liberty.”

The two of them sat in mute contemplation of the crumpled paper. Then Short, feeling obscurely embarrassed, looked down at the topmost name on his list. “Madison writes that a new federal convention will be held next spring, to revise the Articles of Confederation.” He raised the idea tentatively. In some part of his mind he was afraid that Jefferson would insist on attending it and therefore leave him alone, without a position in Paris, or afraid he would drag him back to America. For less than an instant, one tick of Jefferson’s handsome new mantel clock, he allowed himself to picture the house, the ambassador’s office devolving upon William Short. But Jefferson was oddly uninterested in the convention.

“Do you know, William, I have long believed that in New England and in Virginia we have different understandings of the very word, the basic word.
Liberty
.”

Short stirred at his desk; flexed his fingers, cramped from so much writing.

“In New England.” Jefferson raised the Madeira almost to his lips; Short noticed the thinness of his left wrist, the increasingly angular cut of his profile. “In New England they think, John Adams thinks, in terms of liberty and
order
, the freedom to do what is right—in Massachusetts you are free to serve God, and you had better; if you don’t, the church will tell you. But in Virginia we think of it as freedom
from
—we are free from compulsion, free from churches and tyrannies. We trust a man to make his own mistakes, think as he pleases, go where he wants. My father carved his land out of the wilderness, by himself. In Virginia we have freedom from tyranny. In Virginia the opposite of freedom is slavery.”

Memoirs of Jefferson
—
8

O
N ONE OTHER OCCASION, FIVE YEARS
before Patrick Henry’s great “Liberty or Death” speech, Jefferson tried to speak out boldly, like an orator. He made an utter, un-Henry-like failure of it.

The scene was a Richmond courtroom, and ironically enough, Jefferson’s law professor George Wythe was sitting there as the opposing attorney. Between Wythe and his prize pupil, in the plaintiffs chair, hunched a bright mulatto slave.

Now George Wythe was a book lover and collector even more enthusiastic than Jefferson. He liked nothing better than to sit in the study of the old red brick house in Williamsburg—his wife’s house, designed by her architect father—and wave his hand at the shelves and shelves of books he had installed. “They say the law sharpens the mind by narrowing it.” He would smile disbelievingly. “But not in this room.”

So when Jefferson had come as his apprentice student, fresh from William and Mary College, Wythe laid out a program of reading so broad and stupendous and superhuman that it eventually
took five years, beginning on the top shelf with Plato and Greek philosophy (Jefferson’s sole linguistic weakness) and proceeding down the mahogany tiers through poetry, religion, belles lettres, Roman rhetoric, history, and (sometimes) law. At what point Wythe started to utter antislavery remarks nobody knows—after his wife’s death his young black maid bore a mulatto son; respectable Williamsburg was silent—but certainly he belonged to that trio of “enlightened” thinkers in the city (Professor William Small and Governor Fauquier the others) who introduced young Jefferson to the future by way of the scholarly, progressive past.