Jefferson (59 page)

In another minute they turned right, through a stone vault, and into a courtyard that looked like the home of a republic of artists. On strings or flat against damp walls hung brightly colored canvases, prints, black-and-white engravings by the hundreds, the work of the resident painters. Above them, clinging precariously to flat stone, the painters had added wooden balconies to the windows of their little apartments; then flowerpots and makeshift charcoal stoves. In the very center of the courtyard, like a gypsy encampment, rose a conglomeration of crooked shanties, hen coops, dog houses, tented laundries, and soap-making vats. In one corner kerchiefed women stood with their arms folded, washtubs at their feet. Near the entrance children squatted, half naked, by
dirty puddles, laughing and shouting as if the old Pont Neuf had somehow been transported inside, safe behind the king’s walls.

“She lives through there.” Morris pointed toward another, lower vault, and the carriage rattled across the paving stones and into a smaller, more elegant courtyard, where the carriage stopped, and then Morris led him across yet another little square. Through a grille Short glimpsed traffic and the two stiff rows of chimneys that always made the Palais Royal look like a sow on her back.

“And up here.”

Stumping loudly with his wooden leg, Morris mounted the stairs, coat flapping, paused at a landing, squinted down a window. At the third landing he straightened his coat with a sharp tug and knocked once, loud as a shot.

The next two hours passed for Short as a dream. Jefferson’s circle of friends—apart from Saint-Germain,
Short’s
circle too—was limited to political liberals,
“les américains,”
and visiting merchants. On his own, by force of charm alone, Morris had somehow found his way into a different Paris. The lady novelist Adèle de Flahaut, as beautiful, easily, as Short imagined, bore no resemblance at all to the brisk, modest matrons of the Hôtel de Langeac, whose chief role was to ornament and admire. When he followed Morris into the drawing room, the maid continued on ahead, pulling open a second set of doors, and then a third. Abruptly they entered Madame de Flahaut’s boudoir itself, where their hostess stood before a mirror, dressed in a diaphanous pink shift, extending her hands like a Delphic priestess while another maid powdered her lovely arms.

Morris greeted her with relaxed urbanity, sat down on a shabby couch beside the mirror. Short was introduced, seated, ignored in rapid fashion. Over her shoulder Adèle spoke in languorous, extremely colloquial French to Morris. The two maids, heads together, draped and redraped the gauzy shift.

Blinking to focus, Short saw just to his left a Chinese screen and behind it one corner of a brass tub. He bent. The tub was filled with warm milk and water, and when he looked up again his nose told him that the priestess three feet away had just emerged from it.

“ ‘Belinda sees no charm that’s not her own,’ ” Morris quoted cheerfully from the couch.

“Parlez français,” Adèle told the mirror.

“ ‘Cois tibi paene videre est,’ ”
he said,
“ ‘ut nudam.’ ”

“I speak Latin,” she informed him, “and you cannot see through my dress.” In the mirror her heavy-lidded eyes shifted to Short. “Can you, Monsieur Chort?”

In the parlor they were joined briefly by a bandy-legged older man in English lounging coat and twill jodhpurs. He nodded at Short, mumbled to Morris, and wandered into another room.

“The Baron de Flahaut has his apartment downstairs,” Morris explained. He drew Short to one of the Louis XV chairs beside the fireplace, and both of them watched as Adèle, now fully clothed in a green-and-white gown, herself exited through a different door. “They live here on his pension and whatever salary he makes as director of the king’s gardens.”

“Buffon’s old post.”

“Buffon’s old post, but hardly Buffon.”

Short looked around the room. The walls were hung with engravings of country scenes, the fireplace was stuffed with cheap wood, not coal, crackling and spitting as it burned; mirrors between engravings, fine chairs worn at the back and arms and leaking cotton; a long threadbare rug of no distinct color, rumpled across a stone floor. Jeffersonian, Short registered the fact automatically: no books.

“Nil admirari,”
Morris murmured.

When Adèle returned, she was followed by a handsome blond woman obviously her sister, a tall, hawk-nosed Frenchman dressed in ruffled court finery, and last—most striking of all—a man of medium height, middle age, with a thin, mocking expression and a ponderous club foot encased in black leather that thumped more loudly than Morris’s leg and swept back and forth like a pendulum under the folds of his cape. As Short got to his feet, even with his poor eyesight he had no trouble recognizing the former Abbé of Saint-Denis, now the Bishop of Autun, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the most worldly and libertine of all French reformers; if he were only a believer, Mirabeau had joked, Talleyrand might be the conscience of the Revolution.

No introductions this time, not even from Morris. The three
new arrivals took their places around the fierce little fire and began to eat and drink whatever the procession of maids carried to them.

“We have come from Versailles,” began Talleyrand, and Morris, peeling an orange, nodded.

“Have some of this conserve,” the sister urged, passing a jar of green jelly to Morris. “Cela vous purgera trois fois.”

Morris smiled and handed it to Short. By the fireplace Adèle had taken up another Delphic pose, equidistant between Talleyrand and Morris, arms along the mantel but inclining her head to Morris. In spite of himself, Short stared at her heavy-lidded eyes, the smooth face full of complex, sensual defects.

Talleyrand was now questioning Morris. “You saw the opening of our theatrical season?”

“He means the Estates-General,” Adèle said.

Morris was grave. “Madame de Tessé gave me an extra ticket. She hoped it would make me less a royalist and more a democrat to observe the excesses of power.”

“You’re no royalist,” said the hawk-nosed man. It was his one and only contribution to the evening.

“Nor democrat either. But I confess—is that the right word, my dear bishop? Confess?” Talleyrand raised two crooked fingers and made a sign. “Thank you,” Morris said. “I do confess, in all the pageantry your king and queen made a brilliant showing. I sat at the back of the Menus Plaisirs, where I could see everything, even your ecclesiastical ermine, sir, and hear nothing. The king appeared to read his speech well. Necker read well. The applause of the Third Estate—well, should I admit that at times tears came to my eyes? But the poor queen was so altogether alone and unpopular.”

“By all means, admit it,” drawled Talleyrand. His eyes came around, indifferently, to Short.

“The King of England,” Adèle informed them, her finger now deep in the jar of conserves, “has gone mad again, you know. This time he claims to be George Washington. They say his doctors follow him everywhere but don’t dare speak unless he speaks to them first, because
that
would violate royal protocol.” She placed the finger in her mouth. “The only book they allow him to read, I’m told, is, of all things,
King Lear
.”

“Which in English literature,” Talleyrand said, “curiously enough exists with two different endings, Shakespeare’s and the revised, happy version of some modern hack. Do we know the king’s choice?”

The conversational banter flew. Morris stretched his leg and his stump, rolled his eyes, joined in with a fluent, insinuating French that made Short feel suddenly a hundred years old. He took brandy from a maid. Talleyrand brought out a fat gold
tabatière
from the folds of his cape and offered him snuff. Morris told how Houdon had made him pose for Washington’s statue and asked his advice about the bust he was now making of Jefferson, at Jefferson’s request.

“Jefferson leaves soon for America, does he not?” asked Talleyrand.

“He has written for permission, but heard nothing.”

“And will he return?” The sister, whose name was Julie, had joined Adèle at the fireplace.

“He will return, of course,” said Talleyrand without bothering to look up at her. “Poor Lafayette will need him to spell
Rights of Man
or whatever childish declaration our fevered marquis decides will save the nation.” Adèle shifted her skirts by the firescreen, and the bishop reached up, as casually as if he were plucking a fruit, and kissed the inside of her wrist.

Morris stretched his wooden leg. Another six inches, Short thought, fascinated, and the wooden leg would meet club foot. He raised his eyes to find Adèle’s fixed on him.

“I think,” said Morris seriously, “you underestimate our red-haired minister. To my mind, it is unthinkable that General—or rather President Washington—will form a new government without Jefferson. He is too aloof, reserved, I grant you, to be a great politician. But he is a man of infinite subtlety.”

“I saw Jefferson once,” Adèle said. She smiled at Morris but spoke to Talleyrand. “From your carriage, at the Tuileries. I distrusted his face,
hated
it. He is obviously a man
faux et emporté
.”

Flushing, bewildered, Short translated her phrase:
a man false and passionate
. But he had no chance to object—no chance even to absorb Morris’s remark, which could mean only that Jefferson, once gone, would not return to France as minister. The bishop
was rising to his feet. In a corner Julie was whispering to her sister.

At the stairs Talleyrand lingered to say good night to Adèle, and Morris, Short in tow, bowed and walked on. In the courtyard his carriage was already waiting—Short had the sensation of being surrounded by hundreds of invisible wires, each one manipulating a hidden part of the scene. Morris sat back on the bench and folded his arms across his waistcoat while the horses backed and clattered.

“Emporté,”
he said softly. “ ‘Passionate.’ A nice word for the ever-amiable, ever-distant Mister Jefferson.”

Prudence collapsed in a rush. “He said nothing to
me
,” Short blurted, “about not returning. I assume that he returns in five months.”

Morris looked at him coolly. “You’re worried about your future, yes? If he remains at home, you think you might replace him here.”

Short made an involuntary, deprecating gesture; took refuge in consulting his watch, whose face, in the bouncing darkness, he could not see. The carriage joined the river of wheels on the rue Saint-Honoré.

“I would not,” Morris said carefully, “place my trust in Jefferson. He would not recommend you.”

“He would.”

“He thinks all young Americans should flee the temptations of fleshpot Europe,” Morris said, “as you well know.” He gripped the leather strap by his window and leaned close enough for Short to smell wine, sweat, the faintest possible scent of milk and water. “You have become far too French for him, my dear fellow. Let us face it. You are one of his ‘sons,’ but the most wayward, alas. Madison and Monroe busy themselves day and night with politics, they advance the great cause of the father. Meanwhile, you neglect everything for the sake of your pleasures.” Morris tapped Short’s knee with one finger. “He thinks you have formed a scandalous attachment.”

Before Short could do more than bristle, Morris had leaned back again; his grin flashed in and out of a streetlamp. “I name no names,” he said.

“Jefferson would not—” What was the word he needed?
Deceive? Betray?

But in his peremptory way Morris had decided to change the subject completely. “The Bishop of Autun has offered to take me to an impotence trial,” he said cheerfully. “Do you know the custom? When a French woman wishes a divorce, the Church in its militant wisdom grants it only if the husband can no longer perform his conjugal duties. Sometimes he agrees. Sometimes, for reasons of property or pride, he elects to demonstrate—shall we say his ‘competence’—before witnesses? The bishop will take me as his guest, he says. He claims the rate of failure is remarkably high.
Quod est demonstrandum
.”

Short could only shake his head.

“The bishop means me to understand his invitation allegorically,” Morris said, sounding in his irony precisely like the bishop. “That is, I am to stay away from Madame de Flahaut.”

“She is very beautiful.” Short watched the Champs-Élysées appear on his left, a dark mass of trees and gravel. When had Morris given instructions to the coachman? More wires.

“Her nose is too big,” Morris said. “Her sister Julie left her husband when she was twenty-five, did you know that? And traveled for months with the Cardinal de Rohan, dressed in the clothes of a boy acolyte. Jefferson may be right about the corruptions of old Europe on youths like you and me.”

The carriage was wheeling through a crowd of other carriages, en route to the theaters. Beggars and soldiers had suddenly popped up, gopherlike, on opposite sides of a corner.

“Not, of course,” Morris added slyly, “that the celebrated friend of the celebrated Mrs. Cosway should be the first to cast stones.” He sniffed in mock alarm. “I seem to speak in nothing but biblical terms after I see the demonic bishop.”

Short could only shake his head again and pinch the bridge of his nose. Morris was watching with lynx eyes. “Jefferson has fooled you,” he said flatly. “He won’t openly denounce your ‘attachment,’ you know—that would be despotic, and Jefferson is the apostle of freedom. But he will do what he thinks best for you, not what you want. He will maneuver you round and round till you go home. Little gestures, little coldnesses, favors. Look at his poor browbeaten daughters, caught like fish in his nets. Look at
poor Maria Cosway. What a subtle old domestic tyrant he is. He professes freedom, our Jefferson, but he keeps slaves.”

Morris placed his whole hand on Short’s knee this time. “Shall I tell you another allegory, mon chèr Chort? Religious, too, curse the bishop. There was a priest a hundred years ago at a village near Mézières, much beloved by his parishioners for his saintliness. He consoled them, comforted them, led them daily to God; an exemplary Catholic priest. When he died, he left a will and some letters to Voltaire confessing that for the last thirty years he had secretly been an atheist and had never believed a word he preached.”