Jefferson (60 page)

He gave Short’s knee a final push. “Here is Jefferson’s house,” he said.

I
n the late afternoon of Sunday, July 12, Jefferson was returning home in his new English carriage from a visit to the Palais Royal, where he and his daughters had been taking tea.

To avoid the soldiers and wagons now permanently jamming the rue Saint-Honoré, they crossed below the Louvre and rolled west along the river until they reached the Place Louis XV. For Jefferson this was nearly the most familiar of Parisian landmarks. Those mornings when he did not ride through the Bois de Boulogne he customarily gave over to a walk from the Grille de Chaillot to the life-size equestrian statue in the center of the Place, exactly 820 double steps, he had calculated, from his own front door.

With a gesture as automatic as Short’s he opened his watch, but ignored it and stared straight ahead at the Place. Around the statue, drawn up in battle formation, stood more than a hundred German cavalry, part of the king’s hated mercenary guard. Behind them foot soldiers—Swiss, also belonging to the king—flags up and bayonets glinting in the sun.

The carriage swerved, jolted to a halt.

Scattered through the square were piles of stones, large and
small, intended for the new bridge under construction, and behind the stones, damned up like a flood, hundreds and hundreds of grim, blue-shirted citizens were massed and waiting. Jefferson cranked down his window and called to the driver. They rolled another few yards and stopped. Where the Place was usually alive with carriages and horses and noise, there was now only a weird, unearthly silence and a wide empty space. A German horse stamped its hoof against pavement. An officer’s voice carried like the crack of a whip.

Jefferson ordered the driver to go forward.

They clattered noisily into the center of the Place. The gray-green equestrian statue slid by their window, the tense white faces of the cavalry, plumes, boots, a blue and red German flag.

Ten yards past the statue a German officer, horse prancing, sword vertical in a gesture of command, pulled into their path. Patsy sat up straight and cocked her head, as if listening to the voices now coming from somewhere behind their carriage. Beside her father Polly began to cry.

Jefferson stretched his arm to pull Polly toward him.

The officer bent from his saddle and peered inside, but only for a moment—the noise of the huge crowd was sweeping closer in a rising growl, the horse was edging sideways. Jefferson spoke in French, the officer pointed his sword toward a lane between piles of stones, leading directly into the Champs-Élysées, then shouted something unintelligible to the driver, who shook the reins wildly and yelled. The carriage shot forward and they galloped through a parted sea of angry faces. To the rear, seconds after they passed, the crowd was surging into their wake, heaving stones and bricks at the cavalry, which was backing, wheeling, turning.

Patsy stuck her head out the window and looked back on a tumultuous roaring mass. The mob had surrounded the soldiers, stones flew in geysers. A man’s body dropped from a roof like a falling sack. Before the trees and dust cut off her view, she saw the German flag dip and fall, the first puffs of smoke, and then, catching up, came the sharp slap of air against ear that was the sound of muskets fired in battle.

“The king,” Lafayette groaned, pacing straight toward the window as if he would crash through it. “The king, the king, the king.”

“The whole riot,” Jefferson said mildly, “was set off by the king’s dismissal of Necker. That and the use of foreign troops to guard French soil.”

“I know it, I know it.” Lafayette turned sharply at the last moment and stopped in front of Patsy. “I know it. Sheer madness to dismiss him. The only minister in the cabinet whom the people
Liked
.” He pulled the curtain and looked out, then shook his head at Patsy with a puzzled frown. “I cannot get used to the fact that the Grille de Chaillot is gone.”

Patsy leaned to follow his gaze. Three weeks ago she and Polly had stood at the same window and watched while a combination of mob and soldiers had dismantled the customs barrier and most of the stone wall of the Grille de Chaillot. Since then, with the soldiers gone, their house had been burglarized twice and her father’s favorite ormolu clock stolen. Now they had bars and bells on the windows and a private guard in the garden.

“Here is your Declaration of Rights again,” her father said. He held out a paper, and Lafayette bounced halfway across the carpet to take it. “I’ve ventured a few suggestions, as you asked.”

“We look to you,
I
look to you,” Lafayette muttered. With another turn of his heels he was back almost to Patsy’s perch by the window and holding the paper up to the light. “You’ve changed the first sentence, the list of essential rights?”

Patsy rose and looked over Lafayette’s shoulder, quickly translating as she read. Where Lafayette, in his large looping handwriting (exactly like Polly’s), had written
“Declaration of Rights—Every man is born with some inalienable rights, such as the right to property, the care of his honor and his life, the free disposition of his person”
—around these words her father had placed thin, square brackets and drawn a line, eliminating both property and honor from the list of inalienable rights.

“ ‘Honor,’ ” her father said with a stiff motion of his bad wrist, “is the main principle on which monarchical government rests—it creates those charades and ceremonials that keep the aristocracy obligated to the Crown. I take the idea, in fact, from Montesquieu.”

“Montesquieu,” Lafayette repeated and stared blankly at Patsy, as if trying to remember a face.

Behind him William Short slipped into the room and took a seat at his desk. Patsy smoothed her skirt against her legs. She had not seen Short in almost a week, thanks to the mobs and riots. But where Lafayette had been racing with his troops from Versailles to Paris or back, or coming constantly to see her father, pleading for help, Short had been away attending to the Duc and Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld, whose country house in La Roche-Guyon he seemed to think was exposed to the wildest kinds of threats and attacks. He looked completely, totally exhausted, Patsy decided, worse than she had ever seen him. Good. It served him right.

“And as for ‘property,’ ” her father said. Short propped his head on his fist and looked up at him. “I had originally written ‘life, liberty, and property’ in the Declaration of Independence, you know.”

Lafayette, who could have known no such thing, nodded.

“But I revised it to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”

Lafayette studied his text for such a revision.

“Indeed”—her father was now in the full tide of reminiscence, a mood she always loved to see in him, even when she had no knowledge at all of the people or places—“I think we did retain ‘property’ in the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, but I have always regarded property as a means to human happiness, not an end in itself. My old law teacher George Wythe used to distinguish between natural and civil rights, and property belonged to the second.” He saw Lafayette’s worried expression and broke off.

“I will study the changes and take them to my committee,” Lafayette said. He put away the sheet of paper and reached for his three-cornered general’s hat (uncharacteristically stained with dust and mud, Patsy noted), which he had dropped on a chair as he entered.

“You’ve erected a superb edifice,” her father said, walking with him toward the door. “The essential principles are sound, the reforms well in hand. Have courage.”

“If you had been injured, or your daughters—”

“Now I will own one apprehension,” her father said with great serenity. “Not that one, because we have been walking the streets otherwise in perfect safety. But the refusal of the National Assembly
to accept trial by jury as a right, this troubles me. Trial by jury is the only anchor by which a government can be held to its principles. Individually or in groups, judges can be biased, or bought; but twelve honest men, chosen at random—”

For once Lafayette interrupted. “Today there have been riots not one league from here at the monastery of Saint-Lazare, all afternoon. I must beg you to stay in.”

“Are they demanding bread?” Patsy asked. Now that she was out of Panthemont, Patsy went everywhere in the city, observed everything. She had walked down the rue Saint-Honoré with Sally Hemings earlier that day. They had seen bakers’ shops boarded up or looted and smashed to splinters. Bands of armed men stood at corners selling stolen flour from wagons.

“Bread, always bread,” Lafayette sighed. One of his multiple duties, she had read in the
Journal de Paris
, was escorting shipments of grain into the city. He patted her absentmindedly on the shoulder and spoke to her father. “Paris has less than three days’ supply of bread—but in the last few hours the mobs have grown much more organized. They’re marching from Saint-Lazare to every armory they can find. The leaders want to be armed against the king’s guard.”

“Short and I warned you weeks ago about the effect of foreign troops on the mobs.”

“You did, you did. You were both so practical.” Lafayette grinned suddenly, feebly. “So
Anglo-Saxon
. You must despise our Latin wildness. How did you find our friends in the country? Safe? Well?”

Short had now joined them at the study door. He had found the duc and the duchesse well but anxious, he told Lafayette. The peasants in their district were loyal so far. On the other hand, rioters roamed the countryside everywhere, especially in Normandy, torching the houses of the nobility. As he talked on with his typical good-natured earnestness, Patsy wondered whether to believe a word of it. As far as she was concerned, Short and Rosalie de La Rochefoucauld were behaving disgracefully. Everyone could see it. Her father disapproved sternly, that she knew; he never invited the duc and duchesse to his house anymore if Short would be there, and when they met at other people’s parties, he watched Short with narrowed eyes.

Not, she told herself, making an effort to be scrupulously honest, that the two of them actually
did
anything; they only talked and looked in a certain obvious way, and walked up and down a room for hours together, heads almost touching. She listened to Short say something clever about the riots. The duc was old enough to be Rosalie’s grandfather. When she was married, Patsy had already decided, if she couldn’t live in Paris, she would live with her husband in her father’s house at Monticello.

Short asked a question she didn’t hear, and smiled at her. Had he and Rosalie, she wondered, ever
really—
?

“The duc is changing his politics.” Lafayette shook his head; his huge teeth were as big as flagstones.

“In fact,” Short said, “the duc begins to think the mobs pose a greater danger than the king. I told him he sounded like John Adams.”

Her father’s hand was on the study door. He laughed and pulled it back. “Mr. Short refers to an old debate between Adams and me. Our little Shays’s Rebellion out in western Massachusetts had a great and sobering effect on him, you remember. In politics, we used to say, Mr. Adams fears the
many
, I fear the
one
.”

Her father was pulling open the door. In the hallway facing them stood James Hemings, hands on hips, scowling. As usual, her father walked past him without a glance. “You know, Adams once told me he had read through all of Plato and learned only one thing,” he said to Lafayette. “That sneezing is a cure for hiccups. Did you ever hear what Franklin said about Adams?”

Lafayette shook his head. Slowly James Hemings began to unfasten the door, newly barred against burglars.

“He said Adams was ‘always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, in some things, absolutely out of his senses.’ ”

Lafayette gave only a distracted laugh. As James Hemings drew the door open with a grunt, he clapped the hat on his head and looked out to the street, where three soldiers waited on horses. Beyond them, over the dark green trees of the Champs-Élysées, low clouds walled off a sullen sky.