Jefferson (61 page)

“Tomorrow,” Lafayette said, “the mob intends to march to the Invalides for powder and guns, but they won’t find any powder there.”

In French, to Patsy’s utter amazement, James Hemings asked
the Marquis de Lafayette: “Where do they keep their powder then?”

Lafayette appeared unsurprised. His left hand was steadying his scabbard, while his right hand shifted to the hilt of his sword. “They keep it in the Bastille,” he said.

The next morning, Gouverneur Morris noted in his journal that the wind was still from the southwest, something unusual in his experience of Paris, and that the streets were covered with puddles and mud, something entirely familiar. Showers had fallen during the night; leaning from his
hôtel
window he could see the same heavy black clouds of yesterday, now lowered almost to the treetops and chimneys.

When he went for his accustomed early morning walk, the streets were already thronged with angry crowds, “moblets,” he wrote, enjoying the play with words. Moblets of soldiers in uniform, moblets of chattering laborers now often called s
ans-culottes
, wearing the revolutionary cockade of red and blue in their hats; moblets of boys, muddy Savoyards, hysterical, speech-making women.

He returned to the
hotel
for his carriage but found that the driver and groom had both disappeared. When he had finally hired another, he set off for his banker’s to discuss the complex tobacco loan that had originally brought him to Paris, but twice his carriage was stopped and searched for firearms, and at their offices the French bankers were plainly too nervous to carry on business. As he reconstructed it later, about the time he had taken his chair and spread out his papers—noon, or a little after—Éthis de Corny was leading a ragtag army of citizens up to the very mouths of the cannons guarding the Invalides, where they demanded powder, bullets, and the thirty thousand muskets stored deep in the arsenal. Behind the cannons stood gunners holding lighted candles. Four hundred yards away, mounted but not stirring, a detachment of the king’s Swiss and German guards waited for orders. Inside the Invalides a few crippled pensioners worked halfheartedly to remove firing pins or triggers from the guns. By the time de Corny’s men marched scornfully past the cannons, the pensioners had disarmed all of twenty muskets.

But the guns were no good without powder. In answer to de Corny’s question, the governor of the Invalides replied that his powder, some 250 pounds of it, had been transferred a week ago to the Bastille.

Morris was dining in his
hotel
when the mobs passed by again, now heading directly (though he could not know it) for the huge eight-towered fortress that dominated the eastern edge of Paris, not far from the burned-out shell of Réveillon’s house. Morris had never seen the Bastille. He had heard of it only as a prison notable for its endless underground dungeons and its one celebrated inmate, the curious and learned Marquis de Sade, who liked to stand at his window and shout long-winded obscenities at passing strangers. Morris finished his meal—“a very bad one,” he wrote—closed his journal, and proceeded on foot to the Louvre. There he joined Adèle de Flahaut and (for once) her elderly husband, both of them peering out of their own windows like the Marquis de Sade and listening to the distant thunder of gunfire and explosions that had become the punctuation of every Parisian dialogue.

At tea, while the old baron paced and listened, Morris amused Adèle with stories of his house in New York—Morrisania—on which he lavished all his money and care. “I am like Jefferson in that,” he told her. “I’ve fallen in love with my house, a relationship much more dangerous than the love of women.”

“Don’t be like Jefferson.”

“I will be like Hamlet then.” He placed the tip of his finger on the smooth ball of flesh beneath her right thumb. “ ‘Every man has both business and desire.’ ”

They were speaking in English, which the baron did not understand. Adèle shifted in the chair to incline slightly in Morris’s direction. “I have heard—don’t ask from whom—that you also write poetry impromptu, to charm the women.”

“That would be most romantic of me, if it were true.”

The musket fire grew louder. The baron had come close to their chairs and now stopped, head tilted toward the window. Adèle silently handed Morris the wooden escritoire she had been holding; a sheet of paper, and a pen, which she carefully dipped first in a brass inkwell shaped like a lion’s claw. Morris dipped the pen a second time as if for inspiration, then quickly scratched out two quatrains.

When he handed the paper back to Adèle, her husband looked down for the first time. “Now the shots come from the Hôtel de Ville,” he said in French, “or else the Place de Grève. What have you written, Monsieur?”

“He writes,” Adèle said, ignoring the pinched, gray expression on her husband’s face, “that he is too old to be a lover.”

Across the city later that day, Jefferson and Short, waiting at de Corny’s house, learned that the Bastille had been taken in a great blast of cannon fire, musket fire, blood. A hundred citizens were dead. Thirty or more Swiss guards had been hanged indiscriminately by the mob. The wretched commander of the prison had been dragged through the streets to the Hôtel de Ville, spat upon, kicked, pummeled every step of the way. When a member of the crowd—a pastry cook—approached him for some reason, the commander lashed out with a wobbly kick. Instantly a dozen knives were plunged into his chest, the body was rolled over and over through the mud to a gutter, and two pistols were fired directly into the skull. Then the pastry cook took a pocketknife from his apron and painstakingly sawed away the commander’s head, which was jammed onto a soldier’s pike and thrust up to the roaring crowd.

For two more days the mobs roamed the streets almost at will. In Versailles the king made a conciliatory speech. In Paris he rode in procession, escorted by Lafayette, to the Hôtel de Ville, where he received (no one knew why) the keys to the city and placed on his royal hat the blue-and-red cockade that made him too a “sansculotte.”

Jefferson watched the procession from a borrowed apartment on the rue Saint-Honoré. He told Short, when the king’s carriage passed, followed by thousands of citizens armed with pikes and swords and pruning hooks and scythes, that liberty had been bought at a low price. Below them the crowd was chanting over and over, “La-fayette! La-fayette!” and when the marquis saw them, he rose in his saddle, turned his horse in a gallant, prancing circle, and waved his cockaded hat at Patsy and Polly.

Two days later Morris dined at a
table d’hôte
in the Palais Royal. At just before five in the afternoon he was walking alone in the arcades, waiting for his carriage. On the street in front of him yet another crowd began to pass, waving the inevitable scythes and pruning hooks and muskets and carrying in triumph the severed head and shredded torso of a nobleman whom he recognized, though the jaw and mouth were stuffed with clumps of filthy straw and mud. In his journal Morris wrote in the mesmerizing present tense, in a tone as close as he ever came to outrage:

“
H
as anyone told you the anecdote about the Duc de La Rochefoucauld’s witty reply to the king?” Clérisseau grinned expectantly at Short, with only the faintest trace of malice.

“Many people,” Short said untruthfully.

“It is a legend already, is it not, my dear?” Clérisseau turned his grin toward Rosalie de La Rochefoucauld, who stood at least three feet away from them in the dark shade of a sycamore. Without waiting for an answer Clérisseau turned back to Short. “On the night the Bastille fell—was it really only a month ago?—the duc rode out to Versailles and demanded to see the king in his private apartments. Naturally the guards resisted—it was nearly midnight, the king was asleep; but the duc pushed his way through all the same, right up to the royal bedside.

“ ‘Sire, I have just come from the city,’ the duc said.

“ ‘Is it a revolt?’ said the king.

“ ‘No, sire, it is a revolution.’ ”

Clérisseau chuckled. “Perfectly French, that story. When I was a boy learning my grammar, we were always taught that there are three main qualities of the French language. The first is clarity. After that is clarity. And the third is also clarity. I do not think,” he added after a moment, “the king has quite understood it yet.”

“We have been strolling about in the gardens.” Rosalie emerged from the shadow of the sycamore. “To escape the heat.”

“And our friend has been reading aloud from diplomatic dispatches, I presume. Very romantic, very charming.” Clérisseau let his round eye draw their eyes, in the French manner, toward the sheets of paper Short held in his hand. Short looked down gloomily. He had counted on half an hour alone with Rosalie before anyone else arrived. But Clérisseau was now living temporarily in the old Duchesse d’Enville’s town house and had immediately followed them—tactlessly or deliberately—into the gardens.

“No.” Rosalie placed herself between the two men and began to walk. Today, for escaping the heat, she wore a white linen dress with billowy muslin skirt and a neckline scooped low enough to show, almost, the two pink coins of her nipples. “Monsieur Short has taken Madame de Tott’s suggestion and written a little history of the great Declaration of Independence. He was just reading parts of it to me. It’s very brilliant.”

“Have you given us, à la Jefferson, the temperature and the weather each hour and day of the great event?” Clérisseau took Rosalie’s arm with his right hand, Short’s arm with his left, and beamed on Rosalie’s décolletage.

Short folded the papers in half. In fact, he
had
written that the temperature on July 4, 1776 was 68° at 6
A.M.
, 76° at 1
P.M.
, information he had copied from Jefferson’s own memorandum book. He had also written, not brilliantly at all, an account of how Jefferson’s original version had been “mutilated” (Jefferson’s word) by the Continental Congress. And then how John Dickinson had walked nobly out of the hall so his delegation could vote for independence without him, and old Joseph Hewes of North Carolina jumped up as if out of a trance and stretched out his arms and shouted, “It is done! by God, it is done!” And he had ended with a long, stupid, truly pompous meditation on how “All men are created equal” was the most important sentence ever written in the history of political thought. He folded the paper again. His prose was not witty in the least.