The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (23 page)

Becoming a Chef

In the weeks before learning of Lucy Jefferson’s death, Hemings had started his apprenticeship with his first teacher, Combeaux, whom Jefferson paid 150 francs to begin the training. Combeaux was Jefferson’s
traiteur
(caterer), and he was also a “restaurant keeper” in the city.
³⁷
Although Jefferson gave no address for his establishment, it must have been relatively close to the Hôtel de Langeac. Hemings continued with Combeaux until February of 1786, mastering the technique of French cooking that would form the basis of his career during the rest of his time in slavery and after he became a free man.
³⁸
While Combeaux and the French people Hemings worked with may have spoken some English, he was probably largely immersed in French and forced to communicate as best he could. He apparently did not do so well early on. During that same February, Jefferson sent the following humorous message to Elizabeth Hemings through Antonio Giannini, his gardener at Monticello: “James is well. He has forgot how to speak English, and has not learnt to speak French.”
³⁹

Jefferson, who was obviously exaggerating the situation for comic effect, may well have secretly sympathized with Hemings’s plight. Although he could read French well, he never became as comfortable with the language as his daughters. One understands why. They were young girls, and he was in his early forties when he went to France, and it was simply more difficult for him to pick up the language. Martha revealed that her father did not know how to speak to people when they arrived in France. Again, that is no surprise because the only way to learn to speak a language is through practice. However many years he studied with his tutor, Jefferson cannot have had much opportunity to practice speaking French. He himself admitted that he could not write the language, but his biographer Dumas Malone would not take him at his word on this.
⁴⁰
Jefferson evidently meant that writing French was not as easy for him as reading it, that it did not come as quickly to him as other mental tasks.

Though not as young as Patsy Jefferson, Hemings was younger than Jefferson and better suited to achieving some level of proficiency in conversational French. Jefferson made the comment about Hemings’s struggles with the language just eighteen months into his time in France, very early to expect fluency in a new language. He had over three more years after Jefferson’s report to achieve the kind of breakthrough that can occur almost overnight when the basic system of a language is suddenly and inexplicably revealed. Unlike Jefferson, who had some familiarity with the structure and vocabulary of French, Hemings likely had next to nothing to start with, other than what the Jeffersons may have taught him so that he could at least greet people and make his basic desires known. Though he began with the disadvantage of no previous introduction to the language, he had the advantage of youth and energy. Unlike Jefferson, who frequented English-speaking salons and had relations with other English-speakers, Hemings was thrust, during his apprenticeships and when he was at the Hôtel de Langeac, into a world where English was not spoken.

There was a sad coda to Jefferson’s communications with Giannini about Hemings. When the gardener wrote back, he passed along Elizabeth Hemings’s “compliments” to her son and word that his sister Lucy, nine years old, had died.
⁴¹
The cause of her death is not known. This was likely a terrible blow to Hemings. His mother had been unusually lucky for a woman of her status, indeed for any woman of that time. Losing family members was an almost unheard-of thing for the Hemingses. Lucy is the only one among Elizabeth Hemings’s many children who is known to have died as a child. Jefferson was more used to this, if such a death was ever really gotten “used to.” He had lost several siblings by the time he was a young man.
⁴²
Now Hemings’s youngest sister was the thirteen-year-old Sally. He had no idea that Lucy’s death would be the catalyst for bringing her to join him on what was surely the time of his life.

Despite all the bad news from home, both Hemings and Jefferson continued on: Hemings learning his trade and Jefferson his. When his apprenticeship with Combeaux ended, Hemings graduated to more specialized training: learning the art of French pastry making. He had several teachers, but by far the most impressive was one of the prince de Condé’s cooks. The prince, Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, was a member of the royal family and lived on a very extravagant country estate several hours outside of Paris called Chantilly, which made Monticello (even in all its later incarnations) appear decidedly déclassé. Its architecture, grounds, and art collection were impeccable. The stables, considered “the grandest in the world,” could house 240 horses. Chantilly had been known since the days of Louis XIV, who dined there, for the sumptuous meals the prince’s cooks prepared.
⁴³
Hemings was indeed learning with a master, with results that extended beyond his lifetime and live on in recipes that survive at Monticello today.

Hemings first worked with the prince’s cook “one day in town, five days in the country, and four after their return to town.”
⁴⁴
The lessons were particularly expensive and got him into a bit of trouble with Philip Mazzei, a Jefferson friend who had arranged for them. Mazzei described the problem to Jefferson in a letter in April of 1787. According to Mazzei, Hemings said he did not know until he arrived at the country estate that the lessons would cost “12 francs a day,” with his “maintenance” included in the price. The cook claimed that he had told Hemings the price before they left, but Mazzei was annoyed at Hemings. He reasoned that even if the young man had not known how much it would cost until he got to the country, he should not have taken the four additional lessons when they returned to town. He was evidently concerned that Hemings’s “improvident or unwary” decision would cost Jefferson too much money.
⁴⁵
The prince’s cook offered to continue with Hemings whenever the prince was in residence in Paris, and to “take [James] to Burgundy during the session of Parliament there.” Another cook, evidently associated with the prince’s household, offered to work with Hemings for “100 francs a month if the arrangement [was] by the year at 200 francs by the month.”
⁴⁶
Jefferson, on a trip through the south of France, wrote back to Mazzei as concerned about the price of the lessons as his friend was.
⁴⁷

Though Mazzei presented this as a problem of Hemings’s making, even a cursory consideration of what happened reveals that he, not James Hemings, made the most “improvident” decision. Mazzei, through his “good offices,”
⁴⁸
had arranged to have a man in the employ of an important member of the French royal family, a cook in what was surely one of the most celebrated kitchens in the country, take on his friend’s servant as a pupil. He was not dealing with Combeaux the
traiteur
. Mazzei surely knew that such an arrangement would not come cheap. Yet, he did not bother to determine in advance how many lessons would be involved and how much each would cost—in other words, to proceed carefully—and then tell Jefferson so that he could decide whether the price was bearable to him. If he did not have time to reach his friend, he could have made the decision on Jefferson’s behalf. That would have been the most sensible course of action, especially since Mazzei was making a deal with Jefferson’s money, not his own. Instead, he left it to James Hemings to decide that twelve francs a day was too much and that he should not get as many lessons from the prince’s cook as he could, and then Mazzei chastised Hemings when he made the “wrong” decision.

Was it so clearly a bad decision? Consider the terms of the new cook’s offer to train Hemings, which can be taken as a measure of what at least he thought was the market for his services. Even if Mazzei and Jefferson thought the cook’s offer—100 francs per month if there was a contract for a year, and 200 if it was month to month—was too high, it still reflected the very reasonable practice, then and now, of charging more for short-term contracts for high-end services than for long-term contracts. The price of a day-to-day contract is not merely a year-to-year contract divided by 365 days.

Why would Hemings know how much the celebrated prince de Condé’s cook was going to mark up his charges for training him on a day-to-day contract and whether that markup was definitely too much for Jefferson? Hemings had seen enough of Jefferson to know how extravagant he could be. They were, after all, living in a resplendent mansion that had a complement of servants and was being filled with the expensive furniture Jefferson was purchasing. High-priced cooking lessons could well have been just another of his extravagances. Had Mazzei inquired about the cost ahead of time, the matter could have been resolved before there were any hard feelings. But he professed ignorance of all of the arrangements, though by any measure it was exactly his job, as one acting as Jefferson’s agent, to be informed about them. And when it looked as if his plan was going to cost his friend a lot of money, a fact that no doubt embarrassed him, he shifted the blame for his own negligence onto James Hemings.

Hemings was in no position to turn around and chastise Mazzei for the lack of forethought that had led to this debacle, certainly not in a fashion that would have made its way into history books as a comment on Mazzei’s capabilities and character. It was Mazzei and Jefferson who had the power through their letters to characterize for posterity the nature of this problem and in doing so define James Hemings and his role in this matter in their own way, one that preserved a sense of Mazzei’s basic competence while diminishing Hemings’s. These men were of the same class and race, and whatever he may have thought about it in his own mind, Jefferson could not, in the letter responding to Mazzei about all of this, acknowledge his friend’s error by asking the obvious question:
Mr. Mazzei, why didn’t you find out how much it was going to cost me before you sent James out to work with the prince’s cook?

T
HE IDEA OF
Paris as a liberating force in the lives of Americans is a cliché of long standing, and it is often said that the city liberated Thomas Jefferson. In Henry Adams’s formulation, he was able “to breathe with perfect satisfaction nowhere except in the liberal, literary, and scientific air of Paris in 1789.”
¹
For the first and last time in his life, he lived in a society with a large social cohort whose intelligence, erudition, and accomplishments matched or exceeded his own. No place could have provided a more perfect respite from the wreckage of his personal life. Here this ever forward-thinking man began to overcome, as much as he could, the pain of his wife’s death and to open himself to the possibilities of making a new future with the family and the acquaintances still left to him. Never again would he know such a complete marriage of his interests—social, personal, political, aesthetic, and cultural—as he experienced during his five years in France.

James Hemings was a particular kind of American in Paris, an enslaved one. Talk of his “liberation” in that place must encompass more than just the abstract or psychological. Certainly Hemings had an individual personality that was ripe for development in a place with very different morals and mores, a language he had to learn, and a great cuisine that he was to study and to master. In all his previous travels with Jefferson, Hemings had never encountered the opulence of the architecture on display in the churches, cathedrals, and some of the private residences where he trained as a chef and that he passed on a daily basis. He was from a frontier society, and he had come to the very opposite of that—a visibly old country, whose battles, successes, and values were on display in the buildings, statues, streets, and public areas he would come to know well. Young men of rank took the grand tour though the great cities of Europe, with Paris as an obligatory stop, as a way of finishing their educations and preparing themselves for their lives as gentlemen. Hemings, of course, was not considered a man “of rank” and would never lead a gentleman’s existence. But his journey from the Virginia wilderness to what passed for cities in the United States and to the sophistication of Paris was perhaps even more personally transformative for him than it would have been for most gentleman travelers. The distance between the life he had led and the one he would experience in Paris was far greater than it was for members of the upper classes seeing the city for the first time. There was much more for Hemings to learn, about himself, the society he had come from, and the man who owned him.

The knowledge, for example, that Jefferson and his daughter—among the elite of Virginia society—were considered poorly dressed by Parisian standards, and quickly had to have clothes made so that they could appear in polite society, was a revelation.
²
He had come of age in a world that told him, and other enslaved black people, that their white masters were at the very pinnacle of human existence, achievement, and refinement. Yet, here was a society in which his master, though greatly respected and admired by those who knew him, took on the aspect of a hick.

Moreover, Hemings, and later his sister, encountered Paris at a singular moment in its history. Much has been written about France on the eve of revolution—the extremes of wealth and poverty, the confused and deteriorating economic situation, its ultimately doomed political culture. During this same time, the society was heavily influenced by the intellectual and cultural ferment of the Enlightenment, a force that was in play in other parts of the world, but found its apotheosis in France. The country was still very hierarchical, and the labor force “corporate”
³
in organization, but the hierarchies were fraying at the edges as progressive thinking about the rights of man, the benefits of science, progress, and reason, and the need for challenging orthodoxy filtered down to the masses. In ways impossible in previous generations, ordinary people found opportunities in Paris that heightened their expectations about what was possible in life.

The vast majority of the city’s residents had come from outlying towns and provinces in search of new lives and new futures, as people have done throughout the ages. Paris in the 1780s, however, offered its pilgrims even more chances to forge new identities and to reject the notion that the circumstances of one’s birth determined what one deserved in life. There was “a democratization and modification of elite culture” as ordinary people began to feel comfortable participating in activities that had long been the province of the upper classes. Poor people partook of high culture. Observers were “astonished, amused, or irritated at the number and variety of people who descended upon the Louvre, after the bienniel art salons were instituted there in 1737. Not only the educated and discerning came, but a ‘swarm of would-be connoisseurs,’ ‘people of every sort,’ ‘countless young clerks, merchants, and shop assistants.’” It was a place where servant girls and workingmen hired carriages, where public events and theater commingled the masses with the elite, and where even a seamstress hosted a literary salon that met on Sundays, the one day that she and her working-class guests had off and could get together.
⁴
At all levels of French society there were people who were, as one historian put it, “living the Enlightenment.”
⁵
While Jefferson consorted with the elites who were doing that, Hemings worked daily alongside their working-class counterparts who were doing the same thing in their own ways.

Hemings had free movement, as he did in Virginia, and was able to take part in Paris’ many public spectacles. Even before he began to receive a regular wage, Jefferson gave him money that allowed him to go about the city with some level of assurance. With Jefferson paying for necessities—clothes, a watch, shoes, and food—Hemings could use his money for his own purposes, but entertainment did not always require money.
⁶
A host of “street performers, automatons, marionettes and shadow puppets, animal displays, scientific exhibits, acrobats, and—observed one English visitor, Arthur Young—‘
filles
’ without end,” were on display on Parisian streets.
⁷
On a “fine day” Hemings and countless other residents of Paris could enjoy “the spectacle of the crowds themselves, the parade of jostling, laughing, humanity” that can be a form of entertainment itself. A number of theaters opened up in the 1780s, charging such low prices for admission that all but the completely destitute could attend.
⁸
For people like Hemings, those at or near the bottom of the social scale, there was much more to do, many more ways for him to assert himself than existed back in Virginia.

As liberating as Paris could be to Hemings’s inner life, his enslavement was an important external reality, not the stuff of metaphor or psychology. This was a matter of American law and culture that he had lived since birth. But he was no longer in America. The country that Hemings was now in adhered to what has been called the “Freedom Principle,” which held that every slave who stepped onto French soil was free. There were, the saying went, “no slaves in France.”
⁹
Although this idea was deeply embedded in the country’s collective psyche, the matter was more complicated than the aphorism suggested.

Slavery was not unknown to the French. It was, however, largely confined to the French colonies in the New World, Senegal, and on the Indian Ocean. Many features of American slavery that were familiar to Hemings—gangs of slaves in the fields, public auction blocks—did not exist in Paris. Slavery “came” to France proper whenever French colonial masters returned to the country and brought slaves as personal servants. Throughout the eighteenth century periodic crises arose as more masters arrived in France with their slaves, and some of those slaves, invoking the Freedom Principle, did not want to return home with their masters.
¹⁰
What mechanism, if any, could make them go back if presence on French soil made the enslaved free?

French kings and the parlements (the supreme courts in all the provinces of France, not to be confused with legislative bodies) and the admiralty courts, which had primary jurisdiction over transactions involving the seas, were often at odds about the correct answer to that question. The kings—Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI—periodically issued edicts and declarations about the status of slaves brought into the country. These rulings most often gave a safe harbor to visiting colonial masters, who were allowed to keep their slaves so long as they followed certain specified procedures. In the earlier regulations, masters were to register incoming slaves and assert that they had a plan to have them taught a trade or undergo religious instruction—not particularly onerous burdens. After the colonial masters began bringing in their slaves and letting them stay long past the time they would be receiving any kind of training, regulations were promulgated that put a three-year limit on slave apprenticeships, after which time all slaves were to be returned to the colonies.
¹¹

These deviations from the Freedom Principle, which in regulating slavery implicitly recognized its existence, were prompted, in part, by concerns that an influx of people of African origin into the country would lead to the “tainting” of French blood. When the actual numbers are considered, the charge—carried forward most energetically by Guillaume Poncet de la Grave, attorney general to the Admiralty Court—that a “deluge” of black people was inundating France was mere hyperbole. Perhaps for Poncet de la Grave even a handful of black persons might have constituted a deluge, but, then, the entirety of his career suggests that he was something of a crank.
¹²
For example, there never were as many blacks in France during the eighteenth century as there were in England. In the latter half of the century, France had a population of over 20 million people. Historians put the number of blacks in the country at any one time between 4,000 and 5,000, with the largest concentration of them—hovering around 1,000—in Paris. At the same time England had a population of around 9 million people. Estimates of the number of blacks living there range from a minimum of 10,000 to as high as 30,000.
¹³

Poncet de la Grave and other officials were determined to make sure that the black population in France did not grow, and their agitation led to the appointment of a commission (with Poncet de la Grave as an adviser), charged with solving what they perceived to be a great problem.
¹⁴
At least two great interests were at play: Poncet de le Grave’s and others’ racist hysteria over the prospect of mixed blood and the concerns of powerful French colonials upset by the effect that the liberalizing influence of France and the Freedom Principle had upon black people who came to the country. The drafters of the declaration that would be called the
Police des Noirs
took special note of “
l’espirit d’indépendance et d’indocilité
” that blacks in France displayed, and they attributed it to their residence in the country.
¹⁵
This phrase, written into the law’s preamble, addressed what was thought to be a serious problem: life in France changed black slaves, not only while they lived there; it made them a threat upon their return home, where they would be more likely to press for changes in the social structure of colonial societies. Whether they went home to become agitators or not, just hearing that there were slaves who had been emancipated in France would have influenced enslaved people back in the colonies.

While Ponce de la Grave fixated on racial intermixture, French colonists considered interracial mixing a fact of human life and not a galvanizing problem—they had found ways to deal with that. Indeed, by the time the Hemingses were in Paris, many free, property-owning, and tax-paying French colonists were products of liaisons between white males and black females. Dangerous political ideas that threatened their way of life in the colonies were another matter. As the commission members contemplated its parade of horribles, they even expressed the fear that blacks in their own colonies would be further radicalized by the words and actions of the thirteen colonies on the nearby North American continent, which threw off their colonial masters in 1776.
¹⁶

There was, however, a conflict. Residing in France altered a slave’s sense of self and threatened the foundations of slavery in the colonies, but colonial property owners generally had the right to use their property as they saw fit—including to bring their black servants to France if they wanted to. As in Virginia, successfully maintaining a slave society often required interfering with slave owners’ absolute property rights, and for the commission members and their white colonial supporters, slaveholders’ personal whims meant little when measured against the overall well-being of France’s enormously profitable slave colonies. The solution was clear: to close the loopholes in earlier declarations that had allowed the supposed excess of blacks to come and then remain in the country, the
Police des Noirs
, declared in 1777, forbade the entry of blacks, mulattoes, or any “people of color” into France altogether—not just slaves, any black people. Those who were there before the date when the law took effect were supposed to register themselves, or be registered by their masters if they were slaves, with local authorities. They were allowed to stay. Those who arrived after that date were to be taken into custody, registered, and held in a
dépôt des noirs
set up in France’s port cities for that purpose. They were then to be put on the first ship back to the French colonies.
¹⁷