American Sphinx (12 page)

Finally there was the problem of where to live. He shuttled among a series of hotels for the first few months, then, in October 1784, signed a lease for a villa at Cul-de-sac Taitbout on the Right Bank. But this proved inadequate and inconvenient, so he moved the following year to the Hôtel de Langeac on the Champs-Élysées near the present-day Arc de Triomphe, then on the outskirts of the city. He rented the entire building, a fashionable and spacious three-story dwelling originally built for the mistress of a French nobleman. This became his Parisian Monticello, complete with several salons, three separate suites, stables, a garden and a full staff of servants, maids, cooks, plus a coachman and gardener. It was lavish and expensive—the rent and furniture exceeded his annual salary of nine thousand dollars—but what he required to feel at home abroad.
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When all the arrangements were finally completed, Jefferson had constructed an extensive support system of servants, secretaries and acolytes that afforded him the same kind of physical and emotional protection that he had enjoyed on his Virginia plantation. At the center of the household stood Jefferson himself. (Patsy had been placed in a convent school, the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, which Jefferson was assured—and frequently felt the need to reassure himself—was renowned for its liberal attitude toward non-Catholic students. She was home only on special weekends.) The inner circle of defense was manned by James Hemings, who was Jefferson’s personal servant when not attending culinary classes, and Adrien Petit, the supremely competent overseer of all household affairs and employees. The next ring of protection handled political and diplomatic issues. It was managed by two secretaries: David Humphreys, the thirty-two-year-old Connecticut poet who had served on George Washington’s staff during the war and had now attached himself to Jefferson as the fastest-rising star in American statecraft, and William Short, a twenty-five-year-old law student, a graduate of William and Mary, Jefferson’s in-law, protégé and all-purpose political handyman.
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The outer perimeter of counsel and comfort lay back in America, in effect a series of listening posts in Virginia and the Congress at Philadelphia from which James Madison and James Monroe delivered regular reports, often using a ciphered code to conceal sensitive information. Taken together, Madison, Monroe and Short represented that segment of the younger generation of political talent in Virginia that had come to regard Jefferson as its titular leader; each was almost old enough to be his younger brother and almost young enough to be his son. The correspondence with Madison proved to be the start of a fifty-year partnership, perhaps unique in American history, in which Madison was the ever-loyal junior member. (Madison succeeded Jefferson in the presidency; then Monroe succeeded Madison, thereby occupying the office with Jeffersonians for the first twenty-four years of the nineteenth century.) Jefferson cultivated all three of these young Virginians as his protégés, even envisioning the day when they would live next to him at Monticello. In February 1784 he shared the dream with Madison: “Monroe is buying land almost adjoining me. Short will do the same. What would I not give you could fall into the circle. With such a society I could once more venture home and lay myself up for the residue of life, quitting all contentions which grow daily more and more insupportable. Think of it. To render it practicable only requires you to think it so.” Part praetorian guard, part quasi-members of his extended family, these younger Virginians had already identified Jefferson as the heir apparent to Washington in the line of succession to state and national leadership. Much of Jefferson’s first year in France was spent establishing the communications network of this looming Virginia dynasty.
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The settling process during that first year included one final variable of long-term historical significance, Jefferson’s relationship with the Adams family. When news reached John Adams of Jefferson’s appointment, he let out word that he was pleased: “Jefferson is an excellent hand,” he noted to friends back in New England. “You could not have sent better.” When some members of Congress expressed concern about Jefferson’s excessive idealism, Adams would have none of it: “My Fellow Labourer in Congress, eight or nine years ago, upon many arduous Tryals, particularly in the draught of our Declaration of Independence . . . , I have found him uniformily the same wise and prudent Man and Steady Patriot.” Adams’s wife, Abigail, and their daughter, called Nabby, had joined him and their son John Quincy the same week that Jefferson had arrived in France. For nine months, until Adams was dispatched to London as America’s first ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, the Adams quarters at Auteuil became Jefferson’s second home.
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More than fifty years later, and after a phase of bitter political disagreements that seriously frayed their friendship, Adams still recalled this time with fondness. Upon John Quincy’s election as president in 1824, for example, Adams reminded Jefferson that “our John” had won. “I call him our John,” he explained, “because when you was at Cul de sac at Paris, he appeared to be almost as much your boy as mine.” The special relationship between Adams and Jefferson had its origins in their political partnership of 1776, but the deep emotional bonding between the two men occurred in France in 1784–85.
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Abigail Adams played a crucial role. Jefferson’s first winter in Paris was one long and nearly debilitating illness. His recovery during the spring occurred under her watchful eye and then with the whole Adams family in their parlor, swapping anecdotes and opinions about the whole range of diplomatic and domestic subjects. Abigail was the link between questions of foreign policy and family priorities, probably the first woman Jefferson came to know well who combined the traditional virtues of a wife and mother with the sharp mind and tongue of a fully empowered accomplice in her husband’s career. Jefferson had always regarded these different assets as inhabiting distinct and separate spheres that God or nature had somehow seen fit to keep apart. In Abigail, however, they came together. She was Martha with a mind of her own. Transcripts of those afternoon conversations, needless to say, do not exist. But the character and quality of the free-flowing banter survive in the playful letters exchanged after the Adams family moved to London.

First there was the bond of mutual admiration and jocular courting. Abigail asked Jefferson to purchase several small replicas of classical beauty. Jefferson responded: “With respect to the figures I could only find three of those you named, matched in size. These were Minerva, Diana, and Apollo. I was obliged to add a fourth, unguided by your choice. They offered me a fine Venus; but I thought it out of taste to have two at table at the same time.” Or Abigail requested Jefferson to survey the Parisian shops for black lace and evening shoes, apologizing at the end for “troubling you with such trifling matters,” which was “a little like putting Hercules to the distaff.”
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Then there was the running joke about the inherent depravity of the English monarch and nation. Jefferson reported “a blind story here of somebody attempting to assassinate your king [i.e., George III]. No man upon earth has my prayers for his continuance in life more sincerely than him. He is truly the American Messias. . . .” Abigail observed that all stories originating in the English newspapers were lies: “The account is as false—if it was not too rough a term for a Lady to use, I would say false as Hell, but I would substitute one not less expressive and say false as English.” Jefferson asked her if there was anything he could do, in his official capacity, to improve English manners. Abigail informed him that “there is a want of many French commodities, Good Sense, Good Nature, Political Wisdom and benevolence”; Jefferson would “render essential service to his Britanick Majesty if he would permit Cargoes of this kind to be exported into this kingdom.”
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Finally there was the matter of Jefferson’s parental responsibilities. The Adamses were still in Paris when Jefferson received word that Lucy, his youngest child and the daughter whose birth had led to Martha’s fatal illness, had herself died of whooping cough back in Virginia. Abigail helped console Jefferson—he went into a deep despondency—and they developed a special affinity as parents. When her own daughter, Nabby, announced her intention to marry Colonel Stephen Smith, the personal secretary to husband John, Abigail proposed a unique arrangement to Jefferson: “Now I have been thinking of an exchange with you Sir. Suppose you give me Miss Jefferson [Patsy], and in some [fu]ture day take a Son [her grandson] in lieu of her. I am for Strengthening [the] federal union.”
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But most of Abigail’s maternal advice concerned Jefferson’s middle daughter, Maria, called Polly. Jefferson had left her with relatives back in Virginia—she was only four years old—and in part because of Abigail’s prodding, he decided to risk the Atlantic voyage and have her sent over to Paris to consolidate his family. Abigail was at the wharf in London when Polly arrived and immediately began to initiate Jefferson in the time-honored Adams tradition of brutal honesty.

Polly herself was an absolute charmer. “I never saw so intelligent a countenance in a child before,” Abigail wrote, “and the pleasure she has given me is an ample compensation for any little services I have been able to render her.” But Jefferson needed to face his failures as a father: “I show her your picture. She says she cannot know it, how could she when she could not know you.” When Jefferson wrote to say that official duties prevented him from crossing the Channel to fetch Polly, so he was sending Petit, his chief household servant, Abigail felt obliged to insist that Jefferson contemplate Polly’s reaction to this news: “Tho she says she does not remember you, yet she has been taught to consider you with affection and fondness, and depended upon your coming for her. She told me this morning, that as she had left all her friends in virginia to come over the ocean to see you, she did think you would have taken the pains to have come here for her, and not have sent a man [Petit] whom she cannot understand. I express her own words.”
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As if this were not enough, Abigail wondered out loud how a man who professed to feel such affection for his children could then commit them to the care of Catholic nuns. The decision to place Patsy in the convent at Panthemont had always mystified her. Now that Polly had finally joined her father, “I hope that she will not lose her fine spirits within the walls of a convent too, to which I own I have many, perhaps false prejudices.”
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Jefferson’s relationship with John Adams also mingled deep and mutual affection with a level of bracing honesty from the Adams side that frequently forced Jefferson to face the persistent gap between his ideals and the messier realities of the real world. Jefferson, for his part, provided Adams with an extremely thoughtful and hardworking partner in the business of representing America’s interest in Europe. Abigail claimed that Jefferson was “the only person with whom my Companion could associate with perfect freedom, and unreserve. . . .” Taken together, the two men were the proverbial opposites that attracted: the stout, candid-to-a-fault New Englander with the effusive temperament and the pugilistic disposition, and the lean, ever-elusive Virginian with the glacial exterior and almost eerie serenity. Each man seemed to sense in the other the compensating qualities missing in his own personality. In the amiable atmosphere created by Abigail at Auteuil, they found the leisured conditions that allowed them to appreciate the attractiveness of their respective other sides, “completing” each other, if you will, and creating a truly formidable diplomatic team in the process.
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As distinctive products of the war for independence, they shared a bottomless commitment to the prospects for an independent American nation and an equally limitless mistrust of English policy toward its former colonies. Jefferson claimed that he had “an infallible rule for deciding what that nation [England] would do on every occasion.” It was a simple rule—namely, “to consider what they ought to do, and to take the reverse of that as what they would assuredly do. . . .” He claimed that, by adopting this formula, he “was never deceived.” Adams concurred completely. “If John Bull don’t see . . . a Thing at first,” he observed to Jefferson, “You know it is a rule with him ever afterwards to swear that it don’t exist, even when he does both see it and feel it.” Adams believed that the loss of the war with America, and with it a substantial portion of their overseas empire, had rendered most Englishmen incapable of fair-mindedness toward their former colonies. “They care no more for us,” he concluded, “than they do about the Seminole Indians.” There was even a dramatic, almost melodramatic moment, when their mutual Anglophobia was sealed in a symbolic blood oath. When Jefferson visited Adams in England in the spring of 1786, the two former revolutionaries were presented at court and George III ostentatiously turned his back on them both. Neither man ever forgot the insult or the friend standing next to him when it happened.
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In addition to their mutual animosities toward England and their common sense of indignation at the insufferable arrogance of the king, the friendship worked because Jefferson deferred to Adams. After all, Adams was his senior and had been negotiating with the French and English for five years. Jefferson’s deferential pattern began as soon as he arrived in France: “What would you think of the enclosed Draught to be proposed to the courts of London and Versailles?” Jefferson inquired. “I know it goes beyond our powers; and beyond the powers of Congress too. But it is so evidently for the good of the states that I should not be afraid to risk myself on it if you are of the same opinion.” The proposal envisioned reciprocal rights for citizens of all nations, complete freedom of trade and a reformed system of international law. Yes, Adams replied, it was a “beau ideal” proposal, but unfortunately it was also completely irrelevant to the current, and cutthroat, European context: “We must not, my Friend, be the Bubbles of our own Liberal Sentiments. If we cannot obtain reciprocal Liberality, We must adopt reciprocal Prohibitions, Exclusions, Monopolies, and Imposts. Our offers have been fair, more than fair. If they are rejected, we must not be Dupes.”
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