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Authors: Max Byrd

Jefferson

BOOK: Jefferson
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Praise for the novels of
Max Byrd

GRANT

“[A] serious, intricate novel … adroitly deploys a small ensemble of Washington socialites, journalists, and politicians … Byrd builds his characters with a remarkable accretion of details.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“An excellent portrait of one of our greatest generals.”

—National Public Radio

“Outstanding … sure to strengthen Byrd’s reputation as one of America’s finest historical novelists … 
Grant
is typical of what Byrd does so well—combine a minimum of fictional characters with splendid research, vivid imagination, and above all, historical accuracy to portray a truthful profile of a famous American.”

—Associated Press

“A fascinating read for any serious student of the period.”

—Publishers Weekly

JACKSON

“Rich, thickly peopled … The heart of the book—its great, almost Homeric centerpiece—is an enthralling, masterly account of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815…. With
Jackson
, Mr. Byrd has vaulted … into the front rank of American historical novelists.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Byrd’s eye for texture and detail brings 1828 and the beginnings of the Jacksonian era alive.… He makes the story come alive and then keeps it moving.”

—Raleigh
News & Observer

“This book is for everyone, whether student of history or not, for its wonderful insights into the people and times of our infant republic.”


Library Journal

“Brings history back to life.”


Nashville Banner

JEFFERSON

“So authoritatively does Mr. Byrd conjure up the day-to-day details of Jefferson’s life, so knowingly does he describe the atmosphere of pre-Revolutionary France, that the reader practically forgets that his novel is based on thousands and thousands of researched facts. Indeed,
Jefferson
has the organic intimacy of a novel that has sprung full-blown from the imagination of its creator.”


The New York Times

“Absolutely splendid historical fiction that resonates with international, provincial, and individual passion and drama.”

—Booklist

“Max Byrd wins the anniversary prize for best book of the year about Jefferson.… It adroitly combines in-depth historical research with the fast-moving plot of a suspense story.
Jefferson: A Novel
can satisfy the appetites of both casual novel readers and serious scholars.”


The Georgia Review

Jefferson
is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

2013 Bantam Books eBook Edition

Copyright © 1993 by Max Byrd
Interview copyright © 2013 by Max Byrd

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B
ANTAM
B
OOKS
and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover and in slightly different form in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1993.

Thomas Jefferson insignia courtesy of Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation

eISBN: 978-0-345-54426-1

www.bantamdell.com

Cover design: Thomas Ng
Cover photograph: © The Art Archive/Musée de l’Ain Bourg-en-Bresse/Gianni Dagli Orti

v3.1

Contents

T
here were two facts about Jefferson that I never could reconcile.

Fact one: When he first spoke to someone he invariably stood with his arms folded tightly across his chest. The day I arrived in Paris, twenty-six years old, so naive and enthusiastic I blush at the memory now, four wretched weeks beating across the wet Atlantic to rejoin him—that November morning I leapt out of my carriage and rushed through the house on rue Taitbout, calling his name at every room and finding him at last in the innermost study, seated with a book in a wing-backed chair; or slouched in the chair Virginia-fashion rather, with his knees higher than his head, like a half-open knife. He stood up at once to greet me—all six feet and more of him, always taller than anyone he met—but in the same motion the arms and the book came mechanically up and crossed over his chest. Even after he had taken my hand and shaken it, the arms sprang back to his chest, crossed, and stayed there, clasped. I was to see him do it a thousand times, I suppose,
in the same way exactly, no matter whether in Paris with little French counts and countesses bobbing up and down like dolls, or in New York with brusque Federalist men of business or even with his own poor bullied daughters. In the end, observing the ritual from my discreet corner of the room by the secretary’s desk, I came to think of it as a gesture of keeping something away, instinctive fence-building for a shy and reserved man.

His French architect Clérisseau said I was exactly wrong, of course: It was the instinctive gesture of a cold man locking something in.

The other fact was his singing. He sang
constantly
—in my old age now I turn over the myriad accounts of him stacked on my table, reminiscences of friends, enemies, comrades, and I never see it mentioned anywhere, but sing he did. Snatches hummed or more often actually sung in that soft, reedy voice that made him such a bad public speaker. He sang while he rode—more than once I rode with him from the
hôtel
he had rented on the Champs-Élysées to the palace at Versailles and heard not a word from his lips all morning except those quiet little songs. He sang when he wrote (and he never stopped writing). Italian songs most often, or French ones. Nothing could have been more serene in effect, or truer to the impression of cheerful imperturbability he always gave his friends (and enemies). Nothing could have been less like the rigidity of those folded arms.

Having written this much of these little memoirs of Jefferson, I am reminded of a third trait. He was a superb rider all his life, even for a Virginian, and we are born to horses. But before he rode, every time, he performed a strange personal ritual, such as I’ve never seen another man do. While the groom held the bridle, Jefferson always wiped off the horse’s back and neck meticulously with a clean white handkerchief. More than once I watched him then put away the kerchief and moments later take the whip to his poor wiped horse—and as the miserable animal wheeled round and round, rearing and shying and kicking, he would grip the reins short in one hand and smash the leather thongs down furiously again and again till the flesh bled in buckets. I never saw a more
violent
horseman.

Why did he do it? Was he teaching the horse who was master? Was he venting some internal anger—or guilt—hidden from everyone
else, kept locked away in that remote, unapproachable, fenced-away center of Jeffersonian privacy?

Did the great democrat whip his black slaves that way? Clérisseau would ask with an ugly grin.

—W
ILLIAM
S
HORT
                 
P
HILADELPHIA
, J
ULY 4, 1826

BOOK: Jefferson
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