Jefferson

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