Jefferson (13 page)

“Mesmerism,” Franklin continued, “reached its peak, I believe, one year ago exactly. In fact, it was our own
chère
Madame Brillon who first suggested I join the king’s investigation.”

“Anton Mesmer,” John Adams told Jefferson. “Viennese quack.”

“Faith healer,” Abigail added, carrying in a tray, Short guessed at once, of James Hemings’s patented macaroons. “In the last century we would have hanged him for a witch in Massachusetts.”

“Well, he likes to play my ‘armonica,’ ” Franklin said pleasantly. He folded the tails of his coat neatly over his breeches and lifted his head, like Jefferson, to the spring sunshine. “He uses it
as background music for his séances, so I was quite well disposed to like him.”

“You are disposed to like everyone, Franklin.”

“I am told,” Abigail Adams said, “that he chiefly uses his tricks to prey on young women.”

“He is,” Madame Brillon said in emphatic French, “a very handsome man. He is as tall as Chefferson and very forceful. He cures every kind of illness.”

“You would enjoy his scientific pretensions, my learned friend,” Franklin said to Jefferson. “At Mesmer’s séances you sit, about thirty of you altogether, around a long oaken case a foot or so high, specially carried in from Vienna.”

“Le baquet,”
Madame Brillon translated.

“This
baquet
is filled with a layer of powdered glass and iron filings, then with dozens of bottles arranged symmetrically. Then he places a lid on the trough. Each patient takes an iron rod supplied by an assistant, and he inserts the rod through one of the holes in the lid. Meanwhile Mesmer walks around the trough tying every one to each other with a cord at the waist. Now they are linked to ‘the magnetic fluid’ of the atmosphere.”

“He always wears a coat of lilac silk.” Madame Brillon pulled her black scarf aside and revealed more dirty gauze and an impressive bosom. A kitten appeared at the edge of Franklin’s mound of cushions, and Madame Brillon dangled the end of the scarf on its pale triangular nose. “Dr. Mesmer carries another, very long iron wand himself,” she added.

“With which he touches the diseased parts of your body.” Franklin looked frequently to Jefferson as they talked, not anxiously, Short thought, but with an affectionate curiosity that he himself had yet to understand. The two had met over a decade before at the Second Continental Congress in 1775, that legendary gathering of immortals, as Short thought of it, and apparently from that moment had been mutually devoted. No two men could be more different—plump, earthy Franklin, with his liking for sweet food, flirtatious women, constant joking; Jefferson, as tall and thin as Franklin was short and stout, reserved, serious, sternly unattached to women of any stripe. All that they shared were politics and scientific ideas, and even there Franklin tended to joke and tinker while Jefferson studied systematically and
gravely. “In an election,” Franklin had told Short once, “I always think the tallest candidate should win. I took one look at our Virginian and said, ‘What
he
writes, I will sign.’ ” In his mind’s eye Short drew an imaginary family tree—Franklin the father to Jefferson the son; Jefferson the father to Short the son.

“Now, he also touched other parts, I am reliably told.” This was Colonel Humphreys, passing onto the terrace from the house and carrying—incongruously—an armload of cut flowers.

“The military mind at work.” Franklin smiled at Humphreys as he smiled at everyone else. The secret of so much smiling eluded Short. Franklin simply never quarreled or criticized. Jefferson said that he had learned from Franklin the one great lesson of his life: always to nod and walk away when another man disagreed angrily with him.

“Colonel Humphreys,” Franklin told them, “refers to the
titillations délicieuses
of the famous doctor. From time to time, it is true, Mesmer will place himself
en rapport
with a patient by seating himself opposite him—or her—and pressing foot against foot. Even, ladies, knee against knee. They all go off into a kind of trance.”

Jefferson stirred and folded his long arms across his chest. “But as I recall, sir, your official investigation determined Mesmerism to be a fraud.”

“Ah. Our skeptical committee did indeed say that. The language struck me as strong—the benevolent Dr. Guillotin wrote it—you should ask him about his ideas on humane execution, by the way, learned Thomas. He has a new machine—ghoulish. But yes, we all concluded that Mesmer’s magnetic fluid is a hoax—he’s since taken to Mesmerizing trees and animals. Patients are cured—if they
are
cured—by their own imaginations, which are far more powerful than a
baquet
of bottles.” Franklin leaned to one side and patted the sulking Madame Brillon on her shoulder. “If I thought Dr. Mesmer could make vanish the little gravel quarry in this old stony body, my dear, I would roll naked in his trough like a baby.”

At the great front doorway of the house Abigail and Nabby kept Short to one side while Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams stood by
the old man’s litter. The three commissioners talked in low, businesslike voices. Abigail was concerned for Jefferson’s health. Nabby stood cradling a single long-stem rose and remarked archly that if reports were true, Mr. Short’s health should be their real worry.

“The poor man must be exhausted. I hear,” she said, “of the ‘Pomona’ of Saint-Germain, who is your tutor in French; the ‘little opera girl’; the ‘fair Grecian,’ who is Madame de Tott—”

“Stop,” Short said, both hands high in protest.

“The Ace of Spades—”

“Good heavens!”

“Mr. Short will have need of Dr. Mesmer himself,” Nabby told her mother. “C’est la vie sportive de Paris.”

“Nabby, go in the house.” Abigail studied the huge bay mare that the footman had led from the stables for Jefferson. “You know, Mr. Short, we part for London in three days.”

“We shall miss you.” Short never knew quite what tack to take with the formidable Abigail. In her New England mob bonnet, with her unfrizzled brown hair, her sharp nose and sharper voice, she seemed the most hopelessly provincial woman in Paris; like all the Adamses, however, she specialized in surprises.

“And we you,” she said briskly. “Mr. Adams, of course, will miss the politics, but he despises Paris. Do you know what
I
shall really miss, Mr, Short?”

Short began a halfhearted gesture toward the massive house and its forty beds.

“The ballet,” she said firmly.

Short opened and closed his mouth.

John Adams’s raised voice drifted over the grass.
“Hic autem perturbationibus …”

“It is astonishing to me,” Abigail said, ignoring it. “The first dance I ever saw in my life—dragged to it by Madame Brillon, as you might guess—it absolutely shocked me. In Boston—well, my delicacy was wounded. Girls clothed in the thinnest silk and gauze, petticoats short, springing in the air and showing their garters and
drawers
.”

Short felt his face warming.

“The truth is,” she said, “their motions are light as air; I go every week now, and when you watch for a while, the spectacle
becomes astonishingly beautiful, and you begin to think of it all as a charming, innocent art.”

“We attend the concerts,” Short said, stupidly.

The white cap bobbed. The brown eyes turned liquid. For an instant Short saw past her dry middle-aged face to the softer face of a young girl, as young as Nabby. “Now I find myself asking,” she said slowly, “have I been wrong all along? Is it really innocent? Or is daily example merely the most subtle of poisons?”

“Well—”

“Well, I wanted to say before the men break off.” She glanced toward Franklin, now easing himself backward, with the help of two servants, into his Roman litter. “I have brought six children into the world, Mr. Short, and followed two of them to an open grave. I know what it is.” She nodded once, sharply, at Jefferson. “Mr. Jefferson,” she said, “is one of the choice ones of the earth.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You watch him.”

“Mr. Short,” John Adams said, breaking away early from the sight of Franklin’s struggles. Thumbs in his vest, head cocked, he walked toward them like a Braintree farmer out to inspect his manure.
“Quicquid erit, melius quam nunc erit.”

“Horace?” Short guessed.

“Ovid.” Adams grinned with a schoolmaster’s pleasure. “ ‘Whatever happens will be better than what’s now.’ Come to see us in England, Mr. Short.”

“The Ace of Spades,” Jefferson said when they entered into the Bois. He stretched his long torso forward and adjusted the headstall of the bay.

This time Short’s face genuinely burned.

“I have acute hearing,” Jefferson reminded him. His expression was as mild and smiling as Franklin could have wished, but to Short’s ears his tone was icy thin in disapproval.

“Sir—”

“I also see that you receive more letters from Preeson Bowdoin.”

Short automatically touched the pocket where he had placed Abigail Adams’s packet of letters. “Yes, sir.”

“Brother Adams will tell you that French life offers more than enough temptations to a young, agreeable gentleman,” Jefferson said, “without actually seeking a guide to them. Preeson Bowdoin comes from a good Virginia family; he has parts. For the sake of your old friendship I was glad to entertain him at the rue Taitbout. But he is led about by the strongest of all human passions. He has an uncontrollable voluptuary streak. I trust we agree that in his grand tour of Europe so far he lacks serious application. Time spent in his company is time pretty well lost.”

“Yes, sir.” Short spurred his horse to keep up with the energetic prance of Jefferson’s great bay. In his mind’s theater Preeson Bowdoin was being hanged and slowly quartered.

“It is only,” Jefferson said, lifting his chin, looking straight ahead, “that I have such high hopes for you.”

At Neuilly they threaded between the numerous and chaotic sites of new construction that dotted the riverbank as far downstream as the Isle of Swans—Jefferson leaning far out of his saddle, peering critically at foundations and casements—and finally came to a halt by the bridge. He would cross here, Jefferson explained, and deliver certain messages from Franklin and Adams to Lafayette on the Left Bank. Short, on the other hand … Short hastily assured him that he was heading home, straight to business. Jefferson nodded somberly. They parted with a quick, flat-palmed wave Virginia-fashion, and Short wheeled his horse around with both spurs digging.

His route took him parallel to the river, and then by a northward turn up to the newest avenue in Paris, the broad, dusty Champs-Élysées, where Jefferson had recently talked of moving.

At the corner of the very property Jefferson had in mind, by the rue de Berri, Short paused to rest his horse. Along the riverbank they were building houses. On the Right Bank the government was just completing a long enormous wall, twelve feet high, made of thick masonry and iron spikes, which would serve as a customs barrier around the city. Here, on the Champs-Élysées itself, the Farmers-General had erected a fortified toll gate, likewise built of masonry and iron, that spanned the entire road between the ends of the wall.