Jefferson (16 page)

“But you left three days ago!”

Adams was unfolding a sheet of paper and shaking his head. “No, no. Delayed again. Miserable business with the miserable treaty. I sent a note to Jefferson—
two
notes—you’ve probably been gallivanting with the ladies in Saint-Germain.” Short opened his mouth to protest, but Adams pressed on in his usual brusque fashion. “I came to town an hour ago and had the fiacre let me off here”—he gestured downhill toward Notre-Dame—“now I can’t find the
street
.” He pursed his lips and pronounced his strongest New England expletive:
“Firecrackers.”

Short squinted at the paper. “Sir, you’re on the wrong side of the river.”

“I want Verrières’s store. That’s off the Quai des Grands Augustins, yes?”

Short shook his head. Seven months had made him a complete Parisian. “It’s in the Palais Royal, on the
Right
Bank, one mile and two bridges from here.”

Adams groaned. Under the white wig his face blazed red with exertion and heat. He looked up at the sun, down at the crumpled note. “It’s the store where all the prices are already set,” he muttered, half to himself. “The man pins a card with the price on every item. The newest thing. Don’t have to bargain. Mrs. Adams wants bolts of silk for London.”

“Palais Royal,” Short said firmly.

“Walk me there, to the bridge at least.”

Short took his arm and started up the rue Saint-Jacques, winding left in the direction of the Pont Neuf, the “New Bridge,” which everybody made a point of saying was in fact the oldest bridge in Paris. As they pushed through the crowds, Adams raised his voice to explain the disaster of the treaty. Of all the European
rulers, he said, only Frederick of Prussia had faith enough to sign a trade agreement with the thirteen squabbling, undeveloped American states. But the post crept at a French snail’s pace; the text had to be approved in two languages; all three American commissioners must sign—and Franklin and Adams would both be gone in a matter of days.

“Hopeless,” Adams declared, and came to one of his sudden, inexplicable halts. In front of them red-and-white-printed posters fluttered up a brick wall like a patchwork paper tree, two stories high (all commercial posters were actually illegal—“défense d’afficher,” the
official
posters announced at every corner—but no Parisian building escaped them). “ ‘Come see the puppet show,’ ” Adams said, reading the nearest one. “They must mean Versailles.” Then he poked a stubby finger at the package under Short’s arm.

“Mr. Jefferson’s printing work?”

“Yes, sir. New calling cards.” Adams bobbed his head knowingly; two weeks ago, on May 2, Jefferson’s official appointment as minister plenipotentiary had finally arrived from Congress. “And his book.” Short pulled aside the waxy green paper that was Pierres’s trademark to reveal a half-dozen little octavo volumes.

“Ah!” Adams seized the first volume and cracked it open, greedy for print, indifferent to the stream of jostling passersby. He had Jefferson’s addiction to books, Short thought, trying to block the crowd for him. (All of them did, he corrected himself: Franklin, Adams, Madison; even the soldier Washington would quote
Cato
by the yard to his lieutenants.) On the cobblestone, peering, grumbling, Adams flipped the pages with one hand, read, flipped again. Abruptly he snapped it shut and handed it back.

“Now you know,
I
think of writing a book myself,” he said as they resumed walking. In sight of the river now, they had to battle for every inch. A herd of oxen was rounding the corner in an armada of horns and dust. Along the walls on either side of the street, like sentinels, the licensed beggars of the quartier had set themselves up in double lines, holding their green permits to beg in one hand, gesturing and snatching at sleeves with the other. Shopgirls and matrons squeezed by Short, giggling; a ragman tilted his cart. Every few yards a chanteur stood singing—different songs—and rattling a tin cup. Over the din of voices and cattle
Adams pushed his thought. “I would make it a comment on democratic government,” he said, scowling at the beggars, “on the theories of democracy, starting with the ancients.” They retreated to let a barrel-laden wagon, big as a ship, scrape through. “Jefferson has his pedantic streak, you know.” Short put a hand to his ear. “All right, all right,” Adams said impatiently, allowing himself to be dragged into the nearest doorway. “You worship him, he’s a statesman, he’s written a book. Well, I remember in the Confederation Congress, one day Robert Morris delivered his proposal for the national currency—it had got to the place one state wouldn’t accept another state’s money—and Morris came up with a new national unit, calculated down to the 1,440th part. He said it was the most mathematically perfect coin in the world. Jefferson took one look, came back himself three days later with a proposal that the national currency be called a ‘dollar’ and be divided by decimals—pennies and dimes.”

“Extremely practical,” Short said.

“Practical enough. Jefferson said in that calm way of his, ‘the bulk of mankind are schoolboys through life—how can they calculate to the 1,440th part?’ And that’s one side of him. Man of business. We used his coin. And of course he wanted to go on and reform the weights and measures, too, and make
them
decimal; but that was too much and we voted it down. Now here’s my point. Before we knew it, Jefferson had put away his sensible coins and got out his maps and was making another proposal, this time for the names of the new states when we admitted them—below where the Michigan Indians live, he wanted that to be Cherronesus!”

“Cherronesus?”

“Break your jaw, wouldn’t it? Below that, just north of the Kentucky territory, he wanted Metropotamia, Polypotamia, and Pelisipia!”

The wagon lurched on, and they stepped back over the muddy kennel that ran down the middle of the street; a moment later they emerged on the rue Saint-André-des-Arts, a murky stretch of slick cobblestone and mud that ran downhill like a drain. From under their feet the stench of filthy water and rotting food rose everywhere, a thick miasma of smells. A beggar squatted over the mud, pants down. Adams made a face and pinched his nostrils. Short
took his arm and steered him down a new passageway, hardly wider than their shoulders. At a corner they stopped again, and Adams wiped his red face with a handkerchief.

“Now Mr. Francophile-Parisian,” he demanded, jerking his head, “did you ever notice
that
before?”

Short followed his pointing finger. A slanted doorway, cracked open like a gloomy mouth. Windows, drains, an iron grillwork balcony; three or four boys of indeterminate age helped an old woman stack trays of lettuce.

“The
bird
.” Adams shook his hand at a tiny bamboo-slat cage hanging in the nearest window, where a wretched gray sparrow huddled like a ball of rags. “Have you never noticed that every French family, no matter how poor they are, keeps some animal in a cage? Birds, rabbits, little puppies—I’ve looked in half the windows in Paris. They all cage up something.”

Short stood with him in the alley feeling doubly foolish—he had never noticed; Adams was absolutely right. “Why?” he began—“for food?”

But Adams was already hurrying on. “Because they have a
king
,” he growled, spitting out the word. “Because if you live under somebody’s thumb—king, noble, priest—you want to keep something or somebody under
your
thumb. It’s
human nature
.” At the end of the passage he stopped and jammed his hands on his hips, staring. Before them stretched the greenish-brown river, the chimney-pecked silhouette of the Louvre, and just to the left, a quarter of a mile away, the roaring, boiling, permanent carnival of the Pont Neuf, where crowds of pedestrians and wagons converged from three directions and poured into a tilting, poster-white mass of buildings and scaffolds and shops that covered the actual bridge from bank to bank. As always, Short felt his mind leap—the great city crested here like a bursting wave.

Beside him Adams mopped his brow and shuddered. “I
hate
Paris,” he said. And with the abrupt change of subject that was his confusing singularity, he jabbed a thumb at Short’s package and added, “Does he say anything about slavery in the book?”

Short looked down at his package. “He’s sending you a copy, of course, as soon as the binder finishes.”

“Because that is the great contradiction in you Virginians, you know.”

“Mr. Jefferson—”

“—proposed in the very same Confederation Congress a bill that would prohibit slavery in any new state admitted to the union, Cherronesus, Michigan, Polypotamia—
any
new state.”

“It failed.”

“It failed by one vote. Beatty of New Jersey was too ill to come. It took seven states to carry; Jefferson got six. Only two southerners voted for it—Williamson of North Carolina and Jefferson. Every other southerner voted no, they
saw
that the result would be eventual emancipation. Confined to a few seaboard states, the whole wicked institution would shrivel and perish. Can you imagine how different the nation would be, thanks to one vote?”

Short readjusted the string on the package, suddenly heavy and warm against his ribs. What inner association of ideas did Adams follow? How was it possible to estimate rightly a man at once so vain and pompous and
shrewd
?

“I go across the bridge.” Adams sighed, watching the crowds swirl toward the Pont Neuf. “Then the bridge on the other side. Through the gardens and there I am.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you are delivering those books to somebody?”

“The Marquis de Chastellux, who promises to send on a copy to Buffon.”

“What horrible names they have.
Buffon
. Like ‘Bufo,’ the toad in Latin. Buffon’s the one who says all American animals and people are smaller than Europeans, yes? Because of the climates?” For a moment Short expected another flare of the Adams temper, always triggered by criticism of America. But the older man simply nodded to himself, uninterested in Jefferson’s scholarly debates with the great naturalist. He placed a friendly hand on Short’s arm. “Good-bye again, Mr. Short. I have reason to think you’ll turn up in London one of these days. Meanwhile, distrust the cunning French.”

“I will. I do.”

“John Jay’s wife Sally,” Adams said, “was so attractive and looked so much like Marie-Antoinette that when we all walked into the theater one night—it was ’81—the crowd mistook her for the queen and rose in applause.”

Short twisted the string, uncertain of the point.

“Another bird in a cage,” Adams told him flatly. “The crowd will turn on her one of these fine French days.”

And with that he was gone.

Pont Neuf to Saint-Germain, crowds to mansions. Hat under his arm, Short bowed politely to the Marquis de Chastellux’s majordomo, a remote, gilded being who bowed back a calibrated quarter of an inch and waited impassively in the doorway. Short traced an Adams-like association of ideas: masters, servants,
liberty
. In rapid colloquial French (bringing an eyebrow of surprise to the majordomo’s face) he presented the copies of
Noted on Virginia
, explained that one was for Buffon, and reminded the man to check the letters inserted in each volume. Mr. Jefferson wished the letters and books delivered at once, as soon as the marquis was free. Bowing, backing, he regained the street, hefted his remaining books and papers and looked about.

Free. At liberty. He snapped the cover of his gold watch. When they finished their work that morning, Jefferson had quickly retired to his study to assemble the new copying machine just arrived from Philadelphia. Tonight he would attend a concert on the Boulevard—harpsichords, Bach, and boredom—and Short was free, unengaged. Paris lay all before him, where to choose his … He watched a trio of brightly dressed ladies step from their carriage onto a makeshift wooden ramp, where the universal mud of Paris lay only an inch or so deep. Laughing, they glided toward the marquis’s door. The image of the Ace of Spades rose in his mind like a card from a conjurer’s deck. Short smiled crookedly. There was no mystery whatsoever about his association of ideas.

With a brisk kick of his legs he began to walk. He could continue down the rue de Bourbon and drop in unannounced on Lafayette, who relished informality. Since his return from America the pineapple-topped marquis kept a perpetual open house for Americans and French “américains,” sweeping them into his parlor with outstretched arms. Or two streets beyond, there was the town house of Madame de Tessé, Lafayette’s wife’s aunt, whom Short had never met but who likewise kept an open house for political liberals. (He
had
seen her handsome and learned protégée
Sophie-Ernestine, who read Greek and Latin and bowed very low to pour tea.)

Still walking energetically, Short veered away from the great houses that lined the street. Left Bank for books and study, Right Bank for … what he wanted. At the first corner, when the Seine could be seen winking in the sunlight, he tucked his books and papers high under his arm and strode toward a boatman’s landing.