Jefferson (47 page)

The procession of servants with parcels had ended at last. Still behind his desk, head down, Jefferson was now moving from one stack of letters to the next, singing softly as he went. Short attempted to make himself useful by drawing sheets of paper from already opened envelopes. Jefferson’s left hand sorted and squared; his clumsy right hand swept the heavier piles to one side.

“I must arrange for transport from London to Paris, or go myself,” he said half to himself, half aloud. “She’s only nine. And answer these. And fall back into routine at once.” He looked up and sighed. “Travel exhausts me, William. I suppose I must go to the ball tonight, you too. But then I need to sit down and write a memorandum of my trip before I bury it under business. And I need, of course, to be brought up to date—the Assembly of Notables, Calonne’s performance, Lafayette—”

“Along that line”—Short grinned—“I’ve prepared a pictorial summary.” He took two steps behind the desk and reached over Jefferson’s copy press to bring out a large rectangular cartoon that he had cut from the
Journal de Paris
and ordered to be mounted and framed. He tilted it for Jefferson to see: a monkey wearing an oversize crown and carrying a skillet addressed a barnyard of poultry, the Assembly of Notables. The monkey was saying cheerfully,
My dear creatures, I have called you here to deliberate on the sauce in which you will be served
.

Jefferson smiled and put the print aside.

“And Petit will want to make a household report,” Short added, hiding his disappointment at Jefferson’s reaction; nonreaction. “First, he seems to have dismissed half a dozen servants for thievery—he means to give you every detail. Second, James Hemings has been in another fight. This time with the Prince of Condé’s cook, who was giving him private lessons. The cook has a bandaged head and a black eye. James doesn’t seem to be damaged at all. He—”

Jefferson surprised him by interrupting. “Have you set aside any letters from Mrs. Cosway?”

After a moment’s hesitation Short crossed the room and reached into his own desk for the morocco-bound portfolio where he had placed Maria Cosway’s single letter. Jefferson took it without expression and dropped it into his left coat pocket.

“So many days in a rolling carriage alone, so much time for reflection,” he said, walking toward the window. In the harsh afternoon light, as Short now saw him, his face was lined, his red hair faded to a sandy brown; Jefferson was what a learned friend of Short’s had once described as “prognathous,” protruding of jaw. Strained, weary, he looked every one of his forty-four years. “Tonight,” Jefferson said. His gaze drifted sideways again in the manner that made his political enemies call him evasive, and suddenly, without warning, Short felt a sensation of ice in his throat. “Tomorrow at the latest.…” Jefferson looked away. “Let me sit down with you, William, and have a serious talk about your future.”

But the future had to wait on the present. The Duchesse de Baronne’s masquerade began according to fashion at eleven that night, in the ballroom and lighted gardens of her newly constructed
hôtel
on the rue de Varenne.

“These are called golden ‘girandoles,’ ” said an enormous German woman dressed as a shepherdess. She pointed to the glittering star-shaped decorations attached everywhere to the walls. In the whirl of dancers and noise, Short bowed foolishly.

“They’re only made of paper and wax,” the shepherdess told Jefferson. Like Short, he bowed. “But they catch the candlelight, don’t they, and make the room dance. You’re both foreigners.”

“American.” Short was distracted, glum. He pinched the nose of his domino mask—at such affairs ladies always dressed, men were permitted to wear masks only; not for a moment had he and Jefferson considered a costume. The shepherdess playfully tapped his shoulder with her crook and fairly shouted over the music. “You’ve done your hair in the style we call ‘sleeping dogs.’ ” Short raised his fingers from his mask to his curled hair. “Very popular style, but too old for you.” Her breasts heaved,
buttery islands bobbing in a sea of lace. “I believe in dressing young.”

She had turned to Jefferson, whose dignity (even in a domino), Short observed, usually had that effect on women. Seizing his opportunity, Short moved away from the entrance, past the musicians, and toward the series of six great crystal punch bowls set out by the garden doors.

Beneath an entire constellation of glittering girandoles he found Lafayette, unmistakable in his tiny black domino, blue silk coat, and elaborately embroidered vest, which showed on the left side an Indian carrying a bow, and on the right side (over his heart) Washington dressed in a yellow toga.

“The Court’s chosen color this season,” he said, in a mood evidently as glum as Short’s, for once speaking French, “is yellow. Even the punch is yellow.” He held up his glass. “We go back and forth. When I returned in ’82 after the Battle of Yorktown, the new rage was
white
. A decree of the queen. Everybody wore white in every possible combination—before that, thanks to the birth of the royal heir, the color was yellow,
ca-ca dauphin
.” Unbelieving, Short mentally translated:
baby-shit-yellow
.

“Where is Jefferson? Never mind.”

In the shifting tide of the crowd Lafayette was replaced by an elderly man who also wore his curls in the sleeping dogs style. Together he and Short backed away slowly from the circle of dancers taking the floor. Short scanned the shepherdesses, princesses, milkmaids, houris before him. Clérisseau was chattering, the two de Cornys were dancing gaily. Rosalie was nowhere in sight—she had been nowhere in sight for him since the memorable night at Chaville exactly one month ago. Not a word, not a note.

“I’m sixty-five years old,” the elderly man said emphatically; he gripped Short’s arm with an old man’s impatience and led him toward a quieter corner of the room. “I first entered society in 1735. Wit was the fashion then, did you know that? All the women thought they were witty, all the priests. Everybody wrote books, conversations became dissertations.” With one hand he pushed up his mask to rub his eyes. How could she ignore him now? Could she really be so pure, so devoted to her husband?

“Next,” the old man persisted, “this was about the middle of the
century, next came Science. Everybody took chemical courses, everybody kept a geometrician instead of a page. The last gasp was Mesmer. Mesmer and Buffon.” His fingers scraped lint from Short’s sleeve. “Today it’s politics. The Assembly of Numbskulls, ambassadors everywhere. All the women are political now, not witty. Last night Madame de Simiane talked for an hour on the question whether Virginian tobacco should be taxed.”

“I’m Virginian.” It was all Short could think to say.

The old man bared his teeth in a smile or a bark.

In the garden where he retreated, removing his mask, blinking up at the genuine stars above him, Short listened to the distant sound of the music as he walked. He could hear much better than he could see, he decided, closing his eyes; individual notes, violins, harpsichord, oboe—

Jefferson’s mild voice broke into his thoughts. “I wrote Mrs. Bingham a letter before I left, deploring the empty bustle of Paris.” He fell in beside Short on the dark gravel path. “But I had forgotten the music, how wonderful the music is.”

Short made a little motion with his hands, uncertain for the second time in five minutes what to say.

“Polly has arrived safely,” Jefferson said, “you will be pleased to know. When I had worked my way to the bottom of the letters you had so carefully filed for me, I found
two
on the same day from Mrs. Adams, announcing my daughter’s arrival—she is there, in London.”

“Then you will be going at once to bring her here?”

Jefferson guided them to a halt before a low stone bench, flanked on either side by marble cupids. In the moonlit background, larger (blurred) statues peeped from trees or bushes like marmoreal spies. For an instant Short’s mind stepped back to Abigail Adams’s garden in Auteuil, where mythological statues had guarded John Adams’s precious piles of sublime manure.

“In fact,” Jefferson was saying, “I plan to send Petit to bring her back.”

“Petit?” Short was more than surprised—a girl of nine, a strange servant, the dangerous Channel crossing.

Now it was Jefferson’s turn to make a motion with his hands. “So much business has accumulated—the death of Vergennes, you
know, the appointment of de Brienne to replace him. Our old friend Malesherbes has joined the king’s council, from which I take heart.”

Short listened to the roll call of names, the mild voice analyzing and describing the politics of each one. A cynic, Clérisseau liked to tell him, always attributes the worst motive to any action. Either Jefferson knew from his letters that Maria Cosway was arriving in Paris at any moment—hence his reluctance to leave for London—or else he was unwilling to go to London because once there he would have to call on her, and on her husband, and in the company of his daughter. Under the stern Puritanical eye of Abigail Adams.

Jefferson had fairly launched into his subject now. “There is
promise
of reform on both sides,” he said. “The Court promises to reduce its expenditures, the ministry promises to establish provincial assemblies to discuss taxation. I would hardly be true to my own principles if I didn’t approve of such a move toward representation. But what is chiefly needed is a revolution in public opinion—”

“Sir.”

They had strolled a dozen yards from the bench, near a stone wall above which rose, half a mile away, the starlit yellow-gold dome of the Invalides.
Ca-ca dauphin
. The phrase “public opinion” was one Short had never before heard in his life—what did it mean? Another brilliant Jeffersonian invention? Or a political cliché? But he put the idea to one side. He had begun with an utterly different thought.

“Sir, about my future. You referred earlier to my future?”

Jefferson too had removed his mask. The music had stopped. Couples were beginning to stroll after them into the garden. Ahead of the guests, servants carrying lanterns were now lighting torches set in tall iron holders.

“Yes.” Jefferson had halted this time before a statue of Laocoön and his sons, who writhed in marble agony, choked by four huge coiling serpents. Short stepped forward instinctively to adjust the focus of his eyes: white marble, streaks of torchlight, black concave background of stone. For a heartbeat he felt as if he were inside his own skull, observing a nightmare.

“You are twenty-eight now, I believe,” Jefferson said. “One of the finest minds and characters I have ever known; along with Madison one of the best educated, most serious.”

“Sir—”

“But at twenty-eight the world expects that such a mind should have more to show for its training than—” He gestured dismissively toward the crowd of masqueraders spilling into the garden. “Our country needs men like you, educated like you. As much as it would pain me to lose you, William, I want to recommend, as a friend, that you consider returning to Virginia and taking up your place there.”

“In the law, you mean?”

“In the law certainly. At the bar of the general court for a short time, then to the bench perhaps; to the Assembly, to Congress. I know that you have no real affection for the law—”

“I have an insuperable aversion to the law.” As soon as he had spoken, Short cursed the stupidly defiant tone of his voice. But Jefferson was never offended by defiance. He laughed and stretched his thin, crippled right wrist to stroke the marble serpent that appeared to be squeezing the very life from Laocoön’s throat.

“An allegory of your feelings toward the law, perhaps,” Jefferson said. “As one who retired early from it myself, I can say little in its favor, as a career. I used to wish old Coke and Blackstone to the devil. But for government it is indispensable.”

“I am a terrible speaker as well,” Short said abruptly. “At the bar, before a jury; in public.”

Jefferson had straightened to look at him, as far as Short could tell in the flickering combination of torchlight and starlight, with genuine surprise. “You speak very well, very well. When I was ill and you presented Lafayette’s bust to the city, many people told me afterward how handsomely you had spoken out.”

“In French, yes,” Short said (he feared) sardonically. “
En français
I am a better and a finer person.” Jefferson folded his arms. “But I mean as someone who speaks to persuade, to argue a cause before a judge. My mind goes white, a tabula rasa, I cannot proceed.”

“The habit of pleading to a court would soon enable you to
possess yourself of argument, William. You would see the strong sides, the weak sides—habit creates its own strength.”

Short was aware of the irony of his excuse. How to put it?
I resemble you in this, who never speak in public if you can avoid it
. They were in fact, in truth as different, as unalike as … father and son.

“You speak far more easily than I do,” Jefferson said, seemed about to say more; stopped.

Some of the masqueraders had almost reached them on the gravel path. Short spotted the bulk if not the features of the German shepherdess.