Jefferson (50 page)

A man after Jefferson’s own heart, Short thought as they pulled off the main road and entered the gardens. A public house and a private life; a team of printers at his disposal. More and more Short found himself thinking of Madame de Tott’s suggestion—when he was not thinking of Madame de Tott’s complicity. Why shouldn’t he write a life of Jefferson one day? Who knew him better? Who had lived with him longer? He would gather reminiscences, facts, and letters from Jefferson’s boyhood friends in Virginia. He would write down what Franklin had told him; John Adams—the carriage bounced uphill past a brackish pond crowded with lily pads and weeds; he craned to look back at the following wagon with its load of boxes.

Why
not
write such a book? He might well begin with the death of Jefferson’s father—the early death of a father is always a cataclysmic, shaping event for a son, and no one had ever told him exactly how Peter Jefferson had died. Was it in summer? On a lingering sickbed like Jefferson’s wife? Did the father’s death account for the constant, stoic self-control of the son? Enthusiasm crept into Short’s mind. He would sift, examine, develop. Penetrate Jefferson’s defenses, disclose the springs of his character: explain once and for all why he guarded his feelings so closely; why his feelings were all the stronger for being walled in and guarded.

At the official house and office they were greeted by Buffon’s forty-year-old secretary and alter-ego, Louis Daubenton.

“Le Comte de Buffon, alas, is not well, he is not here to receive you,” Daubenton told them. He raised one black eyebrow at the three immense boxes Petit was unloading onto the steps.

“I understand,” Clérisseau said cheerfully, brushing dust from his coat, “that even when he’s here, he never speaks to his guests until they sit down at the table.” He pushed the door with his foot and peered in.

“This is Monsieur Clérisseau,” Short explained.

Daubenton was a tall, many-boned man with a flat wig and a nose that split his face like a hatchet. He bowed to Clérisseau. “Charles-Louis Clérisseau, author of
Les Monuments de Nîmes
. Honored. A great book.”

“My own opinion as well,” Clérisseau said. “If only the purchasers of great books had agreed. Monsieur Short is also a writer, of diplomatic fiction; formerly a poet. Now, sir, here are three crates from Monsieur Jefferson to Monsieur Buffon”—Short handed over a letter, Petit and a Savoyard began dragging the first box up the steps—“but no one knows what’s in them, and Jefferson, like Buffon, is away on retreat.”

“I don’t read English.” Daubenton was frowning at the letter.

“I’m sure Jefferson would call it American,” Clérisseau said. “Shall we use this room for the unveiling?”

Daubenton looked at Short, shrugged, then followed him into a first-floor chamber whose walls were lined with glass-topped cabinets of minerals and, between each cabinet, stacks of dirty brown folios, which on Clérisseau’s inspection all turned out to be copies of Buffon’s
Histoire
, volume three.

“A library of a thousand books,” Clérisseau said, opening one at random, “nine hundred of which he has written himself.”

“Monsieur Jefferson sent us once before a panther skin, from Philadelphia,” Daubenton reminded Short suspiciously. “You brought it yourself.”

“Well, these come from a General Sullivan, who lives in New Hampshire,” Short said, “and it can’t possibly be another panther skin.” They stood back as the Savoyards deposited the third box on the floor. Side by side, they made a platform six feet in length, ten feet wide, braided across the middle with thick hemp rope. At Short’s nod, Petit produced a hammer and clawed a rope loose; in a matter of minutes the room was filled with flying straw, boards, the squeal of ripping nails.

“Horns!” Clérisseau cried.

He bent over the first box and pulled out a set of knobby gray antlers that belonged, Short thought, taking them as they came down the line of hands, to a small New England deer or caribou.

“More horns!”

Clérisseau had unceremoniously shed his wig and elegant green
coat and now stood over the open box in his shirt-sleeves. Beside him one of the Savoyards, streaky-faced, grinning through gapped teeth, was scooping out straw with both hands.

“A direct hit!” Clérisseau wrestled another set of deer antlers out of the packing. “A broadside shot. Books at twenty paces, horns across the Atlantic—Jefferson really knows no limits!”

Daubenton handed Short a third set of antlers and a handwritten tag, attached with a cord.

“ ‘This is the roebuck, of Massachusetts,’ ” Short read. “ ‘About three years old. All of these specimens come from either New Hampshire or Massachusetts.’ ” He looked up to see Clérisseau beginning the next box. “You have several sets of elk horns,” he told Daubenton. “Caribou horns, a number of deer hides and deer skeletons, the ‘spiked horn buck.’ Jefferson has sent them all for the Comte de Buffon to study and exhibit.”

“And greetings from Brobdingnag!” Clérisseau shouted over the sound of more boards tearing. From the middle box he was in the act of drawing out an amazingly large animal skin, most of whose hair had fallen off or was just now coming away in coppery puffs. Short held his nose. With the instinctive flourish of a true-born Parisian, Clérisseau raised the floppy skin to his shoulders, grasped the neck with one hand, and transformed it into a swirling cape.

“On the Boulevards,” he said with a courtier’s mince, “I shall dress in the latest fashion
d’Amérique
.”

“ ’sieur.” His attending Savoyard was staggering under the weight of a new set of horns. Clérisseau’s face broke into a delighted grin. One hand still gripped the front of the skin at his collar—legs and hoofs dangling down each shoulder—the other lifted the new horns onto his head. He swayed, took a step. Daubenton had put on his glasses and stood beside him, staring. Through the haze of straw and dust Short saw Clérisseau dance into the open, trailing the brown cape, wearing the towering, unmistakable flat-boned horns of a New Hampshire moose.

“ ‘Moose’!” Clérisseau shouted, reading the card Short held up. He turned in circles before the glass-topped cabinets, whirling like a popeyed pot-bellied Dionysus. “I’ve fallen in love with American words—moose! Moose! À la mode de moose!”

Memoirs of Jefferson
—
11

A
MONG THE LOYALISTS AT THE SECOND
Continental Congress, it was considered a sinister habit of Sam Adams’s that he liked to organize unruly young men and teach them, of all amazing things, how to sing psalms together.

“Harmony,” he would say slyly, making one of his strange palsied gestures. “Psalm singing brings many different voices into harmony. Harmony is what we aim at.”

Seduction. Sedition and seduction were what Sam Adams aimed at, the Tories fumed, just as he “harmonized” his three dozen so-called “Indians” into the infamous, ill-named Boston Tea Party. But by the spring of 1776 even the stubbornest of Tories would have admitted that their complaints were largely drowned out by the clamor for independence that Adams had so tirelessly—I choose the metaphor—orchestrated.

Jefferson slipped into Philadelphia late as always (he has always “slipped” onto a public stage), just in time to be greeted by rumors, flattery, the first buzzing flies of a Pennsylvania summer,
and the unceasing attention of Sam and John Adams, who immediately saw a use for him.

Or rather for his pen. Because on June 7 the stylish, stiff-necked Richard Henry Lee, “Virginia’s Cicero,” with his bony face and his thin, chilling smile, had walked to the front of the room and placed on the president’s table a resolution that every member of Congress had known would come, sooner or later:

The debate, anticipated for months, raged on for days, inconclusive, bitter, the great states of New York and Pennsylvania still hanging back, South Carolina and Maryland not yet matured (Jefferson said) for “falling from the parent stem.” Midway through June, a committee was appointed to write a declaration, in case the resolution finally passed. The whole of Congress assumed that Richard Lee would head it.

But Thomas Jefferson was the favorite of the two Adamses (“he is the greatest rubber off of dust I have ever seen,” John Adams repeated busily everywhere), not least because Lee was distrusted by all northerners as “radical,” a kind of oratorical highwayman bound to no one, while the grave, studious Jefferson, mute always in the presence of his elders, looked like a safe, a harmonious, Virginian. Not least, as well, in John Adams’s mind, because Jefferson wrote with the crisp, elevated felicity of a pragmatic angel, and if there was one flaw Adams would admit to, it was that his own prose style, pungent as it was, had too much the smell of earth.

Was it John Adams who put the very pen in Jefferson’s hand? Probably. The other committee members were no writers either, except for Franklin, who wouldn’t do it (and who would have ruined it with a joke if he had).

In any case Jefferson went back to his sparse rooms on Market Street and sat down alone before the little folding travel desk. Sat down with a head still aching from the long, intolerable April-to-May attack that had followed the death of his mother. With a head
still reverberating—I am guessing now, nobody has been inside that head—still reverberating with anger at his mother for that last unforgivable parental desertion; at his long-dead father, too, no doubt. “Falling from the parent stem” is, after all, strange phraseology for a political revolution. But then, a child’s feelings, though they go underground soon enough, are like stars and never burn out. Break with a parent, willingly or not, and prepare for a deep, melancholy sense of unmendable loss. If you read the Declaration of Independence closely, in its first drafts, you will find it a family document.

You will find it a family document, for example, in the opening paragraph of “grievances,” which the Rebel must have written with extraordinary speed on the first piece of paper that came to hand (the reverse side of the sheet is covered with pencil drawings of a horse stall he admired in the stables of Governor John Penn):
“The king had dent over not only soldiers of our own common blood but Scotch and foreign mercenaries to destroy us, invade us and deluge us in blood. This is too much to be borne even by relations. Enough then be it to day, we are now done with them.”
Then:
“unfeeling brethren! … we might have been a great and happy people together.”
And at the bottom of the page, with many scratchings over and revisions, this:
“we acquiesce in the necessity which pronounces our everlasting adieu.”
Then crossed out and substituted the exact phrase from
Tristram Shandy
that he would use six years later on his wife’s deathbed, when he would once again collapse like a man singled out by the gods and destroyed:
“the necessity which denounced our eternal separation.”

Surprisingly enough, for someone so essentially rational and
private
, he left these last lines in the final draft he laid before Congress on June 28. By then, Pennsylvania was ready to vote on Lee’s resolution, New York would probably vote—the Declaration was shoved to one side, the angry debate resumed. Dickinson rose to protest, John Adams rose (bounced) to refute. On July 2, American independence was abruptly voted and the Congress, with scarcely a moment’s pause, snatched up Jefferson’s document and began to read.

Began to read and
slash
, Jefferson must have thought. Adams stubbornly defended every word his young protege had written, but Congress was filled with too many orators and critics. Out came some oversharp phrases and adverbs in the beginning. Out
came a fine sentence accusing the king of inciting insurrections. Out came the climactic paragraph describing the treachery of our unfeeling English “brethren,” which had left John Dickinson shaking his poor old egglike head till John Adams believed it would fall off and crack. And out, finally, out came the whole long section denouncing George III for encouraging the slave trade (this was urged by South Carolina and Georgia, but Jefferson noted sarcastically in his journal that the northerners felt a little “tender” about it as well, since they had been pretty considerable carriers of slaves to others). To the author’s mind this was the unkindest cut of all. Jefferson had labored on the passage over and over, on the very steps of the meeting hall John Adams had told him it was the best part of the whole composition, “a noble, vehement philippic.” It reconciled with reality the great assertion of the preamble, that all men were created equal, it joined Jefferson’s youthful campaign against slavery and his anger against the parent stem. Independence made no sense without an attack on slavery. To see it crossed out by a clerk’s indifferent pen—