Jefferson (56 page)

At precisely the same moment Jefferson also looked down at his watch.

In the diagonal beam of the new skylight the hands showed just a moment before six. James Hemings handed him his black hat with silver trim. Sally Hemings started to open the door, but Petit, lips pursed as always, cheeks faintly rouged, stepped in front of her and followed Jefferson down the outside stairs and across the cobblestone sidewalk to his waiting carriage. When Jefferson had
climbed in, Petit closed the door, looked up to the slouching driver, and clapped his hands twice.

On the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré Jefferson took out an envelope and from it slipped a twice-folded letter.

There was more—two pages more—but Jefferson refolded the letter and replaced it in his pocket. The carriage skidded over wet pavement, sending a spray of mud and straw from the wheels. On the edge of the street a trio of beggars scattered, shouting, a squadron of red-plumed soldiers appeared; the carriage jolted through a logjam of wheels, leather, horses, and bounced free again before the great Gothic jumble of the Tuileries Palace, where more soldiers lounged in front of barricades and a ragged tide of pedestrians and carts flowed around them, downhill toward the Seine.

At the rue de Grenelle the driver turned right; at Panthemont braked to a noisy halt.

From her window Patsy had seen the carriage coming for half the length of the street. Before her father could even step down to the pavement, she was pushing through the wicket of the huge wooden door and taking his arm. How would he be? Once near Gum Spring in Virginia they were crossing the James River and the two ferrymen started to quarrel—drunkards—and the boat swung headfirst into the current and toward the rapids, and her father rose up with a face of absolute fury and
roared
(the only time in his life) that they had better row for shore before he pitched them over the side like sacks.

“Patsy.” He took her hand and covered it with his own. “Patsy.
You have the blue eyes of your mother and the foolish red hair of your father.” His smile was never more gentle. Inside the school he patted her hand again, then walked away in the direction of Madame de Mézières’s office.

In the corridor, conscious only of flitting shadows, whispers, Patsy waited with her hands clasped in prayer. A servant walked by, then a dog, shaking its ears. Patsy was taller than Mrs. Cosway, than Madame de Corny, than Madame de Tott, but she felt like a small child sitting on a floor, surrounded by giants. When her father emerged from the office, he was still smiling, but the sensation she suddenly felt was fear, climbing her throat like a bird.

“I have paid all your bills at the school,” her father said, “and Polly’s too.”

“But—”

“The servants will pack your trunks and bring them tomorrow. Polly is on her way.”

“Papa—”

“And we will never speak of this again.”

“I want to stay,” Patsy protested feebly, willing the blue eyes of her mother
not
to cry.

“I have bought you a wagonload of new linen and dresses. And tomorrow we will go down the rue Saint-Honoré, just the two of us, and buy all the lawn and cambrics you can carry.”

She clenched her fists until the nails pierced the skin.

“You see,” he said gently, bending close until his face filled her whole field of vision, as in truth it always had. “You see, I am one of those parents who mean to rule exclusively by love.”

She burst into scalding tears.

Memoirs of Jefferson
—
12

T
HREE VEHEMENT PUBLIC QUARRELS
.

For so ostensibly peaceable and benevolent a man as Jefferson, whose unofficial motto was always to “take things by the smooth handle,” it seems a very high number indeed. (I omit those lesser, rather poisonous or smoldering grudges with Patrick Henry and John Marshall.)

The first, as all the world knows, was with that disdainful, aristocratic master of numbers (and motives) Alexander Hamilton. Conventional wisdom has it that Jefferson and Hamilton quarreled because they were such natural and mighty opposites. Hamilton was the bastard son of a West Indies shopkeeper, a dedicated monarchist and roué (whose conquests included his own sister-in-law), brilliant in oratory, brilliant in the army (no ignoble flight across Carter’s Mountain for him), absolutely savage and joyous in political combat: it would be hard to think of a person less like the Sage of Monticello. Down to their very difference in heights—Hamilton could not have been five feet, seven
inches when he strutted—and their taste in clothes (Hamilton the fop incarnate), the two of them, everyone prophesied in retrospect, seemed born for confrontation.

In the beginning, of course, it hardly seemed that way at all. There was a scene I never saw—I was still in France—but heard described: Jefferson the new secretary of state meeting Hamilton the new secretary of treasury outside Washington’s door on Broadway in the muggy New York spring of 1790; the two of them strolling arm-in-arm up and down that placid street for an hour, talking over the ways they might jointly resolve the Constitution’s first political crisis. The issue (then, now, forever) was money; specifically, whether or not the new government ought to pay back the states’ revolutionary debts at full value, thereby enriching the wealthy speculators of New York and Philadelphia (Hamilton’s people, as it turned out) at the expense of the poor and agrarian. Jefferson was disposed to compromise, and as always, his course of action had something to do with buildings and land. Swing your influence to establishing a new capital city along the Potomac, he told Hamilton; and you can fund your debts as you will.

But even as they shook hands (and brought the District of Columbia into being), signs of discord could be seen. Hamilton was arrogant, monarchical, devoted to the forms of the British government. At the Constitutional Convention he had shocked poor James Madison by proposing a president-for-life. Jefferson was shocked even more by his love of power and contempt for the people (“Your people, sir, is a great beast,” Hamilton truly did say, smiling over his wine). One day when Jefferson was unpacking in his offices the crates I had sent him from Paris, Hamilton strolled in on some sort of errand and saw three small portraits on the wall.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“They are my trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced,” Jefferson told him. “I had them commissioned by John Trumbull in London. Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke.”

Hamilton stared at the trio a moment longer. Then he said, “The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar.”

A few weeks later, his eyes opened about banks and debts,
Jefferson wrote James Madison that Alexander Hamilton’s only philosophy was preparing the boots and spurs for the rich to ride on the backs of the poor.

I saw Hamilton but a few times myself; Aaron Burr put a bullet through his heart long before I could know him. But even at a distance one thing was always clear to me—without President Washington there probably would have been no quarrel; with him, Jefferson and Hamilton were like rival sons, scrambling for the father-attentions of that great, cadaverous, remote, violent-tempered Colossus, who had no child of his own (but burst into tears once telling of his love for Lafayette). Childless father; fatherless sons. In their heart of hearts, brothers. I always liked it that Hamilton was also called out by the newspapers on charges of adultery (admitted); and that the woman’s name was, of all things, Maria.

“But Hamilton had no sense of
place
,” John Adams told me once when I advanced my theory. The year was 1820, six years before he died, and the place (in that case) was Braintree, Massachusetts, that flint-gray, bone-hard section of New England coast where he and Abigail had retreated home many years earlier, licking their political wounds after his tumultuous presidency. I had come to pay my respects at his ancestral farm, the tag end of a useless two-day business trip to Boston. We sat all morning in the plain little front parlor. (He was allowed exclusive use of it till noon, he said, when Abigail would sweep in with her train of leaping grandchildren.)

“The core about Jefferson,” Adams said, “is ground, soil;
land
. You think about it. Monticello. Virginia (awful state—I never saw it). That whole
vast
Louisiana Territory he couldn’t wait to grab. But Hamilton didn’t care a hoot where he lived. New York, West Indies, London, all the same to him. The man had no roots, no land loyalty.”

Adams had changed a great deal in thirty-five years, but not his salt-plain habit of speaking.

“I don’t like your theory,” he told me. “But it’s just as well Washington never had any children. Half the royal families of Europe would have tried to marry them, and we might have been right on our way to a monarchy, after all. Which was Jefferson’s greatest fear. Never mine.”

“You correspond with Jefferson now.” I ventured onto dangerous ground.

“I do. But I didn’t speak or write to the man for a dozen years, Mrs. Adams either.” Adams puffed on his pipe like Old King Cole and eyed me over the hump of his belly. When he was first elected vice president, I had been told, and was presiding over the Senate, he went into agonies over the proper titles for everybody. He seriously wanted to call Washington “His Highness the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties.” Behind his back the senators called Adams himself “His Rotundity.”

“When Jefferson took the election of 1800 from me,” Adams said, “I was too mad to talk to him. Didn’t even wait to give him the keys of the mansion. Left at four in the morning so I wouldn’t see him.”

“I was in Europe.”

“I wasn’t. I was right there, a one-term President, while Jefferson and Burr tied for votes and ended up in the House of Representatives for the election. Thirty-six ballots they called, from Wednesday in a snow storm to Tuesday in the rain. Old Joseph Nicholson of Maryland was sleeping in the coatroom, burning up of a fever. Whenever there was a new ballot, his wife would wake him up, put a pencil in his hand, and he would scribble ‘Jefferson,’ then fall back in a faint. They said if Burr won, the country would be sold off to the banks, and if Jefferson won, the people would have to hide their Bibles under their beds.
Hamilton
finally decided that much as he hated Jefferson, he didn’t think the man could be corrupted (which nobody in his right mind ever said about Burr). So he threw the last ballot to Jefferson.”