American Sphinx (16 page)

But most of the available evidence about Jefferson’s relationship with his daughters comes from letters. And the letters exist because Jefferson chose to keep his daughters separate from his household throughout the vast bulk of his time in France. Moreover, both the major message and the abiding tone of the letters conveyed a willful distancing of parent from child, what might be called arm’s-length parenting in the patriarchal style. For example, Patsy had wanted to accompany her father on his tour of southern France in the spring of 1787. Jefferson declined the request, then sent back sermons: “Determine never to be idle. No person will ever have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing. And that you may always be doing good, my dear, is the ardent prayer of yours affectionately.”

From Aix-en-Provence he apologized for his infrequent letters, then continued in the moralistic mode: “No laborious person was ever yet hysterical. . . . It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate; to surmount every difficulty by resolutions and contrivance. . . . You ask me to write you long letters. I will do it my dear, on condition that you will read them from time to time, and practice what they inculcate.”

An earlier letter to Polly strung together the same homilies on hard work and then, in a particularly insensitive passage, seemed to say that his own love was conditional upon her measuring up. You must apply yourself, Jefferson lectured, “to play on the harpsichord, to draw, to dance, to read and talk French and such things as will make you more worthy of the love of your friends. . . . Remember too as a constant charge not to go out without your bonnet because it will make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much.”
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It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Jefferson, who was so remarkably adept at crafting his literary persona to suit the audience, simply lacked the ability to convey affection to his own children. This does not mean that he was an unloving or uncaring father. His idealization of domestic bliss as the ultimate source of his personal happiness was certainly sincere, and his children were integral parts of that protected space where the ideal lived in his imagination. But in real life, in the day-by-day interactions with his flesh-and-blood daughters, he was incapable of sustained intimacy.

His relationships with mature women were decidedly different. If Jefferson tended to place women on a pedestal and then place that pedestal in the most cherished chamber of his mental Monticello, his letters to women friends combined conspicuous gallantry with a flirtatious, playfully intimate style. If his letters to his daughters have a lecturish, almost wooden tone and seem hurried and obligatory, his correspondence with women his own age is highly personal, soft to the point of sentimentality and carefully crafted.

For example, his letters to Angelica Schuyler Church, a renowned beauty and accomplished artist whose daughter was attending Panthemont with Patsy, suggest a kind of male coquette. “When you come again,” he apprised Church after her visit in Paris, “I will employ myself solely in finding or fancying that you have some faults, and I will draw a veil over all your good qualities, if I can find one large enough.” He then imagined Church visiting him at Monticello, the two of them gazing appreciatively all afternoon at the majesty of the Natural Bridge. He affected the same swooning style in correspondence with Madame de Tessé, an aunt of the Marquise de Lafayette’s whose estate at Chaville featured gardens in which Jefferson loved to stroll: “Here I am, Madam,” he wrote from Nîmes, “gazing whole hours at the Maison quarrée, like a lover at his mistress. The stock-weavers and silk spinners around it consider me as an hypochondriac Englishman, about to write with a pistol the last chapter of his history. This is the second time I have been in love since I left Paris.” The first, he noted, was occasioned by a statue of Diana he viewed in Beaujolais.
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Actually, the statue of Diana had been preceded by a quite living and equally lovely woman by the name of Maria Cosway, the wife of the prominent miniaturist Richard Cosway. (Almost all of Jefferson’s female friends were married or widowed.) If ever Jefferson encountered the essence of femininity as he imagined it, Cosway personified the ideal perfectly. She was described by contemporaries as “a golden-haired, languishing Anglo-Italian, graceful to affectation, and highly accomplished, especially in music,” and the various portraits that survive depict a set of deep blue eyes, a tumble of blond curls, a beguiling blend of hauteur and vulnerability. When these were combined with an almost imperious pouting posture and the soft trace of a foreign accent—Italian was her native language—the total effect was usually devastating on men. Jefferson proved no exception. They met in early August 1786, introduced by the young American artist John Trumbull, who had accepted Jefferson’s invitation to join his household in Paris while he worked on his painting “The Declaration of Independence.” Within days Jefferson was head over heels in love.
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For the next six weeks Jefferson and Cosway were together almost daily, touring every garden, viewing every distinctive building, statue, painting or ancient ruin in Paris and its environs. For Jefferson, the luxuriant beauty of a work of art activated the same deep pool of passion that a beautiful woman also tapped—aesthetic appreciation and femininity were closely associated primal urges within his soul—and the commingling of Parisian art and architecture with the seductive attractions of a beautiful young woman (Cosway was twenty-seven) generated an explosive combination that left him utterly infatuated. He ignored his diplomatic chores, often dispatching Petit to make his excuses for missed appointments.

The rhapsodic adventure reached a climax on September 18, 1786, when Jefferson, still very much under the spell of emotional exuberance, broke his right wrist while trying to vault over a large kettle or fountain—there is disagreement over which it was. Just where the accident occurred and whether Cosway was even with him at the time are not known. Jefferson’s most revealing comment on the incident came a month later: “How the right hand became disabled would be a long story for the left to tell,” he wrote to William Stephens Smith. “It was by one of those follies from which good cannot come, but ill may.” The injury incapacitated Jefferson for several weeks and put an effective end to the romantic frolics with Cosway. “It is with infinite regret,” he wrote her with his left hand, “that I must relinquish your charming company for that of the surgeon.” But two different French physicians botched the treatment—the wrist gave him trouble for the rest of his life—and Cosway left for London with her husband before another rendezvous could be arranged. He did manage to see her off, claiming that he turned away as she disappeared on the horizon, feeling “more dead than alive.”
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We can never know with any certainty what transpired between Jefferson and Cosway during the fall of 1786. Historians, biographers and even filmmakers have lingered over the episode in loving detail and reached different answers to the “did-they-or-didn’t-they?” question. What is indisputable is that Jefferson spent several months in a romantic haze, which he described in terms reminiscent of the young lover in
The Sorrows of Young Werther:
“Living from day to day, without a plan for four and twenty hours to come,” he confessed to another woman friend, “I form no catalogue of impossible events. Laid up in port, for life as I thought myself at one time, I am thrown out to sea, and an unknown one to me.” Indeed, the Cosway affair is significant not because of the titillating questions it poses about a sexual liaison with a gorgeous young married woman but because of the window it opens into Jefferson’s deeply sentimental soul and the highly romantic role he assigned to women who touched him there.
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The most self-revealing letter he ever wrote was sent to Cosway in October 1786, while he was still under the spell of their whirlwind infatuation and still recovering from the injured wrist, which itself served as a perfect metaphor for his wounded condition. Twelve pages and more than four thousand words long, Jefferson labored over the letter with the same intensity he had brought to the Declaration of Independence. The famous letter—it has been endlessly interpreted by several generations of scholars—takes the classic if somewhat contrived form of “a dialogue between the Head and the Heart.” Though the announced intention of the letter is to offer Cosway a problematic picture of the internal battle within Jefferson between reason and emotion, it is a love letter, and therefore the powers of the heart are privileged. The heart has the last word as well as the best lines (i.e., “Had they [philosophers] ever felt the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart, they would exchange for it all the frigid speculations of their lives . . .”). Jefferson even enlists the American Revolution in behalf of the heart’s side of the argument, claiming that victory in the war for independence was a matter of “enthusiasm against numbers” because it defied any rational measure of probability. So at one level the heart is the unequivocal winner of the debate. Despite the agony he felt at Cosway’s departure, the ecstasy of their time together was worth the pain. But at another level it is Jefferson’s head that is orchestrating the arguments and words of the dialogue. The act of crafting the letter allowed him to recover control over the powerful emotions that the relationship with Cosway had released. He kept a letterpress copy of the letter to record the emotions of the moment for posterity. In the long run the head prevails.
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Jefferson’s subsequent correspondence with Cosway charts the gradual and perhaps inevitable cooling of the infatuation. It also bears witness to his urge to transport his palpable feelings for a real woman to a more imaginary region where perfect love could be more easily and safely experienced. In December 1786, still suffering from the wrist injury and the pain of separation, he recalled a magic cap he had read about as a child that enabled its wearer to fly wherever he wished. “I should wish myself with you, and not wish myself away again,” he wrote. “If I cannot be with you in reality, I will in imagination.” He reported his dream of the two of them in Virginia, visiting the Natural Bridge: “I shall meet you there, and visit with you all the grand scenes. I had rather be deceived than live without hope. It is so sweet! It makes us ride so smoothly over the roughness of life.”
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In her early letters Cosway was able to match him with her own romantic imaginings. “Are you to be painted in future ages,” she wrote in February 1787, “sitting solitary and sad, on the beautiful Monticello tormented by the shadow of a woman who will present you a deform’d rod [presumably his wrist], twisted and broken, instead of the emblematic instrument belonging to the Muses. . . .”
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But by the summer of 1787 Jefferson’s letters had become less frequent. Cosway fell back on her pouting and petulant poses, complaining about his lack of attention and threatening to cease writing until the number of Jefferson’s letters matched hers. She was now, however, locked into a war of words with one of the virtuoso prose stylists of the age. His long silence, he explained, was the result of a trip to southern France and northern Italy, where he “took a peep into Elysium” and realized that “I am born to lose everything I loved.” But the references were not to Cosway, at least explicitly; they were to the architecture of Italy and his failure to see Rome. “Your long silence is unpardonable,” she replied, then admitted that she did not know what else to say: “My war against you is of such a Nature that I cannot even find terms to express it. . . . But I begin to run on and my intention was only to say
nothing;
send a blank paper. . . .”
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Jefferson’s response to Cosway’s impatience only increased her frustration: “I do not think I was in arrears in my epistolary account when I left Paris. In affection I am sure you were greatly my debtor. I often determined during my journey to write you; but sometimes the fatigue of exercise and sometimes a fatigued attention hindered me.” She had by now become a lovely memory that he could summon up and appreciate in the privacy of his imagination: “At Heidelberg I wished for you too. In fact I led you by the hand thro’ the whole garden. . . . At Strasbourg I sat down to write you. But for my soul I could think of nothing at Strasbourg but the promontory of noses. . . . Had I written to you from thence it would have been a continuation of Sterne upon noses. . . .” This last reference was to a passage in Laurence Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
that describes an elongating nose, an unmistakable piece of sexual innuendo intended to be provocative. But the reference eluded Cosway, who was accustomed to leaving her male admirers in various European capitals wondering and wandering in her wake. (No less than James Boswell said she treated men like dogs.) Now, however, she herself was dangling, the femme fatale who had more than met her match. She was incensed: “At last I receive a letter from you, am I to be angry or not. . . . lett me tell you I am not your debtor in the least. . . . how could you lead me by the hand all the way, think of me, have Many things to say, and not find One word to write,
but on Noses?”
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During Cosway’s return visit to Paris the two former lovers managed to see each other only briefly and always in large social gatherings. During Jefferson’s return trip to America, he lay over in England for ten days while waiting for a ship but chose not to make the effort to visit her before sailing. She reciprocated by claiming that a bad cold made a trip to him impossible. In one of her last letters she acknowledged defeat in the verbal jousting match, along with a pervasive sense of personal inadequacy: “I wish always to converse with you longer. But when I read your letters they are so well wrote, so full of a thousand pretty things that it is not possible for me to answer such charming letters. I could say many things if my pen could write exactly My sentiments and feelings, but my letters must appear sad scrawls to you.” Jefferson, for his part, said good-bye in terms that recognized how the sizzling infatuation and then quarrelsome coquetry had now congealed into a cooler but more comfortable friendship. The more unmanageable emotions had long since been consigned to a cherished and safely insulated chamber of his soul. “Adieu my very dear friend,” he wrote. “Be our affections unchangeable, and if our little history is to last beyond the grave, be the longest chapter in it that which shall record their purity, warmth and duration.” While his customary discretion makes it impossible to know whether the affair with Cosway had an active and not just a suggestive sexual dimension, the abiding character of their lengthy correspondence makes it abundantly clear that Jefferson preferred to meet his lovers in the rarefied region of his mind rather than the physical world of his bedchamber.
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