Jefferson (29 page)

“And my charming wife,” Cosway repeated. “I would sit down if I could find a damn’d waiter to bring me a chair.”

Short rose hastily to seize an unused chair from another table, while Clérisseau explained the café and stood to offer his own place. By the time Short had returned, they were settled again and Cosway was poking one monkeylike finger into Short’s papers.

“Would you like coffee?”

Cosway shook his head. His wig rocked on his head.

“Wine?”

“I’ve just been to the Camp of Tartars,” he told Clérisseau.

“With d’Hancarville?”

“No.” He swung his leg over the arm of the chair, slouched, and stared up at Short. “Do you know what d’Hancarville’s subject of
study is?” Before Short could answer, he shook his head again. “Never guess. By God, it’s hot in here. D’Hancarville studies the phallic religion of ancient Greece. Fact. He showed me a locked cabinet full of the most amazing objects. Big as your arm. Made out of bone.”

Short felt his dislike for the man rising almost to physical nausea. A drunken, skinny, monkey-faced little fop with the leer and smirk of a schoolboy. He pulled Jefferson’s bill for religious freedom toward his lap and pushed the chair back.

“My wife and your ambassador,” Cosway said, without the slightest sign of jealousy, “are off somewhere touring the Bois de Boulogne. I painted till noon, then saw old d’Hancarville. The Camp of Tartars is just out there, all those tents on the other side of these arcades. They have a wax model, anatomically correct, of la belle Zulima.’ Also a Prussian giant and his dwarf wife.”

“The Camp des Tartares,” said Clérisseau, rising, “is a notorious place for pickpockets and thieves. You should have been warned.”

“It is a place,” Cosway said, managing to sway even as he sat in the chair. Ostentatiously he tucked the tail of his shirt into the blue trousers. “It is a place,” he grinned, “of absolute
liberty
.”

In the sunshine outside Cosway appeared less drunk. He walked between the two men to the end of the arcade Beaujolais on rue de Montpensier, where a line of carriages-for-hire was stationed. At the head of the line Clérisseau signaled for a carriage to take Cosway home.

“Rue Coqhéron, is it not?”

“Come with me, Clérisseau, and see what I’ve been painting.” In an obvious afterthought Cosway turned and included Short in the invitation as well. But Short held up one hand and clutched his books with the other. A hasty plea of business, a diplomatic flash of teeth. The last thing he saw was Clérisseau at the carriage window mouthing a word—but what?—while the carriage clattered forward and out of sight.

As Short returned to the Palais he wondered at the peculiar laws that governed marriage. A beautiful (shallow) woman like Maria Cosway, a repellent creature like her husband. He thought of Jefferson and Martha Wayles, like attracting like; the old Duc and the young Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld, December and
May. If he were Cosway—by some act of celestial malice—he would do everything possible to rise above his nature; if, on the other hand, he were Maria Cosway, how could he not be in perpetual flight from such a goat’s bed?

But at that moment Maria Cosway was in flight from no one. She was seated on a bench just inside the Pavillon de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne, watching a trio of tame deer walk calmly about, behind the sharply pointed wooden posts of what was labeled, in French and English, an “American stockade.” The sight was as baffling to her as it was apparently amusing to Jefferson, who detached himself from the stockade and strolled back to the bench, smiling.

“This represents the gardener’s idea of where the ‘noble savage’ retreats from the dangerous beasts of America.”

“And it’s not true?”

“The only dangerous beasts I see at Monticello are horses and doctors.”

She laughed and, moving the folds of her skirt with one hand, made room for him on the bench. Beyond the stockade, by a little brook and a bridge, other couples strolled through the garden. “You see wild beasts in America, and in Paris you see artists, almost the same thing, no? In the last week you’ve met David, in his studio. And Madame Vigée-Lebrun and Carle Vernet and the sculptor Pagou and also Houdon—”

“Whom I knew before.”

“On business only.
And
you’ve met General Kosciusko as well, a bonus of sorts, since you’re both politicians.” She watched him trace a geometric design in the gravel with his walking stick. Always in slight, contained,
masculine
motion. Kosciusko she had been told was a kind of Polish hero, a revolutionary statesman who had done—something; but
he
had known Jefferson instantly, taking his hand in both of his and bowing low with unmistakable respect. “So now we have brought you into the whole Paris world of painters and artists, without even a stockade to protect you.”

As they made their way, like the other couples, toward the bridge, Jefferson pointed out for her and named, in English, every plant and blossom that they passed. Then he came somehow closer—she watched their swinging hands gently approach, veer, brush;
his colored on the back with the soft ginger hairs that also ran stiffly down the nape of his neck, as men’s do—and when she was listening again, he had begun a question.

“An education for me, of course, in all the fine arts. But you always let the others do the talking. And yet Trumbull assures me that you are a painter as well. Is it true?”

“Ah,” she said. “Trumbull.”

“He says you exhibited at the Royal Academy in London.”

“Once. Once or twice I showed paintings. But Richard, you know …” Leaning, smiling, she brushed the tips of her fingers across his hand and came to a halt in the middle of the path. “Richard forbids me to paint now,” she said seriously, “and if someone insists on a portrait, some friend—well, nothing is for sale.”

“He
forbids?
”

She had told the story often enough, she knew the effect of her smile, and of Richard’s blunt, jealous prohibition; but no one had ever reacted quite as Jefferson did. For a moment she expected his face to harden into anger or outrage—some men did that; other men puffed or blew on their moustaches or raised an eyebrow—the Prince of Wales had laughed. But Jefferson … Was she catching the set of his emotions now, or was he entirely a mystery? … Jefferson simply changed the subject.

“The Bagatelle up ahead is a building with a curious history.”

This time she let her hand rest firmly on his and made no move to resume their stroll, so that he was forced to stop and turn back to her. She said, “We’re friends, even in such a short time, are we not?” Through the trees a moving checkerboard of light played across his face; it was like reading a puzzle. “You may hear stories. When our family came back from Italy to England, I was briefly engaged to a musician, a Dr. Parsons, who was quite poor. When I married Richard, some people joked that I had done it for money—Richard is very rich, he was very generous. But it was all for love.”

Jefferson was silent. She had no sense at all of what he thought, only the impression of rigid muscles, tension. He rode horses like a soldier; she had seen him swing into the saddle like a boy of twenty. Impulse rose in her throat. “You were married once.”

Jefferson pushed away the leaves of a shrub with his stick to allow her to go ahead. Behind her she heard him say in a normal tone of voice, “My wife died four years ago.”

“Ah.” Side by side now. The Bagatelle was a miniature castle, charmingly laid out with flowers, ponds, varnished bits of terracotta that sparkled in the sunlight. John Trumbull had told her that Jefferson was one of the strongest characters he had ever known—a prodigy of learning and will—and the most reserved. He would never say one word beyond his intended effect, beyond what he wanted to say; his self-control was the key to everything else. So, of course, a person of impulse, she thought, watching him, would naturally attempt to turn the key.

“What was she like?”

Jefferson looked sideways, squinting, distressed. “She was musical. Gentle.” He hesitated.

“Did she talk about the famous politics with you?”

Carefully, painfully, he smiled at her, a face caught in the hard vise of courtesy. “I did not
forbid
her to talk of politics, you know, but she preferred not. I confess I prefer it when ladies do not.”

They had stopped in the center of the path, facing each other. Maria was aware of his height, his flushed skin. In the summer heat her heart pounded so fiercely that her head trembled, her legs in her skirt trembled.

“And when she died, four years ago, were you distraught?” Trumbull had told her he had been like a madman; his friends thought he would die himself or lose his reason.

He spoke with slow formality, as if he had composed his answer long before. “I entered a great stupor of mind,” he said. “For many months I was as dead to the world as she was, whose loss occasioned it.”

Then he raised his hand briskly to point at the whitewashed walls of the Bagatelle. “The little château here, you know, was built on a wager by the Comte d’Artois—hence the name ‘trifle.’ His brother the old king bet his wife that it couldn’t be finished in sixty days.”

The rest of the gardens were tedious. They returned early in Jefferson’s phaeton, stopping only at the Pont de Neuilly, where Jefferson made her observe closely the engineering genius of the low elliptical arches that supported the bridge.

As they clattered across the Seine and entered Paris again, he suddenly remarked with a puzzled expression that William Short had been out of spirits ever since the day of the Halle aux Bleds, when he had had to dine in their place with the old Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld and her son and his wife. Short would say nothing about the dinner that night, the company; he was silent as a stone.

Maria smiled and spoke so softly that Jefferson heard not a word. “Poor in-love Mr. Short,” she said.

Papers and books.

Papers and books lay spread across both desks, across the two large tables on either side of the door, which were usually reserved for mail and parcels; across two of the six upholstered chairs in the study, even across the slats of Jefferson’s polygraph copying machine. The heavens had opened and rained books, Short thought, squalls and showers of ink. Above the papers and books rose three new bookcases, already full, constructed of dark French oak from Burgundy and fitted into the walls. He remembered a phrase attributed to the old English curmudgeon Samuel Johnson, recently dead, “the epidemic conspiracy for the destruction of paper.”

“Monsieur Jefferson’s house,” Clérisseau said drolly, “has books the way my own apartment has ants.”

“Method in our madness,” Short said. Outside the closed door he could hear voices, one mild and even, Jefferson’s; the other higher-pitched and, of all things in Jefferson’s household, angry. “Do you know François Soulé?”

“The historian. I have seen—but, alas, not bought or, further alas, read—his history of the American Revolution.”

“Jefferson bought a copy in London—”

“If I were not an architect”—Clérisseau picked a book at random from the top of Short’s desk—“I would, as long as he is here, become a bookseller. And very rich.”

“—and he made a memo for Soulé, correcting his facts.”

“These are his underlinings?”

“Well, no.” Short felt himself oddly embarrassed. In this too he was different from Jefferson. “I made them. That’s my copy of
Buffon. Jefferson actually never puts a mark in a book. He writes notes on separate sheets of paper and inserts them at the back.”

“In France,” Clérisseau began, but stopped as the door opened and Jefferson stepped partly into the room. Just beyond him, standing on the carpet, as tall as a man and showing carrot-red hair under her blue school cap, arms folded, jaw clenched, Patsy Jefferson glowered at her father. In the seventeen months he had known her, Short had never seen Patsy out of temper. Her father’s darling, pet; a dutiful, self-effacing girl, but fourteen now and taking on the lineaments of a young woman.

“
I
would like to see the Bagatelle someday,” she said, staring at Short without the slightest sign of recognition. “With Mrs. Cosway’s
kind
permission.”

Jefferson spoke so softly to her that Short and Clérisseau both turned instinctively away, for fear of appearing to eavesdrop. Clérisseau took up the sheet of paper entangled in the copying machine and handed it to Short, who smoothed it on the desk and inserted it into Jefferson’s leather portfolio. When he looked up, Patsy was gone. Jefferson was closing the door, entering the study.

“You find us in disorganization,” he said genially to Clérisseau, shaking his hand.

“I have decided to combine architecture and commerce,” Clérisseau said. Short watched him grin at Jefferson and pull at the ends of his little moustache, like a popeyed cat. “I’ll build you a house entirely of books, which I will sell to you first.”

Jefferson walked calmly along the three new bookcases. “Well. Sunday evenings. We are always informal. My daughter is home from her school. Mr. Short is in his shirt-sleeves. Do you know,” he said to Short, “that my old schoolmaster Maury writes to say his mother has heard Patsy is settled as a nun in a convent?”