Jefferson (38 page)

Short put down the remaining sheets of paper, vaguely embarrassed. He remembered what followed in the dialogue. The Head said it was better never to make friends than to lose them and suffer; the Heart claimed suffering was part of life, there was no sublime pleasure without it. In the midst of everything, predictably, Jefferson began to talk of America—Maria should come to America and paint it, perhaps someday (sheer fantasy) she would have to seek asylum from wicked old Europe and he could welcome her—welcome them
both
, husband and wife—to his house.

Of course he would write in dialogue form, Short thought, disgusted with his own obtuseness. The lady was
married
. No matter how warm it had got at Saint-Germain, the Roman would always observe the outward proprieties. But this attraction for married, for
forbidden
women—he glanced at the last page of the dialogue as he folded it away. Jefferson was such a perfect machine of contradictions himself, so perfectly balanced, he had left it unresolved who won the debate, Head or Heart. But Short felt certain that Maria, who could barely write a grammatical sentence in English, would have no idea at all of the subtlety of Jefferson’s tribute.

In fact, in Antwerp, Maria sat down with the whole dialogue and read it three times through before looking up. Trumbull, lounging in the corner of the room, his right foot on a low table, his teacup resting on his chest, met her violet-blue eyes and smirked. He had delivered the letter to her himself, confidentially, since Jefferson
had enclosed it discreetly in a letter to him; Jefferson would send all his letters thus, he had explained, because of the “infidelities” of the French mails.

Trumbull arched his eyebrow in a disagreeable way he had recently cultivated and lifted his teacup from the saucer, as if making a toast.

“Our friend is well?” he asked in French.

Maria smiled brightly. “He has copied the words to a French song for me,” she said, “such a long song.”

“And which one is it?” Still in French.

“ ‘Jour Heureux,’ ”
she said, pretending to look at the letter.

“Not so very long,” Trumbull said in English, with the faintest possible intonation of mockery.

“I shall go into the other room and write him my thanks,” Maria said, but without moving. An English melancholy had descended over her once again, she thought; her face and neck were like stiff sheets of paper cut out with scissors, full of sharp angles and corners; she was an unreal person. In two more days they would be in London. The image of that smoky, gray, stone-faced, fog-smothered city came to her eyes almost like a vision. The wheels of time, Jefferson had written, moved on with a rapidity … She had forgotten the rest of the beautiful sentence. The wheels of time were carrying her back to London. In drab, Protestant London there would be no monasteries where men of God prayed at all hours for all those others who did not pray, who were lost and in need of rescue.

“I shall write him my thanks,” Maria said after a long pause.

“When,” Trumbull asked, uncoiling himself from the chair like—she thought—a snake, “when do you think you will return to Paris?”

“I shall probably return next spring,” she said. “To Paris.”

Trumbull no longer bothered to hide his smirk. “With Richard?”

“Or without him,” she said calmly, but closing her eyes.

Memoirs of Jefferson
—7

I
PICTURE TO MYSELF TWO SCENES
.

Identical, contradictory.

One
, late May 1765, Williamsburg, the House of Burgesses furiously debating what action to take in response to the infamous Stamp Act just passed by Parliament. Thomas Jefferson, then twenty-two years old and still a gangly red-haired student, all collapsible elbows and knees (as his friends remembered him), standing rooted at the doorsill of the lobby intent upon the speeches. Patrick Henry, dressed as usual in preacher’s black, with a dour, sour kind of look and an habitual farmer’s slouch much like Jefferson’s; a member of the Burgesses, almost thirty years old, but coarse-featured and rustic and virtually unknown in Williamsburg, rising to take the floor in front of the most sophisticated and polished gentlemen in Virginia.

Nobody ever cared less for that kind of polish. Henry’s speech, which started calmly, soon rose to a pitch of furious, terrible invective against the injustice of the Stamp Act and the tyrannical pretensions of the almighty British Parliament, which had assumed
for itself the unlawful right of taxation over the king’s free-born, liberty-loving colonies. As Patrick Henry paced back and forth and roared defiance, the assembled legislators, still thinking of themselves as loyal British subjects (and thinking too, no doubt, of the formidable royal governor Lord Botetourt, not half a mile down the street in his brick palace), began to mutter or call out to him. He paid them no mind. Mesmerized, Jefferson pushed to the first row of the crowd.

Henry approached the end of his speech. He halted in front of the speaker’s bench, then slammed a rough fist down on the railing, under the nose of the king’s attorney-general, Jefferson’s spectacularly rich, spectacularly fat old cousin Peyton Randolph and, ignoring Randolph’s huge red face, launched into his peroration. “Caesar had his Brutus. Charles the First his Cromwell. And George the Third”—here the room rocked with noise and protest. “Treason!” screeched Randolph, struggling to his fat feet. On the other side of the floor Jefferson’s own professor of law, George Wythe, sprang from his chair: “Treason!” Half a dozen voices joined the cry. Black-clad Patrick Henry simply stood, hands on his hips, in calm defiance. When the cries of treason began to fall away, he raked the room with a look, reared on his heels, and finished thunderously—“and George the Third may profit from their example.
If this be treason, make the most of it!
”

Afterward, defeated nineteen to twenty, shoving past Jefferson in the lobby, Peyton Randolph swore to his followers that he would have given five hundred guineas that day for a single vote. Presumably his lean young cousin did not offer his own opinion then, though he repeated it in awe for weeks after, that Patrick Henry had gifts as an orator beyond anything Jefferson had ever imagined—“He appeared to me,” he told his friend John Page, paying a characteristically bookish compliment, “to speak as Homer wrote.”

Query: Did this rebellious admiration come from Jefferson’s own miserable limitations as a speaker? Or was he merely engaged, as always, in some kind of inner debate, choosing sides (for the moment) between the crude upland energies of his own people, out in the wilderness of Albemarle County, as against the smug, self-oiling political machine of the Tidewater sophisticates? Are politics the mere extension of our childhood? Peyton Randolph
was his cousin on his mother’s side. Patrick Henry came out of the backwoods frontier world that belonged to his father. The day after his speech, Henry was seen starting for home along the Duke of Gloucester Street, wearing torn buckskin breeches, saddlebags over his arm, leading his horse.

And query: Was Patrick Henry what the mild, rational, self-disciplined Jefferson was not: “sublime”?

Scene Two
. Ten years later, March 23, 1775. The old white clapboard Church of St. John, on one of the seven hilltops of Richmond, where the Burgesses, now much less smug and smooth, are gathered illegally to debate the momentous question whether, in this year of crisis, Virginia ought to arm its militia like other colonies and prepare for civil war.

Jefferson, seated as a member of the Burgesses, now a prosperous young lawyer, and author the previous year of a brilliantly hot-headed pamphlet called
A Summary View of the Rights of British America
, which had succeeded in placing his name on a list of “traitors” marked by the British Parliament for hanging. Patrick Henry coming to his feet once again and striding down the aisle to the tiny space in front left cleared for speakers, while up and down, in every pew, the audience, which knows their man by now, stirs in expectation.

It was so unseasonably hot that morning, Jefferson once told me, that all the church windows were flung open (townspeople leaning in to listen) and the air burned when it moved. Henry’s face was pale white, but his eyes also burned (if you can credit some of the more melodramatic witnesses) and glowed like coals. As always, he began with the appearance of deliberation. It is a question of freedom or slavery, he said. He has only one lamp by which to guide his feet in this question, and that is experience. Experience tells him that the British ministry will respond to more petitions and more addresses, just as they have already in Boston, with sneers and soldiers. What do we have to oppose them? Shall we try argument? We have been trying that for the last decade. Have we anything new to offer them on the subject of American rights? Nothing. There is no need for Virginians to deceive themselves. The storm is ready to break.

Henry was a legendary master of the orator’s pause, the long, daring moment of silence. He liked to stop and draw his body up
out of its slouch and wait rigid till his audience had grown unbearably tense. James Madison used to claim that when he had argued a case in patient detail for two hours, Henry would get up slowly, pause and stare at the jury, and undo everything before he had uttered a word. Now he simply broke off in the middle of his speech and glowered at the ceiling. Then: They say America is weak and can never stand firm against Great Britain. We are
not
weak. We are three millions strong.

And more than that—I sat one long afternoon on a porch front in Williamsburg and listened to three old men act out by turns the way Henry had suddenly exploded into his tremendous conclusion. The oldest one of them even wrote it down for me, word for word, with every gesture he remembered.

“Besides, Sir, we shall not fight our battles
alone
. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery. Our chains are forged. Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston. The war is inevitable. And let it come! I repeat, sir, let it
come
!

“Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. What is it that gentlemen wish? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and
slavery
?” Here, the old men said, Henry stood in the attitude of a condemned galley slave, loaded with fetters, awaiting his doom. His shoulders were bowed; his wrists were crossed; his face was twisted into helplessness and agony. After a long, long pause he raised his eyes and his chained hands toward heaven and burst out, “Forbid it, Almighty God!”

Then he turned toward the part of the church where the Loyalists had taken seats together, and he slowly bent his form nearer and nearer the floor and said, “I know not what course others may take,” and his hands were still crossed, his face was heartbroken and hopeless. Another pause, longer even than before, so that you could imagine the Loyalists imagining the condition of Virginia under the chains and iron heels of the invading British Army. Suddenly he rose straight and proud—“But as for me”—and his thin body was thrown back, every muscle and tendon seemed to strain against the invisible fetters that bound him, and he hissed the words through clenched teeth. Then the loud, clear, triumphant notes, “Give me liberty,” and as each syllable of the word
Liberty
echoed through the church, his fetters were shivered; his arms were hurled apart; and the links of his chains were scattered to the winds. When he finished the word
Liberty
his hands were open, and his arms elevated and extended, and after a momentary pause, only long enough to permit the ringing echo of “liberty” to cease, he let fall his left hand to his side and squeezed his right hand firmly, as if holding the point of a dagger toward his breast. And he closed the grand appeal with the solemn words, “or give me death!” and suited the action to the word by a blow upon the left breast with the right hand, which seemed to drive the dagger straight to his heart.