Jefferson (44 page)

The one delegate nobody noticed, though he arrived a spectacular six weeks late, in a beautiful phaeton with two spare horses, was Jefferson.

They
knew
of him, of course. His
Summary View
pamphlet had been passed from hand to hand, wildly praised for the bold brilliance
of its prose (Dickinson shuddered). And because he was the youngest delegate (at thirty-two) and already celebrated for his pen, they assigned him at once to tedious committee after committee and watched with satisfaction as his reports and letters came flawlessly in, precisely on schedule. But Jefferson the
man—
he never spoke; there is no record at all of his ever speaking in Congress; in committee, Adams said, he was prompt, frank, decisive, but no one else seems to remember. Once or twice he brought out his violin at Philadelphia dinners. Otherwise, from June to October, Jefferson played the role of spectator—silent in a different way from Washington, whose long periods of taciturnity suggested enormous strength marshaled within, a dense mass; the silence of a statue. Jefferson’s was the sly silence of reserve, of elusive private guardedness; when someone approached, he folded his arms across his chest like a gate. Visionary, in short, as always; looking past the day’s committees and reports and squabbles to a far-off pattern that only he saw emerging.

He had a little box, designed by himself, that unfolded into a compact portable writing desk and served him as the equivalent of an orator’s rostrum. “I wonder what in fifty or a hundred years,” John Dickinson said to him one day, fretting, swatting at a fly, “will we have accomplished here by our ‘revolution’?” Characteristically, Jefferson made no answer at the time. But that night he took out his little desk and wrote a long essay describing what he thought they would have accomplished—a free government, a free people, governing themselves by reason; a revolution that would transform and uplift the condition of men all over the globe; life, liberty, justice, everything achieved by reason: “the world’s best hope.” He sent it by post, and Dickinson carried it in his pocket and read it to every delegate he met.

Memoirs of Jefferson
—
10

L
IFE MUST BE LIVED FORWARD, I HAVE
read somewhere, even though it can only be understood backward.

I am now, in this rainy summer of 1826, a biblical three score and seven; sixty-seven years old. Casting my mind backward, it is remarkable how little I remember of the past twenty years—a softly turning blur of indistinguishable days and nights, a feeling somehow of gathering speed. Of my years in France with Jefferson, on the other hand, I remember whole days at a time, preserved and hardened in memory as if in amber. Do I, at all, begin to understand?

One memorable day among hundreds: The week before Jefferson set out on his tour of southern France in February 1787, to take the waters at Aix-en-Provence for his still unmended wrist, he and I rode up the highway from Paris to Versailles, battling every foot of the last two miles through an enormous, noisy throng of soldiers, peasants, carriages, and mere foot-slogging
citoyens
,
come to Court like us to see the opening day of the long-postponed Assembly of Notables.

I remember with perfect clarity the building where the Assembly was to be held—not the king’s palace, but a giant cube of a warehouse across the road, with the unofficial name “Menus Plaisirs,” trifling pleasures, because the king ordinarily used it as a storehouse for ballroom costumes, candelabra, furniture, dried flowers, lanterns, theatrical flats, whatever served as ornament for the Court’s endless festivities. Jefferson, of course, was fascinated by anything architectural, so we had to stop outside the visitor’s door, in the cold February sun, and examine exactly what had been done to such an unpromising barn. Not much, was the answer. The Notables needed a meeting room large enough for two hundred delegates, plus the Court retainers and inevitable crowd of ambassadors and hangers-on who would flock to observe. The palace chapel was briefly considered and rejected; likewise the Hall of Mirrors. Finally, with time running out, the royal architect had simply taken one outside wall of the Menus Plaisirs and to it joined three new temporary walls of thin wood and plaster, making a hollow box three stories high. The doors were little more than boards on hinges; the entrance was unpainted and bare, and except for a series of tinted skylights in the roof, there were no windows at all. The whole thing, Jefferson told me, studying the roof in frowning disapproval, had been built in less than a month.

When we had looked our fill at the exterior, Jefferson presented our tickets to a soldier behind a cordon and we pushed our way through a genuine Babel of other foreign guests, up a set of makeshift stairs, and onto a wooden viewing platform.

The next moment he took me utterly by surprise with a question.

Bending close, cupping his mouth to be heard over the din of voices: “William. You are a man of sensitive observation, great alertness. What singular fact do you notice about this assembly?”

In those days, when I was younger than anyone else in the world, Jefferson’s questions always threw me into a momentary fright. I was on trial, exposed. A bad answer would stamp me (for good) as a fool in his eyes.

“What do you see?” he asked, and I looked about, half panic-stricken.

Our platform was a vast, jostling crowd of shoulders and faces. We were too far from the front edge for me to make out clearly where the king’s party would sit and the delegates conduct their business. I blurted the first thing that came into my head: “I don’t see any women!”

My usual good luck. He smiled, nodded, drew me forward through the crowd. A cubic acre of Frenchmen, jammed by the hundreds and hundreds into every space and cranny, and for once in that endlessly stylish, fashionable, chattering nation, not a female in sight.

Jefferson bent close to my ear. “By the king’s orders,” he said. “He has forbidden all women from attending the ceremony today. I take it as a sign of political seriousness.”

Even now I remember the firmness with which he said this, and the confusion with which I heard it. Jefferson belonged to the school of Virginia gentlemen, already old-fashioned when I was young, that treated women with mild, iron-fisted courtesy. He was a benevolent tyrant to his daughters (poor Patsy, who lived in her father’s house till her own children were grown), a strict believer in woman’s limited sphere. I was present at the Hôtel de Langeac the day he told young Anne Bingham not to wrinkle her pretty forehead with politics. (She wrinkled it with something else.) He once lectured Alexander Hamilton’s beautiful, ambitious sister-in-law Angelica Church for half an hour: The tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion, he said; ladies should be content to soothe and calm their husbands when they returned ruffled from political debates.

“Gratifying seriousness,” he repeated now, leading me forward again to the very edge of the platform. I blinked away women and seriousness and examined as best I could the spectacle unfolding some thirty feet below.

It was not, I remember thinking dazedly, the congress of centurions in Philadelphia. An eye-popping show of color greeted us. Below the platform stretched a long open space, brightly lit by the skylights, populated by several hundred milling Notables, each in his most resplendent, luxurious costume. Wigs rose like snowy mountains, Alp after Alp. Entering from one side, a line of be-jeweled, bespangled courtiers had begun to wend their way over a blue carpet. Before the ornately gilded throne, at the far end of the
hall, bishops and cardinals of the church strolled about in scarlet cassocks and caps; noble gentlemen pulled at their knee-length Burgundy coats, or their silk breeches, or cravats, or else carefully straightened (before a mirror held by a servant) the sweeping plumes of their ceremonial hats.

Jefferson’s mood changed in an instant. “Fops, dandies,” he said under his breath. I strained to hear him. “Even without women to distract them—how can such a parade of
peacocks
expect to reform?”

“There’s Lafayette.” I pointed toward the red-headed prince of pineapples walking slowly, hand on sword, toward the raised throne, which was surrounded, as far as I could tell, by a cascading mountain of candy-colored cushions on which, presumably, the royal party would lounge.

Jefferson ignored him. “The minister of police in Paris,” he told me, intense, confidential despite the noise, “declares there are more than ninety thousand people in the city without a home, sleeping in the streets or in hovels by the river. Yet here …” He waved his hand in disgust.

Before I could reply, trumpets had begun to sound by the door. A master of ceremonies was escorting someone (“the keeper of the seals,” Jefferson muttered), and the Assembly was under way. Then soldiers, mace bearers, princes of the blood were filing toward the dais. Louis XVI himself, a blur of blue and gold, was lowering his vast royal bottom to the throne and two lackeys were placing warm bricks under his feet. The tide of spectators surged. For a moment Jefferson’s tall profile disappeared, and I was alone in the crowd. The king removed his hat, replaced it, spoke something in a high, slow voice that carried badly, and the keeper of the seals bowed, bowed, bowed and advanced a step, bowed all the way to his knees in abject homage. When I could see him again, Jefferson’s arms were folded tightly across his chest. Two spots of red burned on his cheeks.

“From the race of kings,” he said as I came close, “good Lord deliver us.”

In the carriage returning to Paris, Jefferson held a whale-oil lamp in one hand and read aloud from John Adams’s most recent letter, much of it describing a violent uprising in western Massachusetts
two months before, a protest against taxes led by a farmer named Daniel Shays.

“Alarming news,” I said automatically, watching the lights of Paris approach along the curving river. I tried to think of an incisive political comment. “With such instability, no wonder they plan a new constitutional convention.”

But Jefferson shook his head. In the swaying carriage, by the flickering lights, he had never looked so much like an angry hawk. “In fact, I hope they pardon Daniel Shays, whoever he is. The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable in a people that I would wish it to be always kept alive. Better to exercise it in the wrong than not exercise it at all.” He stretched his long legs and twisted three-quarters length on the hard carriage bench. “John Adams wants to see them punished, as you hear. Abigail says make a stern example of them.” The hawk’s smile grew thin, grew faraway serene. “But I like a little rebellion now and then,” he said softly. “It’s like an electric storm in the atmosphere. It clears the air.”

Alas, my mind was never truly formed for politics. As we sat bouncing in the carriage, moving back toward the city I loved best in all the universe, I found myself thinking, not of constitutions and rebellions, but of Jefferson’s strong dislike of forward, ambitious women.