Jefferson (49 page)

His hand steered her gently to one side, just past the door. “Here are Hubert Robert’s antiquity paintings commissioned for Fontainebleau,” he said; “they now call him Robert des Ruines.” He raised his good hand toward the nearest one, a beautifully colored study of the old Roman Maison Carrée at Nîmes; next to it, the ancient crumbling Pont du Gard at Aix.

“He captures it all perfectly,” Jefferson told her. “I saw the originals on the spot, you know, not five months ago.”

“Yes, and from there you went into Italy”—Maria affected a pout—“and never wrote me a word of it till you came out again. You might have gone to Rome, even Florence!”

He smiled benevolently, drawing her in his loose-jointed, rambling way down the line of paintings, so utterly different from the stiff-backed European men with their hats under their arms, their noses up in the air.

“I did indeed take a peep into Elysium,” he said. “But I only entered it at one door and came out at another. I calculated the hours it would have taken to carry me on to Rome, but they were exactly so many more than I had to spare. In thirty hours from Milan, I could have been at Venice and the Adriatic, but I’m born to lose everything I love, am I not?”

They had drifted almost to the tall windows of the Salon that overlooked the river.

“If you had been with me,” Jefferson said, still smiling, “there were so many enchanting scenes we needed you to paint.” And without looking at the actual painting on the wall before them, he began to describe a landscape near Milan that she should have captured on canvas, a castle and a village hanging on a cloud, a stream, a mountainside shagged with rocks and olive trees. He had written her something like this in a letter, but to hear it in person, to listen to his voice, see his face, his confident manner … Her eye stopped at the withered hand.

“Well.” She turned away. “This is a
real
painting, you see, and by a master.” She tipped her fan toward the trompe-l’oeil of Roland de la Porte beside the window. It was a rendering of the
Crucifixion in precise relief; chalky white cross, deep violet background, our Savior with head bowed, three bright spots of blood.

“Perfect.” Jefferson inspected it as if he would take its measurement. From the corner of the window you could see straight along the river to the Pont Neuf and the gray sloping roof of a church.

“Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois.” Jefferson said: “One of the oldest churches, I think. When my friend Adams was here, his son John Quincy was at Froullé’s bookshop one day and a bell rang in the street and everybody in the shop fell suddenly to their knees. It was the priest from that church carrying ‘le bon dieu’ to some dying person.”

“Le Porte-Dieu. He carries God,” Maria said. “Even the king has to kneel when he passes. They say Louis XV once fell to his knees right in the mud, on the street.” Her memory searched for the French words of the famous story: Le roi s’est mis à genoux dans les boues.

“The Adams boy,” Jefferson said, amused, “is a New England Calvinist just like his father. He said he was ‘revolted.’ ”

Along the next wall a few samples of sculpture had been arranged in front of the paintings. Here Short and the merchants were admiring Houdon’s new bust of General Washington, placed next to the bust of Lafayette that Jefferson had presented to the city. One of the Americans demanded something of Jefferson in the harsh clack-clack of the Yankee accent, the crowd of spectators shifted, and Maria found herself unexpectedly going along the walls with Short, her enemy, her spy.

“You have brightened his spirits wonderfully,” Short told her. She could detect no sarcasm in his voice. Ingratiating, rather. All day long, for whatever reason, he had seemed oddly subdued. “When his daughter arrived in July, he was overcome with homesickness, you know. He talked of nothing but Virginia and Monticello and how soon he might be traveling home. Now—”

“This is Madame Vigée-Lebrun’s work, no?”

“All these portraits, yes.”

Maria pushed herself forward boldly. Madame Lebrun believed that women should dress simply, naturally, without affectation. The painting Maria had fixed on was a portrait of the actress
Madame Raymond, unostentatious, hair falling in natural curls, a shiftlike dress of ivory-colored cotton lawn. Trumbull said that at her dinners Madame Lebrun served nothing but fish and salad, and that she once made her pompous husband strip off his powder and wig and sit down to eat with a wreath of laurel about his head. Short was saying something. Maria moved on. I could do this, she thought. I could paint with power, force, like a man, if only, if only—

“Over there is the queen herself,” Short said.

Maria turned quickly, but of course he meant the portrait of the queen, just to the left of the entrance door, in the place of honor. She moved purposefully toward it, folding her fan. Even at a distance it was different from the usual royal flattery, utterly different from Rubens’s huge fleshy portraits of Catherine de Médicis in the Luxembourg Palace. Here, when you came close enough, the scene was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, but daringly, Maria saw, Madame Lebrun had posed Marie-Antoinette not as a queen or a Greek nymph, but as an ordinary woman, a
mother
. A baby played on her lap, two older children stood at her sides. She wore a hat and a formal velour gown and looked straight toward the painter. But the crib on her left was empty, signifying, Maria guessed, the queen’s loss of a child—was it a year ago? She stopped abruptly. Cribs and babies always worked on her imagination; her mind sank backward into memory, drowning, her own crib, her murdered baby brothers, the avenging nurse lowering her gigantic watery face like a moon.

“It meets with a mixed reaction,” Short volunteered beside her. “For various reasons the critics are quite divided about its merits.”

Maria nodded. She knew all about the scandals whispered around the queen. Richard had repeated every filthy joke he had heard, he had read aloud till she screamed from a little book called
Les Amours de Charlot
, which began with the queen masturbating and went on to love between women, nymphomania, worse. Marie. Maria.

“I like her portraits,” Jefferson said, doubtfully, appearing at her other side. “She captures expressions very well. But her palette can be too somber, too dark for my taste.”

“You had thought of commissioning her,” Short said.

“Perhaps. For Monticello.” Jefferson was somehow drawing
her leftward, toward the next painting. “I dream of installing a little gallery at Monticello to remind me how I have passed among heroes. But now look at the next—surely this is the finest thing in the room, superb, sublime!”

“David,” said Short.

“The Death of Socrates.”

Maria allowed herself to be brought within inches of the new canvas, which was large, dark, austerely masculine. On a bed, left hand raised to calm his weeping students, Socrates reached for a bowl of fatal hemlock. Behind him a bare stone wall, an arched passageway leading to barred windows. The only woman was Socrates’s wife, insignificant, resembling a man. Maria opened her fan and dropped back a step. Ordinarily no one was more enthusiastic than she was for the works of David, but this cold, calculated painting—what about it so appealed to Jefferson? She let her eyes go back to Marie-Antoinette.

“Sublime,” Jefferson repeated. “If it were not already taken I would purchase it.”

“You like the colors?” Maria could see the artist’s intent: the tragic force of the students’ love was meant to burst in colors against the severe, classical lines of the composition; David was indeed sublime, Madame Lebrun merely domestic. But today the effect made her shiver.

“I like the colors,” Jefferson said. “Yes. I like the way Socrates breathes greatness, soul.” He had extended his hands, the good and the injured, to frame the painting.

“And the theme?”

“I see this as a register of conflict,” Jefferson said. “On the one hand, law, rigor, the state; on the other hand, emotion, love of life. Public duty and private desire. Sacrifice.”

Short saw the two of them look at each other as if exchanging a private code, a secret appeal. “Head and Heart,” Maria said softly, finishing Jefferson’s thought. But as Short watched she carefully stepped aside from his touch.

“They see almost nothing of each other,” Clérisseau declared. He paced half the length of the rug and made a kind of pirouette
around the three massive wooden boxes. “All of Paris wonders why, after six weeks, the flame seems to have died out.”

Short was irritably searching his desk for the right envelope. “All of Paris wonders nothing of the sort.”

Clérisseau circled the boxes warily. “All right; true, correct. No one in Paris actually cares. The spectacle of a married woman and her perhaps
amant
is hardly new. Or shocking. Or interesting. Especially if the woman travels about in a perpetual caravan of female attendants and is never seen so much as to get into a carriage alone with him. Discretion is the better part of nothing.”

Short found that even the letters on the envelope blurred in the slantwise light of the room. If or when he returned to Virginia, would his eyes improve? Clérisseau stopped in midpace and read over his shoulder: “Madame Townsend. Monsieur Grand. Monsieur Daubenton.”

“Daubenton.”

“And,” Clérisseau said, taking the letter, opening the seal for him with a snap of his thumb, and handing it back, “especially nothing if the
amant
takes a room in the monastery at Mont Valerien and spends two or three days a week in dreary, masculine retreat when he could be with his beautiful lover. Can you explain—think of me as a visitor to the strange American planet—can you explain
that
behavior?”

Short started to speak, then shook his head.

“He rented his room when?” Clérisseau asked. “September fifth? Hardly a week after she had arrived? ‘Love’s first moment after noon,’ the poet says, ‘is night.’ Yes?”

Short could only shake his head again, unfolding the letter at the same time. He had devoted many hours himself to just that question. Jefferson was a man who always seemed to need two houses, one for open, public living, so to speak, as at Monticello; the other for retreat, solitude, as at Poplar Forest or now at the hermitage on the French mountain. All month he had disappeared regularly on Fridays and returned on Mondays, carrying great batches of correspondence and diplomatic ledgers. The monks enforced a rule of absolute silence in their gardens, but Jefferson said the paying guests were allowed to speak, quietly, during meals. As for Maria Cosway’s bristling caravan of attendants—Short refolded the envelope.

“I like the child Polly,” Clérisseau said. “She has a fragile air, and she already speaks French. But why has her aunt in Philadelphia shipped her these three herculean boxes?”

“She hasn’t. The Hercules in this case is a General John Sullivan of New Hampshire, and the letter says they’re to be delivered before they spoil to Buffon’s assistant at the Jardin du Roi.”

“A gift from Jefferson?”

“ ‘Objects of natural history.’ That’s all it says.”

Clérisseau sniffed once. “Another potshot in the Wars of Truth.”

“If you want to come along,” Short said, ringing for Petit, “the mystery will soon be lifted.”

Clérisseau sniffed again and picked up his hat. “
This
mystery. Not the other.”

In the carriage, to Short’s surprise, they discussed politics. Clérisseau, far less conservative than his habitual irony suggested, declared bluntly that the disturbances of the summer would go on and on until—“until the king divorces the queen?” Short asked. Like everyone else, Short was amazed by the violence of the popular revulsion against Marie-Antoinette.

Clérisseau shook his head. “You know the riots this summer?” Short nodded. In August, after the Assembly of Notables, the king had exiled the remaining unruly and liberal
Parlement
to a provincial village. Riots of protest had broken out across Paris. Mobs escorted favored nobles to their carriages, pelting others with mud and stones. They looted bakeries, shops, toll gates. Intransigent, the king had decreed yet another set of taxes to pay his crushing debts.

“Jefferson is right. Nothing will truly change until the fundamental
injustice
of our system changes.” Clérisseau smoothed the fabric of his handsome emerald coat. “A parable. At dinner some years ago in Versailles, as one of the king’s little games, each of the guests was required to tell a true story about a thief. When Voltaire’s turn came, he simply smiled his wily little foxy smile and said, ‘Once upon a time there was a man who was a member of the Farmers-General—I forget the rest.’ ”

The Jardin du Roi lay to the east of the Latin Quarter, in the Faubourg Saint-Victor, facing the river. “Almost out of the city and into the country,” Jefferson liked to say, and he had come a
number of times from the Grille de Chaillot to see the collections of plants and wander among the botanical curiosities that Buffon had put together. But Buffon himself, though he was granted a handsome house rent-free on the southwest corner of the gardens, rarely appeared in Paris anymore. Deputies did all the work while the master, in his Burgundy retreat, wrote volume after volume of his endless, inexhaustible
Histoire naturelle
.