Jefferson (5 page)

“But you should go,” the Frenchman persisted. “You should fly your wonderful kite from a balloon.”

Franklin nodded. “Somebody will,” he said. “Eventually.” He turned and smiled genially in the direction of Adams, who was stabbing the pâté with his fork. “I’ve seen every balloon, you know. The first was two years ago—before you arrived, Brother Adams. The Montgolfier brothers sent up an unmanned balloon made out of red silk from the Champ de Mars, even though it was raining torrents. It flew for nearly an hour and came down ten miles away in a village.”

“Where the villagers,” said Madame Brillon, “promptly destroyed it with their pitchforks.”

“They thought it was the devil,” Franklin agreed.

“But the next—”

“The next balloon,” he said, “had a wicker basket hanging below the hot-air stove, and in it the Montgolfiers put a sheep, a duck, and a rooster, all of which returned unharmed after a tour over the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Then at the end of the year—it was ’83—they launched from the Tuileries, and this time one of the brothers rode in the basket where the sheep had been, far above Paris. Later he told me his first thought when he cleared the rooftops was ‘What a wonderful sight!’ ” Franklin peered over the
tops of his spectacles, toward Colonel Humphreys, it seemed. “And does anyone know what his
second
thought was?”

Humphreys shook his head.

“ ‘How priceless this would be in a battle!’ ”

At which moment the servants arrived, noisily passing out courses of fish and game, and the conversation broke apart into tête-à-tête. Short strained for a moment to catch a glimpse of Jefferson, but against the flickering candlelight and the mountainous, not to say snowy landscape of powdered wigs ranged down the table, he could hardly make out the commissioner’s face. But pale, melancholy, Short thought; not well, even at a distance.

Miss Adams entertained him with a long, breathlessly indignant description of Franklin’s particular friend whom they did
not
invite to dinner—a Madame Helvétius, who lived with two young priests and a bachelor philosopher (respectively ten, twenty, and thirty years younger than herself) and who, her papa swore, had used her chemise to wipe the floor when her lap dog had wet it. By the time dessert had arrived—the wilting flowers in the centerpiece stayed just as they were, failing to metamorphose into anything at all—the entire party was light-headed and gay. In the midst of it, reverting to his customary silence, Franklin seemed to watch benevolently, like a small pink-faced balloon, but as the servants began to remove the cloth and bring the wine, he nodded expectantly toward Adams.

There was an inevitable delay while Adams stood and rapped on the table with his knuckles. The French misunderstood his signal and talked more loudly, Abigail Adams bustled dishes and bottles herself to the kitchen in a whirl of aprons, but then Adams’s cool New England twang began to bore through the hubbub. He was delighted so many of them would brave the rain that day to come to his home—he remembered a poem in a single verse written by a newcomer to describe the Paris climate: rain and wind, and wind and rain. But the Baron de Grimm had complained it was too long by half: “Wind and rain would have said it all.”

Adams wiped his lips, put down his napkin, and laced his fingers behind his back.

“Now. The other two American commissioners wish me to make an announcement tonight, of general interest. As all of you
know, we arrived in France originally to sign our treaty with Great Britain—that was the doctor, Mr. Jay, and your humble servant. Mr. Jay has long since returned to America, and while the doctor and I have stayed on to negotiate other,
commercial
treaties, and Mr. Jefferson has joined us—nonetheless Fortune turns her wheel.”

He stopped and repeated everything in slow, correct French (as stiff as buckram, Short thought; not one to board in Saint-Germain, John Adams studied French in a ponderously formal way at home—he had shown Short the copy of Bossuet’s
Funeral Orations
that was his text).

“Fortune turns her wheel,” Adams said once more. “The doctor observes that he travels very little now, but he has authorized me to announce to you that in the spring of this year he means to relinquish permanently his post here and travel back to Pennsylvania.”

The outburst was all that Franklin would have wished. The ladies groaned, the French gentlemen sprang from their chairs, a general bilingual lament rose from the length of the table. Adams remained standing, hands still clasped behind him. “I guessed,” Miss Adams whispered to Short. “All those letters and meetings. He wants to go home to die.”

In the drawing room afterward, while servants passed around bits of orange and nuts and sweet red wine, a trio of musicians played Scottish and Irish melodies—Franklin’s favorite kind of music—and he himself gave a brief demonstration on his own glass-and-finger instrument, the famous and briefly fashionable “armonica,” which he had invented twenty years ago in London. And then, before Short was at all prepared for it, the party was ending. John and Abigail Adams handed guests into coats and cloaks, carriages ran up through the interminable rain, and footmen splashed in and out of the hallway with their boots and umbrellas. In the confusion Short found himself face to face with Franklin as they waited for a carriage to move.

“Mr. Short.”

“I saw your likeness yesterday, sir, in the shop at the Palais Royal and was amazed at the resemblance.”

Franklin chuckled, like a great elf, Short thought. “Yes.” He
leaned on his cane, smiling. “I like to say that I have been
i-doll-
ized in this kingdom.”

“Your popularity, sir—”

Franklin had the old man’s habit of finishing young men’s thoughts. “My popularity is a source of great amusement to me. Do you know that when I first arrived in Paris and was being made much of, the king grew so prickly about it that he presented the Countess de Polignac with a Sèvres porcelain chamber pot, and my portrait at the bottom of it.”

Franklin chuckled again and looked around. From the drawing room Adams and Jefferson were slowly advancing, heads down in conference. “You’re serving him as secretary?” Franklin asked.

“Informally. There’s no salary or title—”

“So you don’t know how long it can last. He’s a very deep man, very deep. Mr. Jefferson doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve.” Madame Brillon was two steps away, holding up Franklin’s gray hooded cloak and chattering over her shoulder in rapid French. Franklin patted Short’s wrist in an unexpected gesture. His hand was as soft and skittering as a mouse. “Now, of course, you’re thinking what my departure means politically for him—and you.”

“My plans—”

Franklin bent forward confidentially. Short expected him to warn against Adams, or to recommend “Poor Richard”-fashion some sly mixture of prudence and horse sense. Instead, he cocked his elfish head and looked past Short’s arm and into the darkness of the hallway, nodding as if he were seeing a familiar, harmless ghost. “France will change him,” he said quietly. “It changes everyone. Whatever he was, he will turn out different. Whatever
you
are”—the old man straightened and grinned—“flirt like the devil,” he said.

I
n Virginia, Short reminded himself, the beds were very small and people slept more or less sitting up, propped on cushions and pillows. In France, however, the fashion now was to sleep “lying flat,” stretched out full length over the whole bed.

He rocked his chair back on its legs, looked over the desk to the odd, extra long, very comfortable French bed, and yawned. In the tall frame of his window the afternoon rain had slowed to a fine gray curtain of drizzle. Jefferson had left hours ago to visit his daughter Patsy at the convent across the Seine, where she boarded as a student; Humphreys had mounted his horse at noon and ridden out to John Adams once more at Auteuil. As for his own duties—Short lowered his eyes to frown at the portfolio of letters he was supposed to translate or copy for Jefferson, just as if he were a real secretary and this would all last, Paris, and Paris beds, and Paris winters.

He stood up abruptly, poked once at the little pyramid of sea-coal burning in his fireplace, and then crossed the room to the window. From his third-floor apartment he could see the rooftops of the neighboring Chaussée d’Antin, bright sloping quadrangles and chimneys of wet tile and soaked gray stone, and beyond them the distant black horizon of Auteuil. With another, briefer yawn
he thought of the dinner party the day before. If
he
were to fly in a hot-air balloon, floating high over rooftops and gardens and carriages, there would be no speculation about how to use it in a battle. Leave that to Colonel Humphreys. In a balloon you would be able to comprehend all Paris at once, take it all in at once. In his mind’s eye he saw the rooftops themselves coming away like little lids on boxes, himself peering down into every room, every secret. An odd question occurred to him. No one had ever flown in the sky like that before: What would the old poets have written—what would Virgil or Horace or Spenser have said if they could have seen the world
from three thousand feet
?

Below the windowsill, on the street, a thoroughly earth-bound water carrier was staggering under the weight of his two wooden buckets, which he had carried up from the river to deliver somewhere. Short watched the stocky little man disappear around a corner. The other day Jefferson, standing at his own study window, had characteristically worked out for Short that a strong porter beginning at nine o’clock in the morning could complete thirty round trips a day, coming as far up the Boulevards as the rue Taitbout.

Short made a wry face. No dreamy questions about dead poets and balloons. Jefferson’s mind worked in its own way. Never—not in a thousand years—would anybody else have thought to calculate such a fact.

Memoirs of Jefferson
—
2

T
HE TARLETON AFFAIR COULD ONLY BE
understood in the light of what came after … and before.

It is no disgrace, certainly, for a man to fall into a period of despair or even a kind of paralysis in his own affairs. So vital and energetic a person as John Adams confessed that more than once in his life his “demons” (good Puritan word) had brought on fevers, headaches, “anxiety” (his own word too), and general collapse. In the spring of 1781, two months before Banastre Tarleton thundered into Charlottesville, Governor Jefferson received another of those blows that hammered him throughout the Revolution. His wife, a widow when he married her, had brought
to their marriage a young son, who died soon after. Their own first child, Martha, also known as Patsy, was healthy and even robust (inheriting, it was clear at a glance, Jefferson’s big, lanky frame); but a daughter and a son had subsequently died; a second daughter, Mary, also survived, but in April yet another infant daughter, Lucy Elizabeth, succumbed. The governor was sufficiently battered by this loss, but his wife—his wife now entered a period of melancholy and paralysis all her own.

“I mean to retire,” Jefferson wrote a friend. “Public service is private misery.” He watched in despair as his young wife more or less ceased to function in the household. She sat for hours in her room or wandered the big unfinished house (all that Southern
clutter
) without speaking. The house slaves took over the purchases and records for the kitchen, the garden and laundry came to a halt, and the governor galloped helplessly back and forth between Richmond and Monticello as often as he could break away from those swaggering, ineffective, whiskey-stained legislators. But Tarleton’s raid and the flight to Carter’s Mountain, if they shook Martha Wayles Jefferson back into a semblance of life, had just the opposite effect on him.

Those who visited the small cabin called Poplar Forest, where he kept his family in retreat for two or three months, say that the tumble from Caractacus broke Jefferson’s spirit more than his bones. Now Melancholy took him for its own. Now it was
his
turn to be confined to his room and nursed
—
“I am reduced,” he wrote General Washington, “to a state of perpetual decrepitude” (he was thirty-eight!). Even though Tarleton’s troops had raged over his property in a spirit of total extermination, sparing the house at Monticello but destroying virtually all of his crops, all of his Elk Hill plantation, driving off slaves, cattle, horses (they slashed the throats of the colts too young for riding)—even with so much work to do (and doctor bills, in that inflated currency, of £600), Jefferson stayed whole days silent in bed, writing steadily on a board he held across his knees. Toward the end of summer he would leave his bed and sit propped by a mountain of cushions at his desk, writing for hours at a time, barely eating, rarely speaking. Yet strangely enough, during this whole period he wrote almost no letters at all, just two or three like the one to Washington.