Jefferson (65 page)

“I ordered an inscription,” said Madame de Tessé.

Jefferson stepped over the wrappings and bent to read.
“ ‘
Summo rerum moderati / cui tandem / Libertas Americae
…’ ” He translated aloud. “ ‘To the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, under whose watchful care the liberties of North America were finally achieved.’ ”

Madame de Tott finished the translation. “ ‘And under whose tutelage the name of Thomas Jefferson will descend forever blessed to posterity.’ ”

Jefferson took Madame de Tessé’s tiny hands in his. Tears glinted in the corners of her eyes; the little pockmarked cheeks were tremulous beneath the absurd wig.

“My dear friend,” Jefferson said with the slow, stiff formality he adopted when moved, “I am never so conscious of my littleness as when praises are bestowed on me which I do not merit. I feel like a thief, running away with the property of others. My conscience binds me to make a small alteration in the last line.”

Short glanced at the pedestal.
Nomen Thomas Jefferson
.

“Let it be changed to say
‘Nomen de Noailles, comitissa de Tessé.’
 ”

In her fiat voice scholarly Madame de Tott retranslated. “ ‘The name of the Countess of Tessé will descend to posterity.’ ”

“You are a true, devoted friend of Liberty,” Jefferson said, still holding her hands.

At the door to the dining room James Hemings appeared, arms loaded with folded sheets.

“When you return to Paris,” said Madame de Tessé, “I will see that the bust is installed on it properly.”

“We shall place it here in the hall.” Jefferson’s voice was gentleness itself. He moved out of James Hemings’s path without appearing to see him and indicated, over the customary Jeffersonian litter of trunks and boxes, the cleared table in the dining room. “Every other room has been metamorphosed into a packing shop for the voyage. But come in here and take a glass of wine with me this morning.”

Madame de Tott, the fair Grecian, said something quite loudly in Greek, with a lilting musical accent completely different from her usual dry tone. Jefferson looked around with an amused twist to his mouth.

“What did she say?” Madame de Tessé arched her right eyebrow to the edge of the wig.

“She quoted the end of the second book of the
Odyssey
,” Jefferson said, “when Telemachus makes a sacrifice of wine and oxen before he embarks on a long sea voyage.”

“What prodigies I know,” said Madame de Tessé comfortably.

“Alas, we have run short of oxen.”

“I defer the pleasure. When you return from America”—she craned her head to include Short in the remark—“you will find us all prodigies, I hope; democratic prodigies.”

“Those who still have their heads left on their shoulders,” Short said, far more sharply than he intended.

“Monsieur Short,” said Madame de Tessé. She stopped on the threshold of the dining room and frowned with displeasure. “You’ve grown as antirevolutionary as Monsieur Morris.”

“It’s only the mention of sea voyages that makes him anxious,” said Madame de Tott, a step behind her.

“Ah yes, I remember.” Madame de Tessé’s frown relaxed; she nodded with maternal tolerance. “Monsieur Short hates the water. He won’t sail if he can help it, will he?” But at her side Jefferson’s frown remained sternly in place.

An hour later, when the ladies had departed, he entered Short’s room without ceremony, with only a peremptory rap on the open door, and reached Short’s desk in three long strides.

“The tone of your remarks about the revolution,” he said before Short had gotten to his feet, “has for some time given me pain.”

“Sir?”

Jefferson glanced around the room, then turned and stepped back to close the door. “Your remark this morning to Madame de Tessé.”

“I meant,” Short began, not quite truthfully, “only a jest.”

“This revolution is a great event, a very great event in the history of liberty. This country has already begun steps to abolish its aristocratic titles, to establish a free and republican government. I am a friend to it.”

Short had come around to the front of his desk. As always when he was frightened, a part of his mind took refuge in exact, obsessive observation. Jefferson wore his usual costume of blue coat and gray trousers, his neck wrapped in a blue scarf; anger had dug long lines across his brow and his chin—prognathous—stabbed to a hard marble cleft.

“You think, like Gouverneur Morris, like Clérisseau, that the violence of the revolution invalidates the revolution. Where there is such excess, you think, such bloodshed, there is no freedom. I think otherwise. Many guilty people have fallen in the last six months without a trial, and some innocent people too. These I deplore as much as anyone, and shall deplore to the day of my death. But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle. To make a revolution here it was necessary to use the arm of the people, and that is a blind instrument.”

“Very blind.” Short spoke firmly, but his mind came up with no other words. Feebly he repeated himself. “Blind indeed.”

Jefferson had meanwhile turned his back and walked toward the single window in the room, which looked out at the decaying garden. “Was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?”

What could Short answer? He saw blood one way—crimson smears on pavement, cold rags of flesh. Jefferson saw everything—how? Abstractly? In a blind vision?

“Some of those martyrs,” Jefferson said, “I knew personally, and I have been wounded, in spirit, by their loss. But rather than let the revolution fail, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country”—he spun on his heel and looked back at Short—“and left
free
, it would be better than it is now.”

In the distant, recording part of his brain Short was remembering:
Mr. Jefferson is much given to hyperbole
. But he said nothing and was conscious, shamefully, that he had lowered his eyes and face in something like abasement. All his life, he thought, the one great thing he had envied in other men was not wealth or learning or physical strength, but passion.

At the door Jefferson stopped and cleared his throat. Virginia reasserted itself, courtesy reasserted itself. “If I speak too warmly, William,” he said, paused, started over. “The preparations for our trip have made me impatient, too much so. Finding a ship, booking a passage for so many people …” He waved his stiff right hand at one of the packing boxes that had invaded Short’s neatly organized room. “The confusion.”

Short felt the back of his legs touch his desk. Suddenly, almost against his will, he could think of nothing except Gouverneur
Morris’s cruel prophecy. “Have you made your bookings yet for the return to Paris?”

The stiff hand disappeared into the blue coat. The smile was Roman, a thin crease of dignity and frost. “That will be much easier to arrange in Virginia.”

“But you will be back in the spring?”

“I will be back, of course,” Jefferson said, with his other hand on the door.

“It is only,” Short began. “It only occurs to me to ask—” And then he stopped. Morris’s voice rang in his head. The urge was overwhelming to ask Jefferson directly, confront him even—
If you don’t return, will you recommend me? Will you fix me in this place? Give me what I want?
His heart thumped like a cannon under his ribs. What if he asked? And what if Jefferson answered?

At the door Jefferson waited, his hand still on the handle. Slowly his expression softened. “You were going to ask?” he said.

Short saw him as if at a great distance, in the hazy shadow of memory and fear. Even to ask would be to mistrust. He had known Jefferson’s quiet, fatherly voice all his life, he thought, longer by far than he had known Morris. Jefferson would never deceive him.

With the bittersweet sensation of having made an irreversible choice, he shook his head. “No.”

On the morning of Jefferson’s departure Short awoke early, much earlier than anyone else in the house. When he lit his candle and opened his gold watch, the spidery hands pointed to ten minutes before five.

He dressed quickly and crossed the room to pull back the shutters. Pointless. The garden and street were completely dark; not even a flickering
réverbère
along the Champs-Élysées. His candle’s tongue made the only sound.

No lights. He felt the cold smooth glass of the window against his forehead. The year that he was six, his father had taken him one night up the side of Loft Mountain in Albemarle County, to watch a ceremony of Indian signal fires. The two of them had sat on the cold, smooth wagon bench listening to animals and night birds while his younger brother dozed behind them on a burlap
sack. The Indians had set piles of wood every two miles apart straight up and down the Shenandoah range, and at midnight, far to the north, they lit the first one. Then the next hilltop south lit its fire in relay, and the next, and the next. From where he stood, held upright by his father on the wagon, it had looked to Short as if a great red bird of flame were flying from hill to hill.

He yawned and rubbed his cheek and watched a single lantern appear somewhere along the banks of the Seine. He had no desire whatsoever, he thought, to return to Virginia.

On the stairway going down to the kitchen he could hear stirrings from another part of the house. Then a door opened and a voice carried softly down the stairs. Jefferson, singing.

In the kitchen itself a footman was asleep on a stool. Petit stood in front of the fireplace warming a piece of bread. When he saw Short he tilted his head to indicate the silver coffee service on the table.

“James has just taken him his breakfast and his bowl of cold water for his feet.”

“We’re all up early.”

Petit shook his head sorrowfully. “He wants to leave in two hours, but I told him the servants would never load the carriage properly by then.”

“Not all those trunks, and the girls, and the extra horse.”

Petit pursed his lips and spoke with Gallic melodrama into the fire. “He is
le rot des maîtres
.”

The king of masters. An undemocratic sentiment; unrevolutionary. Don’t let the master hear. Short picked up the coffee service and, on this morning of mornings, carried it himself to his room.

By now, as he closed the door with his foot, the sun was casting pink and gray lines of light into the eastern sky. Rooftops, church steeples, fresh lanterns; moving lights on a river barge. A paradox: Europe, older by two thousand years, seemed young and new in comparison with the endless dark, mossy, tangled, impenetrable forests of the New World. Yes? No? He would find some way to work the idea into his manuscript.

His manuscript. Petit’s acid black coffee burned his tongue, churned his stomach. Short glanced with dislike from the window back across the room to the desk, where sheets of paper lay in faint white squares on the blotter.
The Life of Thomas Jefferson, in the
Manner of Mr. Boswell.
Unfinished, unreadable. Last night he had labored for three hours trying to write the story of Jefferson’s governorship in the Revolutionary War, and in the end everything he had written was contradictory or inconclusive. Colonel Tarleton either chased Jefferson like a rabbit over Carter’s Mountain, or else Jefferson waited bravely until the last minute and rode away, and though he had worked until his head ached, Short still had no idea which version was true. He had wadded up his paper and thrown it away.

When they had departed this morning he would return and try his hand at something else: Jefferson and Mrs. Walker; Jefferson and his rival Patrick Henry. He poured a second cup of coffee from the silver spout, watching the liquid black stream turn silver itself in the rising dawn. Everything was metamorphic, ambiguous. Every day he learned a new incongruous fact. Morris, grinning wickedly, had informed him that Patrick Henry’s mad wife had actually been John Paul Jones’s lover first—what use could he make of that? He raised the coffee cup to his lips. The truth was, he had begun too soon; he could work for years and years and still reach no conclusion about Jefferson, Jefferson’s life, or the distant, fire-signaling country to which Jefferson, far more than he, belonged. Better to wait, he thought. Better to wait two decades before he tried again. Better, when they had departed this morning, to ride in the opposite direction, toward Rosalie.

By nine-fifteen, Jefferson’s carriage was fully loaded and waiting outside the front door on the rue de Berri. The servants were assembled on the pavement, and Jefferson, who had wanted to drive away quietly with no farewells, was walking stiffly from group to group, murmuring a few words in French.

“When you see me next,” Patsy told Short, “I shall be seventeen years old.”

“She wants to be married,” Polly said as she climbed into the carriage. She poked her head out the window and added, “I don’t.”

“Say au revoir for me—to everyone.”

“I will only say à bientôt.”

“When we are both old and married,” Patsy said, “we shall speak French to each other, at Monticello.” Her long, narrow face assumed a Jeffersonian solemnity. And then, contrary, he was
sure, to all her resolutions, she suddenly embraced him in a rush and planted a loud, tearful kiss on his cheek.