The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (37 page)

Two weeks after Martha died, Edmund Randolph visited Monticello. A few minutes with Jefferson convinced him that the rumors he had heard of his friend and mentor’s “inconsolable grief” were true—to the point of “his swooning away whenever he sees his children.” Other friends, such as James Madison, refused to believe Randolph’s eyewitness account. They could not connect the intensity of his grief to Jefferson’s “philosophical temper.”

None of these people were psychologists; rather the opposite. Today we would say that Jefferson was experiencing a trauma, a psychic wound so intense it affected his relationship with women for the rest of his life. Martha’s death was the climax of a series of personal losses, compounded by his failures as a political leader during his governorship. The two streams of anguish blended into a terrible regret for the time he had given to pursuing his public career. He could not avoid thinking that the separations, the frantic flights from British raiders, were the reasons for Martha’s death. He had sacrificed her to the Revolution, and for what? All he had gotten in return was a blotted name and sneers from foes, and even from friends, that he was a man who preferred “domestic pleasures” to serving his country.

No one watched or remembered these terrible days and weeks with more anguish than Jefferson’s oldest daughter, Martha. Writing fifty years later, she confessed, “The violence of his emotion, of his grief…to this day I do not trust myself to describe.” When Jefferson emerged from his library like a ghost from a tomb, he was still a haunted man. All he could do was ride around the countryside hour after hour, swaying in the saddle like a corpse. Ten-year-old Martha rode beside him, reaching out to this reeling, incoherent man to hold him erect, offering herself as a mostly wordless companion on their aimless rambles along unfrequented roads.

By now Martha knew from the household slaves or from her aunts that Jefferson had promised never to marry again, for her and her sisters’ sakes. It was the beginning of a bond between father and daughter that became stronger and more meaningful to both of them with the passage of the years.

On October third, Jefferson wrote to Elizabeth Eppes, who had returned to her home, Elk Hill. He told of Patsy (Martha) riding with him and her
determination to accompany him to Elk Hill when he made a visit that he had apparently promised Mrs. Eppes. “When that may be…I cannot tell,” he wrote. “Finding myself absolutely unable to attend to business.” His grief burst uncontrollably onto the page: “This miserable kind of existence is really too burthensome to be borne and were it not for the infidelity of deserting the sacred charge left to me, I could not wish its continuance for a moment. For what could it be wished?” He did not write another letter for eight weeks.
²⁰

Martha Jefferson was buried beneath the great oak on the side of the mountain, near Jefferson’s friend Dabney Carr and her lost children. Over her grave, on a plain horizontal slab of white marble, Jefferson placed an inscription:

TO THE MEMORY OF
MARTHA JEFFERSON
DAUGHTER OF JOHN WAYLES;
BORN OCTOBER 19TH 1748
INTERMARRIED WITH
THOMAS JEFFERSON
JANUARY
1
ST
, 1772;
TORN FROM HIM BY DEATH
SEPTEMBER
6, 1782
THIS MONUMENT OF HIS LOVE IS INSCRIBED

IF IN THE HOUSE OF HADES MEN FORGET THEIR DEAD
YET WILL I EVEN THERE REMEMBER YOU, DEAR COMPANION

Those last words were a quotation from the
Iliad
, in Greek.

The most deeply felt dream of Thomas Jefferson’s life was over. The figure who stood “always in the forefront” of his vision of happiness was gone. Could he find another vision to replace it? It would take almost a decade for him to realize the words he had written in Philadelphia about everyone’s right to freedom and equality required defense and interpretation if they were to become the guiding credo of the new nation. But in all the twists and turns of a renewed public career that would transform America, Martha Wayles Jefferson remained a presence in her husband’s mind and heart.

I
n the months after Martha Wayles’s death, Thomas Jefferson’s friends launched a campaign to lure him away from Monticello, a place that could do nothing for the moment but deepen his despair. In the Continental Congress, James Madison persuaded Congress to reappoint Jefferson as a commissioner to negotiate a peace treaty. Madison immediately wrote to Edmund Randolph in Virginia: “The resolution passed a few minutes ago…Let it be known to Mr. Jefferson as quickly as secrecy will permit. An official notification will follow…This will prepare him for it.” Knowing Jefferson’s sensitivity about his inglorious governorship, Madison added, “It passed unanimously, and without a single adverse remark.”
¹

The news reached Jefferson at a plantation near Monticello, where he was having his three daughters inoculated against smallpox. In a letter to a French friend, he confessed he was “a little emerging from the stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as she was whose loss occasioned it.” That same day he wrote to Madison and to the president of Congress, accepting the appointment. Leaving his daughters with Francis and Elizabeth Eppes, he journeyed to Philadelphia and then to Baltimore, where a French ship was supposed to take him to France. But before he could sail, word arrived in America that Benjamin Franklin and his fellow diplomats had signed a satisfactory peace treaty, and he returned to Monticello.

Madison, back in Virginia, persuaded the state legislature to appoint
Jefferson to Congress. He accepted, but soon found that politics did little to ease the gloom that shrouded his spirit. He was tormented by migraine headaches and a host of minor illnesses common to people suffering from depression. Nevertheless, he performed admirably and industriously as a drafter of committee reports and bills. In the spring of 1784, the delegates chose Jefferson to join Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in negotiating commercial treaties with other European states. The politicians were trying to loosen Britain’s grip on America’s import and export trade. Again, Jefferson accepted, and after two false starts, he arrived in France to begin a five-year exploration of the Old World that he had dreamed of making since the age of twenty.
²

Now he was an older, wiser, and much sadder man. To lessen the pain of separation, he took his twelve-year-old daughter Martha with him. He left the two younger girls, Mary, whom Jefferson called “Polly,” and Lucy Elizabeth, whom he called “Lu,” with their aunt, Elizabeth Eppes. Jefferson also took one of Elizabeth Hemings’s sons, James, to Paris with him. A bright, lively young man, James had welcomed his master’s offer to apprentice him to a French
traiteur
(caterer), where he could learn the art of French cooking.

Benjamin Franklin and John Adams gave Jefferson the warmest of greetings and opened doors for him throughout Paris. Soon Jefferson was enjoying the French talent for charming visitors. “They were so polite,” he remarked in one letter, “that it seems as if one might glide through a whole life among them without a jostle.” He also liked their temperance. He seldom if ever saw anyone drunk. One of his favorite people was the Comtesse de la Rochefoucauld d’Anville, immensely dignified and sarcastic but with an amazing enthusiasm for America. Her son, Louis-Alexandre, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld d’Anville, lived in a magnificent mansion, where Jefferson met intellectuals such as the Marquis de Condorcet, one of the
philosophes
who were hoping to transform French society. Pretty, charming Madame de Corny, wife of one of the Marquis de Lafayette’s closest friends, liked Jefferson so much that they began walking together in the leafy Bois de Boulougne. Jefferson was delighted by her exquisite femininity, which she combined with a penetrating intelligence.
³

Young Martha Jefferson, still very much a country girl, was more amused than dazzled by French femininity. She and her father were barely settled in their lodgings, she told a friend, when “we were obliged to send
immediately for the stay maker, the mantua maker, the millner and even a shoemaker before I could go out.” She also submitted to a
friseur
(hairdresser) once, but “soon got rid of him and turned my hair down in spite of all they could say.” Thereafter she put off Monsieur Friseur as long as possible, “for I think it always too soon to suffer.”
⁴

With the help of Lafayette’s wife, Jefferson soon found a school for Martha, the Abbaye de Panthemont. The abbess, the father was assured, “was a woman of the world who understands young Protestant girls.” Martha did not speak French, and none of her fellow pupils spoke English. But in the Abbaye lived fifty or more older women “pensioners” from good families, who quickly taught her the language. Soon everyone called her “Jeffy,” and she was “charmed with my situation.” Her father visited her often and found no fault with the education she was receiving.
⁵

II

Outwardly, most people saw a serene, confident diplomat, vastly enjoying the architecture, the paintings, the plays, and operas of Paris, a city that was the artistic center of the civilized world. But for a year, Jefferson found it difficult and frequently impossible to shake off his depression. In November 1784, he wrote to a friend that he had “relapsed into that state of ill health, in which you saw me in Annapolis (where Congress met in 1783) but more severe. I have had few hours wherein I could do anything.”

In January 1785 came a devastating letter: little “Lu” Jefferson was dead, “a martyr to the complicated evils of teething, worms and hooping cough.” Jefferson relapsed into almost total gloom. He was sure his “sun of happiness” had clouded over, “never again to brighten.” Throughout the winter, he was dogged by migraine, poor digestion, and lassitude. John Adams’s wife, Abigail, who had become fond of him, reported he was “very weak and feeble” in March. Jefferson told his friend James Monroe he was “confined the greater part” of the winter.
⁶

Spring sunshine—and new responsibilities—lifted his spirits. Benjamin Franklin returned to America, and Jefferson was appointed ambassador to France in his place. John Adams went to London as the ambassador to Britain. Jefferson soon realized his new role was “a lesson in humility.” When a French man or woman asked if he was replacing
Dr. Franklin, Jefferson invariably replied, “No one can replace him. I am his successor.”

This reply underscores an aspect of Jefferson’s career that has escaped almost everyone’s attention. In the Revolution, he had not achieved a degree of fame even close to the dimensions of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. The leadership and political skills of these two men had sustained the Revolutionary struggle. Thanks to Lafayette, Jefferson’s role as the author of the Declaration of Independence was better known in France than in America. His part in the following seven years of struggle with Britain had been negligible, and even tinged with failure, thanks to his poor performance as Virginia’s governor.

III

After Jefferson had been in Paris almost a year, he began to pass judgment on the country he had so long yearned to visit. The power and privileges of the king and the ruling class of aristocrats troubled him. He told one American correspondent that “the great mass of the people were suffering under physical and moral oppression.” Even the nobility did not possess the happiness “enjoyed in America by every class of people.” The older nobles never stopped intriguing for political power. Younger aristocrats spent most of their time pursuing beautiful women. “Conjugal love” between a husband and a wife was virtually nonexistent. He contrasted this national tendency to the American ideal of a happy marriage.
⁷

Perhaps influenced by William Temple Franklin’s inglorious example, Jefferson declined to encourage young Americans to come to Europe. He was particularly emphatic on this point with his favorite nephew, Peter Carr, who corresponded with him throughout Jefferson’s stay in France. Jefferson was full of advice to Carr on what he should be studying to prepare himself to become a man of distinction. He had asked his friend James Madison to become Peter’s tutor, and he shipped him boxes of books from Paris. He had intimated when he left Monticello that he might invite him for a visit. But when Carr asked if the time had come, Jefferson informed him that he was now “thoroughly cured of that idea.”

Jefferson explained why in scathing terms. If he came to Paris, Carr would probably pick up habits that would “poison” his spiritual and psychological health. Young Americans tend to succumb to “the strongest of
all human passions” and become involved in “female intrigue[s] destructive of his and others’ happiness.” Or he would develop “a passion for whores destructive of his health.” Either route taught the young American to consider “fidelity to the marriage bed as an ungentlemanly practice.” These temptations were almost impossible to resist with “beauty begging on every street.” Peter did not need foreign travel to make himself “precious to your country, dear to your friends, and happy within yourself.”
⁸

Young Martha Jefferson did not view French morals as gloomily as her father. This may have been a tribute to Jefferson’s success in insulating her from the worst aspects of Parisian amorality—the prostitutes swarming on the boulevards, the brothels on the side streets. “There was a gentleman a few days ago,” she told her father, “that killed himself because he thought his wife did not love him. They had been married ten years. I believe that if every husband in Paris was to do as much, there would be nothing but widows left.”
⁹

Jefferson was also uneasy with the Gallic fondness for racy jokes and overt sexual references. His secretary, William Short, reported he “blushed like a boy” when a French friend made an off-color remark. But he was not a puritan like John Adams, frowning disapproval on everyone who yielded or even admitted to sexual desire. Although he may have feared the worst, the new ambassador made no objection when William Short began a liaison with the beautiful young wife of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld. Eventually the affair plunged Short into a decade of misery—fulfilling Jefferson’s remark to Peter Carr that such intrigues destroyed happiness on both sides of the erotic equation.

Although Jefferson commented acidly on infidelity as a way of life in most upper-class French marriages, he was far more disturbed by French women’s passion for politics. He repeatedly deplored their intrigues and interference, calling them “Amazons” and contrasting them to American wives, who were “angels,” faithful to their spouses and soothers of their husbands’ nerves when they “returned [home] ruffled from political debate.” He persisted in this opinion, even when he met and enjoyed the company of an extremely political American woman in Paris, Abigail Adams. The intensity of his feelings on this subject renews the suspicion that a woman in his own family did not approve of his revolutionary activities.
¹⁰

In spite of his negative opinions, the ambassador had a lively social life.
He was constantly invited to dine with the Marquis de Lafayette and his charming wife, Adrienne. Jefferson was already admired as the author of the Declaration of Independence when news from Virginia added to his reputation. James Madison reported that Jefferson’s proposal to establish freedom of religion had passed the state legislature. French intellectuals, eager to escape the grip of the Catholic Church, were enthralled.

Yet Jefferson’s melancholy frequently returned to haunt him. “I am burning the candle of life without present pleasure or future object,” he told one American friend. “I take all the fault on myself, as it is impossible to be among people who wish more to make one happy.”
¹¹

IV

Lurking just around a bend in time was a cure for this recurring gloom. Her name was Maria Cosway. Jefferson met her one late summer day in 1786 strolling in the Halle aux Bles, Paris’s great domed marketplace, on the arm of the American painter John Trumbull. A mass of golden curls crowned an oval face and exquisite rosebud lips. Liquid blue eyes shaded by an intriguing melancholy and a soft, fluttery voice that spoke English with a piquant Italian accent completed a style so meltingly feminine, the ambassador was mesmerized.

Maria had been the rage of fashionable London for several seasons. She had been born in Italy of Anglo-Irish parents and was in Paris with her husband, the miniature painter Richard Cosway, who stood beside her in an almost blinding array of colors. One of the great fops of the era, Cosway was a gnomish little man twice her age. He strutted around in “macaroni”-style outfits—mulberry silk coats embroidered in scarlet strawberries—and purple shoes.

Jefferson barely glanced at Mr. Cosway. Enthralled by Maria, he persuaded the Cosways and Trumbull to revise their social calendar for the day while he did likewise and declared himself ready and eager to be Maria’s eyes and ears for a tour of Paris. (It was her first visit.) He hustled them into his ambassadorial carriage, and they rattled off to the royal park of St. Cloud, with its sun-dappled green lanes and magnificent fountains. They dined and strolled through the gallery of the Royal Palace, with its dazzling mythological murals. Back in Paris in the dusk, Jefferson led them to a pleasure garden designed by two ingenious Italians, featuring
spectacular fireworks that created “pantomimes” in the night sky—Vulcan toiling at his forge, Mars in combat. Maria cried out with pleasure at these heavenly visions. The day ended with a visit to the most gifted harpist in Europe, who told Maria about his improvements in her favorite instrument while his wife played some of his exquisite compositions.
¹²

For the next two weeks, the ambassador’s carriage stopped at the Cosways’ house almost every day to whirl Maria off for another six- or seven-hour tour of Paris or its environs. Richard Cosway was busy painting miniatures for a royal patron, the Duke D’Orleans and his family, and John Trumbull returned to London to paint (at Jefferson’s suggestion) “The Declaration of Independence,” which would make him famous. But the loss of these chaperones did not deter Maria and her enthralled admirer from spending whole days together, visiting new Parisian wonders such as the Bagatelle, a park containing exotic gardens and an elegant casino. They enjoyed cold suppers at a small inn near Marly-le-Roi, the favorite palace of long dead King Louis XIV, where pavilions were crowded with beautiful statues of gods and demigods.