The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (38 page)

Maria told Jefferson the story of her unhappy life. Educated in an Italian convent, she had seriously considered becoming a nun. Her Protestant mother had forbidden her even to think of it and when her father died, took her to London, where for several years she had scores of wealthy sons of noblemen and East India Company merchants panting after her. She was repelled by all of them, and her mother, perhaps to punish her, perhaps feeling it did not make much difference, ordered her to marry the physically repellent Cosway. Once more she obeyed, but her unhappiness only deepened. Cosway encouraged her to display her considerable talents as a painter and musician, but he was flagrantly unfaithful with lovers of both sexes and frequently rude. She was an ornament for his drawing room, nothing more.

Pity blended with the desire that Maria’s beauty was stirring in Jefferson’s psyche. There was an innocence about her that made her Italian-flavored coquetry seem harmless, unintentional, even when it was wreaking havoc on his emotions. He gazed into her mournful eyes as she told him that she yearned to do something important with her life. How she envied Jefferson, who had already helped to create a new nation and written some of its laws! As he listened and sympathized, Jefferson saw “music, modesty, beauty and that softness of disposition” that stirred memories of Martha
Wayles Jefferson. He began reading poetry and copying passages in which “every word teems with latent meaning.” Some were clearly references to Martha:

Other selections seemed to reflect his desire for Maria:

But still other selections suggested a contrary emotion:

Jefferson continued to see Maria almost daily. He talked vividly about the natural beauties of Virginia, its rivers and mountains that would make perfect subjects for her brush—she was especially skilled in painting landscapes. A glimpse of Jefferson’s high spirits is visible in a letter he wrote to Abigail Adams in London in which he declared that the French “have as much happiness in one year as an Englishman in ten.” Everywhere he looked in Paris, he saw “singing, dancing, laugh[ing], and merriment.”

This ebullience may explain what happened on September 18, 1786, as he and Maria strolled along the Seine. Full of exuberant energy, the no longer young ambassador tried to vault a fence or hedge, forgetting that Virginians, virtually born on horseback, were by no means agile on their own feet. He may have been telling Maria about the special thrill of the hunt, the soaring leaps over ditches and fences, and the crunching contact with earth on the other side. In Paris it was the ambassador, not his horse, who crashed to earth. When Jefferson staggered to his feet, his right hand dangled helplessly. He made light of it and strolled cheerfully to his own house, where he told Maria he had dislocated his wrist and had better call a surgeon. He would send her home in his carriage.
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For two weeks Jefferson was in constant pain. He slept little and no
doubt wondered why he had made such a fool of himself. He was not a boy of twenty; he was forty-four years old. Maria sent him sympathetic notes and visited him several times, but a sickroom was hardly the place for further romance. Not until October fourth did Jefferson venture out with Maria again. It was her last day in Paris, and she had begged him to share it with her. The jouncing carriage jarred and possibly dislocated the damaged wrist again; Jefferson spent the night in agony. But another note from Maria, begging to see him one more time, nerved him to call his carriage and join the Cosways as they began their journey to Antwerp to board a ship for London. Maria had told him that her husband had promised to bring her back to Paris in April. “I…shall long for next spring,” her note all but sighed. They had a last meal together in the village of St. Denis and exchanged wrenching farewells.

V

Jefferson spent the next two weeks writing one of the longest, most revealing letters of his life. He began by telling Maria that he had stumbled back to his carriage after saying goodbye to her, “more dead than alive.” At home, “solitary and sad,” he sat before the fireside and heard a dialogue begin between his head and his heart:

Head: Well, friend, you seem to be in a pretty trim
.

Heart: I am indeed the most wretched of all earthly beings. Overwhelmed with grief, every fiber of my frame distended beyond its natural powers to bear, I would willingly meet whatever catastrophe should leave me no more to feel or to fear
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Head: These are the eternal consequences of your warmth and precipitation. This is one of the scrapes into which you are ever leading us. You confess your follies indeed: but still you hug and cherish them, and no reformation can be hoped where there is no repentance
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So it went for twelve electrifying pages, written with Jefferson’s left hand. The heart blamed all its troubles on Jefferson’s head, which had taken them to visit the Halle aux Bles, the marketplace where he had met the Cosways, because the head wanted to sketch its magnificent dome. The head acerbically retorted that a chance encounter with a beautiful woman was no excuse for succumbing to a frenzy of love.

Opinions of this remarkable document have differed almost as violently as Jefferson’s head differed with his heart. Some people have called it a great love letter. Others are put off by the way Jefferson frequently speaks of his fondness for both Maria and her husband. This complaint is easily dismissed. Jefferson was protecting both himself and Maria from scandal if a stranger or, worse, a newspaper got hold of the letter. But this dialogue between head and heart remains a very strange love letter.

Most love letters passionately avow devotion and adoration without any qualification. Those are the ones recipients save for the rest of their lives. But this dialogue between the head and the heart does not affirm that sort of passion. On the contrary, the heart’s protestations of its rights and pleasures are repeatedly rebuked and checked by the head.

Here is the head telling the heart how to find tranquility:

Carried away by its own eloquence, the head goes much too far. It tells the heart to avoid friendships. Friends get sick, die, lose their money or their wives, and require exhausting amounts of sympathy. The heart replies eloquently that there is deep pleasure in consoling a friend or caring for him during an illness. Working itself into a fury, the heart decries “sublimated philosophers” and their “frigid speculations.” If just once they experienced the “solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart,” they would instantly change their arid minds. Defiantly, the heart tells the head it intends to go on loving people, especially Mrs. Cosway, who has promised to return in the spring. He is sure she (and her husband) will reappear in Paris’s May sunshine. Even if she fails to come and fate places them on opposite sides of the globe, his “affections shall pervade the whole mass to reach them.”
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With those brave words, the heart wins a victory of sorts. But it is hardly a resounding one. Perhaps the best proof that this is a very special kind of love letter is the lady’s reaction to it. “How I wish I could answer that dialogue,” Maria wrote wistfully. “But I honestly think my heart is invisible and mute….”
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Maria Cosway was not a stupid woman. She had no difficulty reading the fundamental message Jefferson was sending her:
My heart adores you as an ideal, as a woman who stirs my soul. But my wary, controlling head will never allow me to propose a flight to some hidden valley in Italy or the south of France, or a headlong escape to America, where we will defy your despicable husband and the rest of the supposedly respectable world in days and nights of rapturous love
. This was the sort of thing an impassioned lover would propose—but the widowed Thomas Jefferson was not this kind of man.

Using the same guarded style that Jefferson relied on to conceal his personal message, Maria wrote that her muted heart was bursting “with a variety of sentiments”—her sense of loss “at separating from the friends I left in Paris”—and her joy “of meeting my friends in London.” It was enough to “tear my mind to pieces,” but she would not go into it because he was “such a master on this subject”—presumably a mind torn to pieces—“Whatever I may say will appear trifling.” This is not the language of a woman aflame with passion. If anything they are the words of a somewhat disappointed woman, who only dimly understands the reason for her dismay.

A year later Maria Cosway returned to Paris, without her husband. She stayed almost six months—and saw Thomas Jefferson only twice, both times at large dinner parties, one of which he gave for her. They corresponded off and on for the next forty years. Their letters were affectionate, but there was no attempt to rekindle the aborted passion of Paris.
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VI

Meanwhile, Jefferson became deeply involved in negotiations with a much younger member of the opposite sex. He decided that nine-year-old Mary Jefferson (now called Maria, probably at her insistence) must come to Europe. Her presence would complete the family circle and relieve him of the dread of receiving a message that she had followed little Lu into the shadows. Jefferson’s letters to his daughter Martha suggested a streak of sternness in his parenting—he was constantly exhorting her to study hard, to become an accomplished woman. With Maria, Jefferson was the total opposite. Miss Polly, as she was often called, was to be persuaded, not ordered, to embark for Paris. It is more than a little interesting that Polly/ Maria was often described as an almost exact replica of her mother both in looks and temperament.

The young lady turned out to be a challenge that taxed Jefferson’s formidable rhetorical powers. In his first letter, he promised her innumerable French dolls and other toys in Paris, plus the chance to learn to play the harpsichord, to draw, to dance, to read and talk French, to see her sister Martha and, it need hardly be added, her lonely father. Maria replied:
I am very sorry that you have sent for me. I don’t want to go to France. I had rather stay with Aunt Eppes
. Further attempts at parental persuasion got similar replies.
I cannot go to France and hope that you and sister Patsy are well
. The final riposte was:
I want to see you and sister Patsy but you must come to Uncle Eppes’s house
.
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The baffled Jefferson finally resorted to deception. A ship was chosen, passage was booked, and her Eppes cousins joined Polly aboard the vessel for several days before it sailed. They cheerfully romped above and below decks. On the day of departure, Polly was allowed to play until night shrouded the ship and she tottered into a cabin and fell asleep. When she awoke, the ship was at sea. With her was Sally Hemings, a pretty mulatto girl of fourteen, the youngest daughter of Elizabeth Hemings. Sally had been pressed into service at the last moment, when an older, more reliable nurse became ill and could not make the voyage.

Polly (Maria) became the pet of the ship. She grew so attached to the captain and his crew that by the time the voyage ended, there was more trouble prying her off the vessel. The captain took her and Sally to London and handed them over to Abigail Adams, who was soon telling Jefferson that Polly “was a child of the quickest sensibility and the maturest understanding that I have ever met with for years…. I never felt so attached to a child in my life on so short an acquaintance.” She described her escort, Sally Hemings, as “a girl of about 15 or 16” but “quite a child.” Abigail reported that the captain of the ship had said Sally had been useless as Polly’s nurse and he might as well bring her back to America on his return voyage. But Abigail thought she seemed fond of Polly and “appears good naturd.”

Abigail—and Polly—assumed that Jefferson would rush from Paris to collect her. Instead he sent his French butler, Petit, whose English was primitive. When Petit arrived, Polly threw another tantrum and refused to leave Abigail Adams. In fact, she would not let that lady out of her sight, complaining bitterly of the way she had been deceived into leaving her Aunt Eppes.

Polly/Maria told Abigail she did not remember her father but had been
taught to think of him with affection. Now she wondered whether that was another deception. He had forced her to leave all her friends in Virginia. She had expected him to come to England for her. Instead he had sent a man who could barely speak English! Her indignation inspired John Adams to write Jefferson a reproachful letter for failing to “come for your daughter in person.” It took the better part of a week to persuade Polly to depart for Paris with Petit and Sally Hemings. At one point, she threw her arms around Abigail and cried, “Why are you sending me away—when I’ve just begun to love you!” Before the battle ended, Abigail was more distraught than Polly.
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Jefferson was totally delighted by this imperious young lady. He wrote to Abigail Adams about how Polly “flushed, she whitened, she flushed again” when she received a letter from Abigail. The pleasure Jefferson took in this performance leaves little doubt that in looks and manner, Maria was a vivid copy of her dead mother. After a week of showing her the sights of Paris, he enrolled her in the convent school with Patsy (Martha), where, he told Mrs. Eppes, she soon became “a universal favorite with the young ladies and their mistresses.”
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