by Max Byrd
What that author did first was walk to the end of the lawn and carefully study the horizon. Seeing no troops, he came back to the house and brought his guests calmly down to breakfast. Then, although he had legally stopped being governor two days before, he gathered together all the official papers he still had in his possession and started to burn or hide them—no secret would ever fall into enemy hands if he could help it. Meanwhile, on his instructions the houseguests hurried down the mountain to warn Charlottesville and the outlying settlements (when they woke a boozy Patrick Henry at Cismont, he disappeared so fast that he forgot one shoe). The state’s papers safely hidden, Jefferson sent his family west to a friendly plantation, and he himself rode halfway down the mountain to a lookout point. Legend says he looked through his telescope and saw nothing, so started back; then he realized that he had dropped his sword at the lookout point, and when he returned and stopped a second time, he saw Tarleton’s soldiers winding uphill like a green-backed snake.
Indisputably, he rode back to the house and warned the servants. By the time the British horsemen reached the first roundabout, he was gone again and Martin Hemings (twenty-six and known to everyone as the “sullen” Hemings) was handing the last pieces of family silver to a slave named Caesar, who was hiding them under the floorboards. As the British tore over the lawn, Martin slammed the plank down, trapping Caesar under the floor. The first officer through the door shoved a pistol against his chest and threatened to fire if he didn’t say where Thomas Jefferson was, and sullen Martin Hemings put his hands in his pockets and scowled and muttered, “Fire away then.”
Not ten days later, such was the disreputable state of partisan politics in Virginia, a fat-faced young henchman of Patrick Henry forced the legislature to investigate Jefferson’s conduct—never to impeach him, as the Federalists afterward said. In early December, after brooding in silence for five months, Jefferson walked into the Assembly at Richmond with a sheaf of papers in his hand. Neither Henry nor his henchman had the nerve to be there. Eyes straight ahead, Jefferson strode up the center aisle to the speaker’s rostrum and from his great height looked down on a sea of lowered and embarrassed heads. Methodically, one by one, in that reedy-soft voice of his that was never any good for public speaking, he began to answer the charges. As drama, it was a brilliant performance, revealing his character perfectly, revealing … revealing—what?
In perfect fact, like all his performances, Jefferson’s speech in Richmond that day revealed nothing whatsoever, nothing at all—his friends believed him, his enemies laughed; the Virginia Assembly voted him a grudging resolution of thanks. And the real truth of the whole subtle, notorious Tarleton episode remained just as ambiguous, as elusive, as un-self-evident as before.
If you ask my unbiased opinion …
William Short opened his gold watch. The spidery hands showed ten minutes to three in the afternoon. At the window, Parisian rain drummed with Parisian impatience against the glass.
“Sir, you’ll be late. And sir, the carriage is here.”
Short looked up and worked his jaw in a gesture of irritation he had recently perfected in order to look older. He let his hand hover above the stacks of correspondence he had just finished sorting across Jefferson’s desk. Next to the desk, arranged on a polished shelf, lay three new pedometers Jefferson had purchased to measure his walks around town. Short’s hand stopped just above them. One of the pedometers was so complicated that it apparently had to be strapped to the knee like a pony’s harness and attached to the waist through a hole you cut in your trousers.
“And it starts to rain,” the footman said from where he stood by the door, then added helpfully in infantile French, “pleurer,” and pointed toward the window.
Short dropped his hand and stood back, tugging at his vest. It was in fact raining like twenty demons, he decided when he peered at the window, and he was going to be seriously late getting to Auteuil. At the door the footman coughed and stretched his cuffs expressively. Despite himself Short felt the beginnings of a smile. The truth was, he couldn’t be irritated long at anything French, not even the weather. From wig to calf the footman was beautifully dressed in Jefferson’s red livery, with gold buttons, gold epaulets, and even an inch of too-expensive, dandified white lace at the collar and cuffs, but in place of shoes this sophisticated Gallic being had strapped on his feet—a pair of huge white soapy scrub brushes. He looked exactly as if he were standing, in all his glory, barefoot on two melting cakes of snow. Lace and epaulets aside, however, he was merely Jefferson’s official frotteur, the servant assigned to polish and wax the wood floors, which with inimitable French gaiety he did by putting on his brushes and gliding up and down the hallways, hands behind his back like a skater on a pond.
Short made his way cautiously down one side of the newly waxed hall, checked his powdered hair in the mirror, then allowed himself to be bundled into his coat by yet another servant and handed down the steps to the carriage.
“You’re late,” David Humphreys grumbled, pulling the door shut himself and rapping on the window for the driver to start. “And this filthy rain is going to make us later.”
“A Paris on est toujours de bonne heure et en beau temps,” Short replied, knowing very well that Humphreys understood not three words of French in a row.
“Shut up,” Humphreys said, and rapped again.
Short settled back and grinned at him. The further truth was, not only did he love the French, but his heart quickened at the thought of the dinner they would shortly attend, more precisely at the thought of French bosoms heaving in their décolletage under John Adams’s fat candles. To think of white, round cakes of snow—
The carriage bounced around the corner of the Cul-de-sac Taitbout and turned right into the rue Taitbout itself. This was a stretch of alternating new three- and four-story houses and vacant lots, treeless and largely unpaved, ending at the muddy broad promenade known so far simply as the Boulevard. Only at the Boulevard, in front of the Théâtre des Italiens, did you enter the elegant bubble of style that Short had already come to think of as his Paris.
“January,” Humphreys muttered, wiping the clouded window with his sleeve. “Four more months of rain and sleet. Then rain and heat.”
Short shook his head in mock sympathy. Humphreys was a New Englander and had grown up in the foulest climate on this planet. Even Jefferson, always courteous and positive, could be made to agree that Humphreys had an ounce too much spleen in his makeup. Miss Adams made the astonishing claim that he wrote poetry upstairs in his room, but Short refused to believe it.
They clattered through a squadron of other carriages and horses, and Short leaned forward to glimpse the stubby brown columns rising out of the mud where a crew was building, with excruciating slowness, a new church to be called the Madeleine, which would face majestically south toward the vast, fashionable Place Louis XV. The rain now was the color of cold steam, the pavements a carpet of mud and straw and horse ordure, flung up in a disgusting spray whenever the little four-wheeler rocked sideways into the center gutter.
“Now I want to remind you,” Humphreys said, putting up a gloved hand like a warning signal. “He will be there already. He left before noon for his appointments, and he went on in the fiacre.”
Short pulled his head back from the window and nodded. Who did Humphreys think had arranged every appointment, hour by hour, down to the very horses and tack for the fiacre?
“And I want you to let him stay till the end,” Humphreys said. “No fussing, no significant remarks about the weather and the time.” He let his gloved forefinger tap in stern rhythm on Short’s knee. “No mother-henning.”
Short tested his gesture of irritation again, but the collar of his greatcoat, he saw, made it invisible to Humphreys, who would in any case ignore it. Humphreys was a military man—he still used his title of Colonel—he had been at Washington’s side in Annapolis the day Washington resigned his commission in 1783. Short suspected he regarded them all, includ
ing Jefferson, as nonmilitary and hence not quite serious.
“He is still not well,” Short said. “His health is not good.” They lurched right and onto the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
“He is perfectly well.”
If you wished to become a diplomat, as Short intended, he believed there was no better place to practice than with the stiff, dogmatic, permanently belligerent Humphreys. Jefferson—the “he” of all their conversations—had left home today for the first time in six weeks, after being confined virtually every moment to his bedroom with a whole series of debilitating ailments—the headaches that came from nowhere and twisted his face in pain, the diarrhea that also afflicted him periodically, the general “seasoning,” as everyone called the natural period of adjustment to foreign water and air. By great good luck, Short himself had escaped all serious “seasoning.” Humphreys was constitutionally immune.
“Well, I will be sweet reason itself,” Short said.
Humphreys snorted. “You’re a Virginian. You wouldn’t know sweet reason if it bit you.”
The carriage lurched again suddenly and bounced one wheel hard against a wooden street post. Hanging on, peering through his window, Short could see beggars or peasants fighting in front of a bread stall. Fists, caps, furious wet faces. He gripped his leather strap and twisted to watch as the coach tilted away and turned. Arms flew. A man crashed backward into the stall. This was Paris, too, he had to admit, violent, brutal, riotous as a kennel. But here at least (his mind rushed to its defense) the violence was predictable, comprehensible—here they fought over food, they scrapped fiercely for the right-of-way in a crowded street. By contrast, in Virginia the violence was of another order of mystery altogether. The day he had begun to practice law, Short remembered, a Tidewater farmer had come in with a shriveled black thing in his hand: a slave’s ear he had cut off and for some reason wanted to register in court. The young William Byrd of Westover, they said, fearing for his daughter during an epidemic, had the slaves dig up his father’s corpse, six years buried, so he could study death.
“A Virginian,” Humphreys repeated as they hit smoother pavement and began to pick up speed toward Auteuil. He spoke with the abstracted, single-minded tenacity that no doubt won battles. “All Virginians are bloody strange.”
In January 1785, William Short was twenty-six years old. At William and Mary College, where he studied Latin and French, he had intended to become a poet, but turned out instead (by a familiar declension, Jefferson said) to be a lawyer. He was related to Jefferson in a cousinly Virginia way through a minor branch of the Skipwith family, and at home—but Short tried not to think of home.
Farmerlike, John Adams opened the door for them himself, blinking and peering.
“Late enough, young men,” he told them brusquely.
“The rain,” Humphreys said, almost as brusquely, shedding his wet coat with an exasperated shrug. Mud and water covered the red tile floor of the hallway. “We thought about coming in an ark.”
Beyond Adams’s stumpy figure Short could just see Jefferson moving through a crowd of brightly dressed guests.
“An ark,” Adams repeated dourly. He was a short, pigeon-breasted little man with protruding eyes and an air of permanent, hard-earned impatience. He cocked his head, listening to the rain. “Maybe wash away Paris,” he said, closing the door. According to Adams’s own frequent declarations, he rented the huge Palladian house and garden in Auteuil simply to be out of Paris, which he hated, and into the French countryside, which he tolerated.
“We’re the last?” Short’s instinct (mother-henning) was to push past and make his way to Jefferson—now turning, a crown of sandy red hair, his back to the other guests—but politeness (a Virginian’s constant guardian angel) and a rational fear of Adams’s sharp tongue kept him in the cold hallway next to Humphreys.
“The very last. That would be in the French mode, I suppose. Arrive just when the food is ready.” Adams waved their coats into a servant’s hands, jammed his own hands into his pockets, and appeared to think his hostly duties done. “In fact, there’s plenty of time left. The doctor”—he tilted his head to indicate Benjamin Franklin’s round figure following Jefferson’s tall one—“the doctor has been exceedingly informative as usual, with the result that we three are still in high conference despite our little social pause.” Adams sniffed. His dislike for Franklin was so fixed and so great that the invitation for dinner had unsettled and fascinated every American in Paris.
“Wipe your shoes and wait in there with the congregation.” The hallway opened to double doors on each side. Adams pointed to the crowded drawing room on the left but stared disconcertingly hard at Short. “We’ll make our grand appearance when he’s finished in the study.”
Humphreys, as official secretary to the American commissioners, had been to Adams’s house a hundred times, but for Short it was only the third visit. He hesitated for a moment in the hallway as if to study the bright paintings and the ornate gold trellis paper that, uncharacteristically, Adams had bought to decorate his walls. New England Puritan though he might be, Short thought, there was an undeniable sensuousness in John Adams’s makeup; granite streaked with sugar. Humphreys was already striding through the guests, bowing every few feet like a mechanical doll.
“Franklin,” Adams said in a tone of disgust, reappearing somehow beside Short, “drinks only mineral water. Try the punch”—he pronounced it poonch. “Mrs. Adams made it.” Then he too was gone.
Short nodded obediently to empty space and took a tentative step toward the room. In front of him two dozen or more people appeared to be frozen in a typical French tableau. The men stood in small, tight circles, their tricorne hats tucked firmly under their arms to show off their powdered wigs, their ceremonial swords poking from under their coats like silver rats’ tails; for their part, the women, equally powdered but bare-shouldered and dazzlingly colorful, sat in chairs or sofas as close to the single fireplace as they dared, hoping to catch whatever warmth the men had not managed to block with their legs.
“Monsieur Short, viens ici, come favor us.”
The great Madame Brillon, growing stout, growing gray, was at forty (and more) accustomed to having her way. She sat in a stuffed chair next to the fireplace holding a cup of Mrs. Adams’s poonch and smiling in invitation. Short made his way over the vast carpet (Persian, expensive, like strolling through a sunburst—nobody put carpets on floors in horse-foul Virginia). There were two younger French ladies flanking her, their powdered white hair piled and shaped as high above their brows as their bosoms were cut and scooped below (Short bowed low himself, thinking of cakes of snow); around them stood a ring of five or six be-powdered and be-wigged French gentlemen, hats jammed under their arms, dressed, Short thought, like celestial beetles.
“We awaited our translator,” Madame Brillon said in beautifully accented English.
Short bowed again, acknowledging his reputation as a student of French. When a French garrison had billeted at Williamsburg in the war, he had haunted their officers’ tents to practice the language. When he had first arrived in Paris two months ago, he had taken a room in the sleepy village of Saint-Germain just to perfect his accent.
“But we wondered if you would be willing to cross so much water tonight to join us.” The speaker was a man Short had seen at twenty parties—the French had a maddening habit of never introducing anyone to anyone else. He was in his late fifties, faultlessly dressed in sapphire-blue coat and white lace, possessed of two bulging Gallic eyes, a nose like a flattened horn, and a sardonic, anti-American wit.
“Monsieur Short has an aversion to ocean travel,” Madame Brillon explained serenely to the satin-clad woman on her right. “He vows never to return home by sea.”
“Monsieur Jefferson will have to part the waters for him,” the blue man murmured (but when Short looked up he affected not to have spoken).
“Ah, but Monsieur Jefferson is a monk, not a prophet. A woman looks at those cool gray eyes a
nd knows that.” Madame Brillon placed a warm, plump hand on Short’s. “Now. Has he told you why we are all summoned here? Franklinet brought us our invitation”—she glanced toward a tall young man in a curled wig who stood by the fireplace ladling punch. William Temple Franklin, the illegitimate son of Franklin’s own illegitimate son, known universally as Franklinet. A brainless, harmless, perpetually slack-jawed person. It was rumored that he had proposed marriage to Madame Brillon’s daughter, just as Franklin himself had once proposed something less (or more) to Madame Brillon.
“Not a word. There were letters from home on Tuesday, and he skipped his usual Thursday evening here.”
“Unwell,” said one of the beetles significantly, and the others nodded. Jefferson’s poor health had not gone unnoticed. Which one—or three—of these encircling dandies would be the court spy? Short wondered. In the midst of all its virtues, French life suffered from a chronic, circular preoccupation with spying. The police spied on the citizens, the citizens spied on foreigners and each other, the court spied obsessively on everyone. Any unconsidered remark or gesture, however harmless, seemed to have a second life at Versailles, where Short imagined the stout-bottomed young king standing perpetual guard in a tower, a huge white-powdered ear turned suspiciously toward Paris.
“Letters from America? Letters perhaps from the Marquis de Lafayette?” The blue man was interested enough to drop his shield of irony for a moment.
