by Max Byrd
In point of fact, the aristocratic Jefferson was now speaking with something like his old radical, democratic energy. “Bill eighty-two,” he continued, giving the modest legislative name to the Virginia declaration of religious freedom that he had written and labored bitterly for seven years to pass. “Bill eighty-two was intended to break the stranglehold on privacy that the state enjoyed.”
Short nodded and moved his lips silently; he could recite whole portions of the preamble: “Almighty God hath created the mind free … Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself.…”
“In Virginia,” Jefferson said, “before we presented our bill, heresy was still a capital offense. Denial of the Trinity could be punished by three years’ imprisonment, children could be snatched away from their parents. These were dead laws, William, but dead laws can be revived. In any case every landholder in the state was compelled to support the Anglican Church with his taxes. The tyranny in Massachusetts was worse. I hear it said that our settlers came from England seeking religious freedom, but that is an untruth of great malignity. They came seeking uniformity of religion, a thing there never can be and never should be.”
The energy died away from his voice, and he rubbed his face with his hands. His smile returned cautiously, not to his eyes. “As for the ceremony we have just witnessed,” he said, straightening, “to you, on this day of confidences, I will admit that I take no consolation from superstition.”
On the long walk back to rue Taitbout—“the sun is my almighty physician,” Jefferson said—Short listened to a recital of the duties they would jointly undertake, when and if a lumbering Congress, now settled in New York, completed the appointments.
There were sixteen treaties in all that they were authorized to pursue, commercial trade agreements with every European nation. So far only Prussia had shown interest. In addition, Congress chafed—to be precise, Jefferson and Adams chafed—under the yearly tributes they paid to the pirates of the Barbary Coast to ransom the sailors they routinely abducted from American ships. (Defiance and a large navy, Jefferson said, were his idea of tributes.) And sale of three specific American commodities—tobacco, rice, whale oil—needed to be negotiated directly with the Farmers-General of France. Jefferson laid out the problem with laconic clarity: In return for an annual payment of cash, which he badly needed, Louis XVI had granted to a group of wealthy individuals, the Farmers-General, the sole right to purchase these three crops; they collected indirect taxes on every sale and used the full power of the government to enforce their monopoly. What Congress wanted was a market for American goods. What the Farmers-General wanted was the highest possible taxes. What the king wanted was any agreement that would damage British trade.
“You’re not daunted, William,” Jefferson asked a little mischievously, “by the prospect of writing a brief on whale oil?”
Short had never encountered a subject that didn’t interest Jefferson. “I will master the whale,” he declared.
“We will shake the poetry from him.”
“Whale—hail!”
But Jefferson’s moment of playfulness was over. As they ascended the six stone steps to the door, he rubbed his face again wearily. James Hemings pulled the door open and took his hat, and in a matter of moments Short stood alone in the hallway, listening to his vanishing footsteps.
The next day was Sunday, ordinarily the most festive day of the Parisian week, when cartloads of shut-in city dwellers flocked to the Bois de Boulogne. But the rain had returned, there was a bleak hint of January snow. Jefferson kept to his room, and the others passed quietly through a gray tunnel of twenty-four hours.
On Monday Lafayette arrived from Philadelphia, as expected, and went directly to Auteuil for conferences with Franklin and Adams. At midday, still in rain, he stopped for half an hour at the rue Taitbout. (Short glimpsed the extraordinary gilded carriage from his third-floor window, the swift pineapplish top of the marquis’s head.) He spoke privately with Jefferson, presented a great leather pouch of mail, and left with a flourish. When one of the manservants came rapping wildly on the door, Short had just opened the first of his letters.
“Le maître—venez-le-voir! Le maître est mort!”
Short ran down the stairs two at a time, shouting for Humphreys. At the study door he collided with James Hemings, shoved him aside, and bolted through.
Jefferson sat, legs akimbo, sprawled backward in a chair by the fire. As Short reached him he struggled upward and started to stand, then simply held out a sheaf of letters and fell back.
“Lucy,” he said.
“Sir?”
His face had lost every tint of color. Short seemed to peer straight through it, a transparent shadow. He caught Jefferson’s wrist; the older man shook him away. Then Humphreys was beside him speaking loudly and going to his knees on the floor. Servants darted behind the chair and hurried forward with linen and bowls of water, but Jefferson motioned them all toward the door, as if an impassable zone surrounded him.
Humphreys thrust the sheaf of letters at Short. The first was from Francis Eppes, Jefferson’s brother-in-law in Richmond. Short scanned it, seeing the names of Jefferson’s two younger daughters, the words illness—Hooping Cough—fears. The second was from Dr. James Currie:
I am sincerely sorry my dear friend now to acquaint you of the demise of poor Miss Lucy Jefferson, who fell a Martyr to the complicated Evils of teething, Worms, and Hooping Cough.
Short glanced at the date—October 14, 1784. Three months ago. The last letter was from Jefferson’s sister:
It is impossible to paint the anguish of my heart. A most unfortunate Hooping cough has deprived you, and us of two sweet Lucys, within a week. Ours was the first that fell a sacrifice.… Your dear angel was confined a week to her bed, her sufferings were great though nothing like a fit. She retained her senses perfectly, called me a few moments before she died, and asked distinctly for water. Dear Mary has had it and is now recovered.
When Short looked up again, Jefferson was on his feet, swaying, supported by Humphreys’s strong arms. We are all in our shirt-sleeves, Short thought irrelevantly.
“My daughter,” Jefferson said with a ghastly smile, “is dead to life.”
Tea first, pastry second, brought crisp out of a “slow” oven while the tea cooled. James Hemings knew the prescribed order the way he knew everything else about Jefferson’s habits, automatically, completely, precisely, a great rock of fact that sat perpetually in the center of his brain.
He bent, placed the silver teapot on the table, and stood back. To his right, Jefferson. To his left, Mr. Short, Mr. Adams, his wife, and the daughter they called Nabby. Behind Adams, none too effectively warming the room, the coal fire that one of the other servants had let fall dangerously low. Jefferson hated to be cold.
“Thank you,” Short said to him, reaching for the teapot. Always polite. Always natural. The only person in Jefferson’s house, James believed, who really noticed he was there.
“The pastry now,” Jefferson said.
James nodded but walked to the fireplace first, where he tossed in a little brass shovel-load of coal. In the kitchen, Marc, the foultongued maître d’hôtel, sat by the oven door drinking Jefferson’s red wine straight from a bottle.
“Monsieur le Noir,” Marc said.
James knelt and slid the macaroons out of the oven. You get the proper heat for baking pastry, Jefferson had instructed him—he had written it out on one of his slips for James to keep—by holding a bit of white paper in the oven. If it burns, it will scorch your macaroons; if it just browns the paper it is exact.
“Black man,” Marc repeated in slurred French, then waved the bottle. “But you’ve not black, you’re mulâtre. Mu-lat-to. So who was the black man’s papa?”
When James returned to the study Patsy was perched on a stool at her father’s side, her nose buried in a teacup. Two weeks after his letters from Virginia, Jefferson still had the stiff, dried-out face—the mask, James thought—of a man in
grief, but Patsy, Patsy was the Jefferson this time who could hardly speak or move. Her sister’s death seemed to have turned the girl to stone. Mrs. Adams had been trying to make conversation while the men debated their business, and now she looked up at James first with relief, then anxiety. Like most northern ladies, Abigail Adams always tried to think of something to say to him and invariably struck the wrong note.
“You must write down this recipe for me, James. Or …”
James handed a plate of warm macaroons to Patsy.
“James can write,” Patsy said.
“Well. Well, of course. I was just thinking—I’ve heard he was very sick.”
Short turned around in his chair and stabbed at a macaroon. “It’s true. James had a violent seasoning, just like his master.”
“Well. I have a remedy. You need to take some Castile soap, James—”
“Oh, he’s been fine for weeks,” Short said quickly. “He’s back in school, aren’t you, James, studying French cuisine?”
“Yes, sir.”
Patsy leaned forward with the same awkward long-boned motion her father had. She was twelve years old and already five and a half feet tall. “Is Marc drunk again, James?” She cocked her head at Abigail Adams. “Daddy has got to dismiss Marc, I think. He steals and he drinks.”
“French servants,” Mrs. Adams said, pleased with the topic. “I have seven in our house and two more, Esther and John, that came with us from Braintree, and none of the French will do any work that’s out of their station—the coiffeuse won’t sew, the femme de chambre won’t wash. Nothing gets cleaned.”
On the other side of the room John Adams was pacing, declaiming, while Jefferson slouched with his long knees higher than his shoulders. When he bit into a macaroon, Adams bobbed his head up and down and made a gratified jack-o’-lantern smile.
“James, you’re a genius.”
“He’s started with pâtisserie.” Jefferson straightened to take his own plate from James’s hands. Six feet two-and-a-half inches tall, James thought, and whenever he sits in a chair, he folds up in sections like a carpenter’s rule.
“From pâtisserie,” Jefferson said, who loved any kind of system, “his school progresses to sauces—six months on sauces—then soups, game, meat. Fish they reserve for very late in the training.”
“I’d give anything for some Massachusetts cod,” Adams said, his mouth full. “Tell James to fix you some cod.”
In the hallway James looked at the coin Adams had given him—on every visit Adams slipped him something—hitched his shoulders, and went down the hall, down the grooved stone steps, into the glowing red kitchen. Now two of the French servants had joined Marc by the oven (but only Marc dared to drink Jefferson’s wine), warming their hands.
“Terminé?” the taller one asked with a jerk of his head toward the door. The kitchen was small and crowded and hot, and his long French face was nearly as red as his coat.
“Une demi-heure,” James said. “Faut préparer.”
“Merde.” Marc rolled the bottle neck between his fat palms; lurched to his feet; spat on the floor. The tall footman simply stretched his shoe over the place and rubbed. In Paris, James thought, stacking the plates from his tray, they all spit wherever they want, even the well-bred lords and ladies with their wigs and ruffles and little gold swords. He had seen a diamond-covered duchesse at Dr. Franklin’s house put one hand to her throat, make a loud hawking sound like a Virginia field hand, and spit right on Franklin’s polished parquet floor. Her husband had done just what the footman did—while Franklin kept on talking—and rubbed the spot out with his soft leather shoe. Nobody ever spat on the floor at Monticello.
“You wait, and I show you some sights tonight,” Marc said, squeezing past, squeezing his arm. “French girls adore les noirs.”
By the oven the footmen were chattering in French and waving their hands one last time over the charcoal. In another two minutes they would have to lead the horses and carriage around to the street and wait in the freezing cold until the Adamses finished their tea. Then Jefferson would go upstairs, Patsy would sulk to her lessons, and Short … James thought that Short had fallen in love with a girl in Saint-Germain and would be calling for his horse as soon as they left.
“They love a black man’s hair.” Marc squeezed past in the other direction now and ran his hand across James’s head. James bared his teeth and shoved it away. “Curly as a cunt,” Marc whispered, staggering drunkenly.
James reached for the heavy sheepskin coat he kept on a peg, bought with the money Jefferson paid him. On the street outside, where the footmen were struggling with the horses, he paused to look up at the stars—French stars—then started to walk as fast as he could toward the lights that glowed on the horizon, just above the Boulevard.
Rue Taitbout, the Boulevard, rue de Grammont—he could go left at that point and wind his way up to the Café Montpelier, where all the English-speaking visitors gathered nightly. Or he could push straight ahead from the rue de Grammont and down toward the Palais Royal, which turned into an open brothel at sundown. He could go, he thought, and suddenly grinned at the stars like a wolf, anywhere.
James Hemings was nineteen years old, or possibly twenty—nobody knew for sure—and “bright” in the peculiar Virginia sense of the word, meaning a Negro who was extremely light-skinned, nearly white. He was also quick-tempered, intelligent, and after four months, completely at home in Paris. He came by his brightness on the male side. His father, as all of eastern Virginia knew, having been the planter John Wayles, Martha Wayles Jefferson’s own father, Jefferson’s father-in-law. By the laws of descent, that made him Martha’s half-brother, but by the laws of Virginia, because his mother was a slave (and his grandmother too), James Hemings was Jefferson’s servant.
Servant.
In Paris he was a man with money in his pocket, hair powdered and scented, a warm coat in the latest fashion.
He turned left, decisively, along the Boulevard. This was the road to Clichy and Saint-Denis, his favorite stretch in the whole city when the mood he called the “trembles” seized him. For nearly two miles you walked past rich men’s glowing hôtels, the enormous new Opéra building with its hundreds of candle boxes and canopies and colored placards, cafés turcs, where turbaned waiters served sweet coffee, Swiss theaters, jeux de paume, red and green Chinese bathing houses—a wild boiling soup of Parisians, foreigners, horses—prostitutes, beggars, milords; blacks. At the Théâtre des Italiens the speeding carriages, trapped in the masses of playgoers, wheeled and turned like bugs.
He dug his chin into his collar and slowed to watch an egg-and-rope man do his trick on the narrow sidewalk of the theater’s colonnade, inches away from a roaring bonfire somebody had started in the gutter. A little Parisian fille in a fur bonnet bumped sideways out of the crowd, smiled, and ran her fingers down his leg, and James, inhaling perfume, smoke, the icy edges of a February night, pushed her away. While he patted his pocket with one hand, the whore laughed and called him a name in French. On Sunday night they were wilder than ever, he thought, grinning. He touched himself on the leg where the girl had touched him and shoved off into the crowd again, a black boat bobbing in the current.
Past the theaters the sidewalks turned into ribbons of silk and mud. Bathing houses and cafés took over. The Cabinet des Littéraires had English newspapers for its patrons, James had been there a dozen times. He put his face to the window and watched for a moment—he could read and write just as Patsy had said, because he was a house slave and a Hemings (no other slaves at Monticello had last names), but he had heard Jefferson say more than once that a slave should be taught only to read; when they could write, too, he said, they could forge their papers and run away from their masters. Inside, by an oak-paneled wall, a huge white-haired Alsatian waiter with a mountain slide of double and triple chins recognized him and motioned toward the door—in Paris a black could go in, sit down, order coffee, the whores would flock and settle on his shoulder like sparr
ows—but James shook his head, made a vague French gesture of regret, moved on.
In another two minutes he pushed his way through a door, to a bar. Two quick cognacs—the girl who had rubbed against him (hard whalebone stays, soft bubbles of flesh) had raised the trembling from his knees, where it always started, to his crotch, where it always ended.
There were whores in the bar too. He looked around. He smiled, he rolled French words off his tongue like candy drops, and the filles bent to whisper clove-scented propositions. He kept one hand tight on his money, the other on his glass, filled again; refilled again.
At nine o’clock when the theater crowds had thinned and the streets grown even darker, he twisted sinuously down the rue de Richelieu, sweating cognac. The wind had knocked out all the glass panes and most of the candles in the streetlamps here. He stepped and tripped around a pyramid of new bricks—they were building Paris all over again, he thought, on every block and corner. Just like Monticello. He fumbled at last for the door. A loose metal handle shaped like a horn. A curtain of beads and cloth. The overpowering smell of cooked red meat.
“Jim-mee! Jim-mee—regardez notre américain, c’est dimanche encore!”
The cognac had made him hot. In front of the coal fire James stripped off his heavy coat and shook his sleeves loose.
“Jim-mee, you visit a little early. We’re going to make you wait.”
The smiling face came in and out of focus through a film of cognac: eyes, lips, greasy black hair falling down to his neck. In the markets James had noticed that the French vendors looked like the animals they sold—beaked nose, neck like a little string for the chickens; shaggy old bearded peasants for the goats. The woman who drove her pigs up the rue Taitbout lumbered under cascading rolls of fat, on hips like wagon wheels; her flat white snout, Short had told James, was for devouring her young. Denis Bretelle had a girl’s slender figure, no beard at all, and he dressed in a long, belted robe that reached to his feet.
