by Max Byrd
“Jim-mee, both of them are busy, tous les deux.”
Slow, exaggerated French, palms spread wide in apology; if you concentrated you could follow every word. James took the brass cup of cognac that Denis brought him from out of the darkness.
“It’s Sunday, Jim-mee, you don’t have to supervise the house? You can stay a long time?”
“All night, all night.” He nodded, lifting the cup. In Paris—one of the things James did in Paris was invent new identities for himself. If he went into a shop, he liked to practice his French, change his history. Sometimes he said he had worked for General Lafayette as an orderly and his mother was a Portuguese Creole drowned at sea; sometimes he had lived free in New York and passed for white, and his mother had died, shot in the streets by her lover, and he had come to Paris to study art. For Denis … he struggled to remember. For Denis he veered closer to the truth: He was Jefferson’s aide in Paris, he personally knew Ben Franklin; he was a freed mulatto.
“Elisabeth,” the little Frenchman said, kneeling. A confidential breath, an invisible cloud of garlic, saffron, and vinegar-wine. Under his pimp’s robe Denis had no shoulders at all. In the dark his arms seemed to grow out of his hips, like sticks. “Elisabeth says she wants you this time herself.”
James shook his head. Denis had two girls, one of them dark and mongrel, much darker than James, and she was the one he chose every time; the other, Elisabeth, was pure white and French, and that was a line he wasn’t prepared to cross. Not yet.
Denis was bustling back and forth—another brass cup, stirring a pot—voices on the staircase. The fire sounded like rain, the meat smelled like flowers. He wasn’t drunk, James thought; he needed the cognac to slow him down and draw out the pleasure. Seventy francs could squirt away, just like that, right in her hand, first touch. And then Denis was back, kneeling again, talking politics.
“Now you’ve heard at the American hôtel,” he said, “about the Petit Trianon?”
James nodded. He didn’t care.
“At the Petit Trianon the queen is building a hameau rustique—you know the word?”
“Hamlet. Yes. A little village.”
“Hamlet. The queen has had a hamlet built behind the palace at Versailles, she wears a shepherd’s dress, no tops—” ludicrously he grabbed the robe where his breasts would be and fluttered the cloth. “All the cows have blue silk ribbons in their ears. She milks them in a silver bucket.”
“This is the queen?”
“She sleeps with her little boy.” Denis had practically fallen across James’s lap. His breath, his smell was overpowering. He pumped one hand at the robe under his belt. “She teaches him like this.”
At the other end of the room the shadows were waving like dark fronds, big rippling black leaves that moved with the fire. The girl leaned against the doorjamb, calling his name.
“But it’s much worse in America.” Denis struggled to his feet. “Riots, murders. In New Orleans they brand their slaves with hot irons, right on the cheek, they feed the slave children to dogs.”
“You shut up!” James shouted. He swung at the little Frenchman, once, twice, sending him flying, the cup flying. On the fire a pot overturned, and Denis rolled through a stream of hot grease.
“It’s true!” Denis bleated, dodging another blow. He staggered, twisted and fell, upending a chair. “La vérité, Jim-mee—je l’ai lu dans les journaux!”
Cursing, James kicked blindly into the shadows. The pimp backed into a corner, squatting on his haunches like an Arab, and held up his hands. “No, I read it all in the papers, from England—they stoned General Washington, Jim-mee, it’s true!”
Upstairs, his legs were still trembling. The girl tugged him through a doorway, more beads and curtains, and into the cramped little room she used. From the stairwell they could hear Denis muttering in strangled French, calling aloud a word or two in English as he straightened the parlor. Across the stairs, through the swinging lacework of beads, James saw another candle, an arc of white skin.
“Jim-mee, Jim-mee,” the girl crooned, pushing close, working her fingers over his shirt. She called herself Marcella and claimed to be half-Italian, but there was full-blooded African not far back, not any farther back, James thought, than his own grandmother.
“Last time, too,” she scolded, “you fought somebody else downstairs.” Fingers, now lips, nibbling. “Always politics, Jim-mee.”
“I don’t care about politics,” he said. She had short, stubby legs, and she straddled his right thigh as her hands worked, moving her belly voluptuously up and down his leg. James swayed and reached, tugging at her cotton shift.
“It’s cold,” she protested. “Your hands are cold. Every time they say something about America—swing, fists!” Now she was riding his thigh faster, and her fingers had pulled his shirt completely open. He closed his eyes and groaned when her breasts touched his skin. The shift bunched at her hips. His hands dug, kneading. In the flickering light of the candle she had left on the table he saw creamy brown flesh and his own hands, lighter in color, like ghostly prints. When the trembling spread from his legs to his center, there, he backed away a step, breathing hard, and whispered for cognac.
“Lie down, wait.” Marcella’s bed was a coarse mattress covered with blankets. He sprawled and rolled. The white girl was in the hallway, passing from her room. Looking in? The glass Marcella handed him was fat like a sherbet bowl. He propped himself on one elbow and watched her shift rise, snag on her breasts, then float away in the drunken, wavelike darkness. Tea first, pastry second. If your white skin browns, it is exact.
He lifted the glass and swallowed. Warm cognac crawled down his throat like a snake.
“Jim-mee,” Marcella whispered, settling on top of him, sighing, a soft, distant sensation of warmth. “Jim-mee hates to be cold.”
“One of the most elegant ladies at the entire table,” John Adams said. He paused and looked around the study impressively. In his chair Franklin cocked his egglike head, clasped both hands over his cane, and pursed his lips into an indefinably impish smile. In the other chair Jefferson made a steeple with his fingers and smiled as well.
“Elegant,” Adams repeated. He was wearing a new black suit of quite beautiful silk. A la mode, he carried a new tricorne hat under his arm. He paused happily in front of Jefferson’s fireplace, showing off his clothes, enjoying his story.
“This was in Bordeaux,” Adams said to Short, who had entered the room carrying an armload of papers. “I am explaining to Dr. Franklin the wanton dissipation of the French, whom we are both fortunate to be leaving.”
“I am eager to learn,” Franklin said drolly.
Adams, thought Short, not ironic in himself, was the cause of irony in other men. He placed the papers on the table beside Jefferson and stepped back. Adams resumed his pacing.
“This was in Bordeaux, in ’78, when I had first arrived as part of the peace commission and was making my way north to Paris. Mrs. Adams was not with me. My French hosts set out one of their grand dinners and seated me as the guest of honor next to a very elegant young lady. Young and handsome and elegant,” he added. “Even though she was married to one of the French gentlemen there, she ignored him utterly, spoke not a word to him, and addressed all her discourse to me.”
“Very wanton,” Franklin said.
“ ‘Mr. Adams,’ she said.” Adams paused, lifted his chin, and superbly imitated a woman’s high-pitched French accent. “ ‘Mr. Adams, by your name I conclude you are descended from the first man and woman, and probably in your family may be preserved the tradition that will resolve a difficulty I could never explain.’ ”
Adams cleared his throat and looked at each of them in turn. “She then said, ‘I never could understand how the first couple, Adam and Eve, found out the art of lying together.’ ”
Franklin guffawed. Jefferson closed his eyes and raised one hand to his brow.
“Never having heard a woman speak in this way,” Adams said, “I found
the question—I will be frank—I found it scandalous. I believe at first I blushed.”
“The spirit of scientific inquiry runs deep in this nation,” Franklin said with a straight face. “Does it not, Mr. Short?”
“I told her”—Adams turned his back to the fire and flipped up the tails of his coat with one hand to warm himself—“I told her that there was a physical quality in us resembling the power of electricity or the magnet, by which when a pair of men and women approach within striking distance they fly together like the needle to the pole, or like two objects in electric experiments.”
“I like your image of the needle.” Franklin winked at Short.
“She replied,” Adams continued, “that whatever its origins in history, she thought it was a very happy shock!”
As they laughed again, he turned to Short. “I would not have repeated such things before young ears, Mr. Short, had not our gifted friend here assured me you have made great progress in French manners.”
“Mr. Short,” Jefferson said, rising, “has been living for weeks at a time in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, perfecting his French. I understand there is a young lady in the household.”
“Mr. Short is a very handsome young man,” Franklin said tolerantly.
“But he returned the day before yesterday to help me here with … certain ‘projects.’ ” For a moment Jefferson seemed about to say more. Then he shook his cuff and changed the subject. “More to our purpose, gentlemen, he has assembled and brought into order—this great pile here on the table—all of my correspondence with the House of Burgesses in Virginia.” Jefferson’s voice, Short thought, was stronger. His face, caught in a slant of the morning sun, had regained much of its natural color and lost the stiff, brittle quality of the past two months. In conversation he made no reference—ever—to the dead child Lucy. She had simply vanished into that completely private core of independence (Short considered his word), of independence and reserve where Martha Wayles Jefferson’s name and memory were also fiercely guarded.
“With the most recent letter”—Jefferson held it up—“we are fully authorized to commission a statue of General Washington, and at Monsieur Houdon’s price of twenty-five thousand livres.”
“That is,” Adams said doubtfully, “more than a thousand English guineas.”
Jefferson nodded. By this time they were all at the door, James Hemings holding it wide, and following Franklin as he hobbled toward the hallway and the carriage entrance at the cul-de-sac. “Monsieur Houdon expects us this morning to discuss the arrangements for payment and also our preference for design.”
“I favor an equestrian statue,” Adams announced as they all climbed into Jefferson’s personal brougham, a black four-wheeler, newly purchased, furnished with a smooth, leather-covered interior and a gilt eagle on the door. “A statue of the general mounted on his horse would be appropriate, artistic.”
Franklin settled into his seat opposite Short, facing the horses, and smiled weakly through the pain of his stone. “Mr. Jefferson is going to take us to Houdon’s studio, I surmise, by way of a short, educational tour of Parisian statues. That way he can instruct us a little in our true preference.” He tilted his head toward Short as the carriage began to roll. “The world missed a great professor when Mr. Jefferson took to politics instead.”
Adams stroked his round little belly with both hands, as if it were a cat in his lap. “I pride myself on knowing a bit about statues,” he said.
“There is only one statue, in fact, that I hoped you would see.” Jefferson balanced his letters on his lap and looked diplomatically from one to the other.
“Well,” Franklin said, closing his eyes. “Let me guess. Monsieur Houdon’s studio is on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, correct?”
“Nearby. The rue du Fondary.” The carriage had reached the corner of the Boulevard and with noisy shudderings begun to wade into traffic. “But I’ve asked the driver to go by way of the Place Louis XV.”
“Ah.” Franklin nodded, eyes closed. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Short thought. “Thomas, you outdo yourself. The king’s statue as a model for our great democrat. Subtler and subtler.”
The statue of the great king, when they came in sight of it, stood at the center of a vast gray-green cobblestone square, laid out between the Tuileries Gardens and the beginning of the grandiose new development called the Champs-Élysées. At Jefferson’s command the carriage rocked and swayed into a clockwise stream of horses and wheels. Jefferson leaned eagerly forward.
“This I propose as a general model,” he said over the noise.
Short squinted. Adams jostled impatiently against him. Jefferson, Short was convinced, would never need glasses; he had the serene, crinkled expression of an old Shenandoah hunter, and in fact his legendary father had been just that.
Adams found fault. “I don’t see anything remarkable. And what’s more, I can tell you Houdon didn’t carve it. It’s too old.”
They slowed, tilted, eddied near the statue. “No,” Jefferson agreed. “It was carved by Edme Bouchardon. And it is old. But what is remarkable to me is the size.”
Adams frowned, shook his head.
“It’s life size,” Franklin said suddenly, apparently opening his eyes for the first time. “By God, it’s life size, not oversize. I never saw that before.”
“Not quite,” Jefferson said. They were all crowding forward now, cranking the window down and peering at the statue. “I took its measurements one morning. Of all the equestrian statues in Paris, this is the only one that approaches human proportions. Even so, it’s impossible to find a point of view from which it doesn’t appear too large, even monstrous, unless you come back as far as we are, and then you lose sight of the actual features on the head. A statue is not made, like a mountain, to be seen at a great distance.”
“You took its measures, tape and pencil in hand, I suppose.” Franklin was nodding and winking at Short, as if to say the man will fall into a lecture on any subject. Adams, who had no artistic interest whatsoever, was rubbing his jaw in an effort to find something to say.
“So I want to propose to Houdon,” Jefferson said, “a statue of General Washington on this scale, perhaps even smaller; and I need your support to persuade the Burgesses. What’s more, I want it to show him standing, not on a horse, simply standing alone on a marble base.”
The carriage bumped and plunged into a narrow street at the top of the square. “Well,” Adams said gravely, at last able to contribute something, “that will at least be cheaper.”
Like every middle-aged Frenchman Short knew, Jean-Antoine Houdon had a pretty young wife.
She received them at the door, curtsying, smiling, chirping like a bird, and they followed her through the hallway, through the kitchen, across the garden, and into a two-story detached building that served the great man as a studio. There Houdon himself greeted them, without a servant, standing cheerfully in the midst of an enormous (truly southern, Short thought) clutter.
He bowed first and formally to Franklin, whose bust he had done in 1778 and so fixed forever, in Short’s opinion, the old man’s image in American iconography. Then he wiped his hands on his white sculptor’s smock and shook hands with them each in turn, waving them forward one by one, in pantomime and broken English, toward a row of dusty chairs along one wall.
Wheezing, Franklin sat down. Jefferson, still in the middle of the room, gestured for Short to come forward as translator. Behind them Adams had begun to stroll among the statues, head cocked at a disapproving angle, his round belly, in the French expression, two steps ahead of the rest of him.
“You discover me,” Houdon said in slow, careful French, “at work on another foreign commission.” He raised one hand—the longest, whitest hand Short thought he had ever seen, like the flipper of a huge fish—and indicated a boy posing on a foot-high wooden box. Short had actually not seen the model as they entered, so jammed was the studio with plaster and marble figures, blocks, torsos, busts, casting furnaces,
tools, paintings. Now he and Jefferson both turned to examine the boy, who was naked except for a small linen cloth tossed strategically across his thigh. He sat on another box, arms wrapped around a wooden staff, gazing unconcernedly at the ceiling. In the manner of all French salons, Houdon had decorated every square foot of wall space with shelves of busts or triple or quadruple rows of frames and paintings. So many eyes gazed down on him that, for an instant, Short stiffened to address the jury.
“A Spartan lad,” Houdon was saying wistfully. “Sitting naked in the temple. Commissioned for the King of Prussia.”
“These are our official commissions,” Jefferson said. The King of Prussia’s explosive sexual habits were a subject all diplomats avoided. Jefferson presented Houdon with the bundle of papers and letters that Short had arranged and translated last night. The little sculptor motioned to another boy, this one fully clothed, who appeared to come suddenly to life like Pygmalion’s dream and step forward from yet another wall of statues.
Without even glancing down, Houdon extended the papers to him. The boy opened his mouth in a vast snaggle-toothed yawn, no longer mythological, but human, and looked squarely at Short, one attendant to another. Then he winked and ran from the room.
When Short turned back from him, Jefferson had already begun in his halting French to explain his ideas. The statue should be life size or a little larger. To take Washington’s exact measurements, it would be necessary for Houdon to travel, at Virginia’s expense, all the way to Mount Vernon. Jefferson himself preferred a pedestrian pose, with Washington either walking forward or his knee otherwise bent at an angle to the pedestal. Modern dress he thought much better than the usual Roman toga or indeterminate robe; the general should be depicted in his uniform, with epaulets visible but not distracting from his countenance.
