by Max Byrd
Houdon listened attentively. They were an odd pair, Short thought, scribbling notes: the stocky little Frenchman with the thinning gray hair and square, bourgeois forehead, and the towering, aristocratic Jefferson, whose face, as always when he talked about ideas, seemed animated like a girl’s. Short glanced at Adams. Franklin, old as he was, shared the same extraordinary capacity to be interested. It was the mark of the genuinely great; the two of them could discuss electricity, statuary, architectural design, printing types, the geometry of wigs—any subject whatsoever that touched on the material world. John Adams had nothing of their intellectual range. He had bought yards of landscape paintings for Auteuil, but simply to please Abigail, he grumbled—you can see the sky and the hills anytime you want, he had informed Short; you just open your door and look outside. Adams had no interest in science. His mind was emotional and unpredictable and really quite limited. Out of the corner of his eye Short saw him now scowling at a small nude Diana made of bronze. As Houdon’s beautiful young wife came through the door bearing a tray of wine and glasses, Short found himself first glancing at the plump, tremulous figure she casually revealed; then thinking with something like horror: of the two of them, Adams and Jefferson, his own mind was far more like Adams’s.
The “certain project” Jefferson had mentioned was in fact a secret.
Three hours after they had entered Houdon’s studio, Short found himself on the other side of Paris, alone in the printing shop of a stub-necked, square-jawed Frenchman named Philippe-Denys Pierres, whose window looked squarely out on the rue Saint-Jacques, in plain sight of the two black towers of Notre-Dame.
“You are too late,” Pierres said rudely, taking up a position behind his table and studying Short’s coat and trousers. By contrast with Houdon’s cluttered atelier, this room was a model of Jeffersonian neatness. Presses, tables, cabinets, box after wooden box of inky types: everything had a place, every possible flat space was cleared for work. By contrast with Houdon’s serious friendliness, Pierres’s rudeness was—French, Short thought.
“And you are too well-dressed by far to do this business, Monsieur Short.”
Short placed his hat on a stool and pulled out his watch. Pierres unfolded Jefferson’s letter and read it again. “He says you are to correct the first twenty sheets here in my shop.” He turned the letter over and then turned it face up again, scowling.
“Queries one through five,” Short told him in what he knew was impeccable French. “I can work at one of your excellent tables or”—he pointed toward the door to an inner room from which the heavy thump of a press could be heard—“I can stand directly beside the pressman.”
“Written in English,” Pierres muttered, shaking his head. “Is he coming, too, the author?”
Short flipped up the gold hunter’s disk on his watch and rationed out one crisp, ingratiating smile to the printer. “Ambassador Jefferson will call for me in his carriage at five, exactly two hours from now.”
“Much too soon,” Pierres snapped, and reached under his table for a wrapped bundle.
The first printed page was simple: Notes on the state of Virginia, without the author’s name or the date. Short checked the spelling, drew three lines under the “s” of state to indicate a capital, and turned to the next sheet, the table of contents. Why Jefferson must be so secretive about the book Short had no idea—not a word had he breathed to Adams, or even to Franklin—but then, Jefferson’s motives often remained mysterious to him, no matter how innocent the “project.” He is the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, Franklin had told him, smiling (himself, Short thought, not always the soul of penetrability).
He picked up the third sheet.
Query I
An exact description of the limits and boundaries of the state of Virginia?
Below it Jefferson’s answer began in straightforward, fact-laden prose: “Virginia is bounded on the East by the Atlantic: on the North by a line of latitude, crossing the Eastern Shore through Watkins’s Point.…” So far as Short could see, Notes on Virginia amounted to nothing more than a two-hundred-page anatomy of Virginia’s geography and natural history. A modest questionnaire, Jefferson had called it two days ago, when he had spread the manuscript across his desk, to arrange for the printer. On one side the twenty-three precise queries that the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, secretary of the French Legation, had sent Jefferson from Philadelphia, during the last months he was Governor of Virginia. On the other side, clipped in order, Jefferson’s neat handwritten answers. Short paused at a paragraph giving the exact latitude and longitude of Mason and Dixon’s Line and made a mental calculation. Marbois had returned to France in early 1781. So Jefferson must have written out his answers while he sat all summer in the long, miserable retreat at Poplar Forest, after the disastrous flight over Carter’s Mountain.
He ran his pencil to the bottom of the page: “These boundaries include an area somewhat triangular, of 121525 square miles, whereof 79650 lie westward of the Allegany mountains.” Short pinched the bridge of his nose hard with two fingers. Square miles. Longitude. Where were Jefferson’s feelings? To write like this—calm, meaningless fact after fact—when up and down the state your enemies were laughing at the “horseback governor.” Short twisted his mouth in irritation. Obviously feelings would sink out of sight, crushed by the sheer leaden weight of facts. Was that Jefferson’s motive? To build a cairn of numbers over his feelings? Short reached for sheet number five, spotted a long smudge of ink like a lizard along its margin, and read Query II with a sinking heart.
A notice of its rivers, rivulets, and bow far they are navigable?
How far navigable. He rubbed his eyes and looked up. Outside the shop, wagons, voitures, horses clattered by in their own perpetual river of noise and life. A trio of laughing grisettes, young shopgirls in gray dresses, peered in through a pane and waved at Pierres, who grumpily turned his back. They drifted away, giggling.
No one actually crushes his feelings, Short thought. The best you can do is disguise them. His mind flickered back to the entry in Jefferson’s journal five days after his wife’s death, the grotesquely factual account of how to stuff a dead bird. Feelings rebounded. Feelings came out at an angle sometimes, like a ricocheting bullet.
He smoothed the proof sheet over the counter.
The Mississippi will be one of the principal channels of future commerce for the country westward of the Alleghaney. From the mouth of this river to where it receives the Ohio, is 1000 miles by water, but only 500 by land … What was the Eastern Channel has now become a lake, 9 miles in length … which yields turtle of a peculiar kind, perch, trout, gar, pike, mullets, herrings, carp, spatula fish of 50 lb. weight, cat fish of an hundred pounds weight …
This was better, Short told himself, rubbing his face. You would need an ear of stone to miss the note of patriotism here. You wrote this way if you loved the land like a suitor, every dimple, rivulet, and spatula fish in it. But when had Jefferson ever made a secret of that? How many times had he said that the longer he stayed in Paris, the more beautiful Virginia became?
Short flipped ahead. Ports. Mountains. Caverns. He picked up a poorly inked sketch of Madison’s Cave, on the north side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. After it an indented title, “The Natural Bridge.”
The Natural bridge, the most sublime of Nature’s works, though not comprehended under the present head, must not be pretermitted.
Short frowned and drew his finger down a battery of numbers. Then:
Its breadth in the middle, is about 60 feet, but more at the ends, and the thickness of the mass at the summit of the arch, about 40 feet. A part of this thickness is constituted by a coat of earth, which gives growth to many large trees. The residue, with the hill on both sides, is one solid rock of lime-stone.… Though the sides of this bridge are provided in some parts with a parapet of fixed rocks, yet few men have resolution to walk to them and look over into the abyss. You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to
the parapet and peep over it. Looking down from this height about a minute, gave me a violent head ach.
“I use the word sublime in its technical aesthetic sense,” Jefferson said behind him. Short whirled around, blushing. “I take it from Edmund Burke. The ‘sublime’ is what gives us a feeling of danger or violence, but without real risk.”
“I have seen the Natural Bridge.” It was all Short could think of to say.
Jefferson took the proof sheet from him and smiled. “People compare it, you know, to the great falls at Niagara—a tremendous, terrifying roar and spectacle, but you watch it from below, on a rock shelf, in perfect shivering safety.”
“And the ‘beautiful’?”
Jefferson bowed in greeting to Pierres, who had that moment entered from the thumping press room. “The beautiful,” he said, “is harmonious, orderly, regular—much inferior to the torrential sublime, Burke claims.” With an exaggerated gesture Jefferson presented to the scowling Pierres a new bundle of manuscript for printing. “Our friend here, for example,” he said mischievously in English, “is clearly a ‘sublime’ man.”
Short laughed and picked up his hat from the stool. “Homer is sublime,” he said.
“And Pope is beautiful.”
Jefferson turned away to study a sheet of figures that Pierres had silently presented, and Short felt a quick rush of disappointment. But after a moment Jefferson lifted his long aristocratic chin and added in the same mischievous tone, “Now which are you actually, William, a sublime man or a beautiful?”
“Is it necessary to choose, sir?”
“Well, I suppose I have found it a condition of life always to be choosing one thing and losing another.” The smile never faltered, but melancholy suddenly ran silver-thin through his voice. Short raised his hand in involuntary protest.
Jefferson pushed away the sheet of figures. “I’ve dismissed my carriage. Come outside and walk with me a bit. Our friend Pierres can send all this home by messenger.”
There was no gainsaying such an invitation. Short tucked his hat under his arm, like a Frenchman, and turned toward the door.
On the street he expected that they would proceed along the river, in the shadow of Notre-Dame, toward the Quai des Grands Augustine, where all the antique booksellers’ shops were clustered and Jefferson was well known as a customer. Instead, Jefferson chose an odd, many-angled side street, apparently unnamed, and began to lead him in the other direction, uphill toward the Sorbonne.
“I like these little out-of-the-way bric-a-brac shops. You never know what you’ll discover.” He halted to indicate a dusty display window at street level. “The owner of this one told me the other day he was at work on a perpetual motion machine that would astound the world.”
“Just like America. Half the artisans I knew at home were trying to make a machine like that.” Short peered into the window, but thanks to the sun’s glare saw only Jefferson’s reflection. It was a tall, calm, reassuring presence against the ever-present tumult of Parisian wagons and horses. The haunting oddities of Notes on Virginia had vanished from his mind, and inwardly Short was relishing, not for the first time, the idea that he could now spend day after day like this in Jefferson’s company, in perpetual motion, perpetual friendship.
“Exactly like America.” Jefferson beamed at the thought. “It appeals to the optimistic temperament, the American temperament. You meet it rarely here. But when I was practicing law in Williamsburg, I must have seen at least two dozen inventors who had put together some unheard-of combination of springs, weights, and balances and claimed it was a machine that would run forever.”
In the case of anything mechanical, Short was on uncertain ground. “Theoretically, I suppose,” he said doubtfully, “such a machine is possible.”
Jefferson shook his head. “I am, alas, that contradictory thing, a skeptical optimist. Newton’s laws of motion show that energy can be released but not created. Friction will eventually stop the parts of any machine. To tell the truth, though I would never want to discourage invention, the Almighty Himself could not construct a machine of perpetual motion while the laws exist that He has prescribed for matter.”
Short felt himself at once humbled and instructed. It was true what Franklin had said, that when Jefferson went into politics the world had lost a great professor.
“You were happy as a student at Williamsburg, were you not?” They had started to walk on up the street, but Jefferson paused and waited expectantly for Short’s answer.
“I studied far less than I should have done.” Short cast his memory back to a scene he could scarcely picture now, standing in the center of Paris. “The war had just begun when I entered William and Mary, you know. There were soldiers marching through every week, making their bivouacs on the campus. We adjourned classes for two whole months in my first year. A French regiment set up camp, and that was a distraction. And then, of course, my father died. I was not quite twenty.”
Jefferson nodded. “It was a very different time when I was there.” He steered them down a narrow alley, and Short saw with delight that in two minutes more, by a shortcut he didn’t know existed, they would be at the gates of the Luxembourg Gardens.
“When I was a student,” Jefferson continued, “the only soldiers I saw were the two or three guards at Governor Fauquier’s palace, where George Wythe used to take me for evening musicales. We would play chamber music with the governor, then sit and talk at dinner. I heard more good sense, more rational and philosophical conversation with them than in all my life besides.” He stopped to let a rumbling coach-and-four go by. “My own father died when I was much younger.”
At the turnstile gate Jefferson paid the entrance fee for both of them. “Did Mr. Wythe bring you along as far as Sophocles in the Greek?” he asked.
“The Antigone, yes. I still read it sometimes in my college copy. There is no poetry like the Greek, nothing.”
Jefferson took his arm and they headed across a gravel path, stones crunching underfoot as they walked. To the left the garden’s famous parterres stretched in rigid French formation, covered with squads of yellow blossoms. In the corner of his eye, Short could see the east wing of the old Palais du Luxembourg, home of the king’s brother; beyond the palais the flags and pennants fluttered atop the new Théâtre Français. Jefferson ignored the view. “In earlier life,” he said, bending closer, “I was fond of poetry, too. But as years and cares advance, the powers of fancy have declined.” He looked at Short with undisguised affection. “It is a great pleasure to see you with all those powers in full vigor, to bring you along a little way, if not in the Greek exactly, then in Paris, the world. I never had a son, you know, William.”
Short’s face blazed like a torch. His tongue could manage nothing more than, “Sir. Yes, sir.”
“Tell me now,” Jefferson said, releasing his arm and altering his tone from solemn to playful. “We are to go tomorrow to assist John Adams at his house-closing ceremony at Auteuil. After my little lesson on aesthetics, which is that likely to be, young scholar—the sublime or beautiful?”
It depended, Short thought, on the sublimity of manure.
They arrived at Auteuil the next day just after noon, coming on horseback for the exercise and cantering up the hillside from the Bois de Boulogne almost to the doors of the house. Jefferson had barely swung out of the stirrup before John Adams had him by the arm, dragging him out through the central hallway and into his prized five acres of garden.
“Look at this,” he was saying as Short caught up. Between his stone fountain and his summer gazebo Adams had heaped up a row of chest-high brown pyramids, crusty and odiferous as a barnyard. “Look at this—dry! lumpy! half of it straw! By the great gods of a cow’s rear end,” he said fiercely, glaring left and right, kicking suddenly at a clod, “won’t you agree, Thomas, that American manure is better?”
At lunch they talked of Mesmerism.
Franklin had come over in his litter—a trial run, the little doctor said cheerf
ully, for the journey to Le Havre he was shortly to make—and the ladies settled him in a great throne of cushions and bolsters on the terrace, where they all faced the twin rows of orange trees in tubs that Abigail had contributed to the garden.
“I have forty beds in this awful house,” she told Short with a confidential groan. “Forty! In Braintree we had six. And the only part I’ve ever liked here is the garden!”
Short looked where she pointed, down a lovely alley of trees laid out amidst oblongs, octagons, and circles of brilliant flowers. Fifty feet from them a gray-green bronze statue showed a boy robbing a bird’s nest, one finger caught in exquisite surprise by the bird’s beak. Beyond it rose yet another mountain of very brown, very inferior (he must believe) manure.
“These are your letters that came in the pacquet to Mr. Adams,” Abigail said, pulling two or three folded envelopes from her apron. “Pretty illegible handwriting, yes?”
“Mesmer,” Franklin said behind them with a loud sigh, evidently answering a question. He held up his empty glass, and Madame Brillon, sprawling next to him, dressed in a dirty blue chemise, a straw hat with gauze around it, and a black scarf, languidly reached for the pitcher of mineral water to refill it.
“Dr. Anton Mesmer is absolutely—”
“Mesmerizing?” Nabby Adams had taken her place in a chaise longue beside Short, smiling sweetly and raising her voice to tease Franklin, another Adams family trait.
“The very word.” Franklin tipped an imaginary hat to her. “Monsieur Short brings out the minx in your daughter, my dear Abigail.”
“It’s the prospect of leaving France that does it,” Adams said from deep in his own chair. “Not that going to England will be better,” he added gloomily. To Adams’s left Jefferson lounged against the wall of the house and held his face up to the sky like a six-foot sunflower.
“Mesmerism,” Franklin continued, “reached its peak, I believe, one year ago exactly. In fact, it was our own chère Madame Brillon who first suggested I join the king’s investigation.”
