by Max Byrd
“Extremely practical,” Short said.
“Practical enough. Jefferson said in that calm way of his, ‘the bulk of mankind are schoolboys through life—how can they calculate to the 1,440th part?’ And that’s one side of him. Man of business. We used his coin. And of course he wanted to go on and reform the weights and measures, too, and make them decimal; but that was too much and we voted it down. Now here’s my point. Before we knew it, Jefferson had put away his sensible coins and got out his maps and was making another proposal, this time for the names of the new states when we admitted them—below where the Michigan Indians live, he wanted that to be Cherronesus!”
“Cherronesus?”
“Break your jaw, wouldn’t it? Below that, just north of the Kentucky territory, he wanted Metropotamia, Polypotamia, and Pelisipia!”
The wagon lurched on, and they stepped back over the muddy kennel that ran down the middle of the street; a moment later they emerged on the rue Saint-André-des-Arts, a murky stretch of slick cobblestone and mud that ran downhill like a drain. From under their feet the stench of filthy water and rotting food rose everywhere, a thick miasma of smells. A beggar squatted over the mud, pants down. Adams made a face and pinched his nostrils. Short took his arm and steered him down a new passageway, hardly wider than their shoulders. At a corner they stopped again, and Adams wiped his red face with a handkerchief.
“Now Mr. Francophile-Parisian,” he demanded, jerking his head, “did you ever notice that before?”
Short followed his pointing finger. A slanted doorway, cracked open like a gloomy mouth. Windows, drains, an iron grillwork balcony; three or four boys of indeterminate age helped an old woman stack trays of lettuce.
“The bird.” Adams shook his hand at a tiny bamboo-slat cage hanging in the nearest window, where a wretched gray sparrow huddled like a ball of rags. “Have you never noticed that every French family, no matter how poor they are, keeps some animal in a cage? Birds, rabbits, little puppies—I’ve looked in half the windows in Paris. They all cage up something.”
Short stood with him in the alley feeling doubly foolish—he had never noticed; Adams was absolutely right. “Why?” he began—“for food?”
But Adams was already hurrying on. “Because they have a king,” he growled, spitting out the word. “Because if you live under somebody’s thumb—king, noble, priest—you want to keep something or somebody under your thumb. It’s human nature.” At the end of the passage he stopped and jammed his hands on his hips, staring. Before them stretched the greenish-brown river, the chimney-pecked silhouette of the Louvre, and just to the left, a quarter of a mile away, the roaring, boiling, permanent carnival of the Pont Neuf, where crowds of pedestrians and wagons converged from three directions and poured into a tilting, poster-white mass of buildings and scaffolds and shops that covered the actual bridge from bank to bank. As always, Short felt his mind leap—the great city crested here like a bursting wave.
Beside him Adams mopped his brow and shuddered. “I hate Paris,” he said. And with the abrupt change of subject that was his confusing singularity, he jabbed a thumb at Short’s package and added, “Does he say anything about slavery in the book?”
Short looked down at his package. “He’s sending you a copy, of course, as soon as the binder finishes.”
“Because that is the great contradiction in you Virginians, you know.”
“Mr. Jefferson—”
“—proposed in the very same Confederation Congress a bill that would prohibit slavery in any new state admitted to the union, Cherronesus, Michigan, Polypotamia—any new state.”
“It failed.”
“It failed by one vote. Beatty of New Jersey was too ill to come. It took seven states to carry; Jefferson got six. Only two southerners voted for it—Williamson of North Carolina and Jefferson. Every other southerner voted no, they saw that the result would be eventual emancipation. Confined to a few seaboard states, the whole wicked institution would shrivel and perish. Can you imagine how different the nation would be, thanks to one vote?”
Short readjusted the string on the package, suddenly heavy and warm against his ribs. What inner association of ideas did Adams follow? How was it possible to estimate rightly a man at once so vain and pompous and shrewd?
“I go across the bridge.” Adams sighed, watching the crowds swirl toward the Pont Neuf. “Then the bridge on the other side. Through the gardens and there I am.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you are delivering those books to somebody?”
“The Marquis de Chastellux, who promises to send on a copy to Buffon.”
“What horrible names they have. Buffon. Like ‘Bufo,’ the toad in Latin. Buffon’s the one who says all American animals and people are smaller than Europeans, yes? Because of the climates?” For a moment Short expected another flare of the Adams temper, always triggered by criticism of America. But the older man simply nodded to himself, uninterested in Jefferson’s scholarly debates with the great naturalist. He placed a friendly hand on Short’s arm. “Good-bye again, Mr. Short. I have reason to think you’ll turn up in London one of these days. Meanwhile, distrust the cunning French.”
“I will. I do.”
“John Jay’s wife Sally,” Adams said, “was so attractive and looked so much like Marie-Antoinette that when we all walked into the theater one night—it was ’81—the crowd mistook her for the queen and rose in applause.”
Short twisted the string, uncertain of the point.
“Another bird in a cage,” Adams told him flatly. “The crowd will turn on her one of these fine French days.”
And with that he was gone.
Pont Neuf to Saint-Germain, crowds to mansions. Hat under his arm, Short bowed politely to the Marquis de Chastellux’s majordomo, a remote, gilded being who bowed back a calibrated quarter of an inch and waited impassively in the doorway. Short traced an Adams-like association of ideas: masters, servants, liberty. In rapid colloquial French (bringing an eyebrow of surprise to the majordomo’s face) he presented the copies of Noted on Virginia, explained that one was for Buffon, and reminded the man to check the letters inserted in each volume. Mr. Jefferson wished the letters and books delivered at once, as soon as the marquis was free. Bowing, backing, he regained the street, hefted his remaining books and papers and looked about.
Free. At liberty. He snapped the cover of his gold watch. When they finished their work that morning, Jefferson had quickly retired to his study to assemble the new copying machine just arrived from Philadelphia. Tonight he would attend a concert on the Boulevard—harpsichords, Bach, and boredom—and Short was free, unengaged. Paris lay all before him, where to choose his … He watched a trio of brightly dressed ladies step from their carriage onto a makeshift wooden ramp, where the universal mud of Paris lay only an inch or so deep. Laughing, they glided toward the marquis’s door. The image of the Ace of Spades rose in his mind like a card from a conjurer’s deck. Short smiled crookedly. There was no mystery whatsoever about his association of ideas.
With a brisk kick of his legs he began to walk. He could continue down the rue de Bourbon and drop in unannounced on Lafayette, who relished informality. Since his return from America the pineapple-topped marquis kept a perpetual open house for Americans and French “américains,” sweeping them into his parlor with outstretched arms. Or two streets beyond, there was the town house of Madame de Tessé, Lafayette’s wife’s aunt, whom Short had never met but who likewise kept an open house for political liberals. (He had seen her handsome and learned protégée Sophie-Ernestine, who read Greek and Latin and bowed very low to pour tea.)
Still walking energetically, Short veered away from the great houses that lined the street. Left Bank for books and study, Right Bank for … what he wanted. At the first corner, when the Seine could be seen winking in the sunlight, he tucked his books and papers high under his arm and strode toward a boatman’s landing.
Twenty minutes later he was lifting the hammer-s
haped knocker on a familiar door.
“C’est Monsieur Chort?”
“Oui. Madame est ici?”
“Elle est …” The young maid stepped into the hallway and partially closed the door behind her. “Elle est occupée.”
“Ah. Et ce soir, peut-être? Occupée encore?”
The maid leaned forward to study Short’s gold watch. She was about fifteen, he guessed, with straight black hair only lightly powdered. She wore a short skirt as Parisian women usually did on the streets, to keep the mud and filth from their clothes, but the ankles and calves she showed were farm-girl thick and covered with coarse little hairs. Did Madame hire such a girl as contrast with her own luminous white mane of hair? Or because a peasant girl would work for practically nothing, just to stay in the city?
“You are the Englishman?” the maid said, lifting her eyes from the watch but touching his hand with her fingers.
“American.” Or did she keep her as an apprentice, so to speak, to the trade?
“And you are Chort, but in fact you’re tall.”
Short put away the watch. “Tonight perhaps?” Between the door and the doorjamb he could glimpse plush red velvet and a crystal decanter on a table. Even in the cool hallway he felt suddenly red-faced and warm. The girl pretended to think.
“Eight o’clock,” she said at last. “Madame could see you then, for an hour or two.”
Memoirs of Jefferson—4
JEFFERSON, THE SOPHISTICATED MUSICIAN, author, and statesman of European fame, who served French wine in the White House and spoke four different languages, grew up barefoot along wild and untamed rivers with barbaric Indian names: Pamunkey, Rappahannock, Mattaponi, Potomac.
A European confronting one of these strange-sounding American streams for the first time will be struck even now, after two centuries of settlement, by their desolation. No bridges, no Ponts Neuf, few boats; the traveler in Virginia still fords a river where he can, on foot or on horseback, waist-deep and higher in dangerously fast mud-brown water; or else waits hours on a slippery bank for one of the flat-bottomed ferries that work back and forth near the seaboard, between two dense, silent walls of blue-green forest.
In 1746, when his son was three years old, the Herculean Peter Jefferson set out with a small party of men to survey the so-called “Fairfax Line,” an immense grant of land from King George II to Lord Fairfax, reaching from the salty head of the Rapidan all the way up to the first clear springs of the Potomac. For nearly eight weeks, while their families waited in suspense and terror, the explorers tumbled up and down over uncharted rocks and precipices, sleeping in the crevices of pines to stay clear of bears, using their rifles and knives to live off the land like savages. They went over five successive ranges of mountains that Peter Jefferson afterward remembered as endless, vast, dark, crisscrossed and choked with fallen timber and hanging ivy. They lost horses (but no men) in impenetrable swamps of laurel and stump pine. At the top of the Potomac they set up a stone marker (still there, still called the Fairfax Stone), and Peter Jefferson carved his initials deeply on a beech tree. On their return they plunged southeast through a mountainous area so rugged that they labeled it Purgatory on their map; the black, furious, dismal river that rushed through it they named Styx.
The river that Jefferson knew earliest was the less mythological but still dangerous Rivanna. In the midst of some four hundred acres of forest—bought from a friend for a bowl of warm punch in the Raleigh Tavern at Williamsburg—Peter Jefferson built a small wooden house on the sloping north shore of the Rivanna, just two hundred yards from the water. This settlement he called Shadwell, after the London parish where his wife had been born. Here he also erected some barns, a dairy, and eventually a water mill that was to collapse in a flood.
His son, unable to leave any structure or house or room in its original state, made an early effort to alter even the Rivanna. As a young man he canoed it south to see if a channel could be made navigable all the way to the James, and then on to the Tidewater ports. It could be navigated, young Tom Jefferson reported back to his neighbors—and their tobacco carried straight to the waiting ships—all that they needed to do was remove some rocks and boulders six miles down from Charlottesville. He collected the money and workers and moved the rocks. It was his first act of public service (and remodeling).
But long before that, Peter Jefferson had taken him upstream into the wilderness and introduced him to the skills of a pioneer. In camp he brought his son under the watchful, unfriendly gaze of Indians, who sometimes reappeared later at Shadwell to bargain for grain or cloth. By family tradition somewhat Indian-like himself, that is to say, grave and taciturn, solemn, Peter Jefferson spent long hours teaching his boy how to hunt and ride in the rough-and-tumble frontier manner; taught him so well that long after Shadwell, Jefferson scorned all “town” games, especially those played with a ball (a prejudice he kept all his life) and recommended that for building self-reliance boys learn to shoot a rifle instead.
Now to a boy, a father is like a king.… For Jefferson the antimonarchist I suppose I had better correct my phrasing. To a boy, a father is like a hero. Peter Jefferson could sleep all night in the hollow of a tree, gun across his lap; he could fight off savage animals (or Indians) and lift gigantic hogsheads with one hand. His fastidious son, who never slept in anything but a bed his whole adult life, inherited the physical stamina but not the father’s taste for the frontier. If Peter Jefferson was a hero to his son, it was doubtless in the more civilized guise of the skilled surveyor, whose maps imposed measurement and order on an otherwise chaotic Nature. A surveyor, moreover, with the manual laborer’s passionate reverence for book-learning. In the house at Shadwell, hundreds of miles from any bookseller’s shop, Peter Jefferson somehow managed to accumulate forty-two volumes of books, including Addison, Swift, Pope, and Shakespeare, and his dying instruction was that the boy should receive a thorough and “classical” education. “If I had had to choose between my father’s estate and a liberal education,” Jefferson liked to say years later, “I would have chosen the latter.” No need to choose, of course. On August 17, 1757, when the boy was fourteen, the father died, in the dying time, leaving to his care sixty slaves, seven thousand acres, six sisters, one brother, and a difficult widow who lived twenty years longer.
Short poured champagne and glanced down for the twentieth time at his open watch. He had chosen a café off the rue Saint-Honoré, half a mile from the cul-de-sac where, at eight o’clock, his appointment awaited him. On the table the garçon had placed a second bottle of champagne squarely atop his copies of Noted on Virginia. Short leaned forward and daubed the little ring of moisture the bottle had left. Then the clatter and noise of the café rose even higher. A gentleman wearing the huge silver star of an English lord on his coat crossed the room, scattering good money and bad French. Short smiled at the fuss, the scene, the easy cosmopolitan air, the reflection that he was here, an ocean away from—everything. He twisted in his chair to watch the milord emerge on the street, adjust his powdered wig, and disappear. In the windows of the opposite building, twilight was slowly hardening into darkness. On the street carriages sailed by like golden boats.
He cupped his watch in his palm.
The Ace of Spades had white hair above; black hair below.
Short leaned back against the bolsters, stretched his legs under the silk sheets, and watched her cross the room toward him, carrying a scented candle on a candlestick.
Not only black below but trimmed neatly into the shape of her name.
Short sighed and inhaled deeply as she slid into the bed beside him. French women rarely bathed—Marie-Antoinette was said to bathe three times a week and was widely regarded as a fanatic—but his companion kept a small tub in her bedchamber, behind a translucent gauzy screen, and after each conversation she liked to retire for a few moments there. Short inhaled again and turned on his side to touch soft, damp skin. In the flickering light of the candle and the coal fire, her body was a l
andscape of black and white shadows.
“So, Guillaume, you brought me a present?” Her English was perfect; one languorous arm dipped to the floor and came up with a copy of—Short blinked: Notes on Virginia.
“No. No, I brought you champagne.”
But she had already pushed her white shoulders higher and opened the book at random. “ ‘Cumberland, or Shawanee river intersects the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina 67 miles from the Mississippi, and again 198 miles from the same river …’ ” One part of Short’s mind registered the thought that here indeed was the surveyor Peter Jefferson’s true son speaking. Another part recoiled from the indecency or comedy (or both) of reading Jefferson’s book in such a place. But as always the controlling part stirred and grew at the sight of breasts rising, nipples hard and dark as berries. His hands curved down the valley of belly and thigh, burning.
She flipped to another page. “ ‘The Comte de Buffon,’ ” she read incredulously. “This is a book about France?”
Short had begun to pull the sheet away from her hips. She was long-legged, small-breasted. The white hair framed an oval face of slow, sensual intelligence, punctuated by a black beauty patch at the corner of her mouth. Like all Parisian women she was never entirely naked; a gold chain hung around her neck, its triangular diamond medallion flat between her breasts, reflecting the hair above; below.
