by Max Byrd
“Buffon,” he told her, “claims that all animals and men in America are physically smaller than in Europe, because the climate is hotter.”
“Don’t.” She stirred.
“And moister.”
“Don’t.”
“The author refutes him.” The book closed. The sheet fell. In Williamsburg, of course, Short had known women—upstairs in the Raleigh Tavern you could arrange what you liked—but nothing had prepared him for the exoticism of Paris. He inhaled the smell of cinnamon, peach. Long legs wrapped around him, skin against skin, moving like silk against silk. White hair, soft wide lips; games played with a ball. Two. The candle guttered and the bed creaked as they shifted. Her voice, at once amused and breathless, came first in French, then English. “Buffon a fait une erreur.” Short felt her fingers brush the flat, rigid muscles of his stomach.
“Proof in hand,” she whispered.
Firecrackers.
The king’s great palace at Versailles stood as a textbook demonstration of how to control a crowd.
From the highway to Paris, some four hundred yards below the palace gates, a narrow graveled road climbed on a slight uphill slant, bearing to the west, through a grove of trees. In mid-December 1785 the trees were already leafless and black and presented no obstruction to the gaze of soldiers in their scattered wooden sentry boxes. Behind the soldiers the first barricade ran the width of the palace, a twelve-foot high fence of iron bars topped with sharpened spearheads and snow, and it opened at two symmetrical points only, just wide enough for a carriage to pass. Inside, between the two wings of the palace itself, an icy cobblestone courtyard narrowed to a second gate, a second iron barrier. Beyond this, at the very entrance, a third iron gate, watched like all the others by the king’s enormously tall Swiss guards. Beyond this, still in progressively narrowing enclosures, the king’s chambers, the king’s rooms, the king’s closet, the king himself.
Jefferson walked across the courtyard in lightly falling snow. It was not yet eleven in the morning, but the guards on duty had already begun their afternoon meal, toasting long yellow baguettes on a charcoal brazier, heating wine or punch in a copper kettle sheltered from the snow. The nearest guard squinted at Jefferson’s passport, then used one hand to lift the white bar of wood that blocked the door.
In the hall soldiers and courtiers hurried at showy, inefficient speed in all directions. Jefferson displayed his passport again, turned right, proceeded past the chapel, from which music, voices, and hammers could all be heard, and stopped finally at the east staircase to unfold his passport yet again.
In the opposite direction lay the state chambers, in which the king received ambassadors and in which, not seven months before, John Adams had presented him, bowing and kneeling far more than strictly became a Massachusetts rebel, to the great fat-bottomed, slope-browed young despot, whose hands, Adams later complained, were still streaky black with grease from his royal hobby of making miniature locks and keys. When Jefferson had taken his place beside Adams, he had read a prepared speech from a sheet of paper, praising the friendship of France and America and pledging his good will in continuing it. To the sardonic amusement of David Humphreys, who stood in the circle of guards and onlookers, at every mention in his speech of either the king’s or the queen’s name, Jefferson took off his hat and then replaced it, and the king and all his courtiers did the same.
At the top of the east staircase he paused for a last check of his papers; then a secretary led him through a series of rooms to the small private office of the foreign minister. The Comte de Vergennes rose to greet him with his watch open in his hand.
“You know Monsieur de Reyneval,” Vergennes said in French, snapping his watch closed. “Of course.”
From a shadowy corner by the window, so white-haired and pale that he gave the impression of stepping in from the snow, Reyneval advanced, bowed, grinned unpleasantly.
It was the special feature of Versailles always to be frigidly cold. Formalities over, Jefferson rubbed his hands together for warmth and took the center of three chairs that the foreign minister had arranged some ten impractical, bone-chilling feet from his tiny fireplace. On his right, Reyneval began to demonstrate at once why, in the diplomatic corps, he was known as the comte’s “eyes.”
“You have moved your residence,” he said, still grinning as he sat down.
Jefferson nodded and stretched his long legs toward the fire. “Yes, to the rue de Berri, on the Champs-Élysées. We moved in September, the whole household.”
“A charming location.” Reyneval imitated Jefferson’s gesture of rubbing his hands together. “The Hôtel de Langeac, correct? With garden, stable, marvelous furnishings—you must have received a generous lease. Or housing allowance.” He glanced at Vergennes. The first subject on which the comte had written the new ambassador, months ago, was the American Congress’s repeated, embarrassing failure to pay its promised salaries to the French officers who had fought in the Revolution. Reyneval’s pleasantries were legendarily unpleasant.
“You feel the cold, Monsieur Jefferson,” Vergennes said. “Move closer to the fire.”
“And Monsieur Short is well?” Reyneval asked. “We missed him at Versailles during the summer, but now I understand that he was traveling, sightseeing in London and the Hague.”
Jefferson smiled and inched his chair politely to the arctic edges of Vergennes’s carpet. Most of the American correspondence was written in code—by preference Jefferson even used code in his personal letters—but the “infidelities” (young Short’s tactful word) of the French post office were so gross and common that no one in the room, least of all Reyneval, was ignorant of the fact that Short had traveled to the Hague on strictly diplomatic business, to personally convey a treaty with Prussia to the hands of its foreign minister; or that his trip to London involved Jefferson’s impatient desire to organize American warships against the marauding Barbary pirates of North Africa.
“Monsieur Short,” Jefferson replied conversationally, “has been suffering from jaundice, I’m sorry to say. He stayed in Saint-Germain the whole of November, but last week he came back to the rue de Berri.”
Vergennes snapped open his watch again, holding it at arm’s length in his lap. “Your letter to me was very forceful,” he said.
“I appreciate your willingness to see me.”
“But I do not precisely take your point.” The foreign minister’s smile was unfailingly polite; but Vergennes’s eyes were remote and stony, and his brow was almost scarred by a dark comb of deeply notched frown lines. “You wish to improve commercial relations with France—your ally, whose soldiers fought for you—yet the greatest part of American business continues to go to England, your former enemy.”
“And not yet your friend,” Reyneval added.
“Well, of course, old habits are hard to break,” Jefferson said. “Most of our merchants have traded with England all their lives, you know. They sell their goods in England and in the nature of things use their profits to buy where they sell. Now if they could sell in France, they could buy here as well, to everyone’s benefit. We could shake our dependencies on England, you could expand your markets.”
Vergennes conceded it.
“I have brought a list of American products you might consider importing.”
Reyneval stood and crossed to the fire, which he poked ineffectively with a brass shovel.
“Rice,” Jefferson said, reading from a paper. “Rice grown in South Carolina, which France now presently buys exclusively from the Mediterranean.”
“Egyptian rice,” Vergennes said, “is so much superior to American rice that I see no market.”
“Indigo,” Jefferson continued, “which you now import from your own American colonies.”
“Yes,” said Vergennes, “because it is so much better than your product.”
Flour, fish, and wood products met the same objection. Reyneval stood by the fireplace, turning slightly from time to time as if to examine h
is coat and wig in the full-length mirror behind him. Jefferson reached into his portfolio and produced a new sheet of paper.
“Whale oil.”
“The most romantic of all your products,” Vergennes said tolerantly. “Monsieur Adams described it to me in great detail—your heroic New England sailors, the single frail boat, and the vast animal, the solitary harpooner.”
“Leviathan to lamp,” Reyneval said.
“Well.” Jefferson consulted his notes. “At the port of L’Orient an American merchantman named Barrett has just landed with a large cargo of oil, which he proposes to exchange, one-third for money, two-thirds for French merchandise.”
Vergennes folded his hands across his lap.
“This is because of a special reduced duty on whale oil for this year only. If the duty continues at the same reduced rate next year, Barrett proposes to exchange his whole cargo for merchandise, to the clear advantage of the French merchants, who will see no coin whatsoever leave the country.”
Vergennes wore a brilliant gold insignia of rank, like two linked stars, on the left breast of his coat. Diagonally across his chest, left to right, hung a blue silk ribbon the width of a man’s hand, embroidered with delicate white fleurs-de-lys. He used his right hand to tug at the ribbon; then refolded his hands in his lap. It was obvious that he had no intention of committing himself to a continued reduction of the whale-oil duty. After a moment, without changing expression, Jefferson returned to his sheet of paper.
“Tobacco.”
“Ah.” Reyneval detached himself from the mirror. “We come to the crux.”
Jefferson raised his eyes to follow him as he paced to the window. Beyond it thick snow now swirled like the batter of a cake. Reyneval, Lafayette had warned, is no friend to America. As soon as you raise the question of tobacco—and the whole plan of meeting with Vergennes, in Lafayette’s view, was a disastrous mistake in the first place—Reyneval will sneer it to death.
“You yourself grow tobacco, I believe,” Reyneval said. Insinuation, the ghost of the ghost of a sneer. “On your farm.”
Jefferson turned his eyes and blandly addressed Vergennes. “Now, Monsieur, as you know, tobacco arrives here from various sources—Virginia, the Indies, Turkestan—the ships deposit it in barrels at all your river ports, from Bordeaux north. The Farmers-General, who have the monopoly of course, register and seal each barrel and collect a tax in the port; then the tobacco is shipped inland to another set of warehouses, inspected and sealed again; another tax. Then another stage, by wagon; for central France a fourth or fifth stage, for the Jura even more. And at every stage the Farmers-General collect a new tax, issue receipts, allow a local sale or two. It is”—Jefferson paused—“a complicated system.”
Vergennes’s allegiance to the status quo was automatic. “You must not forget, my dear sir, that the king receives a revenue of twenty-eight million livres a year from this complicated system. If American tobacco is largely excluded, well, it is a very old and ancient arrangement. We don’t tamper with it. I might perhaps ask—”
As if drawn by the tiny fire, Jefferson had crossed his legs while Vergennes spoke and slowly slid down the back of the chair, lifting one shoulder and dropping his long right arm almost to the carpet. When he suddenly interrupted, his voice and posture were so casual that the undiplomatic effrontery of it left Vergennes blinking, his open mouth a silent O.
“I wonder if I could make a proposal, Monsieur?”
The mouth closed, the brow frowned. Vergennes sat in stiff vertical blue lines, unmoving, as if he had been slapped. In the abrupt silence of the room, snow brushed against the window in long, soft feathers; a single coal snapped into embers.
“Instead of collecting import taxes over the whole kingdom,” Jefferson said, “at five or six or even seven different stages, why not simply restrict the import of tobacco to a few designated port cities? Cherbourg, for example, and Nantes. That way, a single collector in each city could do all the work.”
Vergennes opened his mouth again, then closed it. Reyneval stood frozen, equally stiff and vertical, between the chairs and the window, one hand clasping the back of his neck, white eyes staring down at Jefferson.
“You employ some three thousand tobacco tax collectors now,” Jefferson said calmly, “and every one of them draws a salary. My plan is radical, of course. But consider. The Farmers-General’s monopoly remains, the king’s revenues actually increase. And American tobacco can be easily included.”
“Monsieur Jefferson,” Vergennes began, and stopped.
“It would work,” Reyneval said in a tone of complete amazement.
Twenty minutes later at the entrance to the hallway, in an icy draft from the heart of Versailles, Vergennes bowed formally, tugged at his ribbon, and promised to consider Jefferson’s proposal:
“It would actually work,” Reyneval repeated, offering his be-jeweled hand. “It is a brilliantly practical idea.”
“Monsieur Jefferson is famous for his practical sense,” Vergennes said. A courtier in a greatcoat with shaggy epaulets of snow approached, and he waved him away. “You will remember how pleased I was to learn that you would replace Dr. Franklin here.”
The mention of Franklin always brought a curiously boyish smile to Jefferson’s face. He took his hat and riding coat from a waiting secretary’s arm and nodded at the nearest table, where a foot-high ceramic figurine of Franklin, complete with fur cap and gold spectacles, flew a little silk kite on a wire. “I’m afraid, my dear comte,” he said in a phrase that would be repeated for weeks at the court, “I only succeed Franklin. Nobody could replace him.”
“It would work brilliantly,” Lafayette declared. “Why didn’t you tell me what you were going to do? It’s brilliant!” He clasped Jefferson by both arms and looked as if he were about to burst into tears. Short intervened.
“He used your figures, of course,” he said, speaking loudly, bowing deeply, and the marquis turned his narrow face eagerly toward Short. Any mention of his role, in anything whatever, made the marquis swing like a magnet toward the speaker. “Those figures you devised for him months ago, the names of the ports you gave us.”
“Yes, yes.” The marquis was nodding and drinking from his wineglass at the same time.
“Well—” Short had reached a dead end. “Well, only you could have discovered them and set them out so perfectly. You, with your friendships and connections.”
Lafayette swiveled back to Jefferson for confirmation, and Jefferson, on cue, began speaking in his softest voice, repeating Short’s assurances. Short exhaled with a sigh and moved a step away from them. When they paid no attention, he retreated even farther, paused at a sideboard laden with food, and then looked about the crowded room.
He had forgotten how far Lafayette’s obsession with things American had gone. To visit him now on the rue de Bourbon was to plunge into a fantasy world. At these soirées no French was to be spoken. At some point, sooner or later, the boy George-Washington Lafayette and the girl Virginie would be hauled forward to recite American poems in American English. At the drop of a hat the modest and devoted (and surpassingly dull) la marquise Adrienne would guide you through room after room stuffed from floor to ceiling with repellent homespun American souvenirs: woven cane baskets from South Carolina, dried leaves of Virginia tobacco, a stuffed possum shot by Lafayette himself, a brick from Mount Vernon. Tonight—procured who could guess how?—the butler passing wine among them was a full-blooded Indian, dressed for the Parisian winter in a deerskin loincloth and shirt, war paint, and a headband crowned with turkey feathers.
Short sipped his own wine and found that it had a bitter, coppery taste, the aftermath of the bout with jaundice that had driven him to bed (alone) in Saint-Germain for nearly five weeks. He edged around a group of bare-shouldered French ladies, feeling slightly light-headed and unsure if it was the décolletages or the wine. In front of the fireplace he stopped to admire the huge framed and glassed copy of the Declaration of Independence
that Lafayette had hung in a place of honor.
“You must know the one by heart,” a woman’s voice said, “and the other you must think a bizarre French jeu.”
Short looked down into the formidable, pockmarked face of Lafayette’s cousin. The celebrated Madame de Tessé was a woman about Jefferson’s age, petite in figure, famously partisan and fiercely liberal in her politics. She pointed her silk fan at the equally huge but empty frame that hung on the wall next to the Declaration. “My cousin says that frame is reserved for the French Declaration of Rights, yet to be written, of course.”
Short started to reply, but she continued, “The most revealing thing I can tell you about our young Lafayette is this. When he was eight or nine years old, growing up in the dismal forests of the Auvergne, which with luck you will never visit—he dances so badly because he grew up in the provinces, it is why he took so completely to you Americans—there was a wild dog or animal—they called it, I think, the ‘hyena of the Gevaudan’—that roamed the countryside devouring livestock. The peasants claimed it devoured women and children, too, and naturally it drank their blood. Little Gilbert used to go out every day into the woods, determined to see the hyena.”
“To kill it?” Short managed to ask.
“Certainly not. To admire it. Gilbert sympathizes with any outcast or hunted beast. It’s how he sees himself. He was nearly forced to leave the Collège du Plessis when he wrote an essay on ‘the perfect horse.’ He wrote that the perfect horse would buck and throw his tyrannical rider as soon as he saw a whip. The Jesuits flogged him for that, of course—a rare instance of Jesuitical humor.”
“Then—”
