by Max Byrd
Jefferson’s face had turned faintly red.
“For example,” Raynal went on, oblivious, raising one hand, palm open to the company. “For example, one is astonished, really astonished that America has not yet produced a good poet. Or an able mathematician. Or a man of genius in any art or science whatever.”
Barrett was staring slack-jawed. William Bingham and several others had stiffened. Even Buffon in his chair stirred uncomfortably.
“Well. When we shall have existed as a people,” Jefferson said with a casual half-shrug of his shoulders, “as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, or the Romans a Virgil, or the French a Racine, well then, a fairly deserved reproach, I suppose. Though degenerate is hard. On the other hand, in the science of physics our little country of three millions has already produced a Franklin, whose discoveries in electricity are second to none in all the forty millions of Europe. I imagine Mr. Rittenhouse the equal of any astronomer living. And of course”—he looked mildly from Raynal to Buffon—“in war we have produced a Washington, whose memory will be adored so long as liberty and freedom have their disciples.”
“Ah. Washington. Liberty.” Raynal made a pretense of inspecting the color of his wine. Clérisseau began to say something, but Raynal lifted his chin and spoke loudly over him. “We hear reports that General Washington’s house has been burned by mobs—”
“Nonsense!” said Barrett.
“—and the general himself hanged in effigy.”
“These are reports from British newspapers,” Jefferson said.
“Burned his house,” Raynal repeated firmly. “To the ground. Attacked him. Chased him from his property. Stoned him as he got into his carriage. The liberty-loving mobs. Here in Paris we are much concerned about what they will do, these Ciceronian democrats, when Dr. Franklin finally arrives home from England.”
Jefferson looked over Raynal’s shoulder, at the windows opening onto the Grille de Chaillot. For an instant Short thought Jefferson was about to abandon his lifelong policy of walking away from a quarrel. His face had gone from red to dangerous white, his profile under the flickering candles was thin as a blade. But he inhaled deeply and then looked back at Raynal. “When Dr. Franklin reaches home,” Jefferson said, turning away as he spoke, “the citizens will undoubtedly salute him with the same invisible stones they used on Washington and Lafayette.”
Early the next morning, Jefferson came into the study grinning.
Short looked up from the desk, where he was writing a memorandum to their banker.
“Paul Jones has just left us a parcel of mail from London,” Jefferson said. He took his seat at his own desk, swiveled his chair, and held up two sheets of stiff buff-colored paper. “And John Adams has written me a letter too wonderful to bury in my files. Listen.”
Short put down his pen and grinned in return.
“To set the scene he first says he paid a call on the Ambassador of Tripoli one afternoon last month. Two secretaries of legation—this pleases Adams, twice the normal attention—two secretaries—ushered him into a room with a fireplace and a pair of luxurious chammy chairs and ottomans arranged in front of the fireplace. They placed him in one of the chairs but obviously didn’t dare sit down themselves. In walks the ambassador five minutes later, a genuine sultan by the name of Abdurrahman, who takes the other chair, crosses his legs, and promptly starts to speak in a combination of Italian and Lingua Franca.”
Jefferson ran his fingers through his hair, then stood again, carrying the letter.
“Adams speaks no Italian,” Short said, leaning back in his chair. “Not a word.”
Jefferson had reached the far wall, on which, hanging to his left, was an oil portrait of Washington meant to give the study an American air; to his right a French serinette, a wicker cage holding two small parakeets and a music box on a crank, meant to teach the birds how to sing. He gave his usual glance of bemused irony at the silent birds and shook his head. “Not a word. But let me read. You recall that these Barbary pirates, after capturing who knows how many of our innocent merchantmen, have finally proposed their terms—peace for one year at 12,500 guineas; ‘perpetual peace’ for 30,000 guineas. The subject of the meeting was to offer our counterterms and see if we could ransom our hostages. But the ambassador insisted on a little ceremony first. Now listen, these are Adams’s own words.
“ ‘ “We make tobacco in Tripoli,” said his Excellency, “but it is too strong. Your American tobacco is better.” By this time, one of his secretaries had brought two pipes ready filled and lighted. The longest was offered me; the other to his Excellency. It is long since I took a pipe, as you know, but as it would be unpardonable to be wanting in politeness, I took the pipe with great complacency, placed the bowl upon the carpet, for the stem was fit for a walking cane, and I believe more than two yards in length.’ ”
Jefferson stopped and lowered the sheets of paper, still grinning boyishly. “I think I should commission a painting,” he said. “For the Annals of Diplomacy.”
“He must have turned green—or green and white!”
“No, William, you underestimate the Adams resolve. Listen: ‘I smoaked in aweful pomp, reciprocating whiff for whiff with his Excellency, until coffee was brought in. His Excellency took a cup after I had taken one, and alternately sipped at his coffee and whiffed at his tobacco, and I followed the example with such exactness and solemnity that the two secretaries appeared in raptures and the superior of them, who speaks a few words of French, cried out in ecstacy, “Monsieur, vous êtes un Turk!” ’ ”
In the carriage an hour later Jefferson took out the letter and started to read it all over again. “The Puritan Turk. The Sultan of Braintree. I would give much to know what Abigail thought of our John in his awful smoking pomp.”
“You miss him, sir,” Short ventured. “It’s good he’s invited you to visit him in London.”
Jefferson rubbed his shoulder against the leather upholstery of the carriage and stretched his long legs. “I could do more good here,” he said. His smile slowly faded. “Much more good, you know. Vergennes has finally appointed a committee to examine the tobacco duties, and Lafayette is on it. If I stayed to prompt him—”
“But if Adams says the Barbary chiefs are ready to negotiate?”
Jefferson tugged at his ear. “John Adams,” he said, “is a remarkable man. It is no secret to you that he has a degree of vanity, that he is, Turkish pipes aside, too attentive to ceremony.”
“He is”—Short hesitated—“irritable.”
“As the day is long. Vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of human motives. When you have said that, you have said all you can against him. But I expect he is wrong about the pirates. Why should they treat? Why should they not take our money and do as they like? I see no solution to hostages ever, except war, war or an outrageous ransom year after year. If it were up to me, I would send Paul Jones with half a dozen frigates and cut them to pieces one by one.”
“Well.” Short stirred. Jefferson as war-making general sat uneasily with all the other Jeffersons he knew. The carriage came to a jouncing halt, and he glanced out at a logjam of horses and wheels.
“And in any case,” Jefferson said, “when I arrive in London, most likely the king’s royal government”—his voice mocked the phrase—“will ensure that I encounter the maximum of delay and humiliation. In his love of ceremony I’m afraid Adams plans to present me at Court.”
“The king would ignore you!” Short protested, not knowing that he would prove a prophet. Adams strolled about in life wherever he liked, thick-skinned, armored in irritability, but Jefferson was exquisitely sensitive to the slightest affront. Before the war the British Court had frozen out poor Franklin with astonishing rudeness. What would George III do to the author of the infamous Declaration of Independence?
“Look there.” Jefferson pointed to a corner house where servants were scattering armloads of straw across the muddy pavement. “They do that when someone in the hous
e is sick, to muffle the noise of wheels.”
“Better to be deaf altogether,” Short said, turning automatically to look. The carriage lurched forward with a crack of the whip. Their destination that morning was the Institut des Sourds et Muets, the deaf-and-dumb school operated by yet another Parisian abbé, open to visitors on Mondays and Wednesdays. Jefferson’s apparently limitless curiosity had produced a special invitation to observe their classes.
“Well, I leave in three days,” Jefferson said, “king or no king, count or no count. Adams says he has a young American painter I will like, John Trumbull. And when I return we may have heard at last from Eppes.” Short nodded. Jefferson had written twice already to his brother-in-law, requesting that his eight-year-old daughter Mary, now calling herself Polly, be sent to join him and young Patsy. “But all the same”—his smile came back, tighter and smaller—“Washington stoned, Mount Vernon burned—what a nation of liars and villains and fools.” He crossed his arms like a bandolier, and his warlike tone suddenly flared. “I wish there were a sea of flame between England and America.”
At the Institut a gentle abbé, flanked by two Portuguese nuns, led them through a series of rooms where children sat in rows of wooden desks, communicating with their teacher by means of rapid, incomprehensible finger signals. A kind of code, Jefferson murmured, clearly fascinated. Short trailed him with a dim sensation of unease. No sounds except their footsteps or the scrape of chairs, the occasional whispered explanation from the abbé. Silence was un-French, Short thought; it was also unnatural to the condition of children. And yet his mind wheeled back irresistibly to the endless silent green forests of his own childhood, the silent country of Virginia. Clearings of flat red clay, encircled by huge, ominous trees; encroaching walls of silence. What did he miss? What did he hate? When he looked up he saw that, as usual, he had been absorbed in himself, while, as usual, Jefferson had been casting his nets wide for knowledge.
“Have you ever instructed one of the ‘wild boys,’ Monsieur?”
The abbé frowned, clearly not understanding, and Jefferson turned to Short for translation. “Il fait une allusion aux enfants sauvages, les enfants trouvés dans les forêts, dans les déserts.” For months Jefferson had been reading in the Mercure de France about the numerous children discovered living alone in the forests of Germany and France—abandoned in most instances because of physical deformity or simple poverty; often the wild boys had no speech at all and appeared to be totally deaf and dumb.
“No.” The abbé shook his head and smiled. “Never. All our children are normal; normal human beings.”
“I ask,” Jefferson said, “because Monsieur Short and I had a debate one morning: What is the nature of human nature? What single quality is essential to the definition human?” His gray eyes rested on Short thoughtfully. “Monsieur Short said, ‘The power of love.’ ”
The abbé was pleased. He nodded and placed his palms together at his breast and bowed. “But,” Jefferson continued, “I concluded that the nature of human nature demands the power of speech. Of all our faculties, only language is uniquely human—don’t you concur?”
The abbé smiled in gentle disagreement. “I am bound to your friend’s position, Monsieur,” he said softly. “One would fall short of being human if one could not express one’s love.”
“In language?”
“Somehow.”
In the carriage Jefferson shifted his legs restlessly—restless was the word for Jefferson that month, Short thought—and stared at the passing gray and brown facades of the rue Saint-Honoré.
“A fascinating school, but I could never learn the hand signals the children use. I’m too old. They made my brain swim to watch them. At the end of the tour,” he added ruefully, “I felt as if I were one of Buffon’s experiments, a Virginia savage transplanted to the Old World and subtly beginning to ‘degenerate.’ ”
Short grinned at the expert imitation of Raynal’s thin voice. “Vous êtes ou un Turk ou un enfant sauvage.”
“Un Turk sauvage,” Jefferson said. “Trouvé dans les forêts et dans les déserts.”
Short smiled again. Jefferson read and wrote French easily, but he spoke it weakly and with, of all things, a slight Scots accent, absorbed from his first teacher in Virginia, the very Scottish and very fierce James Maury.
“When I come back from London,” Jefferson said, reading the amusement in Short’s eyes, “I will no doubt express myself better.”
Short proved himself a second time that day a prophet. “When you come back,” he said, “Paris will be wearing a new face.”
In any event, as the London newspapers all recorded, it was not a face that Jefferson saw next.
At the Court of St. James’s on the seventeenth of March, as John Adams, coughing and muttering into his fist, led him forward through a phalanx of silk-sleeved British ministers and courtiers, the man Adams sometimes called the Great Hanoverian Ham caught sight of them.
In the best of circumstances George III lacked self-possession. Red of face, small of head, unusually tall and thick-waisted, he presided over his levees and ceremonies with fussy Germanic stiffness. His grandfather, the first George, had known not a word of English when he assumed the throne in 1714 and made no secret of his preference for the large ladies and larger horses of his native Hanover, where he retreated for a full six months of every year. The second George was not much better. The third George, determined to be a good English king, had promptly lost half the empire to rebellion and was rumored to suffer intermittent fits of insanity, in which he stood talking loudly to the roses in his garden.
On the morning of the seventeenth, as he caught sight of Adams and Jefferson advancing through the crowd, the monarch crossed his arms, jammed one hand under each armpit, and stared. An aide whispered in his ear. Adams made a round man’s attempt at a bow and murmured their names. Jefferson advanced another step. The king turned on his heel, presenting the two Americans with a clear view of the Hanoverian rump, and walked away. After half a moment of contemplation the rest of his courtiers did the same.
“In brief,” said Clérisseau some months later, after Jefferson’s return, “he delivered a typically English insult. Witless and wordless.”
Short grunted (witlessly, he realized) and made a feeble swipe with his handkerchief at his sweating brow. It was the first week in August, and outside the window on the rue de Berri, Paris lay breathless in a hot, dry cloud of dust.
“And in any case,” Clérisseau persisted, “why didn’t John Adams explode on the spot? I always picture John Adams as a round little bomb with a sputtering fuse.”
Short let himself grin at the image. “Well. Unlike the rest of us, Adams rather likes the English. Likes London. Abigail is happy there. The daughter Nabby is engaged to marry her father’s secretary and she is happy. It would take more than an insult to make him explode.”
“I lived there five years,” Clérisseau said, “in my younger days, when I would do a great deal not to starve and the English were fond of hiring French architects. I would never go back.”
“Nabby is marrying an American, actually,” Short said, following his own thought. “William Stephens Smith. Twenty-seven and a half years old, my age exactly. She wrote to ask when I would marry.”
“Miss Adams thinks you have become a French libertine,” Clérisseau said with amusement. He mopped his own brow and neck and blinked his big eyes. Even for August the day was sweltering. “The ladies of the town swarm about you—or vice versa—you leave a sea of broken hearts in your wake, Short. Have I mixed my metaphors?”
“Clérisseau,” Short said pleasantly, “shut up.”
He turned away from the Frenchman and studied the huge clutter of packing boxes and wadded tissues that covered Jefferson’s study floor. Clérisseau likewise folded his arms and regarded the neat rows of thermometers, microscopes, and drawing instruments extracted from the boxes and lined up across the desk. In the great salon that adjoined the study, under the bea
utiful sunburst painting that Jefferson had commissioned for the ceiling, stretched a second brigade of identical trunks and boxes, all presumably stuffed with more of Jefferson’s London purchases.
“William, thou shouldst be married. How long was he actually in England?”
“Seven weeks altogether.”
“Then he didn’t have time to buy quite everything on the island. What is this?”
Short squinted at the object in Clérisseau’s sweaty hand. Ever since the day they had gone to visit Houdon, he decided, his eyesight had grown steadily more blurred. He moved his head slightly, so that his peripheral vision, which was better, would come into focus. “That is a new kind of mercury thermometer, for use indoors.”
“Ah.” Clérisseau replaced it on the desk. “To tell us it is hot.”
“He wants precise information,” Short said defensively. In his journal Short had lately tried to devise code names for Jefferson: the Roman, for those days when diplomatic politics held sway and Jefferson went about his business with a certain stern aloofness; the Rebel, for those moments when he seemed suddenly angry and impatient enough to dismantle any established authority (after seeing George III in London he had purchased a seal engraved with the motto Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God). But for the restless, unreachable person behind his grid of precise information and books, Short could come up with no satisfactory single word. Sphinx? Poet? Evader?
“Now,” Clérisseau said. Despite the heat he observed the rigid French fashion of dressing without regard to elements or weather. Today he wore, as always, a full dress coat and a ruffled shirt and, at the corner of his mouth in the middle of his powdered cheek, a small black beauty patch the size of a coin. He straightened his elegant lace cuffs. “Where have you hidden my model?”
“Upstairs,” Short told him, “next to Trumbull’s room.”
They threaded their way between boxes and trunks and climbed the stairs to the second landing, where Jefferson had set up a library for overflow volumes. The room looked down on the garden, and as Short pulled open the windows he could see James Hemings—no blurriness about that—walking in shirt-sleeves between rows of shoulder-high Virginia corn.
