Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  The arcades of the Palais Royal replaced the Louvre; then, as the carriage rolled east into a crowded square, they passed a bizarre stone column at the edge of the Halle, standing free like the turret of a castle and decorated with carved moons and planets and a belt of elaborately shuttered green windows. Dismounting on the rue de Grenville, Jefferson paused to look back at it and murmur in Short’s ear, “A long day so far, my friend—don’t forget the old duchesse, bring out your watch.”

  It was almost the last thing Short heard him say for half an hour. The noise of the grain market—a low hivelike rumble from the street—rose to a deafening roar at the entrance.

  “Pandemonium!” Trumbull shouted happily. “There they are!”

  He pulled Jefferson forward. Short followed, stopped. A wagon the size of a house lurched forward on tilting wooden wheels, dragged by six great dray horses, rumps like the King of England, and pushed by a dozen shirtless workers whose torsos gleamed under a thick silver coating of grain and dust. More workers converged on either side, another wagon, a team of oxen pulling barrels; two merchants shouted orders and pointed in opposite directions, hands snatched Short backward, out of the path of the oxen, and he felt himself passed along a gauntlet of gesticulating men—one woman, mountainous in white apron—until he stood twenty yards away from the wagon. On the other side Jefferson and Trumbull had disappeared into the crowd.

  “A droite!” someone shouted. “Attention!”

  Short sprang back a step. He pressed his shoulders against the side of a stall. The smell of grain filled his nostrils and burned his eyes. When he looked up, blinking, the whole space of the dome was floating overhead, sixty feet high, hazy, a golden bell of sunlight.

  “Monsieur, attention!”

  Short pinched the bridge of his nose and squinted upward through the dust, impressed in spite of himself. Score a point for Trumbull. How was it done? The dome appeared constructed in strips of alternating glass and wood, two feet wide at the base, arching in tandem all the way from the top of the circular wall to a small nipplelike center. Below it noise and dust swam in the light, everything moved about in a dazzling light. On the far side of the entering wagons Short could just see Jefferson’s red hair between two huge stalls of wheat.

  “A droite, monsieur! Prenez garde!”

  He stumbled to his right again and stopped by a ten-foot pyramid of burlap sacks. Jefferson was now on the far side of the hall, near the opposite entrance. If he tried to follow the same way, the convoy of wagons rumbling in would hold him up; if he simply kept walking to his right, however, threading the maze of grain stalls and shouting merchants, he would meet them from the other direction. What was Jefferson doing? The red hair dipped in a courtly bow. Blond hair—extraordinarily blond, even in the midst of so much light and gold—bobbed near him. Then Trumbull’s dark hair moved in front.

  The noise was less overwhelming if you stayed near the base of the circular wall. Short detoured around a basket scale. Grain cascaded out of a wagon, a waterfall of light. He jumped sideways, kicking his feet, and three black Norway rats scampered through his legs, squealing.

  He hurried forward over a carpet of grain and dust. On the other side of the market Trumbull was now pointing up to the skylights; beside him stood a small, wiry-limbed man dressed all in purple and red—Cosway? At this distance, with his bad eyes, Short thought, shaking his head, the man looked like a costumed monkey.

  Where was Jefferson?

  He neared the center of the stalls. Jefferson and a slender young woman—the dazzling blond curls of a moment ago—had detached themselves from Trumbull and stood apart, almost at the second doorway, heads close in conversation.

  Now where was Trumbull?

  By the time Short reached the far entrance, the noise of wagons and merchants had struck an unexpected lull. He quickly circled an island of stacked barrels and almost ran into Jefferson. A moment later, against a backdrop of straw and oats, he found himself bowing, his forehead inches away from those same blond curls, gazing into a clear, exquisitely formed face. Eyes violet or gray. Dress blue. Neck slender and arching, perfect. As she lifted her head he saw the pale white curve of her bust, blue lace, a finger’s width of bare décolletage.

  “And also Mr. Cosway,” Trumbull was saying.

  Reluctantly Short turned to his left. Richard Cosway bowed and clicked his heels, stepping backward at the same time, as if, Short thought, to let him take in the whole dandified effect: lavender silk coat, feverishly embroidered from shoulder to tail with red leaves and berries; tight, pipe-stem trousers of shiny black; dress sword with one of those enormous ribboned sword-knots that the English treasured. Lace collar. Silver wig. Brown little face, wrinkles, patches, a quick false smile like the flash of a razor. Exactly like a monkey.

  “Delighted,” Short said.

  “Enchanté.” Another click of the heels.

  “Now we can hear,” Trumbull said, beaming at them. The wagons had all come to a halt. The workers and merchants had started to gather for some commercial reason at the other end of the hall, their voices fading. Overhead, a flock of chattering sparrows turned and splashed through the dome of light.

  “Now we can breathe!” Cosway said, fanning himself with a little leather-bound book.

  “No, no—this is the time to look at the dome, study the dome.” Trumbull had raised both hands high in artistic benediction. “Look at the joints, all of you, the woodwork, the play of glass and timber!”

  Cosway opened his book. “ ‘A modern work, but based on a design by Philibert Delorme,’ ” the artist read pompously. “ ‘Sixteenth-century author of Inventions pour bien bâtir. Twenty-five wooden ribs, twenty-four identical windows. Hemispherical space with a radius of sixty feet. Ninety tons of glass and Normandy oak. Circumference of more than two hundred feet—.’ ”

  To Short’s amazement Jefferson and Mrs. Cosway had strolled away, to a point just at the edge of the doorway. When Cosway looked up and caught sight of them, he smiled at Short and snapped the book shut.

  “My wife and the heat,” he said, “the heat and the dust.”

  Outside, Jefferson had found a stone bench under a tree, and Maria Cosway had sat down on it, in a little blue cloud of crinoline and silk.

  “It was too much inside,” she told them as they all arrived. “Too close.” A shake of the golden curls. A smile, Short had to admit, almost as bright as the curls. She spoke in breathless musical tones, with a charming accent partly English, partly Italian, worlds away from the nasal—Cockney?—of her famous husband. “The air in London is so terrible, so gloomy and wet—we came to Paris for me, really, just to escape the gloom—we call it ‘gloomth’ in London. But here it’s so hot and dusty, I feel like a silly girl, I can’t be pleased.”

  “Oh, Paris is hot,” Jefferson said, who never complained about the weather. “But outside the city, in little villages like Saint-Germain—”

  “We haven’t been,” Maria Cosway interrupted, placing her hand on his sleeve. “Ten whole days, and we haven’t been anywhere at all except people’s houses and artists’ studios, not the simplest excursion.”

  “Not even to Saint-Cloud or Versailles?”

  “Nulle part!”

  “My work,” Cosway said. He had made his way restlessly behind the bench, guidebook still in one hand, page marked by a long simian finger. “I am a painter, as Trumbull knows, as Paris knows. No sooner arrived than the Duc d’Orléans, out of the blue, sends to our hotel. I must paint his children’s portraits, his wife’s, his friends’—” He turned his tiny brown face from Jefferson. “So Maria languishes days at a time while I pursue the bubble ‘art.’ ” He nodded and made a quick, unnerving bow inside his too-large lavender coat.

  “That,” Maria said, rising from the bench and pointing her fan, “is a wonderful tower or column—do you see?”

  Jefferson had turned with her. Over their backs Short and Trumbull could see the odd three-story column they had passed before. Cosway
was already walking forward, thumbing his book, bouncing on his wiry black legs.

  “What do you think of them?” Trumbull whispered.

  “Beauty and the Beast,” Short said. “Venus and her monkey.”

  Jefferson and Maria Cosway had already pulled ahead of them, walking side by side. The two men hurried to catch up, and then with much lifting of hems and twisting sideways to balance, the whole party advanced between parked wagons and horses, over a dirty curb, over a gutter clogged with golden mud.

  “ ‘Constructed in 1572,’ ” Cosway announced, reading from his book as they gathered around him. A foppish grimace aimed directly at Short. “The architect was the celebrated Jean Bulant, whoever that was. Intended first for the grounds of the Hôtel de Soissons, for Catherine de Médicis, who liked to go up the little stairs in the center and consult the stars with her astrologer.”

  Maria clapped her hands. “Italian—I knew it!”

  “My wife is Italian,” Cosway said to Jefferson. The two men were roughly the same age, Short calculated, in their middle forties, but next to each other, the spidery Englishman and the tall, sharp-faced Virginian, they looked like members of different species. “Or rather Anglo-Italian. Née Hadfield, but her father was an English merchant in Rome.”

  “Florence,” Maria said. She was no more than twenty-seven or -eight, Short thought; a good two decades younger than her husband. Automatically he began to compare her to other women—she was far prettier than Madame de Lafayette; smaller, more delicate than the Ace of Spades; but coarse and flirtatious, a mere shopgirl-coquette, if one thought of the shy, dark-haired, exquisite wife of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld.

  “Well.” Cosway shrugged.

  Jefferson was smiling with a boyish animation that Short had never seen on his face before. What had happened? Where had the black mood of impatience and boredom gone? In the space of ten minutes the Roman had vanished, the Rebel had stalked off the stage. Jefferson was bending and pointing out to little Mrs. Cosway the geometric pattern of the windows. With a sense of foreboding, Short reached in his pocket for his watch.

  “Sir?” He extended the watch apologetically. “I should remind you of the other appointments today.”

  Jefferson frowned.

  “Mais non, Monsieur Short,” Maria said, smiling, pouting, shaking her head. “Jamais—this is my first day out in Paris, away from business. Sir”—her white hand was a feather, a dove, lighting on Jefferson’s great one. “Be independent! Declare your independence! The famous author of independence—you see, we know who you are; stay with us, take us all to Saint-Cloud or Versailles in your carriage—for the ‘coolth’!”

  “The old duchesse,” Short began, but Jefferson had turned to Trumbull.

  “Do you think—?”

  “Why not? Ten days of work, one day of pleasure?”

  “Un jour heureux,” Maria said. “That’s correct in French?”

  “Perfect, un jour heureux. A happy day. Mr. Short can carry a message.” He stopped, rubbed his chin. With a kind of eerie detachment Short observed his hand bring the watch stiffly back to his pocket like an automaton, deposit it, disappear. Jefferson was the most scrupulous man he had ever known about truth. Two days ago, he had dictated a moralizing letter to his nephew in Virginia: “There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible as a lie; he who permits himself to tell a lié once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time.” What could he possibly tell the old duchesse?

  “Dispatches,” Maria said firmly.

  Jefferson nodded. “A diplomatic dispatch has arrived at the embassy,” he told Short. “An urgent letter from John Jay requires my immediate attention. You can stay for the dinner, of course, William, but say that I am unable.”

  In the corner of his eye Short could see Cosway’s wrinkled brown face, Trumbull’s smirk.

  “Tell the duchesse,” Jefferson said with a face of smiling impenetrability, “that it was irresistible.”

  Roman; Rebel. What else? Romeo? Machiavel?

  In the broad, rational light of morning Short deposited his armload of rolled papers and drawings on the table and looked up, prepared to be wary.

  “A marvelous man, absolutely marvelous,” Maria Cosway said from the other end of the room, skirt swinging like a bell as she walked. She stopped in front of the empty fireplace and placed her hands on her hips. “All these books, all these books—and he’s read them all, yes? Every one of them?” Unlike most visitors, Short noticed Maria didn’t actually look at the books she was admiring—and there must have been two or three hundred just in the salon alone, not even a proper library setting, but an overflow space for Jefferson’s recent purchases.

  “Books,” she repeated, stopping now under the sunburst painting on the ceiling and looking in fact the other way, toward the great windows and the summer garden below.

  “Le Comte de Buffon was in this very room six months ago,” Short told her, certain she had never heard of Buffon, “and Mr. Jefferson showed him those volumes of engravings under the Encyclopédie.” He inclined his head in the general direction of the bookcase, where twenty or thirty gilt-edged volumes seemed to march up and down the shelves like little leather soldiers.

  “And now you’ve brought another book.” As Maria advanced, she came into clearer focus. The golden curls sprang into relief, the deep violet eyes (definitely violet this morning), the tiny waist, full yellow skirt, two exquisite dainty blue slippers poking like mice from under the hem. Her breasts—Short lowered his head and pulled out the long folio volume of Antiquités de France that was sitting beneath the papers. A book of extraordinarily detailed engravings that Jefferson had just that week purchased from Clérisseau, as a delicate way of thanking him for the plaster model.

  “This is a kind of travel book of the past,” he murmured. He disliked Maria’s husband enormously—what other words? Thoroughly, completely, totally; as one dislikes a bug or a bit of nastiness stuck to one’s heel. Too strong, but let it stand. The husband was a fool; the wife was … a beautiful coquette, Pope’s addle-brained Belinda in The Rape of the Lock brought to life; but a Virginian was sworn to politeness the way a Frenchman was sworn to fashion. He opened the book at a marker and showed her the famous Roman aqueduct at Arles, another of Jefferson’s interests.

  “I’m too tired for books.” Maria dropped abruptly into one of the soft chairs next to the table. “Fatiguée, épuisée.”

  As if on cue the far door of the salon opened, and James Hemings entered, followed by Adrien Petit, who appeared more than usually stimulated by the presence of the Cosways, Maria in the salon, Richard downstairs with Jefferson and Trumbull going over plans, papers, itineraries—Short had no idea. Jefferson and Trumbull had returned long after midnight and risen early, huddling after breakfast in the study until the Cosways’ carriage had arrived.

  “Dit-on ‘épuisée,’ Monsieur?” Maria asked Petit, who had come to attention and started to beam at her first words. “C’est vraiment français? Correct French?” James gave a sullen look and slid his tray of teacups and dishes onto the table. James and I, thought Short; immune. Behind them two more servants were bringing hot water, biscuits, a small bright wheel of butter.

  “C’est correct, absolument, Madame,” Petit assured her. “Mais vous êtes trop jeune, trop charmante d’être ‘épuisée,’ et de si bonne heure du matin—”

  “Sugar.” James thumped the bowl onto the table.

  “We stayed up—do you know how late we stayed up, Mr. Short?”

  “On your jour heureux? No.”

  “First.” Maria held up a small, perfect finger. “We left the Halle aux Bleds a little after you did, and we took Mr. Jefferson’s carriage all the way to the Parc Saint-Cloud, straight across the river, right into the country.”

  “For the ‘coolth.’ ”

  She paused to give him a smile. “You remember. You’re just like him. We went to Saint-Cloud and toured a gallery of paintings and dined at a little inn nea
r that. Then we came back to Paris and went to the Faubourg Montmartre, where we saw fireworks, amazing, wonderful fireworks—like a war!”

  Short closed the volume of engravings and accepted the cup James handed him. The fireworks were a specialty of the famous Ruggieri brothers, off the rue Saint-Lazare, who orchestrated what they called “lyric pantomimes” in rockets, colored flares, and exploding candles. Two weeks ago, Short had joined Clérisseau and others for an evening portraying “The Combat of Mars” and “The Forge of Vulcan,” with an afterpiece entirely in red rockets, “The Salamander.”

  “Absolutely wonderful,” Maria said. She paused to watch the retreating backs of the servants. “We would never have known about it if not for Mr. Jefferson—the Duc d’Orléans, I can assure you, does not condescend to fireworks.”

  At the end of the salon Petit and James stepped aside to allow Trumbull in, carrying awkwardly under his arm a large canvas wrapped in tissue. Behind him, looking just as ill-matched as Short had remembered, came Cosway and Jefferson. Cosway wore the same lavender-red coat as before, but sky-blue trousers today, ornately buckled shoes, and a wig much too big for his tiny brown face. Monkey or bug? The ornamental sword stuck out from his coat like a sting.

  “And after that,” Maria said, turning her head in a lazy, thoroughly captivating manner toward the three men, “we stopped for a concert.”

  “A beautiful concert,” Trumbull said. He nodded at Short and began to pile biscuits onto a dish for himself. “We should have sent you a dispatch.”