by Max Byrd
“We went to the Krumpholtz house,” Jefferson said, either indifferent to Trumbull or not hearing. “Julie Krumpholtz played the harpsichord for us and sang, hours and hours of music.”
“In London,” Cosway said, likewise serving himself with tea and biscuits, “my wife arranges every week what the press have graciously named Great Concerts. The Prince of Wales comes, Lady Duncan, General Paoli, Lord Sands, Mr. Boswell, the Countess of Aylesbury.” At every name a smile—grimace—a sharp, energetic chop of the silver wig. The Roman wouldn’t last an hour in the company of such an insect; the Rebel would have turned away in disgust. The third Jefferson, however, the new Romeo …
“And she herself composes for the harp,” Cosway finished.
“And plays it too.” Trumbull had Yankee manners, fingers sticky with frosting in his mouth.
Jefferson handed Maria a second cup of tea (where had the first one gone? Short wondered, glancing about). Now he sat down beside her, knees almost touching the fluffed yellow skirt and its plump hint of thigh and hip. He wore the glassy-eyed look of a man utterly captivated, utterly—Short changed his image: the look of a hooked fish. Jefferson bent his red hair solicitously toward her blond. Meanwhile Cosway was speaking pompously again, another spate of aristocratic names; Trumbull, impressively virile, barrel-chested in his tight gray coat and open collar, was simultaneously recounting a story about David the painter and the canvas he was about to unwrap for them. Abruptly Short thought he could take no more. He replaced his cup on the table, waved one hand in a vague, unreadable gesture learned from Clérisseau, and headed for the door. “Urgent dispatches,” he murmured over his shoulder to Jefferson, knowing it was feeble, even impudent, smiling to placate the Roman, hurrying to outrun their voices.
An enemy, Maria Cosway decided, watching him leave. In a company of men, however hard she tried to please, there was always one like Short who made her feel useless and foolish. A stupid girl. Una puttana.
“So, wake up—what do you think of it, Maria? Be frank, tell me the truth.”
Trumbull had pulled the tissue wrapping away from his canvas. He propped the painting against the leg of a chair, just out of the sunlight. He stood behind it with his arms folded like a gladiator and bared his teeth in a grim masculine smile.
“Oh,” she said, stalling for time. She broke into admiring, meaningless Italian phrases, not bothering at all with what she said, certain that Trumbull didn’t understand a word, nor Richard of course, but she suddenly broke off as she caught sight of Jefferson’s curious face. He spoke French badly but doggedly; she had never been in the presence of a man who seemed so entirely, from head to toe, every moment—she searched her head for the English word: intellectual.
“Not fair to take refuge in your native language, Maria.” Trumbull had been in the army, she thought, and could produce a disagreeable note of command when he wanted.
“I like the colors then,” she said, guessing that he had worked hardest on that. “I like the colors very much—they clash, they explode!”
“ ‘Battle of Bunker’s Hill,’ ” Richard read on the bottom of the frame.
“And the expressions.” She rose and pointed toward the head of an American soldier apparently shielding or protecting his black servant. Above him a British officer had fallen back, dying, another American lay under the point of a bayonet, and down the brown hillside to the right a city she took to be Boston grew in sharp angles like a brown crystal. She thought she should be patriotic and resent the obvious British defeat in progress, but she didn’t care, she had never cared. “You were there, Mr. Jefferson, no?”
Jefferson shook his head and smiled gently. “I know as little about battles as I do about painting, Mrs. Cosway. I was far from Bunker Hill that day, I’m afraid.”
“Jefferson lives in Virginia,” Trumbull said rather gruffly, fussing with the slant of the frame, “a good four hundred miles from Boston.”
Maria put her chin in her hand in a pose that she knew to be charming. Trumbull called her by her Christian name, in the loose, informal manner of artists these days—she resented it, she thought; she liked the graver dignity of Jefferson. Meanwhile her husband had started to talk, bouncing back and forth in front of the painting, rising on the balls of his feet, little teacup in hand, spouting technical terms, growing critical of the very colors she had liked, the head of the American soldier she had praised, which was anatomically incorrect, he declared; and Trumbull was listening seriously, nodding his head, because, however much he looked (she knew) like a monkey in a wig and silk pants, Richard Cosway was an eminently successful artist and Trumbull was not. And when Richard took it into his head—an extraordinary English phrase; some days, especially in Paris, the oddity of English expressions struck her at almost every word—when he took it into his head to analyze a painting, nobody could be as thorough, as detailed, as cruelly precise. She moved her eyes and saw Jefferson, and both of them smiled carefully at Richard’s lecture.
Undiscouraged, Trumbull had more paintings to show them—outlines, sketches, an impressive plan for The Signing of the Declaration of Independence, which featured Jefferson’s own red-haired portrait from life, Trumbull’s official reason for coming to France. They lingered in the bright upstairs salon until nearly one, when Richard abruptly announced that he was famished and Jefferson, who seemed to think of everything hours and miles before anyone else, calmly said that his servants had already set out champagne and fruit in the garden below.
A French couple joined them there (how he arranged the timing of their visit baffled her), and Richard, excited by a new audience, decided for the first time in weeks to pay attention to Maria.
“My wife,” he said casually during a pause, holding a strawberry over his open mouth but twisting his neck to grin at them each in turn, “my wife is not English, did you know that?”
“She’s Anglo-Italian,” Trumbull told the French couple, who spoke perfect English. The husband, Éthis de Corny, had fought for the Americans in the Revolution, Jefferson said; the wife, Maria thought, was remarkably pretty and looked at Jefferson too often.
“But we are lucky she’s anything at all, you know.” Cosway nibbled at the strawberry and rolled his eyes toward the bench where she sat. “She almost became”—breathless, affected whisper; a little mincing bounce on his toes, like a fool—“a religious martyr.”
Her cue. “My husband means,” she told the French wife, leaning forward confidentially, “that a bizarre, terrible thing happened in my family when I was a child. In Italy the newspapers wrote about it for months.” She stopped, barely heard the inevitable polite questions. She had told—performed—this story so often for Richard that the words came automatically, even listlessly, in a smoothly worn track, but this time, watching Jefferson herself, she put unexpected energy into her voice.
“My father was born in Manchester but moved to Florence to pursue his business. I was born there, my first language was Italian, as you hear—but I was the fifth of my parents’ children, and the first to live.”
“The first,” Cosway repeated.
“The four others had all died as babies, in their cribs at night. Without being sick. The Italian doctors had no idea why. My mother, of course, was distraught and hysterical all the time, ready to die herself. But my father—my father was a wonderful man, my rescuer. He thought something was too suspicious here. Babies die, but not four in a row, all in their beds. Each baby had had a different nurse, he saw to that, and still they died. So when I was born, he hired a new governess and a new nurse, and gave the governess the secret duty to watch the nurse and everyone else who came near me.”
Jefferson had moved away from Trumbull and found a place on the opposite bench, beside the Frenchman. His red hair almost white in the sunlight, his long face framed against the green American corn plants he had showed them—Jefferson had daughters, she remembered; some of his children had died.
“One day a maidservant who had worked in another
part of the house, the scullery, for years, went into the nursery and, thinking no one was near, took me in her arms and said, ‘Pretty little creature, I have sent four to heaven, I hope to send you too!’ My governess was hiding in the next room—she ran to my father, my father called the authorities, and the poor wretched girl confessed—she had a religious mania; she had smothered each one with a pillow case she carried in her dress, and she thought the little babies went straight to heaven, with no sin. They put her in a lunatic house. And me, as an act of thanksgiving, they put in a convent.”
She sat back and smiled at the company; started to add that sometimes, because of her rescue, she saw strange, impossible … signs. But Richard would emphatically not want her to say that. She repeated her last words and smiled, particularly at Jefferson.
Afterward, as they stood in front of the door on the rue de Berri, waiting for their carriages, Jefferson asked quietly how long she had stayed in the convent.
“Until I was nineteen, when my father died.”
“And then?”
“And then I wanted to take the veil and become a nun, the way so many girls in a convent do.”
Jefferson frowned and looked about quickly, as if to check that the arriving carriages had lined up properly; but she saw in the frown the usual disapproval of Englishmen and Americans—to them all Catholics came from the moon. Catholics were worse than pagans. “You have a daughter in a convent,” she said.
“Well. But she only goes to school there, she studies French and music—no question at all of taking the veil, as you put it.”
Maria let her finger remain on his wrist. To annoy a man was not necessarily a mistake. To show that you could prick under his skin … “We must talk about this, about religion and daughters.”
“We have so many better subjects,” he said elegantly but briskly, handing her up into the carriage and turning away. As she settled into the seat, she watched him walk toward the others with his long, loose-limbed American stride. But two minutes later, from her carriage window above the pavement, she heard him arrange with her husband for yet another excursion that night.
On the fifth day of their friendship, as she liked to call it, Jefferson joined them for a morning at the gallery of the Luxembourg Palace.
“I know less of painting the more I see it,” he said, coming to her side as soon as the guards had swept open the doors. She made a point of waiting until all Richard’s guests had entered first: Trumbull, Short, Madame Vigée-Lebrun, a trembling old gallant named d’Hancarville who studied Greek antiquities in an obscurely scandalous way, Richard himself, three other French couples.
“Mr. Cosway obtained the invitations,” Maria said, not certain that obtained was the right English word. “For months, you know, he’s talked about nothing except the famous Rubens gallery—twenty-one paintings that nobody ever sees because the building is closed—you must stick close to him to learn about painting.”
Jefferson smiled. He offered no attempt whatever to join Cosway and the others, now clattering down a dusty corridor ahead of them. “Mr. Cosway’s students are so much more advanced than I am. It seems a waste of his time.”
“Well then.” She pulled her cloak tighter about her shoulders and glanced around with a sense of real alarm—the gallery wing of the Luxembourg Palace was at least a hundred years old, boarded up and falling apart, literally. The ceilings bulged, the walls slanted. Next to them rose a staircase barricaded with old crates and wood scraps. Its steps were broken off like rotten teeth.
“Well then,” she repeated stupidly, and stopped. She talked too much, she thought. Sometimes it was better to say nothing at all, especially with someone so quick as Jefferson. And in any case the old man d’Hancarville had now fallen back and begun to mumble to them both in rapid, interminable French.
The last guard pulled open the last door more than a century ago, and they all entered the gallery together. Rubens, her strange husband’s strange obsession, had been commissioned to depict the life of Marie de Médicis. Huge allegorical canvases, each one at least twenty feet long and a dozen feet tall, hung mounted high overhead, on the crumbling gray walls of what must have been Marie’s own palatial ballroom. Richard painted miniatures—fashionable little portraits for gold lockets or watch lids or jewelry cases, exquisite, precise; fussy. The Rubens paintings—Maria made an involuntary gesture of surprise. Their sheer size overwhelmed everything else, their long sweeping motions of brush and eye; clouds boiled off the canvas, billowing landscapes and mountains, great fleshy Dutch bodies that were landscapes in themselves. In the gigantic painting just to her right Marie de Médicis lounged backward on a cloud, half-naked, one arm cocked behind her golden curls, vast royal breasts, an acre of pink and white belly. Nothing in the world like Richard’s paintings!
When she had looked once around the room, deciphering the order of the series, she saw that Jefferson, ever systematic, had set off on his own tour, pacing from one painting to another with his guidebook open. She shivered. The gallery was in even worse repair than the rest of the palace. Workmen had propped long beams of rough timber against the walls, between every other painting, like flying buttresses. Directly above her head more boards covered a broken skylight; dust, dark mold, spiderwebs: you peered at everything through a film of filth.
“ ‘How many pictures of one nymph can we view, all how unlike each other, all how true.’ ” John Trumbull had almost bumped into her, and now he was quoting verse she didn’t recognize at all.
“Pope,” Trumbull continued with a patronizing note that sometimes made her dislike him very much. “Alexander Pope. You don’t know it? ‘To a Lady,’ one of the wittiest poems in English.”
Jefferson had materialized beside them, out of the gray air. “Our Mr. Trumbull is a graduate of Harvard. He overflows with learning.”
“I like that one enormously.” Trumbull extended his arm, thumb straight up, to study a portrait of Marie arriving from Italy in a ship, the new bride of Henry IV. Maria tried to follow his moving hand, but her eyes stayed fixed on the queen’s swollen breasts. Each one was the size of a wine cask.
“The next painting down,” Trumbull said, “is much weaker. The best of the lot is at the end, the allegory of France.”
As he moved away, still holding his arm out straight, Jefferson touched her elbow. She found herself doing three things at once: turning to face him with a smile, smoothing her skirt, trying to remember if he had ever actually touched her before. But men, in a room full of paintings like these—
“Trumbull is sometimes too bluff and military, I’m afraid,” Jefferson said softly. “I hope you excuse him. He has a great deal on his mind, he worries.”
“I’m accustomed to painters,” she said, then added, feeling somehow it would be a compliment to Jefferson, “I think he’s a very good artist, you know.”
Jefferson watched the younger man stop and fold his arms in front of the allegory of France. His own gesture, Maria thought; no wonder he likes him. Both of his young men imitate all his gestures. Short—in the corner of her eye she saw Short approaching them—often stands in a folded-arm posture, head to one side, exactly like Jefferson’s.
“In the Revolution,” Jefferson said, “Trumbull started out as a very lowly officer. But he literally ‘drew himself’ to General Washington’s attention. He made sketches of the battlefields, the British formations, the artillery placements, such excellent, useful sketches that Washington promoted him to his staff as official artist. Now he’s decided to record the whole history of the war in paintings—Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, Yorktown, American history in pictures, a wonderful legacy for the future.”
“You always think so much about America.”
He looked down at her in genuine surprise. “I think about nothing else.”
Short had reached them and interrupted with a question about Jefferson’s schedule. Poor earnest Short. Jealous of Trumbull, Maria thought; jealous of me. She stepped away from the two men to let th
em finish their business, but within moments Jefferson had steered them back to her side.
“Mr. Short reminds me that the Comte de Vergennes expects us in an hour. More American thoughts, alas.”
One of the traits Maria had cultivated in herself was impulse. Always say what you felt, when you felt it. “Is something wrong with Trumbull’s eyes? I never thought of it before, but look how he stands and points, all twisted around. He can’t see!”
At the far end of the gallery Trumbull had joined Madame Vigée-Lebrun and taken her hand in his, lifting it to trace some design in the painting. Short turned sharply to stare.
Jefferson wore a bland, superior expression—the face of a man who had secrets; for an instant Maria disliked his face very much—then his features relaxed. His quick, deliberate smile softened his eyes. “Of all the painters and artists in Paris, Mrs. Cosway, you are the only one to have observed.”
Short had turned back, quizzical.
“Trumbull suffered a boyhood accident,” Jefferson explained. “He almost never mentions it—he lost the sight in one eye.”
“His left eye,” Maria said.
Jefferson nodded.
“Sir—”
“One of the worries I mentioned. He fears going blind.” Over his shoulder Jefferson said in a voice too firm for Short to ignore, “If you wait for me at the door, William, I will join you in two minutes.”
Maria let herself drift in the gray light, beneath the billowing flesh of the queen.
“Your friend Madame Vigée-Lebrun is an artist too,” Jefferson said, drifting beside her. “I find her name in all my catalogues, but never her works.”
“Ah, she has no American subjects, that’s why. Elisabeth paints portraits of women only, extraordinary portraits—the queen dotes on her—we’ve known her for years, Richard has, her and her husband.” She lifted her chin, showing her throat. “Your protege there takes an obvious interest, no? Injury or not, he has an eye for a pretty woman.”
