Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  “Well, artists do.”

  “And yet.” She hesitated, keeping her profile high. In the ecclesiastical gloom of the gallery, voices murmured discreetly, shoes tapped on the marble floor. What was the precise line between impulse and calculation? She made a point of not looking into Jefferson’s face. “Anyone can see that she’s not happily married.”

  Charles-Louis Clérisseau, man of leisure and man of pleasure—far too much of the former these days, he thought wryly; far too little of the latter—strolled down the crowded Valois arcade of the Palais Royal.

  It was midafternoon, sunny again after a morning of low damp clouds, and since he had accomplished nothing at all that forenoon in his solitary, client-free studio, Clérisseau had decided to visit, without spending money if possible, the busiest spot in Paris.

  He made his way down the middle of the arcade, pausing occasionally in the crowd to let a squad of workmen bustle through into the center garden. When he was a boy the Palais Royal had been one of the gloomier landmarks in the whole Faubourg Saint-Honoré. If you entered from the south, skirting the formidable dark palace of Cardinal Richelieu that gave the place its name, you came, after a few nondescript alleyways and courtyards, to the long plot of grass where Richelieu, to please the king, had built a miniature fort for the young Louis XIV. By the time Clérisseau had seen it, the fort was a crumbling pile of masonry and the entire property had passed into the hands of the fat, popular, amorous Duc d’Orléans, about whom Clérisseau had first heard one of the most curious words in the French language: “Ventripotent.” Powerful of stomach. And then, miraculously, the old duc had suddenly ceded everything to his nervous, entrepreneurial son Louis-Philippe, who had promptly turned loose an army of builders and architects—

  Clérisseau paused to savor the sophisticated obscenity of a shopkeeper quarreling with a drunken Spaniard. Three covered arcades, two hundred shops and cafés, five thousand milling, idle, pleasure-seeking customers … The Spaniard spun away with a volley of oaths, stumbled on his drunken feet, and pulled up short, just inches from Clérisseau’s nose. He was a peasant, dressed in the coarse blue wool and clogs of a laborer. It was Clérisseau’s private opinion that the most dangerous change in Paris in his lifetime had been the new, promiscuous mingling of classes. He pushed the Spaniard backward with one flat-handed blow and braced his legs to reach for his sword, but the crowd had already surged between them, and the Spaniard’s dirty black head was swept away in the natural tide of bodies and noise.

  Clérisseau shook his sleeve and dusted, unnecessarily, his shoulder before stepping forward again. Jefferson—of all people the great democrat Jefferson had said the same thing two weeks before. Paris was a fairground, a people’s foire, out of control; the day the king had allowed a mob of ordinary citizens into Versailles to witness a balloon launch, that was the day, Jefferson said, the king had lost his mystique.

  Clérisseau felt suddenly thirsty. In the shops and stalls to his right a coutelier was lining up his rows of sharp bright kitchen knives, like so many long silver fish in a school. Beyond him two old men in aprons struggled to lift a saddle to the shelves of M. Duplessis, Bourrelier. A bookshop, a binder, linen stalls, stairways to apartments—Clérisseau walked purposely forward, inhaling the smell of leather and oil, perfume, ripe human flesh; a fille pirouetted gaily around him, twirling her parasol, and disappeared up the stairway. Clérisseau slapped at his money pouch and strode on, toward the corner.

  The third floor of the Palais was reserved for belles filles—he knew that quite expertly; the second floor for clubs and little offices (across the garden on his left he could see the swinging signboard of the Société des Planteurs), but the corners of the arcades were where, by unspoken custom, the cafés and restaurants were found. He stopped in front of Février’s, a little stall of oysters on melting ice just beside the curtained doors, and winced at the printed list of prices. Farther on, at the shady corner where the arcade Valois turned left and became the arcade Beaujolais, he stopped again at the Café Mécanique and through the checkered panes of glass saw with a smile the neat, trim figure of William Short, sitting alone at a table.

  He was too absorbed (as usual) in what he was reading even to look up.

  “May I join you?” Clérisseau inquired.

  Short turned his head, blinking. Then he smiled in recognition. “Of course, always. I didn’t see you. I didn’t know you ever came to this strange place.”

  “Many times.”

  Short was busy moving his stacks of letters and papers from the square wooden surface of the table to his lap and the floor, but he paused for a moment to tap the edge with his knuckles. “A wonderful idea, wonderful and strange. ‘O brave new world that has such tables in it.’ ” While Clérisseau watched with an expression of amusement, he waved an arm expansively at the banner hanging on the far wall and read it aloud: “ ‘Sans Serveurs’!” The great novelty of the Café Mécanique, of course, as Short had discovered, was that there were no waiters here whatsoever. The twenty or so individual tables in the room, each with legs as thick as a man’s body, were uniformly equipped with a note pad, a pen, and a small wooden lever; when you had written your order on the pad, you pulled the lever (keeping your feet back, as everyone quickly learned), and the table slowly sank into the floor on pneumatic valves. In a matter of moments a cook in the basement had read your order, stacked the required dishes and carafes on the table, and sent it hissing smoothly again upstairs.

  “Let me buy you a dish of fresh coffee,” Short said, clearing the last of his papers. “I love to see it work.”

  “Our friend must ‘love’ it even more.” Clérisseau scratched a few words on the pad. Short slid his own dirty cup to the center and worked the lever. “With all the copying machines and three-stage gravitational thermometers you’ve set up so far, I’m surprised he hasn’t installed one of these to replace young Adrien Petit.”

  “Actually,” Short started to remind him. Several of the tables had dumbwaiters concealed in the thick legs, so that additional plates could be sent up to clients without lowering the whole table; more than once Jefferson had mused out loud about the practicality of such a dumbwaiter at Monticello.

  Clérisseau listened with only half an ear. Beneath their feet the floor began to vibrate. “Stand back,” he said. “Attention to your books.”

  Instinctively they scraped their chairs backward. After a long moment, with a sigh like an expiring kettle, the table rose back between them, a new silver pot of coffee and two clean cups and saucers sitting in the middle, a vase of cut flowers, a bowl of brilliant white sugar lumps. As Clérisseau poured, Short restacked his papers and folded them together. Clérisseau pointed the elegant little finger that supported his cup.

  “You have become Parisian entirely, you know, dear Guillaume—a huge beautiful hôtel at your disposal, servants, carriages, and yet you bring your work to a café and sit all day by a public window. What’s the difficulty? An excess of Trumbulls on rue de Berri?”

  Short concentrated on his cup, tasting the soupy liquid. One disadvantage, of course, of the invisible service was that the coffee was practically cold.

  “In fact, we have renovations under way at the rue de Berri. The downstairs salon is losing a wall, two new doors are going out to the garden, hammers, plaster, chaos everywhere. With the best will in the world I can’t quite blame Trumbull.”

  Clérisseau shook his head. By unspoken agreement they avoided the subject of Maria Cosway. “If I recall, our Jefferson did the same thing at the rue Taitbout, no? Redesigned one floor, took out a whole retaining wall? Always designing, always constructing.”

  Short squared his papers uselessly and nodded, conveying (as intended) no clear answer at all.

  “Do you know Gibbon?” Clérisseau asked abruptly.

  Short pinched the bridge of his nose and made a little face, feeling, as so often, half a step behind Clérisseau’s rapid changes of subject. “I know who Edward Gibbon is,” he
said dryly. “The historian of the fall of the Roman Empire. I’ve never read a word of him.”

  Clérisseau indicated the stack of papers and leather-bound books. “Do you know what his neighbor the Duke of Gloucester said when Gibbon presented him with volumes five and six of that great work?” Clérisseau’s mock-British accent was perfect. “ ‘Another damned thick square book. Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?’ ”

  Short laughed uncomfortably, resquared his papers, and then, deciding that even Clérisseau’s habitual irony deserved an answer, removed an unbound French journal from the stack. He opened it at his bookmark and turned the journal around for Clérisseau to read.

  “I’m preparing an answer to this statement by the Comte de Mirabeau,” he said.

  Clérisseau pursed his lips. Mirabeau was one of the wild figures of French politics, a mountainously ugly man whose legendary pursuit of female virtue was matched only by his energy in pursuit of radical ideas. Short guessed, rightly, that Clérisseau would read the paragraph he had marked with cautious respect.

  “He maintains,” Clérisseau said, looking up after a moment, “that there is no country on earth, not even America, where a man can be a fully privileged citizen simply by practicing the social virtues.”

  “By which he means that you have to swear allegiance to a state religion, as in France or England, or else give up some of your rights. You know that Catholics in England are still double-taxed; theoretically they can’t hold office, they can’t vote. And in France—”

  “So by refusing to make an exception of America, Mirabeau brings down your wrath.”

  But Short was too seriously engaged with the question to rise to the sardonic tone. Of all Jefferson’s accomplishments, he thought, this ranked second only to the Declaration of Independence. All of Europe should know it. “We’re sending a copy of this law, in French and English, to Mirabeau. I’m to draft the accompanying letter in French.” He handed Clérisseau the printed text that had just arrived, two days ago, from James Madison in Virginia.

  Clérisseau read aloud in English: “ ‘A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom.’ ”

  “Jefferson introduced it into the Virginia Assembly in 1779,” Short said. “But it’s taken till now—seven whole years—for the Assembly to pass it.”

  Clérisseau turned the page over, moving his lips, then read aloud again. “ ‘The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude its powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty.… truth is great and will prevail if left to herself.’ ”

  “Liberty,” Short said, and stopped.

  “Justice,” Richard Cosway said loudly, swaying slightly as he grasped the corner of their table. “Virtue. The red roast beef of old England. How are you, Mr. Short? Monsieur Clérisseau, we met one day at David’s studio, if you don’t remember. And then again—then again—”

  Cosway swayed a bit more dangerously and passed a pale hand over his forehead. The artist wore a coat of hyacinth-colored silk, with strawberries embroidered on it; blue trousers, white boots; and a thin dress sword topped with a golden knot.

  “And then again at the studio of Monsieur d’Hancarville, in the Louvre,” Clérisseau concluded. “You and your charming wife were paying a visit.”

  “And my charming wife,” Cosway repeated. “I would sit down if I could find a damn’d waiter to bring me a chair.”

  Short rose hastily to seize an unused chair from another table, while Clérisseau explained the café and stood to offer his own place. By the time Short had returned, they were settled again and Cosway was poking one monkeylike finger into Short’s papers.

  “Would you like coffee?”

  Cosway shook his head. His wig rocked on his head.

  “Wine?”

  “I’ve just been to the Camp of Tartars,” he told Clérisseau.

  “With d’Hancarville?”

  “No.” He swung his leg over the arm of the chair, slouched, and stared up at Short. “Do you know what d’Hancarville’s subject of study is?” Before Short could answer, he shook his head again. “Never guess. By God, it’s hot in here. D’Hancarville studies the phallic religion of ancient Greece. Fact. He showed me a locked cabinet full of the most amazing objects. Big as your arm. Made out of bone.”

  Short felt his dislike for the man rising almost to physical nausea. A drunken, skinny, monkey-faced little fop with the leer and smirk of a schoolboy. He pulled Jefferson’s bill for religious freedom toward his lap and pushed the chair back.

  “My wife and your ambassador,” Cosway said, without the slightest sign of jealousy, “are off somewhere touring the Bois de Boulogne. I painted till noon, then saw old d’Hancarville. The Camp of Tartars is just out there, all those tents on the other side of these arcades. They have a wax model, anatomically correct, of la belle Zulima.’ Also a Prussian giant and his dwarf wife.”

  “The Camp des Tartares,” said Clérisseau, rising, “is a notorious place for pickpockets and thieves. You should have been warned.”

  “It is a place,” Cosway said, managing to sway even as he sat in the chair. Ostentatiously he tucked the tail of his shirt into the blue trousers. “It is a place,” he grinned, “of absolute liberty.”

  In the sunshine outside Cosway appeared less drunk. He walked between the two men to the end of the arcade Beaujolais on rue de Montpensier, where a line of carriages-for-hire was stationed. At the head of the line Clérisseau signaled for a carriage to take Cosway home.

  “Rue Coqhéron, is it not?”

  “Come with me, Clérisseau, and see what I’ve been painting.” In an obvious afterthought Cosway turned and included Short in the invitation as well. But Short held up one hand and clutched his books with the other. A hasty plea of business, a diplomatic flash of teeth. The last thing he saw was Clérisseau at the carriage window mouthing a word—but what?—while the carriage clattered forward and out of sight.

  As Short returned to the Palais he wondered at the peculiar laws that governed marriage. A beautiful (shallow) woman like Maria Cosway, a repellent creature like her husband. He thought of Jefferson and Martha Wayles, like attracting like; the old Duc and the young Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld, December and May. If he were Cosway—by some act of celestial malice—he would do everything possible to rise above his nature; if, on the other hand, he were Maria Cosway, how could he not be in perpetual flight from such a goat’s bed?

  But at that moment Maria Cosway was in flight from no one. She was seated on a bench just inside the Pavillon de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne, watching a trio of tame deer walk calmly about, behind the sharply pointed wooden posts of what was labeled, in French and English, an “American stockade.” The sight was as baffling to her as it was apparently amusing to Jefferson, who detached himself from the stockade and strolled back to the bench, smiling.

  “This represents the gardener’s idea of where the ‘noble savage’ retreats from the dangerous beasts of America.”

  “And it’s not true?”

  “The only dangerous beasts I see at Monticello are horses and doctors.”

  She laughed and, moving the folds of her skirt with one hand, made room for him on the bench. Beyond the stockade, by a little brook and a bridge, other couples strolled through the garden. “You see wild beasts in America, and in Paris you see artists, almost the same thing, no? In the last week you’ve met David, in his studio. And Madame Vigée-Lebrun and Carle Vernet and the sculptor Pagou and also Houdon—”

  “Whom I knew before.”

  “On business only. And you’ve met General Kosciusko as well, a bonus of sorts, since you’re both politicians.” She watched him trace a geometric design in the gravel with his walking stick. Always in slight, contained, masculine motion. Kosciusko she had been told was a kind of Poli
sh hero, a revolutionary statesman who had done—something; but he had known Jefferson instantly, taking his hand in both of his and bowing low with unmistakable respect. “So now we have brought you into the whole Paris world of painters and artists, without even a stockade to protect you.”

  As they made their way, like the other couples, toward the bridge, Jefferson pointed out for her and named, in English, every plant and blossom that they passed. Then he came somehow closer—she watched their swinging hands gently approach, veer, brush; his colored on the back with the soft ginger hairs that also ran stiffly down the nape of his neck, as men’s do—and when she was listening again, he had begun a question.

  “An education for me, of course, in all the fine arts. But you always let the others do the talking. And yet Trumbull assures me that you are a painter as well. Is it true?”

  “Ah,” she said. “Trumbull.”

  “He says you exhibited at the Royal Academy in London.”

  “Once. Once or twice I showed paintings. But Richard, you know …” Leaning, smiling, she brushed the tips of her fingers across his hand and came to a halt in the middle of the path. “Richard forbids me to paint now,” she said seriously, “and if someone insists on a portrait, some friend—well, nothing is for sale.”

  “He forbids?”

  She had told the story often enough, she knew the effect of her smile, and of Richard’s blunt, jealous prohibition; but no one had ever reacted quite as Jefferson did. For a moment she expected his face to harden into anger or outrage—some men did that; other men puffed or blew on their moustaches or raised an eyebrow—the Prince of Wales had laughed. But Jefferson … Was she catching the set of his emotions now, or was he entirely a mystery? … Jefferson simply changed the subject.

  “The Bagatelle up ahead is a building with a curious history.”

  This time she let her hand rest firmly on his and made no move to resume their stroll, so that he was forced to stop and turn back to her. She said, “We’re friends, even in such a short time, are we not?” Through the trees a moving checkerboard of light played across his face; it was like reading a puzzle. “You may hear stories. When our family came back from Italy to England, I was briefly engaged to a musician, a Dr. Parsons, who was quite poor. When I married Richard, some people joked that I had done it for money—Richard is very rich, he was very generous. But it was all for love.”