Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  Daubenton handed Short a third set of antlers and a handwritten tag, attached with a cord.

  “ ‘This is the roebuck, of Massachusetts,’ ” Short read. “ ‘About three years old. All of these specimens come from either New Hampshire or Massachusetts.’ ” He looked up to see Clérisseau beginning the next box. “You have several sets of elk horns,” he told Daubenton. “Caribou horns, a number of deer hides and deer skeletons, the ‘spiked horn buck.’ Jefferson has sent them all for the Comte de Buffon to study and exhibit.”

  “And greetings from Brobdingnag!” Clérisseau shouted over the sound of more boards tearing. From the middle box he was in the act of drawing out an amazingly large animal skin, most of whose hair had fallen off or was just now coming away in coppery puffs. Short held his nose. With the instinctive flourish of a true-born Parisian, Clérisseau raised the floppy skin to his shoulders, grasped the neck with one hand, and transformed it into a swirling cape.

  “On the Boulevards,” he said with a courtier’s mince, “I shall dress in the latest fashion d’Amérique.”

  “ ’sieur.” His attending Savoyard was staggering under the weight of a new set of horns. Clérisseau’s face broke into a delighted grin. One hand still gripped the front of the skin at his collar—legs and hoofs dangling down each shoulder—the other lifted the new horns onto his head. He swayed, took a step. Daubenton had put on his glasses and stood beside him, staring. Through the haze of straw and dust Short saw Clérisseau dance into the open, trailing the brown cape, wearing the towering, unmistakable flat-boned horns of a New Hampshire moose.

  “ ‘Moose’!” Clérisseau shouted, reading the card Short held up. He turned in circles before the glass-topped cabinets, whirling like a popeyed pot-bellied Dionysus. “I’ve fallen in love with American words—moose! Moose! À la mode de moose!”

  Memoirs of Jefferson—11

  AMONG THE LOYALISTS AT THE SECOND Continental Congress, it was considered a sinister habit of Sam Adams’s that he liked to organize unruly young men and teach them, of all amazing things, how to sing psalms together.

  “Harmony,” he would say slyly, making one of his strange palsied gestures. “Psalm singing brings many different voices into harmony. Harmony is what we aim at.”

  Seduction. Sedition and seduction were what Sam Adams aimed at, the Tories fumed, just as he “harmonized” his three dozen so-called “Indians” into the infamous, ill-named Boston Tea Party. But by the spring of 1776 even the stubbornest of Tories would have admitted that their complaints were largely drowned out by the clamor for independence that Adams had so tirelessly—I choose the metaphor—orchestrated.

  Jefferson slipped into Philadelphia late as always (he has always “slipped” onto a public stage), just in time to be greeted by rumors, flattery, the first buzzing flies of a Pennsylvania summer, and the unceasing attention of Sam and John Adams, who immediately saw a use for him.

  Or rather for his pen. Because on June 7 the stylish, stiff-necked Richard Henry Lee, “Virginia’s Cicero,” with his bony face and his thin, chilling smile, had walked to the front of the room and placed on the president’s table a resolution that every member of Congress had known would come, sooner or later:

  Friday, June 7, 1776. The delegates from Virginia move in obedience to instructions from their constituents that the Congress should declare that these United colonies are & of right ought to be free & independent states.

  The debate, anticipated for months, raged on for days, inconclusive, bitter, the great states of New York and Pennsylvania still hanging back, South Carolina and Maryland not yet matured (Jefferson said) for “falling from the parent stem.” Midway through June, a committee was appointed to write a declaration, in case the resolution finally passed. The whole of Congress assumed that Richard Lee would head it.

  But Thomas Jefferson was the favorite of the two Adamses (“he is the greatest rubber off of dust I have ever seen,” John Adams repeated busily everywhere), not least because Lee was distrusted by all northerners as “radical,” a kind of oratorical highwayman bound to no one, while the grave, studious Jefferson, mute always in the presence of his elders, looked like a safe, a harmonious, Virginian. Not least, as well, in John Adams’s mind, because Jefferson wrote with the crisp, elevated felicity of a pragmatic angel, and if there was one flaw Adams would admit to, it was that his own prose style, pungent as it was, had too much the smell of earth.

  Was it John Adams who put the very pen in Jefferson’s hand? Probably. The other committee members were no writers either, except for Franklin, who wouldn’t do it (and who would have ruined it with a joke if he had).

  In any case Jefferson went back to his sparse rooms on Market Street and sat down alone before the little folding travel desk. Sat down with a head still aching from the long, intolerable April-to-May attack that had followed the death of his mother. With a head still reverberating—I am guessing now, nobody has been inside that head—still reverberating with anger at his mother for that last unforgivable parental desertion; at his long-dead father, too, no doubt. “Falling from the parent stem” is, after all, strange phraseology for a political revolution. But then, a child’s feelings, though they go underground soon enough, are like stars and never burn out. Break with a parent, willingly or not, and prepare for a deep, melancholy sense of unmendable loss. If you read the Declaration of Independence closely, in its first drafts, you will find it a family document.

  You will find it a family document, for example, in the opening paragraph of “grievances,” which the Rebel must have written with extraordinary speed on the first piece of paper that came to hand (the reverse side of the sheet is covered with pencil drawings of a horse stall he admired in the stables of Governor John Penn): “The king had dent over not only soldiers of our own common blood but Scotch and foreign mercenaries to destroy us, invade us and deluge us in blood. This is too much to be borne even by relations. Enough then be it to day, we are now done with them.” Then: “unfeeling brethren! … we might have been a great and happy people together.” And at the bottom of the page, with many scratchings over and revisions, this: “we acquiesce in the necessity which pronounces our everlasting adieu.” Then crossed out and substituted the exact phrase from Tristram Shandy that he would use six years later on his wife’s deathbed, when he would once again collapse like a man singled out by the gods and destroyed: “the necessity which denounced our eternal separation.”

  Surprisingly enough, for someone so essentially rational and private, he left these last lines in the final draft he laid before Congress on June 28. By then, Pennsylvania was ready to vote on Lee’s resolution, New York would probably vote—the Declaration was shoved to one side, the angry debate resumed. Dickinson rose to protest, John Adams rose (bounced) to refute. On July 2, American independence was abruptly voted and the Congress, with scarcely a moment’s pause, snatched up Jefferson’s document and began to read.

  Began to read and slash, Jefferson must have thought. Adams stubbornly defended every word his young protege had written, but Congress was filled with too many orators and critics. Out came some oversharp phrases and adverbs in the beginning. Out came a fine sentence accusing the king of inciting insurrections. Out came the climactic paragraph describing the treachery of our unfeeling English “brethren,” which had left John Dickinson shaking his poor old egglike head till John Adams believed it would fall off and crack. And out, finally, out came the whole long section denouncing George III for encouraging the slave trade (this was urged by South Carolina and Georgia, but Jefferson noted sarcastically in his journal that the northerners felt a little “tender” about it as well, since they had been pretty considerable carriers of slaves to others). To the author’s mind this was the unkindest cut of all. Jefferson had labored on the passage over and over, on the very steps of the meeting hall John Adams had told him it was the best part of the whole composition, “a noble, vehement philippic.” It reconciled with reality the great assertion of the prea
mble, that all men were created equal, it joined Jefferson’s youthful campaign against slavery and his anger against the parent stem. Independence made no sense without an attack on slavery. To see it crossed out by a clerk’s indifferent pen—

  What did he think? In the state house no one could really tell. He sat in the back row, on an old cane chair, fanning away the flies in silence. Few people knew that on the morning of June 28, when he first had to submit the Declaration, his mind was already deeply troubled, not by the document itself (no one was a more confident writer) but by the terrifying prospect that he would have to walk to the front of the room, turn and face the Congress, and then read aloud what he had written—Jefferson, who never exposed himself by public speaking. He had spent most of the previous night nervously marking up his copy with intricate little slashes and dots intended to tell him just where to pause as he read, and for exactly how long, like a clockwork Patrick Henry. (Afterward the baffled printer would mistake his little marks for commas and periods, so that the first printed copy of the Declaration of Independence was in fact the most ill-punctuated composition in American history.) Now Congress, which had chosen him because he was a writer, was simply hacking away his most deeply felt passages, and he could do nothing but sit and smile in courteous silence.

  Next to him Franklin watched with his usual droll expression. Not much about human nature escaped Franklin. He leaned over and tugged Jefferson’s sleeve. “When I was a young printer,” he said, “I knew a hatter who made a new sign for his shop. He wrote it on a signboard: ‘John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats.’ But his friends came by—you understand friends. One said the word ‘hatter’ was redundant and struck it out. Another said ‘makes’ was unnecessary. Somebody else said, ‘sells hats? Who expects you to give them away?’ When they were finished, his sign was reduced to plain ‘John Thompson’ with the picture of a hat.”

  On November 3, Jefferson gave an evening party for men only.

  “Monsieur Short,” said Lafayette with impenetrable courtesy, coming up to him beside the fireplace, “I believe you know the Duc de La Rochefoucauld?”

  The duc bowed and did not smile. “We have met a dozen times at least, have we not, Monsieur Short? Our noble friend has grown so thoroughly American as to introduce old acquaintances to one another.” A smile arrived at last, like winter, on the due’s gray lips. “Though I believe it is my wife who has the advantage of knowing you well.”

  Short was certain that his face had turned to sheets of flame. He smiled, bowed, accepted wine from James Hemings’s tray, and listened to his voice murmur perfectly truthless, perfectly civil nothings in reply. Out of the background Clérisseau suddenly appeared, grinning broadly and bringing Jefferson with him.

  “I have been speaking to our host,” said Clérisseau, not hesitating to interrupt, “about horns.”

  Short held his smile in a vise.

  “Monsieur Short, the most attentive man in Paris, kindly let me go with him last week to the Jardin du Roi and present that old scoundrel Buffon with twenty sets of horns and a hundred dozen animal pelts from Maine. Now our Thomas says he had no idea they were coming.”

  “In fact, they cost me forty-seven pounds sterling,” Jefferson said wryly, “and nearly lost me the friendship of John Adams in London. I had merely written General Sullivan many months ago and asked him to be on the watch for the skins and horns of a New Hampshire moose, if one came on the market, so that I could prove to Buffon how large our animals really grow.”

  “And instead?” Lafayette was genuinely curious.

  “Instead, as a former general, Sullivan made the acquisition of a moose the object of a regular military campaign. His troops sallied forth in the middle of March—much snow—a herd attacked—one killed—a road cut twenty miles through the wilderness—the carcass drawn on a cart to his house to be cleaned and packed and then shipped on to me. When he arrived in London two months ago, he presented a bill, without explanation, to Abigail Adams, who gave it to her son-in-law, who paid it, aghast, and asked John Adams for reimbursement.”

  Short watched Jefferson bend down and stoke the coals in the fireplace. The Duc de La Rochefoucauld was sixty-five years old if he was a day. Rosalie was twenty-four. Short had seen her alone exactly once since Chaville—a whispered protest in the anteroom of a party, a hurried kiss, not given, not resisted. In the fairy tale the two children pushed the wicked troll into the fire.

  “The size of the bill rather stunned them,” Jefferson said, straightening, “as it did me. And on top of that, I had already put Mr. Smith, the son-in-law, to immense trouble ordering a harpsichord to be made for me in London.”

  Lafayette looked around the drawing room possessively. “Not here.”

  “Not yet. It’s being shipped down the Seine from Le Havre.” With a regretful smile Jefferson held up his withered right hand. “My days of playing music are finished, I’m afraid. It will be for Patsy and Polly.”

  The Duc de La Rochefoucauld took his seat unceremoniously in one of the new blue upholstered chairs arranged before the fireplace. “I understand,” he said, “that Madame Cosway plans to hold an exhibition of her paintings in the Palais Royal.”

  As if on cue, Sally Hemings came into the room to replace her brother, carrying with her a silver tray and two more decanters of wine. She had recently been given money to buy new clothes and have her long hair dressed, and Short saw the duc look up at her with something like distracted masculine interest. Then he let his eyes slide past Short’s and repeated his question.

  This time Jefferson made an almost imperceptible shrug, which Short interpreted silently: He was not privy to Mrs. Cosway’s plans, he had organized his little gathering of men as a perfectly independent occasion.

  “More new rooms!” Clérisseau returned from the doorway, where he had been squinting into the stairwell. He let Sally Hemings pass with an appreciative glance. “It’s ungracious of me, an architect, to say so, but how do you put up with so much building all the time? You’ve been in two houses in Paris and you’ve tried to remodel them both—nails, hammers, racket!”

  “My passion is tearing down and putting up,” Jefferson said placidly. “I cannot let it alone.”

  “Is it true you went a whole winter in Virginia without a roof?” This was the Abbé Morellet, who had the smooth pink cheeks of a roasting pig and held a glass of wine in each trotter.

  Jefferson smiled and shook his head. He took the nearer of Sally Hemings’s decanters and began to move from guest to guest, filling their glasses. The dinner had been typical of him, Short thought; mostly vegetables (including Indian corn from his garden), very little meat, an excellent Château Haut-Brion. The Roman ordinarily followed a strict rule of no more than three glasses of wine a day, but in the past few weeks the rule had been less and less observed. When Maria Cosway had last come to the Grille de Chaillot, which was two weeks ago now, attended by the triple-chinned Princess Lubomirska and an entourage of chattering Poles, Jefferson had served champagne and duck and Maria had neither eaten nor drunk.

  “You must tell us,” said the duc from his chair—Short turned his back and took a step away, which he recognized as idiotically symbolic. What did the duc really know? Or care? More to the point, what did Jefferson know?

  “You must be perfectly honest,” the duc said. “When you return to America, will you rebuild your famous Monticello? Will you make it a maison française?”

  It was a shrewd question. The duc was a shrewd man. Rosalie would not marry a fool. Would not love a fool.

  “I have plans in fact,” Jefferson said with mock pride, “to rebuild it completely à la française. You know the Hôtel de Salm?”

  “Aha!” Clérisseau beamed.

  “You wrote my aunt,” Lafayette said through a mouthful of cheese. “You said you had fallen in love with it, ‘smitten.’ ”

  “I have spent many an afternoon in the Tuileries Garden watching it go up,” Jefferson admitted. “And most of all I
admire the great dome that crowns the house, a wonderful play of horizontal lines against rising curves.”

  “Like the Halle aux Bleds,” said the duc.

  “Exactly. The same combination of Palladian form and modern engineering.” Short handed Jefferson the sheets of ruled paper he knew were wanted and watched as he and Clérisseau began to sketch for the rest a diagram of the intricate beams that supported the dome of the Halle. The Roman could metamorphose into the Enthusiast in a split second if one of his dozen—his two dozen—special interests were mentioned. As Jefferson, now in a chair by the duc, started to draw skylights and stairs he had seen somewhere else, Short edged across the carpet to Lafayette.

  “He is a man of such brilliance,” Lafayette murmured. “Purity.” With his habitual curiosity—or desire to be seen?—Lafayette pulled the curtains apart and looked out on the Champs-Élysées. “Like Washington,” he added as an afterthought.

  “A Madame Townsend has been to see him,” Short said confidentially. “She brought a letter from John Paul Jones and wanted to borrow money. She hinted strongly that she was à daughter of Louis XV and highly placed to aid America.”

  Lafayette was more interested in the dry moat that separated Jefferson’s house from the pavement of the Champs-Élysées and the torchlit customs gate, thronged as usual at this hour with wagons, merchants, lounging soldiers. “Well, it’s easy to check.” He stretched his neck and ran a hand over his bristly red hair. “There’s a man in Versailles who has the official list of the old king’s bastards—I can give you his name—but offhand I don’t remember a Townsend.”

  “Jefferson surmises she was Jones’s mistress.”

  The Prince of Pineapples chuckled. “Dr. Franklin used to say that part of the American mission was to keep Admiral Jones’s mistresses happy. John Adams’s face would go black each time he said it.” He dropped the curtain and looked back at Jefferson, now folding his sketches and slipping them into his pocket. “Architecture bores me. My dear friend”—he turned his back on Short and began to walk briskly toward Jefferson—“here it is November. Have you not received the new constitution? Have you heard nothing?”