by John Ferling
Franklin, who was pushing eighty and suffered so many afflictions that he could hardly stir from Passy, had asked to be recalled. Congress complied, sent Adams to London as the first United States minister to the Court of Saint James, and named Jefferson to succeed Franklin. Jefferson knew that he would never be held in the same esteem as Franklin, who he thought was the most respected man in France. Nevertheless, Frenchmen that Jefferson had met during the war spoke positively of him to the Foreign Ministry. Lafayette, in fact, praised Jefferson as the best ambassador that the United States could appoint, and characterized him as “good, upright, enlightened” and “respected and beloved by every one that knows him.”11 Lafayette’s judgment was borne out. Jefferson established an agreeable relationship with Comte de Vergennes, Louis XVI’s foreign minister. Franklin had been rather passive and deferential, and Adams confrontational. Jefferson, who was always diligent and industrious, did his homework, interacted agreeably with Vergennes, and succeeded in winning the foreign minister’s respect. Privately, Jefferson disparaged Vergennes’s devotion to “pure despotism” and criticized his lack of knowledge of American affairs, but he also believed that the foreign minister’s inordinate fear of Great Britain rendered him of great value to the United States.12 However, a good rapport did not mean success. When all was said and done, Jefferson achieved little that he had set out to accomplish.
Thomas Paine in Common Sense had been uncannily accurate in capturing the aspirations of the colonists. “Our plan is commerce,” he said of what was to be the United States, and he added that trade “will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe; because it is the interest of all Europe to have America’s free port.”13 Jefferson could not have agreed more, and he worked tirelessly to persuade the French to move toward a free trade policy. The most enlightened French officials, perhaps including Vergennes, agreed with him. But Jefferson soon saw that he was swimming upstream. The French system consisted of ancient monopolies, Byzantine restrictions, cumbersome fees and duties, and antiquated means of collecting taxes. Besides, any French official so unwary as to attempt dramatic alterations risked not only political suicide but also upsetting the fragile economic system.
Jefferson had a second goal as well. Longing to break Great Britain’s neartotal monopoly of the American market, he wished that France would begin exporting its manufactured goods to the United States. He was no less eager to have the French open their ports to Chesapeake tobacco, rice, and naval stores from the Carolinas and Georgia, grains from the mid-Atlantic region, and fish and oil shipped from New England. In no time, the United States could enjoy a more satisfactory balance of trade, its merchants and planters could disentangle themselves from their long-standing bondage to British creditors, and the new American Union could be bolstered. It was a vision of greater American economic independence, which if realized would only aid its political independence.
Jefferson won the approval of Vergennes and other important French officials. Hamilton’s friend Gouverneur Morris, who came to France in 1789 to tend to Robert Morris’s business interests, found that Jefferson was “very much Respected” by the French. Morris added that the esteem in which the American minister was held was “merited by [his] good Sense and good Intentions.”14 But Jefferson could not move mountains. Nor did he have a magic wand. For instance, even though he persuaded France to permit imports of rice from the southern Low Country, the French spurned the American product as inferior to rice from northern Italy and the Levant. For all Jefferson’s work, after five years the volume of Franco-American trade had hardly changed. Not until deep into the next century would some of his dreams be realized.
Jefferson had spent thirty months in France, and his outlook regarding Franco-American relations and the security of the United States had gelled. This outlook changed little over the next quarter century. He persistently clung to the hope that, in time, the French might see their varied and ever-changing Continental trade as “of short duration” and commerce with the United States as “perpetual.” In addition, he saw France as the very rock of American safety. “Nothing should be spared on our part to attach this country to us,” he counseled. “It is the only one on which we can rely for support under every event. It’s inhabitants love us more I think than they do any other nation of earth.”15
In the spring of 1786, after a year’s separation, Jefferson was reunited with John and Abigail Adams, if only briefly. Adams, in London, believing his negotiations on commercial treaties with Portugal and Tripoli had reached the crucial stage, asked Jefferson to come and join the talks. Jefferson came quickly, as eager to see his old friends as to conduct diplomacy. The Adamses were delighted to see him too. When leaving Paris a year earlier, Abigail had confessed that her one “regreet [was] to leave Mr. Jefferson.” After moving to London, she remarked that the separation from the Virginian “left me in the dumps.”16
Jefferson remained in England for more than six weeks, in the course of which he and Adams set off on a seven-day, three-hundred-mile tour of the English countryside. They visited gardens, took in the architecture, climbed a 115-foot observation tower for a panoramic view of five counties, walked battlefields from the English Civil War, paid admission to see Shakespeare’s house—where, reprehensibly, they “Sat in the chair in which he used to Study, and cut a relic from it”—and looked over the college in Oxford.17
Back in London, their negotiations with Tripoli went nowhere, though the two concluded an accord with Portugal’s envoy, only to learn subsequently that it had been rejected in Lisbon. Jefferson had also crossed to England filled with the misguided hope that he and Adams might jointly persuade Great Britain to budge on its trade policies toward the United States. Instead, he soon discovered—as Adams put it—that opinion in England was “high against America.” Adams also remarked that the English treated him with “dry decency and cold civility.” Jefferson would have relished such treatment. Throughout his stay, he felt that he was looked on with contempt. When he was introduced to the monarch, George III responded with a noticeable lack of civility. An unconfirmed story later made the rounds that the king had turned his back on Jefferson. That account was probably embellished, as Jefferson never mentioned it. Later, Jefferson said that the king and queen had been “ungracious.” He added that the English people disliked Americans and “their ministers hate us, and their king more than all other men.” He also remarked that the English “require to be kicked into common good manners.”18
For the most part, Jefferson was happy to leave England and return to France. England “fell short of my expectations,” he said, though in fact much that he said about England was complimentary. He thought the English were unrivaled as farmers and gardeners, and that England’s “labouring poor” were better off by “about a third” than their counterparts in France. He lauded the English for their adaptability to machines, and was especially taken by their “application of … the steam-engine to grist mills.” He even thought London was “handsomer” than Paris, though not so appealing as Philadelphia. Aside from their enmity toward Americans, the two things that he disliked most were British architecture—“the most wretched … I ever saw”—and the horrid “extravagance” with which the English aristocracy lived, though the British nobility hardly differed in that regard from aristocrats throughout Europe.19
Jefferson must also have been happy to resume his life as a diplomat, which he thoroughly enjoyed. On a day-in, day-out basis, he tended to the surprisingly large number of Americans who came to Paris, helping them as best he could. He sometimes entertained them, which he never thought an onerous part of his duties. Near the end of his mission, several Americans living in Paris paid tribute to his “particular kindness and attention to every American” who needed assistance, adding that Jefferson’s “noble and generous” behavior had won their “love and admiration.” Jefferson always seemed to have time to help others. When Gouverneur Morris came to Paris on business, he met with Jefferson thirteen times
during his initial six weeks in the city, and on several occasions dined with him. Though they had “only a slight Acquaintance” beforehand, Jefferson showed Morris about Paris, making observations on Parisian architecture all the while, and even provided tips on shopping. Morris noted too that “Mr. Jefferson lives well, keeps a good Table and excellent Wines which he distributes freely and by his Hospitality to his Countrymen here he possesses very much their good Will.”20
When Jefferson returned from London in the spring of 1786, almost four years had passed since his wife’s death. He did not keep a diary, and in his correspondence with his closest friends Jefferson maintained a stony silence about his inner feelings. But it appears that the distractions of work and a spirited social life—and, above all, time—helped him through the canyons of anguish. Consciously or not, he was at last ready to move on with his life. All that remained was to meet the right person, and by accident, while sightseeing on a warm summer afternoon in August or September, he met her. Her name was Maria Cosway. Jefferson and his companion, the young American artist John Trumbull, stumbled upon Maria and her husband at the Halle aux Bleds, the Parisian grain market. Trumbull knew the Cosways from his days in London and introduced them to Jefferson.
Jefferson was immediately bewitched by this attractive and accomplished twenty-six-year-old blonde. She was the daughter of English parents who owned an inn in Florence. After her four older siblings were murdered by an insane nurse, Maria was sent to a convent school, where she became fluent in six languages and blossomed into an accomplished painter and musician. When she was nineteen, her mother arranged her marriage to Richard Cosway, one of London’s better-known artists. He had money and the settlement was bountiful. But Cosway was nearly twice Maria’s age and decidedly unattractive, with simian features. (William Hogarth, the pictorial satirist, once depicted Cosway as a hairy baboon.) Maria was not ready to marry, and to be sure, she was not eager to have Cosway as a husband. But she dutifully married and went with him to live in a four-story, twenty-six-room mansion in London, a place that soon acquired a reputation for lusty evening parties at which “dangerous Connections may be formed.” That, at any rate, was the opinion of the bustling Gouverneur Morris, who met Maria in London in 1788, called on her often, and described her as “vastly pleasant.” She was, in fact, a modern career woman, as she was childless and exhibited and sold her paintings.21
Beguiled, Jefferson begged off a prior engagement so that he could dine with the Cosways on the evening they met. That was the beginning. Over an indeterminate period, probably somewhere in the vicinity of six weeks, he spent numerous “half days, and whole days” with her. They explored Paris, visited galleries and museums, attended concerts and the theater, even ranged into the countryside. On one excursion along the Seine, Jefferson, feeling his oats and forgetting his age, attempted to bound over a fence. He did not succeed. He fell, breaking his right wrist. He underwent surgery, and for up to two weeks was confined at home with racking pain. Maria visited him throughout his convalescence. Richard Cosway’s feelings are unknown. However, once he learned that his wife planned to see the recuperating Jefferson, Cosway “kill’d my project,” as she put it, and suddenly cut short their stay in France. She thought her husband was more eager to return home than she had “seen him all this time.”22
Knowing that Maria would be leaving the next day, Jefferson called for her and they rode together in his new cabriolet. That night, the pain of her imminent departure was accompanied by an excruciating throbbing in his wrist, brought on, he said, by “having rattled a little too much over the pavement.” He found “No sleep, no rest” that evening.23 The next morning, his agony notwithstanding, Jefferson had the horse hitched to his small carriage and accompanied the Cosways out of Paris.
Soon after returning home, Jefferson sent Maria one of the lengthiest missives he ever wrote, a four-thousand-word composition, all of it written with his left hand. This so-called “head and heart” letter was abstruse, deliberately so, as he was searching to learn if she thought their relationship had a future, but at the same moment fearful of where his unbridled passion was leading. He confessed that he had been a “mass of happiness” while with her, and that “every moment” they shared had been “filled with something agreeable.” He waxed on about her “qualities and accomplishments,” specifically her artistic skills and “modesty, beauty, and that softness of disposition.” But since the “awful moment” of her leaving, he had sunk to the depths of sadness. “I am rent into fragments by the force of my grief,” he wrote, adding that without her, he was “more dead than alive.” He portrayed himself and Maria as similar in many ways, but especially as victims of “the same wound.” Each suffered the sad, lacerating pain of loneliness, hers due to an unhappy marriage, his the consequence of a marriage that had come to a devastating end.
The “art of life is the art of avoiding pain,” he said, and one way for them to avoid their pain was “to retire within ourselves.” Though he did not say so, this was the course he had chosen following both his disappointments as a clumsy collegiate suitor and his wife’s death. On each occasion, he had become a “gloomy Monk, sequestered from the world” and left to face “unsocial pleasures in the bottom of his cell!” His life changed when he met Maria. Having “felt the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart,” he never wished to return to a “frigid” existence. Instead, he wanted to embrace her “wonderful proposition”; when two lonely people were thrown together and fell in love, she had apparently said, they should “retire” together. Sharing their love would “insulate” them against the “dull and insipid” world of sorrow and anguish.
Jefferson spoke of their “follies” in Paris, a married woman and single man carrying on an affair. But the risks they had run had been “worth the price.” He had no regrets. “We have no rose without it’s thorn: no pleasure without alloy.” Looking “back on the pleasures” he had found in being with her, he assured Maria that his tender memories remained secure in the “warmest cell” of his heart.
Reason told him that there was no hope for a permanent relationship with her, but he contrasted his situation with that of the patriots in his country who in 1776 had longed to be independent but knew that their dream could only be realized through a seemingly impossible war against mighty Great Britain. Thankfully, he continued, America’s rebels had sought that which they cherished. “[W]e supplied enthusiasm against wealth and numbers: we put our existence to the hazard, when the hazard seemed against us, and we saved our country.”
Jefferson seemed to be saying that he and Maria should act daringly to save themselves. In the most esoteric fashion, he appeared to say that he wanted Maria to live with him at “our dear Monticello.” Together on his remote hilltop, they would “ride above the storms,” living happily not “in the shade but in the sunshine of life.” How “sweet it is to have a bosom whereon to recline our heads.”24
Jefferson wrote three additional times during the first weeks after Maria’s return to London, routing his letters through Trumbull, so that Richard Co-sway would remain unaware. In each, he probed to learn her feelings. “Write to me often. Write affectionately, and freely…. Say many kind things and say them without reserve,” he said. A Christmas Eve missive was filled with love. He confessed, “I am always thinking of you,” adding, “I am determined not to suppose I am never to see you again.” And he implored her to “Think of me much, and warmly. Place me in your breast with those who you love most.”25
Maria responded that she wanted to write “an endless letter,” one in which she would presumably say all the things he wanted to hear. However, given what she called the “torments, temptations, and weariness” that had forever haunted females, she said she was unable to be straightforward. Her guarded letter was so diffuse that its meaning was difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle. One way to read it was that she was telling Jefferson of her hope to leave her husband and live with him. Though perhaps not “reasonable i
n [her] expectations,” she said, she and Jefferson shared “trait[s] of character” and thought, and both had long been “suffering patiently” with the hand that fate had dealt them. Maria appeared to tell Jefferson that he could spend his days alone “on the beautiful Monticello tormented by the shadow of a woman”—his deceased wife—or he could live a happy and productive life with the woman he loved, a choice that would permit him to reach his full potential, so that history would remember him as a muse “held by Genius, inspired by wit.”26 No less recondite than he had been in his “head and heart” letter, Maria gave the appearance of saying that the next move was Jefferson’s.
Jefferson, who had been writing to Maria roughly every three weeks, waited four months to respond, though the delay was due largely to his long trek through France and northern Italy. Either he had not understood her letter, or he wanted to make sure that he had not misunderstood what she had written, for he again delved to learn her feelings. He began by telling her that he longed to see her, and that if she came to Paris, he wanted to see her every day. During every minute they were together, he wrote, “we will … forget that we are ever to part again.” But this too, was a letter that was more about discovering her thinking. He begged her to express the sentiments “flowing from the heart.”27
Maria did not do that in a letter, but late in the summer of 1787 she returned to Paris, and without her husband. Officially, she had come to further her artistic aspirations, but her act was so extraordinary that in some measure she must have undertaken the trip to discover whether she and Jefferson had a future. Moreover, by acting so daringly, defiantly even, she was, as Jefferson had requested, expressing the sentiments that flowed from her heart. She arrived late in August and remained for nearly one hundred days. Though she lodged with a Polish princess on the other side of Paris, Maria and Jefferson saw each other frequently. No one knows what transpired between them, what was said, what was done. All that is known is that they were together on what was scheduled to be her last night in Paris, December 6, and that they agreed to meet the following morning for breakfast. Maria did not appear. In fact, she left Paris without saying goodbye. She subsequently pleaded both that she was “Confus’d and distracted” and that she “could not bear to take leave any more.” Both explanations were probably true, but confusion, or discomfiture, was probably paramount. Something had brought matters to a head during their final night together. Indeed, she told Jefferson that she had “suspected” the evening would end as it did. She must have said that she was ready to leave her husband for him, but she must also have said that she would not divorce Cosway, a step nearly unheard of in the eighteenth century, and one forbidden by the Catholic Church.28
