The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  Young Martha Jefferson, still very much a country girl, was more amused than dazzled by French femininity. She and her father were barely settled in their lodgings, she told a friend, when “we were obliged to send immediately for the stay maker, the mantua maker, the millner and even a shoemaker before I could go out.” She also submitted to a friseur (hairdresser) once, but “soon got rid of him and turned my hair down in spite of all they could say.” Thereafter she put off Monsieur Friseur as long as possible, “for I think it always too soon to suffer.”4

  With the help of Lafayette’s wife, Jefferson soon found a school for Martha, the Abbaye de Panthemont. The abbess, the father was assured, “was a woman of the world who understands young Protestant girls.” Martha did not speak French, and none of her fellow pupils spoke English. But in the Abbaye lived fifty or more older women “pensioners” from good families, who quickly taught her the language. Soon everyone called her “Jeffy,” and she was “charmed with my situation.” Her father visited her often and found no fault with the education she was receiving.5

  II

  Outwardly, most people saw a serene, confident diplomat, vastly enjoying the architecture, the paintings, the plays, and operas of Paris, a city that was the artistic center of the civilized world. But for a year, Jefferson found it difficult and frequently impossible to shake off his depression. In November 1784, he wrote to a friend that he had “relapsed into that state of ill health, in which you saw me in Annapolis (where Congress met in 1783) but more severe. I have had few hours wherein I could do anything.”

  In January 1785 came a devastating letter: little “Lu” Jefferson was dead, “a martyr to the complicated evils of teething, worms and hooping cough.” Jefferson relapsed into almost total gloom. He was sure his “sun of happiness” had clouded over, “never again to brighten.” Throughout the winter, he was dogged by migraine, poor digestion, and lassitude. John Adams’s wife, Abigail, who had become fond of him, reported he was “very weak and feeble” in March. Jefferson told his friend James Monroe he was “confined the greater part” of the winter.6

  Spring sunshine—and new responsibilities—lifted his spirits. Benjamin Franklin returned to America, and Jefferson was appointed ambassador to France in his place. John Adams went to London as the ambassador to Britain. Jefferson soon realized his new role was “a lesson in humility.” When a French man or woman asked if he was replacing Dr. Franklin, Jefferson invariably replied, “No one can replace him. I am his successor.”

  This reply underscores an aspect of Jefferson’s career that has escaped almost everyone’s attention. In the Revolution, he had not achieved a degree of fame even close to the dimensions of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. The leadership and political skills of these two men had sustained the Revolutionary struggle. Thanks to Lafayette, Jefferson’s role as the author of the Declaration of Independence was better known in France than in America. His part in the following seven years of struggle with Britain had been negligible, and even tinged with failure, thanks to his poor performance as Virginia’s governor.

  III

  After Jefferson had been in Paris almost a year, he began to pass judgment on the country he had so long yearned to visit. The power and privileges of the king and the ruling class of aristocrats troubled him. He told one American correspondent that “the great mass of the people were suffering under physical and moral oppression.” Even the nobility did not possess the happiness “enjoyed in America by every class of people.” The older nobles never stopped intriguing for political power. Younger aristocrats spent most of their time pursuing beautiful women. “Conjugal love” between a husband and a wife was virtually nonexistent. He contrasted this national tendency to the American ideal of a happy marriage.7

  Perhaps influenced by William Temple Franklin’s inglorious example, Jefferson declined to encourage young Americans to come to Europe. He was particularly emphatic on this point with his favorite nephew, Peter Carr, who corresponded with him throughout Jefferson’s stay in France. Jefferson was full of advice to Carr on what he should be studying to prepare himself to become a man of distinction. He had asked his friend James Madison to become Peter’s tutor, and he shipped him boxes of books from Paris. He had intimated when he left Monticello that he might invite him for a visit. But when Carr asked if the time had come, Jefferson informed him that he was now “thoroughly cured of that idea.”

  Jefferson explained why in scathing terms. If he came to Paris, Carr would probably pick up habits that would “poison” his spiritual and psychological health. Young Americans tend to succumb to “the strongest of all human passions” and become involved in “female intrigue[s] destructive of his and others’ happiness.” Or he would develop “a passion for whores destructive of his health.” Either route taught the young American to consider “fidelity to the marriage bed as an ungentlemanly practice.” These temptations were almost impossible to resist with “beauty begging on every street.” Peter did not need foreign travel to make himself “precious to your country, dear to your friends, and happy within yourself.”8

  Young Martha Jefferson did not view French morals as gloomily as her father. This may have been a tribute to Jefferson’s success in insulating her from the worst aspects of Parisian amorality—the prostitutes swarming on the boulevards, the brothels on the side streets. “There was a gentleman a few days ago,” she told her father, “that killed himself because he thought his wife did not love him. They had been married ten years. I believe that if every husband in Paris was to do as much, there would be nothing but widows left.”9

  Jefferson was also uneasy with the Gallic fondness for racy jokes and overt sexual references. His secretary, William Short, reported he “blushed like a boy” when a French friend made an off-color remark. But he was not a puritan like John Adams, frowning disapproval on everyone who yielded or even admitted to sexual desire. Although he may have feared the worst, the new ambassador made no objection when William Short began a liaison with the beautiful young wife of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld. Eventually the affair plunged Short into a decade of misery—fulfilling Jefferson’s remark to Peter Carr that such intrigues destroyed happiness on both sides of the erotic equation.

  Although Jefferson commented acidly on infidelity as a way of life in most upper-class French marriages, he was far more disturbed by French women’s passion for politics. He repeatedly deplored their intrigues and interference, calling them “Amazons” and contrasting them to American wives, who were “angels,” faithful to their spouses and soothers of their husbands’ nerves when they “returned [home] ruffled from political debate.” He persisted in this opinion, even when he met and enjoyed the company of an extremely political American woman in Paris, Abigail Adams. The intensity of his feelings on this subject renews the suspicion that a woman in his own family did not approve of his revolutionary activities.10

  In spite of his negative opinions, the ambassador had a lively social life. He was constantly invited to dine with the Marquis de Lafayette and his charming wife, Adrienne. Jefferson was already admired as the author of the Declaration of Independence when news from Virginia added to his reputation. James Madison reported that Jefferson’s proposal to establish freedom of religion had passed the state legislature. French intellectuals, eager to escape the grip of the Catholic Church, were enthralled.

  Yet Jefferson’s melancholy frequently returned to haunt him. “I am burning the candle of life without present pleasure or future object,” he told one American friend. “I take all the fault on myself, as it is impossible to be among people who wish more to make one happy.”11

  IV

  Lurking just around a bend in time was a cure for this recurring gloom. Her name was Maria Cosway. Jefferson met her one late summer day in 1786 strolling in the Halle aux Bles, Paris’s great domed marketplace, on the arm of the American painter John Trumbull. A mass of golden curls crowned an oval face and exquisite rosebud lips. Liquid blue eyes shaded by an intriguin
g melancholy and a soft, fluttery voice that spoke English with a piquant Italian accent completed a style so meltingly feminine, the ambassador was mesmerized.

  Maria had been the rage of fashionable London for several seasons. She had been born in Italy of Anglo-Irish parents and was in Paris with her husband, the miniature painter Richard Cosway, who stood beside her in an almost blinding array of colors. One of the great fops of the era, Cosway was a gnomish little man twice her age. He strutted around in “macaroni”-style outfits—mulberry silk coats embroidered in scarlet strawberries—and purple shoes.

  Jefferson barely glanced at Mr. Cosway. Enthralled by Maria, he persuaded the Cosways and Trumbull to revise their social calendar for the day while he did likewise and declared himself ready and eager to be Maria’s eyes and ears for a tour of Paris. (It was her first visit.) He hustled them into his ambassadorial carriage, and they rattled off to the royal park of St. Cloud, with its sun-dappled green lanes and magnificent fountains. They dined and strolled through the gallery of the Royal Palace, with its dazzling mythological murals. Back in Paris in the dusk, Jefferson led them to a pleasure garden designed by two ingenious Italians, featuring spectacular fireworks that created “pantomimes” in the night sky—Vulcan toiling at his forge, Mars in combat. Maria cried out with pleasure at these heavenly visions. The day ended with a visit to the most gifted harpist in Europe, who told Maria about his improvements in her favorite instrument while his wife played some of his exquisite compositions.12

  For the next two weeks, the ambassador’s carriage stopped at the Cosways’ house almost every day to whirl Maria off for another six- or seven-hour tour of Paris or its environs. Richard Cosway was busy painting miniatures for a royal patron, the Duke D’Orleans and his family, and John Trumbull returned to London to paint (at Jefferson’s suggestion) “The Declaration of Independence,” which would make him famous. But the loss of these chaperones did not deter Maria and her enthralled admirer from spending whole days together, visiting new Parisian wonders such as the Bagatelle, a park containing exotic gardens and an elegant casino. They enjoyed cold suppers at a small inn near Marly-le-Roi, the favorite palace of long dead King Louis XIV, where pavilions were crowded with beautiful statues of gods and demigods.

  Maria told Jefferson the story of her unhappy life. Educated in an Italian convent, she had seriously considered becoming a nun. Her Protestant mother had forbidden her even to think of it and when her father died, took her to London, where for several years she had scores of wealthy sons of noblemen and East India Company merchants panting after her. She was repelled by all of them, and her mother, perhaps to punish her, perhaps feeling it did not make much difference, ordered her to marry the physically repellent Cosway. Once more she obeyed, but her unhappiness only deepened. Cosway encouraged her to display her considerable talents as a painter and musician, but he was flagrantly unfaithful with lovers of both sexes and frequently rude. She was an ornament for his drawing room, nothing more.

  Pity blended with the desire that Maria’s beauty was stirring in Jefferson’s psyche. There was an innocence about her that made her Italian-flavored coquetry seem harmless, unintentional, even when it was wreaking havoc on his emotions. He gazed into her mournful eyes as she told him that she yearned to do something important with her life. How she envied Jefferson, who had already helped to create a new nation and written some of its laws! As he listened and sympathized, Jefferson saw “music, modesty, beauty and that softness of disposition” that stirred memories of Martha Wayles Jefferson. He began reading poetry and copying passages in which “every word teems with latent meaning.” Some were clearly references to Martha:

  Ye who e’er lost an angel, pity me!

  O how self fettered was my groveling soul!

  To every sod which wraps the dead…

  Other selections seemed to reflect his desire for Maria:

  And I loved her the more when I heard

  Such tenderness fall from her tongue.

  But still other selections suggested a contrary emotion:

  But be still my fond heart! This emotion give o’er’

  Fain would’st thou forget thou must love her no more.

  Jefferson continued to see Maria almost daily. He talked vividly about the natural beauties of Virginia, its rivers and mountains that would make perfect subjects for her brush—she was especially skilled in painting landscapes. A glimpse of Jefferson’s high spirits is visible in a letter he wrote to Abigail Adams in London in which he declared that the French “have as much happiness in one year as an Englishman in ten.” Everywhere he looked in Paris, he saw “singing, dancing, laugh[ing], and merriment.”

  This ebullience may explain what happened on September 18, 1786, as he and Maria strolled along the Seine. Full of exuberant energy, the no longer young ambassador tried to vault a fence or hedge, forgetting that Virginians, virtually born on horseback, were by no means agile on their own feet. He may have been telling Maria about the special thrill of the hunt, the soaring leaps over ditches and fences, and the crunching contact with earth on the other side. In Paris it was the ambassador, not his horse, who crashed to earth. When Jefferson staggered to his feet, his right hand dangled helplessly. He made light of it and strolled cheerfully to his own house, where he told Maria he had dislocated his wrist and had better call a surgeon. He would send her home in his carriage.13

  For two weeks Jefferson was in constant pain. He slept little and no doubt wondered why he had made such a fool of himself. He was not a boy of twenty; he was forty-four years old. Maria sent him sympathetic notes and visited him several times, but a sickroom was hardly the place for further romance. Not until October fourth did Jefferson venture out with Maria again. It was her last day in Paris, and she had begged him to share it with her. The jouncing carriage jarred and possibly dislocated the damaged wrist again; Jefferson spent the night in agony. But another note from Maria, begging to see him one more time, nerved him to call his carriage and join the Cosways as they began their journey to Antwerp to board a ship for London. Maria had told him that her husband had promised to bring her back to Paris in April. “I…shall long for next spring,” her note all but sighed. They had a last meal together in the village of St. Denis and exchanged wrenching farewells.

  V

  Jefferson spent the next two weeks writing one of the longest, most revealing letters of his life. He began by telling Maria that he had stumbled back to his carriage after saying goodbye to her, “more dead than alive.” At home, “solitary and sad,” he sat before the fireside and heard a dialogue begin between his head and his heart:

  Head: Well, friend, you seem to be in a pretty trim.

  Heart: I am indeed the most wretched of all earthly beings. Overwhelmed with grief, every fiber of my frame distended beyond its natural powers to bear, I would willingly meet whatever catastrophe should leave me no more to feel or to fear.

  Head: These are the eternal consequences of your warmth and precipitation. This is one of the scrapes into which you are ever leading us. You confess your follies indeed: but still you hug and cherish them, and no reformation can be hoped where there is no repentance.

  So it went for twelve electrifying pages, written with Jefferson’s left hand. The heart blamed all its troubles on Jefferson’s head, which had taken them to visit the Halle aux Bles, the marketplace where he had met the Cosways, because the head wanted to sketch its magnificent dome. The head acerbically retorted that a chance encounter with a beautiful woman was no excuse for succumbing to a frenzy of love.

  Opinions of this remarkable document have differed almost as violently as Jefferson’s head differed with his heart. Some people have called it a great love letter. Others are put off by the way Jefferson frequently speaks of his fondness for both Maria and her husband. This complaint is easily dismissed. Jefferson was protecting both himself and Maria from scandal if a stranger or, worse, a newspaper got hold of the letter. But this dialogue between head and heart remain
s a very strange love letter.

  Most love letters passionately avow devotion and adoration without any qualification. Those are the ones recipients save for the rest of their lives. But this dialogue between the head and the heart does not affirm that sort of passion. On the contrary, the heart’s protestations of its rights and pleasures are repeatedly rebuked and checked by the head.

  Here is the head telling the heart how to find tranquility:

  The art of life is the art of avoiding pain: and he is the best pilot who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it [life] is beset…. Those which depend on ourselves, are the only pleasures a wise man will count on: for nothing is ours which another may deprive us of. Hence the inestimable value of intellectual pleasures. Ever in our power, always leading us to something else and never cloying, we ride, serene and sublime above the concerns of this mortal world.

  Carried away by its own eloquence, the head goes much too far. It tells the heart to avoid friendships. Friends get sick, die, lose their money or their wives, and require exhausting amounts of sympathy. The heart replies eloquently that there is deep pleasure in consoling a friend or caring for him during an illness. Working itself into a fury, the heart decries “sublimated philosophers” and their “frigid speculations.” If just once they experienced the “solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart,” they would instantly change their arid minds. Defiantly, the heart tells the head it intends to go on loving people, especially Mrs. Cosway, who has promised to return in the spring. He is sure she (and her husband) will reappear in Paris’s May sunshine. Even if she fails to come and fate places them on opposite sides of the globe, his “affections shall pervade the whole mass to reach them.”14 With those brave words, the heart wins a victory of sorts. But it is hardly a resounding one. Perhaps the best proof that this is a very special kind of love letter is the lady’s reaction to it. “How I wish I could answer that dialogue,” Maria wrote wistfully. “But I honestly think my heart is invisible and mute….”15