Now that Patsy was settled at the convent and James was apprenticed to Combeaux the caterer, Jefferson could devote himself to finding a house. In late summer of 1785 he located a place that suited him—the Hôtel de Langeac on the Champs-Elysées, at the corner of rue de Berri. The townhouse had been constructed in 1768 by the Comte de Saint-Florentin for his mistress, the Marquise de Langeac, hence the home’s name. It then passed to the marquise’s son, the Comte de Langeac, who became Jefferson’s landlord. It was a two-story, twenty-four-room structure, with a neoclassical facade and an asymmetrical floor plan that was fashionable at the time and that included a circular entry hall and a large oval bedroom and study; these last two rooms Jefferson took as his own. Behind the house was a large garden, where Jefferson laid out a sizeable plot. He wanted to plant American vegetables, and so he wrote to Colonel Nicholas Lewis requesting seeds for sweet potato, watermelon, and “cantelupe” as well as seeds for the “small ripe corn we call Hominy corn.” He also asked Lewis to send him “a dozen or two bacon hams.” Even amid the gourmet cuisine of Paris, Jefferson still had a hankering for plantation fare. Eventually, he would add Hochheim and Rudesheim grapevines to his garden so that he could begin learning how to make wine, with an eye to transporting vine cuttings to Monticello and starting a vineyard there.
Just as Jefferson enjoyed varying his French table with American produce, he also looked forward to elevating the cuisine at Monticello with the best food and wines Europe had to offer. To make this dream a reality, he befriended Étienne Parent of Beaune, one of France’s foremost wine merchants, who sent Jefferson case after case of fine Burgundies. A Dr. Lambert in Montpelier was Jefferson’s source for muscat, and the Comte de Lur-Saluces provided him with Sauternes. And so the cellar of the Hôtel de Langeac began to fill.7
“I have at length procured a house in a situation much more pleasing to me than my present,” Jefferson wrote to Abigail Adams. “It suits me in every circumstance but the price, being dearer than the one I am now in.”8 Jefferson would pay an annual rent of seventy-five hundred livres. The house was unfurnished, which added to his expenses. He hired servants, purchased horses and carriages that filled the stables, and paid fifty livres per year for the luxury of running water inside the house.9 He then hired Adrien Petit as maître d’hôtel, the servant who ran the entire household, which involved everything from telling the other servants what to do to managing the household accounts. Jefferson also hired a full-time gardener and a full-time coachman. When James Hemings wasn’t apprenticing with Combeaux, he was employed as Jefferson’s personal servant.10
The Jeffersons found themselves welcomed in France, especially among the upper crust. The French elites believed that an ideal society would be simple, honest, and direct in its interaction, a society in which most inhabitants lived in the countryside rather than in the city, a society that despised rank and class, treated everyone as equals, and loved liberty. The French believed America to be just such a place. Back in 1777 one starry-eyed nineteen-year-old French aristocrat, the Marquis de Lafayette, had left behind titles, château, and wife to volunteer in America’s struggle for independence. Before setting sail he wrote to his wife, Adrienne, that he saw himself as a “defender of that liberty which I worship.”11 Writing of Jefferson almost a century later, Henry Adams would say that, between 1784 and 1789, Jefferson could “breathe with perfect satisfaction … the liberal, literary, and scientific air of Paris.”12 The historian Annette Gordon-Reed adds: “For the first time in his life, [Jefferson] lived in a society with a large social cohort whose intelligence, erudition, and accomplishments matched or exceeded his own.”13
Living in Paris was a unique experience for James, too: for the first time in his life, he was essentially a free man. Back home, all Virginians assumed that any black person they encountered was a slave. However, slavery was unknown in France; more to the point, it was illegal. So Parisians who saw black men or women walking through their city may have thought of them as exotic, but never as slaves.
The French were not abolitionists; the government had limited slavery to the French colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Under this contradictory system, it was perfectly acceptable, from the French government’s point of view, for slaves to be auctioned to the highest bidder in the markets of Senegal and then shipped to the Caribbean to labor in the fields in Haiti, as long as such scenes were not to be found in Paris or Marseille or any other French city. Yet the legal and political establishment of prerevolutionary France was wrestling with another issue: What should be done in the case of slaves who were brought into France by their colonial masters? One early solution had been to permit the practice, provided that the owners registered their slaves and made a declaration that the slaves had been brought into the country to receive instruction in the Catholic faith or to learn a trade. In such cases, the slave owner would be permitted to return to the colony with his or her “property” at the conclusion of the religious instruction or apprenticeship.14 A later law passed in 1777 attempted to bar slave owners from bringing their slaves into France in the first place; under this legislation, the slaves were to be held at a depot at their port of arrival and then returned to the colony from which they came. This law, clearly written with the slave owner in mind, was rarely enforced. The masters disembarked in France and took their slaves wherever they liked.
But all such laws were trumped by an even earlier declaration, the Freedom Principle, which stated that an enslaved person became free the moment he or she arrived in France. The Parlement of Paris, the oldest and most influential court in France, routinely rejected any legislation that attempted to limit the Freedom Principle, and the city’s lower courts supported its decisions. Consequently, there was no better place for James Hemings to live than in the French capital.15 In Paris, a slave was entitled to demand freedom from his or her master; if the master refused to grant it, the slave could petition the court for redress. Some slaves also demanded back wages for services rendered, along with their requests for freedom. Annette Gordon-Reed has found that, in the 1780s, records of the admiralty court, where such petitions were filed, declarations from masters who voluntarily freed their slaves outnumber those from slaves demanding their freedom. And, as Gordon-Reed observes, that does not take into account masters who simply freed their slaves outright without filing a declaration with the court.16
The moment James set foot in France, he would have been able to claim his freedom, and Jefferson could have done nothing to stop him. Jefferson wrote of the dilemma to Paul Bentalou, an acquaintance and fellow slave owner who had traveled to Paris and brought along one of his slaves to serve him. “I have made enquiries on the subject of the negro boy you have brought,” Jefferson wrote, “and find that the laws of France give him freedom if he claims it, and that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to interrupt the course of the law.” Then Jefferson added: “I have known an instance where a person bringing in a slave, and saying nothing about it, has not been disturbed in his possession.” The unidentified “person” was Jefferson himself, and there was more to that situation than he let on to Bentalou. With James Hemings going to and from his cooking classes, it would be only a matter of time before he would learn of the “no slaves in France” legislation. To prevent James from running off, Jefferson had made him an offer: if he mastered the art of French cuisine and returned home to Monticello to teach his craft to another slave, then Jefferson would grant his freedom. James accepted the deal.
According to the historian Sue Peabody, France in the late eighteenth century had a population of approximately twenty million, of whom between four thousand and five thousand were black. The city with the largest black population was Paris, in which lived approximately a thousand men, women, and children of African descent.17 Gordon-Reed explains that blacks were concentrated in the city’s best neighborhoods, where they worked as servants in the houses of the aristocracy and the well-to-do. Jefferson’s home, the Hôtel de Langeac, stood
in the fashionable area known as the Faubourg Saint-Germain, so James would surely have met some of these free blacks while running errands or walking to Combeaux’s restaurant for cooking lessons. He would have met even more on evenings when Jefferson held dinner parties, for the black servants would have been part of the entourage of Jefferson’s distinguished guests.
While in Paris, Jefferson paid James a monthly salary. Furthermore, when James had spare time, he was free to wander about the city at will. In allowing this liberty, Jefferson may have combined generosity with prudence—had he tried to restrict James’s mobility, the servant might have run off to the admiralty court (the court charged with enforcing the Freedom Principle) and demanded his emancipation.
No surviving document from Jefferson’s years in France records James’s impressions, but Paris must have dazzled him. In Virginia, Jefferson was an aristocrat, and his house was considered very fine; the cities James had seen thus far—Philadelphia, New York, Boston—were the pride of the United States. But America’s finest cities paled in comparison to Paris, where nobles dwelt in true palaces of dozens of rooms, rattled over cobblestones in gilded carriages, and strode through the halls of Versailles with bejeweled swords swinging by their sides. In Paris, the still-incomplete Monticello would have been mistaken as an outbuilding of a grand estate. With its population of one million, the city could have easily absorbed America’s most populous urban centers of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, with plenty of room to swallow up Providence, Newport, Baltimore, Charleston, and Savannah as well.
In addition to freedom of movement, James had his own money. In Paris in 1785, a servant in a well-off household could expect an annual salary of between one hundred and one hundred fifty livres. Jefferson paid James two hundred eighty-eight livres per year. Once again, perhaps he was generous so that James would not be tempted to claim his freedom. Yet Jefferson was generous to all his household staff in Paris, including his white French servants. Furthermore, unlike Parisian employers who paid their domestic help in one lump sum at the conclusion of a servant’s contracted term of service, Jefferson paid his servants once a month.18
Jefferson’s generosity meant that the servants he employed were fortunate, but it did not alter their status. France, or at least the city of Paris, may have been willing to grant to people such as James the dramatic shift from slave to freeman; yet, in other respects the French social hierarchy remained fixed and rigid. A tradesman could become wealthy, but he would always be a tradesman, never a nobleman. Individuals of lower rank—whether skilled members of the working classes or prosperous merchants—took pride in the quality of their work and guarded their personal respectability, which would earn them the esteem of those both above and below them on the social ladder. The Abbé Grivel, who operated a school in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, summed it up neatly in his instructions for composing letters to various members of society: “The letters one addresses to one’s superiors must always be very respectful; those one addresses to one’s equals should be honest and always convey marks of consideration and respect. As for those one writes to one’s inferiors, one should always give them evidence of affection and kindness.”19
Rank and status in late-eighteenth-century France were reflected in dress. The aristocracy, both men and women, wore the most expensive fabrics—cloth of gold and silver, furs, silk, velvet—elaborate wigs, and exquisite jewelry. The middle classes prided themselves on the quality and tailoring of their modest clothing. Lawyers dressed in black or other somber colors to reflect the seriousness of their profession. Laborers wore long aprons that hung from the shoulders to below the knees in an effort to keep their less costly clothes clean. Of course, human nature being what it is, plenty of people in France, and in Paris in particular, dressed in a way that suggested they were of higher rank than they actually were. The desire to rise in status via clothing and accessories could be curbed by members of one’s class, who might mock the social climber. If derision failed, there was always the police, who were authorized to arrest a non-noble person for wearing a sword. By the 1780s these old strictures had begun to chafe, especially among professionals such as attorneys and physicians, who were eager to rise above the position assigned to them since the Middle Ages. Surgeons, for example, were especially active in trying to sever their centuries-old ties to barbers and having their calling recognized as a distinct and respectable profession.20
In the Paris that James was exploring, scarcely a trace of the old city remained, aside from the churches, the fortresses, and the prisons. Early in the seventeenth century, the city officials had the last medieval houses torn down. Narrow alleys were widened into proper streets, which brought light and fresh air into residential and shopping districts that before had been dark and stifling. A new law mandated that all new streets had to be at least thirty-two feet wide. And beginning in 1667, street lamps were installed, lighting the way for pedestrians and passengers on evening business.21
There were other improvements as well. A local politician named Jean-Jacques Renouard de Villayer invented the city’s first postal system and erected mailboxes in the best parts of town where the well-to-do could drop their letters and messages for collection and delivery by new postal workers. (In the poorer areas, citizens still delivered their messages the old-fashioned way—in person.) Another entrepreneur was Nicolas Sauvage, a carpenter, who in about 1654 designed and built a carriage called a carrosse, which could accommodate several travelers at once. Sauvage’s hired coaches became Paris’s first public transportation system. Within a decade, twenty such carriages were lined up outside the Hotel St. Fiacre, waiting for passengers. The vehicle soon became known as a fiacre, after the location of its first use.22
Urban planning in general was undergoing significant changes. During the Middle Ages, Parisians had built tall houses, piling one floor upon another, a construction style that blocked the sun and plunged a street into perpetual shadow. But in the seventeenth century, as the last medieval houses were being demolished, a new style was introduced: horizontal buildings only two or three stories high, set along the sides of a grand, open square or a broad boulevard. The boulevards were also a new idea; Paris had never before had pedestrian thoroughfares, and they gave rise to a popular trend: walking. The well-born and the well-heeled took to strolling along the boulevards and around the most popular squares to show off their latest fashions. Borrowing a term from their Norman cousins, Parisians adopted the word flâner, meaning “to wander aimlessly.”23
New construction in the city continued well into the eighteenth century, and at its heart was an enormous square, the Place Louis XV. In the middle of the square stood a giant equestrian statue of the late king dressed as a Roman emperor. Installation of the monument had not been easy. The cart bearing the statue had gotten stuck outside, of all places, the Élysée Palace, which had served as the residence of Louis’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Once the square had been formally inaugurated, it became one of the most fashionable areas in the city, sparking a residential building boom in the neighborhood and along the nearby rue Saint-Honoré. During the French Revolution, the king’s statue was destroyed and a guillotine erected in its place. There Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, along with hundreds of lesser French citizens, lost their heads. In 1795, in the aftermath of the Reign of Terror, the square was rechristened as the Place de la Concorde.24
Of course, there was more to Paris than palaces and grand boulevards. Like any visitor to the city, then and now, James would have been drawn to the taverns and cafés that are still among the most popular gathering spots. For example, the Pomme de Pin (Pinecone), on rue de la Cité, had been the favorite watering hole of the fifteenth-century poet François Villon. Two hundred years later, Racine and Molière were regular customers there, and it was one of the best-known taverns in the city; it is possible that James patronized it, too.
Cafés or coffeehouses were a relatively new development. Coffee had become a fashionable beve
rage in the seventeenth century, and it was two Armenian brothers, Pascal and Gregoire Alep, who capitalized on the craze by opening a shop that offered its clientele nothing but the caffeinated beverage.25 Voltaire stopped by the Café Procope every day, which made the location a hangout for the leaders of the Enlightenment. In the 1780s it was still fashionable with intellectuals, and Jefferson and Franklin were among its customers.
For members of Paris’s working class, the city offered pleasure gardens where they could spend a Sunday or a holy day in the company of family and friends, drinking cheap wine, talking, singing, arguing, and perhaps brawling until it was time to stagger home and tumble into bed. Parisians drank alcohol almost exclusively, and they were not alone in their habits; contaminated springs, rivers, streams, and ponds made it unsafe to drink water in the Old World as well as in the New, and so most Europeans and Americans drank beer, ale, hard cider, and wine. Many Parisians began the day not with a cup of coffee, but with a glass of chilled white wine. John Adams had a habit of starting his morning off with a tankard of hard cider. The drinking went on all day long in Paris, where breaks from work for a snack and a few glasses of wine were part of every laborer’s routine.26
Exactly how much wine French laborers downed during the course of a workday is unknown, but they didn’t appear to be drunk to Jefferson. In a letter to a Mr. Bellini dated 1785, he remarked that he admired the sobriety of Parisians and feared for his own countrymen, who were succumbing to “the poison of whiskey, which is destroying them by wholesale.”27 Yet Jefferson’s information regarding French drinking habits was inaccurate. On average, a single Parisian drank approximately 155 liters of wine per year. Louis-Sébastien Mercier tells us that on Sundays the city’s poor and working people walked to taverns in the suburbs for a day of drinking. According to Mercier, after dark, “regiments of drunks return to town … staggering, beating the walls.… The drunkenness of the Parisian people is abominable and horrible.”28
Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee Page 4
