NINETEEN
Will you take the trouble to procure for me the largest pair of bucks horns you can?
—THOMAS JEFFERSON to Archibald Cary
JEFFERSON FOUND THE SHOPPING in France wonderful. He bought silver and china and wine. Intrigued by a new innovation—“phosphoretic” matches—he purchased three dozen to send to friends in America. There were opera tickets and Italian comedy tickets and tickets to the occasional concert spirituel, musical performances in the Salle des Machines of the Palais des Tuileries. (Jefferson’s first included a song of Handel’s.) He acquired more than sixty paintings in his five years in Paris, many of them portraits or images of religious subjects or scenes. Particular purchases: a Prodigal Son, a Democritus and Heraclitus, a St. Peter Weeping, a Magdalen Penitent, and a Salome Bearing the Head of St. John.
Twice he attended masquerade balls at the Opéra—parties that began at eleven p.m. and ran until six in the morning. (Once he and William S. Smith, John Adams’s son-in-law, were the targets of a forward baroness: “When Mr. Jefferson had made his escape,” Smith wrote, “she had fastened her talons on me.”) On Tuesdays he made his way to Versailles for Ambassadors’ Day. He also visited Patsy at her convent school, the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, which was run by Bernadine nuns—“a house of education altogether the best in France, and at which the best masters attend,” Jefferson wrote to one of his sisters in Virginia.
He tried to play chess with Parisians but found that they were too accomplished for him. When he arrived in Paris, he had accepted an invitation to join an elite chess club at the Palais Royal, the Salon des Échecs. “I have heard him say that when, on his arrival in Paris, he was introduced into a chess club, he was beaten at once, and that so rapidly and signally that he gave up all competition,” one of his granddaughters recalled. He was not a man who liked to lose.
He devoted his energies to the delights of the city’s intellectual society. In June 1785, Jefferson called on the Comtesse d’Houdetot at Sannois, hoping that the trip “has opened a door of admission for me to the circle of literati with which she is environed.” There the party heard a nightingale’s song, Jefferson said, “in all its perfection: and I do not hesitate to pronounce that in America it would be deemed a bird of the third rank only, our mocking-bird and fox-colored thrush being unquestionably superior to it.”
Jefferson remained ambivalent about the tension he found between the virtues and vices of European culture and politics. He was a tireless advocate for things American while abroad, and a promoter of things European while at home. Moving between the two worlds, translating the best of the old to the new and explaining the benefits of the new to the old, he created a role for himself as both intermediary and arbiter. From ideas of political power to Lombardy poplars, from architectural style to pasta, Jefferson put himself at the heart of the transatlantic conversation—always in the service of his nation.
He scouted the finest artists. Officials in Virginia had asked Jefferson and Franklin to execute a sacred charge: the commissioning of a statue of Washington for the new state capitol in Richmond. Jefferson found the perfect artist, Jean-Antoine Houdon, the man Jefferson considered the finest sculptor of the age. Writing Washington, Jefferson said that Houdon would like to come to America “for the purpose of forming your bust from the life.”
Whatever Jefferson learned, he acted upon. “An improvement is made here in the construction of the musket which it may be interesting to Congress to know,” Jefferson wrote John Jay in August 1785. “It consists in the making [of] every part of them so exactly alike that what belongs to any one, may be used for every other musket in the magazine.” Jefferson also asked George Washington “to communicate to me what you can recollect of Bushnell’s experiments in submarine navigation during the late war, and whether you think his method capable of being used successfully for the destruction of vessels of war.” Jefferson sent John Jay documents about French marines on the chance that establishing a marine corps “may become interesting to us.”
He took particular pains to convince the Comte de Buffon that American animals were not, as the count believed, inferior. Jefferson asked Archibald Cary to secure him the horns of a buck: He planned to demonstrate his point with a native example. Jefferson traveled to a school for the blind to learn what he could about its methods of teaching (he also owned a book on instructing deaf-mutes). With Malesherbes, a great French politician and botanist, he exchanged American nuts and berries for French grapevines. He also supported the plans of the American explorer John Ledyard, who was in Paris and called Jefferson “a brother to me.” Ledyard was planning a journey from Siberia to Kamchatka and thence to North America to the Atlantic.
Jefferson held a unique position. “It is certainly of great importance to us to know what is done in the philosophical world; but our means of information are confined almost entirely to you,” the Reverend James Madison wrote him from Williamsburg in April 1785. His home country’s hunger for news was palpable. In a postscript, Madison wrote: “Has the Abbé Rochon published any thing upon his new discovery in optics? How is the effect produced? What is the specific gravity of the crystal? In what way does it differ from other rock crystals?” Jefferson was thrilled to be able to answer.
He also enjoyed shopping for John and Abigail Adams. He purchased a porcelain Mars to complete a set of Minerva, Diana, and Apollo for Abigail. “This will do, thinks I, for the table of the American Minister in London, where those whom it may concern may look and learn that though Wisdom is our guide, and Song and Chase our supreme delight, yet we offer adoration to that tutelar god also who rocked the cradle of our birth, who has accepted our infant offerings, and has shown himself the patron of our rights and avenger of our wrongs.” (The figurines were accidentally destroyed en route to London.) He once sent corsets—by request—to the Adamses’ daughter Abigail Smith. “He wishes they may be suitable,” Jefferson wrote in the third person, “as Mrs. Smith omitted to send her measure.… Should they be too small however, she will be so good as to lay them by a while. There are ebbs as well as flows in this world.” In return, John and Abigail Adams supervised Jefferson’s English tailoring and shoemaking needs.
Ihave at length procured a house in a situation much more pleasing to me than my present,” he told Abigail Adams in September 1785. It was the Hôtel de Langeac, at the corner of the Champs-Élysées and the rue de Berri. “I cultivate in my own garden here Indian corn for the use of my own table, to eat green in our manner,” he wrote Nicholas Lewis in 1787.
Gardening kept him emotionally connected to home. “I am now of an age which does not easily accommodate itself to new manners and new modes of living: and I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds, and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gay capital.”
He was not exactly a barbarous savage. “I observed that although Mr. Jefferson was the plainest man in the room, and the most destitute of ribbons, crosses and other insignia of rank that he was the most courted and most attended to (even by the courtiers themselves) of the whole diplomatic corps,” wrote Thomas Shippen, a young American studying law in London who visited Jefferson in Paris, in 1788.
His public life was going well. “He is everything that is good, upright, enlightened, and clever,” Lafayette wrote the Maryland physician and politician James McHenry from Paris in 1785, “and is respected and beloved by everyone that knows him.” In a sketch published two years later, Luigi Castiglioni, an Italian count, wrote: “Mr. Jefferson is a man of about 50 years of age, lean, of a serious and modest appearance. His uncommon talents are not readily visible at a first encounter, but as one talks with him about the various subjects in which he believes himself to be informed, he very quickly gives evident proof of his judgment and application.”
Jefferson’s ability to absorb and assess the world around him, whether political, scientific, or social, was evident in a description of Parisian life he gave an American friend in his French years. Imaginatively offering a portrait of the daily routine amid the “empty bustle of Paris,” he wrote:
At eleven o’clock it is day chez Madame. The curtains are drawn. Propped on bolsters and pillows, and her head scratched into a little order, the bulletins of the sick are read, and the billets of the well. She writes to some of her acquaintance and receives the visits of others. If the morning is not very thronged, she is able to get out and hobble round the cage of the Palais royal: but she must hobble quickly, for the coiffeur’s turn is come; and a tremendous turn it is! Happy, if he does not make her arrive when dinner is half over! The torpitude of digestion a little passed, she flutters half an hour through the streets by way of paying visits, and then to the Spectacles. These finished, another half hour is devoted to dodging in and out of the doors of her very sincere friends, and away to supper. After supper cards; and after cards bed, to rise at noon the next day, and to tread, like a mill-horse, the same trodden circle over again. Thus the days of life are consumed, one by one, without an object beyond the present moment: ever flying from the ennui … eternally in pursuit of happiness which keeps eternally before us. If death or a bankruptcy happen to trip us out of the circle, it is matter for the buzz of the evening, and is completely forgotten by the next morning.
This was Jefferson’s cultural view of the French; politically, he worried, too, about how the French viewed America. “The politics of Europe render it indispensably necessary that with respect to everything external we be one nation only, firmly hooped together,” he wrote Madison in February 1786. “And it should ever be held in mind that insult and war are the consequences of a want of respectability in the national character.” (He also asked Madison for a “hundred or two nuts of the pecan. They would enable me to oblige some characters here whom I should be much gratified to oblige.”)
Madison was making some progress at home on his and Jefferson’s mutual worry over the power of the central government. A convention to deal with issues of commerce was being called to convene in Annapolis. This meeting ultimately became the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Progress was slow, but real. First the states had to agree to send delegations; the delegations then had to settle on a plan; and finally the plan would face ratification in the states. “I almost despair of success,” Madison said.
While in France, Jefferson mused about the relationship of the individual to the state. He had a stimulating companion with whom to discuss such questions: At midsummer 1787, Thomas Paine visited Jefferson in Paris.
The son of a corset maker, Paine was born in Thetford, a town in Norfolk, England, in 1737. He was raised in an unconventional climate of dissent. His father was a Quaker; his mother was the daughter of an Anglican lawyer. Young Paine was baptized in the Church of England but sometimes went to Quaker meetings.
His Common Sense had galvanized America in 1776, selling more than half a million copies. A powerful writer, Paine followed Common Sense with The Rights of Man, an assault on monarchy, in 1791, and, in 1794–95, with The Age of Reason, an equally epic assault on organized religion. Paine and Jefferson became friends and longtime correspondents; they shared a vision of a new, enlightened world—though Jefferson never forgot that it was foolhardy to sacrifice real progress, however compromised, to the dreams of the ideal.
John Adams wanted Jefferson to come to London. After a series of meetings with the ambassador from Tripoli—sessions that included large pipes of tobacco, turbans, and hot coffee—Adams believed there was an opening to come to an arrangement with the Mediterranean power. Without such a resolution, Adams feared, the American experiment itself might be at risk. “What has been already done and expended will be absolutely thrown away,” he told Jefferson, arguing that there could be a war in the region “which will continue for many years, unless more is done immediately.” In a letter dated Tuesday, February 21, 1786, he asked Jefferson to travel to England.
Jefferson accepted, telling Patsy that he would be back before a letter from her might reach him. “I shall defer engaging your drawing master till I return,” he told her. “I hope then to find you much advanced in your music. I need not tell you what pleasure it gives me to see you improve in everything agreeable and useful.”
At a London dinner hosted by Sir John Sinclair with members of the incumbent ministerial party, Jefferson was seated next to a General Clarke, a Scotsman. “He introduced the subject of American affairs, and in the course of the conversation told me that were America to petition Parliament to be again received on their former footing, the petition would be very generally rejected.”
Jefferson could not believe what he was hearing. “He was serious in this, and I think it was the sentiment of the company, and is the sentiment perhaps of the nation.” As Jefferson saw it, “the object of the present ministry [in London] is to buoy up the nation with flattering calculations of their present prosperity, and to make them believe they are better without us than with us. This they seriously believe; for what is it men cannot be made to believe!”
He showed neither anger nor puzzlement, which is often anger in disguise. Honed through long years in company in Virginia and beyond, it was a gift, this capacity to maintain a placid exterior no matter how much turmoil lurked beneath. He was usually a master of his emotions. “I know of no gentleman better qualified to pass over the disagreeables of life than Mr. Jefferson, as he makes his calculations for a certain quantity of imposition which must be admitted in his intercourse with the world,” said a friend of Jefferson’s. “When it shows itself in high colors, he has only to count ten and he is prepared for the subject.”
In London he and Adams had called at court, only to find that it would have been “impossible for anything to be more ungracious” than George III and Queen Charlotte’s “notice of Mr. Adams and myself.” Many things can be (and are) said of Jefferson, but he was not a rude man, and the monarchs’ unwelcoming disposition, however understandable given that the callers had humiliated the realm over which the Hanovers presided, confirmed everything Jefferson already believed about hereditary power.
Jefferson was struck by the vitriol about America that he read in the London press. “They teem with every horror of which human nature is capable,” Jefferson remarked to Abigail Adams. “Assassinations, suicides, thefts, robberies, and, what is worse than assassination, theft, suicide, or robbery, the blackest slanders!” Jefferson shared a self-aware confidence with Abigail: “It would have illy suited me. I do not love difficulties. I am fond of quiet, willing to do my duty, but irritable by slander and apt to be forced by it to abandon my post. These are weaknesses from which reason and your counsels will preserve Mr. Adams.”
Before Jefferson returned to France, he and Adams decided to spend a few days surveying English gardens, traveling together and passing many warm and intimate hours absorbing the cultivated beauty of a landscape shaped by the creative imaginations of men who had set themselves the task of subtly mastering the natural world.
In Paris, Jefferson was nervous and garrulous about arrangements to bring Polly to him from Virginia. “My anxieties on this subject could induce me to endless details, but your discretion and that of Mrs. Eppes saves me the necessity,” he wrote Francis Eppes. “I commit to Mrs. Eppes my kisses for dear Poll, who hangs on my mind night and day.”
Then a simple letter arrived. “Dear Papa,” read the one-sentence missive, “I want to see you and sister Patsy, but you must come to Uncle Eppes’s house.”
Jefferson found himself in debate with a seven-year-old: “I wish so much to see you that I have desired your uncle and aunt to send you to me,” he wrote Polly. “I know, my dear Polly, how sorry you will be, and ought to be, to leave them and your cousins but your sister and myself cannot live without you.… In the meantime you shall be taught here to play on the harpsichord, to draw, to dance, to read and talk French and such other things as will make you more worthy of the love of your friends. But above all things, by our care and love of you, we will teach you to love us more than you will do if you stay so far from us.”
He could console himself in dark moments with the optimism evident in a recent letter from Charles Thomson: “I will venture to assert, that there is not upon the face of the earth a body of people more happy or rising into consequence with more rapid stride, than the inhabitants of the United States of America. Population is increasing, new houses building, new lands clearing, new settlements forming and new manufactures establishing with a rapidity beyond conception.”
Jefferson was counting on it.