“Hurry!” he tells her. “They will leave without us!”
Thomas Jefferson is angry. He is running, but she can’t run with him, because she is barefoot and the streets are covered with jagged, glinting shards and her feet are getting cut. “Run!” he tells her. “You have to run! They are almost gone!” But she can’t run. The shards slice and tear. Her feet are bloody.
She wants to call out to him, but she can’t make a noise. All she can do is clutch his hand, his arm, and claw at the lapel of his coat. Her feet are bleeding, and she knows that she is about to fall onto the shards.
But then he is holding her in his arms. She has her arms around his neck, and his arms around her are so very strong, and he is running so fast that everything is turning white, and there is this horrible noise that is also like a form of whiteness, and she wonders if this means she is being born or if she is dying.
~ ~ ~
… I am trying to tell the truth to its “teeth and forehead,” as Shakespeare says. Yet I am afraid that I am building a big lie out of tiny facts, that everything I say about who I was and how I lived will imply that I could have lived no other life, that I was entirely dispossessed of freedom of will. The simple fact that tortures me to this very instant is that I was never without freedom of will, that at any of countless junctures I could have said, “No,” and I would have lived a different life. Nothing was truly inevitable, and even when I didn’t know I was making a choice, I was—and I must bear the burden of those choices. Most troubling of all, however, are the times when I did know I was making a choice and a voice inside me told me that the choice was wrong but I didn’t listen — because I didn’t believe the voice, or I didn’t want to believe it, or because I couldn’t really hear it among a thousand other voices. But nevertheless, it spoke, and I didn’t listen, and now I am damned….
~ ~ ~
In history every fact is an element in a mathematical equation: Thomas Jefferson + John Adams + Philadelphia + skinny red ponytail over broad blue collar + pen = Declaration of Independence = the world as we know it. In history almost the entire human race exists in dusklight, murmuring inaudibly, ankle-high to Thomas Jefferson, who is perpetually effulgent with sunrise, who strides the cobbled spaces between monuments with chin raised, eyes fixed on distant prospects, and who knows cumulus clouds mounting aesthetically in ethereal blue but has never known rain.
There are other people in history. George Washington, for example, who is also dawn-effulgent, also massive, a monument in and of himself, maybe a little larger than Thomas Jefferson or a tad smaller. And that bald head, draped around the edges by long, gray hair, those wire-rimmed spectacles, that expression indicating something between peptic distress and discombobulation — that’s Ben Franklin, of course. In history the three men come together, and their speech is of such august profundity that it can never be adequately imagined.
But in life almost everything that Thomas Jefferson eats makes him sick, and so the indoor privies of his Paris mansion, the Hôtel de Langeac, are an endlessly renewed blessing, night and day.
In life Thomas Jefferson is lost. One moment he is imagining that if he were to mount a four-sided book stand on casters like those he devised for his swivel chair, he could switch from book to book with the flick of a finger, and in the next moment he is lost. The streets of Paris are so narrow, disheveled and labyrinthine that a minute’s distraction is enough to erase the connections between where he is, where he was and where he wishes to be. Thomas Jefferson spots a liveried footman, asks directions, but his French fails him so miserably that he can only pretend he has understood. And so he walks off and arbitrarily turns left, then right, and abandons himself to fate.
~ ~ ~
Semen, of course, is the most vital source of masculine energy, but it is also true that if too much semen accumulates within a man’s body, he can go insane. Dr. Richard Gem, the preeminent American physician in Paris, is concerned that, as a grieving widower, Thomas Jefferson is not adequately venting his semen and so is putting his reason at risk. Onanism is not, Gem insists, a safe method for keeping bodily fluids in balance, as it can also lead to madness, in part because of its tendency to inspire excessive indulgence (it is a well-known fact that the insane are universally addicted to this practice). According to the doctor, the only healthy way to discharge excess semen is in the embrace of a young woman. Gem prescribes weekly visits to the house of Madame Benezet. Thomas Jefferson attempts to comply with this prescription but finds the women chez Madame Benezet wholly insincere in their friendliness, and he is disturbed by the presumptions they make about his character. Lafayette and Danqueville suggest that there is no reason for him to pay for the favors of women, since, as a dashing and cultured American, he can have his pick of the belles of Parisian society. But his friends’ forthrightness and ease in female company are all but unimaginable to Thomas Jefferson, and so he takes to maintaining the proper balance of his vital fluids on his own, by expelling semen once a week, or sometimes twice, but never more often.
~ ~ ~
It is September 6, 1786. Thomas Jefferson has drunk two bottles of wine over dinner and believes that he is in love with Maria Cosway, who is a portrait painter, seventeen years his junior and married, and who has drunk nearly as much wine as he has. He wants to prove to her that his love is a mad joy and that he is as vigorous and adept as a man half his age, so he leaps a cistern in the place Louis XV, but his toe catches on the far rim and he descends to the flagstones in an inverted position, breaking his right wrist so badly that he will have to write with his left hand for much of a year and suffer, for the rest of his life, unpredictable squawks whenever he plays even the simplest tunes on his violin.
Maria Cosway laughs and laughs, thinking, What a silly man! thinking he is only playacting as he rolls back and forth on the flagstones, howling. And as he howls, Thomas Jefferson thinks that Martha would never have laughed at the sight of him in such pain, and he thinks that he doesn’t, in fact, love Maria Cosway. And as she comes to realize that he is not playacting, she, too, thinks that she does not love him — this clumsy American, with his farmer’s accent — that he is pompous, and a bore, and that she was a fool to have betrayed her husband for him, though, in fact, she will continue to write to Thomas Jefferson long after he has left France and returned to Virginia and long after she has left her prodigiously unfaithful husband and moved into a convent in Italy, and Thomas Jefferson will write to her — two letters a year, three, sometimes more — and their correspondence will continue until she is an old woman and he is a much older man, and there will, in fact, be an unfinished letter to him on her desk the day she receives word from John Trumbull that Thomas Jefferson has died.
But that drunken night in Paris, Thomas Jefferson cannot see Maria Cosway as she bends over him making sympathetic noises that he knows to be insincere. There are no streetlights, and he and she only dared take a walk after their dinner because the sky was cloudless and there was a gibbous moon — although now that moon is pumpkin orange and steeple-pierced, and in a minute it will have been absorbed by its own flickery fire on the Seine. Thomas Jefferson can see stars around the amorphous obscurity that is Maria Cosway, bent over him, uttering low coos and singsong consolations such as are normally addressed to children, and he is not so drunk that he doesn’t know that the darkness on the streets soon will be of such profundity that he will be all but blind after he has seen her to her hotel and then as he makes his way home, in agony, by starlight, and that the journey will take hours.