Jefferson by Max Byrd Read Free Book Online

some salt, called all the family and servants in. They stood in silent rows around the bed. A moment before the final scene, Jefferson, unable to stand or sit, was led from the room by his sister Mrs. Carr. She took him to his library, where he fainted and collapsed on the bare floor and remained insensible so long that they feared he would never revive.
    For three weeks he kept to this room, walking incessantly day and night, lying down only when he was completely exhausted, and then only in the thin little straw pallet that had been brought in when he fainted. The
violence
of his emotion was what everyone remarked on—his neighbor Colonel Randolph, who was a hard, violent man himself, but violent in another direction, wrote Madison contemptuously that even a month after his wife’s death,Jefferson still swooned like a woman whenever he saw their three children. Madison wrote back with precise indignation that his story was “incredible.”
    Somehow Jefferson managed to write in his account book for September 6:
“My dear wife died this day at 11:45. a.m.”
Then in an act of extreme—not violence but privacy, he gathered all her letters, all the notes and letters that had ever passed between them, every slip, and burned the whole mass in the fireplace. He ordered an inscription in Greek for her tombstone. Five days after her death, he picked up his pen again for the first time and wrote in his garden book (I have seen it and checked the dates):
    September 11, 1792
    W. Hornsby’s method of preserving birds.
    Make a small incision between the legs of the bird; take out the entrails & eyes, wipe the inside & with a quill force a passage through the throat into the body that the ingredients may find a way into the stomach & so pass off through the mouth, fill the bird with a composition of ⅔ common salt & ⅓ nitre pounded in a mortar with two tablespoonfuls of black or Indian pepper to a pound hang it up by it’s legs 8 or 10 weeks, & if the bird be small it will be sufficiently preserved in that time, if it be large, the process is the same, but greater attention will be necessary.
    A fence indeed. Who could get past
that
? Was he thinking of his wife’s body and its inevitable dissolution in the grave? Or was it an example—spectacular—of that precise, objective scientific curiosity that his enemies claim made him so cool? Or is this really a recipe for preserving something beautiful and dead that you cannot bring yourself even to
name
? Virginians are strange. In the five years I lived with him in Paris, I never once heard Jefferson refer to his wife.

    Abigail Adams, energetic as a hurricane, sent over by messenger that evening a prescription to cure Jefferson’s “seasoning” once and for all.
    “I made the mistake last night,” Jefferson explained, lifting his head and smiling at Short, “of describing my symptoms to her.”
    “You mentioned the dreaded grippe?” Short asked. They had each taken a chair near the coal fire in the library, the tea table spread between them, Jefferson in his mildest, most expansive mood. Short thought they were like two English dukes stretching their legs in their manor.
    “I gave it full credit, the grippe, the headaches, the fever—all of them
ad seriatim
. I was the ideal dinner guest, presenting a new and fascinating symptom for each course. It was a shameful appeal for sympathy. I only neglected to expire completely when dessert was served. Now. She writes, ‘Dear Sir, I once found great benefit in treating the same disorders by taking an ounce of Castile soap and a pint of Bristol beer, dividing it into three portions, and taking it three mornings in a row, fasting.’ ”
    Short groaned. Jefferson smiled again and folded the note away.
    “You won’t take it,” Short said firmly.
    “She’s a wonderful woman.” Jefferson placed his teacup on the silver tray. “John Adams’s greatest asset. But no, this is only the New England way of making certain they