Jefferson by Max Byrd Read Free Book Online Page A

drink beer somehow or other, and at the same time making sure they suffer a little for the pleasure. Franklin once told me he never drank so much beer as in Puritan Boston. ‘Conscience,’ he said, ‘makes you thirsty.’ ”
    “You seem well in any case, almost cured.”
    Jefferson stood—unfolded himself in stages—and began to walk in front of his shelves of books, humming snatches of an Italian song. He was forty-one years old, Short reminded himself—forty-two in less than three months, on April thirteenth—and in fact he did not look well at all, not cured at all.
    “You show great self-control.” Jefferson broke off his song and looked back with an expression still mild and ironic. “I had assumed that you would be filled with questions about Franklin’s departure—what it means, why he does it, what the future of the delegation is to be. But you seem content to analyze la grippe.”
    “Dr. Franklin is an old man,” Short said tentatively.
    “Dr. Franklin wants to go home to die,” Jefferson replied. “He has a horror of dying in a foreign country. He keeps young TempleFranklin with him, he says, because he wants to know that a blood relation is on hand to close his eyes and bury him.”
    Short stirred uncomfortably. There was altogether too much dying in this conversation.
    “And of course—” Jefferson moved farther along the shelves, humming, running his hands across the spines of his books. A born sensualist, Short thought, the hands of a great painter, a great artist. He strokes the bindings of his books (an unworthy simile) the way another man would stroke a woman. And a sensualist is sensitive, will collapse when coarser men are unbothered. Jefferson had the frame and body of a Virginia mountaineer, he should have effortlessly knocked aside Paris’s effete headaches and grippes—John Adams had, Humphreys had, Short himself—instead Jefferson looked pale and fragile. With his red hair and feverish skin he looked like a burning stick.
    “Of course,” Jefferson said. He looked at a title, frowned, pushed the book back. Then he crossed and sat down in another chair farther from the fire. “Of course, there is no business for our delegation. That discourages Franklin and makes him willing to leave. That discourages everyone. No country will negotiate with us—”
    “They think our government is unstable.”
    “They think our Articles of Confederation leave us without a central power, and they may be right. The Comte de Vergennes insists that he sees thirteen separate governments, not one United States. He frankly doubts we can make commercial treaties that will
bind
.”
    “So they stall and wait to see how stable we prove.”
    Jefferson made a tall steeple of his fingers. He wore no rings, no jewelry of any kind. According to the old Virginia custom he had only one first name—
Thomas
Jefferson—while the northerners liked to have two at least (John Quincy Adams, Short thought, remembering the Adams son), and the French positively rioted in them: Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Moher de Lafayette. When he spoke again, Jefferson’s voice took on the rich visionary energy it always did if he spoke of the future.
    “Whale oil, tobacco, timber.” He ticked them off on his long fingers. “Rice, fish, lumber, fur—the wealth of our United States, the potential wealth is astonishing. If the barriers of trade wouldgo down
here
, our ships and farms could feed—Europe!” He cocked his head and smiled wryly, as if conscious of the criticism his political enemies always made, that Mr. Jefferson was greatly addicted to hyperbole. “When Lafayette returns next week, we mean to make an all-out assault on the tobacco monopoly here at least.”
    “I think,” Short said, venturing an opinion that he had overheard John Adams give, “that the French resent our continuing trade with England. We still trade three-fourths of our goods with our former enemy.”
    Jefferson nodded absently