I leave to time the unfolding of a drama. I leave to posterity to reflect upon times past; and I leave them characters to contemplate.
ABIGAIL ADAMS, 1801
THOMAS JEFFERSON stood in the tall rectangle of the French window looking onto his gardens at the Hotel de Langeac and guessed at the hour. The tall frame stirred in the soft light and the nervous fingers of Jefferson’s left hand groped for his timepiece. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, he lowered his left hand and, with difficulty, raised his right hand to his waistcoat and extracted his watch. For a brief second, he pressed his right wrist against his breast as if in salutation and then he brought the left hand up to cover the exposed wrist and hand which were slightly twisted inward, the hand having an atrophied look. Slowly his left hand caressed his injured right one, his pale eyes blinking away the pain. A slight smile played at the corners of his fine mouth. As he had guessed, it was almost five.
If Petit and Polly had started out early enough from London, they would be in Dover by now. The thought of London made him pensive. There was still no news of Maria’s arrival. How long had he been waiting for word from her? It seemed like years. He dared not move from Paris lest he miss her. Jefferson turned and walked away from the glowing windows and the multicolored flower beds framed by the windows of his salon. A slender man, with a stiff air, accentuated now by the way he now held his injured wrist, Jefferson’s eyes were his finest feature. A sapphire blue of dazzling clarity, they seemed to look out upon the world like twin mountain peaks from his great height, frosted and glacial, tinged with melancholy, with lashes the same color as his red-gold hair. His complexion was fair, the fine skin almost transparent under a rash of fine reddish-brown freckles that gave him a youthful, innocent look. The face was aristocratic and handsome with its long, slightly turned-up nose, sensual mouth, and firm, protruding, dimpled chin.
He did not consider himself vain, but he was quite pleased with the likeness the sculptor Houdon had begun of him. He had seen the plaster for the first time a few days before.
Entering his forty-fourth year, Thomas Jefferson had become, since he had been in Paris, almost dandyish in his manner of dressing, favoring creamy lace and sapphire-blue worsted. Even his injury had a certain romantic elegance. After his mysterious fall last year, which had deprived him of the use of his right hand, he had been forced to re-educate himself, and he now wrote almost as well with his left hand as he did with his right. But he was in pain at the moment. Both the wrist and the steady throbbing in his head had not abated since yesterday noon. He would force himself to work tonight. It did not seem possible that Petit and Polly could arrive before the day after next. He was very fond of his valet de chambre. He did feel slightly guilty that he had not sent James to London when he had learned that his sister Sally had been sent to accompany Polly from Virginia. He had hesitated, knowing the Adamses’ disposition toward Negro slaves; and knowing James’s own temperament, he felt safer with Petit. Of course, he could have sent them both, but the extra cost, simply to please James, seemed excessive, especially now when the ministry and his expensive obligations were taking all his official funds.
He stood absently in the middle of his magnificent oval salon with its painting of “Dawn” by Berthélemy on the ceiling, backlit by the late-afternoon sun, a figure in black with white linen and a blue waistcoat, the fair hair pulled back in a pigtail and lightly powdered.
When a servant in pale-yellow livery entered, he was startled. He had forgotten he had asked for the medicines and hot water to bathe his wrist at precisely five. Thomas Jefferson looked into the eyes of his slave James Hemings as if he were contemplating a mathematical equation.
James Hemings had not seen his sister in four years. She had been ten and he eighteen when he had left Monticello as body servant to Thomas Jefferson. He loved her more than any of his family and now that in two or three days she would be in Paris, the waiting was unbearable. She would bring the sweet breath of Monticello and all that it represented for him—family and the slavehood he had never forgotten.
He knew he could disclaim his bondage any time he wished on French soil. No one could hold him in slavery and now no one could hold her, either. What providence!
Thinking himself on the brink of freedom, he could even look on his master now with a certain affection. He did feel affection for Thomas Jefferson. His master had been more of a father to him than his real father, John Wayles, had ever been. When he and his brothers and sisters had not been freed, as Wayles had promised, and were sent to Monticello as part of his half-sister’s inheritance, he had been nine years old. Old enough to work. Old enough to grasp the dream they had been deprived of. His mother, with all her wiles and cleverness, her airs of superiority and her concubinage, had failed. She had failed in the only way that matters to a slave concubine: she had not made his father love her enough to free his children by her.
When James entered the room, he found Thomas Jefferson standing, as if he had forgotten something. He had been in this mood for days now. He was, James knew, expecting word from London on the arrival of Lady Maria Cosway. The servant felt a wave of affection and pity for his master as he saw him there cradling his wounded wrist. Thomas Jefferson was not a happy man, thought James, despite all his fame and riches and celebrated friends. He was lonely. The death of his wife had made it impossible for him to believe again in happiness or good fortune. Moreover, his master missed his home more than he admitted.
Personally, James never intended to see Monticello again, nor Virginia for that matter, but he could understand pain and homesickness, especially since the sudden death of Jefferson’s third daughter, Lucy. Now Thomas Jefferson’s two remaining children would both be with him, and he, James, would be reunited with his beloved sister. As if they shared the same thought, Jefferson gave him a strange look, then smiled and squeezed his arm. Without a word, Jefferson sat in one of the armchairs and asked his servant to bathe and massage his wrist.
Two days later, a public coach drew up to the gates of the hotel, and Petit, a little girl, and a very young woman stepped out. Polly Jefferson burst into tears at the sight of her father, whom she didn’t recognize, while her maid paled at the sight of her brother. The two girls clung to each other, and finally the two of them embraced James Hemings, as Polly would not let go of her maid.
The joy of seeing the beauty and purity of his sister’s face moved James deeply. She was well dressed, he thought, in new black silk that showed off her pale complexion and her dark hair, and she was fully formed. Her eyes were a pure liquid gold, a color he had not seen on anyone else. He took her in his arms and watched as, shyly, his master approached his daughter and pulled her away from her slave. James knew that the paleness of Jefferson’s face was an indication of great emotion. Thomas Jefferson was intimidated by his own daughter. Later, he said he would not have known her if he had met her on the street, nor she him.
Polly Jefferson was to make him pay for those four lost years, and Thomas Jefferson paid gladly. He ruled his daughters, as he did everyone, with a fastidious tyranny. It fell hardest on Martha, who loved him most, but all of them were to feel the weight of that demand and its fetters of steel.
But that day they were a happy and reunited family. Martha, home from her convent, was dazzled by the beauty of her little sister and her maid. After much kissing and embracing, Thomas Jefferson and his two daughters went inside. Brother and sister remained behind in the sunshine.
Only Petit remained apart from this “family” celebration. How strange were the ways of Americans and their servants, he was thinking. James had explained to the Frenchman that they were literally the same family. This had shocked Petit, for he was the perfect servant: discreet in his service, correct, loyal in his protection of the ruling class and their privileges.
As they kissed and embraced, Adrien Petit saw more clearly than any of them the farce and the tragedy of that reunion.
Before the week was over, Polly Jefferson was in the Abbaye de Panthémont with her sister Martha. Sally Hemings was installed at the ministry and being taught by James’s tutor, Mr. Perrault, and Petit began to teach her to be a ladies’ maid.
Jefferson remembered everything and asked questions about everyone, white and black. Sally Hemings, through her mother, knew everything that had gone on in the intervening years. She delighted him with her stories, her reports on the crops and gardens. She took over from James the duties of nurse, and every day, her small but surprisingly strong hands would bathe and massage his wrist while she kept up a steady stream of conversation in her soft Virginia accent, a relief to his ears from the harsh beauty of the French he had become so accustomed to. Nothing seemed to be too trivial for him to ask about.
“Tell me everything,” he begged. “Who has died, who has married, who has hanged himself because they cannot marry?”
The mansion where she would live now, explained James to his sister, was called the Hôtel de Langeac. James had moved there with his master about a year after they had arrived in Paris, where his master was minister plenipotentiary and ambassador to the French king, Louis XVI. The Hôtel de Langeac was situated halfway up the Champs-Elysées, one of the main thoroughfares leading out of the city. It went up to and then down the bridge leading to Neuilly and thence to Saint Germain-en-Laye, Marly, and the king’s palace of Versailles. The hôtel (which James explained to her was the French name for a private mansion) adjoined the Grille de Chaillot, a large and beautiful wrought-iron and gilded-bronze gate that marked the limits of the city and was one of its exits and entrances at which the city tolls were levied.
The mansion itself was in creamy white stone with sculptured friezes. The main gate led into a spacious courtyard. To the right were the steps that led up to the front door. To the left of the reception hall was a sweeping pink marble staircase that led to the upper stories. On the ground floor was a circular room with a skylight, and adjoining it was an oval drawing room, one of the most beautiful of the mansion, from which steps led into the garden. It was the ceiling of this oval room which was decorated with the painting of Jean-Simon Berthélemy’s “Dawn,” the master’s favorite.
James led his stunned sister through the elegant, beautiful rooms. On the second floor were the master apartments, with their spacious sunfilled bedrooms, each the size of the drawing room at Monticello, and each with its dressing room and bathroom attached with a hammered-copper and porcelain bathing tub. Then, with great excitement, James showed his sister the “lieux anglais,” or water closets, the latest invention and most modern installation imaginable. The young girl marveled at the painted ceilings and walls covered with silk. She looked out of the tall rectangular windows. And to think Virginians had the nerve to call what they lived in “mansions”! Monticello. She burst into laughter at what she had until now called with awe the “Big House.”