Jefferson Read Online Free PDF Page A

might change his mind and retreat back to the shelves of books. At the door to the dining room his arms folded across his chest like a cross.

    “I shall demonstrate,” Franklin announced to the table at large, “how to flirt.”
    Smiling benignly, he turned in his chair and reached for the ornamental fan that the woman on his left hand placed beside her plate. Still beaming, Franklin picked up the fan between two fingers and opened it with a snap. Then, grinning, he began to turn it rapidly back and forth in front of his face—at each turn simpering like a girl or stopping the fan in midflutter and peeping over the top with huge coy eyes at one of the men.
    “Oh, lord.” Madame Brillon laughed until she began to choke.
    Franklin peered over his fan in a moony way at sour John Adams all the way down the table.
    “To flirt,” Franklin said. “A splendid old English word meaning a quick jerking motion. I
flirt
this fan.”
    In the general laughter Short found himself thinking that two rules had been broken at once—first, the French custom of speaking at a meal only to one’s neighbor; and second, Franklin’s ownrule of never starting a topic of conversation. Poor Richard was famous for sitting quietly in his chair and speaking only when spoken to.
    “But why does she have a fan in January?” whispered the young woman to Short’s left. An Adams voice of fascinated disapproval. The pell mell of the table had thrown Short leeward, toward his host and, as it turned out, the nineteen-year-old Miss Nabby Adams, who was a softer and prettier version of her mother Abigail.
    “It’s warm where she is, by the fireplace,” he said, noting that up and down the table each Frenchman had, true to form, placed his hat beside his plate. Rumor had Miss Adams recovering from an improper romantic attachment to a Harvard wastrel with the implausible (and very un-Adams) name of “Royall” Tyler. Had the canny Abigail steered her toward Short tonight for a reason? “Even the flowers in your centerpiece are melting,” Short told her.
    Miss Adams was studying doubtfully the plate a maid had just slipped in front of her, but she raised her head quickly. “The centerpiece. We went to a dinner in the Louvre Palace, Mr. Short, where the centerpiece was a huge model winter landscape made out of artificial frost.
It
was by the fireplace, too, and during the meal the frost slowly began to melt, and underneath it you suddenly saw miniature trees and houses and little flowing streams, and just as dessert was served, hundreds of tiny blossoms sprang up on wires to symbolize spring!”
    She was actually a charming girl, Short thought, if too serious.
    “This is a new dish someone has invented in Paris,” she said, toying with the dark mass on her plate. “Mama and I weren’t sure—it’s called pâté de foie gras. The liver of a fat goose. Don’t ask how it’s made. Dr. Franklin loves it.”
    At the middle of the table, liberally spreading his pâté on toast, Franklin was now telling a joke. One of the French gentlemen, speaking English with a slow syrupy accent, asked Franklin if he really intended to ascend in a hot-air balloon that summer, as rumor had it. Franklin beamed again and squinted through his spectacles down the table.
    “Mr. Jefferson,” he said, finding him almost in the corner, next to Abigail Adams, a tall, tranquil figure, dressed in the latest French tailoring but unmistakably, in his clear skin and long,slouched frame, American. “Mr. Jefferson is the very man to ascend in a balloon. I am too old—”
    A little clatter of disagreement, led by Madame Brillon. But Franklin was eighty if a day, Short thought.
    “—and not much given to travel anymore. As you know.”
    Everyone nodded in more or less solemn sympathy. Franklin’s constant battle with the bladder stone was widely known. He moved about in great torment, usually drank only mineral water, and sometimes had himself carried in a litter like an