Jefferson Read Online Free PDF

Oriental sage to this or that noble lady’s house. In fact, Short considered, the cult of Franklin in Paris was astounding—Jefferson had warned him: down to the servants in a house, everyone knew about him, his bons mots were quoted and reprinted everywhere, there were paintings and engravings of him in shops and on mantelpieces, even on paper fans. At a gallery near the Palais Royal a woman sold plaster dolls of him, complete with famous wire spectacles and tiny fur hat.
    “But you should go,” the Frenchman persisted. “You should fly your wonderful kite from a balloon.”
    Franklin nodded. “Somebody will,” he said. “Eventually.” He turned and smiled genially in the direction of Adams, who was stabbing the pâté with his fork. “I’ve seen every balloon, you know. The first was two years ago—before you arrived, Brother Adams. The Montgolfier brothers sent up an unmanned balloon made out of red silk from the Champ de Mars, even though it was raining torrents. It flew for nearly an hour and came down ten miles away in a village.”
    “Where the villagers,” said Madame Brillon, “promptly destroyed it with their pitchforks.”
    “They thought it was the devil,” Franklin agreed.
    “But the next—”
    “The next balloon,” he said, “had a wicker basket hanging below the hot-air stove, and in it the Montgolfiers put a sheep, a duck, and a rooster, all of which returned unharmed after a tour over the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Then at the end of the year—it was ’83—they launched from the Tuileries, and this time one of the brothers rode in the basket where the sheep had been, far above Paris. Later he told me his first thought when he cleared the rooftops was ‘What a wonderful sight!’ ” Franklin peered over thetops of his spectacles, toward Colonel Humphreys, it seemed. “And does anyone know what his
second
thought was?”
    Humphreys shook his head.
    “ ‘How priceless this would be in a battle!’ ”
    At which moment the servants arrived, noisily passing out courses of fish and game, and the conversation broke apart into tête-à-tête. Short strained for a moment to catch a glimpse of Jefferson, but against the flickering candlelight and the mountainous, not to say snowy landscape of powdered wigs ranged down the table, he could hardly make out the commissioner’s face. But pale, melancholy, Short thought; not well, even at a distance.
    Miss Adams entertained him with a long, breathlessly indignant description of Franklin’s particular friend whom they did
not
invite to dinner—a Madame Helvétius, who lived with two young priests and a bachelor philosopher (respectively ten, twenty, and thirty years younger than herself) and who, her papa swore, had used her chemise to wipe the floor when her lap dog had wet it. By the time dessert had arrived—the wilting flowers in the centerpiece stayed just as they were, failing to metamorphose into anything at all—the entire party was light-headed and gay. In the midst of it, reverting to his customary silence, Franklin seemed to watch benevolently, like a small pink-faced balloon, but as the servants began to remove the cloth and bring the wine, he nodded expectantly toward Adams.
    There was an inevitable delay while Adams stood and rapped on the table with his knuckles. The French misunderstood his signal and talked more loudly, Abigail Adams bustled dishes and bottles herself to the kitchen in a whirl of aprons, but then Adams’s cool New England twang began to bore through the hubbub. He was delighted so many of them would brave the rain that day to come to his home—he remembered a poem in a single verse written by a newcomer to describe the Paris climate: rain and wind, and wind and rain. But the Baron de Grimm had complained it was too long by half: “Wind and rain would have said it all.”
    Adams wiped his lips, put down his napkin, and laced his fingers behind his back.
    “Now. The other two American commissioners wish me