Jefferson by Max Byrd Page B

invention, the Almighty Himself could not construct a machine of perpetual motion while the laws exist that He has prescribed for matter.”
    Short felt himself at once humbled and instructed. It was true what Franklin had said, that when Jefferson went into politics the world had lost a great professor.
    “You were happy as a student at Williamsburg, were you not?” They had started to walk on up the street, but Jefferson paused and waited expectantly for Short’s answer.
    “I studied far less than I should have done.” Short cast his memory back to a scene he could scarcely picture now, standing in the center of Paris. “The war had just begun when I entered William and Mary, you know. There were soldiers marching through every week, making their bivouacs on the campus. We adjourned classes for two whole months in my first year. A French regiment set up camp, and that was a distraction. And then, of course, my father died. I was not quite twenty.”
    Jefferson nodded. “It was a very different time when I was there.” He steered them down a narrow alley, and Short saw with delight that in two minutes more, by a shortcut he didn’t know existed, they would be at the gates of the Luxembourg Gardens.
    “When I was a student,” Jefferson continued, “the only soldiers I saw were the two or three guards at Governor Fauquier’s palace, where George Wythe used to take me for evening musicales. We would play chamber music with the governor, then sit and talk at dinner. I heard more good sense, more rational and philosophical conversation with them than in all my life besides.” He stopped to let a rumbling coach-and-four go by. “My own father died when I was much younger.”
    At the turnstile gate Jefferson paid the entrance fee for both of them. “Did Mr. Wythe bring you along as far as Sophocles in the Greek?” he asked.
    “The
Antigone
, yes. I still read it sometimes in my college copy. There is no poetry like the Greek, nothing.”
    Jefferson took his arm and they headed across a gravel path, stones crunching underfoot as they walked. To the left the garden’s famous parterres stretched in rigid French formation, covered with squads of yellow blossoms. In the corner of his eye, Short could see the east wing of the old Palais du Luxembourg, home of the king’s brother; beyond the palais the flags and pennants fluttered atop the new Théâtre Français. Jefferson ignored the view. “In earlier life,” he said, bending closer, “I was fond of poetry, too. But as years and cares advance, the powers of fancy have declined.” He looked at Short with undisguised affection. “It is a great pleasure to see you with all those powers in full vigor, tobring you along a little way, if not in the Greek exactly, then in Paris, the world. I never had a son, you know, William.”
    Short’s face blazed like a torch. His tongue could manage nothing more than, “Sir. Yes, sir.”
    “Tell me now,” Jefferson said, releasing his arm and altering his tone from solemn to playful. “We are to go tomorrow to assist John Adams at his house-closing ceremony at Auteuil. After my little lesson on aesthetics, which is that likely to be, young scholar—the sublime or beautiful?”

I t depended, Short thought, on the sublimity of manure.
    They arrived at Auteuil the next day just after noon, coming on horseback for the exercise and cantering up the hillside from the Bois de Boulogne almost to the doors of the house. Jefferson had barely swung out of the stirrup before John Adams had him by the arm, dragging him out through the central hallway and into his prized five acres of garden.
    “Look at this,” he was saying as Short caught up. Between his stone fountain and his summer gazebo Adams had heaped up a row of chest-high brown pyramids, crusty and odiferous as a barnyard. “Look at this—dry! lumpy! half of it straw! By the great gods of a cow’s rear end,” he said fiercely, glaring left and right, kicking suddenly at