Arc d'X

3

FOR ANOTHER SUMMER Thomas grieved, remote and celibate, unresponsive to the women of Virginia who flirted for his attention. Some of these women were single, some already married, others widowed by revolution and disease. In his shy and remote manner he kept their company and considered their sexual offers, among which only the adulterous ones tempted him. For the most part he remained to himself. For weeks, sometimes months, the spellbinding pain behind his eyes that he’d known as a child returned to hold his head in its crush. The slaves could hear his moan in the darkened library, where Sally sometimes glimpsed her mother applying cold rags to his face. Finally the headaches would wane. From the back porch Sally watched Thomas ride off alone in the afternoons, the wild hills his only direction, desolation his only rendezvous.

Thomas resolved after still another summer to leave grief behind and not know it anymore. He made plans to sail with his oldest daughter Patsy for France, booking passage on a ship and reserving all its berths so that they’d sail alone. He decided to take with him Sally’s brother James as his personal valet and servant. On the afternoon of departure all the slaves of the household as well as the fieldhands followed the carriage — driven by James and carrying Thomas and Patsy — down the road waving goodbye. Sally’s mother was the last to linger, watching the road until long after the carriage was out of sight.

Thomas’ ship took six weeks crossing the Atlantic, docking at Le Havre almost two years to the day after the death of Thomas’ wife. From Le Havre, Thomas and Patsy and James traveled to the French village of Rouen. There they stayed in an inn overlooking the town square. In the middle of the night Thomas woke to a dreadful smell that turned his stomach. Thinking he was going to be sick, he jumped from his bed and stumbled to the window, throwing open the shutters; what filled his lungs wasn’t fresh air but the very thing that had awakened him. The night was full of it. He recognized it as the smoke of the burning black female slave that had risen from the next county thirty-six years earlier; slamming shut the window he backed away from it as though an apparition would appear any moment. Thomas wasn’t remotely a superstitious man, so he didn’t easily accept the prospect of apparitions. He was, on the other hand, habitually tormented about his slaves, whose ownership he could barely bring himself to accept but whose freedom he could not bring himself to give. He returned to bed and, his face buried in his pillow, to sleep. The next day he was reminded by one of the villagers that, three and a half centuries before, the girlwarrior Jeanne from Arc had been tried and burned at the stake in the square below Thomas’ hotel window. On the road out of Rouen, from his carriage view, he almost believed he could see streaks of ash in the morning rain.

They arrived in Paris a week later, after dark. Their carriage entered the city from the west, through a gateway in the outer wall, and then spiraled its way into the heart of the city along the inner concentric walls. The streets reeked of cognac and sex. Merchants and rabble-rousers, soldiers and whores jostled each other; women opened their dresses and breasts to the passing coach while insurrectionists, ankle deep in open sewers, exploded with streams of incomprehensible diatribe. Down every avenue tunnels wound off into an ominous darkness that was broken only by the flash of light from a door thrown open, in the momentary glare of which could be seen people engaged in acts so unfamiliar it was impossible to grasp just what they were. Patsy shrank from the onslaught. Her father gazed deliriously. The city seemed to Thomas the size of a country. The carriage continued descending from one ring of walls to the next; by the time they reached the rue d’X and the Hotel Langeac that would be their home over the years to come, Patsy cried for Virginia. Thomas, on the other hand, felt liberated by the way the city had already violated him.

Paris was electrified by the news of Thomas’ arrival. Clergy and aristocracy greeted his appearance with alarm, while French radicals and American expatriates made pilgrimages to the Hotel Langeac where they might discuss philosophy and revolution with him. Thomas spurned the invitations of the French elite who wanted to take his measure and instead passed his time in bohemian circles. His liaisons with women were limited to bubbly libertines and deeply discontented wives who wouldn’t threaten the vow he’d made to his own in her last hour. His most serious affair was with Maria, the wife of an English pornographer who abused her, often leaving her alone in Paris for weeks before snatching her back to London.

The winter after he’d come to Paris, Thomas received the news that Lucy, the last child born to his wife, had died of the whooping cough at the age of two. Not able to trust anyone else to keep at bay the grief he’d resolved never to know, he arranged for the passage to France of his other daughter, Polly. He sent word to his sister in Virginia that Polly was to come as soon as possible, in the care of whatever female slave seemed suitable.