Read Online America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation by Joshua Kendall - Free Book Online

minister to France, a post he would hold until after the storming of the Bastille in 1789. “No one can replace him [Franklin],” Jefferson would repeatedly insist. “I am only his successor.” In 1787, his slave Sally Hemings escorted his eight-year-old daughter Polly from Virginia to Paris. His two girls would both attend the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, an exclusive convent school, where, as Jefferson was assured, “not a word is ever spoken on the subject of religion.”
    After a difficult first winter, when he was sidelined both by ill health and by the news of Lucy’s death, this “savage of the mountains of America,” as Jefferson described himself in 1785, began to acclimate to his new surroundings. Despite his lifelong antipathy toward big cities, which he later characterized as “pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man,” he couldn’t help but adore the architecture, sculpture, music, and art that now surrounded him. Jefferson was also fascinated by Paris’s technological marvels, such as its suspension bridges and gadgets; he enjoyed going to the Café Mécanique, where wine was served by dumbwaiters (as would later be the case in Monticello). The hot-air balloon enthusiast, who, before leaving Annapolis, had compiled a detailed list of recent French ascensions for a friend, rarely missed a chance to view a launch in the flesh. For the self-confessed bibliomaniac, the French capital’s ubiquitous bookstalls—such as those lining the Quai des Grands-Augustins—also proved irresistible. Though Jefferson forced himself to “submit to the rule of buying only at reasonable prices,” he ended up acquiring for himself about fifty feet of books a year, all of which he eventually had shipped back to Virginia. He also sent books back to several American friends—most notably, dozens on law and government to James Madison, just as his protégé was beginning to draft the Constitution. He soon found himself missing little about Virginia except for its factoids. “I thank you again and again,” he wrote in September 1785 to the Scottish physician James Currie, then in Richmond, “for the details it [your last letter] contains, these being precisely of the nature I would wish.…But I can persuade nobody to believe that the small facts which they see passing daily under their eyes are precious to me at this distance; much more interesting to the heart than events of higher rank.…Continue then to give me facts, little facts.”
    The following September, Jefferson was, as Dumas Malone has put it, “quite swept off his supposedly well-planted feet.” The new object of affection for the forty-three-year-old widower was Maria Cosway, a petite, blue-eyed, twenty-six-year-old artist, who was visiting from London where she lived with her husband, Richard Cosway, a successful portrait painter. The American ambassador first met the beautiful and musically talented Italian-born Maria—not only was she a composer, but she also played both the harpsichord and harp—on September 3, 1786, at the Halle au Blé, the domed Parisian grain market. Jefferson was accompanied by the American artist John Trumbull, who introduced him to both Cosways. Twenty years older than his wife, Richard Cosway was then in the personal employ of the Prince of Wales (later King George IV). With her family down on its luck after the death of her father, Maria had succumbed to her mother’s demand to marry the socialite with the deep pockets. The vapid and mercurial Cosway had little else to offer; as numerous contemporaries noted, he had “a monkey face” and couldn’t keep his hands off other women. Jefferson was instantly taken by Maria, whom he later called “the most superb thing on earth”; within minutes, he came up with an excuse to cancel his dinner engagement with the Duchess D’Anville. His long evening with the Cosways didn’t end until an impromptu harp concert in the wee hours at the home of the