We are promised a true American love story, but the lovers of this romance do not so much make love as f***, even in their tenderest moments. The couple in question are Rosalie, Duchess de la Rochefoucauld and William Short, Thomas Jefferson’s adoptive son and secretary at the Paris embassy in the 1780s and ’90s. The long-burning affair did happen, and here, in Ferdinand Mount’s translation, are their letters which criss-crossed Revolutionary Europe, between legations, palaces and prisons.
Jefferson promised the American people life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. His protégé is determined to live up to the ideal, as are the glittering circle of aristocrats and intellectuals with whom he mixes in just pre-Revolutionary Paris. Mount frequently takes his characters up to the heights: to towers, follies, the tops of trees. They long to glimpse the truth of human nature and breathe rarefied air.
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