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. Highest of them all, the Condor of the title, is the mathematician Condorcet, whose head is occupied with refining happiness — personal and national — to arithmetic formula. But the lofty ambitions of a generation brimming with utopian ideals do not tend to joy. They usher in ideas of progress in their salons, in the person of Condorcet; but the emotional freedom of which they dream materialises as a nightmare of Revolutionary terror.
Jefferson later warned young men against travelling to Europe. Besotted with aristocratic grandeur and sophisticated females and trained in the arts of dissimulation, they would return to the new world with exhausted palates and look upon American simplicity as backward and woefully unrefined. William Short pursues happiness in the old world. To the children of the Enlightenment in Paris he represents the sincerity they crave, rather in the way they idolise the American constitution.
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