Oh, the folly in coming here! It crashed over me in another wave of shame.
To stoop to converse with a prostitute. To demean myself. If I couldn’t forgive this, then I must forget it. Forget her. And be gone from this place before someone wondered what the wife of the treasury secretary was doing lingering near what must have been known as a bawdy house.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy to leave. Not with the parading crowds. I was forced to combat the press of bodies, the scent of sweat, the indifferent shuffling of so many feet, vivid memories of the Doctors’ Riots making me anxious. To break free of the crowd, I’m afraid I wielded my parasol with unladylike force, but there was no fighting the rush of so many.
Vive la République! Vive la République! Vive la République!
I was swept along the streets of Philadelphia for half a block before I was rescued—veritably plucked from a churning sea of people—by a very tall, freckled man in an exquisite French suit with fine lace cuffs. “Why, Mrs. Hamilton,” Jefferson drawled, gently pulling me to the relative calm of the corner curbside where he stood with James Madison. “What a surprise to see you here . . .”
My heart sank. I could think of no two persons I should least like to have discovered me so near to Maria Reynolds. And my mind spun with a persecuted turn, not unlike my husband’s. Hamilton had said that his political enemies lured him into the scandal, and I’d dismissed it as a paranoid and egotistical excuse. But if his foes learned of the affair, they might use it.
I wanted to trust that these Virginians were gentlemen—that they’d never serve us up to the public. But if my own husband couldn’t be trusted, why should I trust anything? Or anyone.
“I—I was on my way home,” I said, trying to catch my breath, hating the edge of fear in my voice, and unable to think of an able lie that would avert their suspicions. If they had suspicions.
By God, what a misery to think like Hamilton, wondering at some poison in every person’s smile! I felt guilty for it when Madison offered me an arm with genuine concern. “Are you quite all right, Mrs. Hamilton?”
“Just alarmed by the crowds,” I said.
The cultured Secretary Jefferson casually pressed his back against the bricks, as if he cared little for keeping his satin coat clean. From his lofty height, he surveyed the vista with eyes he shielded from the sun and pronounced, “There is no need for alarm, madam. Why, I think I spy your boy just across the way, having hoisted himself onto a barrel for a better view.”
“My boy?” I asked, sure he was mistaken.
“Young Philip,” he said, pointing. “There with my youngest daughter Polly. Perhaps we may make a match of them.”
It was meant in jest. And yet, I didn’t laugh. “My son should be at home.”
Jefferson gave a sunny smile. “Ah, but it’s too marvelous a day to be inside. The spirit of ’76 is in the air.”
The spirit of revolution, he meant. And I was struck with the impression that Jefferson still fancied himself a revolutionary in search of a tyrant to tear down instead of a statesman charged with a new government to build. Thus, with a meaningful look at Madison, I couldn’t help retorting, “I prefer the spirit of ’87.”
That was the year we forged a Constitution, and I doubt Madison missed my meaning. “Either way,” Jemmy replied. “A marvelous, celebratory day for the revolution.”
He spoke of it as if it were ongoing. As if the French Revolution was a part of our own. And I knew I should have nodded politely and made chitchat about the weather. But nearly confronting Maria had left me agitated enough to say instead, “I’m afraid I cannot celebrate violence.”
“Oh?” Madison asked, because inside that owlish head was a whirling brain that missed nothing. He knew that I had celebrated our soldiers, our war, our victories, and he probably thought me a rank hypocrite. “Despite the follies and barbarities in Paris, the French Revolution has been wonderful in its progress, and stupendous in its consequences.”
He was wrong. The French Revolution was devolving into anarchy.
I knew—certainly I knew—not to argue with these men. Especially here and now. How often had I counseled my husband to govern his tongue? And yet now, unmoored by my anger at my husband, mine flew free. “It certainly is stupefying that a revolution inspired by our own should turn upon those who fought heroically in the cause of our freedom. Rochambeau and Lafayette both in prison.”
At the mention of Lafayette, Jefferson’s voice gentled and his clear blue eyes filled with sympathy. “Mrs. Hamilton, my own affections have also been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause. But the liberty of the whole earth depends on this contest. And rather than it should fail, I would see half the earth desolated. An Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it now is.”
Though the season was not cold, gooseflesh rose on my arms. What a strange man to be so courtly, so charming—and so blithely condemn half the earth in pursuit of a philosophical ideal. Chilled to the bone by this remark, I glanced, disbelieving, at Jemmy Madison, who had the grace to wince.
As the crowds celebrated a new sister republic with a cannonade, all I could think of was the French king’s downfall. This same king who’d come to our aid in the cause of independence. A king who’d put his fate into the hands of his people. The people who claimed to love him.
And he’d been cruelly betrayed.
I’d read in the papers that the French thronged to watch King Louis die, and cheered when the blade fell and severed his head. They stuffed the king, head and
