Word: cosway
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...suggestively phrases it, were "in some sense forbidden." Appropriately, it was in Paris that Widower Thomas Jefferson, 42, enjoyed his flashiest illicit idyl. As a trade negotiator for George Washington, and later Benjamin Franklin's successor as Minister to France, the lanky Virginian fell in love with Maria Cosway, a capricious Englishwoman married to an obnoxious painter and court toady in London...
Though this affair has been dismissed as a bagatelle by most biographers, the release by Jefferson's descendants in 1944 of 25 letters from Mrs. Cosway established beyond doubt that Tom and Maria had been deeply in love. At their parting, wrote Jefferson, he was "rent into fragments by the force of my grief." The letters were, in Brodie's words, "missives of such ineffable tenderness that they constitute the most remarkable collection of love letters in the history of the American presidency...