Word: jefferson
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...Urgent Dispatches." The romance began one August day in 1786 when Painter John Trumbull introduced Jefferson to the British miniaturist Richard Cosway and his young and flirtatious wife. Jefferson was apparently struck by Maria at once, for he canceled all his engagements for the rest of the day. He even sent a messenger to the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld d'Anville. He was sorry, he said, but he could not make it for dinner. "Urgent dispatches" were keeping him at his desk...
After that, Jefferson saw Maria almost every day. They shopped together for pictures, saw the Bibliotheque du Roi, visited the galleries. They saw everything, Jefferson happily recorded, from the gardens and statues of Paris to the "rainbows" of the Versailles waterworks and the hills along the Seine...
Then, on Sept. 18, Jefferson broke his wrist. Some scholars think that he may have been feeling frisky, and that while strolling with Maria, he took a playful leap that was too much for his 43 years. In any case, the daily expeditions ceased. By the time Jefferson was well again, Maria had gone back to London...
...cautiously intimate letters, sometimes carried by the ever-faithful Trumbull, crossed the Channel scores of times. In one of them, Maria finally asked for a picture-a miniature "coppy" that Trumbull was to make of a portrait he had don6 in Paris. At the time, Maria was miffed at Jefferson for not having answered her last letter. "She is angry," Trumbull jokingly told Jefferson, "yet she teases me every day for a copy of your little portrait-that she may scold it, no doubt...
Maria got her portrait ("Wish me joy," she wrote, "for I possess your Picture"), and it was about all she had to remember Jefferson by. He went back to the U.S., and she founded a school for girls in Lodi, Italy...