792 Chapter XXXII
Paris at the time of the fall of the Bastille; but he accepted the peculiarities of life
in America. Going down from C Street, he took the public ferry across the Po-
tomac, and at Alexandria hired a horse, for which he paid three dollars.^24 He rode
for some ten miles to Mount Vernon for a social call on Mrs. George Washington.
He had sometimes disagreed with her late husband, but her high- columned estab-
lishment overlooking the river already represented a common ground of American
politics. He then returned as he had come, a solitary figure on a slow- moving,
placid beast, of a kind that anyone was free to ride, or at least anyone who was
white and had three dollars.
At about this same time the painter David, an old Jacobin of 1793, was at work
on one of his memorable compositions, which may now be seen near the empty
royal apartments at the palace of Versailles. He conceived of a horse and rider
against a rocky Alpine background, moving steeply uphill, the horse a highstep-
ping, tense, and furious charger, with startled eye and mane flowing in the wind,
the rider a uniformed officer seated securely on his restless mount, transfixing the
spectator with an imperious gaze, and while lightly holding the reins in one hand,
pointing with the other over the mountains and into the future. It was a glorified
picture of the master of the New Order in Europe—“Bonaparte crossing the St.
Bernard Pass”—just before his descent for the second time into the Po valley,
where in June 1800 he defeated the Austrians at Marengo. This victory restored
the Cisalpine Republic, and finally broke up the Second Coalition. Democracy in
Europe had not exactly succeeded, but the great conservative and aristocratic
counter- offensive had utterly failed.
That Bonaparte and Jefferson were very different human beings, as different as
the horses they rode on, hardly needs to be pointed out. Jefferson, like American
republicans generally, had once admired Bonaparte; even today there are at least six
places in the United States named “Marengo.” But Jefferson turned against the
increasingly despotic ways and mad egotism of his one- time hero. “Do you call this
a Republic?” asked the disgusted Thomas Paine in 1802. The author of the Rights of
Man had had enough of Europe, and returned to America, and his abandonment
of the old continent was also symbolic. As the great republican enthusiasms of the
1790’s subsided, and as Europe went on with its chronic wars, there came to pre-
vail for a long time in the United States a feeling of self- chosen and fortunate
isolation, a belief that the vices of Europe were incorrigible, and that Americans
should be as little involved as possible with an old world where true liberty could
not exist. It was hard for the man on the three- dollar horse to understand the man
on the charger, to comprehend why decent people could so long uphold Bonaparte,
to think in terms of alternatives instead of ideals, to see that some things taken for
granted in America, like “equality before the law,” might in Europe have to be
fought for.
Bonaparte and Jefferson had this much in common: both were detested as “Ja-
cobins” in some quarters, yet under Bonaparte as First Consul and Emperor, and
under Jefferson as President, the democratic and republican agitation quieted
24 D. Malone, Jefferson and His Time. Vol. III: Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (Boston, 1962), 499.