The World полностью

Then they set off for America, landing in December 1789, to find an offer from the new president of the United States of America. On 30 April, in New York, Washington had been inaugurated after winning the first election under the new constitution, created by a convention in Philadelphia. His ex-secretary Colonel Hamilton had pushed for an English-style mixed system with a ruler for life called the governor, but others had resisted that as too monarchical: the compromise was a strong presidency, balanced by a bicameral congress and an independent judiciary. Here was a state founded on the principle of freedom, its democracy an example to the world – ‘It astonishes me to find this system so near perfect,’ said Franklin.^*

Washington, who rejected the title ‘His Highness’, preferring ‘Mr President’, offered the secretaryships of state to Jefferson and of the treasury to Hamilton. Among the first items of business was the choice of a new capital and the creation of a state bank. In June 1790, in New York, Jefferson, Virginian aristocrat-planter, invited Colonel Hamilton, penniless self-made West Indian bastard and war hero to dinner, cooked by his French-trained chef-slave James Hemings. In ‘the room where it happens’, they agreed that, after a temporary stay in Philadelphia, they would build a new capital on the Potomac. That December, Hamilton founded a state bank.

At Monticello, Sally Hemings gave birth to her first child by Jefferson, assisted by her mother Betty, but the child soon died (though five more would live to adulthood). In Philadelphia, Jefferson and Hamilton, who loathed one another, clashed over the future of the republic. Washington^* was alarmed by the violence in France. Hamilton was pro-British; Jefferson, pro-French, pontificated that one could not move ‘from despotism to liberty in a featherbed’.

Back in Paris, as foreign powers started to arm against the revolution, encouraged partly by the royal couple, using Fersen as intermediary, Antoinette had not dared to correspond with her brother, Emperor Joseph, but now sought help. Joseph planned to rescue the Bourbons, but, ignored by his Russian friends who were seizing Ottoman lands round the Black Sea, he returned to Vienna, covered in agonizing sores. ‘I’m unfortunate in everything I undertake,’ he wrote, writing his own epitaph: ‘Here lies a prince whose intentions were pure but who had the sorrow of seeing all his plans collapse.’ So much of politics is waiting and silence. ‘He governed too much,’ wrote Ligne, ‘and reigned too little.’

On 20 February 1790, shortly after Mozart premiered Così fan tutte, Joseph died in despair and Mozart lost his patron, whose brother Leopold, the new emperor, now worked to save the monarchy. As he composed his masonic opera Die Zauberflöte, Mozart missed Constanze: ‘There’s a sort of emptiness, which hurts somehow.’ That year he wrote two operas in three weeks, but when he received the commission for a requiem, he told Constanze, ‘I know I must die’; the Requiem ‘is for myself’. Yet he now received the lucrative post of Viennese Kapellmeister. Even Salieri praised him, and he was spending time with his son Karl: ‘So delighted I took him to the opera. He looks great.’ He planned an opera of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Everything was looking up, but then Mozart fell ill. Horribly swollen, he kept scribbling multiple scores. On 5 December 1791, he died. Constanze believed he worked himself to death, that his only fault was ‘too soft a heart’ and not knowing ‘how to handle money’. He was buried according to Joseph’s decrees in a communal grave.

In Joseph, Antoinette lost her dearest ally, but she still saw her lover, Fersen. ‘I’m a little happier,’ he wrote. ‘Sometimes I see her quite freely and this consoles us for all the unpleasantries she has to tolerate.’

ANTOINETTE, THE EXECUTIONER AND THE GUILLOTINE MACHINE