The Missing Minister

The letter was a somewhat indiscreet one for a young matron to write a middle-aged widower--especially when the widower was the eminent Thomas Jefferson, U.S. minister to the court of Louis XVI. Nonetheless, Maria Cosway, 29, wanted a portrait of Jefferson, and she was direct enough to write and ask for one. "It is," she added, "a person who hates you that requests this favor."

As scholars have long known, Maria Cosway was merely being coy: far from hating Jefferson, she was a great & good friend of the U.S. minister, and eventually her request was granted. Whatever happened to the painting afterward? Until this week, it was one of the minor puzzles in the story of gallant Mr. Jefferson's famous Paris romance.

"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.

"Wish Me Joy." From then on, they saw each other less often. But their 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.

This week, in the William and Mary Quarterly, a lady-historian named Elizabeth Cometti reported that she had solved the mystery of the missing portrait. She had gone looking for it in the most obvious place she could think of, and sure enough, there it was. It had been hanging, unrecognized for more than 100 years, in the little school in Lodi, where Maria lies buried. There, among her treasures, it will remain.

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