Years later, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Adams would describe the voyage on the Boston as symbolic of his whole life. The raging seas he had passed through, he seemed to be saying, were like the times they lived in, and he was at the mercy of the times no less than the seas. Possibly he saw, too, in the presence of John Quincy, how directly his determination to dare such seas affected his family and how much, with his devotion to the cause of America, he had put at risk beyond his own life. Besides, as he may also have seen, the voyage had demonstrated how better suited he was for action than for smooth sailing with little to do.
III
1778 April 4, Saturday
About ten o’clock we commenced our journey [by post chaise] to Paris and went about 50 miles.
April 5, Sunday
Proceeded on our journey, more than 100 miles.
April 6, Monday
Fields of grain, the vineyards, the castles, the cities, the gardens, everything is beautiful. Yet every place swarms with beggars.
April 8, Wednesday
Rode through Orleans and arrived in Paris about nine o’clock. For thirty miles from Paris or more the road was paved, and the scenes were extremely beautiful.
But for the beggars, France was nearly all beautiful in Adams’s eyes, everything greatly to his liking. In Bordeaux he had been welcomed as a hero, cheered by crowds in the streets, embraced, escorted on a tour of the city, taken to his first opera ever, which he hugely enjoyed. With France and America now joined in common cause, he was no longer the envoy of a friendly nation but of an ally. “God save the Congress, Liberty, and Adams,” an illuminated inscription proclaimed.
An American merchant in Bordeaux warned Adams of bad blood within the American commission at Paris, and some of the local citizenry had seemed disappointed to learn he was not Samuel Adams, ”le fameux Adams.” At a dinner in his honor a beautiful young woman seated beside him had opened the conversation with a question Adams found shocking. But though initially befuddled — “I believe at first I blushed” — he recovered and came off rather well, he thought.
“Mr. Adams,” she had said, “by your name I conclude you are descended from the first man and woman, and probably in your family may be preserved the tradition which may resolve a difficulty which I could never explain. I never could understand how the first couple found out the art of lying together?”
Assisted by an interpreter, Adams replied that his family resembled the first couple both in name and in their frailties and that no doubt “instinct” was the answer to her question. “For there was a physical quality in us resembling the power of electricity or of the magnet, by which when a pair approached within striking distance they flew together . . . like two objects in an electrical experiment.”
“Well,” she retorted. “I know not how it was, but this I know, it is a very happy shock.”
Rolling through the tollgates of Paris the night of April 8, crossing the Seine by the Pont Neuf, passing the Palace of the Louvre, Adams was astonished at the crowds, the numbers of carriages in the streets, the “glittering clatter” of Paris he had read of in books. Toward morning, awake in his hotel room on the Rue de Richelieu, he wondered at the stillness of so great a city — until first light when the clamor of bells and street cries and iron-rimmed carriage wheels on cobblestones was such as he had never heard.
The first call of the day was on Benjamin Franklin, and from that point on Adams was kept steadily on the move, with sights to see, social engagements, dinners, teas, the theater. There were important people he must meet, new faces, names to remember — endless, multitudinous French names — and in nearly every setting, awash in the rapid-fire conversation of what were, he was certain, the most polished people on earth, including a great number of exceedingly fashionable and opinionated women, he understood almost nothing.
It was Franklin who orchestrated the social rounds, insisting the first morning that they dine at the usual French hour of two o’clock with Jacques Turgot (Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de l’Aulne), the distinguished economist and, until recently, Minister of Finance. Adams had felt himself unsuitably “accoutered” to appear in such company, he told Franklin, but off they went.
Franklin lived in the gracious splendor of a garden pavilion, part of the magnificent Hôtel de Valentinois, a columned château on the heights of the village of Passy, overlooking the Seine, half an hour’s ride from the city on the road to Versailles. It was the estate of a wealthy government contractor, former slave trader and generous friend of the American cause, Jacques Donatien Le Ray, the Comte de Chaumont, whose admiration for Franklin appeared boundless and who, with his stout figure and bald head, somewhat resembled him. As the guest of Chaumont, Franklin enjoyed the attention of nine liveried servants, a wine cellar of more than a thousand bottles, and virtually every comfort.
Receiving Adams with all customary cordiality, Franklin insisted that he move in with him to quarters previously occupied by Silas Deane. Arrangements were made for John Quincy to attend a nearby boarding school also attended by one of Franklin’s grandsons, eight-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache.
Franklin’s friends, the “first people” of Paris as he spoke of them, must become Adams’s friends, too, Franklin insisted. In addition to Chaumont and Turgot, there was the stately, white-haired Duchesse d’Enville (Marie-Louise-Elisabeth de La Rochefoucauld), one of the recognized “great ladies” of Paris, whom Adams liked at once, finding her observations, when translated, full of “bold, masculine and original sense.” She was to be their hostess on several occasions. Her son, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, grandson of the great French moralist of the previous century, François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, was a scholar in his own right who, to Adams’s relief, spoke perfect English. It was he who had done one of the earliest French translations of the Declaration of Independence.
Particularly appealing to the eye was Madame Brillon (Anne-Louise de Harancourt Brillon de Jouy), who was much spoiled by a wealthy, elderly husband and made an open show of her affection for Franklin, flirtatiously calling him “Cher Papa” while perched on his lap. Adams would later learn that another woman who appeared to be part of the Brillon family, a “very plain” person whom he presumed to be a companion of Madame Brillon, was in fact the mistress of Monsieur Brillon. “I was astonished that these people could live together in such apparent friendship and indeed without cutting each other’s throats,” Adams would write. “But I did not know the world.”
There was also Franklin’s particular friend and near neighbor at Passy, the flamboyant, once-beautiful Madame Helvétius, widow of the acclaimed philosophe Claude-Adrien Helvétius, who lived amid a menagerie of chickens, ducks, birds in aviaries, dogs, cats, and pet deer. There was the brilliant mathematician and political theorist Marie-Jean A. N. Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, another of the philosophes of the French enlightenment, whose strange pallor Adams took to be the result of “hard study.” And of supreme importance was the King’s Foreign Minister, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, the most polished of all, a fleshy, majestic career diplomat who, during Adams’s initial courtesy call at Versailles, expressed dismay that Adams understood nothing he said, but politely remarked that he hoped Adams would remain long enough in France to learn French perfectly.
Adams had never beheld such opulence — no American had — the exquisite dress, the diamonds on display, the bright rouge worn by the women, the time and money devoted to the elaborate coiffures of women and men alike. (Every morning in Paris some 7,000 barbers rushed through the streets to attend their customers.) Nor had he ever encountered such exquisite manners. Everyone was so exceedingly polite to everyone, and to foreigners most of all.
“The reception I have met in this kingdom has been as friendly, as polite, and as respectful as was possible,” Adams assured Abigail in the first of his letters to reach her.
It is the universal opinion of the people here, of all ranks, that a friendship between France and America is in t
he interest of both countries and the late alliance, so happily formed, is universally popular; so much so that I have been told by persons of good judgment that the government here would have been under a sort of necessity of agreeing to it even if it have not been agreeable to themselves.
The delights of France are innumerable. The politeness, the elegance, the softness, the delicacy is extreme.
In short, stern and haughty republican that I am, I cannot help loving these people for their earnest desire and assiduity to please. . . . The richness, the magnificence, and splendor is beyond all description.
But thinking perhaps he had strayed from his own true republican self a bit more than was seemly — and than Abigail would wish — he assured her that all such “bagatelles” meant nothing to him. “I cannot help suspecting that the more elegance, the less virtue in all times and countries.”
In later years much would be written and said of John Adams’s dislike of France, his puritanical disapproval of the French and their ways. But while, to be sure, there was much he disapproved of, and even disliked, much that he found shocking, such as the forwardness of the women, so also did most Americans of the day. Adams’s objections stemmed not so much from a Puritan background — as often said — but from the ideal of republican virtue, the classic Roman stoic emphasis on simplicity and the view that decadence inevitably followed luxury, age-old themes replete in the writings of his favorite Romans. Like so many of his countrymen, then and later, Adams both loved and disapproved of France, depending in large degree on circumstances or his mood of the moment. What, in fact, was most interesting, as expressed repeatedly in his diary and private correspondence — and what seems to have struck him as most unexpected — was how very much about France he found appealing, how much he did truly love about the French and their approach to life. “If human nature could be made happy by anything that can please the eye, the ear, the taste or any other sense, or passion or fancy, this country would be the region for happiness,” he wrote.
On an evening when the Comte de Chaumont took him in his carriage to a concert in the Royal Gardens of the Tuileries — the Concert Spirituel, which Adams was to attend many times — he was delighted to find that both men and women singers performed, and that the gardens were full of “company of both sexes walking,” as he wrote in his diary. He did not, however, record the numbers of prostitutes that gathered regularly in the gardens, some standing on chairs to attract attention, even as decorous family parties strolled past.
He enjoyed particularly the company of women of fashion whose animated opinions were as much a part of every social occasion as those of the men. In such company no gentlemen would be tolerated in monopolizing a conversation. Adams thought women superior to men overall, as Abigail knew, and he was sure she would wish to know his views on the educated women of France.
To tell you the truth, I admire the ladies here. Don’t be jealous. They are handsome, and very well educated. Their accomplishments are exceedingly brilliant. And their knowledge of letters and arts, exceeds that of the English ladies, I believe.
His “venerable colleague” Franklin, he noted, had the enviable privilege, because of his advanced age, to embrace the ladies as much as he pleased and to be “perpetually” embraced by them in return. But then the adoration of Franklin to be found in all quarters was extraordinary, as Adams would later recount:
His name was familiar to government and people, to kings, courtiers, nobility, clergy, and philosophers, as well as plebeians, to such a degree that there was scarcely a peasant or citizen, a valet de chambre, coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in a kitchen, who was not familiar with it, and who did not consider him as a friend of humankind. When they spoke of him, they seemed to think he was to restore the golden age.
Crowds in the streets cheered the “good doctor.” Fashionable women had taken to wearing a variation of his familiar bearskin hat. His likeness appeared everywhere — in prints, on medallions, on the lids of snuff boxes, making his face, as Franklin himself said, as well known as that of the man in the moon. Possibly the likeness of no one human face had been so widely reproduced in so many forms. Reputedly, the King himself, in a rare show of humor, arranged for it to be hand-painted on the bottom of a Sèvres porcelain chamber pot, as a New Year’s day surprise for one of Franklin’s adoring ladies at Court.
Franklin was loved for his sober, homespun look — the fur hat, the uncurled, unpowdered hair, the spectacles on the end of his nose — and widely believed to be a Quaker, a misunderstanding he made no effort to correct. He was seen as the representative American, the rustic sage from the wilds of Pennsylvania (quite apart from the fact that he had lived sixteen years in London), and he agreeably played the part. Everything about him announced his “simplicity and innocence,” observed an adoring French historian of the day.
But it was as a man of science that Franklin was most adored. It was the fame of his electrical experiments and overall inventiveness that made him one of the paragons of the age. Except for the aged Voltaire, who had only recently returned to Paris after years of exile and who had only a few months to live, there was in the eyes of the French no greater mortal.
It was that year, 1778, that Franklin sat for the celebrated sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, and that Franklin’s host at the Hôtel de Valentinois, Le Ray de Chaumont, commissioned the painter Joseph-Siffred Duplessis, a favorite at the court, to do Franklin’s portrait. For the Duplessis painting, which was to be a greater triumph at the Salon of 1779 than even Houdon’s bust, Franklin wore his customary fur-collared russet coat and appeared perfectly at peace with himself and the world. Admirers saw strength of mind in the high, bald forehead, strength of character in the “robust” neck, unshakable serenity in the slight smile. But the lift of the brows lent a certain sardonic expression and the large, brown eyes looked sad and weary. No name was provided at the bottom of the elaborate frame, only a single-word inscription writ large in Latin, “VIR,” meaning “man of character.”
Whenever possible, Adams worked on his French, preferring the quiet of early morning, before Franklin was stirring. With lists of recommended books — French dictionaries, grammars, works of literature, histories of diplomacy — he went to one Paris bookseller after another until he had them all, and more. And as often as he could, he attended the theater, usually taking John Quincy with him. (For the boy it was the beginning of a lifelong love of the theater.) Adams would bring the text of the play in hand, so they could follow the lines as spoken. But as he would tell Nabby in a letter, it was really the ladies “who are always to me the most pleasing ornaments of such spectacles.”
At a performance of Voltaire’s Alzire, at the Comédie Française, Voltaire himself was seated in a nearby box. Between acts, as the audience called his name, the eighty-three-year-old hero would rise and bow. “Although he was very advanced in age, had the paleness of death and deep lines and wrinkles in his face,” Adams noted, there was “sparkling vitality” in his eyes. “They were still the poet’s eyes with a fine frenzy rolling,” Adams wrote, borrowing an expression from Shakespeare.
A few days later, Adams was present for what was felt to be one of the high moments in the Age of Enlightenment when, at the Academy of Sciences, Voltaire and Franklin, like two aged actors, as Adams described them, embraced each other in the French manner, “hugging one another in their arms, and kissing each other’s cheeks.”
ON FINE SPRING DAYS Adams could walk among the lilacs and allées of linden trees in the formal gardens of the Hôtel de Valentinois. The whole of France was one great garden, it seemed. “Nature and art have conspired to render everything here delightful,” he wrote to Abigail. His health was good. He was extremely pleased with John Quincy’s progress in French.
But he was also deeply troubled by the rancor within the American commission. Franklin had wasted no time confirming what Adams had heard at Bordeaux. It had been Adams’s second day at Passy, during a moment of privacy,
when Franklin spoke of the “coolness” between him and Arthur Lee, whom Franklin described as bad-tempered and extremely difficult to work with. Lee, said Franklin, was one of those “who went through life quarrelling with one person or another ‘til they commonly ended in the loss of their reason.” Lee was in league with another American, Ralph Izard, who, though appointed minister to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, remained in Paris and only caused trouble. Franklin called Izard a man of violent passions and assured Adams that neither Lee nor Izard was liked by the French.
For their part, Lee and Izard were quick to assure Adams that Franklin was beneath contempt, expressing their views with a vehemence that astonished Adams as much as their choice of words.
Izard, a wealthy South Carolinian, was a devotee of the arts who with his wife had been living in Europe for several years. He was handsome, much infatuated with his own opinions, and an honest man, Adams believed.
Arthur Lee was known for his “mercurial temperament.” As a commissioner to the court of France, Lee’s importance, theoretically, was equal to that of Franklin and Adams. Also, with two brothers in Congress — Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot Lee — he had more than a little political influence. Tall, erect, with a prominent Lee nose, he was as proud as any of his proud Virginia line, and spoke a passable French. He had trained in medicine at Edinburgh, where he was first in his class, then changed professions, taking up the law in London, where he became an agent for Massachusetts, first as an associate of Franklin, then succeeding him after Franklin’s return to Philadelphia in 1775. It was in London that Lee had learned to dislike Franklin, and from the time he arrived in Paris, he had found it nearly unbearable to serve again in Franklin’s shadow. Refusing to live with Franklin at Passy, Lee had arranged his own accommodations in the neighboring village of Chaillot.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 172