On Friday, July 30, a servant came “puffing” up the stairs at the hotel to announce, “Young Mr. Adams.” When John Quincy entered, Abigail hardly knew him. As tall as his father, he looked older than seventeen — a man nearly. The resemblance to his father was striking. Seeing him with Nabby made her feel very much the matron, she confided to her sister Mary, but “were I not their mother, I would say a likelier pair you will seldom see in a summer’s day.”
Nabby judged her brother a “sober lad,” but one she was sure she would like once they were reacquainted. To a cousin at home John Quincy wrote, quite properly, “You can imagine what an addition has been made to my happiness by the arrival of a kind and tender mother, and a sister who fulfills my most sanguine expectations.”
From The Hague, John Adams promised to be with them in a matter of days, but warned that there could be no lingering in London. He must join his colleagues in Paris.
ON THE MORNING OF SATURDAY, August 7, Nabby had been out for a walk. When she returned, she noticed a man’s hat on the table with two books in it.
Everything around appeared altered, without my knowing in what particular [she wrote that night in her diary]. I went into my room, the things were moved; I looked around. . . .” Why are these things moved?” — All [this] in a breath to Esther. . . .
“Why is all this appearance of strangeness? Whose hat is that in the other room?” . . . “’Tis my father’s!” I said, “Where is he?”
“In the room above.”
Up I flew, and to his chamber, where he was lying down, and received me with all the tenderness of an affectionate parent after so long an absence. Sure I am, I never felt more agitation of spirits in my life; it will not do to describe.
Abigail’s only reference to the reunion with John was in passing in a letter to Mary Cranch: “You know my dear sister that poets and painters wisely draw a veil over those scenes which surpass the pen of one or the pencil of the other; we were indeed a very happy family once more met together after a separation of four years.”
Early the following day they were all off for Paris.
II
THE JOURNEY WAS MADE in record time. They went by fast coach from London to the Channel, and by boat to Calais, landing on the shores of France at dawn the next morning, then sped on by coach-and-six. If Abigail felt still, as on shipboard, that motion was the preferred state, she must have been ecstatic.
The whole route from Calais to Paris, she and Nabby felt they were riding through scenes from a favorite novel, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. There were all kinds of travelers, Sterne had written — inquisitive travelers, idle travelers, vain travelers — but the true value of travel was not in strenuous sight-seeing. It was in opening one’s heart to feeling.
Adams had been away from Paris for nearly a year. In an effort to regain his strength after the illness that struck him down in the late summer of 1783, he had moved to a large house with a garden on the outskirts of the city, just beyond Passy in the still-rural village of Auteuil.
Long a believer in the therapeutic benefits of fresh air and exercise, he had become still more adamant on the subject during his years in Europe. If the dank atmosphere of Amsterdam had been the cause of his first terrible collapse, so the noisome air of Paris had laid him low the second time.
Like Passy, Auteuil was set on an airy hill above the Seine, and adjoined the beautiful Bois de Boulogne, where he could take his daily walks or ride horseback. But when his American doctor, James Jay, the brother of John Jay, had suggested a sojourn in England, he had gone off to London with John Quincy and later to Bath, to take the waters, an experience Adams had found little to his liking and that was cut short by a summons to return to Holland to secure still another desperately needed loan.
Adams again succeeded with the Dutch bankers, but only after one of the most horrendous episodes in all his earthly pilgrimage. Crossing a wintry North Sea, he and John Quincy had been caught in a storm. Landing on a desolate Dutch island, they had had to press on the rest of the way by foot and iceboat. “The weather was cold, we were all frequently wet,” he wrote. “I was chilled to the heart, and looked I suppose, as I felt, like a withered old worn out carcass. Our polite skipper frequently eyed me and said he pitied the old man.” Adams, by then forty-eight, felt that during the ordeal he had left one stage of life and entered another.
The four Adamses and their two American servants reached Paris on August 13, stopping at the Hôtel d’York on the Left Bank, where the Peace Treaty had been signed. Jefferson and his daughter had already arrived in the city the week before.
While Adams conferred with Jefferson and Franklin, Abigail and Nabby toured the city, John Quincy serving as their guide and interpreter. Then, after several days, the family moved to the rented house at Auteuil, where they were to remain for no one knew how long.
In Paris there had been talk of Jefferson succeeding Franklin as minister to France, a prospect that Adams rejoiced in. Whether Adams would be appointed to the British Court, as was also expected, remained unresolved, and though it was a position he longed for, as a capstone to his diplomatic service, he could not say so outright, and imagined quite correctly that there was stiff opposition in Congress.
Yet Adams was pleased beyond measure. “The house, the garden, the situation near the Bois de Boulogne, elevated above the river Seine and the low grounds, and distant from the putrid streets of Paris, is the best I could wish for,” he recorded the day they moved in. It had been a long time since he had felt so well disposed. “I make a little America of my own family,” he wrote to Arthur Lee. “I feel more at home than I have ever done in Europe,” he told Cotton Tufts. He thought himself better off even than Franklin; besides, his rent was lower.
The house was enormous, three stories of trimmed limestone, and plainly in need of attention. It had once been the country villa of two extravagant, scandalous sisters, the Demoiselles Verrières — Marie and Claudine-Geneviève de Verrières. Depending on how one counted, there were forty or fifty rooms, including a small theater “gone to decay.” Abigail, accustomed to a cottage of seven rooms, was nonplussed. Weeks later she would still be finding rooms she had not seen.
Reception salon, dining room, and kitchen were on the first floor, as well as quarters for the servants. The family “apartments” were above, where every room had French doors looking over the garden. The mirrors alone were said to have cost 30,000 livres. One octagonal room on the second floor was paneled entirely with mirrors.
“Why, my dear,” wrote Abigail to her niece, Betsy Cranch, “you cannot turn yourself in it without being multiplied twenty times . . . [and] that I do not like, for being rather clumsy, and by no means an elegant figure, I hate to have it so repeated to me.”
The furnishings were sparse; there were no carpets. The whole place could do with a good scrubbing, she saw, and wondered how cold it might be in winter.
The garden, however, was “delightful,” very romantic in its neglect, and it was the garden she would come to love most. There were fully five acres with rows of orange trees, stone walks overhung with grapevines, circles and octagons of flowers in bloom, pots of flowers, a Chinese fence, a fish pond, a fountain that no longer worked, and a little summerhouse, “beautiful in ruins.”
The weather, like the garden, enchanted her. The days and nights of late summer were ideal, “beautiful, soft, serene.” And as time passed, her affection for the place grew appreciably. She would rent furniture, purchase new table linen, china, and glassware, hire servants, acquire a songbird in a cage, and see the garden fountain restored to running order. She felt “so happy” at Auteuil, “so pleasingly situated.”
THE FRENCH AND THEIR WAYS were another matter, however. The shock experienced by John Adams on his first arrival in France was tepid compared to that of his wife.
From the morning of their landing at Calais, Abigail had been convinced that every coachman, porter, and servant was somehow trying to cheat her, a
n anxiety not helped by the fact that she understood nothing they said. Now the number of servants she was expected to employ and the division of labor insisted upon by them left her bewildered and exasperated. “One [servant] will not touch what belongs to the business of the other, though he or she has time enough to perform the whole,” she wrote, in an effort to explain the system to her sister Mary. The coachman would do nothing but attend the carriage and horses. The cook would only cook, never wash a dish. Then there was the maître d’hôtel whose “business is to purchase articles into the family and oversee that nobody cheats but himself.” Counting Esther Field and John Briesler, she eventually had eight in service, but that, she was told, was hardly what was expected.
She and John both worried about running into debt, given his salary from Congress of $9,000. While such a sum might be a great deal in Brain-tree, John wrote to Cotton Tufts, at Court it was but “a sprat in a whale’s belly.” “
We spend no evenings abroad, make no suppers . . . avoid every expense that is not held indispensable,” Abigail reported to Mary.
The shock was not so much the exorbitant expense of public life in Europe, but that extravagance was taken as the measure of one’s importance. “The inquiry is not whether a person is qualified for his office,” she wrote to Uncle Isaac Smith, “but how many domestics and horses does he keep.” The British ambassador had fifty servants, the Spanish ambassador, seventy-five.
Fashion ruled and fashion decreed that she and Nabby have their own hairdresser in residence, a young woman named Pauline, who, as a matter of pride, refused to dust or sweep. Both the sweeping and waxing of floors was reserved for a manservant called the frotteur who went tearing about from room to room with brushes strapped to his feet, “dancing here and there like a merry Andrew,” and to whom was also assigned the unenviable task of emptying the chamber pots. Why, with so much land available, there was no proper privy, Abigail could not understand.
Even her two servants from home, Esther and John, felt obliged to have their hair dressed, such was the ridicule they were subjected to by the other servants. “To be out of fashion is more criminal than to be seen in a state of nature, to which the Parisians are not averse.”
She thought Paris far from appealing, for all the splendor of its public buildings. And if she had not seen all of it, she had “smelt it.” Given its state of sanitation, the stench was more than she could bear. With new construction under way everywhere, the narrow streets were cluttered with piles of lumber and stone, great mounds of rubble. Everything looked filthy to her. Even the handsomest buildings were black with soot. The people themselves were the “dirtiest creatures” she had ever laid eyes on, and the number of prostitutes was appalling. That any nation would condone, let alone license, such traffic, she found vile, just as she found abhorrent the French practice of arranged marriages among the rich and titled of society.
“What idea, my dear madame, can you form of the manners of a nation, one city of which furnishes (blush oh, my sex, when I name it) 52,000 unmarried females so lost to a sense of honor and shame as publicly to enroll their names in a notary office for the most abandoned purposes and to commit iniquity with impunity,” she wrote in outrage to Mercy Warren. “Thousands of these miserable wretches perish annually with disease and poverty, whilst the most sacred of institutions is prostituted to unite titles and estates.”
On a visit later to a Paris orphanage run by Catholic Sisters of Charity, she was shown a large room with a hundred cribs and perhaps as many infants. It was a sight both pleasing and painful — pleasing because all was so admirably clean, and the nuns especially attentive and kind, but painful because of the numbers of abandoned babies, “numbers in the arms, great numbers asleep . . . several crying.” In an average year 6,000 children were delivered to the orphanage, she was told by the head nun. Even as they talked, one was brought in that appeared to be three months old. In various parts of the city, it was explained, there were designated places with small boxes in which a baby could be “deposited.” In winter one child in three died of exposure.
Can we draw a veil over the guilty cause [Abigail wrote], or refrain from comparing a country grown old in debauchery and lewdness with the wise laws and institutions of one wherein marriage is considered as holy and honorable, wherein industry and sobriety enable parents to rear numerous offspring, and where the laws provide resource for illegitimacy by obliging the parents to maintenance, and if not to be obtained there, they become the charge of the town or parish where they are born?
The whole French way of life seemed devoted to little else but appearances and frivolity, everybody bent on a good time, going to the theater, to concerts, public shows and spectacles. She wondered when anyone ever did any work. In London she had seen streets swarming with people, but there they appeared to have business in mind. Here pleasure alone seemed to be the business of life and no one ever to tire of it. Not even on the Sabbath was there pause. Sundays were more like election days at home, as all of Paris “poured forth” into the Bois de Boulogne, where the woods resounded with “music and dancing, jollity and mirth of every kind.”
The few resident Americans she met, like the famously beautiful Anne Bingham of Philadelphia and the naval hero John Paul Jones, did not greatly impress her. Young Anne Bingham, who was married to the immensely wealthy William Bingham, was, Abigail agreed, “very handsome,” but “rather too much given to the foibles” of France. “Less money and more years may make her wiser,” Abigail wrote. And John Paul Jones was a decided disappointment. She had pictured him a “rough, stout, war-like Roman.” Instead, he was tiny, soft-spoken, and a favorite with the French ladies, whom he flattered excessively. “I should sooner think of wrapping him up in cotton wool and putting him into my pocket, than sending him to contend with cannon ball.”
But most memorable was her first encounter with a “great lady” of France. The occasion was a dinner given by Franklin at his house in Passy, shortly after the Adams family arrived. In recent years Franklin had become increasingly attached to the “sweet society” of the celebrated Madame Helvétius, whose own small estate was close by in Auteuil. Franklin had even proposed marriage to Madame Helvétius, who declined, saying they were past the age for romance. Yet she remained prominent in his life and always the center of attention at his social gatherings. Franklin told Abigail she was to meet one of the best women in the world, and Abigail, curious to see what so charmed “the good Doctor,” rode to Passy full of anticipation, only to be appalled by the woman from the moment she appeared.
She entered the room with a careless, jaunty air [Abigail began in a vivid sketch, in a letter to her niece, Lucy Cranch]. Upon seeing ladies who were strangers to her, she bawled out, “Ah, mon Dieu! where is Franklin? Why did you not tell me there were ladies here?” You must suppose her speaking all this in French. “How do I look?” said she, taking hold of a dressing chemise made of tiffany which she had on over a blue lutestring, and which looked as much upon the decay as her beauty, for she was once a handsome woman.
Her hair was fangled [done in the latest style]; over it she had a small straw hat, with a dirty half gauze handkerchief round it, and a bit of dirtier gauze than ever my maids wore was sewed on behind. She had a black gauze scarf thrown over her shoulders.
She ran out of the room. When she returned, the Doctor entered at one door, she at the other, upon which she ran forward to him, caught him by the hand, “Hélas, Franklin!” then gave him a double kiss, one upon each cheek, and another upon his forehead. When we went into the room to dine, she was placed between the Doctor and Mr. Adams. She carried on the chief conversation at dinner, frequently locking her hands in the Doctor’s, and sometimes spreading her arms upon the backs of both gentlemen’s chairs, then throwing her arm carelessly upon the Doctor’s neck.
I should have been greatly astonished at this conduct, if the good Doctor had not told me that in this lady I should see a genuine Frenchwoman, wholly free of affectation or s
tiffness of behavior, and one of the best women in the world. For this I must take the Doctor’s word, but I should have set her down for a very bad one, although 60 years of age and a widow. I own I was highly disgusted, and never wish for an acquaintance with any ladies of this cast.
After dinner she threw herself upon a settee, where she showed more than her feet. She had a little lap-dog who was, next to the Doctor, her favorite. This she kissed, and when he wet the floor, she wiped it up with her chemise.
To the Yankee matron from Braintree, the sloppy, ill-mannered, egotistical old woman seemed the very personification of the decadence and decay inherent in European society. Abigail hoped there might be other French ladies whose manners were more consistent with her own ideas of decency; otherwise she would wind up a recluse in France.
YET THESE WERE only early impressions, she conceded. “I have been here so little while that it would be improper for me to pass sentence, or form judgments of people,” she told Mercy Warren, implying that with time she might come to see things differently. And change — or at least soften — she did, and especially as she discovered the pleasures and glamour of the Paris theater.
Abigail had always loved to read plays, but with no theaters in Boston, she had never actually seen one performed on stage until arriving in London. Now she could go as often as she wished and in the French manner, with or without the company of her husband. She quickly became a devotee of both the new Comédie-Française and the Opéra. As little as she understood the language, she loved the actors who were “beyond the reach of my pen.” The performances were far superior to what she had seen in London, the crowds considerably more polite. If only the cleanliness of the British could be joined with the civility of the French, she told Mercy, it would be a “most agreeable assemblage.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 185