For her sister, Elizabeth, Abigail described in loving detail the Comédie-Française, with its great Doric columns, its magnificent chandeliers, one of which, in the sky-blue theater itself, had two hundred candles ablaze.
Fancy, my dear Betsy, this house filled with 2,000 well dressed gentlemen and ladies! . . . Suppose some tragedy represented which requires the grandest scenery, and the most superb habits of kings and queens, the parts well performed, and the passions all excited, until you imagine yourself living at the very period.
One evening the four Adamses went by carriage to the Comédie-Française to see The Marriage of Figaro, then a sensation in Paris. The work of the dashing Beaumarchais — who had been an early supporter of the American Revolution and thickly in league with Silas Deane, shipping supplies to America — the play was a satire about the triumph of virtuous servants over their aristocratic employers. In the fifth act came the famous denunciation of his master by the valet, Figaro, that invariably brought an outburst of approval from the audience.
Because you are a great noble, you think you are a great genius! Nobility, a fortune, a rank, appointments to office: all this makes a man so proud! What did you do to earn all this? You took the trouble to get born — nothing more.
Some weeks later, when her own servants, Esther and Pauline, came home from a performance thrilled by what they had seen, Abigail was delighted.
The opera was more enthralling still, the dancing such as she had never imagined, “the highest degree of perfection.” At first, she was shocked, but not for long. As she wrote to sister Mary, “I have found my taste reconciling itself to habits, customs and fashions which at first disgusted me.
The dresses and beauty of the performers were enchanting, but no sooner did the dance commence that I felt my delicacy wounded, and I was shamed to be seen looking at them. Girls clothed in the thinnest silk and gauze, with their petticoats short, springing two feet from the floor, poising themselves in the air, with their feet flying, and as perfectly showing their garters and drawers, as though no petticoats had been worn, was a sight altogether new to me. Their motions are as light as air and as quick as lightning.
While the opera house was not as impressive a building as the French theater, it was more lavishly decorated, and the costumes on stage more extravagant. “And oh! the music, vocal and instrumental, it has a soft persuasive power and a dying, dying sound.”
She was changing in outlook, she knew. The more she saw of Paris and French society, the more entranced she was with the “performance” of French life, and especially the women of fashion, most of whom, she was relieved to find, were nothing like Madame Helvétius. It was as if the whole of society were a stage. Life itself was a theatrical production and Frenchwomen, raised on theater, had achieved as perfect a command of the art as anyone actually on stage. Abigail could hardly take her eyes off them, studying their every expression and gesture, charmed by the sound of their voices and by their intelligence.
They are easy in their deportment, eloquent in their speech, their voices soft and musical, and their attitude pleasing. Habituated to frequent theaters from their earliest age, they became perfect mistresses of the art of insinuation and the powers of persuasion. Intelligence is communicated to every feature of the face, and to every limb of the body; so that it may be in truth said, every man of this nation is an actor, and every woman an actress.
However greatly she deplored the dictates of fashion, on principle, she was utterly fascinated by the dress of the French ladies, which she described as being like their manners, “light, airy, and genteel.” She had made clothes for herself and her family for years, and little about the design and exquisite workmanship of what passed before her now escaped her eye. The fashionable shape for women was that of the wasp, “very small at the bottom of the waist and very large round the shoulders,” she reported to a cousin at home, adding ruefully, “You and I, madam, must despair of being in the mode.”
With her limited French and limited means, she found her social circle inevitably limited as well. But of the Frenchwomen she came to know, by far the most engaging, and the one whose company she greatly preferred, was the “sprightly” young wife of the Marquis de Lafayette — Adrienne Françoise de Noailles — whose family, the Noailles, was among the wealthiest, most distinguished of France. In years past, after dining at their Paris mansion, Adams had written at length of all he had seen, the gardens, walks, pictures, and furniture, “all in the highest style of magnificence,” and family portraits “ancient and numerous.” Adrienne was one of five daughters of Jean de Noailles, Duc d’Ayen, and Henriette d’Arguesseau, and to Adams they constituted the most “exemplary” family he had met since arriving in Paris. Adrienne, who was still in her twenties when she and Abigail met, had been married to Lafayette in 1774 when she was fourteen and he sixteen. In contrast to most French-women, and very like Abigail, she remained openly devoted to her husband and children. Importantly, she spoke English and despite her wealth and position dressed simply and disliked pretentious display quite as much as did Abigail. Lafayette, a hero in Paris no less than in America, and himself one of the richest men in France, had recently acquired a palatial house on the Rue de Bourbon, which he made a center of hospitality for Americans in Paris.
“You would have supposed I had been some long absent friend who she dearly loved,” Abigail wrote to Mary Cranch of the greeting she had received the day of her first call on Madame Lafayette, and for the rest of her stay she would never fail to enjoy the young woman’s company. “She is a good and amiable lady, exceedingly fond of her children . . . passionately attached to her husband!!! A French lady and fond of her husband!!!” How aware Abigail may have been of the husband’s frequent infidelities is not known.
Nabby, who felt she, too, had found a compatible soul in Madame Lafayette, began to see sides to French life that her own country might take lessons from. “I have often complained of a stiffness and reserve in our circles in America that was disagreeable,” wrote the daughter whose mother worried that she was too stiff and reserved. “A little French ease adopted would be an improvement.”
HOW WERE HER TWO “dear lads” at home, Abigail asked in a letter to Elizabeth Shaw. “I have got their profiles [silhouettes] stuck up which I look at every morning with pleasure and sometimes speak to as I pass, telling Charles to hold up his head.”
But in time came letters from sisters Elizabeth and Mary both, assuring her that all was well at home, the boys well behaved and enjoying perfect health. Braintree had become a dull place without her, wrote Mary, who faithfully reported all that Abigail would wish to know about her house, farm, the doings of the town — who had been married, who had been born in her absence, who had taken ill, and who had died — and the health of John’s mother, who at seventy-five still walked to meeting each Sunday. Her house, Abigail was told, was just as she would wish. “Phoebe keeps it in perfect order. It is swept and everything that wants it, rubbed once a week.” Her every letter was treasured and read aloud to the delight of all. When Mary called on John’s mother, to say she had come to read Abigail’s letters to her, the old lady replied, “Aya, I had rather hear that she is coming home.”
Abigail was to have no worries over her boys, wrote Elizabeth. “I shall always take unspeakable pleasure in serving them.” The Reverend John Shaw reported the progress being made under his tutelage and offered a benediction for John Adams: “May Heaven reward him for the sacrifices he has made, and for the extensive good he has done to his country.”
It still took two to three months for letters to cross the ocean, sometimes longer, but the three sisters kept up their correspondence without cease. In her letters to Mary Cranch, Abigail was more inclined to share the details of her life and her innermost feelings, while with sister Elizabeth — and perhaps because the Reverend Shaw, too, would be reading what she wrote — she was often moved to evoke the creed they had been raised on in the Weymouth parsonage. “I am rejoiced to find
my sons have been blessed with so large a share of health since my absence,” she told Elizabeth.
If they are wise they will improve . . . the bloom of their health in acquiring such a fund of learning and knowledge as may render them useful to themselves, and beneficial to society, the great purpose for which they were sent into the world. . . . To be good, and do good, is the whole duty of man comprised in a few words.
“I wish I could give you some idea of the French ladies,” Nabby wrote to Elizabeth another time. “But it is impossible to do it by letter, I should absolutely be ashamed to write what I must if I tell you truths. There is not a subject in nature that they will not talk upon. . . . I sometimes think myself fortunate in not understanding the language.”
III
FOR ABIGAIL AND JOHN it was the long-dreamed-of chance to enjoy life together again, as husband and wife in a world at peace, and removed from the contentiousness and stress of politics at home, that made the time in France an interlude such as they had never known. No more wars and no more separations became their common creed. With Nabby and John full-grown and the best of companions, they could all four come and go together, do so much that had never been possible before, delighting in each other’s company, indeed preferring it.
To compound the pleasure and stimulation of the new life, there was the bonus of Jefferson and the flourishing of a friendship that under normal circumstances at home would most likely never have happened. The vast differences between Jefferson and Adams, in nature and outlook, were as great as ever; and much had happened in Jefferson’s life since 1776 to change him. But brought together as they were in Paris, in just these years between one revolution and another, none of them knowing what was over the horizon for France or their own country, or for any of them individually, the bonds that grew were exceptional. None of them would think of Paris ever again without thoughts of the other.
In addition to the time he spent working with Adams, Jefferson dined at Auteuil repeatedly, almost from the day the family moved in, and they in turn with him in Paris, once he was settled in a rented house in what was called the Cul-de-Sac Taitbout, near the Opéra. John Quincy, with Jefferson’s encouragement, came to regard Jefferson’s quarters as his own private refuge when in the city, and struck up friendships with Jefferson’s two young aides, Colonel David Humphreys and William Short. The interest Jefferson showed in John Quincy pleased the young man exceedingly and was not lost on his parents. “He appeared to me as much your boy as mine,” Adams would remind Jefferson fondly in later years.
“Dined at Mr. Jefferson’s” became a familiar entry in John Quincy’s diary. “In afternoon, went . . . to Paris, Mr. Jefferson’s.” “Spent evening with Mr. Jefferson, whom I love to be with.”
One afternoon in September the Adams family, Jefferson, and “eight or ten thousand” others attended one of the celebrated Paris spectacles of the time, a balloon ascension from the Tuileries Gardens. “Came home and found Mr. Jefferson again,” Nabby would record another day. “He is an agreeable man.”
When Arthur Lee wrote to tell John Adams that Jefferson’s supposed genius was in fact mediocre, his affectation great, his vanity greater, and warned Adams to judge carefully how much he confided in Jefferson, Adams would have none of it, replying, “My new partner is an old friend . . . whose character I studied nine or ten years ago, and which I do not perceive to be altered. . . . I am very happy with him.”
For Adams so much had changed about the atmosphere in which he lived and worked that it was as if Paris had become an entirely different place, and he, a different man. There were none of the intense pressures and uncertainties of his previous years in Europe. With his family about him, with John Quincy serving as his secretary, he was perfectly at ease, never lonely. “If you and your daughter were with me,” he had once written to Abigail from Paris, “I could keep up my spirits.” And he was as good as his word: his pleasure in her company was palpable to all. “He professes himself so much happier having his family with him, that I feel amply gratified in having ventured across the ocean,” Abigail wrote to her sister Elizabeth. Nothing, it seems, upset him. Not even Franklin bothered him anymore. The old man had become too afflicted with age and the agonies of his ailments, “too much an object of compassion, to be one of resentment,” Adams noted. And the pleasure of working with Jefferson stood in such vivid contrast to the ill will and dark suspicions Adams had had to contend with when dealing with Arthur Lee. As Abigail would confide to Jefferson, there had seldom been anyone in her husband’s life with whom he could associate with such “perfect freedom and unreserve,” and this meant the world to her. Jefferson, she wrote, was “one of the choice ones of the earth.”
She was charmed by his perfect manners, his manifold interests and breadth of reading, and, though she did not say it in so many words, by the attention he paid to her. Knowledge of the repeated tragedies that had befallen him also strongly affected her, as others. That Jefferson had vowed, as he told his family, to “keep what I feel to myself,” only made him a more interesting and sympathetic figure, and particularly to those, like Abigail and John, who had known heartbreak themselves.
IN THE YEARS SINCE JEFFERSON and John Adams had last seen one another in Philadelphia, Jefferson had suffered the loss of two children — an unnamed infant son who died two weeks after his birth, and a baby girl, Lucy Elizabeth, who died in 1781, at age four-and-a-half months. Then, on September 6, 1782, at Monticello, the worst day of Jefferson’s life, his wife Martha had died at age thirty-three, apparently from complications following the birth in the previous spring of still another child, a second Lucy Elizabeth.
As the story was related to the Adamses, Jefferson had been led from his wife’s deathbed all but insensible with grief and for weeks kept to his room, pacing back and forth, seeing no one but his daughter Patsy. He “confined himself from the world,” Nabby wrote in her journal, and then for weeks afterward, as Patsy herself would relate, he “rode out . . . incessantly on horseback, rambling about the mountains,” she still his constant companion and “solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief.”
At thirty-nine, Jefferson had been left a widower with three young children, his political career over, he thought, his political ambitions dissolved.
In the years immediately after his return from Philadelphia, his influence and accomplishments as a member of the Virginia General Assembly had been second to none. He had labored steadily, revising laws, writing legislation to eliminate injustices and set the foundation for a “well-ordered” republican government. And to a degree he had succeeded, although one of his proudest achievements, a bill for the establishment of religious freedom, a subject of extreme controversy, was not passed by the legislature until several years hence, after he departed for France.
Jefferson was infrequently at Williamsburg, however. His principal work, the revising and writing of laws, was carried on at Monticello, where he remained more or less in isolation, absorbed in his “darling pleasures,” as his friend John Page said — with continuing work on his house, gardens, and orchards, his scholarly pursuits, management of the plantation, and the interests of his family. In February 1778, when Adams and John Quincy were bound for France aboard the Boston, Jefferson was placing orders for another 90,000 bricks, and overseeing the first planting of peas for the year and several varieties of fruit trees.
He had seen nothing of the war. Its principal adverse effects on his way of life were spiraling inflation, and the loss of twenty-two of his slaves who ran off in the hope of joining the British side and gaining their freedom. Any connection he had with the larger struggle was through correspondence. His only contact with the enemy was with prisoners. When 4,000 British and Hessian troops who had surrendered at Saratoga were marched to Charlottesville to be quartered outside of the town, Jefferson arranged for proper housing for the officers on neighboring plantations and saw no reason not to offer his friendship and hospitality. Indeed, he took delight in having suc
h welcome additions to his social circle. One Hessian officer would write warmly that while all Virginians were apparently fond of music, Jefferson and his wife were particularly so. “You will find in his house an elegant harpsichord, pianoforte, and some violins. The latter he performs well upon himself. . . .” Possibly, John and Abigail Adams learned of this while in Paris. In any event, for them to have entertained the enemy under their own roof while war raged would have been unthinkable.
But the detachment Jefferson enjoyed from the war had ended abruptly in the spring of 1779 when the Virginia Assembly chose him to succeed Patrick Henry as the wartime governor, a role he disliked and that was to prove the low point of his public career, as probably he foresaw. Only weeks later he was writing that the day of his retirement could not come soon enough. He had no background or interest in military matters. Furthermore, the real political power was not in the office of the governor, but in the Assembly, as Jefferson himself, distrusting executive authority, had helped to establish. After the rarefied life at Monticello, the everyday confusion, endless paperwork and frustrations of administering a state at war — trying to cope with inflation, taxes, allocations of money and supplies — was torturous and only grew worse.
In the first of two one-year terms, he and his family lived as had his colonial counterparts in the Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg, a stone’s throw from the home of George Wythe, where Jefferson had once boarded and read law. In the second term, when the capital was moved further inland to the struggling hamlet of Richmond, he, Martha, and the children occupied a rented house there and again lived in style. But it was his bad luck to be governor in one of the darkest times of the war, as the British shifted their campaign South. Word that Charleston had fallen reached him only days after his reelection. During that summer of 1780 came the humiliating rout at Camden. Virginia troops performed badly, but the defeat meant also the loss of precious cannon, wagons, tents, and muskets. Called on for reinforcements, Virginia could only send unarmed men. Enlistments were down, the state treasury empty.
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