Inoculation carried with it the great risk of touching off an epidemic because the patient was, for a time, contagious—another important reason beside religious zealotry for skepticism about the practice. To guard against that problem, patients were quarantined for a period of weeks. When Robert Hemings was inoculated, Jefferson noted that he had paid “Ambo for lodging & nursing Bob four weeks.” When he mentioned paying to board “Martin & Jame,” he did not say how long they remained in isolation, but there is no reason to suppose that their situation was drastically different from their brother’s.28 As one might expect, things were a bit more rigorous in metropolitan France. There the quarantine was to last at least forty days after the day of inoculation, and it was illegal to inoculate anyone within the city limits of Paris.29 Sally Hemings was sent to an inoculation house outside of town to have the procedure performed.
But where did she go? The exorbitant fees the Suttons charged paying clients like Jefferson included the housing and feeding of the patients, though tea and wine were extra.30 Hemings’s inoculation was handled the same way the Suttons handled other patients in their two-tiered system of treatment. Poor patients back in England, usually treated in mass or group inoculations for nothing or next to nothing, stayed in their villages, which were then kept strictly quarantined. The Suttons made the rounds on a schedule to take care of them. Paying clients were sent away to comfortable inoculation houses that the Suttons set up in areas far from towns, and the brothers made the rounds there to look after them. Like these patients, Sally Hemings underwent the procedure “in private, quarantined from the community at large.”31 Indeed, by the time she arrived in Paris, the Suttons had long had their own inoculation house on the outskirts of the city.
In keeping with the brothers’ insular franchise mentality, which favored their relatives, the family impresario Daniel Sutton sent his father-in-law, Dr. Worlock, to set up the Suttons’ inoculation house in France. It was “an isolated house outside of Paris with fresh air, near Mont Louis, called P. Lachaise.” By 1804 the Sutton’s inoculation house was closed, and PèreLachaise became the site of “the most famous cemetery in Paris,” which still exists today, although now within the city’s limits.32
If it ever existed, no correspondence between Jefferson and Sutton survives, and none of his extant letters to anyone else mention the doctor. The record of all of Jefferson’s incoming and outgoing letters, the SJL (Summary Journal of Letters), can yield no clue. The pages covering the end of 1787, through October 1789, after he and the Hemingses had left Paris, are missing—the only part of this record that is not extant.33 Yet, the men must have communicated. How else would Jefferson have found Sutton and made arrangements for him to care for Hemings and receive payment for it? He probably dealt with Sutton face-to-face. The amount of money was too great, and Jefferson’s interest in the topic too long-standing and deep, to imagine that he passed up the chance to meet with a member of a family so esteemed in such an important field of medicine, an area that always fascinated him.34
While one could see Jefferson viewing Hemings’s inoculation from both his personal and his scientific perspective, the matter was probably almost all personal for her. Even with today’s greater knowledge of medicine and disease prevention, vaccination, a much less dangerous technique than inoculation, frightens many parents whose children undergo the process and some individuals who must be vaccinated as adults. The idea of being given a dread disease to prevent the dread disease quite naturally raises conflicting emotions: gratitude at the prospect of being spared a terrible sickness and, at the same time, fear of being among the tiny percentage of people who suffer as a result of the procedure.
James Hemings, Jefferson, and his daughters were living testaments to the benefits of inoculation when everything went well. But Sally Hemings knew what contracting smallpox meant. It was a disease of her time in a way that it is emphatically not in our own, and it affected all classes. While in Paris, Jefferson noted the death of a prominent society woman from smallpox. George Washington had had it as a young man and carried the scars of the disease. Hemings was old enough to have known of the turmoil and horrific suffering of the slaves who returned to Jefferson’s plantations after the war. Several of her close relatives had been at Yorktown, where the disease was notoriously rampant.
Jefferson knew the extent of the Suttons’ good reputation and that he could not have put Hemings in better hands. Hemings, however, probably had little reason to know about the Suttons, and even if Jefferson chose to act as the good patriarch and explain to her just who Sutton was and the significance of his involvement in treating her (and try to allay any fears), it could not have erased all doubt. Anyone with ordinary intelligence would have understood that a required quarantine of forty days indicated that one was about to undergo a very serious medical procedure and that there was always a chance that things could go wrong. After the trip over the ocean, the sojourn in London with Abigail Adams, and the stressful introduction to city living, new food, new faces, and new surroundings, Hemings faced yet another trial.
The Suttons religiously followed a strict regime that they believed was the key to their success. The method was all. After years of attempting to keep the exact nature of that method secret, Daniel Sutton published a book in 1796 revealing their protocol, complete with a handy chart of the daily routine that patients like Hemings were put through.35 Those who followed the Suttonian method, and those who did not, commonly prescribed a before-inoculation program for prospective patients. According to Sutton’s prescription, at the beginning of her confinement Hemings was to be put on a diet that restricted the amount and type of food. She was not supposed to eat any animal protein. She could not drink any alcohol, which was probably not yet a part of her routine anyway. The Suttons had turned away from the extensive use of the harsh purgatives, fasting, and induced vomiting in the pre-inoculation phase that other inoculators relied upon. Their approach was more moderate, although there were elixirs she had to take on a precise schedule.36
After the inoculation was performed, usually by making a small incision on the upper arm and placing a piece of thread that had been exposed to smallpox pustules into the wound, those attending Hemings at the inoculation house followed her condition. Her “duly restricted” diet continued with a set menu that had a very limited range of choices. After a “Breakfast” of “tea with dry toast” and “milk porridge” or “honey and bread” or “bread with the addition of sugar and currants,” Hemings could look forward to a “Dinner” featuring various types of pudding—“bread,” “rice,” or “plum or plain pudding”—and “the production of the kitchen garden,” presumably vegetables. For “Supper” she could be given any of the items from previous meals, along with “roasted apples or potatoes.” She could not have “fish, flesh, butter, cheese, eggs or spiced food.” The Suttons did not want their patients to eat foods that they believed created a “heating quality.” So, in addition to watching the foods she ate, whatever fluid Hemings took in would have to be “perfectly cooling” to her body. After a few days “purging syrup” was administered periodically. To control the symptoms of the mild case of smallpox—chief among them, a high fever and, sometimes, very intense aches and pains—Hemings was given a dose of a serum that included, controversially even at that time, a tiny amount of “calomel,” a form of mercury. In earlier days, inoculators had used mercury more liberally, often weakening their patients to an alarming degree.37 John Adam’s description of the “Mercurial Preparations” that seemed an almost daily part of his regime under inoculation, mentions symptoms easily recognizable as mercury poisoning. By the time his wife, Abigail, was inoculated twelve years later, the Suttons had appeared on the scene and most of the extreme aspects of the process had been mitigated, including the heavy doses of mercury.38
Along with their attention to hygiene, the Suttons had a great belief, approaching mania apparently, in the benefits of fresh air. They emphasized rest, to prepare the body to t
ake and control the mild case of smallpox. At the same time, they believed that it was important for the patient to move around. In the days after the procedure, Hemings was thus supposed to engage in moderate exercise, defined as walking around the grounds of the quarantine area for a set period of time each day. That is why the Suttons wanted their patients out in the country away from everyone else. A daily walk through a community might bring them into potentially fatal contact with others. Once Hemings developed a fever, it was to be “treated with cold water, warm tea and thin gruel by mouth.” After her “eruption appeared,” she would be directed once again to get up and walk around—and take in more fresh air. Then she would return for more rest.39
Although, or perhaps because, he had a generally low opinion of doctors, Jefferson often played the role of physician in his own life—personally nursing his daughters when they were ill, as he had his wife, giving doses of medicine to slaves, watching the schedule for that, setting their bones, and stitching up wounds.40 With Hemings’s inoculation program, there was medicine to be given and a regimen to follow that had been prepared by a celebrated physician notorious for guarding the secrets of his success. The whole business spoke to virtually every aspect of Jefferson’s personality: his boundless curiosity, his addiction to routine, his interest in progressive scientific methods, and his self-fashioning as a dutiful patriarch and competent quasi-health professional. Hemings probably had to answer many questions from him about everything that had taken place while she was under Sutton’s care in his very secretive world.
Just months into her stay in France, Hemings was living amid strangers, apart from her brother, and others familiar to her, on the opposite side of Paris from the Hôtel de Langeac. Her mother was an ocean away. She had come from a family of numerous siblings and spent most of her childhood living in a place where there were always lots of people her age and older around her. What she faced living on the outskirts of Paris was about as far from the life she had known as one could imagine. Being ill, even under controlled circumstances, is difficult. Being ill and alone in a strange country where people speak a language one cannot understand is on another order of magnitude of difficulty.
Dr. Sutton, of course, spoke English, and Hemings could communicate with him when he made his round of visits. The attendants at the house may have been bilingual or not, as the house was specifically designed to serve French-speaking patients. The Suttons’ long presence in France gave them ample opportunity, and a great financial incentive, to speak to their prospective customers—and any local attendants who worked for them—in their native language. If Sutton thought he could take over the care of Louis XV and deal with his doctors, he probably had at least some knowledge of French. This was very likely Hemings’s first really intensive experience with language immersion, when she was surrounded by people for whom English was a second language. If they talked to her in her native tongue, they would have spoken to one another in their own, sharpening her ear for French even as she wondered what they were talking about.
Hemings was at the right age to quickly achieve proficiency in French. Her son Madison recalled that, by the end of her time in Paris, she had learned to speak the language “well,” which makes sense given her age at the time she came to the country and the length of her stay there.41 When he first arrived in France, a very impressed William Short noted how much faster the teenage children of Jefferson and John and Abigail Adams picked up the language as compared with their elders. This was not a matter of formal study or educational level. The elder Americans had studied French, Jefferson for many years, themselves. Human beings are primed to learn languages, and can do that very well without studying them formally. Hemings was one year younger than Patsy Jefferson and six and eight years younger than the Adams children Short was referring to, John Quincy and Nabby, and thus well within the time period when acquiring language is easier.42
What did Sutton and his attendants make of the young African American girl who had been put into their care by the American minister to France? Did they know she was a slave? It is probably impossible to recover just how many blacks were being inoculated in the city at that time. There cannot have been very many, for there were not that many blacks in the country. Their overall small numbers in Paris as compared with Hemings’s Virginia, or the French colonies, for that matter, made blacks a less immediate threat to Parisian whites. She probably faced a different, less forbidding racial dynamic than the one that existed back in Virginia. The people at the Suttons’ inoculation house (who would have had no reason to go around thinking of themselves as “white” and attaching daily significance to that) were most likely very different from the whites she had encountered for most of her life. Still, Hemings was undoubtedly something of a curiosity at the place. Here Abigail Adams’s observation about her good nature and others’ testimony that she was very pleasant to look at may have given her an advantage as a patient. From Hemings’s standpoint, this may have been the first time she had ever been attended to by white people. In her life to date whites were the centers of attention—that of other whites and of blacks as well. Even at her young age, she had been raised to care for white children who were not much younger than she. “The Girl,” for an extended time, was now the focus of attention, being looked after by others who were there to serve and care for her.
Hard as it must have been, perhaps because it was hard, the entirety of this experience—the isolation, the facing down of an inherently frightening situation, and the process of recovery from the ordeal—helped shape Hemings’s personality just as surely as her transatlantic crossing. Those forty days alone with no tasks to perform, save relying on her own inner strength to get well, left her with no one’s interests to look after but her own. Perhaps for the first time since she was a small girl, Hemings had the perfect occasion to think intensely about herself, what her life had been to date, and what she would like to have happen in the future, and to daydream a great deal about all of that.
11
THE RHYTHMS OF THE CITY
THE HOME THAT Sally Hemings returned to after the end of her time at the inoculation house was just inside the city limits of Paris. Indeed, the Hôtel de Langeac was right next to the Grille de Chaillot, one of the many gated entry points into what was still at the time a walled city. The house, abutting the Champs-Elysées and along the rue Neuve de Berri, was more expensive than Jefferson could afford. He thought, however, that his position demanded a suitable residence for all the entertaining that he expected to do. Whatever its merits as a standard-bearer for the representative of the newly formed United States of America, the house also suited Jefferson personally.1
This residence was truly worthy of a French aristocrat. The expansive grounds entered by a way of an impressive courtyard, contained “green houses,” an extensive kitchen garden, and another “graceful” one that Jefferson pronounced “clever,” admiring its English style. Just off the entry-way into the courtyard from the rue de Berri were the porter’s lodge and servants’ quarters. The house itself, torn down in 1842, seems to have been a gem. It “had a basement, ground floor, a mezzanine,” and a top floor. Howard C. Rice, who wrote extensively about Jefferson’s time in Paris, provides a description of the sumptuous home that James and Sally Hemings came to know that is well worth reproducing.
To the right upon entering, were steps going to the front-door, beyond which was a large antechamber or reception hall. On the left-hand side of this hall a stairway led to the upper stories. Passing through the reception-hall one entered a circular room with a sky-light. Adjoining this circular room was an oval drawing-room from which steps led into the garden…. Next to the oval drawing room, looking out over the Champs-Elysées, were a smaller drawing room and the dining room. Along the rue de Berri side were a bath-room and a series of passage-ways including a stair-case leading down to the kitchens in the basement. Although no plan of the entresol or mezzanine floor has been preserved, it may be supposed that this contained
a series of bedrooms and informal apartments. The first floor…included spacious bedrooms [three], each of which had a convenient dressing-room adjoining it. The house was equipped with the latest inventions in modern plumbing, in the form of water closets, “lieux à l’anglaise.”2
Living at such a place gave both Hemingses ample opportunity to compare their surroundings in Paris with those they had seen in Virginia, and they could only have found Virginian residences wanting. The amenity of having indoor bathrooms was remarkable for both them and the Jeffersons. Along with the lieux à l’anglaise on the upper floors, the ground floor had a room designed for taking baths. The very complexity of the house, with its multiple stairways (one large formal one and two smaller private ones) and its numerous passageways leading into different areas of the mansion, no doubt piqued their interest as well. If Jefferson’s English-style garden was “clever,” so was the house designed by Jean Chalgrin, one of France’s premier architects, who later created the Arc de Triomphe. It was, in Jack McLaughlin’s words, “the most splendid house Jefferson had ever lived in.”3 Rice’s supposition that the mezzanine floor consisted of “bedrooms” and “informal apartments” is sound. All the other rooms that go into making a house a home—kitchen, dining room, parlor, master bedrooms—were accounted for in the plans for the other floors. Having a floor of available bedrooms explains why Jefferson so confidently invited guests to stay with him while in Paris: he had enough space to put them up comfortably, and he was able to play the gracious host, a role he liked very much.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 26