Several people appeared to have noticed that William Short, Jefferson’s distant relative and secretary, had caught Martha’s eye. He had many qualities to recommend him: He, too, was enamored of all things French, including making serious if not wholly effective attempts to learn the language; he was handsome and personable; and her father liked and trusted him. Indeed, when Jefferson left Paris, he left the management of his home, the Hôtel de Langeac, and his business affairs in Short’s capable hands. Nabby Adams found him a sociable man who possessed pleasing manners, “without the least formality, or affectation of any kind,” and he was a favorite of her mother’s as well. Martha and Short had been thrown together during the summer of 1787, when Jefferson took his seven-week European tour. Short checked in on her frequently at the convent and delivered Jefferson’s letters to her. Once the girls left Panthemont and returned to Jefferson’s home for good, she would have seen even more of him.
The forty-four-year-old Duke of Dorset took an interest in these courtship proceedings as well; his niece Elizabeth Tufton once conveyed his message to Martha “that he hopes you like Mr Short as much as ever.” But his words may have been the cutting sarcasm of a jilted rival. Martha had been much in the company of the duke and his nieces in the summer of 1789. A friend had noticed that “the duke seemed to care very much about you, which I am not surprised, my dear Jef—his choice can only honor him and make many, many people jealous.” But when he offered Martha a diamond ring, she refused it, so he was forced to content himself with sending a simple ring instead as a token of his “fond remembrance.”
Remaining behind in Paris after Jefferson’s departure, William Short, whom Jefferson once called his “adoptive son,” was entrusted with his diplomatic duties. Short served as the American chargé d’affaires in France until 1792, before going on to posts in the Netherlands and Spain. Disappointed in a long-standing love affair with a French noblewoman and in being passed over for the ambassadorship to Russia, Short returned to the United States for good in 1810.
Although she had spurned a duke, Martha’s romance with Short did not go smoothly. It is impossible to know what happened to cause their rupture, but in the aftermath, each spoke peevishly about the other. Martha did not even want to hear his name mentioned, and Short did not wish her well. After Martha’s departure from Paris, Elizabeth Tufton told her to look for a letter her sister had written that their uncle had “sent to the American charge d’affaires [Short], (I will not mention names for fear of offending you), who has promised to forward it.” When Marie de Botidoux inquired of Short for news of Martha’s return voyage to Virginia, he was still angry. “Mlle Jefferson was still at Harbor,” Short informed her, her departure held up by “contrary winds.” With no sign that the winds would let up, he feared that “the friends of Mlle Botidoux will have a very disagreeable journey.” He added darkly, “There is one”—and by this he meant Martha—“who deserves it.”
Marriage, of course, was serious business for women, who surrendered their names, legal identity, property, and bodies to their husbands with the pronouncement of their wedding vows. For all the levity of the young girls’ letters, the calculations in choosing a husband were a vital part of their conversations. Perhaps remembering her own parents’ loving marriage as she learned about matchmaking in aristocratic circles, Martha was incredulous to hear the manner in which some European men searched for wives. “I recollect you would not believe that now & then people advertise for a wife,” Bettie Hawkins wrote from London, enclosing just such an ad from The Morning Post and hoping “you will believe your own eyes.” In another letter, Bettie wrote of her forthcoming marriage in May 1788 to twenty-one-year-old Henry Francis Roper Curzon, recounting his credentials. “All I can tell you concerning him is that he is of an excelling family, his father is brother to Lord Leynham, whose title & estate Mr Curson in all probability will have,” she wrote, a pragmatic nineteen-year-old, laying out her assessment of her own prospects for wealth, title, and security as his wife. “He would be a Baronet were he not a Catholick,” she continued, “but this will luckily not prevent his being Lord Leynham, should the present heir kick the bucket.” And happily she could also report that her intended “is remarkably sensible & handsome.”
A year later their friend Julia Annesley married “a Mr Maxwell, oldest son of the Bishop of Meath.” There was a cost, however, to that apparently favorable match. “One may conclude her sentiments on an important point are changed,” the new Mrs. Curzon intimated tactfully, “or this marriage cou’d never have taken place.” When Julia had left Panthemont she bemoaned the “fatal vessel” that had taken her away from France and from Abbé Edgeworth, Martha’s beloved teacher and, it turned out, Julia’s as well. “A charming man!” Julia wrote after her landfall in Dover. “What obligations am I not under to him! He has been the means of my salvation.” Heavy-hearted, she feared for her newly acquired Catholicism in Anglican England. Her fears were justified; to marry the son of an Anglican bishop, she would have to abjure her new faith. Weighing her options, she decided to do so. Later that year, Bettie Curzon heard that Mr. Maxwell had become Lord Farnham, and his new bride “is now Lady Julia, which was her wish.”
As a student at Panthemont, Julia Annesley had known she wanted a title and that she would marry to secure it. But for all her youthful teasing of her American friend’s infatuation (“remember, Priests can’t marry,” she had teased), Julia learned that marital arrangements were about rank and wealth. In exchange for her future livelihood, Julia Annesley traded away a religion decidedly unfashionable in Britain. (Catholics could not vote in Britain until 1829.) As their own weddings approached, the lighthearted banter about the making and breaking of marriages grew serious. Two days before her wedding, Bettie Hawkins confessed to Martha that “I am really un peu dérangée dans la tête [a little deranged in my mind], the idea that I quit all my friends, my dearest and nearest relatives so soon, to follow a man who may soon forget the many promises he has made me….” She trailed off. Her hard-nosed mother, clearly happy about the promising match, was unsympathetic; Bettie’s fears revealed her “an idiot,” she said. “Pity your distressed friend,” Bettie wrote disconsolately.
Martha certainly entered into the spirit of courtship gossip and readily received her friends’ marital updates, but she seems to have resisted the idea of marriage as mere negotiation of money and titles. When their classmate Miss Broadhead became engaged to “a Mr Dashwood, a most amiable young man, heir to a title & ten thousand a year,” Bettie Curzon feared that Martha “may accuse him of the same fault for which you so unmercifully blame poor Sophie”: mercenary motives for marriage. Martha wanted a love match, which Bettie believed that “you Jef—who I believe is capable of a sincere attachment” would be able to have. Like her aristocratic friends, Martha took her status and rank for granted as a natural consequence of her father’s; she would no more sacrifice money for love than would her friends. But as an American, she rejected the titles so coveted by her aristocratic classmates. Still, after a five-year French sojourn, in her dress, self-assurance, and maturing ideas about courtship, love, and marriage, Martha Jefferson was no longer the ingénue her father had brought to Paris. By her final months there, Martha had grown out of her shyness, carrying herself with the self-assurance the more experienced Bettie knew was “necessary in the world, where every man judges you from the opinion you seem yourself to have of your abilities.” And she had learned about the complex calculations she would have to make when it was time to select her own husband.
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THE TRANSITION EFFECTED BY her years in France was much less dramatic for Maria than for her sister, in large part because of her age. Entering Panthemont at nine rather than twelve, and leaving the city shortly after her eleventh birthday, she was too young for the affairs of the heart that preoccupied the older students. The outline of her day and studies would have closely resembled that remembered by Hélène Massalska at the Abbaye-aux-Bois, anothe
r elite Parisian school. As they had been for Martha, French lessons would have been Maria’s first priority; reading, penmanship, and arithmetic would follow. But they were not purely elementary; Maria had not arrived in Paris unschooled. Abigail Adams had exclaimed about Maria’s “so mature an understanding, so womanly a behavior, and so much sensibility united” and noticed her love of books, all a credit to Elizabeth Eppes’s training. “Her reading, her writing, her manners in general shew what everlasting obligations we are all under to you,” Jefferson wrote gratefully to his sister-in-law, days after Maria’s arrival. So it is not a surprise that Maria did well in her new school. After only a year, Jefferson told Elizabeth Eppes that Maria had begun to speak French “easily enough and to read as well as English. She will begin Spanish in a few days, and has lately begun the harpsichord and drawing.”
Unlike Martha in her first weeks of isolation at Panthemont, Maria had an elder sister who gradually initiated her to her new surroundings. Martha’s devoted friends, many of whom were English, also doted on Maria. Bettie Hawkins and Julia Annesley were there when she arrived in July 1787, as were several others whose close friendship with Martha was marked by the treasured exchange of a lock of hair. Maria’s tendency “to attach herself to those who are kind to her” (as her father had observed) had served her well in the absence of her parents. “Her temper, her disposition, her sensibility are all formed to delight,” Abigail Adams, too, had thought. And from her loving aunt Eppes to the strangers who vied to have her sit on their laps in the coach that bore her from the coast to Paris, people were naturally drawn to the endearing Maria Jefferson.
Within two weeks of her entrance into the school, she had secured the affection of Martha’s friends and of the nuns as well. Even after her departure from Panthemont, Bettie Hawkins begged for letters from Maria, urging her not to worry about neatness. Eighteenth-century manners required that writers first draft their letter and then make a fair copy to send. But Bettie waived that rule for Maria. “It does not signify you know, if well or ill between friends. If it did, I should certainly write this over again, for in my life I never saw such a wretched scrawl,” she admitted merrily. From London, Bettie sent storybooks and kisses to Maria and reassurances that she would “answer her charming letter.” Elizabeth and Caroline Tufton never wrote to Martha without enclosing their love to her younger sister as well. Maria also made friends of her own, such as Kitty (Catherine) Church, the niece of Alexander Hamilton. So it was with some justification that Jefferson could report almost immediately to Elizabeth Eppes that Maria had become “a universal favorite with the young ladies and the mistresses” at Panthemont.
His view that Maria was “perfectly happy” at the school was probably more optimistic than accurate, however. As pampered and petted as Maria was by her friends, the regimen at Panthemont, presided over by the Abbess, was a far cry from the individual attention, loving care, and indulgence she had known at Eppington. Caroline Tufton must have noticed Maria’s unhappiness at the convent school, for she guessed that after their return to Virginia, Maria was much happier there.
Indeed, Maria’s thoughts in Europe appear to have been almost entirely preoccupied with Virginia. When in London, she would sometimes sit on Abigail Adams’s lap, Adams told her sister, “and describe to me the parting with her aunt, who brought her up, the obligation she was under to her, and the love she had for her little cousins, till the tears would stream down her cheeks.” She must have done the same thing with her father in her first week in Paris, for he assured Eppes “it is impossible for a child to prove a more sincere affection to an absent person than she does to you.” A year later, her father could tell his sister-in-law that Maria still “looks to you as her best future guide and guardian,” that is, like a mother. While they were in school, Jefferson’s daughters spent Sundays with him, talking of nothing but their relatives at home in Virginia. But even if they spent every day of the week together, Jefferson believed, “the theme would still be the same.”
There was another layer to Maria’s unhappiness at Panthemont: her fear of displeasing her father. Although Maria notoriously hated letter-writing, she had composed a long letter—unfortunately lost to us now—to her aunt Eppes about her voyage, in time for Jefferson to enclose with his notification of her safe arrival. But a year removed from that traumatic experience, though her face “kindled with love” every time she heard her aunt’s name, Maria could not bring herself to write another. It was not for lack of desire, as Jefferson knew. He would keep suggesting that she try again, he told Eppes, but he already knew it was hopeless. “I know she will undertake it at once as she has already done a dozen times. She gets all the apparatus, places herself very formally with pen in hand, and it is not till after all this and rummaging her head thoroughly that she calls out ‘indeed Papa I do not know what to say, you must help me.’ ” Since Jefferson always refused, “her good resolutions have always proved abortive and her letters ended before they were begun.”
Historian Dumas Malone called Maria Jefferson a “reluctant correspondent” because letter-writing seemed to present an insurmountable challenge to her. It was, he concluded, “hard for her to learn to be her father’s daughter,” a failure according to Malone, who measured her entirely according to Jefferson’s standards. But Malone did not consider several other possibilities, not least of which was Maria’s disposition to please. A family story, told by an Eppes descendant in the 1860s, gives another variation of the scene Jefferson had sketched: “He seated his little daughter at the desk with a pen, ink and paper, told her the date, and left her to write. When he returned after a reasonable time, only the date was written, and the paper, so white and fair at the beginning, was blistered with her tears.” When Maria returned to Virginia, the story continued, and was asked by her aunt why she had never written, she replied, “Oh, Aunt Eppes, I did want to and I tried, but I just couldn’t….If I had written to you, I would have told you everything, and Papa was going to read it all.” With her father looking over her shoulder, she could not unburden herself of her loneliness or homesickness, afraid he would read a rebuke of his decision to send for her. Because just starting the letter to her sympathetic aunt would open the floodgates, little Maria restrained herself altogether.
In any event, Maria Jefferson had learned an important lesson in Virginia, where she learned to write. Her first letters, trying to stave off her move to Paris, ended in disaster. Although she had spoken her mind quite firmly, she was overruled. She had also seen her aunt suffer a similar fate, as letters became events to dread rather than anticipate. Ultimately, she must have wondered, what did it signify if she wrote or not? If letters were only going to hurt, why write them? Nor did letters serve Maria Jefferson as the cement of friendship they did for her elder sister. She had known a second mother that Martha had not. As she had learned at Eppington and in London, it was so much more satisfying to unburden herself with a loved one, seated side by side, a sympathetic arm around her shoulders, than to write a letter.
So Maria probably did not object when Jefferson withdrew his daughters from Panthemont in April 1789 to reunite them in a family circle at the Hôtel de Langeac. Situated in a newly developed neighborhood, the house had a large garden that was the delight of both Jefferson and his daughters. He liked to experiment with American plants, and his purchase in June 1786 of a badminton set suggests that Martha played there with her friends from the convent. Away from the dirt and smells of the city, the convenient location permitted easy access down the Champs to the east to the capital’s center and, to the west, to the Bois de Boulogne (a massive park, still a Parisian favorite, where Adams and Jefferson both liked to walk) and the western suburbs.
Martha Jefferson remembered the house as a “very elegant one even for Paris with an extensive garden court and out buildings in the handsomest style.” The three-story house itself was in the shape of a trapezoid, following the irregular shape of the lot. One entered the property through a gated c
ourtyard off the quieter rue de Berri. The entrance hall opened into a large domed room, adjacent to which were a large oval salon illuminated by a skylight, a smaller salon, and a dining room. A grand staircase ascended to the second floor, which had an “oval salon overlooking the garden and three suites, each complete, in the French manner, with a bedroom, study, and dressing room.” Jefferson’s rooms were on the top floor. With its lighting, elegance, and modern plumbing (Jefferson paid fifty livres each year to have water piped into the house), the Hôtel de Langeac was the epitome of French design and comfort.
The Hôtel de Langeac (Parisians referred to their town homes as hôtels), on the corner of the rue de Berri and the Champs-Élysées, was in the westernmost part of the city, just inside the Grille de Chaillot, one of many customs gates built to collect duties from farmers and merchants entering the city from the countryside. In this east-facing view, down the Champs toward the city center, Jefferson’s home is the lower building on the left. In spite of the beauty of the elegant government building on the right, it was a hated symbol of the crown’s power to tax.
We do not know which rooms the girls used on their weekend visits or after their withdrawal from the convent. Indeed, the house would have been quite full with Jefferson and his daughters, Sally and James Hemings, Petit, and five other French servants all lodged there. Short also lived there when he was in town, as did the American artist John Trumbull and other visitors. As the home and office of the American minister, the Hôtel de Langeac was a semipublic building, open to all Americans who needed his help. But it was also the place to which Jefferson had brought his daughters during their last winter at the school. They had contracted typhus during one of the worst winters in Paris’s history. He made light of their illness to Elizabeth Eppes in December 1788, “an indisposition,” he called it, from which Martha had recovered but Maria had not. It was “not sufficient however to confine her to her bed,” he wrote, not wanting to alarm her aunt.
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