Jefferson's Daughters
Page 44
Three weeks later TJ to John Jay, 11 April 1783, PTJDE.
Finally, in early April 1783 Robert R. Livingston to TJ, 4 April 1783, PTJDE.
Formally released by Congress TJ to Robert R. Livingston, 4 April 1783, PTJDE.
Did Martha look wistfully TJMB, 1:531.
In the meantime, two popular novels TJ to François de Barbé-Marbois, 5 December 1783, PTJDE.
As one historian observed Rhys Isaac, “The First Monticello,” in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 102.
He had written to John Jay TJ to John Jay, 3 January 1783, PTJDE.
“I will ask the favor” TJ to James Madison, 31 August 1783, PTJDE.
Dislocated yet again Kierner, Martha Jefferson Randolph, 42.
Eliza Trist agreed James Madison to TJ, 30 September 1783, PTJDE.
On November 19 TJMB, 1:539.
In accordance with Jefferson’s wishes TJ to MJR, 28 November 1783, Betts and Bear, Family Letters, 19.
Her father had hired Kierner, Martha Jefferson Randolph, 43.
“The conviction that you would” TJ to MJR, 28 November 1783, Betts and Bear, Family Letters, 19.
Letters flew from Baltimore Kerrison, Claiming the Pen, 164–69.
“the many happy hours” Rebecca Frazier to Anna Hopkinson Coale, 24 November 1790. Redwood Collection, MS 1530, Maryland Historical Society.
“Disregard those foolish predictions” TJ to MJR, 11 December 1783, Betts and Bear, Family Letters, 21.
“consider…as your mother.” TJ to MJR, 28 November 1783, Betts and Bear, Family Letters, 19; Kierner, Martha Jefferson Randolph, 41, 44.
“danced out the old Year” Francis Hopkinson to TJ, 4 January 1784, PTJDE.
“I have the Pleasure” Ibid.
“whose trade it is” Malone, Jefferson, 1:406–9, quoting Jefferson, “Autobiography.”
Certainly Francis Hopkinson’s five children TJ to MJR, 15 January 1784, Betts and Bear, Family Letters, 23.
“They would be more valued” TJ to Francis Hopkinson, 14 August 1786, PTJDE.
John Jay was returning Malone, Jefferson, 1:418–19; TJ to William Short, 30 April 1784, PTJDE.
By the twenty-eighth of May Robert Hemings, who had been with Jefferson as his valet, also traveled to Boston but was sent home by Jefferson. Gordon-Reed, Hemingses, 160.
He lodged Martha Kierner, Martha Jefferson Randolph, 48–49.
“all of whom papa knew” MJR to Eliza House Trist, [August 1785], PTJDE.
“The vaunted scene of Europe” TJ to Charles Bellini, 30 September 1785, PTJDE.
And as he watched the ship Gordon-Reed, Hemingses, 160.
“threw every day” TJMB, 1:557, quoting The Memoirs of Baron Thiébault, trans. Arthur John Butler (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 1:44.
At last, they crossed See Hubert Robert’s painting, The Opening of the Pont de Neuilly, with Jefferson’s comment in William Howard Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 80. An engineering marvel, the bridge is dwarfed by the skyscrapers of La Defense today. Howard C. Rice, Thomas Jefferson’s Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 108.
“a perfect garden” MJR to Eliza House Trist, [August 1785], PTJDE.
There is not a sliver A crowded Paris street. Balthazar Anton Dunker, illustrator, Tableau de Paris (n.p., 1787), in David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1, 18–20, 224. My description of Paris draws from Garrioch’s.
Less obvious from pictures Garrioch, Making of Revolutionary Paris,18.
There, neighborhoods such as Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, quoted in ibid., 20.
By the time the Jeffersons Ibid., 219.
Once owned by a younger brother Ibid., 218.
Close enough for a commute Ibid., 218; TJ to Buchanan and Hay, 13 August 1785, PTJDE.
“appear a monster” TJ to Virginia Delegates in Congress, 12 July 1785, PTJDE.
But the rue Saint Honoré Rice, Jefferson’s Paris, 21–23.
They arrived at their lodgings Adams, Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson, 46–47.
The very day they arrived TJMB, 1:557–58.
“there is not a porter” Abigail Adams to [Cotton Tufts], 8 September 1784, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. Interestingly, Jefferson submitted, although he considered the process “an affliction” and was tempted to cut off his hair altogether to avoid it. Ibid.
“I soon got rid of him” MJR to Eliza House Trist, [after 24 August 1785], PTJDE.
the most expensive “Fourchette des tariffs de pensions pratiqués par les interants payants de 1760 á 1789,” Martine Sonnet, L’Education des filles au temps des Lumières (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1987), 329.
He had been so impressed Chastellux, François Jean, Marquis de, Voyages de M. de le Marquis de Chastellux dans l’Amérique Septentrionale dans les Annés 1780, 1781, & 1782 (Paris: Prault, Imprimeur du Roi, 1786). This book was translated into English the following year.
Such a well-placed advocate George Green Shackelford, Thomas Jefferson’s Travels in Europe, 1784–1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 172n18.
Martha and Jefferson The following description is based on author’s visit to this site.
Next they were led Notes of Howard C. Rice of his visit to Panthemont, 11 April 1948, in “Notebook A-10: Paris: Left Bank: Faubourg St.-Germain,” Howard C. Rice Collection, ICJS.
“I leave you to judge” MJR to Eliza House Trist, [after August 1785], PTJDE.
“the most monstrous article” MJR to Septimia Randolph, 2 December 1832, Papers of Septimia Anne Cary Randolph Meikleham, Acc. 4726-b, ViU.
Devoted to reforming children’s education Denis Diderot, La Religieuse (1760), quoted in Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 275. On Rousseau and his influence, see Mary Seidman Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 30–33; and François Rousseau, Histoire de L’Abbaye de Pentemont depuis sa translation à Paris jusqu’a la revolution (Paris, 1918), 37–39. Rousseau describes Panthemont as a worldly institution at which a devotion to feverish gossip rendered “arid” such subjects as grammar and arithmetic.
Revered in European and American culture Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 112; Elizabeth Rapley, A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001); Jean Bloch, “Discourses of Female Education in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century French Women,” in Women, Gender and the Enlightenment, eds. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (2005; repr., New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 243–44.
As historians have documented Mita Choudhury, Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 18–19, 134–38; Hufton, Prospect Before Her, 112.
The Mother Superior Choudhury, Convents and Nuns, 15–16; Rapley, Social History of the Cloister, 119–22.
Martha Jefferson’s Panthemont Sonnet, L’Éducation des filles, 27.
A thin soup Ibid., 285.
Combined with Martha’s basic tuition Gordon-Reed, Hemingses, 180. Currency conversions from the eighteenth century are inexact and do not convey their buying power in a particular time and place. I followed the method at hornworld.me/2010/08/19/how-much-did-haydn-earn.
These differences mattered little Sonnet, L’Éducation des filles, 285–87; Goodman, Becoming a Woman, 74.
The dismal state Sonnet’s L’Éducation des filles is the most thorough study of convent schools in Paris and much relied upon by scholars of this period.
By 1800, only 27 percent Dominque Godineau, “The Woman,” in Enlightenment Portraits, ed. Michel Vovelle and trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicag
o: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 409.
But there was a deeper Sonnet, L’Éducation des filles, 285–87.
Marie-Catherine de Béthisy de Mézières Paul Rousselot, Histoire de L’Abbaye de Pentemont (1883; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1971), 17.
Founded in 1217 Danica Zujovic, “A Short History of Pentemont” (n.d., pamphlet printed by the Eglise Réformée, Pariosse de Pentemont), 1, Howard C. Rice Collection, copy at ICJS.
“I must admit” 26 March 1781. Translated in ibid., 3. “Je vous avoue que j’ai été fort surpris d’y lire que vous comptiez sur un secours, de la part de la Commission, de 60 000 livres, et que votre confiance, à ce sujet, était si assurée que vous alliez, en conséquence, prendre des arrangements avec vos créanciers.” Quoted in Rousselot, Histoire de L’Abbaye de Pentemont, 36.
She successfully recruited Roger Armand Weigert, “Un centenaire. Le temple de Pentemont, 1846–1946,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français 94 (January–March 1947): 13–32, 15–20. Howard C. Rice Collection, ICJS.
master over all Dumas Malone, “Polly Jefferson and her Father,” Virginia Quarterly Review 7 (January 1931): 81.
CHAPTER 3: SCHOOL LIFE
“spoke very little French” MJR to Eliza House Trist, [after August 1785], PTJDE. This is the only letter Martha Jefferson wrote describing her life in Paris.
“I am very happy” Ibid.
“really great difficulty” MJR to TJ, 27 May 1787, Betts and Bear, Family Letters, 42.
The Abbess allowed her father MJR, “Reminiscences of Th. J.,” Acc. 10487, ViU.
“four rooms exceedingly large” MJR to Eliza House Trist, [after August 1785], PTJDE.
Panthemont, on the other hand Sonnet, L’Éducation des filles, 59.
In fact, as she told Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, Daughter of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Written in France and England in 1785, ed. by her daughter (New York: Wily and Putnam, 1841), 27.
“great entertainment” Judith Randolph to MJ, 12 February 1785, Trist Papers, Acc. 2104, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina (SHC).
When Julia arrived JA[nnesley] to MJR, 20 April 1786, Papers of the Randolph Family of Edgehill, Acc. 1397, ViU; Ann Lucas Birle and Lisa A. Francavilla, eds., Thomas Jefferson’s Granddaughter in Queen Victoria’s England (Boston and Charlottesville: Massachusetts Historical Society and Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2012), 151. Arthur Annesley was first Earl of Mountnorris and eighth Viscount Valentia.
“I will first give you” JA[nnesley] to MJR, 27 April 1786, Acc. 1397, ViU.
Martha would preserve Martha Jefferson’s List of Schoolmates, n.d., Acc. 5385-I, ViU.
They were the nieces Birle and Francavilla, Thomas Jefferson’s Granddaughter, 164. He would later be more notorious for his liaison with Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
They would write Elizabeth Tufton to MJR, 21 March 1790, Acc. 1397, ViU.
“I shall be indulged” MJR to Bettie Hawkins, March 1789, Acc. 1397, ViU.
“Give me a description” B[ettie] Hawkins to MJR, n.d., Acc. 1397, ViU.
“always wild, your petticoat dragging” Marie de Botidoux to MJR, 31 October 1798, Acc. 5385-aa, ViU.
“held back for twenty years” Ibid., 1798; 12 March 1790; 1 May 1790; 4 October 1809.
Included in the three thousand Rice, Thomas Jefferson’s Paris, 65; Sonnet, L’Éducation des filles, 47.
“pretty well” MJR to TJ, Paris, 27 May 1787; MJR to TJ, 8 March 1787, in Betts and Bear, Family Letters, 42, 32.
“The only kind of needlework” MJR to TJ, 9 April 1787, in ibid., 37–38.
Jefferson had told her TJ to MJR, 6 March 1786, in ibid., 30.
Martha Jefferson’s copy Nöel Antoine Pluche, Nature Display’d. Being Discourses on such Particulars of Natural History as Were Thought Proper to Excite the Curiosity, and Form the Minds of Youth. Containing What belongs to Man Considered in Society, vols. 1, 3, 5, 6, 7 (London: 1750). Jefferson had books sent to him in Paris from England, so it is certainly possible that Martha read this while in Paris. Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 284. It is also possible that she read the work in its original French (Jefferson owned a French edition) and later obtained the English translation for her own children. Either way, she read the work and thought it valuable enough to teach them.
Her French grammar book Charles François Lhomond, Grammaire de Lhomond: Éléments de la grammaire françoise, 1780. Other inscriptions reveal the book’s subsequent history: M Randolph [Martha’s signature when married] Monticello/Virginia Randolph/Monticello/Martha Jefferson Trist.
She read Alain Lesage’s TJ to François de Barbé-Marbois, 5 December 1783, PTJDE.
And she relished Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, Oeuvres de Florian: Galatee, Roman Pastoral (Paris: 1785). Inscribed, “À Mademoiselle Jefferson”; also: “M. Randolph/Monticello; Cornelia J. Randolph/Monticello.” La Fayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, Comtesse de, Ouevres de La Fayette: Zayde, histoire Espagnole, precedee d’un traite sur l’origine des Romans, vols. 1–3 (Amsterdam: 1786). Inscribed, “M. Randolph/Monticello.”
“Are you still reading” B. Hawkins to MJR, [1788 or 1789], Acc. 1397, ViU.
She was introduced Madame de Genlis, Théâtre à l’usage de jeunes personnes [Theater for the use of young people]; Antoine Denis Bailly, Dictionnaire poetique de Bailly (Paris: 1782). Martha’s copy is inscribed, “MJRandolph, Edgehill.” Le Rime di Francesco Petrarca (London: 1784). Inscriptions show that both TJ and Martha read this work.
To perfect the art Goodman, Becoming a Woman, 53. “The art of making extracts” and reading Sévigné’s letters were a staple of French girls’ education. Rousselot, Histoire de l’education des femmes en France, vol. 2, 147.
“I am going to say” Marie de Botidoux to MJR, 2 January 1790, Acc. 5385-aa, ViU. See Goodman, Becoming a Woman, 149–50, for an extract of Madame de Sévigné’s letter breathlessly conveying momentous news from court.
Because Martha left us Sonnet, L’Éducation des filles, 27.
One of its students Quoted in ibid., 212. This described the day of Hélène Massalska, age six to ten, rather than Martha Jefferson, but its overall contours are similar.
“reading and writing” This school’s students were trained as well in “double-entry bookkeeping, receipts and expense accounts; and weights and measures of different countries,” suggesting a somewhat different clientele than Panthemont’s nobility. “Etat et conditions de la pension pour les jeunes demoiselles, relativement à l’éducation complette qu’on continue de leur donner dans le couvent des religieuses Angloises, à liège” (1770). I am grateful to Sally Mason, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, for providing a copy of this document.
At Liège Goodman, Becoming a Woman, 67.
These comparable elite schools Recent scholarship supports this picture of elite education. See Rapley, Social History of the Cloister, 236–38; Samia I. Spencer, “Women and Education,” in French Women and the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Samia Spencer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 84–85.
Following the lead Weigert, “Un centenaire. Le temple de Pentemont,” 19–20. See also, Rousselot, Histoire de Pentemont, 37–38.
“This good woman” Quoted in Choudhury, Convents and Nuns, 135.
Indeed, some have thought Bloch, “Mme Roland de la Platière,” in Women, Gender, and the Enlightenment, Knott and Taylor, eds., 746.
“Titus Livius puts me” MJR to TJ, 25 March 1787, 27 May 1787, and 8 March 1787, in Betts and Bear, Family Letters, 33, 42, 32.
But her letters MJR to Eliza House Trist, Paris, [after August 1785], PTJDE.
“Priests can’t marry” J. Annesley to MJR, 20 April 1786, Acc. 1397, ViU.
“I remember her” Madame de Staël to TJ, 25 April 1807. Marie G. Kimball, “Unpublished Correspondence of Mme. De Sta
ël with Thomas Jefferson,” The North American Review 208, no. 752 (July 1918): 64.
For both serious scholars This is the main argument of Dena Goodman’s Becoming a Woman.
The solution Ibid., 15.
In fact, so standardized Photographed in Goodman, Becoming a Woman, 107.
“little nothings” Ibid., 6, 269.
“The need to write” Ibid., 264.
“Tell me who are friends” Bettie Hawkins to MJR, n.d., Acc.1397, ViU.
“Tell me all about her” Bettie Hawkins Curzon to MJR, [1789], Acc. 1397, ViU.
“I am grateful” Gabrielle D’Harcourt to MJR, [1789], in “Jefferson Quotes & Family Letters,” FLDA.
“your lady ship stands much” Bettie Hawkins to MJR, [1788], Acc. 1397. ViU. None of Martha’s letters to her schoolmates have been located.
“had as many steps” MJR to Eliza House Trist, [after August 1785], PTJDE.
“The abbess in charge” Letter of Jean Armand Tronchin, 10 March 1788, translated in Marie Kimball, Jefferson: The Scene of Europe 1784–1789 (New York: Coward-McCann, 1950), 13–14.
“there are in it” TJ to Mary Jefferson Bolling, 23 July 1787, PTJDE.
The Jeffersons had not been MJR to Eliza House Trist, [after August 1785], PTJDE. For a description of the ceremony, held on 14 October 1784, see Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, 23–27.
“impossible to describe” Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, 24–25.
“fine, white woolen dresses” Ibid., 26–27.
At nineteen, Nabby Adams Abigail Adams had confessed her “false prejudices” about the convent to Jefferson when she expressed her concern about his plan to lodge the lively Maria at Panthemont with her sister. AA to TJ, 10 September 1787. Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters (1956; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 197.
But Nabby had also Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, 26. The memoir of Hélène Massalska, who attended the Abbaye-au-Bois in Paris, describes an identical ceremony there, quoted in Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 537.