by Jane Cook
George was now a teenager. Oh, how she missed seeing him grow into a young man! John had copied a letter from Abigail that reached him in Ghent.
“George’s growth has been very rapid in the year past that I believe he will not be more than an inch or two taller, his voice is changing, and John will insist that he is fifteen years old, and must have a razor in another year. John is short and stocky, full of spirit animation and fire, both of them longing to have you return, so does your affectionate mother,” Abigail wrote.
An American traveling to Ghent had recently seen their boys and gave John a firsthand report. “[He] said to me of our sons, ‘George, Sir, is a fine, tall, stout boy; but as for John, Sir, he is the very picture of you.’”
The update on her sons warmed Louisa’s heart. Now she was in the city of George’s birth. She and John had been happy together then. Berlin enchanted her because there she had first experienced “the luxuries, the pleasures, and the novelties of a court.”
As she settled into her hotel, Louisa confirmed a decision. Gone was the mantra to rest, not recreate, and then resume her journey. Instead she decided to stay in Berlin a week. She didn’t need that much time to repair her carriage, but she wanted to visit former friends by reliving her youth and “forgetting in the lapse of time and distance.” The hardships of the journey from St. Petersburg had changed Louisa. She needed the rejuvenation that only socializing with old friends could bring.
Did he love her as much as he had when they were newlyweds in Berlin? Their separation had brought out her worst insecurities in the fall of 1814. Early on in the negotiations, when John thought he would soon return to St. Petersburg, he confessed to her a secret passion. Adams longed to visit Paris, which he had not seen in nearly thirty years. Accompanying his father to the famous city gave him an education beyond books. Paris was to John what Berlin was to Louisa.
Perhaps aware of his wife’s fears, his desire to see his queen of hearts, however, was more paramount than Paris:
I had had no small temptation to return by the way of Paris, which is only thirty-six hours distance from me, but I am not making this tour of Brussels for my pleasure . . . what has pleasure to show that would compensate me for an obstruction of three days longer from my queen of pleasure? If I lengthen the journey upon my return, it will assuredly not be for amusement, or to gratify my personal curiosity.
But as the months rolled on with more delays in the negotiations, Louisa couldn’t help wondering whether she was still truly the queen of his heart. She found herself lured by the practices of Russian fortune-tellers. Superstition was as common in Russian social circles as snow under their slippers. Surely it couldn’t hurt to see if a deck of cards could tell her what she needed to know?
“Mr. Charles, who is very well, informed you that I lay the cards out to see when you will return,” she confessed to her husband in a letter that winter of 1814.
One card in particular made her worry, leading her to think that another female now attracted his fancy. “Pray tell me what fair lady it is that takes up so much of your attention? As I understand that it is the fashion of the place and as I know how essential it is to the diplomatic reputation to form this sort of intrigue it is impossible for you to lose so fine an opportunity,” she both partially teased and fished.
He responded to her that other diplomats often found distractions in a Delilah, but not him.
“Do not fancy I am jealous . . . it is pretty certain that we have no pretension to be so against the temptations that the world throws in your way, which I am sure are strong and mighty. God bless and speed you soon to the arms and heart of your faithful wife,” she assured him in a late December letter in 1814.
Playing with the cards seemed so harmless, but something about it haunted her too. Within a few weeks of asking John for reassurance, she found herself face-to-face with a real fortune-teller. Two nights before she left St. Petersburg, Louisa said good-bye to one of her best friends, Madame Colombi, the woman she had taken tea with years earlier instead of attending the ball. That incident nearly cost her a place on the empress mother’s invitation list. Louisa loved Madame Colombi: “She was a charming woman and was apparently attached both to my sister and myself.”
When she arrived at Madame Colombi’s house, she discovered that a Russian woman also joined them, but without an invitation. Colombi was too polite to turn this Russian countess away.
“Countess Apraxin was a fat coarse woman, very talkative, full of scandal, and full of the everlasting amusement so fashionable in Russian society, the bonne aventure.”
Countess Apraxin was also a fortune-teller.
“After tea she took the cards, and insisted as I was going a journey, that I should choose a queen, and let her read my destiny.”
Louisa had never seen this woman before or heard her name until that night. The woman was as pushy as she was fat. Unlike John’s encounter years earlier with the bearded lady at Laval’s party, at least this countess didn’t have a beard. Louisa consented and chose a queen. Then Countess Apraxin read her fortune. “She said that I was perfectly delighted to quit Petersburg.”
That was true. Just days earlier, when she said good-bye to the empresses at the palace, she could not conceal her happiness. She told them that Mr. Adams regretted not being able to take leave of them in person, but he expected to be recalled to America after finishing his business in Ghent. He would forever remember their graciousness during his time in their court. The empresses could tell that Louisa was thrilled to say good-bye.
“I delivered your message to the empress,” Louisa wrote to John, “and she said when a man sent so far for his wife, he had no intention to return. I am a poor diplomat for she saw joy, sparkle in my eyes and she had never seen a woman so altered in her life for the better.”
Though Countess Apraxin correctly assessed that Louisa was delighted to leave St. Petersburg, she could have easily detected her elation by watching her talk about her impending journey over dinner with Madame Colombi that night. The countess next predicted that Louisa would soon meet those from whom she had long been separated. That, too, was highly probable.
Then the countess added a warning. “That when I had achieved about half of my journey, I should be much alarmed by a great change in the political world, in consequence of some extraordinary movement of a great man which would produce utter consternation, and set all [of] Europe into a fresh commotion.”
Her prediction grew worse. “That this circumstance which I should hear of on the road, would oblige me to change all my plans, and render my journey very difficult—but that after all I should find my husband well, and we should have a joyous meeting.”
Louisa responded with great pretension. “I laughed and thanked her, and said I had no fear of such a circumstance, as I was so insignificant and the arrangements for my journey so simple, I was quite satisfied that I should accomplish it if I escaped from accidents, without meeting with any obstacles of the kind predicted; more especially as it was a time of peace.”
Departing, Louisa politely said good-bye to Madame Colombi and the countess, who hoped Louisa would remember her predictions.
“I responded I was certain I could never forget her—I note this because it is an amusing and undoubted fact, and I was called on to remember it every moment during the latter part of my journey.”
What Louisa didn’t know was that a king, not a queen, would be the final trump card in her quest for reunion with her husband and oldest sons.
55
King of Spades
BY THE TIME LOUISA REACHED BERLIN THE FIRST WEEK OF MARCH 1815, John had been in Paris almost a month. From his observation, the only remaining traces of Alexander’s victory in France were the bricklayers who were still reconstructing a bridge that was destroyed when the allies entered the city. Peace had come to Paris.
After his negotiations terminated, John came to the famed city too. There he found what he was looking for: culture and relaxation
. He had received Louisa’s note about the “fair lady who according to your cards takes up so much of my attention.” He chose to banter, not bait her.
“That fair lady is younger still, and unmarried,” he assured, telling her of a twelve-year-old girl named Marianne. She and her cousin had entertained the American delegation with songs and couplets as a tribute to the United States. He responded impulsively. A “fancy” overtook him, leading him to write some verses of poetry in response. He arranged to bind his verses at a bookseller’s shop and, through Marianne’s mother, gave them to her as a gift. Perhaps the girl’s sweet, innocent voice reminded him of his lost daughter, the one who would never grow up to sing like her mother. Though much more reserved than his wife, even he grew tender at the sight of a female child.
“You must not be jealous of my muse, and as for all the rest of the fair sex of Ghent, your friend, Mr. Gallatin, used to answer them by the assurance that all my affections absent from home were platonic.”
Adams and the other American commissioners came to Paris for a distinct purpose: to wait for instructions to arrive from the US government about their next assignment.
Within three days of his arrival in Paris, John was introduced to King Louis XVIII, who was installed on the throne following Napoleon’s exile to Elba in April 1814. Told that the king and other royals rarely spoke to anyone during formal presentations, a contrast to Alexander’s charisma, Adams smiled inwardly when King Louis spoke to him.
“The king, however, asked me if ‘I was in any way related to the celebrated Mr. Adams?’”
Though John spoke French, the man performing the introductions answered for him and explained the father-son, president-diplomat relationship. Adams believed that the French government was now stable. King Louis’s job was not too difficult. Napoleon had ruled in such extremes that Louis merely had to govern with moderation, going a little in the opposite direction, but not too far, lest he incite another revolution.
“Louis has only to discern how far it [Napoleon’s policy] may be relaxed, and where he must stop, that it may not degenerate into the opposite vice of weakness. This appears to be precisely the object of his endeavors,” John predicted.
“The great difficulty for him [Louis] will be to manage the army, and to check their martial propensity. They have been deeply humiliated without being humbled. They have all the pride of their former successes, with the galling sensation of their late disasters. They look with a longing eye to their former chief, who is now but a shadow.”
Other than the seismic changes in France’s government, Adams found Paris just the way he remembered it from his teenage adventures: short on labor and long on leisure. The tendency to dissipation, even to a man his age, was still irresistible.
As he waited for a letter from President Madison, he spent hours at the theater and national museum, which proudly displayed the Venus de’ Medici and other works of art. He ate lavish dinners, including one with General Lafayette, the famed Frenchman who as a youth had slipped the bonds of France and voyaged to America to fight for the revolutionary cause of liberty.
While indulging in luxuries and growing fat on delicacies, Adams eagerly awaited the arrival of his queen of hearts. He was completely unaware that Louisa had become lost at midnight in a dark forest in Courland, nearly died while crossing the icy Vistula River, and endured the threatening looks of Baptiste only to have to rely on him in emergencies. He didn’t know that his princess had lost a wheel in the middle of nowhere, tramped through the mud in a common cart, and spent sleepless nights in creepy hovels. He didn’t know, because she had not told him, and what she had written from the road had not arrived.
No sooner had she stepped through the door of her Berlin hotel than Louisa wrote a letter to John: “After a very troublesome and tedious journey, we have happily arrived at Berlin, where I expected to have found letters from you but I am cruelly disappointed and impatiently waiting for the next post will not arrive until tomorrow evening.”
While she hoped to receive correspondence from him during her weeklong rest in Berlin, Louisa was by no means taking her time. She requested that all repairs to the carriage “be dispatched as quick as possible, so as not to delay my journey.”
She found that Berlin’s sights, palaces, and bridges were much the same. The Athenian columns of the Brandenburg Gate continued to be as elegant as they were formidable. The linden or lime trees lining the Linden Strasse still resembled graceful ballerinas. Their trunks remained just as poised and statuesque as ever, while their armlike branches bowed as if curtseying to the pedestrians below.
“Everything looked much as I had left it in the city, excepting the manners and the dress of the people—All the nationality of costume &cc had disappeared, and French was almost universally spoken.”
After seeking the whereabouts of old acquaintances, she arranged an appointment to visit a young, affable princess who, like the former queen, also shared her name.
“The Princess Louisa invited me to pass every evening with her while I stayed in town; and laughingly said that though she could not entertain as she had once done, she would give me two dishes for my supper, and a hearty welcome—No toilet [formal wardrobe] was necessary.”
War had vanquished the pretenses of the German court, which had long reveled in a loose confederation of states and kingdoms. Though Louisa did not identify Princess Louisa’s principality, she was married to one of the many German princes or dukes who ruled more than forty cities and kingdoms throughout Prussia.
During one of their visits that week, the princess was so self-conscious that she apologized for wearing a bright rose-colored silk dress. It hardly seemed appropriate for a woman her age in the circumstances that her country faced, but she thought it was pretty and wore it anyway.
“The great people of Berlin had suffered so much from the war, that there was no pretention of style among them, and they were glad to see their friends socially,” the princess explained.
She introduced Louisa to her daughter and then apologized that she could not introduce her to the rest of her family.
“Her husband and sons she told me were at Vienna; I expressed my thanks for the flattering kindness shown me by her invitation.”
Louisa was not the only woman still separated from her family because of war. Princess Louisa’s husband and sons were among the many gathered for the Congress of Vienna in Austria. Like an orchestra’s contrasting wind, string, and percussion instruments, these allied leaders brought their unique sounds to Vienna to play a symphony they hoped would be heard throughout Europe. Their song was classical, with four movements. They needed to dismantle the French Empire, redraw the map of Europe, settle the spoils of the exiled Bonaparte, and determine who had what trade rights on the open seas.
Instead of mimicking Mozart’s famous tutti outbursts, where all the instruments play the same music simultaneously and harmoniously, the Congress of Vienna had so far been a series of solos, modulations, and dissonance. Indeed the British were so off-key in Vienna months earlier in the fall of 1814 that the disaster was heard all the way to Ghent.
“When we were at Berlin, you remember there was a treaty of commerce concluded between the United States and Prussia,” John wrote Louisa in November 1814. “The first thing the Prussian ministers did . . . was to send me the project of a treaty in form. They never hinted at any question of etiquette, and I am very sure this is the first time that such a pretension was ever applied to such an occasion.”
Adams was the most experienced diplomat of any of the Ghent commissioners—British or American. Gallatin was a cabinet member; Bayard, a senator from Delaware. Kentuckian Henry Clay was Speaker of the House of Representatives, while Jonathan Russell was recently named the US minister after serving as chargé d’affaires in London in 1811. None had served as a high-ranking diplomat as long as John had.
From his experience years earlier in Berlin, Adams knew that a common negotiation practice was to first draft
a treaty, not issue preliminary conditions as the British had done. They used every excuse to prevent any progress toward peace.
John concluded that the Congress of Vienna was another major reason behind their stall tactics. The Brits expected to triumph at Vienna. If they did, their conductor’s hand against the US commissioners would have the full weight of Europe applauding for them—a standing ovation at that.
“Should they [the British] succeed in Vienna, we shall have no peace, because they will prefer war with us, to peace upon any terms,” John wrote to Louisa.
“The great effort of Lord Castlereagh [the top British representative at Vienna] has been to exclude France totally from all influence in the general distribution of spoils of Europe, and even from all interference in the affairs of Germany.”
Likewise Federalists back in America believed that Madison was mistaken over his belief that Russia would back the United States over Britain. One of the most ardent Federalists, Gouverneur Morris, wrote his friend Rufus King, a senator from New York: “I think the President [Madison] is also mistaken in supposing that Russia is the greatest Power in Europe, and especially that she will exercise her Greatness in our Favor.” How wrong he was.
At the Vienna Congress in 1814, France’s representative, Talleyrand, astonished the delegates when he offered for France to return to its pre-1792 boundaries. But there was a catch. He expected the rest of Europe to modulate with him and do the same—antebellum. Britain did not want to give up any of its acquired territory.
“The great effort of Talleyrand has been to exercise influence without provoking hostility, to counteract the views of the British government without directly confronting them, and finally to dissolve the league against France under which the congress first assembled,” Adams summed up the progress at Vienna.
Talleyrand’s suggestion allowed the French to quickly gain ground and pick up the tempo against the unpopular British. Alexander concurred and showed disdain for the English too. Lord Liverpool, the British prime minister, secretly confessed to Lord Castlereagh, “I fear the emperor of Russia is half an American.” Indeed, in many ways, Alexander was. The credit for his favor toward the US at the Vienna Congress belonged to John Quincy and Louisa Adams.