Louisa on the Front Lines

by Samantha Seiple

  Lu found life at Schwalbach boring. “We walked a little, talked a little, bathed, & rode a little, worried a good deal, & I grubbed away at French with no master & small success… rather dull days bathing, walking, & quiddling about,” she recounted.

  The good news was the doctor thought Anna’s condition had improved, even though she still complained and fussed. “I tried my best to suit & serve her,” Lu wrote. “But don’t think I did so very well, yet many would have done still worse I fancy, for hers is a very hard case to manage & needs patience & wisdom of an angel.”

  Lu understood illness firsthand, both as a patient and nurse, and she was sympathetic. But she had also experienced firsthand the horrors of war, and, like the men she had nursed, Lu had used all her strength trying to fight her way back from the brink of death. So it was difficult for her to relate to Anna’s fragility, which many considered an attractive feminine quality. But Lu didn’t. Like many feminists of the time, Lu believed that most female fragility was the result of society’s rules, restricting women from exercise, such as running, and expecting them to wear uncomfortable clothes. The corset was the biggest offender, which was not only tight and painful but made breathing and physical exertion difficult. Lu believed that fragility kept women from fully participating in life.

  Compounding Lu and Anna’s differences were their lots in life. In Lu’s family, the burden of taking care of everyone fell on her, especially because her father had recently lost his job as the superintendent of the Concord schools. In stark contrast, Anna, who was a thirty-year-old spinster, was a daddy’s girl. She had been taken care of her whole life, showered in luxury with no financial worries or any obligation to work—a foreign concept, so to speak, for Lu.

  Lu had been worried about putting her writing career on hold while she traveled, especially because she was gaining momentum. After the critical success of Hospital Sketches, her love-triangle romance Moods was published. Lu had mixed feelings about it. “The book was hastily got out, but on the whole suited me.… For a week wherever I went I saw, heard, & talked ‘Moods,’” Lu chronicled. “Found people laughing or crying over it, & was continually told how well it was going, how much it was liked, how fine a thing I’d done. I was glad but not proud, I think, for it has always seemed as if ‘Moods’ grew in spite of me, & that I had little to do with it except to put into words the thoughts that would not let me rest until I had.”

  After Moods was published, Lu tried to work on her other novel in progress, Success (later titled Work), but she abandoned it to write more “blood and thunder” tales. “Being tired of novels, I soon dropped it & fell back on rubbishy tales, for they pay best & I can’t afford to starve on praise, when sensation stories are written in half the time & keep the family cosy,” Lu wrote.

  But when she was offered the chance to travel to Europe, a lifelong dream, her family insisted that she should go. Lu reasoned that the life experience, like her time at the Union Hotel Hospital, would give her material for more stories, so she was writing down everything in her pocket diary and letters home.

  Before leaving Schwalbach, Lu had finally received her first letter from home. She was thrilled that they missed her. “All is happy & well, thank God!” she noted in her journal. “It touched & pleased me very much to see how they missed me, thought of me, & and longed to have me back. Every little thing I ever did for them is now so tenderly & gratefully remembered, & my absence seems to have left so large a gap that I begin to realize how much I am to them in spite of all my faults.”

  Soon after receiving the letter, Lu and Anna left Schwalbach and traveled through Germany, stopping in the charming Heidelburg, the fashionable Baden Baden, the lovely Lausanne, before finally reaching La Tour de la Peilz. But Lu quickly realized she didn’t like it at the Pension Victoria. It wasn’t the accommodations. The rooms were comfortable, the food was good, and the setting was beautiful, with a view of the glittering lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains. It was the guests who were disagreeable, specifically the Polk family from Maury County, Tennessee.

  Although the South had lost the Civil War with the fall of Richmond and the surrender of General Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s most respected commander, a few days later, it was followed by the assassination of President Lincoln. The conflict lived on, and Lu was discovering firsthand that the hateful bitterness between both sides endured even on the other side of the world.

  At dinner, the first day Lu and Anna were at the Pension Victoria, someone asked them where they were from. “Boston, Massachusetts,” Lu replied. She looked around the long table and noticed a once-handsome, thin, sallow man with gray hair and a mustache glowering at her. And so were his wife and daughter.

  Lu learned that the man was Colonel Andrew J. Polk, one of the wealthiest plantation owners in the state of Tennessee. He had fought for the Confederate army and been badly wounded, and one of his brothers had been killed. When the Yankees arrived in Tennessee, Colonel Polk and his family had fled their princely eighteen-room brick mansion situated on a thousand acres of fertile farmland and equipped with brick barns, brick outbuildings, and a glass greenhouse covering two acres. Their five hundred slaves had also fled, to freedom.

  “Thoroughly beaten, I could not wonder that we were unwelcome neighbors,” Lu penned. “And [I] tried not to show any ungenerous exultation, though I must confess the blood of a born abolitionist simmered—not to say boiled—when I heard the tales they told, [and] found myself insulted daily.”

  In the evenings, Colonel Polk played cards with the other guests while drinking too much brandy. His wife, Rebecca, heiress to an iron fortune that had used slave labor, complained about the hardships and ill health her husband had suffered from the Civil War. She told stories about the Union soldiers, calling them barbaric cowards, and how their slaves had been happy and loyal, but the Yankees had forced them away. She believed their slaves were longing for their “master” to return.

  Her husband boasted that he’d given his slaves a church. “A church to Almighty God, sir,” he exclaimed with a Southern drawl. “And it was a rare sport to see ’em preaching and praying. I used to take my friends down to enjoy the fun. I let ’em marry, too, and gave away the bride myself. You’d roar to see ’em jump the broomstick.” Polk didn’t mention that it was his slaves who had dug the clay, kilned the bricks, cut the wood, and built the church.

  Polk also made sure Lu heard him laugh about a wounded Union soldier who was taken prisoner. Like Lu’s second-favorite patient, Baby B., his arm was shattered from a bullet and needed to be amputated. But the Confederate surgeon amputated his leg instead of his arm, so he could never fight again.

  Interestingly, Colonel Polk’s cousin was the eleventh president of the United States, James Polk, who was considered the last strong president before Abraham Lincoln took office. Polk had been elected on the platform of “manifest destiny”—westward expansion across the continent. During Polk’s presidency, he delivered on his promise, and the United States grew by one-third, adding Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, California, and the Oregon Territory. But the expansion of the country also ignited the conflict over the expansion of slavery, effectively dividing the country and driving it to war.

  At the Pension Victoria, the hostility seethed between Lu and the Polks, and Lu was shocked that the other guests, who hailed from other countries, sympathized with the Polks. Some, like the English, claimed neutrality, a Frenchman just shrugged his shoulders, and two ladies from Scotland advised Lu to be careful, warning her that Colonel Polk was a desperate and, therefore, dangerous man. Lu didn’t try to provoke the Polks intentionally, but when she learned that they were traveling with a black nurse named Betty who was once their slave, she always made a point of acknowledging her. Lu stood firm in her belief that all humans deserve equal rights.

  BUT ON this windy November morning, while Lu was eating her breakfast, her dislike for the Pension Victoria was about to change when the outs
ide door opened, and a cold draft blew through the dining room. Lu was sitting at the long dining room table in her assigned seat by the stove, and when the icy breeze barely cut through the blazing heat radiating in her corner, she heard someone cough. Lu recognized the low hollow cough from her nursing experience. It was the sound of a death knell.

  Lu looked over in the direction of the continued coughing, and she saw a new guest stand up from his assigned seat by the door. While he went to shut the door, Lu noticed he was tall with a thin and intelligent-looking face and expressive blue eyes. Several more times the door was left open by a boarder, and he got up to shut it. And more than once, Lu saw him shiver and cast a wistful glance at her assigned seat near the warm stove. “That boy is sick and needs care. I must see to him,” Lu thought to herself.

  Lu stood up from her table, and he gave her a little bow while opening the door for her. Lu bowed her head in response, then went to find the landlady and have their assigned seats switched. That evening at dinner when Lu looked over, she saw him looking cozy by the warm stove. He thanked her with a smile and a look of gratitude. Their seats were too far apart to talk much, so he filled his glass, bowed to Lu, and said in French, “I drink the good health to mademoiselle.”

  Lu returned the good wish to him, and he smiled but shook his head. She noticed a sudden shadow darken his expression, and she knew her words meant more to him than she had first realized. After dinner, he followed her into the living room and thanked her in English. “So simple, frank and grateful was he,” Lu wrote, “that in half an hour he had told me his story, and I felt a friendly interest in him.”

  His name was Ladislas “Laddie” Weisneiwsky. He was a twenty-year-old Polish musician, and he had lost everything—his parents, home, fortune, country, and health—in the rebellion against Russian rule in Poland. “With his fellow students he had fought through the last outbreak, been imprisoned, and while there, had learned his parents were killed in a cold-blooded massacre, where five hundred Poles were shot down for singing their national hymn in the market-place,” Lu recounted.

  While in prison, Laddie had become ill with tuberculosis, which was most likely a death sentence, and, for reasons unknown, he was released. But he was banished from Poland for refusing to swear his allegiance to Russia. So he made his way to Germany a year ago, then to Switzerland, “and manfully began the hard fight for life,” Lu wrote. Laddie told Lu that in the springtime he wanted to move to Paris, where two of his friends were living and where he hoped to find work teaching music. This sparked Lu’s curiosity about his talent.

  “Play me the forbidden hymn,” Lu said.

  Laddie hesitated, then scanned the room, prompting Lu to ask who he was looking for.

  “I look to see if the baron is here,” Laddie said in broken English, which Lu noted was the prettiest she’d ever heard. “He is Russian, and to him my national air will not be pleasing.”

  “Then play it,” Lu said. “He dare not forbid you here, and I should rather enjoy that little insult to your bitter enemy.”

  “Ah, mademoiselle,” he said. “It is true we are enemies, but we are also gentlemen.”

  Lu thanked him “for giving me a lesson in real politeness which I did not forget.”

  Since the Russian baron wasn’t there, Laddie played for her, singing his national hymn enthusiastically despite his weak lungs. “From that evening we were fast friends,” Lu explained. “For the memory of certain dear lads at home made my heart warm to this lonely boy, who gave me in return the most grateful affection and respect.”

  Laddie fit the type of man Lu was attracted to, and he shared qualities with her “prince of patients,” John Suhre—tall, expressive eyes, noble, courageous, willing to give his life for a cause he believed in, injured lungs, someone who needed to be taken care of, and, most importantly, unavailable. Lu was smitten, and she liked Laddie even more when he took her side in her conflict with the Polks. In fact, everyone was about to change their minds and take Lu’s side.

  ONE DAY the Polks’s nurse, Betty, knocked on Lu’s door. Lu ushered Betty inside, where she saw the two “neutral” Englishwomen. The four of them began talking, and Betty told them about herself, describing “her wrongs with the simple eloquence of truth.” The two women from England began to cry and asked Betty whether it was true what Mrs. Polk said, that the slaves were forced away and longed to have their master back. Betty told them no, it wasn’t, thanking God and the Yankees.

  Worried that Mrs. Polk was telling more lies, they asked Betty whether she was free. Betty nodded her head but told them Mrs. Polk figured Betty wouldn’t run off while they were in Europe. Betty explained she was biding her time. Once her feet touched American soil, she was leaving the Polks.

  The English were no longer neutral and felt compelled to whisper Betty’s story to the other guests, revealing the Polks’s lies. To Lu’s satisfaction, “The tables were completely turned and the North won the day again.”

  IT WAS another blustery day on Lake Geneva when Lu’s thirty-third birthday arrived on November 29. She thought of her father, who was turning sixty-six, and how she would miss the little ceremony her family always had on their shared birthday. But Lu was having one of the best birthday celebrations ever.

  Anna had given her a pretty painting, and Laddie had promised Lu the notes of the Polish National Hymn along with wishing her “all good & happiness on earth & a high place in Heaven as my reward.” Lu expressed her feelings in her journal: “It was a wild, windy day, very like me in its fitful changes of sunshine & shade. Usually I am sad on my birthday, but not this time, for though nothing very pleasant happened I was happy & hopeful & enjoyed everything with unusual relish.”

  Since Laddie’s arrival, they had spent a lot of time together. He was teaching her French, and she was teaching him English. He also entertained everyone, playing the piano enthusiastically and bringing down the house. Other times, Lu and Laddie sailed and walked the shores of Lake Geneva, sharing confidences, and every night he presented her with a winter rose at dinner. He also slipped little notes with funny illustrations under her door, calling them chapters of a great history that they were writing together.

  “A little romance with L[adislas] W[eisneiwsky],” Lu confided in her journal in December. But, later, Lu crossed out the rest of the entry, her pen scratching so fiercely that she destroyed the paper.

  A week after Lu’s birthday, on December 6, Anna and Lu left the Pension Victoria and traveled to Nice, where Anna wanted to spend the winter. Laddie went to see them off. There were tears in his eyes as he kissed both Anna and Lu’s hands and said, “I do not say adieu but au revoir.” For Lu, it wasn’t good-bye. She would meet him again in Paris. Alone.

  A FEW WEEKS later, on Christmas day in 1865, Lu was stuck in her hotel room. The window was open, and she could see that the roses were blooming and the people outside seemed jolly, but, for Lu, the day was dull. Most days were dull for Lu, and she was homesick as well. “Very tired of doing nothing pleasant or interesting,” Lu recorded in her journal.

  When they first arrived in the seacoast town on the French Riviera, Lu described Nice as “lovely,” “pleasant,” and “beautiful.” A horse-drawn carriage would take them for a ride along the wide Promenade des Anglais, which was dotted with palm trees, luxury hotels, shops, castles, a lighthouse, and impeccably dressed people in the latest fashions. But, soon after their arrival, Anna became ill. A famous doctor was called, and he was trying to cure her with medicine, but she wasn’t improving.

  Anna was also upset about Laddie. In response, Lu wrote a cryptic entry in her journal, leading some scholars to wonder whether a love triangle had developed. Lu noted, “Anna was troubled about Laddie who was in a despairing state of mind. I could not advise them [which she later crossed out and wrote ‘him,’ then crossed it out] to be happy as they desired, so everything went wrong & both worried.”

  No further explanation was given, but Lu’s actions give some insight. A mon
th later, in February, after Anna sent the famous doctor away, she started to feel much better. And Lu decided she was going to quit, writing, “My time is too valuable to be spent fussing over cushions & carrying shawls. I’m rather fond of her but she wears upon me & we are best apart.”

  On the first day of May 1866, Lu left Anna. She felt “as happy as a freed bird. Anna cried & seemed to feel badly, but it was best to part, & having come to that conclusion long ago I never changed my mind, but made her as comfortable as I could with a maid & companion & then turned my face toward home rejoicing.”

  On her journey home, Lu made a stop—Paris. When she stepped off the train, she found Laddie waiting for her at the station. His face was beaming, and he grasped her hands in his. Lu laughed, feeling that Paris was almost as good as home.

  “You are better?” Lu asked.

  “I truly hope so,” he said. “The winter was good to me and I cough less. It is small hope, but I do not enlarge my fear by a sad face.”

  Lu revealed in her journal that she spent a “very charming” two weeks with Laddie in Paris. He was her tour guide, showing her all the sights she wanted to see. He helped her pick out a new bonnet, took strolls with her through Luxembourg Garden, and in the evenings played music for her. On May 17, Lu reluctantly started on her journey home. The details are general and vague in her journal, giving no indication whether he was her lover. But, later, Lu went back to the entry in her journal for December, and on the torn piece of paper she wrote, “couldn’t be.”

  ALTHOUGH LU didn’t know it at the time, her love for Laddie was going to live on forever not only in her heart but also in her writing. And, in the stories that she would write for publication about her time with Laddie, she would make the point that he was like a son to her. But Lu didn’t describe their friendship like that in her personal journal. Later in life, Lu would confide to a friend in a letter about lost love and unfulfilled destiny.