Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  Louisa and John Quincy celebrated their first anniversary on July 26, 1798. It came at a difficult time. Louisa lay in bed, suffering through another miscarriage that devastated them both. John Quincy was anxious, worried about money and struggling to defuse the potentially explosive conflict between the United States and France, a conflict that threatened to sink his father’s presidency. He felt listless in Berlin. A week later he noted that he had quit studying German and had become “careless about every other study—of what good is it all?” “The external occurrences of the year have not been fortunate,” he wrote in his diary on that first anniversary. For once, though, he acknowledged that there was a brightness in the dark. “But from the loveliness of temper and excellence of character of my wife, I account it the happiest day of my life.” Still, there were differences between them. He could not make up for what she had lost: her parents and siblings. She was separated from the Johnsons not only by four thousand miles but by an emotional breach. Though Louisa later wrote about her family in highly idealized terms, in the years following their separation, while the Johnsons were in Georgetown and she was in Berlin, she was rarely in contact with them. The few letters that were sent and survive sound strained. The distance made correspondence difficult—it could take six months for a letter to arrive. Letters sent by a circuitous route were easily and frequently lost—and Louisa excused herself by claiming how much she hated to write. Still, the silence on both sides says much. The gulf between them was hard to cross. What Louisa did write to them was stilted and perfunctory. She did not—and apparently, at that point, could not—describe much of her life with the animation and observations that would characterize her later prose. Instead, her brief letters were mostly filled with formulaic apologies for the inadequacy of her words. “As I am certain you must be extremely tired of this letter,” she wrote in one short letter to Nancy, before bringing it to a quick close. “I am sure you will have the goodness to excuse my inability to write any thing amusing,” she wrote to Abigail. When the rare letters did arrive from Georgetown, they tended to bring her pain. Not long after his arrival in Georgetown, Joshua learned that the settlement with his former business partners would not be what he had counted on. He continued to fight for more money, and the acrimony grew intense. Louisa heard the news in bitter reports. “The letters from America weighed me down with sorrow, and mortification,” Louisa later wrote. Her life was now in Berlin, and theirs was now in the United States, a place that she had never even seen. She had found some success; they reported only their difficulties and failures. There was an ocean between them, in more ways than one. At one point, after John Quincy had passed along Delius’s accusatory letter regarding Joshua’s failure to pay his debts, Catherine sent a furious response, angry at John Quincy’s tacit insinuation. Louisa wrote to Nancy that John Quincy’s letter had been “misunderstood.” “You know Mr. A’s manner of writing,” she wrote. Those harsh letters she had received during her courtship had been shared throughout the family. “I am now fully convinced [they] were never intended to give me a moment’s pain.” She knew how that letter would read, even as tentative as it was: as taking her husband’s side over her parents’. Soon after, she wrote a panicked letter trying to take her words back—as if even the slightest defense of her husband had been a betrayal of her family. She was caught between them. And there was that old and pernicious problem: John Quincy’s suspicion that she would be corrupted by the glamorous court. She claimed to have hated the extravagance and expense, the hollowness of the aristocracy, but her exhilarated descriptions of it undercut her complaints. The princesses and barons flattered her, and she enjoyed being flattered. It pleased her to say that she was “respected”; she underscored the word. And she was “extravagantly fond” of dancing. At her first ball, John Quincy joined the noblemen and left his young wife to fend for herself. But his playful younger brother Thomas led her onto the floor for an English country dance. “Strangers were forgotten and he danced so well and with so much spirit,” she remembered, “I was quite delighted.” Prince Radziwill appeared before her to ask for a dance, and Prince Wittgenstein followed, and on and on, until suddenly it was two in the morning. “I became a Belle.” Her success at court was reported back to John and Abigail Adams as flattering to the United States and not to herself. “She is neither dazzled by the splendor nor captivated by the gaiety of the scene in which she finds herself placed,” John Quincy reassured his mother. That was true to an extent—she could laugh at anything, including herself—but not quite true enough for her to escape trouble. There was, for instance, the matter of rouge. The conflict arose when the king wanted to open a ball by dancing with her. She had planned to decline all dances that evening—she had worn a long train to signal her intent—but when Countess von Voss, the queen’s grande gouvernante, appeared in front of her to announce the king’s desire, she knew she had no choice but to stand up, gather her dress, and take her place on the floor across from King Frederick William. She nearly fainted under the hot spotlight of attention. The queen saw the blood drain from Louisa’s face, looked at her kindly, and spoke to her with concern. To put her at ease, she told Louisa that she would give her a present to help her hide her nerves: a box of rouge. In the United States, “paint” was associated with the debauchery of brothels and—not incidentally—European courts. It suggested the sins of Versailles. (Of course, even a quick glance at portraits from the early republic suggests that American women used more makeup than the pious sermons allowed.) Louisa knew that John Quincy would never let her accept it, and so she protested. But the queen was persistent. “She smiled at my simplicity, and observed that if she presented me the box he must not refuse it, and told me to tell him so.” Before Louisa could say anything more, the dance began. Louisa was elated when she returned to her chair alongside the visiting British Prince Augustus and his suite after the dance was done. The prince and his companions, her “accustomed partners,” flattered her with “encouraging” attention and smiles, exclaiming over “the marked distinction” that the king had shown her and complaining that she had accepted him when she had already turned them down. But her husband was unhappy about the promise of the rouge. The gift arrived, and she hid it away. But one day she felt particularly pale. It was Carnival, which meant masked balls. The custom was for a woman to wear a black dress with deep décolletage, a black Spanish hat, black shoes, and black feathers—a stunning look if you could offset the dark cloth with flush cheeks and the glitter of diamonds but a difficult look if you couldn’t. Knowing that the black dresses made pale faces “look cadaverous,” and tired of feeling “a fright in the midst of the splendor,” Louisa brought out the forbidden rouge. When it was time to leave for the ball, she rushed past her husband, calling to him behind her to put out the lights. He sensed something suspicious in her quick step and stopped her before she went down the stairs. When he saw the blush on her cheeks, he led her to the table and sat her on his knee. He picked up a towel, “and all my beauty was clean washed a way.” All was forgiven, for a time. “A kiss made the peace” between them, and they drove off to the party. But all was not really forgotten. John Quincy did not need to ask himself what John and Abigail Adams would have thought about the queen’s present to Louisa, or her succession of “princely partners,” or the invitations to the visiting sons of the tyrant King George III to their house for boisterous meals. Unlike Louisa, he was not pleased when she was “the only foreign lady” offered a part in a quadrille at court. When he learned that the quadrille depicted the marriage of Queen Mary and Philip of Spain, and that it required six weeks of rehearsals, and that performers made liberal use of crown jewels, and that costume painters studied paintings from the era to create the most accurate costumes possible (perhaps snipping off the stitches here and there—“the ladies could not adopt the dress of that period so far as to cover their bosoms,” John Quincy sniffed in his diary), he told Louisa to decline the invitation. She was told to
say she was sick. He needed her to be admired but not adored. She had to fit in but could never belong. 3