Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  If the thought of bringing all the children or leaving Louisa behind with them even crossed his mind, there is no record of it. John Quincy seems to have wanted his wife with him, even where wives were not often found. But the children were another story. The two older children, John and George, would stay in the United States, boarded with Abigail’s sister Mary Cranch. Later, Louisa would claim that she wasn’t involved in the decision. There is no evidence to contradict Louisa’s own memory of how that decision was made, and it is in keeping with how the family tended to work. When John Quincy weighed the factors for going to St. Petersburg, he included his job at Harvard, the president and his countrymen’s faith in him, the old age of his parents, the young age of his children. Nowhere, it appears, did he consider his wife. Nor did he acknowledge her resistance, even if the anguish she later described was amplified by tragedy and time. John Quincy’s exercise of his power in deciding to leave George and John behind would become an inextinguishable source of her fury. “I had been so grossly deceived!” she would write. Again and again, and when it mattered most, Louisa was absent in the major decisions that involved her life and the lives of her children. John Quincy and Abigail made the arrangements for George and John to live with John Quincy’s aunt and uncle, the Cranchs. “I think I could not consent to part with them all,” Abigail wrote to her sister. The boys’ mother was apparently not given that choice. As Louisa would tell it, Thomas was the one who broke the news to her. Not even John Adams was told ahead of time, for fear that she would “excite his pity and he allow me to take my boys with me.” Abigail was the one who suggested that Kitty Johnson accompany Louisa, and Charles, not even two years old, would also come. The details were managed; the trunks were packed; passage was arranged; in all of these discussions and arrangements, she would later insist, and John Quincy’s diary at the time would suggest, she was nowhere to be found. Just before they left, John Quincy and Louisa had their silhouettes cut by an artist for their children. If George and John could not remember the color of her eyes and the feel of her cheeks, then at least they would know the slope of her nose, the curve of her small chin. Then at noon on Saturday, August 5, 1809, a group consisting of John Quincy; Charles, only two weeks from his second birthday; Louisa’s sister Kitty, who was vivacious, charming, and “entirely dependent without one sixpence in the world”; John Quincy’s twenty-two-year-old nephew William Steuben Smith, who would serve as his secretary; Martha Godfrey, Louisa’s chambermaid; Nelson, a free black from Trinidad who would serve as John Quincy’s valet; and Louisa boarded the ship Horace in the Charlestown harbor. Waiting for them were two young men, Alexander Everett and Francis Gray, who were going to Russia as diplomatic attachés at their parents’ expense. As the church bells in Boston and Charlestown rang in one o’clock in the afternoon, the ship left its mooring. By the time night obscured the view, land was almost out of sight. What Louisa thought as she fell asleep that first night at sea is impossible to know; she left no contemporaneous record. None of her letters from the time survive, save for a stiff thank-you to Dolley Madison for the honor bestowed on John Quincy. But in Louisa’s late accounts of that moment, she insisted that it had not been her choice to leave her children. At the time, she felt no choice but to do as her husband wished; he was her authority. Later, she would wish she had resisted. She would struggle with her desire to submit and her desire to revolt for the rest of her life. “A man can take care of himself:—And if he abandons one part of his family he soon learns that he might as well leave them all,” she wrote in 1840, as she furiously raked over John Quincy’s decision not to bring her sons to Russia. Immediately, she pulled back. “I do not mean to suggest the smallest reproach.” In 1840, she would know what she could not have known at the time—that she would not see her sons for six years, and that she would lose them well before their time. In retrospect, she was certain that it was wrong to be separated from her sons. “Oh this agony of agonies!” Louisa wrote in “Adventures.” “Can ambition repay such sacrifices? never!!” PART FOUR

  The

  GILDED DARKNESS St. Petersburg, 1809–1815

  1

  THE VOYAGE TOOK eighty days. Aboard ship, the single room, shared by seven adults and a boy who turned two on the voyage, was rife with tension. Everyone became seasick. Charles was “fractious,” wrote his frustrated father, and the three young men working for John Quincy immediately formed rivalries. Kitty, unwillingly or not, put herself at the center of them. There was no escape, nothing to do but endure. “I found the power of self-abstraction fails,” John Quincy wrote in his diary, a mild hint of his hot temper. Louisa watched it all unfolding and felt despair, “miserable, alone in every feeling.” And she was afraid. The Horace sailed past blockades and privateers, British warships and Danish gunboats. The Napoleonic Wars made every whisper of low white cloud seem like the apparition of a vessel on the horizon, and every vessel was a potential threat. The Horace was halted eleven times, boarded by armed men who questioned the sailors and scrutinized their papers. Near Copenhagen, three ships manned their guns and opened fire. The threat of an enemy was actually the least of the dangers, though. The weather was lethal. The storms grew more severe with each passing week; winter was coming on too fast. The waves rose like walls pulled up by ropes, and the ship slid terrifyingly down their sides. One gale snapped two of the ship’s three anchors. By mid-October, in the middle of the squally Baltic, the captain of the Horace wanted to turn back to Copenhagen and wait until spring to sail. Louisa heard what the captain said about their chances of making it safely. “I had no hope,” she would remember. “I knew that Mr. Adams would never give up.” She was right. John Quincy overruled the captain’s decision, and they sailed on.

  The ship clawed into the Gulf of Finland, curved north toward Stockholm, and then cut east, passing barren gray shores, moving through empty waters. Finally, on October 22, the thin boundary between sea and sky became land: Russia. They sailed into Kronstadt first, an island fortress of granite ramparts at the entrance to the harbor of St. Petersburg. Invited to a salon at an officer’s house, Louisa and Kitty donned enormous brown beaver-fur bonnets that they had bought in Copenhagen, assured they were the fashion in St. Petersburg. When they entered the room, the other women, wearing stiff silk dresses and dazzling with diamonds, turned and stared at the Americans, “aghast.” In the horror on their faces, Louisa saw the image of herself reflected back. It was “too ridiculous.” She couldn’t help but want to laugh. Their situation was less funny in the morning. While the group had slept on the island, a storm had blown the Horace off its moorings and out to sea, with their trunks on board. Louisa had only the thin white cambric wrapper she wore and that ridiculous fur hat. Still, they had to board the small boat that would carry them into the city. It was a long day, a rough crossing in open water followed by hours of slow drifting through shallow channels, past vacant imperial summer palaces and weather-beaten birches. By the time they reached the quay in St. Petersburg, at four in the afternoon, the light was too dim to see the bulbous domes and tapered spires, the gilding, the statues, the vast squares, the gigantic edifices, the monuments that had been built to overwhelm them. The travelers found a room—a “stone hole”—at the Hotel de Londres, on the Nevsky Prospect. At night Louisa could hear rats scurrying on top of the bedside table by her head, scratching and fighting. Within days, everyone in the group had diarrhea from the water (locals called the illness “seasoning”). When their trunks were finally returned, the group discovered their baggage had been plundered. The temperature outside slipped toward zero, and the sun hung over the horizon for only a few hours, leaving the day with wan, gloomy light. The serfs in town traded wool kaftans for sheepskins, and the nobles had their double windows sealed. Within three weeks of the Adamses’ arrival, the bridges over the canals that laced the city together were removed, before ice coursing down from Lake Ladoga could sweep them away. Then the River Neva froze, and ice locked th
e harbor. It would be May before ships could go. • • • WHEN THE COLD STONE HOLE became intolerable, the Adamses moved to another hotel, the Ville de Bordeaux, where the walls were so thin that Louisa could hear the man in the apartment next door instructing his servant to dress him. The neighbors on the other side would cry Brava! when Louisa sang as she sewed. John Quincy looked for a more permanent place, but he found nothing he could afford. When they finally settled into their own house in mid-June, on the corner of New Street and the Moika Canal, it took more than his salary just to furnish it. That was before their other expenses. A Russian household required servants—lots of them. In his diary, John Quincy counted fourteen in his house—and this for a lifestyle that earned the Adamses a reputation as cheap. Wealthy families commonly had fifty or a hundred servants; three hundred was not unknown. If the servants had children, the children needed to be housed and fed. The accounts of one cook came to nearly a quarter of John Quincy’s salary, and that was what was aboveboard. The steward, as a rule, could be expected to steal the best wine and pocket some of the money for bills. Supplies were regularly pilfered; at one point, John Quincy discovered that 373 bottles of wine—including the best—were gone. None of this could be stopped, only managed. In the system of servitude in St. Petersburg, thieving was greeted with a shrug. After the tsar hired away John Quincy’s valet Nelson—Alexander I liked to keep a corps of richly attired African guards—John Quincy had trouble finding a manservant he could trust.

  Among American government officers, John Quincy’s $9,000 salary was second only to the president’s, but that sum required even the stingiest diplomat in St. Petersburg to be tight and mean. In Russia, there was no virtue in thrift. The French ambassador, Armand-Augustin-Louis de Caulaincourt, the highest-ranking diplomat, set the style and tone. Caulaincourt held dinners for hundreds, serving his guests rich meals on Sèvres china. There were damask napkins at his table, and twenty footmen in silk stockings who simply lined the stairs. The French ambassador’s salary was fifty times greater than John Quincy’s, and the tsar, as a favor to his superior ally Napoleon, had given him a palace by the Hermitage. Yet even Caulaincourt found it hard to pay his bills. “Must I sell my shirt?” the French ambassador asked Bonaparte. John Quincy had expected St. Petersburg to be expensive, but he had not expected that his salary would be spent so many times over. He had been to opulent balls; he had met monarchs with jewels large enough to tremble the light. But the extremities of wealth in St. Petersburg were beyond his imagining—and so were the demands it placed on courtiers. “Not a particle of the cloathing I brought with me have I been able to present myself in,” John Quincy complained to his mother, an extraordinary worry for one who had taken it as a point of pride never to fret about the quality of his waistcoat. The need was even worse, he openly acknowledged, for his wife. She was expected at balls and functions nearly every night, and these events were more elaborate than either of them could have dreamed. The court at St. Petersburg made the royal functions in Berlin seem bourgeois. The Romanovs liked a show. They liked their fruit washed with gold, their chandeliers to drip crystal, their balls to be a crush of bodies clothed in the finest materials. They encrusted themselves with diamonds. Louisa and Kitty could pass for decent during the day by stitching up some muslin or gauzy cloth, but formal occasions required hoops, silks, trains, satin shoes, gloves, furs, and trims—and even all this “luggage” left a lady looking bare if she did not have jewels. The empress mother, who ruled in such matters, did not tolerate anything less than too much. She was rumored to have warned a lady who wore the same dress to two dances not to show up in it again, since “she was tired of seeing the same colour so often.” Louisa, who could hardly afford one gown, let alone an endless supply—and more for her sister—once tried to excuse herself from one ball by claiming illness, then went instead to have tea with a friend. The empress mother discovered the trick and sent a message that if it happened again, the American minister’s wife would not be invited back. Louisa tried to wear mourning, inventing a death or two, but her ruse was suspected. So she was left to cut and recut her dresses, and spent far more money at the shops than John Quincy told her they could afford. She would flinch at her husband’s lectures and frowns. “Every bill that I am forced to bring in (having not a six-pence in the world) makes ruin stare him in the face,” Louisa wrote to Abigail. The constant talk of money, want, need, and debts triggered her worst fears. In her letters back to the United States, she obsessed over her lost dowry and her father’s bankruptcy, which she almost described as her own. She begged John Quincy to send her back to America, so that “he may be able at least to support the appearance that his station requires.” Instead of consoling her, he made her feel worse. As she reported to Abigail, he replied that it would be too expensive to send her back, since he could not afford to support her in Massachusetts any more than in St. Petersburg. This was simply not true; life in Quincy did not require buying diamonds and gowns. Why did he say it? Most diplomats did not bring their wives to this post on the edge of Europe—when Louisa arrived, only the Bavarian minister had come with his wife, and within two years, she was also gone. There was precedent in the Adams family for a husband to go on a mission without his wife; after all, John Quincy’s own father, John Adams, had left Abigail when he went to Europe. John Quincy himself had already shown a willingness to live in Washington and Boston without Louisa. But this mission was open-ended, and those separations had been hard. The real reason was probably simple but difficult for John Quincy to admit: he wanted her with him. Perhaps, on some level, he knew she would be useful in the court, too. So she remained—grudgingly. “I do not like the place nor the people,” Louisa wrote to Abigail. Their conversations were vapid, and the women, glittering with icy diamonds, seemed cruel. The buildings were nicer on the outside, but for most of the year she was trapped inside them, inside walls that were three feet thick, with double doors and double windows, ventilated by a sickly draft that swept in through a small swinging pane. Winter meant stale heat and the smoke of ceaseless fires; it meant constant coughs, parched throats, and outbreaks of erysipelas, a streptococcus infection. When she stepped outside, the difference in temperature could be fifty, sixty, seventy degrees. On the road, horses driven hard appeared white, their coats of every color covered in frozen perspiration. Winter muted everything outside. A monochrome ceiling stretched across a desert of ice. The sun was brightest when the air was coldest. Sometimes the snow simply hung in the air, without falling, as if frozen into the void. She had Kitty, at least, and Louisa needed her. There was no Countess Pauline to make her feel at home when she arrived in St. Petersburg, no Queen Luise, who would ignore protocol to make a new woman welcome. Instead the empress, Elizabeth Alexeievna, was beautiful and lily-like, silent, and famously sad. • • • ON SUNDAY, November 12, 1809, Louisa waited in her apartment for the call to meet the empress and empress mother. She was anxious, fluttering, and “perfectly alone.” Several notes had arrived from the Winter Palace changing the time of her presentation, leaving her alternately to hurry up or slow down her nerves. Her husband was at a church service. She was left by herself to fuss over her silver tissue skirt, her hoop, her thick crimson robe; to glance one last time in the glass at her hair, which was “simply arranged and ornamented with a small diamond arrow”; and to gather her fan, fur cloak, and gloves. When she finally emerged from her room to meet the two footmen who were to accompany her in the carriage, the American legation’s young men “could not refrain from laughter” at the sight of her—so much equipage, so much trim, such a long train, lined white, that followed in her wake. But once she reached the palace and climbed the grand staircase, she was grateful for all the “trappings” of her dress, because she had not erred. She would pass.