Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  Her largest expense was the carriage. She bought a berline, a large vehicle with four seats and glass windows, all balanced on an elaborate suspension of springs intended to smooth the rough ride. At first the carriage would travel on runners, like a sleigh; wheels—large for the rear axle, small for the front—were packed for when she reached melting roads. This was only the beginning. She needed to be able to sleep when they were forced to travel through the night. She procured a bed for Charles that could be spread on the carriage’s floor, and blankets and pillows for herself. She needed servants, preferably ones who could handle weapons. She needed letters of credit, which she would exchange for cash on the road. She needed a great deal of money, because each post house exacted a toll, and her carriage, with its six horses and two postilions, was taxed at the highest rate. She sewed gold and silver into her skirts to hide her wealth from robbers on the road (and from her male servants). She bought a hooded sledge, called a kibitka, which would carry the servants as far as Riga. All of this was very expensive, so expensive that it “frightened me.” Selling the furniture had brought her $1,693—a good sum; she had negotiated well—but in the end, John Quincy’s accounting reckoned that her trip, altogether, cost $1,984.99, or somewhere between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars in today’s value. What she didn’t sell, she packed up to send to Massachusetts, or to London to furnish their new home. There were tables, chairs, plates, clothes. There were gifts from their friends. Had John Quincy been with her, he might have insisted that she turn some of the treasures down. But he was not there, and she was not inclined to say no. According to family lore, an exquisite malachite and gold necklace, earrings, bracelet, and a brooch that she kept were given to her by the tsar. The jewelry remained in her descendants’ possession, and it is hard to imagine where else the priceless jewelry could have come from. No doubt because of the tsar’s favoring of the Americans, the Russian minister of the interior (also the tsar’s spymaster and prison warden) sent out orders that she should be treated well on the road “on pain of punishment.” She also got passports—a Russian one for passage through the empire (“in pursuance of the edict of His Majesty, the Sovereign Emperor Alexander Pavlovic, Ruler of all the Russias, etc., etc., etc.”), a Prussian one (“im Namen seiner Majestät des Königs von Preussen”), and one for France (“au Nom du Roi”—since Louis XVIII was restored to the throne after Napoleon was sent into exile). She had to chart her course, calculate travel times, locate post stations. There were many guidebooks, some in John Quincy’s library, though in 1814 they were generally by and for men. It was almost unheard of for a woman to make this kind of journey alone. The trip was nearly two thousand miles. Louisa would be on the road for forty days. It was still winter, and though the solstice had passed and the sun hung just above the horizon for longer each day, the sky was still gloomy and gray and freezing. She wanted to move fast, however, because the frozen roads were to her advantage. Spring’s thaw would make them treacherous. Louisa had three weeks to make all her preparations. She had no way of knowing if any decision she made was right, and experience had taught her to fear how John Quincy would respond. “My anxiety is unspeakable,” she wrote to John Quincy. “If I do wrong it is unintentional,” she wrote on another occasion. “Mon Ami I am so afraid of cold looks.” Before she left, she took leave of the tsarina, who had always been kind to her, and the empress dowager, who, in the end, had decided to like her. John Quincy had explicitly instructed her not to let them know that this farewell was for good, and so Louisa dutifully hinted that she would be back. But the tsarina saw the joy in Louisa’s eyes and heard the thrill in her voice, and she laughed and said she’d never seen “a woman so alterd in her life for the better,” and she wished Louisa the best for the rest of her life. Louisa had not grown to love the society during her five years in St. Petersburg, where scandal masqueraded as civility, and the price of entry was a dress that broke the bank but the price of exclusion much worse. Her closest friend, her sister Kitty, was already gone. But there were a few others left, and they were dear to her. Annette Krehmer, the wife of the Adamses’ banker, had been ready with advice from the moment Louisa had arrived in St. Petersburg, telling her what to buy, where to live. Some men found Mrs. Krehmer pushy and gauche, but Louisa had come to think that it was not a bad thing, in an expensive foreign city, to have a friend who would host large dinners in her elegant house in town, or arrange a country retreat during a time of great distress, or (having a young daughter) invite Charles and his friends to play. Annette had been the baby Louisa’s godmother. There was also a small group of expatriates and diplomats with whom Louisa was friendly, occasionally intimate. Some were already gone, their movements dictated by the constantly shifting alliances and unstable situations of their rulers. Madame Bezerra, wife of the Portuguese minister, had moved to Rio de Janeiro, though for a time they would keep in touch. (“Do you mix much in the gay world,” Madame Bezerra would write to Louisa later. “If so you turn night into day.”) Among those who remained was the Count Joseph de Maistre, the minister from Sardinia, who, having not much diplomatic work to do, spent much of his time writing brilliant essays arguing against the Enlightenment or making conversation in a salon or parlor. With sweeping white hair, a bull’s brow, and a noble, strong jaw, Maistre was, one Russian acquaintance wrote, “without contradiction, the outstanding personage of the time and place.” The Sardinian minister first became friends with John Quincy, with whom he could discuss the excesses of the French Revolution or passages of Plutarch, but Louisa was delighted to find that he continued to visit her after her husband was gone. Together, they would swap morsels of gossip, crack jokes about the British, encourage each other’s instincts for truancy at the suffocating palace parties, and laugh with their whole hearts. Most important, there was the Countess María de Bodé y Kinnersley de Colombi. The Countess Colombi had come to Russia as a child, when her parents, an Englishwoman and a French baron, fled France in 1788 in order to save the baron’s head. “She is so gay; so sensible; and so attractive it is impossible to know her without loving her,” Louisa would write, and she would wear the turquoise ring the countess gave her for the rest of her life. She would think of the Countess Colombi on her journey, and not only because she was her great friend. Something strange had happened when Louisa went to say goodbye to her. At Countess Colombi’s, she encountered another visitor, a Countess Ekaterina Vladimirovna, the wife of Count Stepan Stepanovich Apraxin. She was very fat, very rich, a type of woman Louisa could too well recognize: an idle mischief maker. After the women finished their tea, Countess Apraxin called for a deck of cards and told Louisa to take a queen. Ekaterina studied the card, said that she could see Louisa’s future in her choice, and, to Louisa’s amusement, rattled off the predictable fortune: you are going on a long trip, you will be reunited with those you have not seen in a very long time, so on and so forth. But there was a twist. Halfway on her journey, Countess Apraxin said, Louisa would “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 Europe into a fresh commotion.” This event would disrupt Louisa’s plans, and indeed make her journey “very difficult.” Louisa laughed and assured her that there should be no trouble with her journey whatsoever, “as I was so insignificant and the arrangements for my journey so simple.” But Louisa would have reason to remember what the woman had said. Despite her best intentions not to believe in superstitions, she would wonder if her fate had been foretold. Her imagination was warm. The world was so much stranger than reason would allow. PART FIVE

  NARRATIVE of a

  JOURNEY From St. Petersburg to Paris, 1815

  1

  THROUGH THE CARRIAGE’S WINDOWS, the daylight was dim. Snow hushed and shrouded the late February afternoon. Louisa had timed her departure for this hour, five o’clock, on purpose, the time her friends would be sitting down to dinner. S
he wanted to avoid the familiar pain of saying goodbye.

  She was joined for the long journey by a group of strangers. Traveling with her inside the carriage was a nurse for her son, a Madame Babet, an old woman who had fled France with the Countess Colombi thirty years before, and whom Louisa had hired only that day. The sled that would accompany the carriage, the kibitka, held two manservants. She could trust the one she called John Fulling, because he had worked for William Smith. She was uncertain about the other, a man identified as Baptiste. He had been a prisoner in Russia from Napoleon’s army, and at the last second Louisa agreed to take him to France. Baptiste could use a gun and wield a knife, which meant in theory that he could provide some protection against bandits. But there was something about him that unnerved her, something that made her think she would need protection not by him but from him. There was, of course, also Charles, with his toy soldier’s hat and toy sword, which he claimed to know how to use because Baptiste had drilled him. The postilions readied the horses. The carriage, mounted on runners, began to slide across the snow. The soft sound of harness bells carried through the air as the carriage crossed the canal, passed through the great triumphal arch, and left the magnificent city. She would later say that she did not watch the city recede from view with regret, except to send a sigh to her daughter’s grave. Instead, her thoughts had sped ahead to the end of her journey and to the man who was waiting for her there. It was February 12, 1815—as it happened, her fortieth birthday. “I could not celebrate my birthday in manner more delightful than in making the first step towards that meeting for which my Soul pants,” she wrote to John Quincy just before she was about to depart, “and for which I have hitherto hardly dared to express my desire.” • • • SHE TRAVELED through the night, stopping only to change horses and pay the required tolls. Her carriage moved steadily through the flat snow-covered countryside, passing here and there dark clumps of trees, scattered dwellings, and small Russian Orthodox churches, distinctive with their swollen domes. Long stretches of the road were empty except for the wolves, which darted in the snow unafraid. It was so cold that the wine she had brought froze in the bottles. The carriage veered toward the coast, close enough that she could hear the sibilant sea. In her later account of her journey and in her letters to John Quincy from the road, though, she did not indulge in descriptions of the landscape. There was not much to captivate her, since fields did not flower in wintertime, and she had seen enough of snow. Outside Riga, the frozen land began to thaw; the sled became useless, and the runners of the carriage had to be replaced by wheels that constantly stuck in the mud. When the snow returned outside the city, it became even harder to move; and the passengers had to ring a bell, the sound of which summoned anyone nearby to appear with a shovel and a pickaxe to dig the heavy berline out. At the time, there was nothing romantic to her about this mode of travel, driven, as she was, by “that restless anxiety for the future, which pervades all mankind.”

  For the most part, the trip was easy enough at the start. By now she knew to expect every manner of innkeeper, every quality of mattress; she was no longer a novice to surviving the lurches and bumps of a difficult road. And in fact, she was traveling in some style. Her large and expensive carriage and her impressive stack of official papers marked her as an important person, and so her arrival in town was often treated as an event. Officials were courteous, even deferential. Invitations from the local aristocrats to dinner or the theater would quickly follow. There were also often invitations to extend her stay, but these were invariably declined—to the surprise, sometimes, of personages who were unused to being denied. But impatience made her stubborn. She would not slow down. When she reached Mitau, in Latvia, 375 miles southwest of St. Petersburg, she ran into a problem. She had stopped for a night at a cheerful, tidy public house, the best in town, for an excellent meal—the innkeeper, a French émigré named Jean Louis Morel, had once been Louis XVIII’s chef—and to rest for a few hours before pressing on. After dinner, Morel entered the private dining room, said he wished to speak with her, and nervously looked for eavesdroppers as he closed the door. He told her that a “dreadful murder” had taken place upon the road, that it was much too dangerous to leave now, and that she must absolutely stay the night. Because she had heard this kind of bald ploy for business before, she coolly said that she would be safe, that her servants were armed, and that she was determined to continue onward. At this, Morel interrupted. Her servant Baptiste, he said, was known to him. He had been in town before, as one of Napoleon’s soldiers. Morel said that he was “a desperate villain, of the very worst character; and that he did not consider my life safe with him.” At the same time, Morel begged her not to dismiss Baptiste in Mitau, because he was afraid Baptiste would guess where she had heard of his past and would burn Morel’s house down. Louisa was inclined to believe the innkeeper. She already suspected Baptiste of stealing her son’s silver cup, the gift from the Westphalian minister, which had gone missing. But as she had no proof of any wrongdoing, and as Baptiste had behaved well, she had no grounds to end his service. So she said goodbye to Morel, climbed into the carriage, and the group traveled on. A short time later, the carriage stopped and a postilion climbed down to tell her they had lost the road. In vain, they tried to find it, bumping over swampy land, through ditches and over hills, looking for any signs of a path. Midnight approached, and Morel’s warnings rang in her ears. But she watched Baptiste closely, consulted with him frequently, and was impressed by his careful attention and steady hand. The dangers in the unmarked land—and even on well-maintained roads—were serious. Carriages broke apart, overturned, and bogged down regularly. Injuries and deaths were not unheard of. Finally, at midnight, Louisa consulted with the servants and decided that Baptiste should ride out and search for the road or for help in finding it. As he rode away, she wondered if he would abandon them, but he returned quickly with a Russian officer who lived nearby. Louisa described their situation to the officer “in the most execrable German,” and they found the road and soon reached an inn. She felt stronger, more assured, and resolved “not to listen to any more bugbears” who might “weaken my understanding.” She trusted herself. Louisa would need confidence. Repeatedly on the voyage, she would have to disregard the stern warnings of men, men who told her to wait, to get help, to turn back. She would have to decide whether to order the carriage across a river’s thinning ice. She would have to spend nights upright in the carriage or in dirty hovels. She would have to stand up to innkeepers who tried to take advantage of her sex and small size. She would remember ghost stories and gothic tales, and see long shadows all around her. She would have to pass through desolate scenes and evidence of brutal destruction, rape, and plunder. She would have to deal with suspicious guards and drunken soldiers. She would have to overcome her fears. And she did. • • • AS SHE TURNED AWAY from the coast and toward Prussia, she began to follow the path of French and Russian soldiers, moving over battlefields where Napoleon had fought and through towns terrorized by armies advancing and retreating. The ravages were still fresh: “houses half burnt, a very thin population; women unprotected, and that dreary look of forlorn desertion, which sheds its gloom around on all the objects, announcing devastation and despair.” She saw too clearly, too painfully, what the great accounts of the battles left out: “the graphic delineations of war’s unhallowed march—that speak in thrilling language to the heart, where the tongues of men are silent.” More chilling, perhaps, than the half-burned houses was the way the survivors spoke of the soldiers. To her surprise, they praised the invader Napoleon and his forces. The Russian soldiers who had pursued the French back were more hated and feared, famous for raping—a reputation earned from atrocities both real and rumored. When “the Cossacks! The dire Cossacks!” were mentioned, Louisa saw the blood drain from women’s faces.

  She did not think, though, that she had to worry about such a fate herself. Europe was at peace. The leaders at the Congress
at Vienna had shipped Napoleon off to a small island in the Mediterranean, Elba, where he was made king of his own prison. She had the contacts to appeal to a king or two, if needed. She saw the ruins of war mostly through a glass carriage window. She was able to say, later, that the sights were “deeply interesting.” And soon, she would be able to step out of the carriage, and when she did, she would smile. The carriage’s runners came off, the wheels on. The Russian ice was behind her. She was a thousand miles from St. Petersburg. On Saturday, March 4, after nineteen days on the road, Louisa crossed the river Spree in Berlin. As she remembered it, if not in the moment itself, memories of her life in the first years of her marriage flooded through her. “Youth seemed again to be decked with rosy smiles, and glad anticipations—and I wandered in the bright mazes of vivid recollections which every object called forth in fresher bloom,” she wrote in “Narrative of a Journey.” “There I had felt at home,” she said; “all the sweet sympathies of humanity had been re-awakened.” With far Russia behind her, her heart “was thawed into life and animation.” 2