Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  SHE WENT STRAIGHT to the Hotel de Russie, the same hotel where she had stayed when she had first arrived in Berlin in 1797. She could still look around and see much that was familiar: the palaces, the parks, the long avenue of lime trees. Here she had danced; there she had sung; around that corner had been her apartment. Her old friend Pauline Neale “flew” to greet her. Plans were quickly made, and soon she was with Princess Ferdinand, Princess Radziwill, “the Brulhs; the de Néales; the Golofkins; the Zeinerts; the De Bergs; the Hardenbergs; the Hadzfeldts; the Bishoffswerder, and many more.” Everyone met her “with the most unaffected warmth.” She felt among family, as if her old acquaintances were “long separated and beloved sisters.”

  But little else in Berlin was untouched by time. The palaces were half empty, absent of many of the country’s leaders, who were in Vienna as part of the deliberations that would reshape the political and geographical balance of the continent, providing a framework that would hold, more or less intact, for the next hundred years. And some were dead. The Prussian army had been demolished by Napoleon in 1806; the city had been conquered; many of her friends had been forced to flee. Now, Louisa listened to the harrowing stories of how they had survived, and how some had not. So the welcoming warmth with which Louisa was received by her friends in Berlin had a tempering melancholy beneath it. They lived with “no pretension of style among them,” because so much had been taken from them. They were mellowed by hardship, more apt to find pleasure in small indulgences than satisfaction in ceremony. When she visited Princess Radziwill, she noticed how the princess had aged, how there was “a softer shade of character on her face.” Princess Radziwill had lost her brother, her daughter, and her father; she had seen battlefields and cities on fire; she had been at Tilsit and witnessed the king and queen’s humiliations, as they were forced to capitulate and beg for mercy. Napoleon’s approach had been especially frightening for Pauline Neale, because Napoleon had a special desire to hurt her. After Louisa departed Berlin, Pauline had visited Paris, befriended Empress Josephine, and written a letter to her mother about Napoleon’s plans, which was intercepted. Princess Radziwill read aloud to Pauline what a newspaper reported Napoleon had said when he reached Berlin and found her gone. “Well, if I had caught her here,” Bonaparte had told Count von Neale, “I should have had her hair cropped and sent her to Bicetre”—the lunatic asylum near Paris—“for her interference in having political opinions and expressing them publicly.” Berlin, then, was bathed in the stained light of Louisa’s nostalgia, but also strange. There was a “perfect stillness” that unnerved her, a “foreign air” to the city, unsettling reminders of the degradation that had come with French control—first in the battles that had brought Prussia to its knees, then with the humiliation of being forced to supply and quarter Napoleon’s army as it marched on Russia. Berlin’s native attributes were less apparent, yet to revive in force; more people spoke French and wore French clothes than she remembered. There was less attention to protocol than there had been; there was more talk of resilience and freedom. The biggest change was the most alarming, a shadow cast over the entire population—affecting, Louisa thought, every inhabitant. It was the absence of the queen, killed by typhus in 1810. The queen’s mere presence had “gladdened” the city, and without it, Louisa felt the chill of the gloom. And so Louisa went out to the palace in Charlottenburg, where she had once spent happy summer days, and found her way to the marble mausoleum in a small grove by the gardens. It was built as a neoclassical temple, with Doric columns supporting a portico; on the pediment were inscribed the Greek letters alpha and omega. And there, she mourned the loss of her Queen of Queens. • • • SHE HAD HOPED that a letter from John Quincy would be waiting for her to tell her which route to take out of Berlin. She waited and nothing came. She delayed her departure, uncertain what to do, certain that her husband would instruct her. Finally, with advice from others, she looked at the map herself and set her course. On Saturday morning, March 11, she set out and traveled southwest toward Potsdam and then Leipzig. She knew this land, these sandy roads; she had been here before. But as they continued west, she began to see something that unnerved her: small groups of disbanded soldiers, hungry and ragged, who were in no hurry to go home, and who made their living off the road. At another time in her life, Louisa might have fainted or fallen ill. Now, she made her small son lie flat upon the carriage floor, while she put on his military cap and held his toy sword so that the silhouette would show through the window. The two male servants rode on the roof; they were armed.

  They drove toward Leipzig, which she would have preferred to bypass, and which, in “Narrative of a Journey,” she would say she avoided, because the battlefield that she would have to cross there was famously grim. But she was either repressing the memory of the carnage or rewriting it, because in fact she posted a letter from the city. She would have had good reasons for wanting to forget the place. The battle at Leipzig in October 1813 had produced more than a hundred thousand casualties—an average of thirty thousand a day. Tens of thousands of men were taken prisoner, all the farm animals killed for ten miles around, the houses in sixty villages destroyed. Even now, in 1815—more than a year after the battle—the fields remained littered with random wreckage: straw, rags, harnesses, guns, carts, the decomposed bodies of animals and men. No one had cleared the land since the fight, except scavengers looking for scraps of leather or iron, something to melt down, stitch, sell, or eat. She passed quickly through the devastation. The carriage entered the Thuringian Forest, the land of Goethe and Sturm und Drang. The forest was now as famous for its real horrors as its literary ones. She was on a path that Napoleon and his army had crossed not once but three times, looting, raping, and burning. She could calm herself by saying the path was now safe, Napoleon a prisoner in Elba, and the wars over. But one night, in a town “once probably strong, but now in ruins, miserably conditioned,” an innkeeper told her of a rumor: Napoleon had escaped Elba and had landed on the southeastern coast of France. When she stopped at another post station, the rumor was repeated. And every time the carriage stopped for fresh horses, the news grew more detailed and wilder. It was said he had an army of a thousand men with him. Disbanded troops were answering his call. He was traveling north, toward her destination—toward Paris. A mile outside of Hanau, on Thursday, March 16, Louisa passed ditches and “mounds like graves,” and then came upon a plain “over which was scattered remnants of clothes; old boots in pieces; and an immense quantity of bones, laying in this ploughed field.” This battlefield, perhaps seen in the light of Napoleon’s return, affected her as other battlefields had not. She struggled not to faint. She did not have time to collapse, though. She had to keep going, because now there was no doubt about the truth of the rumors about Napoleon. The former emperor was back. On March 12, when Louisa reached Leipzig, Napoleon was in Lyons with thousands of troops. When she was in Hanau, he was nearing Auxerre, fewer than a hundred miles from Paris. As Louisa advanced toward Frankfurt am Main—traveling faster and faster, the postilions pushing the horses—she saw evidence of soldiers mustering. Towns were busy with activity. She stopped in Frankfurt and visited her banker. Yet again she had hoped to find letters from John Quincy that would guide her, but yet again there were none. She was more dismayed by the silence now, because she was faced with a crisis. Her two male servants, John Fulling and Baptiste, came to her in Frankfurt and told her they were resigning, afraid that if they returned to France, they would be conscripted into Napoleon’s army. She tried to bribe them to stay, but their fears were bigger than her inducements. She asked her banker, Simon Moritz von Bethmann, to find her new servants. Bethmann was in a good position to help. “Le roi de Frankfurt” was among the richest men in Europe and the most well connected. The Prussian king Frederick William III had first laid eyes on Luise at a ball at Bethmann’s; Tsar Alexander, while Bethmann’s guest, had slept with Bethmann’s wife. But when Louisa asked him for help hiring
manservants, he shook his head. It was much too dangerous for a lady to be on the road now, he told her. He could arrange for her to stay in Frankfurt, he went on, and he would offer her his protection—an offer that was rarely refused, no doubt. But she was becoming accustomed to expressing her determination. “I insisted that it would be better for me to get into France as soon as possible,” she told him, and added that if events were indeed so dangerous, she was sure her husband would ride out to meet her. She reasoned that the disorder around Paris might actually be an advantage. She could slip through before any barricades were set. Bethmann was grave, but he could not stop her. He urged her, at least, to take a more circuitous path to Paris, in order to bypass the troops massing on the city’s frontier. He promised to find a servant who might help protect her. In the end, the only male Bethmann could find who would agree to travel to Paris was a fourteen-year-old boy. So at four p.m. on Friday, March 17, the new group started—Louisa, Madame Babet, Charles, and the boy, whose name she never gave. He was such an unlikely protector that she had him ride inside of the carriage instead of on the roof, as the older men had done, because he was vulnerable and made the carriage seem more so. And probably, she wanted to talk to him, because she liked people’s stories, and this boy had a good one. As a young aide to a Prussian officer during Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812, he had seen the emperor up close. He talked of Napoleon’s “sitting among his soldiers to warm himself! of his partaking of their soup, when they had any! His kindness to them in the midst of their misery &ce &ce.” Yet the boy had seen the devastation that Napoleon’s campaigns had caused. So “at the same time” as the boy spoke of Napoleon with reverence, “he expressed great hatred of the man, with all the petulance of boyish passion.” She, who knew something about a conflicted heart, was fascinated “to watch the workings of this young mind, swayed equally by admiration and detestation.” As she moved through the post stations, changing horses and postilions, the number of troops on the roads increased. Their songs grew louder and their shouts more buoyant and aggressive. She crossed from Germany into France, and arrived at a hotel in Strasbourg, where the master of the house advised her that the situation was unsettled and “very critical.” To her relief, he was able to find her a manservant, named Dupin, whom she could trust. At Épernay, she stopped for “a capital dinner” and the best bottle of champagne she had ever tasted. She assumed that she could afford the break, having received assurances that the troops would not pass through the town until the next day. But then, a mile and a half outside of town, she heard women hurling vicious curses at soldiers nearby. Then she heard the voices of the soldiers themselves, who had spotted the distinctive shape of the Russian carriage. “Tear them out of the carriage!” the soldiers cried. “Kill them!” It was the Imperial Guard, in their blue uniforms and feathered caps. Louis XVIII had fled, and Napoleon had reached the Tuileries, where among those to greet him was a man Louisa was well acquainted with, the former French ambassador to Russia, Armand de Caulaincourt. Napoleon’s elite unit was now on its way to meet the former emperor in Paris. Louisa’s carriage was surrounded; soldiers held the horses and turned their guns against the drivers. After seeing her passport, a general cried out that she was an American. “Vive les Américains!” the men cried. “Vive Napoléon!” she cried in return, waving her handkerchief. “Vive les Américains! Ils sont nos amis!” She rode slowly with the convoy; the general who had shouted to spare her rode by her side. As it happened, she was lucky. This general’s name was Claude-Étienne Michel, and he had served Napoleon for many years. A day after meeting Louisa, when he reached Paris, he would be made a comte d’empire, and a few months later would play a role leading the assault upon the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, where he would die. Now, he spoke to her through the window of her carriage and told her that her situation was very dangerous. The army was “totally undisciplined.” She must provoke no one and show no fear. When the soldiers cried Vive! then she must cry Vive! in return. When they reached the next post house, they must spend the night and let the troops pass. She was lucky, he added, because of the quality of her French; she would not raise suspicions. She could pass for native. She listened to all of this calmly, though her heart beat wildly in her chest, while Charles, ice-white, sat frozen, and Madame Babet shook. At the post house, the woman in charge refused to take the travelers in, because she knew she could not protect them. She relented only when Louisa promised to hide with Madame Babet and the child. Inside their chamber, once its windows were shuttered and door barred, Louisa’s body finally collapsed, and she suffered a series of “faintings, head ache, and sickness.” Charles was able to sleep, but Madame Babet was cracking. She had escaped the French Revolution only to return to France to find another about to begin. Clutching at her hands as fat tears rolled down her cheeks, she said she “was lost.” “The Revolution was begun again,” she insisted, “and this was only the beginning of its horrors.” Outside the door, men were carousing and drunk. The innkeeper, a vivacious woman of forty or so, had the good sense to bring out the casks so that the soldiers would not trash the hotel in search of drink. At nine the next morning, the place was quiet, and the locks turned and doors opened. The fourteen-year-old boy was waiting for them, a little worse for wear—prodded by bayonets, and his Prussian cap taken and burned—but not harmed. They piled back into the Russian carriage and continued. The rumors were flying now. The army was at the gates to Paris. A battle was imminent. She was in danger. They did not know what to believe. But one rumor gave her confidence—a rumor about herself. Dupin had heard it whispered that the woman in the large, expensive carriage who was rushing toward Paris instead of away from it (as any sane woman would) must be one of Napoleon’s sisters. When asked about it, Dupin smiled suggestively and shrugged, as if with meaning. Emboldened, they passed through Meaux, where the landlady of the inn, with tears in her eyes, took her to see the graves of six girls, the victims of “savage war, with all its detestable concomitants”—which is to say, they’d been raped and killed. From there, and with this on her mind, Louisa entered the forests of Bondy, famous for tales of banditry, and when a man on a horse thundered after her, she imagined that she was being chased. She had to smile at herself when she discovered he only wanted to warn her of the carriage’s loose wheel. And then she was at the gates of Paris. She turned onto the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin. There was no civil war, only quiet. It was getting dark. At some point that evening, on Thursday, March 23, she said goodbye to the boy and to Dupin; Babet would leave the next day. Louisa drove down the Rue de Richelieu, to the Hotel du Nord. It was eleven o’clock at night when she arrived. From the letters she had posted from the road, John Quincy was expecting her to come that evening. Her conviction that he would ride out to meet her if she was in danger had been hopeful at best. He had thought there might be a battle before Napoleon arrived in Paris, and he still worried for the region’s peace. For the past few days, he had walked out among the crowds in Paris, past bonfires of the Bourbon king’s handbills, watching the papers stamped with the fleur-de-lis curling as they burned. Louis XVIII had escaped to Lille, and Napoleon’s fresh proclamations were already being pasted on the walls. But if he worried or wondered about his wife’s safety on the road, he did not say so. They had been apart for eleven months. That evening, John Quincy went to the Théâtre des Variétés, which was famous for the low-comedy farces that he loved. In his diary, he wrote that his wife and son walked into the hotel room soon after he returned. She would remember it differently. In her account, he was not waiting for her there at all. When she arrived, he was gone. PART SIX

  A LITTLE PARADISE London and Ealing, 1815–1817

  1

  SPRINGTIME IN PARIS, 1815. The trees flew the small flags of new leaves; fevered crowds filled the streets. On the grand boulevards, soldiers strutted and cursed the old king. Some who watched them muttered subversive jokes: “Why is bread dearer and meat cheaper since 20
March? Because the baker has left and the butcher has returned.” But the critics kept their voices low. The streets rang with song. People gathered in the Tuileries below Napoleon’s window hoping for a glimpse, a benediction. The mood was joyous. The gardens were packed. The theaters were full.

  And many nights, Louisa and John Quincy were there too. The theater had been a lifelong passion for them both, something they always shared. They went to see tragedies, comedies, operas, ballets, low farces, and, once, to see Napoleon. They heard a rumor that he would attend that night, April 21. The audience filled the Théâtre-Français past capacity. Everyone wanted to be in the place he was in, as if merely sharing air were a kind of contact. The orchestra, pushed by the crowd behind the scenes, played “La Victoria” and “La Marseillaise” over and over. Finally, during the play Hector, Napoleon entered his box. Louisa and John Quincy could not view him themselves—their box was on the same side as his—but they could not have missed the ripple of heads turning, the wave of emotion, the murmur swelling to a roar: “Vive l’Empereur!” She had seen him before that night, clearly though at a distance. She, John Quincy, and Charles had been walking through the gardens at the Tuileries on a late afternoon in early April when they came upon a throng standing below Bonaparte’s apartments. At that very moment Napoleon threw open the windows and stood for a time, showing himself, bathing in the late afternoon light and in the crowd’s adoration. John Quincy had lifted Charles onto his shoulders for a better look. And there was Napoleon: the strong chin and long thin nose; the famous figure, now fat; the piercing deep-set eyes. She had no reason to be frightened of him anymore. Civil war was not a threat in Paris. To her, Bonaparte had become an interesting attraction, the way the ancient marble statues at the museums were attractions. Later, the Adamses looked at Napoleon during mass at the chapel of the Tuileries. John Quincy noted the occasion in his diary in the same tone that he noted their trip to see the city’s fortifications on the heights of Montmartre. Their time in Paris was full of pleasure. It was “in many respects the most agreeable interlude of my life,” John Quincy wrote. They went to the Louvre for the paintings and the awesome stillness. Louisa shopped for a new wardrobe: high-waisted taffeta dresses with elegant flounces; slippers as light as lacquered eggshells. She went to watch the review of soldiers in the square of the Place Carousel, the drills and peacocking. It wasn’t all for show. France would soon be at war again, and she had seen enough wreckage to be sickened and saddened at the thought of the battles to come. When it came time for the Adamses to leave Paris, Louisa wrote to Abigail that she was filled with foreboding about the fate of France, and with the “utmost regret” at having to go. She was not looking forward to returning to England, nearly twenty years after she left it. It would be, she told her mother-in-law, “a very disagreeable residence.” The dislike between the United States and Britain after the War of 1812 was persistent. She felt it herself. Another posting would mean another meager minister’s salary, too, and the certainty of great expenses; and several more years of late nights and parched mornings, of insincere smiles and insipid conversations with gouty old men. No doubt, too, her feelings were colored by her memories of the circumstances under which she had left London at twenty-two. She had been feeling the hot blast of shame after her family’s flight. She had been pregnant and uncertain of what awaited her. Now she was forty years old and even more of an outsider in a place where she had never quite belonged. Louisa, John Quincy, Charles, and Louisa’s new French chambermaid, Lucy Houel, left the Hotel du Nord in Paris on May 16, passed through the city gates, and entered the countryside. Spring was turning to summer. That morning, John Quincy noticed street vendors selling small bunches of bright red cherries. The orchards showed pale blossoms. At dinner that first night on the road, Louisa tasted the season’s first sweet green peas. The journey to the coast was short, completed in “easy stages.” She had made the trip before; she knew what to expect. It was a remarkably undemanding journey, especially compared with the arduous route she had followed only two months before. Yet, with John Quincy now in charge, it was all too much for her. When they reached Dover, Louisa insisted she could not continue on to London before resting. She was “excessively fatigued,” John Quincy wrote in his diary, “and in the evening very unwell.” This is revealing of something essential about her character. In times of adversity, forced to rise to the occasion, she often thrived. She had crossed thousands of miles from St. Petersburg to Paris, fording half-frozen rivers and meeting with unruly soldiers. She had made difficult decisions quickly and well. She had taken care of her small and terrified son. She had traveled through the night, slept very little, dealt with deserting servants, crossed battlefields and ravaged villages, and faced the approach of a dictator. She had shown courage and self-command. She had not been overcome by fatigue. She had in fact completed the journey from St. Petersburg with such strength that her husband concluded the arduous trip had been crucial to her health. This same woman, once relieved from all responsibility and returned to the protection of her husband, after a much shorter and easier journey, was now helplessly tired and overwhelmed. • • • A SURPRISE in London would revive her. Her two older sons, George and John, were waiting in the Adamses’ hotel rooms on Harley Street, Cavendish Square. When Louisa wrote to Abigail three weeks later, she skipped over words, sped on by happiness: “You will my joy on arriving in London at finding my boys.”