by Joshua Zeitz
On June 24, John Hay, George Nicolay, and Therena Bates Nicolay boarded the City of London in New York, bound for Paris.
PART III
CHAPTER 11
Europe
Shortly before Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, a letter arrived at the White House bearing the signature of John Bigelow, the outgoing American consul in Paris. A respected newspaperman with close ties to Seward and Weed, Bigelow served with distinction alongside William Dayton, the U.S. minister to France. When Dayton passed away in late 1864, Lincoln appointed Bigelow to the ministerial post. In effect, he was to be Nicolay and Hay’s new boss.
“I learned yesterday with unmixed pleasure that you were to succeed me in the Paris Consulate,” Bigelow wrote to Nicolay. “I only regret that your departure from the U.S. is to be so long deferred. The Spring months in Paris are the most pleasant, and the summer the most favorable for establishing yourself in an apartment.” Unaware of his successor’s impending nuptials, Bigelow assured him that “all things considered for the four years to come, there is not a pleasanter office in the gift of the govt. for a bachelor, in my opinion, than that to which you are appointed.” Based on his personal experience, Bigelow estimated that Nicolay could “satisfactorily live here as a bachelor for from $2500 to $3000” and, for that amount, “have a nice apartment, keep a man servant, entertain when necessary at a club, and enjoy all the rational pleasures of the Metropolis,” with enough wiggle room to save $2,500 each year. “Let me beg you to come without delay,” he implored. “It would be a pity to lose the spring in Paris, independent of which, the sooner there is a more mature head in the Consulate the better.”
From Thurlow Weed, Bigelow received assurances that Nicolay was “an intelligent, honorable man, with a bilious temperament. I think you will like him. Hay is a bright, gifted young man, with agreeable manners and refined tastes. I don’t believe that he has been spoiled, though he has been exposed. If he remains the modest young man he was, I am sure you will like him.” Time proved Weed right. In Nicolay, Bigelow found a smart, capable diplomat with keen political sensibilities and workmanlike efficiency, and in Hay, a charming bon vivant who quickly ingratiated himself with all members of the minister’s household—not least among them his wife, Jane, of whom Hay gushed in his diary, “Mon Dieu! qu’elle est vive, qu’elle est vive.” Long after they left Paris, the Bigelows and Hay would remain close friends and frequent correspondents.
The Nicolays spent their first years of marriage in “Paris of the Second Empire—gorgeous, perhaps a little tawdry,” as their daughter later observed, “and seething with political undercurrents, for Napoleon III was already beginning to find himself embarrassed by the forces that later brought about his downfall.” Though the emperor’s regime was in many ways despotic and antidemocratic, it succeeded in modernizing France’s public infrastructure. By the time George and Therena arrived, many of the city’s narrow, winding neighborhoods, historically susceptible to insurrection and disease, had been flattened, replaced by wide, tree-lined boulevards and modern apartment houses and public buildings. Paris was still very much under construction during their tenure there, leading Hay to warn his brother that he ought to visit “the old city before the rest of it is gone.” Strangers in a strange place, the Nicolays arrived armed with a letter from Horace Greeley to his sister Esther Cleveland, a resident of Paris. “I wish you to know and to advise my friend Mrs. J. G. Nicolay,” he began, “who will make her first experiments in housekeeping in your city, and who will greatly profit by your experience and thrift . . . I pray you be as wise and good to her as you possibly can.” During their first year in Paris, the Nicolays installed themselves temporarily at the Hôtel Chateaubriand, a middling establishment where they occupied a large, comfortable room and took their meals with the other guests. They acclimated to communal living with good cheer, amusing themselves with gossip about the eclectic group of residents who constituted their “‘monde’ at the Hotel Chateaubriand.” With Therena away on a summer sojourn, George reported that “the literary lady and her daughter (or relative or whatever she is—I have not had the curiosity to ask) are still there. Col. Travers is back, and our numbers have also been swelled by the addition of an elderly English lady and a daughter . . . Two little dogs are at the present the most stirring, noisy and important personages in the house. It is way far from being ‘gay,’ I can assure you.”
The hotel was roughly two and a half miles from 79, rue de Richelieu, where the American consulate was then located. It was a twenty-minute ride by carriage, or an hour’s walk, depending on the time of year. “During the winter weather in Paris the day is a myth,” Nicolay complained to a friend. “I am not exaggerating when I say that the sun sets every morning at seven o’clock, and that the rest of the twenty-four hours is a night of clouds and fog.” Arriving in late summer and settling in by early fall, the couple eagerly awaited the Parisian spring, which they understood to be “bright and lovely.” Weather aside, Nicolay sized up Paris as “a great city, having much to admire and more to condemn; a sort of delta in a stream of human life; rather an aggregation of debris than a fresh healthy organic structure of vital and intelligent forces. As study, social, political and historical, it is infinitely curious and interesting. As a station of travel it is central and amusing. But as a place to live in, or to die in—well, it may do for Frenchmen.”
Sometime in their second year, the family moved to a spacious apartment, their first private home together. While he attended his share of requisite diplomatic functions, the charms of Paris took a second seat to the call of fatherhood when in 1866 Therena gave birth to a baby girl. They named her Helen, after George’s mother. Therena evidently enjoyed her four years in Europe. She and her husband vacationed in Italy, Switzerland, and Austria; and Paris, once they settled in, proved a charming city in which to raise a young daughter. “I wish you could take a look at the Champs-Elysées on a pleasant afternoon now,” she wrote to her sister. “The costumes are so pretty. Short satin skirts and short velvet over-dresses, in all colors. Of course the black ones are the prettiest. The upper skirts are all puffed and puckered in a wonderful manner, and as you inwardly think, in a shameful waste of nice velvet: but for all that they are awfully pretty.” Though “George makes fun of everything French, from their language, their poets, their authors, down to their cooking,” she found a great deal to admire. Therena admitted to having been “pretty extravagant” during their second year abroad, ordering a wardrobe of new clothing from local couture shops. “I have been wearing old dresses ever since,” she explained, though before the end of her husband’s tenure she commissioned several more. Though she still suffered the same headaches and eyestrain that had plagued her since childhood, she happily acceded to a French doctor’s prescription of red wine and iron tablets and was consuming enough of both to “make me strong as a giant again.” “Dr. tells me that I only need to ‘eat and drink and be merry,’ to be well.”
Therena shared her husband’s love of travel, though the demands of motherhood made it difficult to indulge that yearning as often as she wished. In late 1867 she wrote to her mother, “George has been gone a week on the trip [to] Vienna, Munich, Prague and Dresden. I wanted to go most awfully, but not bad enough to take Helen, and not enough to leave her. If she was only through teething I wouldn’t be a bit afraid to leave her . . . I wish you could take a peep at her now,” she continued. “She is sitting in her little chair, sewing away for dear life with a worsted needle on a mitten which I have just finished for her, and which she thinks is wonderfully nice. She only stops talking when she is asleep. Strange to say, although she was so dark when she was a little baby, she is a regular blonde now—so much so that she don’t look pretty at all in a red dress.” Though she was proficient in French, Therena gravitated to a community of American expatriates, finding companionship with a number of young women approximately her age.
Compared with the weighty responsibilities that they shouldered
at the White House, Nicolay’s and Hay’s jobs in Paris were workaday and mostly ceremonial. Though the United States and France were involved in tense discussions surrounding the emperor’s installation of a puppet regime in Mexico, which Americans regarded as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine, neither man was engaged in any meaningful way in these bilateral talks. As first secretary, Hay performed mostly clerical and administrative duties, leaving him ample time to explore the city, take in healthy doses of French theater and museums, and run the circuit of diplomatic receptions and dinners. As consul, Nicolay devoted the better part of his day to fielding requests, large and small, from American expatriates and travelers and managing the routine affairs of a government office. “Business is dull at the Consulate,” he remarked some time into his tenure.
George found great satisfaction in domestic life. During the summer of 1866, he took his wife and daughter to Switzerland, where they could better hope to avoid the cholera epidemic then sweeping through Paris and other large European cities. With Therena and Helen safely installed in a comfortable resort town, he returned to the consulate, only to realize how much he missed his family. “I won’t flatter you by writing how I find every hour and at every turn, that a wife is an almost indispensable necessity in a household,” he told Therena. “I look around our room, and counting the merely visible objects in it, I fancy it ought to be about the same in appearance as before you went away. Chairs, table, curtains and furniture are all in their places, and ever reinforced by your large trunk, which is still where you left it. I find there is something gone—something wanting which makes it look and feel . . . cheerless and . . . desolate.” When Therena sent a picture of baby Helen, George all but gushed at “how still she must have sat. All the ladies at the house were very much pleased with it and pronounced it a great success.” “Kiss Helen for me,” he instructed, “for being so good when her picture was taken.” When a second photograph arrived, Nicolay wryly observed that Helen “appears like [Dickens’s] Major Bagstock, ‘wide awake and staring,’ as though she were trying to fathom the meaning of all this shooting at her through a bright brass tube without powder.”
“I received your letter of Monday last,” he wrote on another occasion, “in which you tell me that Helen is taking to bread and milk. Is she not too young yet to begin eating solid food? Are you sure it is good for her?” In 1868, Nicolay installed his family for several weeks at a shore house in Normandy, to spare them the discomfort and dangers of the summer heat. Toward the end of July, he planned to join them for a family reunion. “There is a little tot who has been gathering shells on the beach at Houlgate for me today,” he boasted to Hay, “whose embrace tomorrow evening at half past six will make me forget everything except the happy consciousness of again hearing her gleeful prattle.” It had taken little time to transform the “the bull-dog in the anteroom” into a proud, doting father.
• • •
John Hay was not long in Paris before he began to sour on the call of diplomatic ceremony, with its endless cycle of introductions and flummery. “One torment of diplomatic life,” he noted in his diary, “is that you never know the names of these agreeable fellows. They lose all identity in their violet coats and Imperial moustaches. You do not hear their names when you are presented to them, and if you look upon the official list of the officers of the Emperor’s household you only find that you may take your choice of a dozen names for the man you are looking after.” Though office work and diplomatic functions only punctuated the many hours that he spent exploring the city, Hay was intrigued, and in no small measure repulsed, by the opulence and antidemocratic spirit of empire. Invited to a Christmas reception at the palace, he reluctantly “hired a carriage and two servants . . . It was a highly respectable looking affair, not fresh enough to look hired, with a couple of solemn flunkies that seemed to have been in the family for at least a generation.” Arriving at the home of General John Dix, who succeeded Bigelow in November 1866, Hay observed the new American minister approach the “court carriage, the Imperial arms blazing on the panels and the harness, drawn by four horses and accompanied by two mounted outriders. Everything covered with tawdry, tarnished gold lace. It seemed like the Triumphal Car in a flourishing circus. Into this vehicle mounted the General and the Chamberlain, Hoffman and I following in our sham-private remise; and we had all the honors of a stare from the badauds on the asphalt of the Champs Elysées as the party lumbered down to the Tuileries. We were all in our Army uniform.” Upon reaching their destination, the American party was escorted by the emperor’s “violet people” to a large anteroom, where they “were presented to the Duc de Cambacérès, a jaunty old gentleman, lean and shaven and wigged—long also. He bowed lavishly and seemed distressed that nobody would sit down.” When finally an adjoining door opened and the Americans were “ushered into The Presence,” Hay was amused by Dix, who “looked anxiously around for the Emperor, advancing undecidedly, until a little man, who was standing in front of the Throne, stepped forward to meet him. Everybody bowed profoundly as the Duc de Cambacérès gave the name and the title of the General. The little man bowed, and the General, beginning to recognize in him a dim likeness to the Emperor’s portrait, made his speech to him.”
Accustomed to the democratic ethos of the United States, where, for better or worse, ordinary citizens could rush the public rooms at the Executive Mansion during presidential levees, helping themselves to snippets of drapery and carpeting or making souvenirs of the White House silver, Hay scorned the “rich lights and soft shadows” that contrived to enlarge “the little man who is listening or seeming to listen to the General’s address.” Compared with his slain idol, who had twice earned a popular mandate to govern, Napoleon III seemed a second-rate pretender. Hay could scarcely conceal his disgust. “If our Republican eyes can stand such a dazzling show, let us look at him,” he scribbled in his diary.
Short and stocky, he moved with a queer, sidelong gait, like a gouty crab; a man so wooden looking that you would expect his voice to come rasping out like a watchman’s rattle. A complexion like crude tallow—marked for Death, whenever death wants him—to be taken sometime in half an hour, or left, neglected by the Skeleton King, for years, perhaps, if properly coddled . . . He stands there as still and impassive as if carved in oak for a ship’s figurehead. He looks not unlike one of those rude inartistic statues. His legs are too short—his body too long. He never looks well but on a throne or on a horse, as kings ought.
When at last Hay was presented, the emperor, “clearly wishing to be very civil, as it is most rare that a monarch addresses a Secretary of Legation, said, ‘But you are very young to be a Col-o-nel. Did you make the war in America?’ I wanted to insist that older and wickeder men than I were responsible for that crime, but I thought it best to answer the intention rather than the grammar, and said I had a humble part in the war.
“‘Infanterie or cavalerie?’
“‘The general staff!’”
The emperor, unimpressed, turned to his next guest.
With the Bigelows bound for home, Hay decided he had seen enough of Paris. Now twenty-eight years old, he had little material wealth to show for his years of work but an orange grove in Florida and a vineyard in Illinois, neither of which brought steady investment income, and a modest sum in cash and war bonds. “I must begin to occupy myself seriously in earning a livelihood,” he told Seward, “and the first step in my preparations is necessarily the resignation of my present position.” To his uncle Milton, Hay was more candid, acknowledging that he had “got as much out of this place as there is to be got by one. I have lived within my means & have learned French and the machinery and mechanisms of the Diplomatic service.” In the short term, Hay was certain that he could move to Washington or New York and earn a decent living by writing for a magazine or newspaper, but he was “getting too old to be drifting about much longer. I want some steady employment. I could get anything reasonable I asked for in Washington but I would rather not hol
d any more offices if I can help it.” Instead, he asked whether he might join Milton’s law firm. “I have forgotten most of the law I read with you,” he admitted, “& would have to learn it all over again. I am not even a good clerk as I know very little about money or business. It is nearly an even chance whether I would ever get to be worth my salt at the bar, but I feel like trying it on.” Milton’s reply must have been disheartening. There was no room for John in his small but thriving practice.
Early 1867 found Hay in Washington, D.C., where he made the rounds of his old acquaintances and announced his availability for employment. Only two years earlier he had scorned the unwashed office seekers who banged daily on the president’s door in search of patronage and favor. Now he was one of them, and he hated it. Everything about Washington seemed tawdry. “I drove to Willard’s,” he privately noted, “saw the same dead beats hanging around the office, the same listless loafers moving gloomily up and down, pensively expectorating.” After paying his respects to Ward Hill Lamon, Hay made his way to the State Department, where Seward greeted him warmly.
“Well, John Hay,” he said with a grin, “so you got tired of it and came home.”
“Yes,” replied Hay, “I had enough of the place and the place had enough of me.”
Seward approved of the move, launching a “clever disposition on the dangers of a man holding office—the desiccation and fossilizing process . . . and saying he feared Nicolay was getting into that way. I assured him Nicolay was not; that he was single-heartedly pursuing 10,000 dollars, and that when he got it he would come home and go to his ranch. He was glad to hear it, he said.” Seward nevertheless asked whether he wanted or needed a job, and Hay, sensing that it would be wise to hedge his bets, answered that he would “like anything worth having, if it could be given to me without embarrassment to him or the President at the present time.” Several days later, Seward offered him the post of private secretary in his own office, but Hay declined, assuring him that “if he wished my personal services in the Department that of course they were entirely at his service; but that if he had done this out of his own usual kindness for me, that I thought it best to decline; that I had better go home and see my parents for the present.” Seward assured him that the job was there for the taking if he changed his mind and, for good measure, had even proposed Hay “to the President . . . as Minister to Sweden.” It was a kind gesture, though Hay knew very well that he was unqualified for the post, and in any event Johnson “had another man for it.”