FOOLHARDY! WHY HADN’T SHE STAYED IN MITAU? THE COUNTESS would have kept her company. Perhaps she should have delayed her journey. She could have saved herself heartache and worry over Charles. Now she would have to wait for the sun to rescue her, unless a beast of the forest or the worst of man found her first. Then she heard it— voices and the trampling of a horse at a short distance. Man or monster?
“The palpitation of my heart increased until I thought it would have burst. My child lay sweetly sleeping on his little bed in the front of the carriage, unsusceptible of fear and utterly unconscious of danger.”
Then she heard his familiar voice. She didn’t record whether it was raspy or mellow, high-pitched, or deep toned, but she recognized his unmistakable voice. Even if Baptiste was a thief, his voice gave her instant comfort in that frightful moment, while his perspiration-stained frock shirt suddenly smelled sweet.
“Baptiste rode hastily up to the carriage door and informed me that he had found a house quite near.”
Accompanying Baptiste was a Russian officer, who saw him riding from the house. The man “offered his services to take us into the road, as it required great skill to keep the carriage out of the gullies by which we were surrounded.” Louisa agreed to let the Russian officer escort them to the house. Confirming her fears, he told her that murder had recently taken place on that road. Not to worry. He brought lanterns and fresh torches to light their path to shelter.
“One of my men mounted the officer’s horse and we proceeded at a foot pace.” They arrived at the house at half past one, three hours later than she expected. “He [the officer] accepted a handsome present, made many polite speeches, and took leave, recommending the innkeeper to be attentive, and to see that horses should be ready at any hour I might want them, [and] he departed.”
Though the post driver was at fault for missing the road and accepting a job to ride to a place he had never been before, and at night at that, Baptiste and the other servant performed their duty with honor. She was not mangled or murdered in the forest. Neither was her carriage sunk in a swamp. Though shaken, she was alive. More important, so was her child.
“I therefore expressed my satisfaction to my domestics for the prudence and discretion which they had shown through this singular accident, and bade them be ready at an early hour with the carriage and horses,” she explained, determining to get out of there as soon as possible.
Louisa retired to a small room with Madame Babet and Charles. Before she closed her eyes, she did something the French nuns taught her to do many years ago. Grateful for God’s guardian angels, she prayed.
“After thanking most devoutly the Almighty for His protection through this hour of trial, I sought repose with renewed confidence in the persons attached to my service, and determined not to listen to any more bugbears to alarm my nerves and weaken my understanding.”
While Louisa zigzagged through dark forests, John calmly walked into the ornate Palais-Royal, “[w]here I was presented to the Duke of Orleans [Louis Philippe].”
Though not the king—Adams had already been introduced to Louis XVIII—this man was a French royal nonetheless. And in postrevolutionary France, one never knew when the throne would change again.
“He asked me whether I was the son of Mr. Adams who had been president of the United States when he [the duke] was in America.”
“Oui,” John replied.
“He saw the resemblance between me and my father, but did not recollect having seen me in America.”
Adams had heard the comparison many times. To avoid confusion with his father, he often signed his name JQA.
“I was at that time in Europe,” he explained about why they did not meet during the Frenchman’s introduction to his father. John Quincy was an envoy to Berlin while his father was president.
“He had a very grateful remembrance of the hospitality with which he had been treated in America, and was very happy to make my acquaintance.”
The Duke of Orleans was unique among the Frenchmen Adams had met recently. Louis Philippe based his opinion of the United States on what he had witnessed, not on negative stereotypes.
The greatest struggle America faced in the early 1800s was acceptance as a legitimate sovereign nation. Though the United States had won its independence from Great Britain during the Revolutionary War, most Europeans believed the son never left the father. America and England were still one and the same power in their view. The gravest dangers facing the nation were failing to establish free trade in Europe—the surest sign of actual acceptance of US sovereignty—and risking independence by losing a new war with England. Independence once again depended, in part, on an Adams.
As enjoyable as it was to meet a French royal who favored the United States, pressing most on Adams’s mind was his daily obsession—the post. When would the president’s letter arrive? Would he receive the orders he longed for? Would he finally be free to go home to America? Would he receive an honorable appointment? The position of secretary of state was vacant. Or would he be stuck—eternally in “exile” in Europe? Tremendous strife still existed between the United States and England.
“The British will take care to inflict some signal stroke of vengeance to redeem their reputation,” he predicted to Louisa in a January 1815 letter. “Its darkest shade is that it has settled no one subject of dispute between the two nations.” He still worried that the future would be worse than the past.
“My visit here [in Paris] has not hitherto given me much satisfaction,” he confessed. Something was missing no matter where he lived. That something was his wife. As much as he loved the theater, such excursions felt empty without Louisa sharing them with him.
“But life here is a perpetual tumult, the forms and manner of the society are contrary to all my habits,” he complained, adding, “I find myself as much a stranger as the first day.”
The reason he had stopped writing to her was as simple as it was practical. Adams longed to embrace his wife. More than anything he hoped that she had dared to risk winter to leave St. Petersburg and be reunited with him. Though he offered for her to wait until spring, when travel was safer, he prayed that she had left frosty St. Petersburg and was en route to meet him. Because they were nearly the same height, theirs was a comfortable embrace, no hunching over for him or stretching up on tiptoes for her. At five feet seven inches, he was an inch taller than his wife. He missed her more than he would ever admit to the Marquis de Lafayette, the Frenchman who aided the American Revolution years ago, and others he dined with in Paris.
He sent this letter by post to Königsberg in East Prussia and another copy to Berlin. Maybe she would reach one of those places soon. How he dared to hope!
Finally, Mrs. Adams and her entourage broke free, riding five hundred miles without incident toward the Vistula River, the Baltic Sea’s main basin and Poland’s largest river, stretching more than six hundred miles.
They likely passed many pleasant sights, such as the area’s fourteenth-century storehouses, which held salt, timber, grain, building stones, and other raw materials. Because the Baltic’s shores boast the largest and richest deposits of amber in the world, they likely saw bits of this fossilized resin sprinkled along the way.
No matter how attractive the antique amber or quaint the ancient granaries, when they arrived at the Vistula’s shores, Louisa made an alarming discovery: the ice was thin. Help from the locals was even thinner. The ice was in such a critical state that she had trouble finding drivers who were willing to risk crossing it.
How solid was the ice? Could the frozen river hold the weight of her carriage? The ice was iffy, she learned. Even iffier was finding an inn nearby. The locals—likely ice fishermen or traders—gave her the bad news. If she didn’t cross, she would have to make a long, winding detour around the river with no guarantee of finding shelter for the evening. The time was four o’clock in the afternoon. Because it was winter, the sun would disappear very soon. Time was the enemy too.
Her choice was clear: cross the iffy ice or risk a night without shelter, a reminder of getting lost in the woods outside Mitau. The men gave her a variable. If she had the courage to cross, they would attach the horses to the far end of long poles and tap the ice ahead of her.
An hour passed. Night was awakening. She made her choice: cross.
They started at five o’clock. The men went forward a few feet, beating their poles to find the firmest path. They tapped, listened, and watched for cracking. The ice was secure enough to start. Then they attached the long poles to the horses pulling the carriage. Inch by inch Louisa and her party slowly slid over the uncertain ice. Just as the coach reached the border—a few feet from land—the ice cracked and gave way.
The first jolt probably sounded like a crunch. Then suddenly the coach punched through the ice, tossing the passengers from their seats. Madame Babet started screaming. Charles was locked by fear. Louisa heard the severe cracking of the whip as the driver yelled at the horses to pull the sinking carriage to shore.
Is this how it was to end? After all she had suffered, she now faced the worst possibility. If the carriage continued to sink, she and Charles would be permanently separated from John and their family—exiled into a frozen river forever.
What Louisa did not realize in that moment was historical hindsight: her Russian destination had just changed US destiny.