ELEVEN
À la Mode de Paris
Once they changed from horses that refused to budge beyond Westminster Bridge, and had defied the inhospitality of the England Channel, Abigail began to inhabit a strange new world of commitments, language, and friendship for which she was quite unprepared. Beyond Calais, Boulogne, Montreuil, Amiens, and Chantilly, as Paris loomed, her Braintree world receded. Her memory of Penn’s Hill, the white wooden houses and steepled churches, Uncle Tufts, the many Quincys, the Cranches and Shaws, began to pale in the exotic Paris air.
The family arrived in Paris on August 13, and four days later they were settled in the suburb of Auteuil, about four miles from the Opéra house. The vast stone dwelling with forty beds, described by John as being centered somewhere between the ghosts of Boileau, Helvétius and Molière, was ensconced, actually, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, the park he claimed as his own “without any expense.” Passy and Montmarte were silhouetted in the distance; closer by, turreted chateaux with mansard roofs sat on vast and rolling lawns like ample, aristocratic dowagers whose portraits were suitably framed with elaborate cutwork fences. Privacy was preserved by chestnut-lined driveways that resolved into secretive, ivy-mottled courtyards.1
Abigail instantly recognized that the house was truly “gay and really beautifull” compared to her lowly cottage, that the superb allée of trees bisecting the ravishing flower beds in back were to her rough lawn garden at home as silks were to calicoes. But beauty did not make for comfort nor ease. The whole question of trying to staff her French household highlighted the problem of different mores and, even more seriously, inadequate pay. To her own countrymen, her seven servants would be considered extravagant, she knew, unless they understood the whole issue of diplomacy. Quite surprisingly, Abigail’s was a thoroughly pragmatic view of diplomacy, which must have evolved instantaneously with exposure to its practice.2
* * *
Abigail’s protectiveness about her country, as well as her private reservations—she often thought the staff was maintained for “plundering” her—provoked sheer outrage. To send a person to Paris in a public character, to be a public jest, was an insult, she argued. Further, for a nation to degrade its own ministers by obliging them to live in “narrow circumstances” was penny wise and pound foolish. Abigail was certain that one entertainment at home fostered more successful negotiations than twenty official meetings. How, then, she asked, was she to accomplish with seven servants what the Spanish ambassador did with one hundred, including fifty in livery, and the English ambassador with fifty, including twenty in livery? Abigail was on a rampage: one foreign ambassador’s table settings, she noted, cost more than the American ambassador earned in an entire year. Abigail’s solution to financial hardship was to try to imbue her French household with New England order and thrift, an attempt that was rewarded with minuscule victory. The maître d’hôtel agreed to double as footman, on condition that he was given a gentleman’s suit of clothing in place of livery.3
But, annoyed as she was by what she referred to as servant’s “etiquet,” Abigail also marveled at its ceremony. If areas of domestic duties had been legalized duchies, they could not have had more rigid boundaries. She employed a gardener, a cook, a coachman for the carriages and houses, and the aforementioned maitre d’hôtel, who was in charge of supplies and also, Abigail was sure, of seeing that nobody cheated but himself. The staff also included a valet de chambre—their own John Briesler—a femme de chambre, who happened to be Abigail’s own Esther (and worth a dozen others), and a coiffeuse who did some sewing. All these servants to put up with, Abigail complained, and still no washing was done in the house; if the American servants weren’t willing to double and treble in their tasks, she was certain she would be “plagued” with half a dozen more.4
Having tended turkeys and geese at daybreak in Braintree, having cooked for family and boarders, having spun, sewed, and washed the family’s clothing with only occasional assistance, Abigail found almost unforgivable the hairdresser who would not make her bed or sweep out her room, and the cook who would not think of washing a dish. In certain instances, even when the servant’s performance was satisfactory, his attitude was a puzzle. Housework was a solemn business, yet the young man in charge of scrubbing floors looked like a “Merry Andrew,” dancing as he drove foot brushes over the red tile in the first-floor salon (about one-third larger than the Warren’s hall in Milton).5
In reality, Abigail had learned about divisions of labor during her brief stay in London. When she had asked her servant to send a barber to her, the servant of whom she had made the request stared at her “queerly.” “You mean a hair-dresser, Madame, I believe?” “Ay. I want my hair dressed,” Abigail had replied. “Why, barbers, Madame, in this country, do nothing but shave,” the servant answered. These “fixed and settled departments” continued to disturb her now that she had crossed the Channel into France, where she found the situation worse, and simply could not adjust to those who would not “lift a pin out of their separate departments.” They reminded her, each one, of Swift’s high Dutch bride, she said, “who had so much nastiness, and so much pride.”6
Not only the pressure of supporting servants irked Abigail and John; the cost of furnishing a household was punishing. They had to buy bed linen and table linen, and order silver, china, wineglasses, even decanters. With a guinea not going any further than a copper, they were “mortified” that Congress had cut John’s salary by one-fifth, at a time when his family had increased and he was in need of more money, not less. John tried to explain, in letters home, that there was not a man in the world less inclined to pomp or entertainment than himself—it was a relief to be excused from both—but if he knew anything in the world, he knew that it was in the public’s best interests to entertain. Nobody, for example, understood economy better than the Dutch nation, yet they were liberal with their own ambassadors.7
Unfortunately, it was the smell of filth rather than muguet that overwhelmed Abigail’s first impression of Paris. It was the “very dirtiest place” she had ever seen, crammed with slovenly shops and narrow streets, filled with building supplies of lumber and stone. Even in Auteuil, just four miles distant, one could not walk in the streets without wearing boots; mounting her own backstairs, she had to hold up her skirts to avoid soiling their hems, that is, until she set her servants to scrubbing the steps and floors. Although Boston could not boast such elegant buildings, the city was “much superior” to Paris, as London was to Boston.8
Yet Paris had its own allure. For one crown apiece, the Adams family (after parking its carriage near the Tuileries), could not only inspect the egg-shaped taffeta balloon with which man was beginning to explore the air, but watch it rise and float over the city. Another intriguing sight, though hardly Nabby’s favorite, and for which there was no admission charge, was that of observing the Dauphin in the palace gardens which were open to the public on Sundays. Nabby found the three-year-old child, playing with his shovel under the vigilant eyes of four attendants, “pretty” and “sprightly,” but she did make it clear she thought it “ridiculous” that any people should, either from necessity or choice, pay so much homage to a being who might rule them with a scepter of iron. October brought the centennial celebration of the playwright Pierre Corneille. The complex, talented Monsieur de Beaumarchais, the creator of Figaro, was already constantly written about in the newspaper Mercure de France regarding his “nouveau Project de Bienfaissance” (newest plan of charity). A piece by Handel was “sans doute un chose curieuse à entendre” (without doubt a curious thing to hear), of its time, yet also modern, as a music reviewer wrote. A book, regarded as a “plaisanterie,” was called Voyage Autour de la Terre avec Le Globe Aeroflatique (Voyage Around the World in a Hot-Air Balloon). Publication of Nouveau Voyage Sentimental (A Sentimental Journey) by Laurence Sterne was noted.9
* * *
Abigail’s first destination, once she reached Paris, was the milliner; she needed to replace the four caps, worth at least five guineas, that she had somehow lost on the trip to London. Without her head covered, she could not be seen in public; dignity and modesty were, after all, significant facets of fashion, by her standards. Later, when she sat for Gilbert Stuart, she insisted on covering her head, though the artist tactfully suggested that she do otherwise. This September of 1784, cap in place, children in hand, husband in tow, Abigail descended on Paris and was, almost simultaneously, bemused by its variety, shocked by its contrasts, and eventually entranced by its beauty, customs, and even fashions, which at first had “disgusted” her. Within five months of her arrival, she could boast of knowing that it was a sign of politeness rather than incivility when a man sniffed at a partridge leg to determine whether it was fit for consumption by the ladies. She also claimed she was used to seeing a lady rapturously put her arms around a gentleman and “salute” him first on one cheek, and then on the other. She now considered this a thing of “mere course,” and even viewed a touch of rouge rubbed off in the process as an added flourish.10
Studying the many beauties as well as some of the “deformities” of the Old World, Abigail began to talk about finding her taste “reconciling itself.” At the ballet, for example, she was enchanted, she said, by the dress and beauty of the performers; once they began to dance, however, she felt her delicacy “wounded,” and found herself ashamed to look at them. Girls clothed in the thinnest silk and gauze, with short petticoats, “springing two feet from the floor, posing themselves in the air, with their feet flying, and as perfectly showing their garters and drawers,” was a sight altogether new to her. And yet, “Shall I speak a truth?” she asked, daring immediately to do so: “Repeatedly seeing these dances has worn off the disgust, which I at first felt, and I see them now with pleasure.”11
Abigail’s appreciation of the arts was expansive enough, at this time, to include French opera, though she thought its robustly gilded and domed building neither so grand nor so beautifully designed as the discreetly columned Comédie Française. She admired the decorative aspects of opera; “And O! the music, vocal and instrumental, it has a soft, persuasive power, and a dying sound,” she wrote to her sister. “Think you,” Abigail asked Mary, “that this city can fail of becoming a Cythera, and this house the temple of Venus?”12
That Abigail was beginning to enjoy herself was of curious concern to her daughter Nabby, the “petite Ange” (so said many French acquaintances), who seemed determined to keep her distance from whatever or whomever she encountered. Almost in spite of herself, her horizons were broadening; as with her mother, she now accepted circumstances that initially had seemed strange to her, though with reservation. “I am accustomed to many things at present, but I am not reconciled to them,” she admitted. Two things she took exception to concerned her parents. Europe altered people, Nabby had decided, particularly in the case of her mother, whose head she thought was “more Metamorphosed” than any other aspect of the family, unless it was her own waistline. As for her father, she had not thought it possible, with his firmness and resolution, to be such a perfect convert to everything pertaining to dress and appearance.13
Nabby was short-sighted in her evaluation of her parents, particularly her mother. Had she read Abigail’s account of Longchamps, her faith would surely have been restored. Abigail reported that she felt foolish as she paraded up one side and down another of a very wide road, for a mile and a half, and then turned around and followed a vast number of carriages. The pace was funereal, and as she found neither utility nor pleasure in the event, she firmly said that she did not expect to “assist” in it again. Abigail was convinced the occasion had been invented to provide some diversion during Lent, a period when the theaters were empty and the churches were filled.14
At the start of Abigail’s stay in France, not being fluent enough to converse as she would like, she tended to observe rather than participate. She made it clear to all who listened, to all to whom she wrote, that it was too early for her to pass judgment on the French, whose manners were totally different from those of her own country. Despite her lofty intentions, she reached one conclusion, at least, quite swiftly. “If you ask me what is the Business of Life here,” she said, “I answer pleasure.” From throne to footstool, at least in Abigail’s opinion, the French made a science of pleasure; so much so that she wondered how they supported themselves, and was persuaded that the greater part of the population must subsist on bread and water. At least in London, it had seemed to her, though the streets were filled with people, their dress was different. Their appearance indicated to Abigail that they were going about their business—except, of course, on Sundays, when they devoted the day either to church or to a walk. But judging from the gaiety of the peoples’ dress and the places they frequented, she concluded that mood and purpose were entirely different in Paris.15
Abigail liked to analyze the reasons for people’s behavior. Her theory to explain the shocking morals of the French was that theirs was an indulgent religion. Absolutions and dispensations offered by the priests of the Church encouraged pleasure, which, in Abigail’s mind, was a word synonymous with promiscuity. She was puzzled by the churches of the French. She admired their architecture, sculpture, and paintings, on the one hand, but found the prodigious masses of gray stone, so often wedged between seven-story houses that screened out the sun, “rather calculated to damp devotion than to excite it.”16
Abigail admitted that her survey was both limited and transient; when the weather was warmer she hoped to make a more “accurate and critical inspection.” She did note, however, in the forbidding gray Church of St. Roch in St. Sulpice, that at any time of day, whenever one entered, one found priests and visitors of all ages on their knees, crossing themselves, murmuring their Pater Nosters and Ave Marias. Then, when her eyes adjusted to the cloudy light, she observed another sort of ceremony, one of individuals opening and closing doors, slipping in and out of “little boxes and closets”—sentry boxes is what she thought they looked like—that edged the floor of the church. Even though she was chilled with cold, she was too curious to leave without inspecting the small grated window that communicated with another closet of the same kind. At the same time that she described the remarkable ceremony of the “closet,” she uncovered explanations for the French attitude toward marriage and for their morals in general—or thought she did.
One of them holds the person who is confessing, and the other the confessor, who places his ear at this window, hears the crime, absolves the transgressor, and very often makes an assignation for a repetition of the same crime, or perhaps a new one. I do not think this a breach of charity; for can we suppose that, of the many thousands whom the religion of the country obliges to celibacy, one quarter part of the number can find its influence sufficiently powerful to conquer these passions which nature has implanted in man, when the gratification of them will cost them only a few livres in confession.17
Except for commencement day and election day in Boston, the Sabbath in Paris was incomparable to any American custom. Abigail was in an ideal position to make this pronouncement; her house in Auteuil was just a few rods away from that “Beautiful wood,” the Bois de Bologne, where the rites of the Sabbath resounded so evocatively. There was nothing like it even on the Cambridge Commons; people arrived in carts if they did not have a coach, to spend the day singing and dancing. If they did not bring their own picnic, there was cake, fruit, or wine to be bought; they could also purchase ribbons, gauzes, and other such wares from the milliners who set up booths to display their stock. Abigail, though she tended to admire their “appealing stile,” was wary of the milliners, and suspected they had “other purposes” in mind than the mere sale of their merchandise.18
Just thinking about the milliners, jolly and flirtatious, reminded Abigail of a subject that she confessed made her blush. What was she to think of the manners of a nation that permitted 52,000 females in one city to enroll their names in a notary office for the “most abandoned” purposes, and then allowed thousands of the miserable wretches to die each year of disease and poverty. But if prostitution was unthinkable, so was the way the institution of marriage was manipulated to unite titles and estates, yet foster separate establishments for pleasures and amusements. If she compared French morals to English ones, she wondered which of the two countries would prove the “least pernicious.” Women were openly solicited in London, not so in Paris; women on the stage in London were suspect, which was not the case in Paris. Abigail could only conclude that in England vice was like a ferocious beast, seeking whom it may devour; in France it was a subtle poison, secretly penetrating.19
If Abigail was critical of the religious life of France, and the odd custom of celebrating Sunday as a “high holiday,” as a festival, she was testy, in turn, about the limitations placed by her own country on her own habits of observance. The fact that the American Embassy did not permit chaplains on its premises angered Abigail, who did not consider worshiping at the Dutch ambassador’s chapel, in French, a viable alternative. “Do Congress think that their ministers have no need of grace?” she asked. Or was it that religion was not a “necessary article” for them? Soon she would be resigned to acknowledging that Sunday would not feel like Sunday as long as she lived in France.20
* * *
In many ways, in Paris, or wherever she would journey, Abigail was an archetypal tourist, critical of the new, protective of the familiar. Perhaps it was on one of the days when the Paris sky was bloated with the gray fog she found not “agreeable” to her that she talked of the “cheerful sunshine of America,” remembered the “clear blew” sky at home, even longed for an American snowstorm, obviously forgetting the crippling winds and ice that had imprisoned her in the Braintree cottage for weeks on end. At these times she was lost in nostalgia, and found herself sighing (“tho not allowed”) for the tea parties she had left behind in America, thinking that if she could only “transplant” her few chosen friends to the village of Auteuil she would find their agreeable conversation a rich repast. Her habits, tastes, and sentiments were too firmly established to be altered by a change of country or climate, she said, and at her age, her greatest enjoyment consisted in the reciprocations of friendship. Recognizing her preferences and her limitations, Abigail found it as difficult to conform to the French custom of receiving foreigners as she had to the English system, though for entirely different reasons. Etiquette in France required strangers to pay the first call, and as Abigail explained to a friend in Braintree, “You will easily suppose that I have not been so fond of so awkward a situation as going to visit ladies, merely to make my dumb compliments, and receive them in return.”21
For all her considerable reluctance, Abigail’s call on the Marquise de Lafayette was immediately rewarding. It was bound to be so, because the French noblewoman, the former Marie Adrienne Françoise de Noailles, was in many ways Abigail’s French counterpart. She was quietly dressed, devoted to her children, direct and open with people. She was also immediately friendly to Abigail, who had to wait until the Marquise returned to town in November before calling on her, John accompanying her on the ride. Abigail’s servant took in her card and returned, as expected, with word that the Marquise was not at home. Just as Abigail’s carriage was easing out of the driveway, the Marquise’s servant rushed out of the doorway to call her back. Almost simultaneously the Marquise herself came out to greet her personally, Abigail descending from her carriage in turn. In what Abigail described as “the rapture peculiar to the ladies of this nation,” the pleasant noblewoman pressed the American’s hand and kissed her on both cheeks as though Abigail were a long-absent and beloved friend.22
The Marquise de Lafayette’s declared fondness for Americans only heightened Abigail’s admiration for the energetic, friendly young woman, who preferred to wear chintz during the day and to forgo any glitter at night. Because of her austere tendencies, Abigail had to defend the Marquise at dinner the evening she wore a brown silk dress and petticoat with a double gauze handkerchief around her shoulders and a white cap on her head threaded with white ribbon. “The lady’s rank sets her above the little formalities of dress,” Abigail whispered sternly to the American critic. She restrained herself from adding that no people were more extravagant than American women; their fondness for diamond watch chains and girdle buckles only made her wonder that some of them must be living on twice as much as any American minister’s salary could possibly provide.23
As time passed, other Frenchwomen won Abigail’s admiration. She was intrigued by their taste, their musical voices, their intelligence, their light, airy, genteel manners, cultivated, she knew, only after years of study. For the French, manners were an art form, and Frenchwomen were studious artists. Now a converted admirer of the French, Abigail tried to observe their protocol graciously, with one remarkable exception. It was not accident but a striking difference in attitudes that prevented Abigail from calling on Dr. Franklin’s valued friend, the flamboyant Madame Anne Helvétius, also known as Notre Dame d’Auteuil.24
Madame Helvétius had once been handsome, Abigail thought, seeing her for the first time. Crowning her frizzled mound of hair was a small straw hat veiled with dirty gauze; more of the filmy muslin swathed her shoulders and her blue silk dress, which looked, to Abigail, as decayed as her beauty. Dr. Franklin had already discussed his taste in women, but still had left Nabby and her mother unprepared for Madame Helvétius. Dr. Franklin liked Englishwomen with the additional graces of Frenchwomen, and this composite was to be found nowhere but in Paris, he assured Nabby. There was no doubt that he preferred Frenchwomen above all others. In Madame Helvétius, he told the Adams women at the beginning of their stay in Paris, they would find a genuine Frenchwoman wholly free from affectation or stiffness of behavior, one of the best women in the world. But nothing Dr. Franklin had said could they relate to this particular woman. The tidy, immaculate Americans, Abigail and her daughter, only hoped they would find other Frenchwomen with manners more consistent with their ideas of decency. Otherwise, Abigail had decided she was sure to become “a mere recluse.”25
On one of their first visits to Dr. Franklin, they were sitting in his drawing room when Madame Helvétius marched in with what seemed a rather “jaunty” air. Surprised to see other women, she was disappointed not to find Franklin waiting for her. “Ah, mon Dieu, where is Franklin?” she asked. Then, lifting up her skirt, she ran out of the room, to return in moments through another door, encountering Franklin appearing through a third. She ran to him, hugged his hand, greeted him with “Hélas! Franklin,” and two kisses, one for either cheek, followed by a third for his forehead. During dinner, a startled Abigail was uncomfortably aware of the constant movement across the table involving her own husband. With rhythmic continuity, Madame Helvétius, sitting between John and Dr. Franklin, not only locked her hands with the latter but stretched her arms behind the backs of both gentlemen’s chairs; then, retrieving her arms, she threw both “carelessly” around the Doctor’s neck. Abigail would report shortly to friends that she could only think Dr. Franklin could not be adverse to the example of King David: “If embraces will tend to prolong his life and promote the vigour of his circulations he is on a fair way to live the age of an antediluvian.”26
As the evening passed, the worst of Abigail’s suspicions about Madame Helvétius were confirmed. She hoped never to make another acquaintance of this “cast” who, after dinner, hurled herself on a settee, where she showed more than her feet and allowed her little lapdog to curl up beside the Doctor. Next, she kissed the dog, next, the dog wet the floor; next, his mistress wiped the floor with her dress. Abigail was shocked. “This is one of the Doctor’s most intimate friends, with whom he dines once every week, and she with him. She is rich, and is my near neighbour; but I have not visited her. Thus you see, my dear,” Abigail explained to her niece Lucy Cranch, “that manners differ exceedingly in different countries.”27
* * *
On any given day, Abigail’s reactions to the customs of the Old World were as varied as the moody Paris skies, the forbidding pewter grays misting from pale silver to a quiet blue suffused with gentle sunlight. She was scornful and revolted, but, at other times understanding, appreciative, and even amused by the people, sights, and values she was exposed to as a diplomat’s wife. Groan and scold as she might about the cost of living, there were certain expenses she knew that she and her family must resign themselves to, and in fact could not avoid. Unlike London, in Paris fashion was the “deity” every one worshiped, from highest to lowest, and there was simply no escaping this fact: dressing one’s hair was mandatory and there were no porters or washerwomen who did not have their hair powdered and dressed every day.28
Having no choice, the Americans conformed. Johnny had his hair “frizzled,” as Abigail termed the unnaturally curly state of her son’s dark brown hair; even poor Esther and John, ridiculed by the other servants, submitted, with Esther dissolving in tears for allowing herself to be put in such a foolish position. Thomas Jefferson, who was not one for “show & parade,” regarded the idea of dressing his hair as an “affliction,” and was tempted to cut it off. As he did not expect to live but a dozen years more, he explained, he was loath to give up one of them to hairdressing. Eventually, all of them were “à la mode de Paris,” and not entirely miserable about their situation, either. Abigail noticed that Esther seemed as “happy as a lark,” quite recovered from her initial qualms, going off to the theater to see Figaro with another servant, Pauline. “To be out of fashion,” Abigail concluded, “was more criminal than to be seen in a state of nature, to which the Parisians were not averse.”29
Fashion, the idea of dressing according to currently admired standards, was never ignored by Abigail, though she did bring a sensible perspective to the entire pursuit. Even at Braintree, she had exchanged fabrics and patterns with friends and relatives; in Paris, not a spot of rouge, a gauze veil, a jeweled stomacher escaped her vigilant eye. Lengthy reports on fashion, even now, were forwarded by Abigail from Paris, Nabby supplementing them with miniature models made from handkerchiefs. Still, Abigail would only go to certain lengths to be fashionable; by both inclination and purse, she was limited in her pursuit. She found the demands of protocol most trying. Never one to accept dictation with special grace, her resentment over the court requirements for mourning was considerable and shared with her friend Thomas Jefferson. That she outwitted the court in the case of the death of an eight-year-old prince pleased her; she even boasted of her triumph across the seas to Uncle Tufts.30
At times of royal deaths, if the court so decreed, special mourning attire was required of all attendants and visitors, including all foreign ministers and their families, for a certain span of time—in this instance, for eleven days. In deference to this rule, both Thomas Jefferson and his compatriot Colonel Humphries spent fifty guineas at the tailor, having appropriately somber clothes cut to their order, since they did not dare to appear disrespectfully dressed on their regular Tuesdays at court. On the given Tuesday, “full trimmed in awful sable,” Abigail told Tufts, the two gentlemen called at the house in Auteuil to collect her husband. John, informally dressed, explained at breakfast that he had learned the day before that Court would not be held this Tuesday, and by the next week the mourning period would be over. Abigail, who had already decided not to go out in public in order to avoid the expense of a new black dress—her old one not being the silk for the season—gloated that she “took not a little pleasure in announcing to the visitors what others had felt before them, that their Labour was all in vain.”31