TWELVE
A Degree of Tristeness
A North American, Abigail thought, had no right to complain of the rigor of the climate of Paris; this middle of January, 1785, was as mild as a New England May. There were other aspects of her life that she could not complain about either, though finances were a continuing problem. Not for a moment were they paid enough to live in the manner required of people “in the publicke Character in which they have placed my Friend,” Abigail said. On the other hand, she had the company of her “best Friend,” and she had part of her family with her. She was really so happy in the house in Auteuil that she almost resented having to leave it for the titled and gilded dinner parties to which they were habitually invited.1
At Christmastime, as he always tended to do, John had taken a long look back at the outgoing year, and pronounced it one of unquestionable private contentment, at least the past few months, when his family had been together. There was a pattern now to their days; the morning of January 4 was typical. Abigail rose in faint daylight; after the fire was lit and her bedroom cleaned, she knocked on Nabby’s door to awaken her, then at the next door, which was opened by Johnny, usually with a book in his hand. The four ate breakfast together, after which John went into the library to read, then write; Abigail mapped out the day’s work for her staff and darned some of her stockings; Johnny returned to his room to study and translate Horace and Tacitus; Nabby went to her room to translate the passage about Telemachus in Homer’s Odyssey.2
The pace changed at noontime. John took his cane and hat and walked his usual four miles, then met back home at two with the ladies, now freshly coiffed. Dining, chatting, and reading aloud—John in one chair, occupied with Plato’s Laws, Abigail with St. John’s letters—made for a short afternoon. Teatime was preceded by Johnny and Nabby’s favorite game of romps, the salon on one side of the center hall being ideal for this vigorous pursuit of one another; the glass doors at one end of the room opened into the garden, those at the other end into the courtyard. Tea dishes and cloth afterwards gave way to mathematics books and paper and pencils, and Abigail heard nothing from then until nine o’clock of the rest of her family, except on the subject of theorems, at which John made an ardent and interested teacher. Nine o’clock was a sensible cutoff point, and in order, as Abigail put it, to “relieve their brains,” a game of whist prepared everyone for a ten-o’clock curfew. Though this was the schedule for a usual night, there were dozens on which they went out as a family, or on which the children went off to the theater together. Then Abigail would wait up for their return, comforting herself that even on the stormiest nights, the roads from Paris were visible by lamplight. Once she heard the gate bell ring, and Caesar’s welcoming bark, she was at peace. She could look out her window to see the carriage turning in the courtyard and reassure herself that the coachman had brought her children safely home.3
* * *
For all the appearance of serenity, Abigail knew that John was restless, as far as his work was concerned. He stayed for hours at his desk, warning colleagues that their European concerns were “obstructed in everything for want of money,” that success with the English—who had some very “wild” ideas about their own political and commercial interests—was “very problematical.”4
John talked now about being “in the midst of the world in solitude,” perhaps because Franklin, ill with a kidney stone, hadn’t called at Versailles in a year, and Jefferson had not felt well in weeks. John insisted that he did not mean to “intermeddle,” but he needed an ear, someone to listen and understand how important it was for Congress to send a minister to the Court of St. James, or else renounce all thoughts of treating with the English, who were not about to negotiate with the Americans as long as the latter were Paris-based. When John learned, at the end of April, that he had been elected, as of February 24, 1785, the first American minister accredited to the Court of St. James, there was no doubt of his sense of fulfillment. The time had come, “a time foretold by the Prophets, and seers, and Dreamers of Dreams, but never untill very lately steadfastly believed by any to be so near at hand,” he wrote Mercy Warren in May.5
He sensed the grandeur of the moment, but he also anticipated the pitfalls. When he had a few days to think about his future, he worried that he was more to be pitied than envied. He feared that “groups upon groups” of Tories and refugees in a variety of shapes and shades of colors, as well as members of embassies from other parts of Europe—including impassioned English, Scottish, and Irish—would be watching his every move, most of them “wishing and contriving his fall.” This “humble Minister” had no ambition of the sort that achieved popular diplomatic successes. Fortune and figure, birth and grace, titles and ribbons made impressions on courtiers; sacrifice of time, health, and family were the other ingredients of diplomatic success. Everything demanded of him he either despised, or did not possess, or could not give freely. On the whole, whatever there might be “in the feather” of being appointed the first American minister to England, the position, he concluded, was to be dreaded. He did not expect to be cherished or believed in his new post. He was quite willing to settle for a “candid or even a decent” reception in England.6
* * *
The nine months that Abigail had lived with her husband and two of her children as a family were ending; the reunion that had been so long in coming was as rare as it was fleeting. John’s appointment to the Court of St. James opened a new phase in America’s quest for recognition; it also signaled the end of Benjamin Franklin’s august presence in Europe. On March 7, Congress had given leave to the Doctor to return to America as soon as it was convenient; on March 19, Thomas Jefferson was unanimously elected Franklin’s successor at the court of Versailles; Adams and Jefferson were to retain their joint commission to negotiate commercial treaties with European and African nations.7
John’s appointment not only signaled a new era for American diplomacy but a most immediate wrench within the family. A decision was made that John Quincy Adams must return to America to continue his education; both his father and mother agreed that America was the theater for a young fellow who had ambition to distinguish himself. Arrangements were negotiated with Harvard College’s president, Joseph Villard, and John was proud that his son had chosen to go to school in New England rather than old England. The choice demonstrated the son’s respect for a father who was practical enough to know that “young gentlemen of eighteen dont always see through the same medium with old ones of fifty.”8
To pave the way for his son, who had not been home in seven years, who felt himself a stranger to his American family, who was worried that even his English might sound a little odd, John wrote on Johnny’s behalf to Dr. Cotton Mather, to Mercy Warren, and to the Reverend Ezra Stiles. Yet, happy as both parents were to have him going home for his education, parting with their young “Hercules” was a sacrifice. Abigail had grown used to writing her letters sitting in her son’s room by his fireside, and to have him copy over her letters, which seemed to improve with the benefit of his penmanship. Abigail admitted that she dared not trust herself to think about his departure: “In proportion as a person becomes necessary to us we feel their loss; and in every way I shall feel his,” she recognized fully.9
Abigail pleaded with her sister Mary to provide whatever was necessary for her son, and to take care of him in the same way Abigail would of Mary’s children “in the like circumstances.” That Abigail held very precise, if not autocratic, notions of child-rearing was obvious in her response to her sister Elizabeth’s warning of her son Charles’s attachment to a young woman: Abigail’s sons were to have no passion but for science, and no mistress but literature. Furthermore, no son of hers was to form any sentiments with respect to any female, but those of a general nature, until he was more mature and learned; “so shall discretion preserve them and understanding keep them, if they incline their ears to wisdom and apply their hearts to understanding.” She very much feared that Charles, owing to his disposition and sensibility, was more liable to female attachments; her young Hercules sitting beside her in France was much better occupied with his Horace and Tacitus, though she allowed that in time there would be someone “to bring him to the distaff.”10
For all of Abigail’s dedicated thought to Johnny’s future, she realized that Europe without him would have “fewer charms.” His sister, in fact, the pensive, silent Nabby, did not possibly see how her brother’s place “should be supplyd.” The loss of her brother’s company was another tug at Nabby’s security, already tested by her increasingly doubtful relationship with Royall Tyler. One could easily understand why the Marquise de Lafayette, perhaps sensing Nabby’s inner conflict, found the young woman to be “grave.”11
* * *
Once Johnny was packed off to America, Abigail concentrated on her move to London. There was some pleasure in contemplating living in a country where she would not be expected to eat and drink so much, where there would be no need for “twisting and twirling” her tongue so much, where she would see more of her American friends. But there were regrets as well. She would certainly miss her garden, the fishpond and fountain just put in order, the arbor of trees arched over sun-dappled walks. She would regret leaving the tulips, the peach and pear blossoms, the grapes, and she reminded herself sharply that she must be sure to send a parcel of flower seeds home.12
But Abigail, rarely self-indulgent, refused to wallow in sentiment. She would, indeed, be able to leave her garden behind. She had schooled herself to do so because, she explained to her sister Mary, it contained neither plants of her hand nor children of her care. In truth, she had bought a little bird recently that she felt more attached to than any other object, apart from her own family, animate or inanimate. Probably, without realizing what was happening, Abigail was treating her departure from France as a test of loyalties. She was writing home now about how absolute strangers, visiting at Auteuil, claimed greater attachment to the Adams family than to their most intimate European acquaintances, because of their mutual ties with America.13
Rationalize as she might, however, Abigail harbored other regrets about the forthcoming departure for England. She had, despite all the distractions of Paris, remained a true “Daughter of Eve,” dependent on the Marquise de Lafayette as she had been on James Lovell, in former days, for information. No one was more current on American intelligence than the Frenchwoman, who corresponded with people in all of the American states, and received newspapers from every quarter; leaving France, Abigail was aware that she might never replace her splendid informant. Abigail would miss the noble couple for another reason. She admired the Marquise de Lafayette for her passionate attachment to her husband (“a French Lady and fond of her Husband!”), and was pleased that she had named a son after George Washington, and a daughter after the American state of Virginia. She also regarded her as a true friend, an accolade never accorded lightly by Abigail, either at home or, especially, abroad.14
Mention of Virginia only reminded Abigail of the tall, kind widower Thomas Jefferson, the native of that state who had practically become a member of her family, and whose friendship was prized collectively and individually by all four members of the household at Auteuil. He was like a fond uncle to Johnny; Nabby’s heart, sensing his loneliness, had gone out to him and to Martha, his twelve-year-old daughter, who preferred to be called Patsy. The very first month the families were in Paris together, they witnessed, with trepidation, Patsy’s induction at the convent, where, moved to tears by the singing and chanting amid the flow of white woolen robes, she was to be educated. As a family, they had shared with Jefferson far more than the official ceremonies and dinners—theater and carnivals as well. These last months, they had tended to dine at Jefferson’s on Thursdays, and he with them at Auteuil on Sundays. Within the confines of the Adams family, Thomas Jefferson was pronounced “one of the choice ones of the earth.”15
* * *
On May 20, tearful French domestics waved John, Abigail, Nabby, and the always constant John Briesler, and Esther Field off on the road to Calais. Even Abigail’s bird, fluttering frantically in its little cage, held high by the chambermaid, seemed to be wishing its departing mistress a special good-bye, bidding her party special good luck on the six-day journey to London, the beginning of the realization of John’s most earnest ambition to bargain as an American at the Court of St. James.16
The landscape, as they veered away from the Seine, was a woeful tapestry, due to a burning drought; the grass was all but invisible, the grain pale, the flax quite dead, and at times during the journey, the country seemed to be a heap of ashes. No greens, no vegetables were to be seen from the road; pathetically visible were sheep and cattle stalking the fields like herds of walking skeletons, grazing the grounds in search of rotted roots of grass turned by the plow. John and Abigail enjoyed only one distraction, fittingly provided by their friend Jefferson; his farewell gift was a copy of his own book, privately printed that past May, called Notes on the State of Virginia. When he thanked Jefferson later on, John told him that his book was their “Meditation all the Day long,” that it would do its author and his country great honor, that the passages on slavery were worth diamonds, that “they will have more effect than Volumes written by mere Philosophers.”17
In different ways, that early summer of 1785, the three friends recognized loss of some dimension. John thought perhaps it was the melancholy face of nature, or the dull political prospect before him, or his regret at parting with his son, that colored his mood darkly. Or, he speculated, perhaps it was leaving their fine summer situation at Auteuil, and all their friends in and about Paris, that made for such a sorrowful journey. “We have passed through scenes bien plus triste encore,” he wrote to Jefferson, as though he meant to comfort and offer hope to all of them.18
Jefferson was reticent but still explicit about his friendship with Abigail and John. “The departure of your family has left me in the dumps,” he wrote to John. “My afternoons hang heavily on me. I go sometimes to Passy and Mont Parnasse.” Jefferson talked now as though he felt that something more than their friendship was at a turning point; he mentioned being ready, at some time, for the “dark and narrow house of Ossian.” He also asked in a postscript: “Send me your address au plutot.”19
Abigail was affectionately forthright in her long, chatty letter; her sensitive appreciation of her husband’s true friendship with Jefferson, in light of the bitter twist it would be given in a handful of years, was that much more poignant.
I think I have somewhere met with the observation that nobody ever leaves paris but with a degree of tristeness. I own I was loth to leave my garden because I did not expect to find its place supplied. I was still more loth on account of the increasing pleasure, and intimacy which a longer acquaintance with a respected Friend promised, to leave behind me the only person with whom my Companion could associate with perfect freedom, and unreserve: and whose place he had no reason to expect supplied in the Land to which he is destined.20