First Family (18 page)

To say that nothing of diplomatic substance happened during their four years abroad would be misleading. John did negotiate a commercial treaty with Prussia. And he used his excellent contacts with Dutch bankers to arrange several more loans that allowed the American government to consolidate its European debts and thereby affect at least the appearance of fiscal responsibility. But the main events were less visible and more intimate. Abigail and John were together virtually every hour of the day and night: dining together, socializing together, watching Nabby and John Quincy mature together, reading together, touring Paris, London, and the English countryside together, sleeping together. Never before in their twenty-year marriage had they enjoyed such prolonged and routinized proximity. And they would never again experience such abiding closeness until their retirement years at Quincy.

This chapter in their story as a couple, then, is rich with irony. For as they made their way through the ornate etiquette and swirling splendor of Europe’s most cosmopolitan capitals, lived in luxurious mansions with small armies of servants, and bowed and curtsied to kings and queens, their major diplomatic achievement was the recovery of their own emotional connection. They learned to love each other at an even deeper level than before and locked that love in place, and nothing they experienced for the rest of their lives ever threatened their mutual trust.

The original plan was for Abigail and Nabby to join John and John Quincy at The Hague, then travel together to Paris. But John changed his mind, sending John Quincy ahead to London with a note to Abigail, telling her to “stay where you are and amuse yourself by seeing what you can, until you see me.” Abigail claimed that when she first saw John Quincy, who was now seventeen, she would not have recognized him, except for his eyes. Otherwise, her boy had become a man. The reunion with John was surely an emotional occasion, which she related to Mary Cranch, her sister, as being beyond description: “You know my dear sister that poets and painters wisely draw a veil over those scenes which surpass the pen or the pencil of the other.” John Quincy was dispatched to purchase a carriage to take them to the English coast, along with a copy of Samuel Johnson’s
Lives of the Poets
, so they could take turns reading to each other during the trip.
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Their destination was Auteuil, a village located on the banks of the Seine four miles west of Paris and one mile south of Franklin’s quarters at Passy. John had rented an enormous villa, a three-story limestone of forty or fifty rooms—no one was quite sure—that also featured a huge ballroom able to accommodate five hundred guests as well as a small theater “gone to decay.” Abigail’s favorite adornment was the garden: five acres of orange trees, grapevines, flowers in constant bloom, a fishpond, and a somewhat dilapidated summerhouse. The villa came equipped with eight servants, each of whom, she quickly discovered, “had certain etiquette, and one will by no means intrude upon the department of the other.” The cook, for example, would not wash dishes, and the hairdresser would not sweep.
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For Abigail, who had spent her entire married life in a six-room cottage, it was nothing short of overwhelming. She was, to be sure, an extremely well-read woman who had thereby traveled much in Braintree, but she had never experienced conspicuous luxury on such a majestic scale. Her first instinct was to filter the ostentation through the austere lens of a New England housewife, which produced a combination of bewilderment and disgust.

Efforts to improve efficiency by requesting the servants to perform
multiple chores failed completely. She quickly gave up trying to perform certain chores herself, since the servants found it insulting. As a result, since her daily regime back in Braintree had required a good deal of physical exertion, her more indolent habits produced a sudden increase in weight. “I suffer through a want of exercise,” she explained to her sister, “and grow too fat.” It took several months for her to become accustomed to having her hair dressed every day and to applying rouge to her cheeks for a stroll in the garden with Nabby.
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Such splendor, she was at pains to insist, came at a moral cost: “If you ask me what is the Business of life here,” she explained to Mercy Otis Warren, “I answer Pleasure … It is a matter of great speculation to me, when these People labour.” However indispensable French economic and military assistance had been to the American cause—and she was fully prepared to acknowledge that fact—France more than England struck her as the epitome of European aristocratic decadence.
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And the epitome of French decadence was Madame Helvétius, the sixty-five-year-old widow of the distinguished French philosopher, whom Abigail encountered at a dinner party hosted by Franklin soon after her encampment at Auteuil. Even within the flamboyant code of the French aristocracy, Madame Helvétius was considered eccentric. Abigail watched with incredulity as she asked the guests, “How do I look?”; then kissed Franklin on both cheeks, then the forehead; then kissed her lapdog, who proceeded to wet the floor, which she cleaned up with the bottom of her dress. If Madame Helvétius’s goal was to appear outrageous, which it was, she hit her mark with Abigail: “I hope however to find amongst the French Ladies manners more consistent with my ideas of decency,” she wrote to her niece, “or I shall be a mere recluse.”
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John’s diplomatic duties made any attempt at solitary confinement impossible. The wife of an American minister was expected to make calls on the wives of all the other ministers to the French court, an exercise in diplomatic etiquette that Abigail performed only grudgingly. “I have not been very fond of so awkward a situation as going to visit ladies,” she complained, “merely to make my dumb compliments, and receive theirs in return.”
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She was accustomed to making small talk and sharing gossip with women friends back in Braintree, but the stilted official conversations with the ministerial wives were not really conversations at all, more like theatrical performances in which one was supposed to speak the lines from a script drafted by some mindless courtier. Abigail acknowledged that French women had developed a disarming proficiency in this exceedingly languid and arched style, had in fact become “mistresses of the art of insinuation and persuasion” in which words were less important than dramatic facial expressions and sweeping physical gestures, just the sort of operatic style that Madame Helvétius had perfected to the point of parody. Abigail was not very good at this kind of hauteur, which struck her as inherently false and hollow. “So that it may with truth be said,” she observed to a cousin back home, “every man of this nation is an actor, and every woman an actress.”
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One role that John’s position forced her to play was hostess: “It is necessary in this country for a Gentleman in a publick character to entertain Company once a week,” she explained to her sister, “tho it would take 2 years of an American ministers Sallery to furnish the equipage of plate which you will find upon the tables of all the Foreign ministers here.” Most of the other European ministers to the French court were titled aristocrats with inherited wealth, which permitted lavish standards for entertaining that Abigail could not begin to match on the budget afforded by John’s salary. She hoped that the quality of conversation would compensate for more modest accoutrements—the Spanish minister had eighty servants to her eight—and that inviting guests like the naval hero John Paul Jones might impress her guests more than the number of courses or the elegance of the silverware. (Abigail herself found Jones surprisingly ordinary: “I expected to have seen a Rough Stout warlike Roman. Instead of that, I should think of wraping him up in cotton and putting him in my pocket, than sending him to contend with Cannon Ball.”) But no matter how modest the fare at her dinner parties, she always worried afterward that she had wasted money that should have been saved for her sons’ college education.
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Paris invoked in her the same double-edged reaction that John
had offered at his first exposure. On the one hand, the art, architecture, and pervasive mood of refinement justified its reputation as the cultural capital of Europe. On the other, such luxuries were inevitably linked with indolent habits and political corruption. This was the Adams version of civilization and its discontents, and while it had a discernibly moralistic and judgmental dimension, with deep roots in the religious traditions of New England, it reflected Abigail and John’s understanding of the way consolidated wealth simultaneously made great achievements in the arts possible and undermined the disciplined habits that had generated the wealth in the first place. “Riches always create luxery,” as she put it, “and luxery always leads to Idleness, Indolence and effeminacy, which stifles every noble purpose and whithers the blossom of genius.”
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Unlike John, Abigail tended to focus on how the moral corruption of Paris affected women. For example, she was shocked to learn that there were fifty-two thousand registered prostitutes in Paris, which required its women of the night to sign up on the public rolls. “Blush O, my sex,” she exclaimed to her sister when she reported the numbers. Her powerful maternal instincts were challenged when she learned that the largest foundling hospital in the city accepted six thousand abandoned infants annually and that one-third of them died. “I have been credibly informed,” she wrote her sister, “that one half of the children annually born in this immense City of Paris, are
enfans troives
[i.e., abandoned].” She claimed that the only French woman she knew who took her duties as a wife and mother seriously was the marquise de Lafayette, who was considered strange because she was simultaneously “a French lady and fond of her Husband!!!”
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The one area of Parisian culture that most confounded her was the theater, especially the opera. The entire Adams family—Abigail, John, Nabby, and John Quincy—attended an early performance of
The Marriage of Figaro
by Beaumarchais, which challenged the pretensions of the French aristocracy by exposing its presumed superiority as a mere accident of birth and by making Figaro, a valet, more admirable than his noble master. Abigail applauded the message, but acknowledged that, as a medium, the French theater celebrated the aristocratic values that Figaro criticized. She was especially shocked
by the blatant sexuality of the dances: “Girls clothed in the thinnest Silk … Springing two feet from the floor poising themselves in the air … and as perfectly showing their Garters and drawers, as tho no petticoat had been worn.” Nevertheless, she kept going to the performances, often with Nabby alongside, obviously enchanted by theatrical productions that would have been banned in Boston.

Gradually, she found herself lowering her guard and succumbing to the seductive magic of the stage: “I have found my taste reconciling itself to habits, customs and fashions, which at first disgusted me,” she confessed to her sister. “Shall I speak a Truth and say that repeatedly seeing these Dances has worn off that disgust which I first felt, and that I see them now with pleasure?” She was not sure whether she should feel guilty about her moral backsliding or proud of her newfound appreciation of a different world. If her New England conscience needed reassurance, she could—and did—tell herself that regular attendance at the theater markedly improved her French.
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Abigail’s infatuation with the Parisian theater proved the exception to the rule, which was to measure the excesses and extravagances of French culture against her own austere standards and find them sinfully lacking. “My Heart and Soul,” she assured her uncle, “is more American than ever.” She apprised her sister that no matter how exciting her social life might sound, it was like eating a box of chocolates, an indulged habit that soon wore thin: “I take no pleasure in a life of ceremony and parade,” she explained. “I had rather dine in my little room in Braintree with my family and a set of chosen old Friends, than all the Counts and Countesses.” If not quite a judgment rendered in the Puritan-in-Babylon mode, it was a clear statement of preference by a self-confident New England woman for the simpler virtues that her entire life had come to embody.
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If the core of those simpler virtues was family, and for Abigail it surely was, day-to-day life at Auteuil afforded a surprisingly ample opportunity to recover the old domestic rhythms despite the diplomatic and social obligations. Most elementally, Abigail and John were at long last living under the same roof. The accommodations were much more capacious than the Quincy cottage, permitting Abigail to enjoy a full room of her own, not just a closet, overlooking the gorgeous
gardens. The two older children, Nabby and John Quincy, were right down the hall, periodically popping in to interrupt her letter writing with a question about the evening’s agenda or the availability of a book.

The family made a point of eating breakfast together every morning; then John Quincy would retreat to his room to study Horace and Tacitus, which John would quiz him on that evening. Nabby and Abigail would often take walks together in the garden, exchanging gossip about the apparently embedded inefficiency of the servants, upcoming plays at the Parisian theaters, or the latest outrage of Madame Helvétius. In one letter Abigail described the scene: she at a table next to the fire, John at the other end of the table reading Plato, Nabby sewing, and John Quincy dropping in to ask John’s assistance on an algebra problem.
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There they were, surrounded by servants, ensconced amid aristocratic splendor, all, save John Quincy, still trying to master a foreign language, but interacting in the old and ordinary ways as the Adams family. For John, it was a slice of serenity. For Abigail, it was heaven.

The most frequent guest at Auteuil, so frequent that at times he seemed a permanent resident, was Thomas Jefferson, now a widower after the recent death of his wife. He had been chosen to replace Franklin as American minister to France but had fallen ill upon arrival, a victim of the damp French weather that forced him to undergo what he called “seasoning.” John had applauded his appointment, recalling their political partnership in the Continental Congress in the heady days of 1776, and let everyone know that he still regarded Jefferson as “an excellent hand” and “the same wise and prudent Man and Steady Patriot.”
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