John Adams - SA (30 page)

Such being the case, he made the decision on his own, informing Vergennes that as he had been “restored to the character of a private citizen,” he would depart. He submitted a request for passage on the next available ship bound for America, and to Congress addressed a long letter saying that since no notice appeared to have been taken of him, he could only assume that Congress “has no further service for me on this side of the water, and that all my duties are on the other.”

“I shall therefore soon present before you your own good man. Happy—happy indeed—shall I be,” he announced to Abigail, trying to see the bright side. To Richard Henry Lee, he claimed his new status as a private citizen “best becomes me, and is most agreeable to me.” In truth, he was hurt and angry, and justifiably. He had been badly served by a Congress that told him nothing and showed no gratitude for all he had done. He felt himself strangely adrift, less able than ever in his life to sense what lay in store for him. In a letter to James Warren, he vowed never again to allow himself to be made the sport of wise men or fools.

His moods swung from high to low, then lower still with the arrival of a packet of letters from Abigail filled with abject loneliness and accusing him of neglecting her. “All things look gloomy and melancholy around me,” she wrote. “You could not have suffered more upon your voyage than I have felt cut off from all communication with you.” Adams claimed to have written nearly fifty letters to her between April and September, which was almost certainly an exaggeration, but whatever the number, she had received only two. “Let me entreat you to write me more letters at a time, surely you cannot want subjects.” What he wrote, she said, was always too brief, cold, and impersonal. It was as if he had “changed hearts with some frozen Laplander.”

Trying to respond as calmly as possible, Adams wrote and burned three letters in succession. One was too sad, the next too angry, a third too cheerful to reflect the truth, as he explained in a fourth and final version. Was it possible that “some infernal has whispered in your ear insinuations?” Had she forgotten the “unalterable tenderness of my heart?” he asked.

For God's sake, never reproach me again with not writing or with writing scrips. Your wounds are too deep.

You know not—you feel not—the dangers that surround me, nor those that may be brought upon our country.

Millions would not tempt me to write you as I used
[to]
. I have no security that every letter I write will not be broken open and copied and transmitted to Congress and the English newspapers. They would find no treason or deceit in them, it is true, but they would find weakness and indiscretion, which they would make as ill use of.

In another letter, written after receiving three from him, Abigail said she had no doubt of his affection. “But my soul is wounded at a separation from you, and my fortitude is all dissolved in frailty and weakness.” She could not understand his reluctance to express his love. “The affection I feel for my friend is of the tenderest kind, matured by years, sanctified by choice and approved by Heaven. Angels can witness its purity, what care I then for the ridicule of Britain should this testimony of it fall into their hands?”

Adams enlisted support from John Quincy, who told his mother that Papa could “write but very little because he had so many other things to think of, but he can not let slip one opportunity without writing a few lines and when you receive them you complain as bad or worse than if he had not wrote at all and it really hurts him to receive such letters.”

“If I were to tell you all the tenderness of my heart,” Adams confided, “I should do nothing but write to you. I beg you not to be uneasy.”

As the time to leave drew nearer, he grew increasingly woeful. What had he accomplished after all? Did anyone care?

“I am left kicking and sprawling in the mire.... It is hardly a state of disgrace that I am in but rather of total neglect and contempt.” What was to become of him? He had never been in such a situation. “My present feelings are new to me.”

Not since the most anguished diary entries of his youth had he declared himself so overburdened with woe. “If ever I had any wit, it is all evaporated. If ever I had any imagination, it is all quenched.... I believe I am grown more austere, severe, rigid, and miserable than I ever was.”

As ardently as he longed for home, he hated to leave Paris, hated to leave France, and expected he would never return. “The climate is more favorable to my constitution than ours,” he acknowledged to Abigail. He loved the food, the civility of everyday life. The French were “the happiest people in the world... and have the best disposition to make others so.

There is such a choice of elegant entertainments in the theatric way, of good company and excellent books that nothing would be wanting to me in this country but my family and peace to my country to make me one of the happiest of men.

The one tribute he received was a letter from Versailles, a letter Adams treasured. Vergennes, speaking for the King, offered praise for “the wise conduct that you have held to throughout the tenure of your commission,” as well as “the zeal with which you have constantly furthered the cause of your nation, while strengthening the alliance that ties it to his Majesty.”

What appears to have pleased Adams no less was the discovery during his parting call at Versailles that his French had so improved he could manage an extended conversation and speak as rapidly as he pleased.

*   *   *

THE TWO ADAMSES took their leave of Benjamin Franklin and others at Passy on March 8, 1779, and, with the servant Stephens, departed by post chaise for the coast of Brittany. At the bustling port of Nantes on the lower Loire, they settled into a hotel to wait for passage on the American frigate
Alliance
. Days passed, eventually weeks, during which father and son were together steadily. Biding their time, they walked about the town and along the river. Through long afternoons, Adams helped the boy in translating Cicero.

In late April, they moved on board the
Alliance
, only to learn later still, in a letter from Franklin, that orders had been changed and the ship was not to sail for America after all. However, a French frigate,
La Sensible
, was due to sail from Lorient, with a new French minister to the United States, Chevalier Anne-Cesar de La Luzerne. Franklin gave instructions that the
Alliance
carry Adams to Lorient, but on arrival Adams found that Minister La Luzerne had been delayed. And so the wait went on, father and son remaining on board the
Alliance
.

In the days that followed, Adams spent considerable time with the daring young Scottish-American naval officer, John Paul Jones, who was fitting out an old French merchantman that he had renamed the
Bon Homme Richard
. They had met earlier at Passy, corresponded over naval matters, and Jones, quite unjustly, had decided that Adams, in his role as commissioner, was conspiring against him. Privately, Jones referred to Adams as a “wicked and conceited upstart,” and expressed the wish that “Mr. Roundface” were at home minding his own business.

Having no part to play, no say in anything, no useful work, and no choice but to wait, was more nearly than Adams could bear. He began brooding. Imagining himself the victim of more than mere chance, he saw Jones and “the old conjurer” Franklin at the bottom of his troubles. He was being kept waiting, being humiliated, intentionally. “I may be mistaken in these conjectures, they may be injurious to J. and F., and therefore I shall not talk about them, but I am determined to put down my thoughts and see which turns out,” Adams wrote in his diary.

Do I see that these people despise me, or do I see that they dread me? Can I bear contempt—to know that I am despised? It is my duty to bear everything that I cannot help.

From time spent with Jones, Adams decided he was the most ambitious and intriguing officer in the American navy.

Eccentricities and irregularities are to be expected from him. They are in his character, they are visible in his eyes. His voice is soft and small; his eye has keenness, and wildness and softness in it.

Adams never doubted that faces carried clues to character: the white-as-paper pallor of Condorcet bespoke dedication to hard study; the eyes of Voltaire with their “fine frenzy rolling” were the eyes of a poet; in the face of Louis XVI, Adams had seen “goodness and innocence” as clearly as he saw “keenness, and wildness and softness” in the eyes of young Jones.

But then studying his own face in the mirror, Adams did not like what he saw. There was nothing exceptional about him, he concluded, writing in his diary. “By my physical constitution, I am but an ordinary man. The times alone have destined me to fame.” There was too much weakness and languor in his nature. “When I look in the glass, my eye, my forehead, my brow, my cheeks, my lips all betray this relaxation.” Yet he could be roused, he knew. “Yet some great events, some cutting expressions, some mean scandals, hypocrisies, have at times thrown this assemblage of sloth, sleep, and littleness into a rage a little like a lion.”

Most days, however, passed pleasantly enough. It was by his own choice that he dined often with Jones, spent hours in conversation with him and his officers, and as always, Adams was buoyed by talk. He and the surgeon of the
Bon Homme Richard
, an especially companionable man named Bourke, discussed everything from mathematics to rheumatism, Paris, London, the war at home, the war at sea, medicine at sea, the absence of profanity on French ships, and the nuances of the French language. At a dinner hosted by Jones at L'Epee Royale in town, the talk turned to the two ways most recommended for learning French, to take a mistress and to attend the Comédie-Française. When in good humor Dr. Bourke asked Adams which he preferred, Adams responded in like spirit, “Perhaps both would teach it soonest, to be sure sooner than either.” But in his diary, he felt obliged to add, “The language is nowhere better spoken than at the Comédie.”

“On board all day, reading Don Quixote,” was the single entry for May 18.

It was June by the time the French minister, La Luzerne, arrived at Lorient. On June 17, Adams and John Quincy went aboard the
Sensible
, and that afternoon they were finally under way from France, Adams having no idea how very soon he would be returning.

*   *   *

THERE WAS NO ADVANCE WORD of the arrival of the
Sensible
. The latest information Abigail had received, at the end of June in a letter written the first week of April, was that Adams was waiting to sail on the
Alliance
. But then in mid-July, Mercy Warren had passed along information received through James Lovell to the effect that Congress had in mind a new appointment for Adams, and that “Nobody seems to have an expectation of his return at present.”

In the year and a half of her husband's absence, Abigail's distress had been worse than she had ever anticipated or, she was certain, than anyone could ever realize. “Known only to my own heart is the sacrifice I have made, and the conflict it has cost me,” she had confided to her sister Elizabeth in the first weeks of his absence. “I wish a thousand times I had gone with him,” she later told John Thaxter. For the first time in fourteen years of marriage she had had to face an entire winter on her own.

“How lonely are my days. How solitary are my nights,” she had written to Adams in a letter that would not reach Passy until after he had departed.

Her sister Mary Cranch, of whom Abigail was extremely fond, continued to reside nearby in Braintree with her husband and family. But sister Elizabeth had married and moved away to Haverhill near the New Hampshire border. (Unimpressed by Elizabeth's choice in a husband, the young Reverend John Shaw, Abigail had tried to dissuade her, but without success. “Men are very scarce to be sure,” Abigail had written by way of explanation to her own John.) And now Nabby, too, had gone off for an extended stay with the Warrens, leaving Abigail feeling more solitary than ever.

Earlier in the fall, when the French fleet put in at Boston, she had had her own encounter with French hospitality. A delegation of French officers, resplendent in royal blue and scarlet uniforms, had appeared in Braintree to pay their respects to the wife of the American commissioner. She was invited to dine on board one of their ships, which she did, twice, delighting in the perfect manners of the officers and the sense of being at the center of things. On another occasion, accompanied by Colonel Quincy, she dined with Admiral d'Estaing on board his magnificent flagship,
Languedoc
, possibly the finest warship in the world. “If I ever had any national prejudices
[against the French]
they are done away,” she wrote, “and I am ashamed to own I was ever possessed of so narrow a spirit.”

But in winter, surrounded by mountains of snow, secluded from all society, she could as well have been in Greenland, she said. In other times of separation, times of horrible duress with war at her doorstep and epidemic disease raging, she had somehow borne up, with so much to contend with, so little time to dwell on her own loneliness. “This is a painful situation,” she wrote to James Lovell, “and my patience is nearly exhausted.”

But there was a further, complicating element and that was Lovell himself. When Adams had wondered, from the tone of her letters, if some “infernal” might be whispering insinuations in her ear, he was not far from the truth.

In the first weeks after Adams's departure for France, Abigail had confided her state of mind to Lovell, who in response had written that her alarms and distress only afforded him “delight.” More letters followed in which Lovell addressed her as Portia, presuming to use Adams's pet name for her, and inquiring whether he must limit himself to language devoid of sentiment. She replied saying, “I begin to look upon you as a very dangerous man ... a most ingenious and agreeable flatterer.” Yet she signed her letter “Portia.”

Writing again, he appealed to her with a line from the Scottish poet Allan Ramsay, declaring if “ye were mine... how dearly I would love thee,” and underscored the word love. When at the start of a new year she wrote to say Adams had been absent for a full eleven months, the reply from Lovell was closer to the raw double entendres of Laurence Sterne's “Tristram Shandy”, a book Abigail had never read: he expressed relief that her husband's “rigid patriotism” (again underscored) had not left her pregnant again.