Louisa (12 page)

Louisa also spent countless hours
at the home of Countess Pauline Neale, who welcomed her into her large circle of intimates. The young women drank tea, half attended to their embroidery, chatted about “the scandal of the town,” or amused themselves by “satirizing the vagaries of the court belles, or the follies of the court dowdies, or the prank of the young foreigners.” They gossiped about the secret marriage of the queen's sister (“her brute of a husband said to receive all his officers while in bed with her, at five o'clock in the morning, smoking a Meerschaum”); they talked about the “
roué
” British ambassador, Lord Elgin, who made a deal with Miss Dorville: a pair of diamond earrings in exchange for a very public kiss. On inky winter nights they told ghost stories. Pauline was “highly educated; remarkably well read; enthusiastic in her religion; was full of German mysticism in its most exaggerated sense; and a sincere and true believer,” by which Louisa meant she believed in ghosts. It was the age of the great gothic novel, of
The Mysteries of Udolpho
, Friedrich Schiller's
The Ghost-Seer
, Matthew Gregory Lewis's
The Monk
, the novels of E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
. When Louisa heard a story that had “artificial colouring,” she could easily dismiss it. “It is good! but it is not life!!!” Stories that were more roughly told, though, could produce “that electric surprise” that made her hair stand up. The “suppressed fear” would send a shudder through her and send her home in a “fever of excitement.” No one was better at telling these stories than her best friend. Sometimes Louisa would protest and try to “banter” with Pauline, but
the young woman would stop, turn “instantly pale,” and glance nervously around, and Louisa's heart would race. “Living in a school like this; sickly and weak both in body and mind,” Louisa later wrote, “can you wonder that my mind became tainted, and infected by a weakness, of which I have tried to be ashamed; but which still clings to me as if it was a part of my nature?” And why not? Strange things happened, and even the most well-trained minds were susceptible. The “dread of things unknown,” she wrote, “palsies the mind with fear.”

While her husband was reading the newly published essays of Immanuel Kant on
Sinnlichkeit
and
Verstand
(and sending the philosopher's works to America), Louisa was forming her own untutored thoughts and doubts about the dichotomy between reason and sensibility. What could “the cold and artificial presumption of what we term reason” do to explain “the mysterious realities of our actual being?”

Her husband was interested
in names, dates, countries. His diary teemed with information, carefully noted. Facts never meant that much to her. “As I write without attention to dates many errors will be found in my relation of events as to the exact time of their occurrences,” she said in “Record of a Life.” The territory that she was curious about, the one she mapped in her memoirs, was different. She was mapping a psychological and emotional landscape.

It was a peculiar education that she was receiving. She saw the world and painted it in high color, but she was also learning to give it structure, shape, and shadows. She was drawn to stories. On evenings when they were at home, she and John Quincy read aloud: Spenser's “The Faerie Queen,” Shakespeare, Milton. In his inimitable way, he hatched a plan to read to Louisa “the whole collection of British poets,” and began with Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales
.

 • • • 

T
HE
READING
was
a habit they would keep throughout their life. Louisa and John Quincy grew closer as the months in Berlin passed
into years. They took walks in the Tiergarten together, sometimes twice a day. They needed each other more after John Quincy's brother Thomas, who had been a friend to them both, left Berlin to return to the United States in the fall of 1798. “You cannot conceive Mr. Adams's disappointment on opening your letter and finding it directed to me,” Louisa wrote to Thomas that October. “
I
was so agreeably surprized that I absolutely kissed it.”

Louisa and John Quincy celebrated
their first anniversary on July 26, 1798. It came at a difficult time. Louisa lay in bed, suffering through another miscarriage that devastated them both. John Quincy was anxious, worried about money and struggling to defuse the potentially explosive conflict between the United States and France, a conflict that threatened to sink his father's presidency. He felt listless in Berlin. A week later he noted that he had quit studying German and had become “careless about every other study—of what good is it all?”

“The external occurrences of the year have not been fortunate,” he wrote in his diary on that first anniversary. For once, though, he acknowledged that there was a brightness in the dark. “But from the loveliness of temper and excellence of character of my wife, I account it the happiest day of my life.”

Still, there were
differences between them. He could not make up for what she had lost: her parents and siblings. She was separated from the Johnsons not only by four thousand miles but by an emotional breach. Though Louisa later wrote about her family in highly idealized terms, in the years following their separation, while the Johnsons were in Georgetown and she was in Berlin, she was rarely in contact with them. The few letters that were sent and survive sound strained. The distance made correspondence difficult—it could take six months for a letter to arrive. Letters sent by a circuitous route were easily and frequently lost—and Louisa excused herself by claiming how much she hated to write. Still, the silence on both sides says much. The gulf between them was hard to cross. What Louisa did write to them was
stilted and perfunctory. She did not—and apparently, at that point, could not—describe much of her life with the animation and observations that would characterize her later prose. Instead, her brief letters were mostly filled with formulaic apologies for the inadequacy of her words. “As I am certain you must be extremely tired of this letter,” she wrote in one short letter to Nancy, before bringing it to a quick close. “I am sure you will have the goodness to excuse my inability to write any thing amusing,” she wrote to Abigail.

When the rare letters
did arrive from Georgetown, they tended to bring her pain. Not long after his arrival in Georgetown, Joshua learned that the settlement with his former business partners would not be what he had counted on. He continued to fight for more money, and the acrimony grew intense. Louisa heard the news in bitter reports. “The letters from America weighed me down with sorrow, and mortification,” Louisa later wrote. Her life was now in Berlin, and theirs was now in the United States, a place that she had never even seen. She had found some success; they reported only their difficulties and failures. There was an ocean between them, in more ways than one. At one point, after John Quincy had passed along Delius's accusatory letter regarding Joshua's failure to pay his debts, Catherine sent a furious response, angry at John Quincy's tacit insinuation. Louisa wrote to Nancy that John Quincy's letter had been “misunderstood.” “You know Mr. A's manner of writing,” she wrote. Those harsh letters she had received during her courtship had been shared throughout the family. “I am now fully convinced [they] were never intended to give me a moment's pain.” She knew how that letter would read, even as tentative as it was: as taking her husband's side over her parents'. Soon after, she wrote a panicked letter trying to take her words back—as if even the slightest defense of her husband had been a betrayal of her family. She was caught between them.

And there was
that old and pernicious problem: John Quincy's suspicion that she would be corrupted by the glamorous court. She
claimed to have hated the extravagance and expense, the hollowness of the aristocracy, but her exhilarated descriptions of it undercut her complaints. The princesses and barons flattered her, and she enjoyed being flattered. It pleased her to say that she was “
respected
”; she underscored the word. And she was “extravagantly fond” of dancing. At her first ball, John Quincy joined the noblemen and left his young wife to fend for herself. But his playful younger brother Thomas led her onto the floor for an English country dance. “Strangers were forgotten and he danced so well and with so much spirit,” she remembered, “I was quite delighted.” Prince Radziwill appeared before her to ask for a dance, and Prince Wittgenstein followed, and on and on, until suddenly it was two in the morning.
“
I became a
Belle.
”

Her success at court
was reported back to John and Abigail Adams as flattering to the United States and not to herself. “She is neither dazzled by the splendor nor captivated by the gaiety of the scene in which she finds herself placed,” John Quincy reassured his mother. That was true to an extent—she could laugh at anything, including herself—but not quite true enough for her to escape trouble. There was, for instance, the matter of rouge.

The conflict arose
when the king wanted to open a ball by dancing with her. She had planned to decline all dances that evening—she had worn a long train to signal her intent—but when Countess von Voss, the queen's
grande gouvernante
, appeared in front of her to announce the king's desire, she knew she had no choice but to stand up, gather her dress, and take her place on the floor across from King Frederick William. She nearly fainted under the hot spotlight of attention. The queen saw the blood drain from Louisa's face, looked at her kindly, and spoke to her with concern. To put her at ease, she told Louisa that she would give her a present to help her hide her nerves: a box of rouge. In the United States, “paint” was associated with the debauchery of brothels and—not incidentally—European courts. It suggested the sins of Versailles. (Of course, even a quick glance at portraits from
the early republic suggests that American women used more makeup than the pious sermons allowed.) Louisa knew that John Quincy would never let her accept it, and so she protested. But the queen was persistent. “She smiled at my simplicity, and observed that if
she
presented me the box he must not refuse it, and told me to tell him so.” Before Louisa could say anything more, the dance began. Louisa was elated when she returned to her chair alongside the visiting British Prince Augustus and his suite after the dance was done. The prince and his companions, her “accustomed
partners
,” flattered her with “encouraging” attention and smiles, exclaiming over “the marked distinction” that the king had shown her and complaining that she had accepted him when she had already turned them down. But her husband was unhappy about the promise of the rouge.

The gift arrived, and she hid it away. But one day she felt particularly pale. It was Carnival, which meant masked balls. The custom was for a woman to wear a black dress with deep décolletage, a black Spanish hat, black shoes, and black feathers—a stunning look if you could offset the dark cloth with flush cheeks and the glitter of diamonds but a difficult look if you couldn't. Knowing that the black dresses made pale faces “look cadaverous,” and tired of feeling “a
fright
in the midst of the splendor,” Louisa brought out the forbidden rouge. When it was time to leave for the ball, she rushed past her husband, calling to him behind her to put out the lights. He sensed something suspicious in her quick step and stopped her before she went down the stairs. When he saw the blush on her cheeks, he led her to the table and sat her on his knee. He picked up a towel, “and all my beauty was clean washed a way.”

All was forgiven, for a time. “A kiss made the peace” between them, and they drove off to the party. But all was not really forgotten. John Quincy did not need to ask himself what John and Abigail Adams would have thought about the queen's present to Louisa, or her succession of “princely partners,” or the invitations to the visiting sons
of the tyrant King George III to their house for boisterous meals. Unlike Louisa, he was not pleased when she was “the only foreign lady” offered a part in a quadrille at court. When he learned that the quadrille depicted the marriage of Queen Mary and Philip of Spain, and that it required six weeks of rehearsals, and that performers made liberal use of crown jewels, and that costume painters studied paintings from the era to create the most accurate costumes possible (perhaps snipping off the stitches here and there—“the ladies could not adopt the dress of that period so far as to cover their bosoms,” John Quincy sniffed in his diary), he told Louisa to decline the invitation. She was told to say she was sick. He needed her to be admired but not adored. She had to fit in but could never belong.

3

A
T
THE
START
OF
1799,
illness was a credible excuse. She was often sick. Reports of her illnesses, often unnamed in nature, appear again and again in letters and John Quincy's diary. From the regularity of them, it seems she may have suffered from debilitating menstrual cycles. But there was sometimes another cause: she was often pregnant. Almost immediately after recovering from her miscarriage at the end of 1797, she believed she was pregnant, but in February their hopes were “severely dashed to the ground.” She was certainly pregnant in March. Her body reacted violently to the change; she was often sick through the night and into morning. Before long, she was showing signs that she would lose the child. “My prophetic heart! I have no doubt of the cause,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. “The cup of bitterness must be filled to the brim and drank to the dregs.” In July, he wrote of despair: “I cannot even form an hope with impunity.” His anguish was palpable. “The tortures of Tantalus have been inflicted upon me without ceasing.”

The exact number
of Louisa's miscarriages is impossible to know. John Quincy and Louisa, in keeping with custom, were circumspect about her pregnancies. In their writings and letters, they usually referred to pregnancy as an “illness” and made only opaque hints about her
condition. There may have also been times when she thought she was pregnant and turned out not to be. But it appears likely that she miscarried four times between 1797 and 1800. Discharging the fetus was brutally painful for her, often taking several days unless a doctor intervened, and that was perhaps more traumatic. She complained of being “roughly handled.” She lost dangerous amounts of blood. Doctors could do little for her; medicine in those days was less a science than an art. After a young man dropped dead at a ball, for instance, doctors concluded that “his death was owing to the excessive tightness of his clothes, and perhaps to his having drank several glasses of cold limonade, while heated with dancing,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. When she was ill or pregnant, doctors plied her with powders, emetics, and laudanum; they bled and blistered her. No doubt the remedies further damaged her health.

Her body baffled
her and others. Along with the complications from pregnancy, she suffered from headaches, influenza, fainting spells, and other vaguely described ailments. Dr. Brown thought her “in a deep consumption.” She was almost surely anemic. The frequency with which she was bled by doctors didn't help. It's no wonder that she wanted to wear rouge and became obsessed with her pallor.

It wasn't only
her body, though, that perplexed Louisa. She could never untangle the connection between her physical ailments and her mind. The discourse about diseases around 1800 made much of the disturbance of nerves. Even where the etiology of an illness was known, emotional and mental stress were thought to play a part—especially in women. Louisa was convinced that the slightest agitation would send devastating tremors through her body that would leave her pitched and prostrate. A distressing sight or overstimulation could make her fall ill. “From eight o'clock in the evening until midnight she had a continual succession of fainting fits, and cramps almost amounting to convulsion,” John Quincy wrote in his diary after Louisa came home and fell ill after helping a woman who had broken a leg.

When it came
to the miscarriages, of course, her emotional pain
was as bad as the physical trauma. John Quincy felt it too, and showed it—which only made her feel worse. Every hope was a harbinger of disappointment.

April 27, 1798

Mrs. Adams went with Mrs. Brown to Charlottenburg in the morning. Was taken unwell in the afternoon. It is of no use, but rather a misfortune to foresee evils which can neither be remedied nor prevented.

July 17, 1798

A dreadful night. Mrs. A. soon after going to bed was taken extremely ill, and between 12 and 1 o'clock was in such extreme pain, that I sent for Doctor Ribke. He was at Charlottenburg. So was Dr. Brown. [ . . . ]The case appears in almost every point similar to that of last November. Patience and resignation is all that we can have. Was up all night.

December 1799 Monthly Summary

The year would in general have been a pleasant one, but for the state of my wife's health which has been almost continually bad, and concerning which I am even now deeply concerned. The subject presses upon my spirits more than I can express.

February 1800 Monthly Summary

My wife's health is now the object of my greatest concern.

After yet another
one of Louisa's prolonged illnesses, they spent the summer of 1800 traveling throughout Silesia, an area in central Europe (mostly in what is now Poland). They had taken a similar trip, to the baths in Töplitz, to help her recover from a debilitating miscarriage in the summer of 1799, after John Quincy completed the renewal of the commercial treaty between the United States and Prussia. They spent their days wandering through the art galleries in Dresden, visited with friends from Berlin who crossed their path, and, when Louisa was strong enough, took long hikes. They visited textile mills, hiked in the mountains, and carved their names in the walls of a ruined castle. They studied a moving model of the solar system at a weaver's workshop, and at a carpenter's, they were moved to tears by an ingenious puppet show. They went to glassworks in Bohemia, coal mines in Walenberg, the theater everywhere. In Silesia, they bought three sketches of the picturesque countryside, which they later kept hung in their bedroom—three small but transporting reminders of their time there together. She benefited from the fresh air, simple food, and good exercise to a degree that startled John Quincy. “It would astonish you, as it does me, to see how she supports the fatigues of this journey,” wrote John Quincy to his brother. One difficult hike that she completed, he continued, “is considered as so much beyond the strength even of the strongest women, that our guide, who has followed this business these twelve years, assured me he had never conducted but one lady before upon this tour.” On the trips to both Silesia and Töplitz, she became pregnant again: despite the danger to her health (she'd miscarried after Töplitz), their sexual attraction clearly had not waned.

He was tender
with Louisa, and she felt it. Still, there were distances between Louisa and John Quincy that were difficult to bridge. She wanted to be needed; he wanted to be alone. She could be flighty. He could be intransigent or remote. She had once called herself “the spoilt child of indulgence.” He had been schooled by his parents in
stoicism—although his strong feelings sometimes forced open a vent, with eruptions of anger and frustration.

She bore the burden of his frustration and felt the blowback of his stormy moods. At times, a sense of futility tortured John Quincy. From a distance, he watched his father's presidency founder. He also missed his parents; he missed his brother after Thomas had returned to the United States. Louisa told Thomas that the sound of his name brought tears to John Quincy's eyes. It was not easy to be an Adams, gifted to America from birth, then sent into the world for the sake of America. In February 1801, John Quincy learned that his brother Charles had died at the age of thirty, probably of cirrhosis from alcoholism, after years of trouble. He had stopped responding to John Quincy's letters, which were increasingly curt and frustrated inquiries about his investments. The two brothers had lived apart for most of their lives, and John Quincy had not seen him for seven years.

He heard the news
of Charles's death the first week of February 1801, within twenty-four hours of learning that Thomas Jefferson had defeated John Adams in the presidential election of 1800. The effects on John Quincy's own life were inevitably profound. He would be recalled from Europe; any political prospects he had were likely over; worst, his brother was dead. But in his first letter to his mother—he waited until March 10 to write—he tersely expressed his grief at Charles's death and his father's defeat, then moved on. “Political disappointment is perhaps one of the occasions in human life which requires the greatest portion of philosophy,” he wrote to Abigail; “although philosophy has very little power to assuage the keenness of our feelings, she has at least the power to silence the voice of complaint.” Then he turned to foreign affairs. “The North of Europe, and the views, interests, and relations of the several states it contains, are indeed becoming an object of no small concern to our commerce,” he continued. His diary shows signs of a great struggle to manage his sadness—long walks at the park, excuses sent to parties, days at home.
“In the evening read the first canto of Savage's
Wanderer
,” he wrote a few days after hearing of his brother's death and father's loss to Jefferson. It was, he wrote, “a poem the object of which is to prove that ‘the sons of men may owe / The fruits of bliss to bursting clouds of woe.'”

He was already preparing himself for his recall to the United States and a return to private life when he wrote that. In Berlin, his primary task, the renegotiation of the commercial treaty, was done, completed in the summer of 1799. He had been able to use his vantage point to advise the American minister to France, his friend William Vans Murray, and his father, the president, on the perilous situation between the United States and France, helping to avert war. He had time to take his walks, to learn German, to translate
Oberon.
He sometimes despaired of what his future would be when he returned to the United States and resumed a life of drudgery as a lawyer. He was not suited for the law, he admitted, but he had no choice. He had a wife to support. And he could not be sure that he had been right in telling his mother that his wife was uncorrupted by a royal court.

There were signs
that there would be trouble between them when they went to the United States. She had made a home for herself in Berlin; he tried, ungently, to remind her that his home was very different. That winter, 1801, Louisa had tried to wear the rouge again. This time, instead of trying to sneak past her husband, “I walked boldly forward to meet Mr. Adams.” John Quincy told her to wash the makeup off, and she refused “with some temper.” He turned on his heels, went down to the carriage, and left for the party without her. She cried “with vexation” for a few minutes, took off her gown, washed off the rouge, put on something simple, and went over to the Browns' for the evening. By the time her husband picked her up, she was smiling, and the two were “as good friends as ever,” she later wrote. In 1801, “anger seldom lasted with me more than ten minutes, and once over all was forgotten”—or almost, since, writing nearly forty years later, the scene and its humiliations were still fresh in her mind.

It was only a little makeup. Behind it, though, was a serious issue. It had to do with the queen. John Quincy could respect the king well enough, because the king was trying to remain neutral between France, Great Britain, Russia, and Austria, and because the king rose at six in the morning and famously disliked parties. But the queen made him uneasy. She had a frank willingness to command. She was a queen, and a forceful one. She tried to command even him, the republican. “If
she
presented me the box he must not refuse it,” she had told Louisa. It was a royal order he could not stand.

Six years later
, the Prussian army was crushed by Napoleon at Jena. When Queen Luise went herself to make a personal appeal to the emperor, she was mocked: Napoleon responded to her pleas for mercy on behalf of her country by inquiring about the fabric of her dress. John Quincy read the reports of the conflict and took some pleasure in her fate. “The vicissitudes of the world have reached many of our old acquaintance there,” John Quincy wrote to Louisa, thoughtlessly—or pointedly—telling her the news of Prussia's defeat, “and the beautiful and thoughtless queen whom we were accustomed to see so splendid has been brought to dance something less delicious and more vivid than a waltz.”