Louisa (21 page)

Her reading of history only confirmed her grim conviction about what was happening in the world at that moment, the great events “which I am hourly witnessing.” She heard with “unceasing astonishment” about Napoleon's calamitous retreat from Moscow, his army freezing and starving and dying on the road. Her “pity and horror” were intermingled with a sense that he deserved the punishment. “We cannot trace his rise, and see his fall,” she wrote in her diary, “without shuddering at the length, to which a blind and inexhaustible ambition, will lead mankind.”

Napoleon, in turn, made her think of her husband. She was harsher toward him, though not by name, than she had ever been. Her anger and grief over her lost daughter—and her distance from her two young sons, who had been left in the United States against her will—wanted an outlet, and she found one close at hand. In her diary, she barely disguised the connection between Napoleon and John Quincy when she described her contempt. When a man is self-regarding, she wrote, he becomes “incapable” of being sociable in daily life. “Every thing that surrounds him must live for him.” Those “who are so unfortunate as to belong to him”—harsh and telling words—are the ones who suffer the most from his self-absorption, his willingness to sacrifice their lives for his greatness. “They say I am ambitious,” she wrote on August 14, two days after what would have been her daughter's birthday. But how could that be, she asked, when she compared herself “with those to whom I am the most nearly connected,” by which she meant her husband. “When I see every thought devoted peace happiness family every thing neglected for this one object”—power—“my heart decidedly assures me
that for this great end I was not made.” The proof of her powerlessness, she claimed, was in her inability to stop her husband's ascendance. In a voice of rising pitch and intensity, not pausing for breath, she wrote, “Were I of consequence enough to be any thing I should only prove a bar in the way of attaining it No!” This was partly private venting. Her relationship with her husband, even at that time, was more complex, as her intimate correspondence with him always attested. But that
No!
was a small cry of resistance, feeble but desperate.

It is also possible that when Louisa said “they say I am ambitious,” she was guiltily defending herself against her own charge. Her husband, after all, often did the same in his diary, declaring his disinterestedness even as he grasped for glory. That chance for greatness had suddenly come into reach. In Russia—in exile, as he called it—an opportunity appeared to resuscitate his moribund political career. John Quincy did not wait for approval from Washington to accept the tsar's offer to mediate between Britain and the United States to end the War of 1812, and President Madison did not wait for the British to accept the offer before sending Senator James Bayard and Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin to St. Petersburg as envoys while appointing John Quincy the head of the commission. Louisa hosted a dinner for them and accompanied them to see the city's sights, but their presence meant little to her. “The arrival of Mr. Bayard, and Gallatin, my dear Madam, has made so little alteration in our situation, that I have little or nothing to write you, but complaints, of the prospect, I have of a much lengthen'd stay in this country,” she wrote to Abigail.

“
We must live almost
by candlelight,” John Quincy wrote to his mother. The sun glimmered on the snow for only a few glancing hours. Louisa's spirits were as dark. She read John Quincy's astronomy books, peering through the thick glass of the double-paned windows in a futile attempt to see the stars. She was sealed inside.

4

T
HE
B
RITISH
REJECTED
the tsar's offer of mediation, believing that Alexander was biased toward the United States (“I fear the Emperor of Russia is half an American,” wrote the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, to the foreign minister, Lord Castlereagh, in September). Instead, Britain proposed an independent peace conference and agreed to a neutral location. John Quincy went to join Gallatin and Bayard, who had already left St. Petersburg, and Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Jonathan Russell, who were coming from the United States to join the peace commission. John Quincy left St. Petersburg in April 1814. He planned to go to Revel, Stockholm, and Gothenburg; he would end up adding Ghent and then Paris. He was supposed to be gone from St. Petersburg for several months, though he privately expected that he would never come back. He would not reunite with his wife or son for eleven months.

It seems that he was
relieved to leave her. Placidly, he told her that the distance would be good for their marriage. “In the affection of those who truly love,” he wrote to her, “there is a fervour of sentiment when they are separated from each other, more glowing, more
unmingled and more anxious, than when being together it has the continual opportunity of manifesting itself by acts of kindness.”

She was having none of it. “What being on earth is so wretched as a woman without her husband, more especially in a foreign country, without knowing the languages of those who surround her,” she responded furiously. With a note of arch defiance, she declared that she was fine without him. “At first it was dreadful, I am now becoming more reconciled to it,” she continued. “Perhaps in time
I shall like it
.” John Quincy took her words as serious. When he applauded her fortitude but expressed his hurt at her declaration of independence, she responded in a different tone, now mournful. “I should never even in jest have hinted that I could live happily without you. There are some wounds which are not easy to heal, and forgetfulness is not my best quality.”

She had not wanted him to go. She and Charles had accompanied him as far as Strelna, twelve miles outside St. Petersburg, on a cold, gusty day, where they shared a meal and then said goodbye. After the sound of the horse's bells had vanished, six-year-old Charles cried indignantly, seeing the tears on his mother's cheeks.

She was thirty-nine years old by then. Gray streaked her hair. The long winters, endless nights, sealed rooms and stoked smoky ovens guarding against the Russian cold, constant pregnancies and heartbreaking disappointments, anxieties about her children, her parents, her sisters, and money, grief for her daughter, and lonely days had left their marks. Time had loosened the skin around her chin. Her face had grown thinner. She did not know what to expect now.

For months, she had felt
distant from John Quincy. He was—as he would be for much of his life—self-involved in unbelievable ways. But his absence made her miss him. And her doubts in herself, some of which he had planted, made her unsure of her capabilities without him. John Quincy had never shown much confidence in her ability to manage herself, let alone the family's affairs. He tended to lecture and
chide her. He once wrote to her that he knew her “
heart
would always take the tenderest care” of the children, but he felt the need to encourage “continual reflection—if possible to prevent a
thoughtless
moment.” The implication was clear: she could not be trusted. Of course, that particular admonition came after she admitted to leaving a candle unattended and nearly burning down the house. She did not always blame him for not believing in her; she often thought he was right.

So one of his first
letters from the road surprised her. He said that he had forgotten to give her something important. “It is my
Will
—of which you are constituted the sole Executrix, for all my affairs out of the United States,” he wrote. From a man whose affairs were so extensive, and who by nature was so controlling, this was an extraordinary task, but also an extraordinary declaration of confidence. When the document arrived, she tucked it away in a trunk and proclaimed it quite unnecessary. Actually, though, it was a gift, one of the greatest he ever gave to her. “I have been labouring for many years under a false impression so painful to my heart,” she wrote to him. She had always thought that he did not trust her.

His will was only
the start of the responsibilities he now entrusted her with. He sent her memoranda and lists of all his business. He told her to open his mail and judge its importance, passing on what was necessary. He asked her to send him the listed exchange rates from London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Paris, the values of silver rubles and ducats, and, “as often as you can conveniently get the information, the current price of the
obligations
, in the market.” He told her to settle bills, keep accounts with merchants, pay interest when it came due, fire servants when they stole too much. What was more, she was expected to represent the United States in court—unofficially, of course, but in practice. John Quincy had left Levett Harris, the American consul, as the chargé d'affaires, but reluctantly. Harris was well liked, but it was no secret to anyone, including Louisa or John Quincy, that the unsalaried consul lived the lavish life of a Russian noble—elegant clothes,
fine furniture, “very tasty and expensive” apartments with crimson damask walls—by accepting huge bribes. He was also, as Louisa amusedly observed, chasing John Quincy's job.

That John Quincy was willing to leave his business in St. Petersburg in the hands of his inexperienced wife and untrustworthy lieutenant speaks to what he stood to gain by going. He wanted to help end a war he thought unwise, and if he played his part right, his reward, he had heard whispered, would be the highest diplomatic post—minister to Great Britain. He would then be able to return to the United States no longer an outcast, no longer an irrelevant figure but a leading candidate for the presidency—having completed a commission with Clay and Calhoun, two of the nation's brightest young stars. Louisa saw the situation clearly. She may have written about his ambition in her diary with a dagger for a pen, but in her letters to him, she gently teased. “I feel a little anxious to know how the rival candidates for the Presidency will feel towards each other,” she wrote to him.

Maybe John Quincy was right; maybe being apart allowed them to be more tender with each other. Twice a week, they wrote each other letters. His were long, full of charming and self-deprecating anecdotes and evaluations of his fellow commissioners and of himself. He would sketch a scene at supper, or assess Gallatin's considerable talents, or draw the curious comparison between himself and Clay, who was destined to become a crucial figure in his life. Outwardly, Clay seemed the opposite of John Quincy—tall and gaunt, where John Quincy was stout; a gambler, where John Quincy was at heart a Puritan. Clay would sometimes return to bed after a night of cards just as John Quincy was rising. But John Quincy sensed an unflattering kinship. He half joked about it: they shared “the same dogmatical, overbearing manner, the same harshness of look and expression, and the same forgetfulness of the courtesies of society.” The two men sparred throughout the peace conference. Then again, John Quincy sparred with everyone.

Admiring Louisa's own
ability to sketch a character in a letter, he
could be sure that his descriptions of others and his self-analysis would interest her. It was more surprising that his letters to her were also full of news. He would report the capture of the frigate
Essex
, the threat to Sackets Harbor, the deals cut at the Congress of Vienna, and the British peace commissioner's delaying tactics. He wrote to his wife as he was used to writing to his mother. Louisa encouraged him and tried to respond in kind, though her insights into geopolitical events were never as shrewd as her insights into people, and the foreign newspapers she read were usually outdated and wrong. But she was earnest in her effort to engage him. Unlike Abigail, she cared less about what he said than about his saying anything at all. It was a measure of how badly she wanted to be taken seriously. “I have just done reading the Life of Cicero, (dont laugh) and there is a passage in it concerning the defence of republic's, that has struck me most forcibly, and is certainly the most applicable to the present state of our country, of any thing I ever met with,” she would write. She was afraid of being made fun of, but the effect of their exchange was galvanizing. “You will smile at my politics but when I write you my thoughts run so rappidly, that I find my paper full before I am aware of it, and generally on subjects very foreign to my intentions, when I first sat down to write.”

Her confidence in herself and her ability to manage was growing. Given the chance, she did her best, and she did well. She rented a dacha for the summer, negotiated rent for a new apartment in the city, hired and fired servants. When her carriage broke, she bought a new one. She had arrived in Russia lamenting that she could not buy a present for George and John because of her lost dowry, but now she sent each of them a watch. She spent more than usual on her clothing “on account of the fetes.” “I am sorry for it,” she lied.

She liked the independence
, which was new to her. She claimed to hate going into public, especially without her husband. But after one ball she wrote, “On the whole I was never at a more charming party in my life.” When Alexander returned to St. Petersburg for the first time
since the defeat of Napoleon, she went to her first Te Deum—the great Russian Orthodox service of celebration—and joined the multitudes in watching the tsar kiss the cross. In early August, she went to a ball at the summer palace at Peterhof, where the terraces over the Neva seemed to spread in all directions, lit by lantern globes, extending even into the sea. From that vantage, St. Petersburg seemed only a slender white vision. She said she feared she would disgrace John Quincy, but in fact she was proud of how she had done. An Englishman, Mr. Bailey, “said he would astonish the world, and show them that the English and Americans had enter'd into an alliance, by dancing a Polonaise with me,” she wrote. The emperor, she added, was delighted to see it done.

She now did things her way, confident in her good intentions. When Levett Harris, the chargé d'affaires, ordered her not to attend the great ball at Pavlovski (he was miffed at the form of the invitation he himself had received), she went without an escort, taking her young son Charles. They walked through the rose garden, dined with the diplomatic corps, delighted in the pleasure boats, and enjoyed a sense of distinction, after the empress received them with special notice and invited them to stay an extra night. While Charles watched fireworks, Louisa attended the empress mother's ball. “Poor I became the only representative of America,” she wrote to John Quincy—quite pleased.

Charles began to appear
more often in her letters and diary. He had always been a part of her life in St. Petersburg, but never before quite in this way. Before John Quincy left, Louisa's preoccupations were elsewhere, on the endless rounds of social obligations, her health, her grief, her other two sons, almost nearer to her mind by their absence. Charles spent much of his time with servants, or his friends—mostly children of expatriates—or at a little school. John Quincy, of course, superintended his education, and Louisa had long ago given up the sense that she should have some say in it. So Charles had spent his five and a half years in St. Petersburg in a strange setting—trapped inside for much of the frozen year; more comfortable speaking French
or German, the language of his nursemaid (English was his third language); becoming a kind of curious appendage to the court, as they all were. He had played with the tsarina on the floor; he had been put on display at children's balls and parties, where there were “oceans of champaign for the little people.” Once, at the age of three, he opened a ball with the French ambassador's illegitimate daughter. (Louisa had dressed him as an Indian chief, and when he entered—to his startled surprise—the crowd applauded. Another time, he had gone as Bacchus.) He had borne the burden of standing in for his dead sister and absent brothers. John Quincy, in fact, had measured Charles's height not only on his own birthday, but also on George's and John's.