Louisa (24 page)

“
Vive Napoléon!
” she cried in return, waving her handkerchief.

“
Vive les Américains! Ils sont nos amis!
”

She rode slowly with the convoy; the general who had shouted to spare her rode by her side. As it happened, she was lucky. This general's name was Claude-Étienne Michel, and he had served Napoleon for many years. A day after meeting Louisa, when he reached Paris, he would be made a
comte d'empire
, and a few months later would play a role leading the assault upon the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, where he would die. Now, he spoke to her through the window of her carriage and told her that her situation was very dangerous. The army was “totally undisciplined.” She must provoke no one and show no fear. When the soldiers cried
Vive!
then she must cry
Vive!
in return. When they reached the next post house, they must spend the night and let the troops pass. She was lucky, he added, because of the quality of her French; she would not raise suspicions. She could pass for native. She listened to all of this calmly, though her heart beat wildly in her chest, while Charles, ice-white, sat frozen, and Madame Babet shook.

At the post house
, the woman in charge refused to take the travelers in, because she knew she could not protect them. She relented only when Louisa promised to hide with Madame Babet and the child. Inside their chamber, once its windows were shuttered and door
barred, Louisa's body finally collapsed, and she suffered a series of “faintings, head ache, and sickness.” Charles was able to sleep, but Madame Babet was cracking. She had escaped the French Revolution only to return to France to find another about to begin. Clutching at her hands as fat tears rolled down her cheeks, she said she “was lost.” “The Revolution was begun again,” she insisted, “and this was only the beginning of its horrors.” Outside the door, men were carousing and drunk. The innkeeper, a vivacious woman of forty or so, had the good sense to bring out the casks so that the soldiers would not trash the hotel in search of drink.

At nine the next morning, the place was quiet, and the locks turned and doors opened. The fourteen-year-old boy was waiting for them, a little worse for wear—prodded by bayonets, and his Prussian cap taken and burned—but not harmed. They piled back into the Russian carriage and continued.

The rumors were flying now. The army was at the gates to Paris. A battle was imminent. She was in danger. They did not know what to believe. But one rumor gave her confidence—a rumor about herself. Dupin had heard it whispered that the woman in the large, expensive carriage who was rushing toward Paris instead of away from it (as any sane woman would) must be one of Napoleon's sisters. When asked about it, Dupin smiled suggestively and shrugged, as if with meaning.

Emboldened, they passed through Meaux, where the landlady of the inn, with tears in her eyes, took her to see the graves of six girls, the victims of “savage war, with all its detestable concomitants”—which is to say, they'd been raped and killed. From there, and with this on her mind, Louisa entered the forests of Bondy, famous for tales of banditry, and when a man on a horse thundered after her, she imagined that she was being chased. She had to smile at herself when she discovered he only wanted to warn her of the carriage's loose wheel.

And then she was at the gates of Paris. She turned onto the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin. There was no civil war, only quiet. It was
getting dark. At some point that evening, on Thursday, March 23, she said goodbye to the boy and to Dupin; Babet would leave the next day. Louisa drove down the Rue de Richelieu, to the Hotel du Nord. It was eleven o'clock at night when she arrived.

From the letters she had posted from the road, John Quincy was expecting her to come that evening. Her conviction that he would ride out to meet her if she was in danger had been hopeful at best. He had thought there might be a battle before Napoleon arrived in Paris, and he still worried for the region's peace. For the past few days, he had walked out among the crowds in Paris, past bonfires of the Bourbon king's handbills, watching the papers stamped with the fleur-de-lis curling as they burned. Louis XVIII had escaped to Lille, and Napoleon's fresh proclamations were already being pasted on the walls. But if he worried or wondered about his wife's safety on the road, he did not say so. They had been apart for eleven months.

That evening, John Quincy
went to the Théâtre des Variétés, which was famous for the low-comedy farces that he loved. In his diary, he wrote that his wife and son walked into the hotel room soon after he returned. She would remember it differently. In her account, he was not waiting for her there at all. When she arrived, he was
gone.

1

S
PRINGTIME
IN
P
ARIS
,
1815.
The trees flew the small flags of new leaves; fevered crowds filled the streets. On the grand boulevards, soldiers strutted and cursed the old king. Some who watched them muttered subversive jokes: “Why is bread dearer and meat cheaper since 20 March? Because the baker has left and the butcher has returned.” But the critics kept their voices low. The streets rang with song. People gathered in the Tuileries below Napoleon's window hoping for a glimpse, a benediction. The mood was joyous. The gardens were packed. The theaters were full.

And many nights, Louisa and John Quincy were there too. The theater had been a lifelong passion for them both, something they always shared. They went to see tragedies, comedies, operas, ballets, low farces, and, once, to see Napoleon.

They heard a rumor that he would attend that night, April 21. The audience filled the Théâtre-Français past capacity. Everyone wanted to be in the place he was in, as if merely sharing air were a kind of contact. The orchestra, pushed by the crowd behind the scenes, played “La Victoria” and “La Marseillaise” over and over. Finally, during the play
Hector
, Napoleon entered his box. Louisa and John Quincy could
not view him themselves—their box was on the same side as his—but they could not have missed the ripple of heads turning, the wave of emotion, the murmur swelling to a roar:
“Vive l'Empereur!”

She had seen him before that night, clearly though at a distance. She, John Quincy, and Charles had been walking through the gardens at the Tuileries on a late afternoon in early April when they came upon a throng standing below Bonaparte's apartments. At that very moment Napoleon threw open the windows and stood for a time, showing himself, bathing in the late afternoon light and in the crowd's adoration. John Quincy had lifted Charles onto his shoulders for a better look. And there was Napoleon: the strong chin and long thin nose; the famous figure, now fat; the piercing deep-set eyes.

She had no reason to be frightened of him anymore. Civil war was not a threat in Paris. To her, Bonaparte had become an interesting attraction, the way the ancient marble statues at the museums were attractions. Later, the Adamses looked at Napoleon during mass at the chapel of the Tuileries. John Quincy noted the occasion in his diary in the same tone that he noted their trip to see the city's fortifications on the heights of Montmartre.

Their time in Paris
was full of pleasure. It was “in many respects the most agreeable interlude of my life,” John Quincy wrote. They went to the Louvre for the paintings and the awesome stillness. Louisa shopped for a new wardrobe: high-waisted taffeta dresses with elegant flounces; slippers as light as lacquered eggshells. She went to watch the review of soldiers in the square of the Place Carousel, the drills and peacocking. It wasn't all for show. France would soon be at war again, and she had seen enough wreckage to be sickened and saddened at the thought of the battles to come. When it came time for the Adamses to leave Paris, Louisa wrote to Abigail that she was filled with foreboding about the fate of France, and with the “utmost regret” at having to go.

She was not looking forward
to returning to England, nearly twenty
years after she left it. It would be, she told her mother-in-law, “a very disagreeable residence.” The dislike between the United States and Britain after the War of 1812 was persistent. She felt it herself. Another posting would mean another meager minister's salary, too, and the certainty of great expenses; and several more years of late nights and parched mornings, of insincere smiles and insipid conversations with gouty old men. No doubt, too, her feelings were colored by her memories of the circumstances under which she had left London at twenty-two. She had been feeling the hot blast of shame after her family's flight. She had been pregnant and uncertain of what awaited her. Now she was forty years old and even more of an outsider in a place where she had never quite belonged.

Louisa, John Quincy, Charles, and Louisa's new French chambermaid, Lucy Houel, left the Hotel du Nord in Paris on May 16, passed through the city gates, and entered the countryside. Spring was turning to summer. That morning, John Quincy noticed street vendors selling small bunches of bright red cherries. The orchards showed pale blossoms. At dinner that first night on the road, Louisa tasted the season's first sweet green peas.

The journey to the coast was short, completed in “easy stages.” She had made the trip before; she knew what to expect. It was a remarkably undemanding journey, especially compared with the arduous route she had followed only two months before. Yet, with John Quincy now in charge, it was all too much for her. When they reached Dover, Louisa insisted she could not continue on to London before resting. She was “excessively fatigued,” John Quincy wrote in his diary, “and in the evening very unwell.”

This is revealing of something essential about her character. In times of adversity, forced to rise to the occasion, she often thrived. She had crossed thousands of miles from St. Petersburg to Paris, fording half-frozen rivers and meeting with unruly soldiers. She had made
difficult decisions quickly and well. She had taken care of her small and terrified son. She had traveled through the night, slept very little, dealt with deserting servants, crossed battlefields and ravaged villages, and faced the approach of a dictator. She had shown courage and self-command. She had not been overcome by fatigue. She had in fact completed the journey from St. Petersburg with such strength that her husband concluded the arduous trip had been crucial to her health. This same woman, once relieved from all responsibility and returned to the protection of her husband, after a much shorter and easier journey, was now helplessly tired and overwhelmed.

 • • • 

A
SURPRISE
in London
would revive her. Her two older sons, George and John, were waiting in the Adamses' hotel rooms on Harley Street, Cavendish Square. When Louisa wrote to Abigail three weeks later, she skipped over words, sped on by happiness: “You will my joy on arriving in London at finding my boys.”

In the six years since she had seen them, they had changed. The eight-year-old George she had left in Quincy was now fourteen and nearly as tall as his father. He had the rough manners and the awkward bearing of a boy unused to the length of his limbs, but he also had a sensitive, delicate quality, often remarked upon, and dark velvet eyes. Books were his “meat and drink,” his grandmother reported; he read indiscriminately. “Like the bee, he flies from sweet to sweet, always however collecting some honey which he brings home to his hive,” Abigail had written the year before. “He delights his grandfather when he is at home by his readiness to find whatever book he wants in his library, and he will sit down like an old man to hold a conversation upon books for an hour together.” He was special, though his grandparents openly worried he might be odd. “George is a treasure of diamonds,” old John Adams wrote to John Quincy. “He has a genius equal to anything; but like all other genius
requires the most delicate management to prevent it from running into eccentricities.”

The younger boy
was different. Twelve-year-old John was a foot shorter than George and, as John Quincy wrote, “as fat as a little seal.” He swelled with confidence; his grandmother described him as “ardent, active zealous full of fire and spirit.” He had no patience for reading. On the voyage from Boston, the sailors had taught him every knot and taken to calling him “Admiral,” which he loved.

However transformed George and John seemed to their parents and Charles, their parents and brother must have been almost unrecognizable to them. Their father, once almost gaunt, had grown stout. Deep lines, permanent marks of worry, pinched his brow and cut from his nose toward his mouth. His round head was nearly completely bald; what little hair he had was close-cropped. Their mother, too, looked older, her long face more etched, her hair streaked with gray. And their little brother, who was a baby when they last saw him, was now a quiet child of nearly eight, poised beyond his years. While they grew up running through the woods of New England, Charles was a child of the imperial court. While they hardly knew their parents, he could interpret their father's inscrutable expressions. He could read their mother's mood with a glance.

John and George were accustomed to exploring mountains and stony hillsides, to slipping in and out of the houses of their large extended family. They had spent years under the benevolently neglectful tutelage of their grandmother and her sisters. Instead of their schoolwork, they had studied
Arabian Nights
. Now they found themselves in a small apartment on a crowded block in Cavendish Square, with only the manicured parks to pass for wilderness, in a country with which they had just been at war, and which they had been raised to consider their enemy. They had crossed the Atlantic with one decent suit apiece. Louisa and John Quincy immediately hired tutors to instruct them in handwriting, mathematics, fencing, and dancing.

 • • • 

W
HILE
J
OHN
Q
UINCY
was busy addressing the issues unresolved at Ghent, Louisa looked for a place to live. It is almost inconceivable that she would have taken on this responsibility prior to John Quincy's leaving St. Petersburg, only three years before, but much had happened since then. Even the continent seemed to be entering a new order. On June 22, John Quincy received a note from the foreign minister, Lord Castlereagh, that the coalition army had destroyed Napoleon's forces at the Battle of Waterloo. Europe was at peace.

She found a house in Ealing, a small village seven miles outside of the city; the salary of an American minister, at least one who was allergic to debt, ruled out finding a decent establishment within London. The countryside held other appeals. Louisa and John Quincy hardly knew what to do with their sons in the city. The family had treated London like tourists, with trips to the theater, St. Paul's, the Tower of London; they went for walks and flew kites. But the two older boys, restless and bored, chafed at the city's fashionable avenues and cramped spaces, where the carts clattered over the cobblestones and the cries of voices began with the dustmen at dawn and ended with drunken revelers past midnight. Soon, John Quincy was complaining of the “hurly burly of confusion” his sons now brought into his life. “Their time is not fully employed and mine is so completely taken up that I have none left to attend to them,” he wrote in his diary.

Louisa may have
had her own unstated reasons for wanting to live at a distance from her old home on Tower Hill. There were painful memories there, the ghosts of friends and family. What remained reminded her of what had changed. She saw the Hewletts a few times, and her much-loved mentor from Berlin, Elizabeth Carysfort, and there were other visits with friendly familiar faces. Even those reunions, though, had something sad and haunting about them. “I have found
but few of my old friends in this country and those few much changed,” she told Abigail, “but after so long an absence and under such circumstances I could not expect to find it otherwise.” With some sadness, she wrote that “the change which I perceive is most likely in myself.”

Perhaps it was easier
, too, to live a little at a distance from the British court and the rest of the diplomatic corps. She was accustomed to being welcomed by rulers and to finding in the court at least one or two intimate friends. But the Regency court was different. King George III, quite insane, was shut away; the prince regent, a self-styled king of frivolity, took no notice of her; and it was a year before Louisa had an opportunity to be presented to the queen. In the meantime, Louisa was more or less shut out of society. From the outside, no doubt, it was easier to see how opulent, giddy, and at times grotesque society was. The ladies she did meet struck her as harsh and arrogant.