The conceptualization of his disability as a physical indicator of his interior self indicates a social and cultural construction of disability far removed from the medicalized model and harsh stigma of the twentieth century. In one entry, he recounts an exchange with a woman at a dinner party. "How I lost my leg?" She must have asked. "It was, unfortunately, not in the military service of my country." His answer suggests that he at times feigned a cavalier attitude in social situations; he performed as a man comfortable with a disability that was something other than a badge of honor for "service to his country." He notes that she was attracted to him, despite the disability: "`Monsieur, vous avez fair tres imposant,' and this is accompanied with that look which, without being what Sir John Falstaff calls the `leer of invitation' amounts to the same thing." However, this repartee goes nowhere, raising the question of sincere interest. For "in the midst of the chat arrive letters, one of which is from her lover... now with his regiment. It brings her to a little recollection, which a little time will, I think, again banish, and, in all human probability, a few interviews would stimulate her curiosity to the experiment of what can be effected by the native of a new world who has left one of his legs behind. But, malheureusement, this curiosity cannot now be gratified, and therefore will, I presume, perish." For Morris, perhaps bested in this situation by a man "with his regiment," his only recourse, he believes, is to play the role of "experiment"-to push her beyond a threshold and suggest that his disability makes him unique and specially designed for enjoyment. That it will "perish" because he cannot move the conversation in this direction again suggests that from the outset, he had little hope of overcoming the bias against a man with only one leg.22 These entries suggest a sense of self in opposition to able-bodied individuals and their world.
In the early twentieth century, Morris's disability would have likely rendered him crippled and desexualized-and ostracized him both socially and legally from society. But we see little of that status in the eighteenth century." As an elite man, Morris clearly enjoyed fewer limitations than lateeighteenth-century disabled men of lower status. His mobility and success in his own time suggest less restriction and stigma than would emerge in the twentieth century in both Europe and America. Nonetheless, in his lifetime he experienced an individualized sense of difference-not just physical but also linked to his sexuality.
Morris's Diaries
Morris went to France on personal business in January 1789. By 1792, he was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary of France. After traveling in Europe and being abroad for nearly ten years, Morris returned to America in 1799. When he arrived in Paris, France was still an absolute monarchy under King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Although his diaries and later writings reveal casual intimate encounters with several women, his main relationship before marriage was with a married woman, Adelaide de Flahaut, who lived in the Louvre. At the time, the Louvre was filled with rooms and apartments that housed those who shared an attachment to the court. They met for the first time on March 21, 1789. She was twenty-eight, and he was thirty-seven. She had been married ten years at the time to Alexandre-Sebastien de Flahaut de la Billarderie, a sixty-three-year-old Keeper of the King's Gardens. She wrote romantic novels, held a salon, and had a lover-the bishop of Autun, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, who was rumored to be the father of her son.
Such affairs were not unusual, although, as we have seen, American diplomats abroad, such as John Adams, liked to loudly contrast American morals with Parisian customs.24 Yet we know that late-eighteenth-century sexual cultures, especially (though not exclusively) for elites, afforded such men as Morris with ample opportunities for intimacy outside marriage. Although Morris's most detailed reflections were recorded in his diary while in Paris, he conducted an active sexual and romantic life in America as well as Europe. With its larger urban centers, Europe may have offered more opportunities for lovers, but as recent scholarship on late-eighteenth-century New York and Philadelphia has shown, even these relatively smaller American urban centers suffered no shortage of sexual outlets.25 Morris's relationship with Madame de Flahaut was possible because of the salon culture of eighteenthcentury France, but the evidence suggests that we would be mistaken in viewing his time in Paris as a sexual awakening for an American diplomat from a so-called Puritanical New World.
His is no secret diary devoted only to sex. In the pages of his diary, Morris's sexual life melds seamlessly with his salon socializing, his official dealings in France, and his assessment of this country's Revolutionary crisis. For Morris, the sexual and the political were part of one Parisian life for him and part of his identity as an American statesman abroad. Nearly all of his diary entries speak to his sense of sexual adventure, appeal, sociability, and political stature. Given this content, it is difficult to speculate as to his motives for writing the entries. They seem at once part of a process of personal reflection and travel and also useful for recording political, commercial, and social networks in motion. In one concise entry, for example, he writes about church property, details of finance, bread riots in Paris, and sexual intimacy with Madame de Flahaut. In his diary, political and sexual dealings mingle on the page as the actions did in his daily life. Morris most probably does not write these diaries, with their detailed remarks on sex and flirtation with married women, for the public to read.26 And as such their musings, reflections, and remembrances should be noted not as public memorializing but as private self-fashioning of an elite unmarried sexually active man with a disability. All activities combined to fill his days, and he clearly positions himself as living the life of a successful gentleman, which for him included a sexual and romantic component.
Shortly after arriving, Morris quickly settled into the salon culture. As we saw with Franklin, unlike the later depoliticized salons of the nineteenth century, by the outbreak of the French Revolution, salons had shifted from an elite social culture to a politicized public sphere for French aristocracy and intellectual elites: "Both salons and mondanite (society life) existed in close proximity to the worlds of politics, literature, art, fashion, and business, all of which preoccupied French elites."27 The salons were part of a broader culture that Morris appears to have enjoyed as he conducted his political and business engagements. Salons included eating and dancing and were generally known for "a luxurious space, feminine governance, a select company, polite conversation" and heterosociability.28 Morris would not have been out of place at the salons he frequented. As Steven Kale reminds us, "Politicians, diplomats, artists, and journalists frequented the same salons and participated in the same system of social networks."29 Salons, headed by women, were fully part of the emerging public sphere of the French Revolution.30
Unlike Franklin's, Morris's main relationship remained largely secretive. The diaries reveal a social setting with constant entries and exits of diplomats, friends, and salon members. The situation afforded few sustained periods for Morris and Adele to be alone uninterrupted, yet perhaps as a disabled man, and a foreigner, Morris's liminal position enabled him to take flirtation from erotic banter and wit common to salon culture and pursue it to physical sexual intimacy. His diaries express a certain enjoyment at mixing business and official affairs with clandestine sexual moments. In one entry, for example, he records taking advantage of a moment when he was alone with Madame de Flahaut: "We seize the Opportunity."31 The following month, he writes of a particular moment that the two shared. After discussing land-purchasing policies in America to shed light on how private property might be preserved, given the circumstances of the Revolution, he attended a dinner party at the Louvre. When his lover's husband went to another room after dinner, Morris stayed behind "with the Ladies," perhaps because his disability made such female space more easily available to him. Shortly thereafter, the women also left him and his lover alone. He wrote, "And immediately I take Madm on my Lap and at the imminent Risque of Discovery by two Doors and one Window perform the Act. I think of all others Monsr would be least pleasd to beho
ld.""
In a number of entries, Morris writes about engaging in sexual relations in the presence of others, unbeknownst to them. A dinner at the Louvre with Adele and Mademoiselle Duplessy resulted in the following entry: "After Dinner while the latter is playing the fortepiano, as she is near sighted ... [we] almost perform the genial Act."33 In another example, he writes, "We perform the Act at Dusk in the Presence of Madlle."34 In another entry, he writes, "Go to the Louvre, and being disappointed in the Expectation of a clear Stage, Made is so well disposed that we take the Chance of Interruption and celebrate in the Passage while Madlle is at the Harpsichord in the Drawing Room. The husband is below. Visitors are hourly expected. The Doors are all open."35
Morris uses an unusually large vocabulary for describing his intimate relations with women. The extent of his vocabulary demonstrates to himself his erudition and sophistication. Some of his terms simply dislocate sexual intimacy from romantic love, focusing on the mechanics of pleasurable erotic interactions. In one entry, he writes, "we perform the usual Exercises." In another, he writes, "[we] performed certain Gesticulations." Often he refers to doing the "Act" or the "operation"-as in, "after Dinner we embrace to mutual Satisfaction and in a few Minutes `Repeat the Operation.""' But as the above passage illustrates, mutual pleasure was important, and very often Morris's vocabulary demonstrates a pleasure that is rooted in the joy shared equally by intimates. For example, he writes, "as usual communicate the Joy" or "the usual amusement." Other terms include "Love's Disport" or doing the "hymeneal Rights .1117
In Morris's diaries, sexual intimacy is venerated as a mystery or as a gift passed down from the ancients. This reference to the Greeks and Romans is typical of his era's reverence for that culture. For example, he writes, "[we] celebrate the Misteries," "we celebrate," and "[w]e pay our Adorations." Very often he writes of "Cyprian Mysteries," "Cyprian Rites," or "join[ing] in fervent Adoration to the Cyprian Queen." References to the "Cyprian Queen" or versions thereof speak to Aphrodite, the Greek Goddess of Eros, which again emphasizes physical and sexual attraction-not love in a romantic sense, but sexuality and eroticism.38
Morris's extensive vocabulary reveals an attitude toward his sexual relations that is unencumbered by the moral framework that dominates nineteenth-century biographers. His understanding of sexual behavior emphasized pleasure, mutually shared between a bachelor and a married woman and fashioned as cosmopolitan and enlightened. Morris expresses a certain degree of pride in his lifestyle, a sense of satisfaction at his ability to combine sexual, romantic, commercial, and political concerns. For Victorian and even twentieth-century biographers, this approach to sexual expression outside marriage would complicate celebration of his legacy. Yet there was (of course) an easy solution.
Remembering Morris as a Chaste Bachelor
Morris's sexual and affective world may have been enjoyable to him, but it would prove undesirable to his few nineteenth-century biographers. Not long after Morris's death in 1816, Jared Sparks wrote a book about his life and accomplishments that includes selections from his personal papers. Sparks, a respected popular historian of the American Revolution, professor, and president of Harvard, is perhaps best known for his published volumes of writings of Franklin and Washington. Beginning in 1832, Sparks published a three-volume work entitled The Life of Gouverneur Morris, with Selections from his Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers; Detailing Events in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and in the Political History of the United States.
Typical of nineteenth-century biographers of the men identified as Founding Fathers, with their goal of cultivating moral, national character, this earliest biographer makes little mention of Morris's personal life.39 Despite declaring in his preface, "It has not been my aim to write a panegyric, to conceal defects, or emblazon good qualities, but rather to present traits of character, acts, and opinions, in their genuine light and just bearings, and leave them to make their proper impressions," Sparks is unable to break the conventions of the day that had solidified in the decades after Morris's death. Sparks covers nothing sexual or romantic in his biography, leaving that portion of Morris's life and identity hidden from public eye. Morris's intense romantic and erotic relationship with Madame de Flahaut is not even mentioned, although Sparks could not have avoided reading about it in Morris's diaries and letters. He chooses instead to spend less than two pages on Morris's later-in-life marriage, leaving Morris to appear as a chaste if social bachelor for much of his life.40
Some fifty years later, in the absence of biographers stepping forward, Morris's own granddaughter published The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris. Echoing Sparks's "sense of propriety," Anne Cary Morris removes all evidence of his romantic relationship with Madame de Flahaut.41 As we have seen, published volumes of letters and edited diaries-particularly those such as Morris's granddaughter's, which gives no indication that material has been removed-have the disastrous effect of passing off edited material, fashioned with an eye to a particular telling of Morris's life, as unedited and in his own hand. In this way, nineteenth-century volumes by Sparks and Morris's granddaughter use Morris's own words to fashion an individual, the chaste but social bachelor, whom he would scarcely have recognized-or liked, for that matter.
In 1888, Theodore Roosevelt continued the impulse to depict Morris's life as following the early American model of the social and charming bachelor. Such descriptions sidestep questions of extramarital relationships (evidence of which would serve as a direct assault on the institution of marriage) and, with their emphasis on heterosocial interactions, suggest a normative social and presumably sexual interest in women. In his biography, Roosevelt celebrates Morris as a young man in colonial New York, born into wealth and privilege, "a handsome, high-bred young fellow, of easy manners and far from puritanical morals," adding, "He enjoyed it all to the full, and in his bright, chatty letters to his friends pictures himself as working hard, but gay enough also: `up all night-balls, concerts, assemblies-all of us mad in the pursuit of pleasure.' 1142
Roosevelt famously conceived of masculinity in both a traditional upperclass model of sociability and his better-known emphasis on the rough and tumble, robust masculinity.43 In portraying Morris as a success in his political world as well as in the politicized social world of Paris, Roosevelt opens up the possibility of suspect models of masculine deviance. Roosevelt thus protects his subject by explaining Morris's character in that context: "Although Morris entered into the social life of Paris with all the zest natural to his pleasure-loving character, yet he was far too clear-headed to permit it to cast any glamour over him.... He enjoyed the life of the salon very much, but it did not in the least awe or impress him; and he was of too virile fibre, too essentially a man, to be long contented with it alone."44 Given this problematic social world-marked by a stereotyped and nationally infused perception of European decadence as unmanly-Roosevelt explicitly describes Morris's reaction to Paris as properly American.
As for the remarkable three-year affair that Morris had with Madame de Flahaut, Americans would not learn anything about it or what it meant to Morris from Roosevelt. From his biography, readers got the sense that their relationship was a diplomatic one: "`She was thoroughly conversant with the politics of both court and Assembly;' her `precision and justness of thought was very uncommon in either sex,' and, as time went on, made her a willing and useful helper in some of Morris's plans.... She was much flattered by the deference that Morris showed for her judgment, and in return let him into not a few state secrets. She and he together drew up a translation of the outline for a constitution for France, which he had prepared, and through her it was forwarded to the king."45 In this sense, Roosevelt captures an important part of this relationship that someone focusing purely on the titillating or sexual aspects of his affair could easily overlook. But for Morris, the sexual and the political were part of one Parisian life for him and part of his identity as an American statesman abroad. The extent of their social activit
ies was reduced to dinners with Talleyrand and others-but again seamlessly linked to politics.
Davenport Transcriptions of Original Diaries
It would not be until 1939 that Americans would be able to glimpse Morris's personal life-and even then few would do so. Ann Cary Davenport, Morris's great-granddaughter, edited and published a two-volume set of his writings that have become some of the most famous observations of the French Revolution by an American. Although relatively few individuals had access to the edited volumes, and this was certainly no popular work of biography, the Davenport volumes undoubtedly make Morris's revealing diaries available to later biographers.
The original manuscript diaries themselves had been defaced by someone seeking to shape public memory of Morris by preventing some of what he wrote from ever being seen. In several places, the Davenport transcription preserves words now lost from the original manuscript record. In some cases, only one or two words have been crossed out. On April 15, 1791, for example, Morris writes, "Shortly after Dinner I go to the Louvre and we celebrate." Whoever defaced the original diary understood his sexual code and scribbled out the word "celebrate"-his having ever written it evidenced only by Davenport now. In other places, several lines have been obliterated. In one instance, twenty-two lines of the diary were carefully crossed out, and in one or two places several pages have been torn from the diary-lost for good (Figure 6.2).
Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies) Page 20
