American Phoenix

by Jane Cook

  “But the emperor complained that he could not make him [Charles] sociable,” Louisa wrote with amusement.

  The breaking of the ice also loosened lips that summer, especially Mr. Six’s.

  “He told me a number of anecdotes respecting the revolution which placed the Emperor Alexander on the throne,” Adams wrote of their conversation.

  Six insisted that Alexander was innocent of involvement in his father’s death. “Not only was the emperor in no manner accessory to the murder of his father, but that he was affected with the deepest horror at the event; that he absolutely refused for a long time to assume the government.”

  Alexander had been a favorite of his grandmother Catherine the Great, whose heart toward her son Paul grew colder with each passing Russian winter. While she despised Paul’s pea-sized view of power, she failed to name Alexander as her heir. When she died, Paul took over. Because they loved Catherine’s giant vision and believed Alexander was the best one to continue her ideals, the nobility conspired to take Paul’s life. Questioning Emperor Paul’s capabilities became as popular as puffing on cigars among Russia’s elite. Plotting his demise over a game of cards soon superseded any strategy to win a hand of poker.

  According to Mr. Six, the conspirators had a problem. Unlike some czars before him, Paul continued to share a bed with his wife, Maria. The conspirators found a willing partner to help them. Six months before the plot’s murderous climax, Paul’s favorite Turkish slave intentionally “bred discord between them.” The slave’s deception led to a barring of the doors between the emperor’s and the empress’s bedchambers.

  The plot was so poorly “kept that at a dinner party in the presence of a prince, one guest proclaimed: ‘The Emperor Paul has not four hours more to live.’”

  When the conspirators broke into his room that night, Paul quickly realized their intentions. With the door to his wife’s chamber sealed, he could not escape to her room. They easily murdered him.

  An officer gave Maria the news. She immediately told him that she was now empress. He replied that Alexander was now his emperor. Her assumption was sensible. Unlike other monarchical dynasties where the king’s heir is his oldest living child, Peter the Great failed to establish a clear order of accession. Hence claims to Russia’s throne were frequently challenged by wives, sisters, brothers, sons, and others.

  Six explained that Alexander and his mother had not gotten along very well since Paul’s death. She was also unpopular among those in the Russian court who favored France, especially after she prevented her daughter from marrying Bonaparte.

  As winter melted into summer in 1810, it became clear to everyone that the empress mother needn’t worry about Napoleon becoming her son-in-law ever again.

  “The relations between France and Russia, have . . . been . . . affected by . . . the new alliance between France and Austria, formed by the marriage of the Emperor Napoleon with the Archduchess Maria Louisa, eldest daughter of the emperor of Austria,” Adams wrote of the marriage that took place by proxy in April 1810.

  Though everyone was talking about this stab at Russia’s power base in Europe, the Russian government had not officially acknowledged the news. “There has been no public and formal communication of this marriage, made to the Russian government, either by Austria or France. The negotiation which terminated in this contract of marriage was not only kept a profound secret to the Russian Ambassador at Paris, but he was even led to believe and to communicate to his court the belief that the choice of the Emperor Napoleon had fixed upon a different person.”

  Now forever a French favorite, Austria had won this latest power play. What was Alexander to do? With no official communication from the French government, he could not publicly acknowledge the alliance, especially knowing that Napoleon once considered his sister for a bride. Because France was officially an ally, he could not openly scoff at the marriage’s detrimental influence on Russia’s political ties with both countries. Caulincourt solved the problem.

  “I am told that there has been a confidential communication of the marriage, made by the French Ambassador here to the Emperor Alexander in person.”

  In May 1810, Monsieur Caulaincourt held a ball at his residence to celebrate Napoleon’s nuptials. He invited Alexander, who, under the circumstances, could not refuse the invitation no matter how much the idea disgusted him.

  “Went to a ball at the French ambassador’s in honor of the marriage of Napoleon with Maria Louise of Austria,” Louisa factually reported.

  No matter their opinions on Napoleon, the Adamses had no choice but to attend, either. “Obliged to go as the imperial family were to be there,” Louisa added.

  The ice from the Neva River may have broken, but some social rules remained firmly in place. Loneliness and splendor had danced at the first ball she attended in the emperor’s presence. What would she see at this one? Pretense? Of course. Impropriety? Highly unlikely, as the imperial family usually showed good manners to all. What she didn’t know as she pulled on her silver tissue dress—unless she had purchased a new one by that time—was that she would soon dance a polonaise with both pretension and impropriety.

  As their carriage pulled up to the ambassador’s palace, decorum was on full display. Caulaincourt’s residence was elegantly illuminated. Although exterior lighting was necessary, it was a pretense too. After all, St. Petersburg was home to the white nights of summer, where sunset lingers until early morning. Thousands of candles were hardly necessary with the lengthening days of summer.

  “We went at nine o’clock, but it was daylight as at noon, so that the illumination made scarcely any show at all,” Adams astutely observed, noting that many of the other ministers placed lanterns around their homes in honor of the French. The acts were so much of a show that the Spanish minister joked with John that he hoped his house’s illuminations would “expiate some of my sins.”

  Emperor Alexander quickly stood out to Louisa. Rarely had she attended an event where he was not the host. When he was a guest, he was usually the guest of honor, but not this time. Though a phantom presence and far away from Russia at the time, Napoleon was clearly the man of the hour.

  Fully aware of the global politics dancing in front of her, Louisa knew Alexander had every right to be peeved at Napoleon’s pick for a bride. Russia had plenty of noblewomen who could have strengthened French-Russian relations through a marriage with the French emperor. By choosing an Austrian, Napoleon struck a blow at the czar.

  “The ascendancy of France at this court will without doubt be more firmly secured by the result of her new alliance with Austria,” Adams concluded of the influence that Caulaincourt would gain over the czar.

  At the ball Alexander hid his disappointment over the global nuptial politics. “The emperor was remarkably gracious,” Louisa observed of his unflappability.

  The Russian emperor was also as dashing as any Prince Charming that night. He most likely wore a dark silk or velvet suit with a stiff upturned collar that gently brushed his jaw line. He most certainly bore the power of gold, braided epaulets on his shoulders and the silver star of St. Nevsky on the left side of his chest. Free from the trappings of protocol that came with hosting events at the Winter Palace, the czar also seemed surprisingly relaxed.

  At this event, unlike her first ball, where she knew not a soul, Louisa found herself comfortably conversing with female friends at the corners of the dance floor. She was so relaxed that she didn’t notice when a pair of imperial eyes glanced nervously around, looking for her.

  “He inquired of Mr. Harris where I sat,” Louisa explained. “[Emperor Alexander] immediately came to me and tapped me on the shoulder as I was talking to a lady next to me.”

  Stunned, she was. What did His Majesty seek?

  “I must walk or dance the next polonaise with him.”

  She couldn’t have been more shocked had Napoleon suddenly appeared in Russia. “I was very much confused as I did not know what to do when a lady of the court c
ame and informed me that as soon as I saw the emperor take his place in the dance I must walk up alone and take my place by him.”

  Louisa had no time to prepare. No time to practice bowing. No time to buy a new dress or remake her old one. “Naturally timid, this idea almost overcame me.”

  The czar took his place on the dance floor alone. Louisa swallowed her nerves and walked as composedly as she could toward him. “But I got through awkwardly enough.”

  Other dance partners followed, and the polonaise began.

  “He immediately took my hand and we started off—Fortunately for me the polonaise was very short and I bowed when the music stopped.”

  Although the concluding cadence signaled the end of the dance, Louisa quickly realized that the emperor was not finished with her.

  “[I was] intending to return to my seat when he said ‘that the dance had been so short he wished to converse with me!’”

  There she stood, alone with the emperor, without a soul to tell her what to do. “Imagine my confusion [when] every lady in the hall was seated but myself.”

  Protocol may have imprisoned her several times over the past few months, but it also provided immense security. Propriety now seemed broken. The sight of Louisa and Alexander dancing caused many women to reach for their fans and cover their lips. What did it mean? While the ladies whispered, Louisa struggled to converse with the czar.

  “He did not hear well.” Although everyone else was seated, the flurry of whispering made it difficult for Louisa to hear him. She felt that “the climate could only betray my stupidity without being able to understand a word.”

  He tried to talk. She tried to reply, mustering what Russian she could, but most likely resorting to her eloquent French.

  “Thus we stood for about five minutes when he bowed low and retired.”

  Louisa returned to her seat.

  “The music soon struck when his Imperial Majesty again came up and asked me ‘where my sister was’?”

  She had no time to be shocked. “I told him I did not know but would go immediately and seek her.”

  He stopped her.

  “No. I must not as he would go and do that himself.”

  After finding Kitty, Alexander took her out to dance. Though she had attended many events, Kitty did not hold the high position her sister held or know the protocol. Louisa watched with mother-like nervousness as Alexander started the next polonaise with her sister. Her jitters quickly turned to alarm when Kitty behaved as the casual American girl she was. “And she not knowing the etiquettes began laughing and talking to him as she would have done to an American partner.”

  Louisa continued watching in both horror and amusement. On the one hand she knew that Alexander had started this public display. He had abandoned propriety and the rules of his court. On the other hand her sister could easily embarrass the American legation.

  Instead of waiting for Alexander to speak first, Kitty began “the conversation contrary to all usages du monde.”

  How did the emperor react? Was he horrified at her breach of protocol? Quite the contrary. “He was so charmed with the novelty that he detained Caulaincourt’s supper twenty-five minutes to prolong the polonaise.” He didn’t care that the other guests waited for dinner. After all, this was the man who wouldn’t allow anyone to leave his balls until he finished his last glass of wine. The delay, however, ignited a fire of whispers around the hall. Female fans flared again. The emperor’s breach of propriety became the talk of the ball, not only that night but in the days to come.

  “She [Kitty] had never been presented at court so that this extraordinary distinction produced a buzz of astonishment.”

  The emperor’s attention to both Louisa and Kitty loosened more than the lips of his guests. His lack of protocol was about to cause an earthquake reaching all the way to Bavaria.

  “Poor Madame de Bray being the only lady beside myself of the diplomatic [corps] was in a ‘state of astonishment.’”

  Madame de Bray was the only other woman who held the same social rank as Louisa. The emperor’s failure to dance with Madame de Bray was an insult to the woman and her country. She was “so distressed at not being noticed” that Louisa called on Caulaincourt, who came to the rescue. He informed the emperor of Madame de Bray’s presence. The czar responded with propriety and “took the lady out.”

  “And thus appeased the jealousies.”

  Louisa noted that they “got home at two o’clock in the morning and it was broad daylight.”

  She later concluded that the czar’s attention was merely pretense: “The truth was the emperor wished to become acquainted with my sister and the honor conferred on me was only a passport to the act.”

  Was John jealous? Hardly. On the surface, he responded with understatement. “The emperor was gracious to everybody, even beyond his usual custom, which is remarkable for affability,” he wrote in his diary of the event.

  Louisa was not the only one who received Alexander’s favor that evening. John got a little something out of him too. “He enquired of me whether I had taken a walk this day, and on answering that I had; he observed that he had not met me,” Adams said of their conversation at the ball. The czar thought he saw John walking earlier in the day but wasn’t sure if the wigless gentleman was him.

  “He said that the difference of my looks on the street, without a wig, from that in which he had usually seen me, had been the cause that . . . he did not recognize me.” How John longed to permanently abandon his wig!

  Something else stood out at the ball. No one seemed genuinely happy to celebrate Napoleon’s marriage—including the host. Caulaincourt didn’t want to give a party honoring Napoleon’s marriage to an Austrian princess. A poor actor, the French diplomat said and did all the right things, but lacked the passion of a good performer.

  “I heard the ambassador himself say to someone that he gave this ball because he was obliged to do it—it gave him no pleasure,” John noted.

  Caulaincourt’s lavishness was also more apparent than the eighteen hours of daylight that night. With sixty-five servants and fifty-six horses, the French legation was six times larger than the American embassy. Something, however, was stealing his sparkle.

  “There is a becoming gravity, too, and something in his countenance and eye which indicates hardness as well as polish,” John later noticed.

  That night the Adamses didn’t know the emperor’s true motives for dancing with Louisa and Kitty. The long-term repercussions would influence not only John’s future as a diplomat but ultimately the success of US trade in Europe and thus practical acceptance of America’s sovereignty.

  24

  Plato’s Beard

  JOHN HAD HEARD ABOUT RUSSIA’S BEARDED LADIES. HE ONCE SAW a painting proving their purported existence. But in the summer of 1810, he witnessed a bearded beauty with his own eyes. What the expatriate also discovered that night revealed more about the French than he ever expected to uncover in St. Petersburg.

  This patriotic diplomat began the hot summer with a cold determination against the French government. The latest reason? Despite Alexander’s request to free the sequestered Americans the previous year, the Danish government merely changed its tactics. The Danes issued a new ordinance encouraging private Danish ships to capture American ships. John couldn’t help believing that the French government was behind this piratical decision.

  “The conduct of France towards the United States has been, and continues to be, such that I have not thought it advisable . . . to cultivate the acquaintance of the French ambassador here,” he unabashedly confessed in a letter to the American consul to Hamburg.

  In similar correspondence to his father, he poured out his true worries, something diplomat Adams hid in public. Admiration for Napoleon seemed eerily apocalyptic.

  “I can only hope that among the mysterious dispensations of Providence is not . . . permitting a fifth part of the human race to prostrate themselves in adoration before the god Bonaparte.�
�� Idol worship of Napoleon continued to surpass logic. For example, how could the people of the Netherlands truly believe that they could keep their national independence with Napoleon’s brother as their king? Those not enamored were deceived. Many Europeans were convinced that Bonaparte’s conquering ways would end at the altar.

  As Adams wrote his father, nothing could be farther from the truth: “The nuptial torch is not formed to extinguish the fires of conquest.”

  Gone was the idea of preserving humanity’s God-given rights. Replacing it was order—tyranny disguised as reform. “The transition from infidelity to fanaticism is as easy and as natural as that from unbounded democracy to despotism, a transition of which France is exhibiting so glorious a demonstration.”

  John’s experiences reinforced his father’s prediction about France’s failed Revolution. “I believe nobody will now deny, that the time has come which you foretold, when nobody would believe you, that the very name of republicanism is more detested in France than that of monarchy ever was at the moment of its destruction,” John Quincy continued.

  Topping his mind were US trade and independence. If America went to war with England and lost, those ideals might be extinguished forever. Adams believed that Napoleon’s disdain for America’s form of government was a major reason for his decision to underhandedly encourage nations like Denmark to seize US trade ships.

  “This hatred of republics is not without its influence in producing the treatment which we experience from France, which will continue as long as we suffer the same sort of treatment from England.”

  No, he could not risk cultivating a friendship with Caulaincourt.