Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee

by Thomas J. Craughwell

  Adams was not charmed by Franklin’s diplomatic charade. He complained that Franklin’s “name was familiar to government and people. To foreign courtiers, nobility, clergy and philosophers, as well as plebeians, to such a degree there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a valet de chambre, coachman or footman, a lady’s chamber maid or a scullion in a kitchen … who did not consider him as a friend.… When they spoke of him, they seemed to think he was to restore the golden age.” Thanks to Adams’s grousing and griping, we have a marvelously detailed portrait of Franklin’s life in Paris. When not entertaining at home, Franklin dined out, returning in the small hours of the morning. As a result, he slept late, frustrating Adams’s desire to discuss diplomatic business before breakfast. The morning meal was barely concluded when the first callers appeared at Franklin’s door. Adams writes of a “crowd of carriages” rolling up to the house, bearing “philosophers, academicians and economists … but by far the greater part were women and children come to have the honor to see the great Franklin and to have the pleasure of telling stories about his simplicity, his balding head and scattering straight hairs.”

  Initially, Franklin brought Adams along to the dinner parties and salons at the homes of individuals who stood at the pinnacle of French society. There, amid the superb meals, the sparkling Champagne, and the even more sparkling wit, Franklin set about launching a subtle public relations campaign to make the newly formed United States of America a cause célèbre among the French elites. But Adams couldn’t see it. He detested these soirées with Franklin, dismissing them as “dissipations [that] were not the objects of my mission to France.”

  As the inventor of the lightning rod, Franklin was regarded by the French as a kind of demigod who had unlocked the secret of controlling nature’s power. It was just one more thing to gall Adams. But there were more to come. Writing in his diary on April 29, 1778, Adams recorded that he and Franklin had attended a gathering at the Academy of Sciences; also present that evening was Voltaire. The audience began to clamor for the two great men to be introduced to each other. Standing before the assembly, the gentlemen shook hands, but that was not enough. Someone shouted, “Let them embrace, in the French manner!” The crowd took up the cry, and so, as Adams describes it, “the two Aged Actors upon this great Theatre of Philosophy and frivolity then embraced each other by hugging one another in their Arms and kissing each other’s cheeks, and the tumult subsided.” Adams imagined that accounts of the scene would spread throughout France and across Europe, and he always described it in the same way: “How charming it was! Oh it was enchanting to see Solon and Sophocles embracing!”13 Even worse was Franklin’s conduct toward French women. It appears that he kissed almost every one he met—a form of greeting that was perfectly natural in France but made straight-laced Americans suspect the elderly Franklin of sexual dalliance on an impressive scale. Indeed, another American in Paris, Arthur Lee of Virginia, wrote to his brother Richard Henry Lee that Franklin had become a “wicked old man … [wallowing in a] corrupt hotbed of vice.”14

  Adams’s bitterness did not escape Jefferson’s notice. In a letter to James Madison, he wrote: “[Adams] hates Franklin, he hates Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English. To whom will he adhere?” Nor was Franklin oblivious to his colleague’s resentments. At one point, he claimed that Adams was “sometimes, and in some things, out of his senses.”

  Yet despite the clash of personalities, one thing remained unchanged: Adams and Franklin maintained a fundamental respect for each other as intelligent men striving to advance the interests of their country in a world hostile to the ideas of liberty and human rights.15 And, in spite of all the carping from his fellow commissioner, Franklin knew what he was doing. His charismatic approach to diplomacy secured for the politically shaky, cash-strapped United States $40 million in loans and outright gifts from the government of Louis XVI.

  Once in Paris, Franklin was the first person Jefferson called upon. Doing so required a thirty-minute carriage ride out to the suburbs to a lovely place called Passy, a collection of pretty villas overlooking the Seine and surrounded by the Bois de Boulogne. At Passy, Franklin was far from the dirt, noise, smells, and crowds of Paris but still close to Versailles, the center of French political power. The day the Jeffersons stepped into Franklin’s house, the statesman was seventy-eight years old. He suffered from bladder stones, a condition that became almost unbearable whenever he was compelled to make a carriage ride over the rough country roads and unevenly paved streets of Paris. And so Franklin spent most of his days at home, where he received a constant stream of visitors.

  Franklin’s residence, the Hôtel de Valentinois, was built early in the eighteenth century by the duke of Valentinois, who situated it upon a hill overlooking the Seine and the skyline of Paris. Although we know nothing about the appearance of its interior, we do know that the home had spacious terraced gardens planted with chestnut and fruit trees, flower beds, and fountains, the whole surrounded by eighteen acres of woods.16 Franklin added his own distinguishing mark to the structure by installing a lightning rod on the roof.

  If Franklin was fond of Jefferson, Jefferson genuinely revered Franklin. He once wrote that Franklin was “the greatest man and ornament of the age.” Of Franklin’s embassy to the French court, Jefferson wrote: “More respect and veneration attached to the character of Dr. Franklin in France than to that of any other person, foreign or native.”17

  Adams, too, preferred to live outside Paris. He had always been a firm believer in the benefits of fresh country air, an opinion confirmed in his own mind after he fell seriously ill, first in Amsterdam and then in Paris.18 He rented a house—the Hôtel de Ruhault—in Auteuil, which, like Passy, was a hilltop village overlooking the Seine and surrounded by the Bois de Boulogne. Adams was not a man who gave free rein to enthusiasm, but, on the day he moved into the house, he let himself go: “The house, the garden, the situation near the Bois de Boulogne, elevated above the river Seine and the low grounds, and distant from the putrid streets of Paris, is the best I could wish for.”

  Adams had traveled to France in 1778 with his eldest son, eleven-year-old John Quincy. Now, in 1784, as Jefferson arrived in Paris, Adams’s wife, Abigail, and their eldest daughter, nineteen-year-old Abigail (called Nabby by the family), were joining him at Auteuil. The presence of his wife and two of his children lifted Adams’s spirits, as revealed in a letter he wrote to Arthur Lee: “I feel more at home than I have ever done in Europe.” The Auteuil mansion featured either forty or fifty rooms (depending upon which source one consults), complete with a private theater. Parts of the residence were in a sad state, including the dilapidated theater, which would need considerable renovation before any plays could be staged there, if ever the Adamses found themselves in the mood to do so.

  For Abigail Adams, who had raised five children in a seven-room farmhouse in Massachusetts, the house at Auteuil was overwhelming, perhaps almost intimidating. The family occupied the second floor, where every room had at least one pair of French doors that opened onto the gardens and grounds. The walls of one octagonal chamber were covered, floor to ceiling, with enormous mirrors. Of all the rooms in the house, this one Abigail made a point of avoiding. In a letter to her niece Betsy Cranch, she said of it: “I do not like [the mirror room], for being rather clumsy, and by no means an elegant figure, I hate to have it repeated to me.”19

  Then there was the matter of domestic help. Adams’s salary was $9,000—a generous sum back in Massachusetts but entirely inadequate in Paris, where everything was expensive. The family could afford to hire only seven servants, which underscored to the diplomatic community the poverty of the newly independent United States, given that the ambassador from England had fifty servants and the ambassador from Spain, seventy-five.20 Nevertheless, the gardens and grounds delighted the family. Flowers flourished in large pots, and there were fruit trees, including orange trees (oranges were a rare delicacy in America). Even the broken fountain and the tumbled-d
own summerhouse charmed Abigail.

  In Paris, Jefferson became close friends with the Adamses, especially Abigail, who said that her newfound friend was “one of the choice ones of the earth.”21 As for Jefferson, ever the inveterate shopper, he introduced Abigail and Nabby to the finery of Paris. The Hermits of Mount Calvary, a religious order, supported themselves by making silk stockings; Jefferson recommended the product to the ladies, who were instantly delighted by his choice. After the Adamses left France for England, Abigail wrote often to Jefferson, sending him shopping lists of items unavailable there, such as certain types of dessert plates or the silk stockings that she and Nabby now could not live without.22

  * * *

  In the eighteenth century Southerners routinely referred to their enslaved servants and farmworkers as members of the family. In the case of James Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, the familial connection was literal rather than figurative. About 1761, John Wayles, a thrice-widowed lawyer and plantation owner who would eventually become Jefferson’s father-in-law, took Elizabeth Hemings as his concubine. Hemings was one of the house slaves at the Forest, the Wayles family’s plantation. She was about twenty-six years old when the affair with her master began; he was about forty-six. Over the next dozen years, they would have six children together, three boys and three girls. James, who was born in 1765, was Elizabeth and John’s second child.23 Wayles also had four white children, all girls; the eldest, Martha, became the wife of Thomas Jefferson in 1772.

  On the death of John Wayles in 1773, Jefferson inherited his father-in-law’s property, slaves, and considerable debts, which amounted to £4,000.24 Because Wayles had made no provision in his will for the emancipation of Elizabeth Hemings and his children borne by her, the enslaved family was transferred to Monticello. The six Hemings children were Martha Wayles’s half-siblings and, therefore, Jefferson’s in-laws, although that relationship was not recognized by law. To hold members of one’s own family as slaves may sound shocking, but such arrangements were common at the time.

  There may have been a family resemblance between Martha and the Hemings children as well. As Mary Boykin Chesnut, the renowned Civil War–era Southern diarist, wrote in 1861: “Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives & their concubines, & the Mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children & every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think.”25

  At the time of his father-in-law’s death, Jefferson owned fifty-two slaves. From Wayles he inherited another 135, making him the second largest slave owner in Virginia’s Albemarle County. For the rest of his life, at any given moment Jefferson owned about two hundred slaves. He was never an active slave trader; when he bought an enslaved person, it was usually to fulfill a need in his house or on one of his farms. He also sometimes bought slaves for compassionate reasons: to unite a husband and wife, for example (even though marriage between slaves was not recognized under Virginia law).26 His own precarious finances often required him to sell his slaves. Lucy Stanton, senior research historian at Monticello, has found that between 1784 and 1794, Jefferson sold or gave as gifts 161 enslaved members of his household.27

  Jefferson’s views on slavery were inconsistent. On one hand, he condemned the institution as an “abominable crime,” a “moral depravity,” a “hideous blot” that was an offense against natural law. On the other hand, he relied on enslaved labor all his life; indeed, when one of his slaves ran off, he advertised a reward for the man’s return. Unlike some other slave owners, such as George Washington, Jefferson did not emancipate his slaves in his will.28 He recognized his own ambivalence on the subject. On July 18, 1824, toward the end of his life, he wrote: “I am not apt to despair; yet I see not how we are to disengage ourselves from that deplorable entanglement, we have the wolf by the ears and feel the danger of either holding or letting him loose.”29

  That is how an enslaved member of Jefferson’s own extended family accompanied him to France. Once settled in Paris, Jefferson put his plans into action. After making inquiries, he apprenticed James Hemings to a restaurateur named Combeaux, who also operated a catering business. Jefferson paid Combeaux 150 francs to teach James the art of French cuisine. The specifics of the training are unknown, but based on similar arrangements at the time, we can assume that James spent the majority of the week working in Combeaux’s kitchen. (Because Hemings was also obligated to perform tasks for Jefferson, he probably did not work with the chef seven days a week.) The apprenticeship marked the beginning of a new life for James Hemings—one that would ultimately lead to his freedom.

  Chapter 2

  A FREE CITY

  James Hemings spoke French better than his master. He had no choice: as an apprentice in Combeaux’s kitchen, he was surrounded by men who communicated only in French. Perhaps the chef and a few members of his kitchen staff knew a word or two of English, but such limited vocabulary would not have been enough to instruct James in the basics of cooking. And so James would learn the language through immersion.

  He got off to a shaky start. In a letter sent to Elizabeth Hemings (James’s mother) back at Monticello, Jefferson wrote: “James is well. He has forgot how to speak English, and has not learnt to speak French.”1 Jefferson was being facetious, of course. In fact, James would become a fluent French speaker, just as Jefferson’s daughters would. As for Jefferson, although eventually he read the language fluently, he never spoke it well or learned to write it. To save himself from the embarrassment of mangling his speech among French ladies and gentlemen in his social circle, Jefferson sought out the company of Americans and visited salons where all the visitors spoke English in addition to their native tongues. As a result, America’s ambassador to France was never comfortable conversing in French, whereas his slave came to be perfectly at ease in the language.2

  Once the Jeffersons and James Hemings had located the correct Hôtel d’Orléans on the Left Bank, they spent several weeks in the establishment. One of Jefferson’s first purchases was eighteen dozen bottles of Bordeaux wine, which he stored in their rooms. He hired a valet de chambre as his personal servant and began looking about for a school for Patsy.3 Fortunately, he had a friend to advise him. Also living in Paris at the time was François-Jean de Beauvoir, the marquis de Chastellux. In 1779 Chastellux was one of three major generals under General Rochambeau who commanded the French troops sent by Louis XVI to America in support of the revolution. Chastellux was fluent in English, and during the winter months, when armies typically did not fight, he would travel around the colonies, calling upon some of the country’s most distinguished men: Samuel Adams, James Madison, and, of course, Thomas Jefferson.

  Chastellux visited Jefferson at Monticello and found himself enchanted by the beautiful house that Jefferson had designed for himself. He would later write: “Mr. Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the Fine Arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.” But Chastellux’s initial impression of his host was not so enthusiastic. “I found [Mr. Jefferson’s] first appearance serious, nay, even cold.” Jefferson’s reticence with the stranger did not last. “Before I had been two hours with him,” Chastellux wrote, “we were as intimate as if we had passed our whole lives together.” The two new friends sat up nights discussing architecture and literature. When Jefferson discovered Chastellux’s interest in geology, he organized an excursion to the Natural Bridge, one of Virginia’s most striking landmarks.4

  When Jefferson arrived in Paris, Chastellux was one of only two Frenchmen he knew (the other was the Marquis de Lafayette). It was Chastellux who suggested that Jefferson send Patsy to the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The Abbaye de Panthemont was one of the most selective schools in Paris, its student body restricted to the daughters of nobility or other distinguished families. As the child of an American diplomat, Patsy probably would not have b
een turned away. Nevertheless, Chastellux wrote a letter of recommendation to the abbess, Madame Béthisy de Mézières. Madame l’Abbesse, as she was called, was half Scottish, being descended on her mother’s side from the Sutton d’Oglethorpe family, who had supported Bonnie Prince Charlie in his attempt to claim the crown of England and Scotland. She had reigned over the abbey and the school since 1743.

  Patsy was enrolled at the Abbaye de Panthemont in 1785; at the time, about fifty or sixty girls were in residence. Also there at the same time as Patsy was Joséphine de Beauharnais, the future lover, wife, and empress of Napoleon Bonaparte;5 in addition to operating a school for girls, the nuns also offered rooms to aristocratic ladies who sought a quiet retreat from their troubles, whether the lack of a husband, the death of a husband, or the separation from a husband. The girls’ uniform was a crimson frock. They studied arithmetic, geography, and history as well as drawing, needlework, music, and dancing. Patsy learned to play the harpsichord from Claude Balbastre, the organist at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. She wrote to a friend in America that, upon arriving at the school, “I did not speak a word of French.” Her immersion among nuns and teachers and students who spoke only French soon corrected that problem. “Speaking as much as I could with them,” Patsy continued, “I learnt the language very soon.”6

  Although the nuns remained within the abbey’s walls, the girls were free to venture outside. Escorted by Jefferson’s growing number of female friends, including Madame de Lafayette, Patsy attended the opera and visited the gardens of Versailles. She was also invited to attend her father’s dinner parties. At her first invitation she wore her scarlet frock, which resulted in a note from her father instructing her to “make it a rule hereafter to come dressed otherwise than in your uniform.”