The four Adamses and their two American servants reached Paris on August 13, stopping at the Hôtel d'York on the Left Bank, where the Peace Treaty had been signed. Jefferson and his daughter had already arrived in the city the week before.
While Adams conferred with Jefferson and Franklin, Abigail and Nabby toured the city, John Quincy serving as their guide and interpreter. Then, after several days, the family moved to the rented house at Auteuil, where they were to remain for no one knew how long.
In Paris there had been talk of Jefferson succeeding Franklin as minister to France, a prospect that Adams rejoiced in. Whether Adams would be appointed to the British Court, as was also expected, remained unresolved, and though it was a position he longed for, as a capstone to his diplomatic service, he could not say so outright, and imagined quite correctly that there was stiff opposition in Congress.
Yet Adams was pleased beyond measure. “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,” he recorded the day they moved in. It had been a long time since he had felt so well disposed. “I make a little America of my own family,” he wrote to Arthur Lee. “I feel more at home than I have ever done in Europe,” he told Cotton Tufts. He thought himself better off even than Franklin; besides, his rent was lower.
The house was enormous, three stories of trimmed limestone, and plainly in need of attention. It had once been the country villa of two extravagant, scandalous sisters, the Demoiselles Verrières—Marie and Claudine-Geneviève de Verrières. Depending on how one counted, there were forty or fifty rooms, including a small theater “gone to decay.” Abigail, accustomed to a cottage of seven rooms, was nonplussed. Weeks later she would still be finding rooms she had not seen.
Reception salon, dining room, and kitchen were on the first floor, as well as quarters for the servants. The family “apartments” were above, where every room had French doors looking over the garden. The mirrors alone were said to have cost 30,000 livres. One octagonal room on the second floor was paneled entirely with mirrors.
“Why, my dear,” wrote Abigail to her niece, Betsy Cranch, “you cannot turn yourself in it without being multiplied twenty times... [and] that I do not like, for being rather clumsy, and by no means an elegant figure, I hate to have it so repeated to me.”
The furnishings were sparse; there were no carpets. The whole place could do with a good scrubbing, she saw, and wondered how cold it might be in winter.
The garden, however, was “delightful,” very romantic in its neglect, and it was the garden she would come to love most. There were fully five acres with rows of orange trees, stone walks overhung with grapevines, circles and octagons of flowers in bloom, pots of flowers, a Chinese fence, a fish pond, a fountain that no longer worked, and a little summerhouse, beautiful in ruins.”
The weather, like the garden, enchanted her. The days and nights of late summer were ideal, “beautiful, soft, serene.” And as time passed, her affection for the place grew appreciably. She would rent furniture, purchase new table linen, china, and glassware, hire servants, acquire a songbird in a cage, and see the garden fountain restored to running order. She felt “so happy” at Auteuil, “so pleasingly situated.”
• • •
THE FRENCH AND THEIR WAYS were another matter, however. The shock experienced by John Adams on his first arrival in France was tepid compared to that of his wife.
From the morning of their landing at Calais, Abigail had been convinced that every coachman, porter, and servant was somehow trying to cheat her, an anxiety not helped by the fact that she understood nothing they said. Now the number of servants she was expected to employ and the division of labor insisted upon by them left her bewildered and exasperated. “One [servant] will not touch what belongs to the business of the other, though he or she has time enough to perform the whole,” she wrote, in an effort to explain the system to her sister Mary. The coachman would do nothing but attend the carriage and horses. The cook would only cook, never wash a dish. Then there was the maître d'hôtel whose “business is to purchase articles into the family and oversee that nobody cheats but himself.” Counting Esther Field and John Briesler, she eventually had eight in service, but that, she was told, was hardly what was expected.
She and John both worried about running into debt, given his salary from Congress of $9,000. While such a sum might be a great deal in Braintree, John wrote to Cotton Tufts, at Court it was but “a sprat in a whale's belly.”
“We spend no evenings abroad, make no suppers... avoid every expense that is not held indispensable,” Abigail reported to Mary.
The shock was not so much the exorbitant expense of public life in Europe, but that extravagance was taken as the measure of one's importance. “The inquiry is not whether a person is qualified for his office,” she wrote to Uncle Isaac Smith, “but how many domestics and horses does he keep.” The British ambassador had fifty servants, the Spanish ambassador, seventy-five.
Fashion ruled and fashion decreed that she and Nabby have their own hairdresser in residence, a young woman named Pauline, who, as a matter of pride, refused to dust or sweep. Both the sweeping and waxing of floors was reserved for a manservant called the frotteur who went tearing about from room to room with brushes strapped to his feet, “dancing here and there like a merry Andrew,” and to whom was also assigned the unenviable task of emptying the chamber pots. Why, with so much land available, there was no proper privy, Abigail could not understand.
Even her two servants from home, Esther and John, felt obliged to have their hair dressed, such was the ridicule they were subjected to by the other servants. “To be out of fashion is more criminal than to be seen in a state of nature, to which the Parisians are not averse.”
She thought Paris far from appealing, for all the splendor of its public buildings. And if she had not seen all of it, she had “smelt it.” Given its state of sanitation, the stench was more than she could bear. With new construction under way everywhere, the narrow streets were cluttered with piles of lumber and stone, great mounds of rubble. Everything looked filthy to her. Even the handsomest buildings were black with soot. The people themselves were the “dirtiest creatures” she had ever laid eyes on, and the number of prostitutes was appalling. That any nation would condone, let alone license, such traffic, she found vile, just as she found abhorrent the French practice of arranged marriages among the rich and titled of society.
“What idea, my dear madame, can you form of the manners of a nation, one city of which furnishes (blush oh, my sex, when I name it) 52,000 unmarried females so lost to a sense of honor and shame as publicly to enroll their names in a notary office for the most abandoned purposes and to commit iniquity with impunity,” she wrote in outrage to Mercy Warren. “Thousands of these miserable wretches perish annually with disease and poverty, whilst the most sacred of institutions is prostituted to unite titles and estates.”
On a visit later to a Paris orphanage run by Catholic Sisters of Charity, she was shown a large room with a hundred cribs and perhaps as many infants. It was a sight both pleasing and painful—pleasing because all was so admirably clean, and the nuns especially attentive and kind, but painful because of the numbers of abandoned babies, “numbers in the arms, great numbers asleep... several crying.” In an average year 6000 children were delivered to the orphanage, she was told by the head nun. Even as they talked, one was brought in that appeared to be three months old. In various parts of the city, it was explained, there were designated places with small boxes in which a baby could be “deposited.” In winter one child in three died of exposure.
Can we draw a veil over the guilty cause [Abigail wrote], or refrain from comparing a country grown old in debauchery and lewdness with the wise laws and institutions of one wherein marriage is considered as holy and honorable, wherein industry and sobriety enable parents to rear numerous offspring, and where th
e laws provide resource for illegitimacy by obliging the parents to maintenance, and if not to be obtained there, they become the charge of the town or parish where they are born?
The whole French way of life seemed devoted to little else but appearances and frivolity, everybody bent on a good time, going to the theater, to concerts, public shows and spectacles. She wondered when anyone ever did any work. In London she had seen streets swarming with people, but there they appeared to have business in mind. Here pleasure alone seemed to be the business of life and no one ever to tire of it. Not even on the Sabbath was there pause. Sundays were more like election days at home, as all of Paris “poured forth” into the Bois de Boulogne, where the woods resounded with “music and dancing, jollity and mirth of every kind.”
The few resident Americans she met, like the famously beautiful Anne Bingham of Philadelphia and the naval hero John Paul Jones, did not greatly impress her. Young Anne Bingham, who was married to the immensely wealthy William Bingham, was, Abigail agreed, “very handsome,” but “rather too much given to the foibles” of France. “Less money and more years may make her wiser,” Abigail wrote. And John Paul Jones was a decided disappointment. She had pictured him a “rough, stout, war-like Roman.” Instead, he was tiny, soft-spoken, and a favorite with the French ladies, whom he flattered excessively. “I should sooner think of wrapping him up in cotton wool and putting him into my pocket, than sending him to contend with cannon ball.”
But most memorable was her first encounter with a “great lady” of France. The occasion was a dinner given by Franklin at his house in Passy, shortly after the Adams family arrived. In recent years Franklin had become increasingly attached to the “sweet society” of the celebrated Madame Helvétius, whose own small estate was close by in Auteuil. Franklin had even proposed marriage to Madame Helvétius, who declined, saying they were past the age for romance. Yet she remained prominent in his life and always the center of attention at his social gatherings. Franklin told Abigail she was to meet one of the best women in the world, and Abigail, curious to see what so charmed “the good Doctor,” rode to Passy full of anticipation, only to be appalled by the woman from the moment she appeared.
She entered the room with a careless, jaunty air [Abigail began in a vivid sketch, in a letter to her niece, Lucy Cranch]. Upon seeing ladies who were strangers to her, she bawled out, “Ah, mon Dieu! where is Franklin? Why did you not tell me there were ladies here?” You must suppose her speaking all this in French. “How do I look?” said she, taking hold of a dressing chemise made of tiffany which she had on over a blue lutestring, and which looked as much upon the decay as her beauty, for she was once a handsome woman.
Her hair was fangled [done in the latest style]; over it she had a small straw hat, with a dirty half gauze handkerchief round it, and a bit of dirtier gauze than ever my maids wore was sewed on behind. She had a black gauze scarf thrown over her shoulders.
She ran out of the room. When she returned, the Doctor entered at one door, she at the other, upon which she ran forward to him, caught him by the hand, “Hélas, Franklin!” then gave him a double kiss, one upon each cheek, and another upon his forehead. When we went into the room to dine, she was placed between the Doctor and Mr. Adams. She carried on the chief conversation at dinner, frequently locking her hands in the Doctor's, and sometimes spreading her arms upon the backs of both gentlemen's chairs, then throwing her arm carelessly upon the Doctor's neck.
I should have been greatly astonished at this conduct, if the good Doctor had not told me that in this lady I should see a genuine Frenchwoman, wholly free of affectation or stiffness of behavior, and one of the best women in the world. For this I must take the Doctor's word, but I should have set her down for a very bad one, although 60 years of age and a widow. I own I was highly disgusted, and never wish for an acquaintance with any ladies of this cast.
After dinner she threw herself upon a settee, where she showed more than her feet. She had a little lap-dog who was, next to the Doctor, her favorite. This she kissed, and when he wet the floor, she wiped it up with her chemise.
To the Yankee matron from Braintree, the sloppy, ill-mannered, egotistical old woman seemed the very personification of the decadence and decay inherent in European society. Abigail hoped there might be other French ladies whose manners were more consistent with her own ideas of decency; otherwise she would wind up a recluse in France.
• • •
YET THESE WERE only early impressions, she conceded. “I have been here so little while that it would be improper for me to pass sentence, or form judgments of people,” she told Mercy Warren, implying that with time she might come to see things differently. And change—or at least soften—she did, and especially as she discovered the pleasures and glamour of the Paris theater.
Abigail had always loved to read plays, but with no theaters in Boston, she had never actually seen one performed on stage until arriving in London. Now she could go as often as she wished and in the French manner, with or without the company of her husband. She quickly became a devotee of both the new Comédie-Française and the Opera. As little as she understood the language, she loved the actors who were “beyond the reach of my pen.” The performances were far superior to what she had seen in London, the crowds considerably more polite. If only the cleanliness of the British could be joined with the civility of the French, she told Mercy, it would be a “most agreeable assemblage.”
For her sister, Elizabeth, Abigail described in loving detail the Comédie-Française, with its great Doric columns, its magnificent chandeliers, one of which, in the sky-blue theater itself, had two hundred candles ablaze.
Fancy, my dear Betsy, this house filled with 2,000 well dressed gentlemen and ladies!... Suppose some tragedy represented which requires the grandest scenery, and the most superb habits of kings and queens, the parts well performed, and the passions all excited, until you imagine yourself living at the very period.
One evening the four Adamses went by carriage to the Comédie-Française to see The Marriage of Figaro, then a sensation in Paris. The work of the dashing Beaumarchais—who had been an early supporter of the American Revolution and thickly in league with Silas Deane, shipping supplies to America—the play was a satire about the triumph of virtuous servants over their aristocratic employers. In the fifth act came the famous denunciation of his master by the valet, Figaro, that invariably brought an outburst of approval from the audience.
Because you are a great noble, you think you are a great genius! Nobility, a fortune, a rank, appointments to office: all this makes a man so proud! What did you do to earn all this? You took the trouble to get born—nothing more.
Some weeks later, when her own servants, Esther and Pauline, came home from a performance thrilled by what they had seen, Abigail was delighted.
The opera was more enthralling still, the dancing such as she had never imagined, “the highest degree of perfection.” At first, she was shocked, but not for long. As she wrote to sister Mary, “I have found my taste reconciling itself to habits, customs and fashions which at first disgusted me.
The dresses and beauty of the performers were enchanting, but no sooner did the dance commence that I felt my delicacy wounded, and I was shamed to be seen looking at them. Girls clothed in the thinnest silk and gauze, with their petticoats short, springing two feet from the floor, poising themselves in the air, with their feet flying, and as perfectly showing their garters and drawers, as though no petticoats had been worn, was a sight altogether new to me. Their motions are as light as air and as quick as lightning.
While the opera house was not as impressive a building as the French theater, it was more lavishly decorated, and the costumes on stage more extravagant. “And oh! the music, vocal and instrumental, it has a soft persuasive power and a dying, dying sound.”
She was changing in outlook, she knew. The more she saw of Paris and French society, the more entranced she was with the “performance” of French life, and espe
cially the women of fashion, most of whom, she was relieved to find, were nothing like Madame Helvetius. It was as if the whole of society were a stage. Life itself was a theatrical production and Frenchwomen, raised on theater, had achieved as perfect a command of the art as anyone actually on stage. Abigail could hardly take her eyes off them, studying their every expression and gesture, charmed by the sound of their voices and by their intelligence.
They are easy in their deportment, eloquent in their speech, their voices soft and musical, and their attitude pleasing. Habituated to frequent theaters from their earliest age, they became perfect mistresses of the art of insinuation and the powers of persuasion. Intelligence is communicated to every feature of the face, and to every limb of the body; so that it may be in truth said, every man of this nation is an actor, and every woman an actress.
However greatly she deplored the dictates of fashion, on principle, she was utterly fascinated by the dress of the French ladies, which she described as being like their manners, “light, airy, and genteel.” She had made clothes for herself and her family for years, and little about the design and exquisite workmanship of what passed before her now escaped her eye. The fashionable shape for women was that of the wasp, “very small at the bottom of the waist and very large round the shoulders,” she reported to a cousin at home, adding ruefully, “You and I, madam, must despair of being in the mode.”
With her limited French and limited means, she found her social circle inevitably limited as well. But of the Frenchwomen she came to know, by far the most engaging, and the one whose company she greatly preferred, was the “sprightly” young wife of the Marquis de Lafayette—Adrienne Franchise de Noailles—whose family, the Noailles, was among the wealthiest, most distinguished of France. In years past, after dining at their Paris mansion, Adams had written at length of all he had seen the gardens, walks, pictures, and furniture, “all in the highest style of magnificence,” and family portraits “ancient and numerous.” Adrienne was one of five daughters of Jean de Noailles, Duc d'Ayen, and Henriette d'Arguesseau, and to Adams they constituted the most “exemplary” family he had met since arriving in Paris. Adrienne, who was still in her twenties when she and Abigail met, had been married to Lafayette in 1774 when she was fourteen and he sixteen. In contrast to most Frenchwomen, and very like Abigail, she remained openly devoted to her husband and children. Importantly, she spoke English and despite her wealth and position dressed simply and disliked pretentious display quite as much as did Abigail. Lafayette, a hero in Paris no less than in America, and himself one of the richest men in France, had recently acquired a palatial house on the Rue de Bourbon, which he made a center of hospitality for Americans in Paris.
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