American Phoenix Read online

  Word of this American’s arrival traveled as quickly as the cook could serve soup. Countess Mengs remembered Louisa as the musical, French-fluent, intelligent wife of John Quincy Adams, the son of the former US president—whatever that meant to the countess’s European understanding of America.

  When Mengs realized her socialite friend was traveling alone, especially without her reserved, in-control husband, she immediately asked her to stay for a few days. She not only asked; she implored. Her demeanor suggested Louisa’s life depended on it, while her words masked her true concerns. She claimed she simply wanted to introduce her to friends at her house nearby.

  Though flattered, Louisa declined the kind offer. How could Mrs. Adams possibly stop to enjoy herself when her mission was so pressing? Didn’t her papers imply her travels were urgent? Weren’t these letters of introduction as glued to her person as her own hands? She had to get to Paris.

  What her papers didn’t reveal was how long it had been since she had taken a stroll with John Quincy by the river or heard him recite the most inspiring points of a sermon he had just read. Although she had dreaded the days when he would wake up with some new-fangled determination—such as scouring his floor-to-ceiling library of books to find the circumference of the earth—she now missed his calculations of trivia.

  She even longed for those endless summer days when he would pull out his apothecary scales and compare the weights of European coins to American ones. Back then his weights and measurements obsession seemed a terribly boring way to tinker with time.

  “Mr. Adams too often passed it [the evening] alone studying weights and measures practically that he might write a work on them,” she had complained back then. Now she would trade anything for the pleasure of his most annoying habits.

  Nearly a year had passed since their separation. Diligence, not entertainment, must guide each and every decision. How dare she even think of recreating while she traveled sans husband! What would people say? Worse, what would they whisper?

  “I thought it my duty to decline an invitation which would have been very pleasant and agreeable, the countess being a lady of great respectability, and superior attainments.”

  Rest, not recreate. Resume. Then it happened, or rather he happened.

  Though Adams didn’t know it at the time, his Eve left St. Petersburg on February 12, her fortieth birthday. While Louisa stopped in Mitau on her icy land journey around the Baltic Sea, John was in Paris—completely unaware of her whereabouts. He didn’t know if she had chosen to leave St. Petersburg to join him or not. He had yet to receive the letter she wrote him the morning of her departure.

  “I am this instant setting off,” she hurriedly explained, “and have only time to say that nothing can equal my impatience to see you. . . . I could not celebrate my birthday in a manner more delightful than in making the first step towards that meeting for which my soul pants.”

  He had asked her to conduct several business transactions in St. Petersburg, but the way she saw it, his demands were as realistic as flying to Paris in an air machine. Worried he would disapprove of her ability to sell furnishings and settle accounts, she added, “I hope that you will forgive all that is not exactly correspondent to your wishes and receive me with as much affection as fills my heart.”

  She had every reason to fret over his disapproval. The last time they moved, he had made every arrangement—including the one that changed her life forever—all without consulting her.

  Though she anticipated his desire to be reunited with her was mutual, after a nearly year long separation, she couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t be, either.

  John arrived in Paris on February 4, 1815, after living in Belgium, where he grew fat on countless three-hour dinners and “great relaxation of my customary exercise [walking].” His first observation was that no one examined his baggage as he crossed the bridge into Paris. No inspection was the surest sign that peace had, indeed, come to Europe. One thing had not changed.

  “The tendency to dissipation at Paris seems to be irresistible. There is a moral incapacity for industry and application,” he wrote in his diary, remembering when he lived there as a youth with his father and elsewhere in Europe as a young diplomat. “I am as ill guarded . . . as I was at the age of twenty.”

  The nearly forty-eight-year-old Adams would never forget traveling to France with his father years earlier, during the American Revolution. Born July 11, 1767, to John and Abigail Adams, he was not yet eleven years old when he first visited France in April 1778. His father had hoped the trip would be an invaluable education for his son. He was right. From reading his father’s French grammar books and attending an academy in Passy, young Johnny had learned French easily. He had taken to the language so quickly that he taught English to his father’s new European acquaintances.

  “The ambassador said he was astonished at my son’s knowledge; that he was a master of his own language, like a professor,” the senior Adams had boasted.

  By watching his father and Benjamin Franklin implore the French king and other European leaders to aid the United States in its quest to cast off royalty, John had learned the rules of diplomacy—the dos and especially the don’ts of the game.

  A more seasoned John Quincy Adams returned to Paris in February 1815. His sharply curved nose and high arched eyebrows, which he inherited from his mother, still made him look a bit like a bald eagle. No longer was he a youth with a full head of brown hair and his whole life ahead of him. Neither was he a man on a mission. He was navigating a transition with no solid assurance of where he would land. He both hoped and feared that a letter would soon arrive and forever change his destiny—and his family’s—for the better.

  While Louisa couldn’t waste a minute socializing in Mitau, John couldn’t stop chasing the muse of recreation in Paris. He didn’t know which was more irresistible: the museum, the opera, or the new judicial court.

  From his second-story chamber at the Hotel du Nord on the Rue de Richelieu, he could hear the clip-clopping of coaches along the cobblestones and the shouts of pedestrians walking the street below with someplace to go.

  Then he had an idea. He put on his dark overcoat and walking boots. He sought to conquer the bricks with his own feet and get some exercise. Perhaps he could still find it. Maybe his memory would lead him to the other hotel, the Hôtel de Valois, “the same house where I lodged with my father in 1778, April, the first time I ever was in Paris.” Maybe it would be more suitable for living in limbo and a better place to bring her.

  After crisscrossing the city, he found his way back to the Valois. His memory of an elegantly furnished hotel suitable for properly dressed gentlemen was suddenly replaced by the ragged reality of time. The Valois was “altogether in decay, and scarcely furnished at all; yet the price of the apartments is as high as at the best hotels.”

  He knew, too, what it once meant to be vibrant and flourishing only to fall into an abyss of unpopularity. Isn’t that how he had spent the past seven years since being booted from the US Senate in 1808? Isn’t that what life in his so-called exile in Europe had been all about?

  What he couldn’t see as he stared at the decaying hotel was the possibility of his legacy: the banishment of this Adams and his Eve had just become the nation’s salvation.

  While waiting for fresh horses at the Mitau hotel, Louisa could not escape the countess’s pleas to stay through a pretense to socialize. On top of this, Mrs. Adams came face-to-face with a mystery.

  “Immediately after my dinner was removed, the master of the house, after carefully shutting the doors, watchfully noting that no intruders were near, said he wished much to speak to me upon a matter which he considered of vital importance to me.”

  The countess sent the innkeeper to talk with her or, more accurately, to talk some sense into her.

  “I expressed my thanks . . . requested him to be seated and to inform me on what subject he had asked this interview.”

  She watched the man return to the d
oor and give it a solid push, making sure it was closed. Then he sat knee-knockingly close to her, increasing her anxiety to provocative proportions. What stranger would dare get so close to a lady?

  “I, however, assumed an air of great calmness. . . . He began by informing me that the last night a dreadful murder had been committed on the very road which I was about to take, and to urge me to wait until the next morning before I determined to proceed.”

  Murder! She knew crossing the frozen Russian tundra in winter would be a battle against nature’s worst weather, but she wasn’t prepared to battle the worst in man’s nature. She had anticipated below-freezing temperatures by bringing several fur coats and blankets to keep everyone warm as they endured the carriage’s clumsy clopping over pathetic paths from post to post. Expecting hours of fatigue, she had created a cozy bed for Charles in the front of the coach. Nonetheless, nothing could prepare her for this. The murder was proof of humanity’s insanity. No matter the generation, Cain never dies.

  “I told him very coolly and decidedly that the plan of my journey was fixed, and . . . I only intended to go four German miles [roughly eighteen English miles] farther that night, and was to start so early with two well-armed servants.”

  Nonetheless, the day was slipping away. Perhaps a morning ride would be safer than traveling at night on a road marked with fresh blood. After all she had experienced in St. Petersburg, she must move forward. Each mile put her farther away from her heartache, especially from the one she loved so very much, and closer to reunion.

  2

  Thief Inside

  JOHN PICKED UP HIS PEN. “AFTER INFORMING YOU BY MY LAST LETTER of my arrival in this city,” he wrote her, “and of the hotel where I had taken up my abode, I have suspended my communication to you.”

  He did not have a choice. Writing to Louisa again was as impractical as it was painful. If she had left as he hoped, then he did not need to write. Because they had been separated for ten months, he could not be sure of her choice or desire to see him.

  Paris was a place to recreate, to take one’s mind off all worries. He had already visited the National Museum many times, spending hours among its halls. Above all the magnificent sculptures and paintings, the Apollo and Venus de Milo attracted his attention. They “absorb the consideration of everything else; the eye of the enquirer begins and ends with them.”

  Though he attended the museum several times, he visited the theater more often. Tonight would be no different. He was looking forward to watching the female lead, an actress he had seen perform in Russia. “She has improved since I saw her at St. Petersburg,” he recorded in his diary.

  The ends of the plays were just as notable as the actresses and performances. To close the show, the orchestra dutifully struck up “Vive Henri IV,” France’s national song, which celebrated the first king from the Bourbon family, Henry IV, who took power and brought peace to France in the 1590s. Unlike the dramas before them, this royal anthem and tribute to their newly restored Bourbon-family monarch, Louis XVIII, received lukewarm receptions. The audience “applauded a little.”

  Paris may have been at peace again in 1815, but the people were clearly bored with their king.

  “I conceived I had nothing to apprehend, as the postilions must be in the habit of passing the road constantly, which was a very public one, and that I should reach the place of my destination by nine or ten o’clock that night.”

  Louisa watched the innkeeper shake his head grimly in disbelief at her stubbornness. He didn’t mean to alarm her. His voice softened as he spoke of his daughters, women he loved and wanted to protect. He was not a man to be feared or to force his way upon anyone. With tenderness he noted that she was alone. Suddenly he couldn’t handle it any longer. He must open her eyes to the true danger of her circumstances—a most intimate one.

  “He then informed me that the French servant who I had with me was well known in Mitau; that he was a soldier in Napoleon’s army and had remained in that city two years, that he was known to be a desperate villain of the very worst character, and that he did not consider my life safe with him if I suffered him to proceed with me.”

  The news was as surprising as Napoleon’s unquenchable thirst to conquer Europe. Louisa suspected as much about Baptiste. She had hired him and another servant, likely a relative, to travel with her. She did not refer to the other man by name in her memoirs, but noted that he moved at a slow, limping pace.

  At one point Louisa questioned her recollection of Baptiste’s name, writing: “Baptiste, I believe that was his name (but no matter).” Her Russian passport, dated January 28, 1815, documented her servants as Englebert and John Fulling. The apparent discrepancy can be explained by Louisa’s linguistic abilities. The Oxford English Dictionary defines fulling as an English word meaning “to baptize” or “to consecrate fully.” Because she spoke French fluently, she likely thought in French, which explains why she remembered the French name Baptiste instead of the English name of Fulling.

  She had also arranged for Madame Babet, a nurse who had worked thirty years for one of her best friends in St. Petersburg, to help care for Charles. Baptiste was to oversee day-to-day arrangements. As a woman traveling without a husband, brother, or father, Louisa needed the pretense of masculine protection that her servants gave her.

  Baptiste had suffered from Napoleon’s wanderlust. As with Madame Babet and the other servant, he seemed to want nothing more than to go home to his native country. Mrs. Adams, however, had recently begun to doubt his honesty. When they left St. Petersburg, Louisa, Charles, and Madame Babet rode inside the carriage, which required runners to glide over iced roads. Her servants endured in a kibitka, a canvas-covered wagon on skis.

  Before traveling to Mitau, they stopped for four days in Riga to fix a mechanical problem. While there, she discovered that all her provisions had frozen. Even her stashes of Madeira wine had become solid ice. Because of its alcohol content, wine freezes more slowly than water.

  Frozen wine was not her only problem. A thaw then took over the countryside. The iced roads suddenly turned to slush, forcing her to dispose of her ice-sliding kibitka. Louisa had never faced such problems. Then again, she had never traveled such a great distance under so many extreme conditions—at least, not by land and not without her husband as the leader of her entourage.

  The kibitka’s loss forced her servants to ride on the carriage’s backside, which made the vehicle even heavier and more costly. The drivers charged her a rate of a coach and six horses, not a coach of three, the Russian troika, or even four, the English model, as she preferred. Would John have been able to negotiate a better deal? Was she being taken advantage of because she was a woman? She fretted over the likelihood.

  “Here for the first time I had some reason to doubt the honesty of my servant [Baptiste],” she wrote about her stop in Riga, where she first began feeling insecure from within. “A silver cup presented . . . as a parting keepsake to my little boy, was taken from the carriage; and there was little doubt that he had made free with it.”

  John and Louisa were friends with many diplomats, including the Baron de Bussche, who gave Charles the cup. For years John’s propriety and fear of bribery forbade Louisa from accepting gifts from anyone. Easter eggs were the exception. From the peasants on the pavement to princesses at the palace, everyone gave and received Easter eggs in Russia. The custom of trading hard-boiled, glass, or porcelain eggs at Easter was so prevalent that Adams broke his no-gift rule only once a year.

  Louisa and Charles’s departure from St. Petersburg, not to mention her husband’s absence, finally gave her the freedom to do something she had long wanted to do: accept a gift that wasn’t an egg. Now that gift was gone.

  Baptiste had probably disposed of the silver cup by selling it when she wasn’t watching. No sooner had she discovered the theft than the governor of Riga appeared. He invited her party to stay at his home. She refused. Relax, not recreate. She must get to Paris. If she was lucky, she would m
ake the journey in forty days.

  Now the hotel manager before her in Mitau warned of a murder on the very road she was about to take and, perhaps worst of all, confirmed the truth. She was traveling with a thief.

  “At the same time he begged most earnestly that I would not dismiss him [Baptiste] at Mitau, for fear he, the servant, should suspect that I had received information there, and he might burn the house over his head.”

  “I told him that the man had behaved very well so far,” Louisa responded pretentiously. “That I had felt a mistrust of him and did not like him, but that the gentleman who had engaged him had entered into a bond that he should be taken to his own country, and that I was not to part with him unless he behaved improperly.”

  Without proof, she couldn’t charge Baptiste with robbery. Their contract was binding—absolute. She was obligated to take him to Paris in exchange for his service. So far he had adequately managed their arrangements. The other man was good and honest but timid, a contrast to Baptiste, who often took charge. At times she needed Baptiste’s aggressive, if slightly Napoleonic ways.

  The innkeeper said her situation was difficult. She shouldn’t even hint to Baptiste that she doubted his character. Appearing to place unlimited confidence in his services, she ought to rely on him in any emergency and welcome his advice. But if the opportunity came, she would be smart to part with him faster than a flintlock fowler could shoot a fox.

  The man apologized for delaying her. He begged her to keep their conversation quiet. Whispers wouldn’t be wise but would merely endanger both of them.

  “I promised a perfect silence . . . that I would willingly postpone my departure; but as the hour had arrived for that departure, and the carriage would be at the door directly, I was fearful that a sudden change of purpose would excite suspicion, and do more harm than good,” she said, promising to adopt his excellent advice.