Chapter Six

Abigail in Paris

What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.

—Laurence Sterne,
A Sentimental Journey

AS GREATLY AS SHE WISHED it were not so, Abigail Adams was terrified of the sea. She who had held her ground against war, plague, and abject loneliness, who had faced one dread uncertainty after another through the worst of times, steadfastly, never flinching by all appearances, looked upon “hazarding” a voyage over the North Atlantic with nothing less than horror. The very thought, she told her husband, made a coward of her. It was not something she could change, he must understand, and as a measure of his love, he must come home to her with all possible speed. “I know not whether I shall believe myself how well you love me, unless I can prevail upon you to return.”

Her mind was much on mortality. The same September of the Paris Peace Treaty, her adored father, the Reverend William Smith, had died in the Weymouth parsonage where she had been born and raised. The last of her “parental props” had fallen; one of the strongest of her ties to home was “dissolved.” Her father had been among the reasons she had never felt free to leave for Europe. “I cannot consent to your going, child, whilst I live,” he had told her. Still, though free now, she could not bring herself to go.

In the years when John served in Congress, Pennsylvania had seemed “that far country.” Now her firstborn had seen Russia and returned to Europe on his own by way of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, as she knew from John's letters, though from the boy himself she had not had a line in two years. Her two youngest, Charles and Thomas, were away at Haverhill, boarding with her sister Elizabeth and the Reverend John Shaw, who was preparing them for college, Abigail having had a change of mind about John Shaw and his abilities. When she made the fifty-mile ride to Haverhill for a visit, it was the farthest from Braintree she had ever traveled.

Of her children, only Nabby remained at home, but at seventeen Nabby's life, too, was moving on. Fair-haired, pleasing in appearance, she was taller than her mother, more circumspect, less inclined to voice an opinion, a “fine majestic girl who has as much dignity as a princess,” in Abigail's description, though she wondered if Nabby was too reserved, too prudent.

She has stateliness in her manners which some misconstrue into pride and a haughtiness, but which rather results from too great reserve; she wants more affability, but she has prudence and discretion beyond her years. She is in her person tall, large, and majestic; Mamma's partiality allows her to be a good figure. Her sensibility is not yet which attracts whilst it is attracted. Her manners rather forbid all kinds of intimacy and awe whilst they command.

“Indeed, she is not like her Mamma,” Abigail confided to John at last. “Had not her Mamma at her age too much sensibility to be very prudent.”

A young lawyer named Royall Tyler had moved to town, boarding with the Cranches, and was showing interest in Nabby. Nor did he neglect to shower attention on Abigail, who thought highly of him. The son of a wealthy father, valedictorian of his class at Harvard, Tyler was handsome, witty, and well read. “If he is steady he will shine in his profession,” she wrote. “His disposition appears extremely amiable.” She seemed nearly as charmed by him as was Nabby.

But there was gossip of “dissipation” in the young man's past—that he had fathered an illegitimate child by a housemaid at Harvard and had, besides, squandered his inheritance. Abigail began having second thoughts, and wrote at length on the matter to her distant husband. A “growing attachment” between the two young people was plain to see. Tyler was spending more and more evenings by their fire, she reported. What should she do? “What ought I to say? I feel a powerful pleader within my own heart and well recollect the love I bore to the object of my early affections to forbid him to have hope.” She wondered if perhaps a tender passion might be “just the thing for Nabby,” to bring her out of herself.

Earlier, in a long, affectionate letter to his daughter, John had offered memorable advice on choosing a husband that, in sum, expressed what he valued most in a man and what he so struggled to be himself so much of his life:

Daughter! Get you an honest man for a husband, and keep him honest. No matter whether he is rich, provided he be independent. Regard the honor and moral character of the man more than all other circumstances. Think of no other greatness but that of the soul, no other riches but those of the heart. An honest, sensible, humane man, above all the littleness of vanity and extravagances of imagination, laboring to do good rather than be rich, to be useful rather than make a show, living in modest simplicity clearly within his means and free from debts and obligations, is really the most respectable man in society, makes himself and all about him most happy.

On the matter of Royall Tyler he had shown little patience. “I don't like the subject at all,” he told Abigail. The girl was too young for such thoughts. Nor did he like Tyler's method of “courting mothers.” Abigail and Tyler both had “advanced too fast, and I should advise both to retreat.

I don't like your word “dissipation” at all. I don't know what it means.... My child is a model, as you represent her and as I know her, and is not to be the prize, I hope, of any reformed rake... In the name of all that is tender don't criticize your daughter for those qualities which are her greatest glory, her reserve and her prudence.

By the autumn of 1783, the romance had been suspended, though as Abigail reported, the young man's “attachment” had not lessened. As for Nabby, she would do nothing without her father's approval. It was another reason why John was needed at home, to appraise the situation for himself.

Abigail had a melancholy sense of life slipping away before she and John had had a chance to enjoy it. She had turned thirty-nine; the face in the mirror was a young woman no longer. And where, she asked in one especially plaintive letter, was that young “untitled” John Adams she had fallen in love with.

I recollect the untitled man to whom I gave my heart and in the agony of recollection, when time and distance present themselves together, wish he had never been any other. Who shall give me back my time? Who shall compensate to me those years I cannot recall? How dearly have I paid for a titled husband.

Hearing he might be appointed ambassador to the British Court, she begged him to refuse. She had no desire to live in England, no wish for the “parade and nonsense” of a public role. She was too inclined to wear her heart on her countenance, she reminded him. “I am sure I would make an awkward figure. And then it would mortify my pride if I should be thought to disgrace you.” Her health was poor. She tired easily and suffered from headaches. “Neither of us appear built for duration,” she wrote. “Would to heaven the few remaining days allotted to us might be enjoyed together.”

His letters from Paris, written in September, pressed her to sail as soon as possible. Congress had appointed him to a new commission to negotiate a commercial treaty with Britain. She must come. She could sail for London, Amsterdam, or any port in France. The moment he heard of her arrival, he would fly to her—even by balloon if such travel were perfected in time, he added lightheartedly.

But it was only on hearing that he had suffered another serious illness that she changed her mind and resolved to go to him. Except for her marriage itself, it was the most important decision she had ever had to make.

A fever like that at Amsterdam had laid him low, she read in a letter written October 14, one of the last she was to receive before Boston's harbor was closed by winter ice. He was leaving for London for his health and taking John Quincy with him. She must come soon. Concerning the courtship, the “family affair” on her mind, that could be managed quite well, Adams wrote. “The lady comes to Europe with you. If the parties preserve their regard until they meet again and continue to behave as they ought, they will still be young enough.”

She began making plans, though not without dire apprehensions:

You invite me to you. You call me to follow you. The most earnest wish of my soul is to be with you—but you can scarcely form an idea of the conflict in my mind. It appears to me such an enterprise, the ocean so formidable, the quitting of my habitation and my country, leaving my children, my friends, with the idea that perhaps I may never see them again, without my husband to console and comfort me under these apprehensions—indeed, my dear friend, there are hours when I feel unequal to the trial.

In January, after further consideration, John wrote again to say that if she thought it inadvisable to come to Europe, he would come to her. As for Nabby, he continued, “I can scarcely think it possible for me to disapprove of her final judgment formed with deliberation upon anything which so deeply concerns her whole happiness.”

Then, having looked into the young man's background and reputation for himself, as much as that was possible at such a distance, Adams sent another letter, this to Tyler himself. “Sir, you and the young lady have my consent to arrange your plans according to your own judgment,” Adams wrote, “and I pray God to bless and prosper you both whether together or asunder.”

But neither letter would arrive in time.

• • •

SEEING TO THE NECESSARY ARRANGEMENTS kept Abigail occupied well into spring. As John had advised, she and Nabby were to be accompanied by two servants, Esther Field and John Briesler, both of Braintree. Uncle Isaac Smith, the Boston merchant, was to look into proper passage, while another uncle, Dr. Cotton Tufts of Weymouth, who had been advising Abigail on land investments, was to manage the family's financial affairs in her absence.

The farm was leased. But the house and all their possessions Abigail decided to leave in the care of a former slave of her father's named Phoebe, who had been freed by his will and was newly married to a free black man, William Abdee. “As there was no settled minister in Weymouth,” Abigail told John, “I gave them the liberty of celebrating their nuptials here, which they did much to their satisfaction.” That the couple would remain in her house in her absence, however long that might be, gave her particular peace of mind. “I have no doubt of their care and faithfulness, and prefer them to any other family.”

In characteristic fashion she specified exactly how things were to be. “They are during the present year to have the use of the garden east of the house and that part of the great garden next to the road [and] all the fruit which grows in the garden,” she instructed Cotton Tufts.

Phoebe is to be allowed a pint of milk a day... I give her also a pig seven weeks old, 3 pounds [of] hog's lard, and what salt beef there is in the house.... The house and furniture are to be taken care of by opening and airing, rubbing, and cleaning it... They are to be allowed use of the team in the fall to bring up a load of sea weed.... The library is to be under the care of Mr. Cranch. No books to be lent out unless to him and Mr. Tyler... In November you will be so good as to give on my account the sum of 2 dollars to widow Abigail Field, 2 dollars to the widow Sarah Owen, who lives in the same house with her sister Field, 1 dollar to Mrs. Fuller and 1 dollar to the widow Mary Howard and 1 dollar to the wife of John Hayden, who is an aged woman and one of my pensioners—1 dollar to the widow Mary Green.

By the end of May, all was arranged. She had passage to England on the merchant ship Active, which was expected to sail within a few weeks. She had hoped to embark with friends. As it was, she knew none of the other passengers or the captain. She would not be sailing in winter, nor in the midst of war. Still, it was a venture that she had once thought nothing could ever tempt her to undertake. “But let no person say what they would or would not do, since we are not judges for ourselves until circumstances call us to act,” she wrote to John on May 25, in her last letter before leaving.

Day by day, she had looked for some word from him, but there was none. “My thoughts are fixed, my latest wish depends on thee, guide, guardian, husband, lover, friend,” she wrote, borrowing from one of her poets.

Abigail said her farewells in her front parlor on the morning of June 18, the house filled with neighbors, “not of unmeaning complimenters,” she wrote, “but the honest yeomanry, their wives and daughters like a funeral procession, all come to wish me well and to pray for a speedy return.” She had tried to prepare for the moment. “Knowing I had to act my little part alone, I had possessed myself with calmness, but this was too much for me.” She and everyone around her were weeping as she shook hands one by one.

In Boston, at Isaac Smith's house the following day, Thomas Jefferson appeared out of the blue, to introduce himself and say that he, too, was soon to sail with his daughter, Martha, and a young mulatto slave, James Hemings. He had been appointed by Congress to join the commissioners, Franklin and Adams, in Paris. Thinking it important that he know more of the commercial interests of New England, he had been making a quick tour of Connecticut and Rhode Island, and had only just arrived in Boston. What Abigail's first impressions of Jefferson were during this encounter, or what he thought of her, neither recorded.

Jefferson intended to depart from New York in July and urged her to go with him. But her plans were made, her passage paid for. “I thanked him for his politeness,” she reported to John, “but having taken my measures, I was determined to abide by them.”

Like Abigail, Jefferson had never been to sea. As it turned out, he would sail from Boston after all, and only weeks later, crossing under sunny skies, the sea, as his daughter said, as calm as a river.

• • •

ABIGAIL SAILED on June 20, 1784. At age thirty-nine, having never been away from either her home or those of close relatives for more than a night or two in all her life, she, Nabby, their two servants, and a cow went on board the Active at Rowe's Wharf, and with a “fine wind” were quickly under way.

Among the few other passengers, as Abigail recorded, were a Colonel Norton from Martha's Vineyard, a Dr. Clark, a Mr. Foster, a Mr. Spear, a “haughty Scotchman” named Green, and one other woman whose name happened also to be Adams. No sooner had the ship passed the Boston lighthouse into rougher water than they were all horribly seasick. And so it was to be for days, everyone tossed about in cramped, “excessive disagreeable” quarters together.

“We crawled upon [the] deck whenever we were able, but it was so cold and damp that we could not remain long,” Abigail wrote. The ship was filthy and carrying a cargo of whale oil and potash. With every roll of the waves the whale oil leaked, the potash “smoked and fermented,” contributing further to the “flavor” below.

The staterooms for the women comprised two tiny, airless cabins opening onto the main cabin where meals were served and the men slept. Nabby and the other Mrs. Adams were in one cabin, while Abigail and Esther Field shared the other. At night, to keep from suffocating, they had to leave the doors open onto the main cabin. “We can only live with our door shut whilst we dress and undress,” Abigail wrote in a journal she began for her sister Mary Cranch.

Necessity has no law, but what should I have thought on shore to have layed myself down to sleep in common with a half dozen gentlemen. We have curtains it is true, and we only partly undress... but we have the satisfaction of falling in with a set of well behaved, decent gentlemen.

In a storm off the Grand Banks, with bottles and plates crashing to pieces all about them, the women had to be held fast in their chairs, “as some gentleman sat by us with his arm fastened in ours and his feet braced against a table or chair that was lashed down.”

Afterward, the sailors assured her it had been only a breeze. Yet the hard rocking of the ship had so badly injured her cow that the animal had to be killed and cast overboard.

In the unrelieved dampness below decks Abigail suffered severely from rheumatism. The food was inedible. The cook she described as a “lazy, dirty Negro with no more knowledge of his business than a savage.” But with a favorable turn in the weather, finding she could get about, her usual spirit returned, and very like John Adams on board the Boston, she proceeded to “make a bustle,” in her expression. “And as I found I might reign mistress on board without any offense, I soon exerted my authority with scrapers, mops, brushes, infusions of vinegar, etc., and in a few hours you would have thought yourself in a different ship.”

She “took up the direction of our cabin,” as she wrote in another account for her sister Elizabeth, “taught the cook to dress his victuals, and have made several puddings with my own hands.” When she mastered the names of all the masts and sails, the captain said he was sure she could take over at the helm as well.

Unlike John, she loved watching the sea. Wrapped in an old camblet cloak, she spent hours on deck, her soul filled with feelings of the sublime. After a night of brilliant phosphorescence in the water, a phenomenon she had longed to witness, she wrote in ecstasy of a “blazing ocean” as far as she could see. “ ‘Great and marvelous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty,’ ” she recorded reverently.

With Nabby she passed the time in the main cabin reading, writing, chatting, or playing cards with the other passengers, whose company she enjoyed. The doctor, John Clark, her favorite, was consistently cheerful, while Mr. Spear's “drollery” kept everyone in high spirits. From a book she was reading on medicine, she copied a passage about association with cheerful people being good for the health, and speculated whether her husband might not benefit from a little unbending of the mind.

There was only one of the group whom they would all have been happy to do without, the “haughty Scotchman,” Mr. Green, who harped incessantly on the importance of rank and social position and who himself, Abigail concluded, had neither. He paid attention to her only because she was the wife of John Adams, she saw with distaste. “I know his politeness to me is not personally upon my own account, but because of my connection which gives me importance sufficient to entitle me to his notice.

He is always inquiring who was such [and such] a general? I have felt a disposition to quarrel with him several times, but have restrained myself, and only observed mildly that merit, not titles gave a man preeminence in our country, that I did not doubt it was a mortifying circumstance to the British nobility to find themselves so often conquered by mechanics and mere husbandmen—but that we esteemed it our glory to draw characters not only into the field, but into the senate, and believed no one would deny but what they had shone in both. All our passengers enjoyed this conversation.

One of the crew came to her with a story he felt he must tell her. He had been taken prisoner during the war and held in a jail in England. When he and several others escaped to Holland, the only help they were able to get was from John Adams, who gave them money from his own pocket.

What was ahead for her, she pondered in a diary she kept for herself only. Where would she be living? “No matter where,” she wrote, “so that it only be in the arms of my dearest, best of friends. I hardly dare trust my imagination or anticipate the day. Cruel sleep how you have tormented me.”

When, after a month at sea and the voyage nearly over, the ship lay becalmed, she found the wait intolerable. Motion, she decided, was the most desirable state. “Man was made for action... I am quite out of conceit with calm.”

Heading up the English Channel, the ship was caught in gale winds and for three days there was little sleep for anyone. At last, orders were given to drop anchor in the Downs, the roadstead of the Channel, within sight of the little town of Deal. The passengers were lowered over the side into an open pilot boat and in squally rain and the roar of heaving waves, with everyone soaked to the skin, they made for shore.

We set off from the vessel now mounting upon the top of a wave as high as a steeple [Abigail would write], and then so low that the boat was not to be seen. I could keep myself up no other way than as one of the gentlemen stood braced up against the boat, fast hold of me and I with both arms around him. The other ladies were held in the same manner whilst every wave gave us a broadside.

Then with a sudden rush and a sound like thunder, an immense wave swept the boat broadside high up onto the beach. And thus it was, on Tuesday, July 20, 1784, that Abigail and Nabby were “safely landed upon the British coast.”

• • •

UNDER WAY BY POST CHAISE the next morning, they traveled hill and dale to Canterbury, then Chatham, then on to London, seventy-two miles all in a day. Beyond Chatham, they rolled with all possible speed to pass before dark the Black Heath, dreaded for its lurking highwaymen. Fear of the road, the threat of robbery or worse at the hands of highwaymen, was something foreign to Americans. At home it was not uncommon even for women to travel alone feeling perfectly safe. “Every place we passed, and every post chaise we met were crying out a robbery,” Abigail later recounted. “The robber was pursued and taken in about two miles, and we saw the poor wretch, ghastly and horrible, brought along on foot.” She judged him to be no more than twenty years old. Hearing that “the lad” was certain “to swing,” she shuddered. “Though every robber may deserve death, yet to exult over the wretched is what our country is not accustomed to. Long may it be free of such villainies and long may it preserve a commiseration for the wretched.”

Though a “monstrous great” city, London struck Abigail as more pleasant than ever she imagined. There was even sunshine, and the small, elegant Adelphi Hotel, on a narrow street just off the Strand, near the Thames, was “as quiet as at any place in Boston.” That John and John Quincy had stayed there during their visit to London gave it further appeal.

She immediately dispatched a letter to John at The Hague reporting her arrival and her extreme desire to see him. “Heaven give us a happy meeting,” she wrote.

Adams replied at once. Her letter had made him “the happiest man on earth,” he said. “I am twenty years younger than I was yesterday.” Because of the press of business, he was unable to “fly” to her just yet, but John Quincy was proceeding at once.

Hearing that John, while in London the previous fall, had had a full-length portrait done by Copley, and that the painting was on view at the artist's studio in Haymarket, she hurried off to see it. Adams, in court dress of brown velvet, stood holding a scroll in one hand—his memorial to the Dutch Republic, perhaps, or the Treaty of Paris—while with the other hand he pointed to a map of America spread on a table. Beside the table, a globe figured prominently. He was the picture of a statesman—firm of stance, his expression one of grave resolve. He wore lace at his sleeve and a gold-handled sword. If he looked a little older and stouter than when Abigail had last seen him, she thought it “a very good likeness ... a most beautiful picture.” She was delighted.

A steady stream of visitors left her little time to herself. They came every day, Americans in London who wished to pay their respects, including a number of Loyalists. She was told how young she looked, offered assistance, invited to tea. When not receiving visitors, she and Nabby went sightseeing (to Westminster Abbey, the British Museum) or shopping for new clothes, but astounded by the prices, they bought little. She was surprised at how familiar the faces of the English looked, so like Americans, that it was as if she had seen them before. “The London ladies,” she also noted, “walk a vast deal and very fast.”

On Friday, July 30, a servant came “puffing” up the stairs at the hotel to announce, “Young Mr. Adams.” When John Quincy entered, Abigail hardly knew him. As tall as his father, he looked older than seventeen—a man nearly. The resemblance to his father was striking. Seeing him with Nabby made her feel very much the matron, she confided to her sister Mary, but “were I not their mother, I would say a likelier pair you will seldom see in a summer's day.”

Nabby judged her brother a “sober lad,” but one she was sure she would like once they were reacquainted. To a cousin at home John Quincy wrote, quite properly, “You can imagine what an addition has been made to my happiness by the arrival of a kind and tender mother, and a sister who fulfills my most sanguine expectations.”

From The Hague, John Adams promised to be with them in a matter of days, but warned that there could be no lingering in London. He must join his colleagues in Paris.

• • •

ON THE MORNING OF SATURDAY, August 7, Nabby had been out for a walk. When she returned, she noticed a man's hat on the table with two books in it.

Everything around appeared altered, without my knowing in what particular [she wrote that night in her diary]. I went into my room, the things were moved; I looked around.... “Why are these things moved?”—All [this] in a breath to Esther....

“Why is all this appearance of strangeness? Whose hat is that in the other room?” ... “Tis my father's!” I said, “Where is he?”

“In the room above.”

Up I flew, and to his chamber, where he was lying down, and received me with all the tenderness of an affectionate parent after so long an absence. Sure I am, I never felt more agitation of spirits in my life; it will not do to describe.

Abigail's only reference to the reunion with John was in passing in a letter to Mary Cranch: “You know my dear sister that poets and painters wisely draw a veil over those scenes which surpass the pen of one or the pencil of the other; we were indeed a very happy family once more met together after a separation of four years.”

Early the following day they were all off for Paris.

• • •

THE JOURNEY WAS MADE in record time. They went by fast coach from London to the Channel, and by boat to Calais, landing on the shores of France at dawn the next morning, then sped on by coach-and-six. If Abigail felt still, as on shipboard, that motion was the preferred state, she must have been ecstatic.

The whole route from Calais to Paris, she and Nabby felt they were riding through scenes from a favorite novel, Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey. There were all kinds of travelers, Sterne had written—inquisitive travelers, idle travelers, vain travelers—but the true value of travel was not in strenuous sight-seeing. It was in opening one's heart to feeling.

Adams had been away from Paris for nearly a year. In an effort to regain his strength after the illness that struck him down in the late summer of 1783, he had moved to a large house with a garden on the outskirts of the city, just beyond Passy in the still-rural village of Auteuil.

Long a believer in the therapeutic benefits of fresh air and exercise, he had become still more adamant on the subject during his years in Europe. If the dank atmosphere of Amsterdam had been the cause of his first terrible collapse, so the noisome air of Paris had laid him low the second time.

Like Passy, Auteuil was set on an airy hill above the Seine, and adjoined the beautiful Bois de Boulogne, where he could take his daily walks or ride horseback. But when his American doctor, James Jay, the brother of John Jay, had suggested a sojourn in England, he had gone off to London with John Quincy and later to Bath, to take the waters, an experience Adams had found little to his liking and that was cut short by a summons to return to Holland to secure still another desperately needed loan.

Adams again succeeded with the Dutch bankers, but only after one of the most horrendous episodes in all his earthly pilgrimage. Crossing a wintry North Sea, he and John Quincy had been caught in a storm. Landing on a desolate Dutch island, they had had to press on the rest of the way by foot and iceboat. “The weather was cold, we were all frequently wet,” he wrote. “I was chilled to the heart, and looked I suppose, as I felt, like a withered old worn out carcass. Our polite skipper frequently eyed me and said he pitied the old man.” Adams, by then forty-eight, felt that during the ordeal he had left one stage of life and entered another.

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 the 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 especially 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.

“You would have supposed I had been some long absent friend who she dearly loved,” Abigail wrote to Mary Cranch of the greeting she had received the day of her first call on Madame Lafayette, and for the rest of her stay she would never fail to enjoy the young woman's company. “She is a good and amiable lady, exceedingly fond of her children... passionately attached to her husband!!! A French lady and fond of her husband!!!” How aware Abigail may have been of the husband's frequent infidelities is not known.

Nabby, who felt she, too, had found a compatible soul in Madame Lafayette, began to see sides to French life that her own country might take lessons from. “I have often complained of a stiffness and reserve in our circles in America that was disagreeable,” wrote the daughter whose mother worried that she was too stiff and reserved. “A little French ease adopted would be an improvement.”

• • •

HOW WERE HER TWO “dear lads” at home, Abigail asked in a letter to Elizabeth Shaw. “I have got their profiles [silhouettes] stuck up which I look at every morning with pleasure and sometimes speak to as I pass, telling Charles to hold up his head.”

But in time came letters from sisters Elizabeth and Mary both, assuring her that all was well at home, the boys well behaved and enjoying perfect health. Braintree had become a dull place without her, wrote Mary, who faithfully reported all that Abigail would wish to know about her house, farm, the doings of the town—who had been married, who had been born in her absence, who had taken ill, and who had died—and the health of John's mother, who at seventy-five still walked to meeting each Sunday. Her house, Abigail was told, was just as she would wish. “Phoebe keeps it in perfect order. It is swept and everything that wants it, rubbed once a week.” Her every letter was treasured and read aloud to the delight of all. When Mary called on John's mother, to say she had come to read Abigail's letters to her, the old lady replied, “Aya, I had rather hear that she is coming home.”

Abigail was to have no worries over her boys, wrote Elizabeth. “I shall always take unspeakable pleasure in serving them.” The Reverend John Shaw reported the progress being made under his tutelage and offered a benediction for John Adams: “May Heaven reward him for the sacrifices he has made, and for the extensive good he has done to his country.”

It still took two to three months for letters to cross the ocean, sometimes longer, but the three sisters kept up their correspondence without cease. In her letters to Mary Cranch, Abigail was more inclined to share the details of her life and her innermost feelings, while with sister Elizabeth—and perhaps because the Reverend Shaw, too, would be reading what she wrote—she was often moved to evoke the creed they had been raised on in the Weymouth parsonage. “I am rejoiced to find my sons have been blessed with so large a share of health since my absence,” she told Elizabeth.

If they are wise they will improve... the bloom of their health in acquiring such a fund of learning and knowledge as may render them useful to themselves, and beneficial to society, the great purpose for which they were sent into the world... To be good, and do good, is the whole duty of man comprised in a few words.

“I wish I could give you some idea of the French ladies,” Nabby wrote to Elizabeth another time. “But it is impossible to do it by letter, I should absolutely be ashamed to write what I must if I tell you truths. There is not a subject in nature that they will not talk upon... I sometimes think myself fortunate in not understanding the language.”

• • •

FOR ABIGAIL AND JOHN it was the long-dreamed-of chance to enjoy life together again, as husband and wife in a world at peace, and removed from the contentiousness and stress of politics at home, that made the time in France an interlude such as they had never known. No more wars and no more separations became their common creed. With Nabby and John full-grown and the best of companions, they could all four come and go together, do so much that had never been possible before, delighting in each other's company, indeed preferring it.

To compound the pleasure and stimulation of the new life, there was the bonus of Jefferson and the flourishing of a friendship that under normal circumstances at home would most likely never have happened. The vast differences between Jefferson and Adams, in nature and outlook, were as great as ever; and much had happened in Jefferson's life since 1776 to change him. But brought together as they were in Paris, in just these years between one revolution and another, none of them knowing what was over the horizon for France or their own country, or for any of them individually, the bonds that grew were exceptional. None of them would think of Paris ever again without thoughts of the other.

In addition to the time he spent working with Adams, Jefferson dined at Auteuil repeatedly, almost from the day the family moved in, and they in turn with him in Paris, once he was settled in a rented house in what was called the Cul-de-Sac Taitbout, near the Opera. John Quincy, with Jefferson's encouragement, came to regard Jefferson's quarters as his own private refuge when in the city, and struck up friendships with Jefferson's two young aides, Colonel David Humphreys and William Short. The interest Jefferson showed in John Quincy pleased the young man exceedingly and was not lost on his parents. “He appeared to me as much your boy as mine,” Adams would remind Jefferson fondly in later years. “Dined at Mr. Jefferson's” became a familiar entry in John Quincy's diary. “In afternoon, went... to Paris, Mr. Jefferson's.” “Spent evening with Mr. Jefferson, whom I love to be with.”

One afternoon in September the Adams family, Jefferson, and “eight or ten thousand” others attended one of the celebrated Paris spectacles of the time, a balloon ascension from the Tuileries Gardens. “Came home and found Mr. Jefferson again,” Nabby would record another day. “He is an agreeable man.”

When Arthur Lee wrote to tell John Adams that Jefferson's supposed genius was in fact mediocre, his affectation great, his vanity greater, and warned Adams to judge carefully how much he confided in Jefferson, Adams would have none of it, replying, “My new partner is an old friend... whose character I studied nine or ten years ago, and which I do not perceive to be altered... I am very happy with him.”

For Adams so much had changed about the atmosphere in which he lived and worked that it was as if Paris had become an entirely different place, and he, a different man. There were none of the intense pressures and uncertainties of his previous years in Europe. With his family about him, with John Quincy serving as his secretary, he was perfectly at ease, never lonely. “If you and your daughter were with me,” he had once written to Abigail from Paris, “I could keep up my spirits.” And he was as good as his word: his pleasure in her company was palpable to all. “He professes himself so much happier having his family with him, that I feel amply gratified in having ventured across the ocean,” Abigail wrote to her sister Elizabeth. Nothing, it seems, upset him. Not even Franklin bothered him anymore. The old man had become too afflicted with age and the agonies of his ailments, “too much an object of compassion, to be one of resentment,” Adams noted. And the pleasure of working with Jefferson stood in such vivid contrast to the ill will and dark suspicions Adams had had to contend with when dealing with Arthur Lee. As Abigail would confide to Jefferson, there had seldom been anyone in her husband's life with whom he could associate with such “perfect freedom and unreserve,” and this meant the world to her. Jefferson, she wrote, was “one of the choice ones of the earth.”

She was charmed by his perfect manners, his manifold interests and breadth of reading, and, though she did not say it in so many words, by the attention he paid to her. Knowledge of the repeated tragedies that had befallen him also strongly affected her, as others. That Jefferson had vowed, as he told his family, to “keep what I feel to myself,” only made him a more interesting and sympathetic figure, and particularly to those, like Abigail and John, who had known heartbreak themselves.

• • •

IN THE YEARS SINCE JEFFERSON and John Adams had last seen one another in Philadelphia, Jefferson had suffered the loss of two children—an unnamed infant son who died two weeks after his birth, and a baby girl, Lucy Elizabeth, who died in 1781, at age four-and-a-half months. Then, on September 6, 1782, at Monticello, the worst day of Jefferson's life, his wife Martha had died at age thirty-three, apparently from complications following the birth in the previous spring of still another child, a second Lucy Elizabeth.

As the story was related to the Adamses, Jefferson had been led from his wife's deathbed all but insensible with grief and for weeks kept to his room, pacing back and forth, seeing no one but his daughter Patsy. He “confined himself from the world,” Nabby wrote in her journal, and then for weeks afterward, as Patsy herself would relate, he “rode out... incessantly on horseback, rambling about the mountains,” she still his constant companion and “solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief.”

At thirty-nine, Jefferson had been left a widower with three young children, his political career over, he thought, his political ambitions dissolved.

In the years immediately after his return from Philadelphia, his influence and accomplishments as a member of the Virginia General Assembly had been second to none. He had labored steadily, revising laws, writing legislation to eliminate injustices and set the foundation for a well-ordered” republican government. And to a degree he had succeeded, although one of his proudest achievements, a bill for the establishment of religious freedom, a subject of extreme controversy, was not passed by the legislature until several years hence, after he departed for France.

Jefferson was infrequently at Williamsburg, however. His principal Work, the revising and writing of laws, was carried on at Monticello, where he remained more or less in isolation, absorbed in his “darling pleasures,” as his friend John Page said—with continuing work on his house, gardens, and orchards, his scholarly pursuits, management of the plantation, and the interests of his family. In February 1778, when Adams and John Quincy were bound for France aboard the Boston, Jefferson was placing orders for another 90,000 bricks, and overseeing the first planting of peas for the year and several varieties of fruit trees.

He had seen nothing of the war. Its principal adverse effects on his way of life were spiraling inflation, and the loss of twenty-two of his slaves who ran off in the hope of joining the British side and gaining their freedom. Any connection he had with the larger struggle was through correspondence. His only contact with the enemy was with prisoners. When 4,000 British and Hessian troops who had surrendered at Saratoga were marched to Charlottesville to be quartered outside of the town, Jefferson arranged for proper housing for the officers on neighboring plantations and saw no reason not to offer his friendship and hospitality. Indeed, he took delight in having such welcome additions to his social circle. One Hessian officer would write warmly that while all Virginians were apparently fond of music, Jefferson and his wife were particularly so. “You will find in his house an elegant harpsichord, pianoforte, and some violins. The latter he performs well upon himself...” Possibly, John and Abigail Adams learned of this while in Paris. In any event, for them to have entertained the enemy under their own roof while war raged would have been unthinkable.

But the detachment Jefferson enjoyed from the war had ended abruptly in the spring of 1779 when the Virginia Assembly chose him to succeed Patrick Henry as the wartime governor, a role he disliked and that was to prove the low point of his public career, as probably he foresaw. Only weeks later he was writing that the day of his retirement could not come soon enough. He had no background or interest in military matters. Furthermore, the real political power was not in the office of the governor, but in the Assembly, as Jefferson himself, distrusting executive authority, had helped to establish. After the rarefied life at Monticello, the everyday confusion, endless paperwork and frustrations of administering a state at war—trying to cope with inflation, taxes, allocations of money and supplies—was torturous and only grew worse.

In the first of two one-year terms, he and his family lived as had his colonial counterparts in the Governor's Palace at Williamsburg, a stone's throw from the home of George Wythe, where Jefferson had once boarded and read law. In the second term, when the capital was moved further inland to the struggling hamlet of Richmond, he, Martha, and the children occupied a rented house there and again lived in style. But it was his bad luck to be governor in one of the darkest times of the war, as the British shifted their campaign South. Word that Charleston had fallen reached him only days after his reelection. During that summer of 1780 came the humiliating rout at Camden. Virginia troops performed badly, but the defeat meant also the loss of precious cannon, wagons, tents, and muskets. Called on for reinforcements, Virginia could only send unarmed men. Enlistments were down, the state treasury empty.

Jefferson did what he could, and, by his own assessment, was ineffectual. By September he found his duties “so excessive,” his execution of them “so imperfect,” he would have retired but for the urging of friends. Then early in 1781 the British invaded Virginia. The traitor Benedict Arnold led a sudden, daring raid on Richmond, and with the advance of spring, the British under Cornwallis swept through the state almost at will, scattering the legislature to the hills and very nearly capturing the governor.

The Assembly had withdrawn to Charlottesville, theoretically safe from Cornwallis. Jefferson was at Monticello once more, his long-desired retirement scheduled to begin in a few days, as he informed George Washington in a letter of May 28. His term as governor expired on Saturday, June 2.

At sunrise, Monday, June 4, a lone horseman came pounding up the mountain to warn Jefferson that British cavalry were on the way to capture him and the legislature. Captain Jack Jouett of the Virginia militia had made a wild, forty-mile ride through the night. His face was cut and streaked with blood, where it had been lashed by low-hanging branches. Had it not been for a nearly full moon, he might not have arrived in time.

Reportedly, a calm, cheerfully hospitable Jefferson insisted that Jouett have a glass of his best Madeira before continuing on to Charlottesville. “I ordered a carriage to be readied to carry off my family,” Jefferson would write in his account of the morning. Remaining behind, he spent another several hours gathering up papers and making sure the silver and china were hidden away. It was only when he saw by telescope that the streets of Charlottesville in the valley below were filled with British soldiers that he at last mounted his horse and took off through the woods, narrowly escaping the detachment of cavalry that arrived on the mountaintop only minutes later.

The British left Monticello untouched, but at another of Jefferson's farms, known as Elk Hill, where Cornwallis made his headquarters, they burned barns, crops, and fences, slaughtered sheep and hogs, carried off horses, cut the throats of horses too young for service, and took away with them some thirty slaves.

To have fled as he did had been Jefferson's only realistic recourse, but it had cost him in reputation. He was accused by political enemies of having taken flight in panic, of abandoning his duties in the face of the British—as if by allowing himself to be captured, he would have somehow better served his country.

The Assembly had also fled west over the Blue Ridge to Staunton in the Shenandoah Valley, but when the House of Delegates reconvened in Staunton on June 12, a young member named George Nicholas called for an inquiry into the conduct of Thomas Jefferson. No specific charge was made, and by the year's end, after Jefferson appeared before the House to defend his actions, he was officially cleared of any blame.

For someone of his extreme sensitivity, it was a painful ordeal. As he told his friend James Monroe, he had suffered “a wound in my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave.”

Word that Jefferson had been taken captive by the British spread rapidly and as far as Europe, where it had so distressed John Adams. In fact, Jefferson and his family had headed south to the seclusion of Poplar Forest, his other, more remote plantation in Bedford County. There they remained for six weeks, during which Jefferson, in a fall from his horse, shattered his left wrist. To occupy himself, through what had become as low a time as he had known, he began making notes in answer to a series of questions sent by a French aristocrat, the Barte-Martois, on the state of Virginia, notes that would one day be published as a book, Jefferson's first and only book.

When at summer's end he was asked to become one of the peace commissioners in Europe, he declined, telling friend and kinsman Edmund Randolph in a letter from Monticello, “[I] have retired to my farm, my family and books from which I think nothing will ever more separate me.” A month later, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown to the combined American and French forces under Washington and Rochambeau.

Approaching Monticello by horseback afterward, an officer from Rochambeau's army, the Marquis de Chastellux, saw the great house “shining alone” on its summit, and described how, arriving on top, he found the “Sage” of Monticello wholly “retired from the world and public business.”

Several days in Jefferson's company disappeared like minutes, Chastellux later wrote. They talked of art, literature, and natural history, as work on the house continued about them. The clutter and racket of construction were hardly the tranquil setting one would imagine for a sage, but Chastellux thought the house admirably unlike anything he had seen in his American travels. Of Martha Jefferson, then in the ninth month of pregnancy, he wrote only that she was “mild and amiable,” which, regrettably, was no more than conventional compliments for the woman about whom so very little was ever recorded.

With the death of Martha less than five months later, everything changed. In a letter to Chastellux, Jefferson described himself as emerging from a “stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as she....” He had lost all interest in Monticello, believing he could never be happy there again. But before the year was out, Congress again called for him to go to France—an idea set in motion by his close political ally, James Madison—and this time Jefferson accepted at once. When the assignment was postponed and the Virginia General Assembly (again at Madison's request) chose him as a delegate to Congress, he readily accepted that, too, and served six months, though always with an eye on France and what was happening there.

Madison, who had never met John Adams, reported to Jefferson that Adams's letters to Congress from France revealed nothing so much as his vanity, his prejudice against the French Court, and “venom” against Franklin. When Jefferson learned that Adams was again to collaborate with Franklin at Paris, he was incredulous and in a coded letter to Madison offered a private view of Adams that was anything but an unqualified endorsement. He was at a loss even to imagine how Adams might behave in any negotiation, Jefferson wrote, and likened Adams to a poisonous weed.

He hates Franklin, he hates Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English. To whom will he adhere? His vanity is a lineament in his character which had entirely escaped me. His want of taste I had observed. Notwithstanding all this he has a sound head on substantial points, and I think he has integrity. I am glad therefore that he is of the commission and expect he will be useful in it. His dislike of all parties, and all men, by balancing his prejudices, may give the same fair play to his reason as would a general benevolence of temper. At any rate honesty may be expected even from poisonous weeds.

No sooner was Jefferson named by Congress, in May 1784, to replace John Jay at Paris, than he was ready to go. Talk of retirement to Monticello was heard no more. He had not time even to return to Virginia to say goodbye to his two small children, six-year-old Polly and Lucy Elizabeth, now two, who had been left in the care of his wife's sister, Elizabeth Eppes. He gathered up Patsy, who had been living and studying in Philadelphia and, with the young servant James Hemings, was on his way to Boston and ultimately to Paris.

To John Adams, Jefferson's presence in Paris was a godsend. The Virginian seemed entirely his old self, in ability and in his devotion to their common tasks as commissioners. “Jefferson is an excellent hand. You could not have sent a better,” Adams wrote in December to Elbridge Gerry, the spirit of his observations markedly different from what Jefferson had written privately of him.

He appears to me to be infected with no party passions or national prejudices, or any partialities, but for his own country.... Since our meeting upon our new commissions, our affairs have gone on with utmost harmony and nothing has happened to disturb our peace. I wish this calm will continue and believe it will.

In a letter to Henry Knox, Adams wrote proudly, “You can scarcely have heard a characterization too high of my friend and colleague, Mr. Jefferson, either in point of power or virtues... I only fear that his unquenchable thirst for knowledge may injure his health.”

• • •

THAT JEFFERSON WAS OFTEN ILL during their time with him in France was of great concern to the Adamses, though Jefferson himself gamely dismissed it as no more than the “seasoning” required of all newly arrived strangers to the country. But privately, Jefferson, now forty-one, told Abigail he did not expect to live more than a dozen years longer.

When feeling fit, which was much of the time, he was out and about, and as before in Philadelphia, proved an irrepressible shopper. At first chance he bought a new dress sword, silver forks and spoons, candlesticks, wine, violin strings, the model of a hydraulic engine, every purchase recorded in his tidy accounts. He bought new French clothes for himself—French lace cuffs, French shirts and lace ruffles, French gloves—new clothes for Patsy, new clothes for James Hemings, whom he put on regular wages.

The young man had been Jefferson's personal servant from the time Jefferson was governor of Virginia. He was nineteen years old, the son of a slave named Betty Hemings, who had belonged previously to Jefferson's late father-in-law, John Wayles, who reportedly was James's father—which, if true, meant that James was Jefferson's own half-brother-in-law. Since slavery was forbidden in France, James was to be quietly considered a free man for the time being. He would be apprenticed to one of the finest chefs in Paris, that he might one day bring the haute cuisine of France home to Monticello.

Jefferson was still in arrears—the income from his operations at Monticello and his other farms failed to cover his debts—and, like the Adamses, he fretted that his salary was insufficient for the manner in which he was expected to live, and to which, unlike the Adamses, he was long accustomed.

In matters of economy, as in other aspects of his life, Jefferson did not practice what he preached. He would insist to his daughter Patsy that she keep to the rule of “never buying anything which you have not the money in your pocket to pay for,” and warned that “pain to the mind” of debt was greater by far than having to do without “any article whatever which we may seem to want.” Yet this was hardly how he lived. A chronic acquirer, Jefferson is not known to have ever denied himself anything he wished in the way of material possessions or comforts. Once settled in Paris, he never held back, spending for example, more than 200 francs for an initial stock of fifty-nine bottles of Bordeaux—200 francs being the equivalent of three months' wages for the average French worker.

The rented house on the Cul-de-Sac Taitbout was smaller than he liked and would not long satisfy, as he already foresaw; all the same, he proceeded to remodel two rooms and spent half his salary buying more and finer furniture than needed. He rented a pianoforte, hired six additional servants. A chariot he fancied wound up costing 15,000 francs by the time repairs were made and it had been fitted out as he wished with green morocco leather.

With the United States behind on payments on its loans, Jefferson found Paris bankers reluctant to advance him sufficient sums to cover his expenses. In distress, he turned to Adams, who arranged a loan with banks in Amsterdam, as Adams had on occasion for his own expenses. Later, unable to repay the advance, Jefferson would turn to private creditors and go still deeper in debt.

Like Adams, Jefferson wrote repeatedly to friends at home and in Congress, urging that the commissioners' salaries be raised to a realistic level. That the Adamses were able to make ends meet as they did, Jefferson attributed to what he regarded as an extremely “plain” style of life, and even more to Abigail's management of expenses. As Jefferson would explain in a letter to George Washington, John Adams had the advantage of being “under the direction of Mrs. Adams, one of the most estimable characters on earth, and the most attentive and honorable economists.”

Yet at no point did Jefferson's financial plight slow his spendthrift ways. Faithfully, almost obsessively, he kept recording every purchase and expenditure, but it was as if somehow he could never bring himself to add up the columns. At home, in his voluminous farm records, he never in his life added up the profit and loss for any year, and perhaps for the reason that there was almost never any profit.

On principle, Jefferson abhorred cities and their teeming throngs, quite as much as he abhorred debt. The mobs of great cities were like cancerous sores, he had written in his book on Virginia, a state entirely without cities. Nonetheless, he showed no interest now to live as Franklin and Adams did in semirural retreat outside Paris, where the panoramic views over the Seine were more like what he was accustomed to at home, and where the rent was appreciably less. He would reside by choice in the heart of the city his entire time in France, openly delighting in so much that was not to be found in Virginia. He relished all that Paris offered in the way of luxurious shopping, architecture, painting, music, theater, the finest food, the best wine, and the most cultivated society in his experience—never mind what he may have written about cities or the expenses he incurred.

Paris booksellers soon found they had an American patron like no other. In the bookshops and stalls along the Seine were volumes in numbers and variety such as Jefferson had never seen, and his pleasure was boundless. To Madison he would describe the surpassing pleasure of “examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hand and putting by everything related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable to every science.” There were weeks when he was buying books every day. In his first month in Paris, he could not buy them fast enough, and ran up bills totaling nearly 800 francs. Nor was the book-buying spree to end. The grand total of books he acquired in France was about 2,000, but he also bought books by the boxful for Washington, Franklin, and James Madison.

With the purchase of works of art, he was tentative at first, buying only two “small laughing busts,” as he recorded, then a plaster statue of Hercules and two portraits that he itemized only as “heads.” Then, in a spasm of bidding at an estate auction, he bought five mostly religious paintings, including a large Herodias Bearing the Head of Saint John, which, like some of the others, was a copy, in this case of a popular work by Guido Reni. Before he was finished, Jefferson would buy sixty-three paintings in France as well as seven terra-cotta busts for 1,100 livres by the greatest sculptor of the day, Jean-Antoine Houdon, whom, at the request of the Virginia legislature, Jefferson also commissioned to do a life-size statue of George Washington.

Devoted to chess, eager to try his skill with some of the expert players of Paris, Jefferson found his way to a chess club, but was so decisively beaten in several games that he never went back.

Though he could read French well enough, Jefferson was never to speak the language with the fluency Adams attained. Further, he was considerably more disapproving of the outspokenness and apparent promiscuity of French women than ever Adams had been. While Adams, on first arriving in Paris, had reported to Abigail how much he admired the Frenchwomen he met—for their accomplishments, education, their views on serious matters—Jefferson felt that the decadent state of government in France was owing in good part to the influence of such women.

He had at once placed twelve-year-old Patsy in the most fashionable and most expensive convent school in Paris, the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont on the Left Bank, where to Protestant students, he was assured, no word was ever spoken of religion, but where presumably she would be safe from social influences he thought wholly unsuitable for her.

She wore a crimson uniform and was soon speaking French better than her father, who visited her frequently, enjoying the walk over the Seine by the Pont Neuf. One morning in October, Jefferson, Adams, Abigail, John Quincy, and Nabby went together to the convent to see two young nuns take the veil in a ceremony that Nabby would describe in her diary as an “affecting sight” for all. “I could not refrain from tears; everyone seemed affected.”

Jefferson's devotion to his daughter, his obvious pleasure in her company and her equally obvious devotion to him, were to the Adamses greatly to his credit. “She is a sweet girl, delicacy and sensibility are read in every feature,” Nabby wrote of Patsy, “and her manners are in unison with all that is amiable and lovely; she is very young.” Tall for her age and freckled, she was commonly said to resemble her father.

With the onset of winter, Jefferson took ill again. He was confined to the house for six weeks. Sunshine was his great physician, he liked to say, and there was too little of it in Paris.

Then, in the last week of January, came crushing news from Virginia. His two-year-old daughter, Lucy, had died of whooping cough. Of six children, now only two remained alive. The shadow of his unspeakable sorrow fell on everyone around him. The whole Adams household was in mourning. Jefferson, as so often in his life, retreated into silence and went on with his work.

• • •

To THE DIPLOMATIC TASKS at hand, Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, the old Revolutionary trio, gave due attention, working steadily and in easy accord. “We proceed with wonderful harmony, in good humor, and unanimity,” acknowledged Adams, whose sole complaint was a gnawing feeling of “inutility.” The issues before them were commercial treaties with the nations of Europe, but it was extremely slow, unexciting work and with no notable progress. The new independent United States faced commercial barriers everywhere, while desperately in need of markets for American surpluses. The American position was free trade, but very little interest was shown.

With Franklin confined to his quarters at Passy, most of the commissioners' working sessions were held there. They carried on correspondence, drew up reports, and, as obliged, appeared each Tuesday at the King's levee at Versailles, where afterward they dined with the Comte de Vergennes and the rest of the diplomatic corps. “It is curious to see forty or fifty ambassadors, ministers or other strangers of the first fashion from all the nations of Europe, assembling in the most amicable manner and conversing in the same language,” wrote Jefferson's aide, Colonel Humphreys. “What heightens the pleasure is their being universally men of unaffected manners and good dispositions.”

The three American commissioners tried not to get discouraged. But as Jefferson observed, “There is a want of confidence in us.” Ultimately, for all their efforts, only one commercial treaty would be negotiated, that with Prussia.

Writing to a correspondent at home, Adams said philosophically, “Public life is like a long journey, in which we have immense tracks of waste countries to pass through for a very few grand and beautiful prospects. At present, I scarcely see a possibility of doing anything for the public worth the expense of maintaining me in Europe.”

An equitable trade agreement with Britain was much the most important and pressing objective. But British-American relations had been strained since the Paris Peace Treaty, and the British remained maddeningly obdurate until that winter, when the commissioners were informed that His Majesty's government would welcome an American minister to “reside constantly” at the Court of St. James's. It seemed a hopeful shift in tide, but as such a matter could be decided only by Congress, the inevitable wait began.

In letters to Congress stressing the need for an envoy to Britain, Adams neither offered recommendations nor said anything of his own feelings, as ardently as he wanted the assignment. To Abigail there was no question that he would be chosen—it was his “destiny,” she told Mary Cranch—and she was equally unambiguous about Jefferson's fitness for his role in France. Jefferson, she assured Cotton Tufts, was “an excellent man... and will do honor to his country.”

In marked contrast to both Franklin and Jefferson, Adams remained the picture of health. He had rarely ever looked or felt better. And indeed, life for the Adams family had settled into a routine which, if unspectacular, seemed to agree with all of them. Together almost constantly, they enjoyed a contentment such as they had seldom known.

Their days began early. With breakfast finished, weather permitting, John and John Quincy customarily set off for a five- or six-mile walk in the Bois de Boulogne before getting down to work. At two in the afternoon the family gathered for dinner. Most afternoons Adams was at Passy with Franklin and Jefferson. Tea was usually at five, by which time it was dark. In the evenings the family convened in the second-floor sitting room, to read or play cards, except for John Quincy, who was at his studies again, it having been agreed that he would return home soon to enter Harvard. Many nights Adams worked with him, happily playing the schoolmaster again and with his star pupil.

At seventeen the boy was extraordinarily accomplished. In his seven years away from home and from conventional schooling, he had benefited immeasurably from his father's interest and encouragement. His travels, his reading, the time spent in the company of men like Francis Dana and Thomas Jefferson had given him a maturity, made him conversant on a breadth of subjects that people found astonishing. He had already seen more of Europe and Russia than any American of his generation. His French was virtually perfect. He was broadly read in English and Roman history. “If you were to examine him in English and French poetry, I know not where you would find anybody his superior,” wrote Adams proudly to the boy's former tutor and guardian at Leyden, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse.

He has translated Virgil's Aeneid... the whole of Sallust and Tacitus' Agricola ... a great part of Horace, some of Ovid, and some of Caesar's Commentaries... besides Tully's [Cicero's] Orations.... In Greek his progress has not been equal; yet he has studied morsels of Aristotle's Politics, in Plutarch's Lives, and Lucian's Dialogues, The Choice of Hercules in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several books in Homer's Iliad.

In mathematics I hope he will pass muster. In the course of the last year ... I have spent my evenings with him. We went with some accuracy through the geometry in the Preceptor, the eight books of Simpson's Euclid in Latin.... We went through plane geometry... algebra, and the decimal fractions, arithmetical and geometrical proportions... I then attempted a sublime flight and endeavored to give him some idea of the differential method of calculations... [and] Sir Isaac Newton; but alas, it is thirty years since I thought of mathematics.

The picture of father and son, heads together at a table, absorbed in their work, brought Abigail satisfaction of a kind she had been long denied. “The table is covered with mathematical instruments and books, and you hear nothing 'til nine o'clock but of theorem and problems bisecting and dissecting tangents and se[quents],” she recorded one evening at Auteuil, “after which we are often called upon to relieve their brains by a game of whist.”

By Nabby's account, “Pappa's hour” for bed was ten o'clock, after which she and John Quincy would have “a little conversation among themselves.” “We see but little company, and visit much less,” wrote Nabby, who found Auteuil less sociable than she desired. Still in a quandary over Royall Tyler, she had had almost no word from him, and while John Quincy's plans seemed neatly resolved, hers were not.

No one liked the thought of John Quincy leaving. “I feel very loath to part with my son and shall miss him more than I can express,” Abigail wrote to her sister Mary. But “Master John” was now also “a man in most respects, all I may say but age,” and it was his wish to go home.

She herself felt waves of extreme homesickness. A heavy snow falling over Paris filled her with emotion because it “looked so American.” What a sad misfortune it is to have the body in one place and the soul in another,” she told Mary. The time in France had made her love her own country more than ever. And from the little experience she had had making the adjustment to foreign ways, and foreign speech, from what she knew now that she had not before of the intricacies and difficulties of diplomacy, she wondered how in the world “Mr. Adams” had ever “lived through the perplexing scenes he has had to encounter.” Her regard for her country and for her husband had never been greater.

But of all that Abigail wrote of life en famille in the house at Auteuil, perhaps the most memorable vignette was in a letter to her niece Lucy Cranch, dated January 5, 1785. Describing a festive scene at the dinner table, she managed to capture much that was essential about each of them, including herself, but of her Mr. Adams in particular.

You must know that the religion of this country requires [an] abundance of feasting and fasting, and each person has his particular saint, as well as each calling and occupation. Tomorrow is to be celebrated le jour des rois. The day before this feast it is customary to make a large paste pie, into which one bean is put. Each person cuts his slice, and the one who is so lucky as to obtain the bean is dubbed king or queen. Accordingly, today, when I went in to dinner, I found one upon our table.

Your cousin Nabby began by taking the first slice; but alas! poor girl, no bean and no queen. In the next place, your cousin John seconded her by taking a larger cut, and as cautious as cousin T_ when he inspects merchandise, bisected his paste with mathematical circumspection; but to him it pertained not. By this time I was ready for my part; but first I declared that I had no cravings for royalty. I accordingly separated my piece with much firmness, nowise disappointed that it fell not to me.

Your uncle, who was all this time picking his chicken bone, saw us divert ourselves without saying anything. But presently he seized the remaining half, and to crumbs went the poor paste, cut here and slash there; when behold, the bean! “And thus,” said he, “are kingdoms obtained!” But the servant who stood by and saw the havoc, declared solemnly that he could not retain the title, as the laws decreed it to chance, and not to force.

• • •

WHEN DURING THAT SPRING of 1785 Queen Marie Antoinette gave birth to a son, the Duke of Normandy, a Te Deum was sung in thanks at Notre Dame, with the King himself taking part. As intended, it was one of the grandest occasions of the reign of Louis XVI and his Queen, and the four Adamses and Thomas Jefferson, along with everyone of fashion in Paris, were in attendance. Of the spectacles the Americans beheld in Paris, this was surpassing and would be recalled for years afterward, when such memories of France had become part of a vanished world.

The crowds en route to the cathedral were greater than any they had ever seen in their lives. Jefferson speculated to Nabby that there were as many people in the streets as in all of Massachusetts.

“There was but just space sufficient for the carriages to pass along,” wrote John Quincy, “and had there not been guards placed on both sides at a distance not greater than ten yards from one another, there would have been no passage at all for the coaches. For as it was, the troops had the utmost difficulty to restrain the mob.”

Thanks to Madame Lafayette, they were seated in a gallery overlooking the choir, “as good a place as any in the church,” thought John Quincy, who in a long description of the spectacle in his diary demonstrated that besides being precociously erudite, he had learned, as his father urged, to observe the world around him and was well started on becoming an accomplished writer. He described the Parliament lined up to the right side of the choir, robed in scarlet and black, the Chambre des Comptes on the left, in robes of black and white; the bishops arriving two by two, “a purple kind of mantle over their shoulders,” the Archbishop of Paris, “a mitre upon his head,” and finally the arrival of the King.

... and as soon as his Majesty had got to his place and fallen upon his knees, they began to sing the Te Deum, which lasted half an hour, and in which we heard some exceeding fine music.

...What a charming sight: an absolute king of one of the most powerful empires on earth, and perhaps a thousand of the first personages of that empire, adoring the divinity who created them, and acknowledging that He can in a moment reduce them to the dust from which they spring.

Another day he wrote of the show of fashion and wealth at Longchamps in the Bois de Boulogne during the week before Easter.

There are perhaps each of these days a thousand carriages that come out of Paris to go round and round one of the roads in the wood one after another. There are two rows of carriages, one goes up and the other down so that the people in every carriage can see all the others. Everybody that has got a splendid carriage, a fine set of horses, or an elegant mistress, send them out on these days to make a show at Longchamps.

After so many years of living and traveling in Europe, the prospect of returning to “the pale of college” was more than a little discouraging to the boy. But like his father, he was “determined that as long as I shall be able to get my own living in an honorable manner, I will depend on no one.

My father has been so much taken up all his lifetime with the interests of the public that his own fortune has suffered by it. So that his children will have to provide for themselves, which I will never be able to do if I loiter away my precious time in Europe.

With the return of fair weather in April, life picked up. Jefferson, his health recovered, became notably sociable and by choice spent part of nearly every day with some or all of the Adamses. For all that would be said later of Jefferson's love of the French and regard for the philosophes, he clearly preferred to be with the Adamses whenever possible. His pleasure in Abigail's company was overflowing and delighted her, while Franklin, as she wrote, was “vastly social and civil.” She loved the feeling of being included at the center of things, in much the way she had felt while dining on board the French warships in Boston Harbor.

• • •

ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 26, Jefferson rode out from Paris to deliver a letter that had just arrived from Elbridge Gerry informing Adams that he had been named minister to the Court of St. James's. It was requested that he be in London no later than the King's birthday on June 4.

Within days Jefferson learned that he was indeed to replace Franklin as minister to France, and it was with considerable sadness that Jefferson and the Adamses realized the end was at hand to a time like none other they had known. Nobody said goodbye to Paris without some sadness, Abigail was told. Gone from her writing were accounts of the dirt and dissipations of the French. Instead, she regretted leaving for the harsher climate of London, regretted leaving her garden, regretted especially the loss of Jefferson's society.

John Adams, too, for all his ambition to serve in London, seemed anything but eager to leave the setting of such sustained contentment. “I shall find nowhere so fine a little hill, so pleasant a garden, so noble a forest and such pure air and tranquil walks, as at Auteuil,” he wrote to Richard Cranch. “I shall part with Mr. Jefferson with great regret.”

Adams took his new assignment with utmost seriousness, rightly confident that he had given as much thought to British-American relations, and issues of war and peace, as had any American. What “friendly and decent terms” could be achieved in the next few years would be crucial for both nations.

Concerned about protocol in London, worried how he might be received, dreading the thought of people staring at him, he turned for advice to the British ambassador to France, the Duke of Dorset, whom he liked and trusted. In his diary afterward Adams recorded the essence of the conversation:

He said that Lord Carmarthen was their Minister of Foreign Affairs, that I must first wait on him, and he would introduce me to his Majesty... I asked Lord Carmarthen's age. He said 33. He said I should be stared at a great deal. I told him I trembled at the thought of going there. I was afraid they would gaze with evil eyes.

When another diplomat, assuming that Adams welcomed the change in assignment, remarked that no doubt Adams had a number of relatives in England, Adams took offense. No, he declared, he had no relatives there. “I have not one drop of blood in my veins but what is American.” Writing to Mercy Warren earlier, Adams had said emphatically that he was no John Bull, he was John Yankee, “and such shall I live and die.”

At Versailles, in parting conversation with the Comte de Vergennes, Adams listened as Vergennes grandly told him that it was, of course, a step down to go from the Court of France to any other court, even if a “great thing to be the first ambassador from your country to the country you sprang from!”

When Jefferson called on the aging Foreign Minister, he demonstrated perfectly why he would be so welcome at the French Court.

“You replace Mr. Franklin, I hear,” said Vergennes.

“I succeed, “said Jefferson. “No one can replace him.”

What passed between Adams and Franklin at their final parting was not recorded. Doubtless both were perfectly cordial. There would be further work to transact between them, further correspondence to maintain. But it was the last time they were ever to see one another.

At the house at Auteuil, everyone began packing. In the second week of May, John Quincy set off for Lorient, on the first leg of the long journey home to America. He would sail on a French packet and, as part of his passage, was to look after a gift from Lafayette to George Washington of seven hunting dogs.

• • •

THE FINAL DEPARTURE OF JOHN, Abigail, and Nabby from the house at Auteuil, the afternoon of May 20, 1785, was wrenching for everyone present. The servants whom Abigail had once found such a trial clustered about the carriage in tears. When she requested that her songbird be put inside the carriage with her, it fluttered so frantically in its cage that she had to give it up to her chambermaid, and it was on that melancholy note the family departed for Calais.

“We journeyed slowly and sometimes silently,” Abigail wrote to Jefferson. John passed the time en route to the Channel reading the book Jefferson had presented as a parting gift, his own Notes on the State of Virginia, one of two hundred copies he had had privately printed in Paris. The book, Adams would write to Jefferson, was “our meditation all the day long,” implying that he had been reading it aloud to Abigail and Nabby as they rolled toward Calais. The passages on slavery, said Adams, were “worth diamonds.”

Alone at his desk at Poplar Forest, where more than a hundred slaves labored in the fields beyond his window, Jefferson had written one of the most impassioned denunciations of his life, decrying slavery as an extreme depravity:

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions [Jefferson had written], the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it... The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances... if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is to be born to live and labor for another ... or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him.... Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.

Continuing, Jefferson offered as “a suspicion only” that blacks were inferior to whites in both mind and body. “Their inferiority,” he wrote, “is not the effect merely of their condition of life.... It is not their condition... but nature, which has produced the distinction.” Besides their differences in color and hair, he noted, black people secreted less by the kidneys and more by the glands of the skin, “which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor.” They were “more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than whites.... more ardent after their female,” but love seemed with them “to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient... their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.”

What John and Abigail Adams may have thought of this from the man who had professed to believe that all men are created equal is not known.

“The departure of your family has left me in the dumps,” Jefferson wrote to Adams from Paris. “My afternoons hang heavily on me.”

Crossing the Channel on board the Dover packet days later, Abigail offered to share the family's cabin with a desperately seasick young man who, in gratitude for her kindness, gave her two songbirds of his own. “As they were quite accustomed to traveling, I brought them here in safety, for which they happily repay me by their melodious notes,” she would write to Jefferson in her first letter from London, knowing his love of music.