Louisa Page 11

  AT THE START OF 1799, illness was a credible excuse. She was often sick. Reports of her illnesses, often unnamed in nature, appear again and again in letters and John Quincy’s diary. From the regularity of them, it seems she may have suffered from debilitating menstrual cycles. But there was sometimes another cause: she was often pregnant. Almost immediately after recovering from her miscarriage at the end of 1797, she believed she was pregnant, but in February their hopes were “severely dashed to the ground.” She was certainly pregnant in March. Her body reacted violently to the change; she was often sick through the night and into morning. Before long, she was showing signs that she would lose the child. “My prophetic heart! I have no doubt of the cause,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. “The cup of bitterness must be filled to the brim and drank to the dregs.” In July, he wrote of despair: “I cannot even form an hope with impunity.” His anguish was palpable. “The tortures of Tantalus have been inflicted upon me without ceasing.”

  The exact number of Louisa’s miscarriages is impossible to know. John Quincy and Louisa, in keeping with custom, were circumspect about her pregnancies. In their writings and letters, they usually referred to pregnancy as an “illness” and made only opaque hints about her condition. There may have also been times when she thought she was pregnant and turned out not to be. But it appears likely that she miscarried four times between 1797 and 1800. Discharging the fetus was brutally painful for her, often taking several days unless a doctor intervened, and that was perhaps more traumatic. She complained of being “roughly handled.” She lost dangerous amounts of blood. Doctors could do little for her; medicine in those days was less a science than an art. After a young man dropped dead at a ball, for instance, doctors concluded that “his death was owing to the excessive tightness of his clothes, and perhaps to his having drank several glasses of cold limonade, while heated with dancing,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. When she was ill or pregnant, doctors plied her with powders, emetics, and laudanum; they bled and blistered her. No doubt the remedies further damaged her health. Her body baffled her and others. Along with the complications from pregnancy, she suffered from headaches, influenza, fainting spells, and other vaguely described ailments. Dr. Brown thought her “in a deep consumption.” She was almost surely anemic. The frequency with which she was bled by doctors didn’t help. It’s no wonder that she wanted to wear rouge and became obsessed with her pallor. It wasn’t only her body, though, that perplexed Louisa. She could never untangle the connection between her physical ailments and her mind. The discourse about diseases around 1800 made much of the disturbance of nerves. Even where the etiology of an illness was known, emotional and mental stress were thought to play a part—especially in women. Louisa was convinced that the slightest agitation would send devastating tremors through her body that would leave her pitched and prostrate. A distressing sight or overstimulation could make her fall ill. “From eight o’clock in the evening until midnight she had a continual succession of fainting fits, and cramps almost amounting to convulsion,” John Quincy wrote in his diary after Louisa came home and fell ill after helping a woman who had broken a leg. When it came to the miscarriages, of course, her emotional pain was as bad as the physical trauma. John Quincy felt it too, and showed it—which only made her feel worse. Every hope was a harbinger of disappointment. April 27, 1798

  Mrs. Adams went with Mrs. Brown to Charlottenburg in the morning. Was taken unwell in the afternoon. It is of no use, but rather a misfortune to foresee evils which can neither be remedied nor prevented. July 17, 1798

  A dreadful night. Mrs. A. soon after going to bed was taken extremely ill, and between 12 and 1 o’clock was in such extreme pain, that I sent for Doctor Ribke. He was at Charlottenburg. So was Dr. Brown. [ . . . ]The case appears in almost every point similar to that of last November. Patience and resignation is all that we can have. Was up all night. December 1799 Monthly Summary

  The year would in general have been a pleasant one, but for the state of my wife’s health which has been almost continually bad, and concerning which I am even now deeply concerned. The subject presses upon my spirits more than I can express. February 1800 Monthly Summary

  My wife’s health is now the object of my greatest concern. After yet another one of Louisa’s prolonged illnesses, they spent the summer of 1800 traveling throughout Silesia, an area in central Europe (mostly in what is now Poland). They had taken a similar trip, to the baths in Töplitz, to help her recover from a debilitating miscarriage in the summer of 1799, after John Quincy completed the renewal of the commercial treaty between the United States and Prussia. They spent their days wandering through the art galleries in Dresden, visited with friends from Berlin who crossed their path, and, when Louisa was strong enough, took long hikes. They visited textile mills, hiked in the mountains, and carved their names in the walls of a ruined castle. They studied a moving model of the solar system at a weaver’s workshop, and at a carpenter’s, they were moved to tears by an ingenious puppet show. They went to glassworks in Bohemia, coal mines in Walenberg, the theater everywhere. In Silesia, they bought three sketches of the picturesque countryside, which they later kept hung in their bedroom—three small but transporting reminders of their time there together. She benefited from the fresh air, simple food, and good exercise to a degree that startled John Quincy. “It would astonish you, as it does me, to see how she supports the fatigues of this journey,” wrote John Quincy to his brother. One difficult hike that she completed, he continued, “is considered as so much beyond the strength even of the strongest women, that our guide, who has followed this business these twelve years, assured me he had never conducted but one lady before upon this tour.” On the trips to both Silesia and Töplitz, she became pregnant again: despite the danger to her health (she’d miscarried after Töplitz), their sexual attraction clearly had not waned. He was tender with Louisa, and she felt it. Still, there were distances between Louisa and John Quincy that were difficult to bridge. She wanted to be needed; he wanted to be alone. She could be flighty. He could be intransigent or remote. She had once called herself “the spoilt child of indulgence.” He had been schooled by his parents in stoicism—although his strong feelings sometimes forced open a vent, with eruptions of anger and frustration. She bore the burden of his frustration and felt the blowback of his stormy moods. At times, a sense of futility tortured John Quincy. From a distance, he watched his father’s presidency founder. He also missed his parents; he missed his brother after Thomas had returned to the United States. Louisa told Thomas that the sound of his name brought tears to John Quincy’s eyes. It was not easy to be an Adams, gifted to America from birth, then sent into the world for the sake of America. In February 1801, John Quincy learned that his brother Charles had died at the age of thirty, probably of cirrhosis from alcoholism, after years of trouble. He had stopped responding to John Quincy’s letters, which were increasingly curt and frustrated inquiries about his investments. The two brothers had lived apart for most of their lives, and John Quincy had not seen him for seven years. He heard the news of Charles’s death the first week of February 1801, within twenty-four hours of learning that Thomas Jefferson had defeated John Adams in the presidential election of 1800. The effects on John Quincy’s own life were inevitably profound. He would be recalled from Europe; any political prospects he had were likely over; worst, his brother was dead. But in his first letter to his mother—he waited until March 10 to write—he tersely expressed his grief at Charles’s death and his father’s defeat, then moved on. “Political disappointment is perhaps one of the occasions in human life which requires the greatest portion of philosophy,” he wrote to Abigail; “although philosophy has very little power to assuage the keenness of our feelings, she has at least the power to silence the voice of complaint.” Then he turned to foreign affairs. “The North of Europe, and the views, interests, and relations of the several states it contains, are indeed becoming an object of no small
concern to our commerce,” he continued. His diary shows signs of a great struggle to manage his sadness—long walks at the park, excuses sent to parties, days at home. “In the evening read the first canto of Savage’s Wanderer,” he wrote a few days after hearing of his brother’s death and father’s loss to Jefferson. It was, he wrote, “a poem the object of which is to prove that ‘the sons of men may owe / The fruits of bliss to bursting clouds of woe.’” He was already preparing himself for his recall to the United States and a return to private life when he wrote that. In Berlin, his primary task, the renegotiation of the commercial treaty, was done, completed in the summer of 1799. He had been able to use his vantage point to advise the American minister to France, his friend William Vans Murray, and his father, the president, on the perilous situation between the United States and France, helping to avert war. He had time to take his walks, to learn German, to translate Oberon. He sometimes despaired of what his future would be when he returned to the United States and resumed a life of drudgery as a lawyer. He was not suited for the law, he admitted, but he had no choice. He had a wife to support. And he could not be sure that he had been right in telling his mother that his wife was uncorrupted by a royal court. There were signs that there would be trouble between them when they went to the United States. She had made a home for herself in Berlin; he tried, ungently, to remind her that his home was very different. That winter, 1801, Louisa had tried to wear the rouge again. This time, instead of trying to sneak past her husband, “I walked boldly forward to meet Mr. Adams.” John Quincy told her to wash the makeup off, and she refused “with some temper.” He turned on his heels, went down to the carriage, and left for the party without her. She cried “with vexation” for a few minutes, took off her gown, washed off the rouge, put on something simple, and went over to the Browns’ for the evening. By the time her husband picked her up, she was smiling, and the two were “as good friends as ever,” she later wrote. In 1801, “anger seldom lasted with me more than ten minutes, and once over all was forgotten”—or almost, since, writing nearly forty years later, the scene and its humiliations were still fresh in her mind. It was only a little makeup. Behind it, though, was a serious issue. It had to do with the queen. John Quincy could respect the king well enough, because the king was trying to remain neutral between France, Great Britain, Russia, and Austria, and because the king rose at six in the morning and famously disliked parties. But the queen made him uneasy. She had a frank willingness to command. She was a queen, and a forceful one. She tried to command even him, the republican. “If she presented me the box he must not refuse it,” she had told Louisa. It was a royal order he could not stand. Six years later, the Prussian army was crushed by Napoleon at Jena. When Queen Luise went herself to make a personal appeal to the emperor, she was mocked: Napoleon responded to her pleas for mercy on behalf of her country by inquiring about the fabric of her dress. John Quincy read the reports of the conflict and took some pleasure in her fate. “The vicissitudes of the world have reached many of our old acquaintance there,” John Quincy wrote to Louisa, thoughtlessly—or pointedly—telling her the news of Prussia’s defeat, “and the beautiful and thoughtless queen whom we were accustomed to see so splendid has been brought to dance something less delicious and more vivid than a waltz.” • • • QUEEN LUISE was and would remain an angel in Louisa’s mind, whatever John Quincy thought. But it was another woman who exerted an even more powerful influence upon her, a woman who had the kind of fascinating attraction Louisa was drawn to throughout her life. In 1800, a new British ambassador, Lord Carysfort, arrived in Berlin, and he brought with him his wife. Elizabeth Carysfort was a forceful, even dazzling figure. It was Louisa’s opinion, at least, that Lady Elizabeth Carysfort “did most of the diplomacy” on behalf of her husband, and even John Quincy, who was not inclined to compliment anyone’s intelligence too highly (let alone a woman’s), was impressed by Elizabeth’s mind. Lady Carysfort was, John Quincy wrote to his brother, “a woman of a remarkable fine understanding.” Educated like her brothers (one of whom was Lord William Grenville, Britain’s foreign secretary), she was, Louisa wrote, “one of the finest women I ever knew—of very superior mind and cultivation.” This was a fault, even as it was a strength. In the same breath, Louisa betrayed her sense of conflict. She wrote that Elizabeth was “very plain in her person; somewhat masculine in her manners,” and she had a tendency to make other women “timid and afraid.”

  Louisa was drawn to such “masculine” women (her teacher Miss Young had been another), even though she believed that she should be repelled. And they were drawn to her. However Louisa described their gender, what these women seem to have offered her was a kind of mothering. Lady Carysfort “took a fancy to me,” and in return Louisa loved the older woman “as if she were my own mother.” Louisa would visit Elizabeth in her boudoir, “a sort of sanctum sanctorum,” where the British ambassador’s wife would talk about books, her thoughts for the future, death, and how her faith in God wavered. “Here she sometimes gave way to her private sorrows—and here only she could talk to me of her private history; of her afflictions; of her own peculiar opinions; both religious and literary,” Louisa wrote. This idea that a woman’s “private history” might have value, that she might have a rich inner life shaped by deep emotions, strong beliefs, and personally formed opinions, was crucial. When she was older, it would mean more to her, but the seed was planted when she was young. And her time with Lady Carysfort helped her in a more immediate sense. It gave her strength. At the start of 1801, she needed it. She was pregnant again. She and John Quincy hardly let themselves hope, not even writing to their parents about the possibility of a child. Lady Carysfort refused to let Louisa submit herself to her anxiety. Instead of letting her lie on her sofa, weak and reclining, Lady Carysfort would appear at her door and demand that they go riding. She would send an invitation for dinner and refuse to take no for an answer. And so Louisa rode out into the bracing air, or spent evenings in “a perfect gale” of laughter while sitting next to some “German lump of obesity,” or listening to the king of England’s son play the piano while a Frenchwoman sang “God Save the King.” In mid-April, Louisa entered her confinement. The king, she later said, ordered the street outside the Adamses’ apartment blocked, so that the clatter of traffic would not disturb her. On April 12, she went into labor. The pain was intense, the German male midwife drunk, and Louisa’s left leg temporarily crippled. But a son was born, breathing. They named him George Washington Adams. A high fever gripped Louisa after the delivery. Puerperal fevers were common; doctors, drunk or sober, were not always in the habit of washing their hands. John Quincy was anguished and scared. When he wrote to tell his mother about the birth of her grandson, he added that he was waiting a few days to tell Catherine Johnson: he was afraid to write immediately, since he might have to follow the good news with a letter saying that her daughter was dead. But his responsibilities to his country remained foremost in his mind. Two weeks after the child was born, John Quincy received his recall to the United States, and he wanted to leave without delay. One of John Adams’s last acts as president had been to summon his son home. On the day John Quincy received his recall, Louisa, who had been slowly improving in health, was “continually seized” with “sudden faintings.” John Quincy despairingly wrote in his diary that she was “immovable,” unable even to shift from one side of her bed to the other. She lay there for weeks, her baby suckling one breast while a borrowed infant nursed the other, since Dr. Brown feared that excess milk would spread her fever to her brain. But she could not convalesce forever—however much some part of her, consciously or not, might have wanted to remain right where she was. John Quincy prepared to leave Berlin at the earliest possible chance. There was not even time to wait for the child to be vaccinated by traditional methods; a faster, experimental one was done instead. By the time Louisa managed to limp across the room with assistance, arrangements had been made to sail to the Un
ited States. She still could not climb the stairs. On June 17, she was lifted into a carriage, and she, John Quincy, their son, and their two servants, Whitcomb and Epps, left Berlin. Saying goodbye, she cried “bitter tears.” The son she held in her arms was her solace. What she thought of his name is unknown. Perhaps it was a chance to prove her American patriotism. Perhaps she was just glad that the name was not an Adams name, that it was not John. (Presumably, the disgraced Joshua was not an option.) Perhaps she didn’t care. What mattered was the existence of the child in her arms. It was her triumph, the redemption of what she saw as her failures so far. “I was a Mother,” she wrote. They went first to Hamburg, where, on July 8, they boarded a ship. It was called the America. Its deck was as close to America as Louisa had ever been. PART THREE