Jefferson's Daughters Read online

  By the twenty-eighth of May, James Hemings had arrived in Philadelphia (Short would travel later), and together he, Jefferson, and Martha left the city bound for Boston. It would take them three weeks, occupied by the usual maintenance requirements of eighteenth-century travel and a week’s stay in New York City. Jefferson used the time to acquaint himself with northern commercial interests, which, as an ambassador for the entire country, he must also represent. For that purpose, he added a week’s tour of New England when they discovered that they could not depart for France until early July. He lodged Martha with John Lowell, a judge and antislavery activist who offered his services to any Massachusetts slave suing for freedom. She never spoke of her time among Lowell’s family, so we do not know what the young Virginia girl thought of their antislavery activities. Of course, she had spent time in Philadelphia with Francis Hopkinson, who later helped to write the constitution of the newly revived Pennsylvania Abolition Society and served as its secretary, so Boston may not have marked her first encounter with antislavery ideas. Still, New England would have revealed a different kind of society to all three Virginians: father, daughter, and slave.

  At long last, Jefferson and Martha walked up the gangplank to the ship that would take them across the ocean, nearly two years after Martha Jefferson’s death. The Ceres was beautiful: new but already proven seaworthy by a previous crossing. They would have it practically to themselves, sharing it with only six other passengers, “all of whom papa knew,” Martha reported later. It was a perfect passage: short—nineteen days—sunny, and calm. “If I could be sure it would be as agreeable as the first,” she later said, she would happily make another.

  We can imagine the three voyagers standing at the ship’s rail, watching as land disappeared from view. It is not likely that Jefferson mourned the sight, although he no doubt regretted his inability to see his younger daughters before he left. But they were in the best of hands, so he would not worry. Instead he may have stood at the bow, looking forward now after his years of sorrow. “The vaunted scene of Europe,” for which Jefferson had longed and which had been promised for the better part of two years, would finally be his. The trip would have been monumental for nineteen-year-old James Hemings as well. Unlike Jefferson, Hemings had made a point of visiting Monticello to say his goodbyes when he heard that Jefferson wanted him for a sojourn that was likely to last two years. The land disappearing over the horizon proclaimed liberty for all men but enslaved him; it was not his country in the same way as it was his master’s. Did he look backward, toward Virginia and his family, or forward? And as he watched the ship cut through the waves, did he ponder the marvel of his eastward destination, the reverse of the voyages his ancestors had made from England or Wales, or packed in the bowels of a slaver from Africa?

  When Martha wrote about the trip a year later, she spoke with the voice of experience, as a young girl who had mastered the challenges of living among strangers, first in Philadelphia, then in Boston, and finally in Paris. Her memory of an idyllic passage was selective, entirely editing out the last two days of the voyage, when she had fallen ill. What she was feeling as she left her sisters and aunts behind, we cannot know. It was a key moment, however, as the paths of the Jefferson sisters diverged markedly. Left behind to be raised by her aunt, Maria would find what Martha did not, a second mother. Trained in the mode of upper-class Virginia girls, Maria, like her peers, would seek marriage and motherhood, with little interest in exploring the wider world beyond her home. For her elder sister, Philadelphia had served as a kind of bridge from rural Albemarle to the splendors of Paris; her travels to New York City and Boston would have amplified her broadening view of the world, including, possibly, her views on slavery. Paris would not be her first time living among strangers, but it would require a transition from the New World to the Old. As she stood at the ship’s railing, she must have wondered what awaited her there, and how she would adapt.

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  THEY ARRIVED IN PARIS on August 6. They had left Triel, twenty-five miles to the northwest of the city, that morning, changing horses four times. En route, they stopped to see the Machine de Marly, whose fourteen huge wheels, groaning and creaking with effort, another admiring visitor had noted, “threw every day more than 27,000 hogsheads of water up a height of 600 feet into the aqueduct.” Traveling along the aqueduct, the water propelled from this engineering marvel supplied the beautiful fountains at Versailles, about four miles away. At last, they crossed the bridge at Neuilly, a wide stone structure Jefferson thought “the handsomest in the world,” which had been completed just ten years earlier. A scant two and a half miles away, the great city rose before them. Perhaps the day was fair, like many August days in Paris, and the walls of the city gleamed white in the summer sun.

  After their progress from the coast, through countryside that Martha had thought “a perfect garden,” they arrived in the teeming, boisterous, reeking city of Paris. Nothing could have prepared them for what they saw. A city whose population was variously estimated at between five hundred thousand and a million inhabitants, Paris was—even conservatively—at least a dozen times bigger than Philadelphia. Its maze of more than eight hundred streets defied the efforts of visitors, foreign and provincial alike, to find their way to the city center. Most streets were narrow and crowded, filled with stalls where Parisians hawked their wares or brought their work, their socializing, and their arguments. Hazards abounded: dangling shop signs, projecting additions to overcrowded homes, overhanging flower boxes. There were no sidewalks. People, animals, wagons, and carriages all jostled for position, colliding with one another and tipping over the makeshift stalls, adding to traffic and din. There is not a sliver of daylight in a 1787 depiction of a typical Paris street: A country rustic, clutching a whip, drives his plodding workhorse past several women who press their backs to the house behind them to give way; a dog daringly darts under the horse’s hooves; a delivery man with an enormous mirror strapped to his back leans heavily on his walking stick as a young boy, clutching a loaf of bread, ducks beneath his arm. A well-dressed bourgeois attempts to clear the way for his deliveryman, but a further complication is emerging: A carriage approaches from around the corner, the driver looking dismayed as he surveys the congestion from the height of his seat. Not until 1783 were city streets required to have a minimum width of thirty feet.

  Less obvious from pictures of eighteenth-century Paris were its smells. Rivers could be the source of odors sweet and foul, from the abundant flower markets that lined the banks and the sewers that dumped into the Seine. Mornings brought the pleasant aroma of fresh-baked bread and coffee; later in the day, if the breeze was blowing just so, one could detect the distinctive smell of hops from the breweries south of the city, as well as the sickening stench from the tanneries. Even the most fashionable areas of the city were not immune to rank odors: Some days, the terraces of the pleasure garden attached to the Tuileries Palace could be overwhelmed by the stink of human excrement.

  Initially, Martha was spared this view of the seamier side of Paris, since she and her father approached their destination from the northwest. The city had been undergoing a building boom since the 1760s, expanding in all directions but particularly to the west. There, neighborhoods such as the Faubourg Saint-Germain on the Left Bank drew aristocratic families, both French and foreign, seeking lodging. The elegance of the neighborhood is on display in an eighteenth-century engraving of the rue de Grenelle: Newer buildings of neoclassical design are interspersed with older but tasteful townhouses, in a tableau of graceful order. If the anonymous artist exaggerated the width of the street (and he did), he nonetheless made his point: beauty, serenity, and cleanliness could be had in Paris, if you could afford them. By the time the Jeffersons arrived in 1784, half of the city’s aristocratic families lived in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and it is still one of Paris’s most exclusive neighborhoods, housing embassies, diplomats, and the well-heeled.

  A depiction of the rue de Grenelle in 17
89, this engraving is an idealized view showing the street to be much wider than it actually was. La Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons, the colonnaded building seen here on the left side of the street with four small fountains at street level (two of which are barely visible here), was just two blocks from Panthemont. Both buildings still stand along a street that has not altered dramatically since Jefferson’s day.

  Building had proceeded apace on the Right Bank as well. As they entered the city outskirts, Jefferson’s driver guided their phaeton down the main thoroughfare, the Champs-Élysées. On their left, a whole new quarter was being built in what had been, until recently, the royal orchards. Once owned by a younger brother of Louis XVI, the orchards were sold off by lots in the 1770s, spurring entrepreneurial construction projects of individual luxury homes for the nobility and the creation of new streets off the boulevard for further development. These lovely houses, enclosed by carefully kept gardens, made an immediate impression on Jefferson. Close enough for a commute to the city, but with their delightful rural aspect, they would be precisely what he would choose when it was time to look for his Paris home.

  Proceeding down the Champs-Élysées, the carriage carrying Jefferson and Martha reached the great Place Louis XV. Twenty years in the making, the square had only been completed seven years before. At its center stood an enormous statue of Louis XV, which the joyous city of Paris had voted to erect in order to commemorate the king’s reputedly miraculous recovery from illness in 1748. Jefferson admired the statue from a distance but as they drew closer thought the immense proportions made it “appear a monster.” But the square, gracefully connecting the gardens flanking the Champs-Élysées on the west with the gardens of the Tuileries on the east, formed a beautiful prospect along the Right Bank of the Seine and a spectacular entrance to the city.

  Their carriage turned left onto the rue Saint Honoré, toward another fashionable district, the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Nobility who did not reside in Saint-Germain could be found here. The family of Adrienne de Noailles, who had married the Marquis de Lafayette, the famous French hero of the American Revolution, lived on this street, as did the Comte and Comtesse d’Houdetot (salonnières who were avid admirers of Benjamin Franklin). Then as now, exclusive shops lined the street; Jefferson would log in his memorandum book the many livres he spent there. But the rue Saint Honoré was narrower than the Champs-Élysées and lacked sidewalks; here the Jeffersons would have encountered the traffic and congestion for which Paris was notorious. They arrived at their lodgings, the Hôtel d’Orléans, on the rue de Richelieu, where they stayed for a few days before realizing their mistake and moving to the more spacious (and expensive) lodgings of the other Hôtel d’Orléans, on the Left Bank.

  They spent the first three weeks getting acclimated. Even their first drive through the rue Saint-Honoré, the center of haute couture, had made them realize that their provincial Virginia clothing marked them as country rustics. Jefferson addressed this immediately. The very day they arrived, he spent 167 livres on clothes for Martha and 120 livres for a single pair of sleeve lace ruffles for himself—this in a society in which a female servant was doing well if she earned 12 livres a month. He also bought a couple of yards of cambric and lots of edging—perhaps to be made up for ruffles for Martha. Four days later, he bought himself a sword and belt to add to his presentation before moving to their more luxurious hotel on the Left Bank. More clothes for Martha, and more lace ruffles, shirts, knee and shoe buckles, and a cane for him soon followed.

  Painted two years after Jefferson’s arrival in Paris, this portrait reveals his adoption of the elegant French style he discovered in his first days in France. He wears a rich blue coat, silk waistcoat, a crimped double-pleated jabot, and powdered wig. Completed in London in 1786 while Jefferson was visiting John Adams, this is the earliest known portrait of Jefferson. He gave it to Adams to mark their deep friendship.

  A year later, Martha laughed at the memory of those first few days. “I wish you could have been with us when we arrived,” she wrote to Eliza Trist. “I am sure you would have laughed, for we were obliged to send immediately for the stay maker, the mantumaker [dressmaker], the milliner and even a shoe maker, before I could go out.” But even though Abigail Adams had reported that in Paris, “there is not a porter nor a washer woman but what has their hair powderd and drest every day,” Martha saw the friseur but once. Regardless of what was à la mode in Paris, Martha Jefferson was not going to subject herself to the torture of French hairdressing. “I soon got rid of him,” she told Trist mischievously, “for I think it always too soon to suffer.” She must have learned a few styling techniques in that one session, however, since she crowed in triumph that she “turned down my hair [myself] in spite of all they could say.”

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  JEFFERSON’S OFFICIAL DIPLOMATIC DUTIES notwithstanding, a most pressing personal matter was the selection of a proper school for Martha. His friend the Marquis de Chastellux, who had visited Monticello shortly before Jefferson’s wife died and returned to Paris that same year, came to the rescue. He suggested the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, one of the most fashionable schools in the city—and, by a mile, the most expensive. A noble reference was required for admission, and Chastellux secured that as well. He had been so impressed by Jefferson on his Virginia visit that he had included Jefferson in an account he published in Paris in 1786 of his travels in America. Such a well-placed advocate may explain why the Comtesse de Brionne, the niece of the Abbess of Panthemont, agreed to serve as Martha’s sponsor for admission on such a brief acquaintance, if indeed she even met Martha at all.

  On August 26, just three weeks after their arrival, Martha and Jefferson left their lodgings at the Hôtel d’Orléans on the rue des Petits-Augustins for the one-mile trip to the abbey. They entered the grounds through an extensive garden and pulled up to the entrance of the school. An enormous building—the garden façade was two-thirds the length of a modern-day football field—the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont was designed to impress. The product of fifty years of planning, renovation, and rebuilding (ongoing, even while Martha was there—she never could escape the din of construction), Panthemont was as elegant a presence in the Faubourg Saint-Germain as any of its other aristocratic neighbors. Indeed, a walk along the rue de Grenelle today remains one of the best ways to see the Paris that Martha and her father knew. Martha’s school building still stands; occupied by the Ministry of Defense for many years, national austerity cuts prompted its sale in 2014 to a private developer.

  The full splendor of Panthemont is best appreciated from the main entrance—the double white doors shown here—rather than the plainer street façade. The garden would have been in full flower on that August day when Jefferson brought his daughter to her new school and home. Directly above the double doors through which Martha entered was the Abbess’s office, graced with a little balcony and bathed in the sunlight that streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  Martha and Jefferson alighted from their carriage in front of the imposing entrance. Tall sets of double glass doors adorned the façade on both the first and second floors. Capped by transom and fanlight windows, they drew Martha’s eye continuously upward to the elaborately carved pediment that heralded the entrance to the school. Graceful arches bonneted the rows of windows on the upper floors; a cupola elegantly capped the third floor. Nothing in Philadelphia, New York, or Boston had prepared her for the grandeur of her new school. Looking up, she suddenly felt very small.

  They made their way into the spacious vestibule, with its high ceilings and elaborately carved moldings, and were ushered up the flight of stairs, to the office and reception rooms of the Abbess, the Mother Superior of the convent and head of the school. Martha nervously scrutinized the magnificent surroundings as she climbed the grand staircase, her dread mounting as the moment of separation from her father drew closer with each step. Reaching the second-floor landing, she could see a long hallway that led to the rooms that would be her home. The a
bundant sunlight coming in through the windows that faced the inner courtyard may have cheered her. She was not allowed to linger, however, and following their guide, Martha was taken to meet the Abbess, whose impressive office boasted the same high ceilings and carved woodwork that she had seen downstairs. No record of this first meeting exists. Maybe Martha tried out her elementary French from her lessons at home, or maybe she was utterly tongue-tied from grief over her impending separation from her father. Next they were led to an office where Jefferson paid his daughter’s tuition to Sister de Vis, Amariton, or d’Elbée, the nuns in charge of the convent’s accounts. Undoubtedly Martha was also introduced to Sister Tonbenheim, the headmistress, who supervised all the students.

  Jefferson bid his daughter farewell, assured her he would come to visit often, and left her to the care of the nuns. Writing to Eliza Trist a year later, Martha still could not bring herself to describe her utter desolation as she watched him go. “I leave you to judge my situation” was all she would say. At just eleven, she was abandoned to navigate the waters of this new world alone.

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  THE CONVENT SCHOOL PRESENTED innumerable mysteries to a girl from Virginia, from the female government that controlled such a prominent institution to the strange clothing of the nuns. Martha entered her new school with all the anti–Roman Catholic sensibilities then held by Protestant Americans, who abhorred what they saw as the slavish obedience required of Catholics to a foreign ruler in Rome and who were deeply suspicious of the mysteries of their liturgy. Even after the passage of England’s 1689 Act of Toleration, colonial American Catholics remained marginalized, and Martha had not entirely escaped this cultural disdain. Years after her return from Paris, she would describe the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation as “the most monstrous article of their creed…absurd and disgusting.” Although no doubt reassured by the recommendation of the Marquis de Chastellux and by her father’s decision to place her at Panthemont, she must have wondered how a Catholic convent school would prepare her for her adult life in America.