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  In fact, in the Age of the Enlightenment, convent schooling was the target of criticism and ridicule even by Frenchmen. Enlightenment philosophes such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that nature endowed men with rational capacities, which, when cultivated through learning, enabled them to contribute to the advancement of society and its happiness. They rejected the ancient Christian idea that men were tainted by original sin; rather, they believed that men were inclined toward goodness. Thus they rejected institutionalized religion and the monarchy as oppressive fetters on man’s innate freedom to reason toward and to choose what is right. The strong arm of the Church, imposing its restraints on the self-interested inclinations of men, was irrelevant—even harmful—in this new view of society. In time, the belief in this natural tendency of men toward improvement, and their resulting capacity for self-government, would become a central argument in the overthrow of the monarchy in America.

  Devoted to reforming children’s education according to this new worldview, Enlightenment thinkers were therefore highly critical of French nuns and the curricula they offered their students. The philosophes portrayed the convents as cloistered islands, devoted to the perpetuation of an outmoded and superstitious way of understanding the world. They were also suspicious of the nuns’ credentials: When Enlightenment philosophes referred to the rational capacity of man, they did not mean a universal understanding of humanity. Although they acknowledged that women were capable of some learning, they generally agreed that women were inferior, emotional creatures. Ultimately incapable of controlling their passions, therefore, women required the governance of men. A favorite method of discrediting convent education was to portray the convents as dens of female iniquity (“the sewer into which society’s waste is thrown,” Diderot had called them) in racy novels that spun tales of lewd and unscrupulous nuns corrupting their innocent charges.

  Revered in European and American culture as the harbingers of modernity, the philosophes launched attacks that left enduring impressions. It is only in recent decades that their portrayal of ignorance and venality in French convents has been debunked. As historians have documented two centuries of tensions between the French government and female religious orders, a very different picture has emerged of the nuns’ strength, pragmatism, and steely resolve in their struggle for survival. Beginning in 1610, the government tried to herd these religious communities of women into cloisters, quite literally to isolate and contain them. But the nuns fought back by creating teaching orders that brought them into daily contact with French families and enabled them to support themselves. So successful were they that by the time Martha Jefferson was in school there, Parisian parents could choose from no fewer than forty-three convent schools for their daughters.

  French convents and convent schools came to serve important functions for their exclusive clientele: They were places to educate daughters to the conventional religious beliefs expected of aristocratic women. They frequently served as places of refuge for widows, unmarried women, and royalty. And, particularly in the case of the more prominent convents, they provided a way to shore up family alliances and add prestige to the family. The Mother Superior of the nuns, or the Abbess, was typically drawn from an aristocratic family, and her connections enabled the economic survival of the community when the government mandate to cloister prevented the women from going outside the convent walls to earn their support. Thus, far from being ignorant, passive, and out of the mainstream, French nuns knew exactly how to use their social, political, and economic connections to offset the deprivations imposed by their government.

  Not all students were aristocratic however, and the schools these nuns founded were a study in contrasts, as varied as the economic classes they served. Martha Jefferson’s Panthemont stood at the pinnacle of all of them. For one hundred livres per year, the annual wage of a male servant, a young girl might attend the charity school of Sainte-Famille; for a thousand, she could attend Panthemont. Charity schools attended to the basics of reading and writing for students who could barely be spared from home; at Panthemont, lessons ranged from classical history to music and dance, to train the daughters of nobility for their entry into the glittering world at court. A thin soup served in a pewter plate would feed the charity school student; an additional fee of two hundred livres admitted Panthemont’s pensionnaires to the sumptuous fare of the Abbess’s table. Combined with Martha’s basic tuition, Jefferson’s tab for the additional fees of board, specialty masters, and the privilege of dining with the Abbess totaled three thousand livres per year (very roughly comparable to twenty-three thousand dollars today).

  These differences mattered little to the philosophes, of course, who derided all convent schooling; indeed, many of the calls for the reform of female education in the eighteenth century were attacks on the education provided by French nuns. This was due in part to the secular leanings of the philosophes, and to the proliferation of their views by people who admired them. The dismal state of female education in Paris could also be explained by the short amount of time girls actually spent in formal learning: One study of seven Paris convent schools found that 60 percent of the students attended for less than two years. By 1800, only 27 percent of French brides could sign their names in the marriage registers, as opposed to 40 percent of English ones. But there was a deeper, more fundamental problem with female education in 1780s Paris. Although some had begun to argue that women also possessed intellectual ability and the capacity for rational thought, pragmatic parents had to groom their daughters for a marriage market that still abhorred the femme savante, a disparaging term for the woman who made herself ridiculous by proudly displaying her learning.

  Elite French convent schools walked this tightrope carefully. Marie-Catherine de Béthisy de Mézières, the Abbess of Panthemont between 1743 and 1790, was eminently suited to the challenge. She was a well-born woman, although not of nobility. Her mother was the daughter of an English brigadier general and courtier of King James II. A Catholic, James II was deposed by a rebellious parliament and replaced by James’s sister Mary and her husband, William of Orange. Fleeing with her family to France, where they continued to plot the restoration of James’s monarchy, Marie-Catherine’s mother landed on her feet with her marriage to Monsieur de Béthisy de Mézières, a French general who was known more for his ugly visage than for his military talents. More important, he possessed a shrewd head for business, and his speculations in far-off Mississippi had succeeded where many others’ had failed. His money and her political savvy equipped this unusual pair to raise their four daughters to occupy exalted positions in French society: Two married nobility and two headed religious communities.

  Marie-Catherine saved Panthemont, rescuing the convent from falling into ruin. Founded in 1217, the Cistercian order had been relocated to Paris in 1672 from its original site on a mountainside outside Beauvais (the word pentemont loosely translates as mountain slope), after a flood all but destroyed their convent. They had settled for a building on the rue de Grenelle, then on the western reaches of the city. Barely a third of a mile farther west, Louis XIV was building the Hôtel des Invalides, a beautiful structure to house his wounded soldiers. (Les Invalides still stands and is the site of Napoléon Bonaparte’s tomb.) Of course, by the time Martha Jefferson met this indomitable woman, the area around the school had profited from the building boom and was already quite fashionable. But when Madame de Béthisy de Mézières became abbess in 1743, her convent was steps away from the westernmost city walls and was rapidly deteriorating.

  She boldly recruited Pierre Contant d’Ivry, a member of the Royal Academy of Architecture, who held the title of “architect to the king” and whose career included the design of the Palais Royal and La Madeleine. Undeterred by significant cost overruns and even d’Ivry’s attempts to scale back her ambitious plans, she unapologetically importuned wealthy patrons for funding. One of them, the Cardinal of Luynes, was clearly taken aback by her methods. “I must admit,” he t
old her, barely able to contain himself, “that I was quite surprised to read that you were counting on a donation, on the part of the Commission of 60,000 livres, and that you were so confident about receiving this aid that you consequently were planning arrangements with your creditors.” She successfully recruited postulants to her order of nuns and wealthy young students to her school, and even attracted women of quality seeking respectable refuge, such as Rose de Beauharnais, the future Joséphine, wife of Napoléon Bonaparte. Madame l’Abbess, as Martha called her, presented a model of female energy, capability, and authority that the girl would have found extraordinary, especially as she cast back to the memory of life in Virginia, in which most women (with the exception of widows) lived under the daily government of men.

  Still a month from her twelfth birthday, Martha Jefferson from Albemarle County, Virginia, stepped into a very different world that August day in 1784. With its all-female environment, its days devoted to studies and conversation with her peers and worldly boarders, and the formidable leadership of the Abbess, Panthemont was unlike anything she had ever experienced at Monticello, where her father was master over all. These were uncharted waters, indeed.

  MARTHA’S FIRST PRIORITY WAS TO learn French. Of the fifty to sixty other boarders, only one spoke English—and she was two years old. The Abbess spoke English, of course, but neither she nor the two-year-old would be part of Martha’s daily rounds of lessons, meals, and play. As she settled in, she tried to draw upon the French lessons she had taken in Philadelphia. They had failed her, she had to admit to herself—a testament to the limits of ornamental female education in Revolutionary America, even in Philadelphia. She remembered with chagrin how her father had been overcharged for baggage transfer on their arrival at Havre de Grace because he “spoke very little French and me not a word.” On the lookout for such innocents abroad, French handlers charged Jefferson “as much to have the bagadge brought from the shore to the house, which was about a half a square apart, as the bringing it from Philadelphia to Boston.” In this place where none of her classmates understood her, she would have to start again. She was a quick study, however, and determined, “so that speaking as much as I could with them I learnt the language very soon.”

  Within a year of her arrival, she was cheerfully describing her new life. “I am very happy in the convent and it is with reason,” she reported firmly to an American friend; “there wants nothing but the presence of my friends of America to render my situation worthy to be envied by the happiest.” So adept at French had she become by the following year, she began to worry because she was having “really great difficulty” writing in English.

  Martha may have begun feeling utterly bereft of friends and footing, but that situation seems to have been remedied fairly quickly. The Abbess allowed her father to visit her every evening for the first few weeks until she got her bearings. Indeed, with no other option in the daily routine of the convent, Martha quickly surpassed him in her mastery of French. She donned the same crimson uniform worn by all the other pensionnaires, no longer noticeable as a newcomer. The students’ uniforms were based on the court dress Louis XIV mandated for women one hundred years earlier. In the only surviving letter she wrote to her American friends about her stay in Paris, she described it as “made like a frock laced behind with the tail like a robe de cour hooked on muslin cuffs and tuckers.” The robe de cour, or stiff-body dress, had a straight bodice, shaped by stays, which narrowed at the waist and laced up the back. A separate train (Martha’s “tail”) fell either from the shoulders or the waist. The formal dresses worn at court had detachable lace sleeves, but for everyday wear, the students at Panthemont wore the more practical and washable muslin sleeves and neckerchiefs.

  Martha was pleased with her accommodations. There were, she said, “four rooms exceedingly large for the pensionars to sleep in, and there is a fifth and sixth one for them to stay in in the day and the other in which they take their lessens.” Other French girls’ schools were improvised arrangements, superimposed upon already existing monastic buildings that had been designed for cloistered nuns. Panthemont, on the other hand, was spacious and convenient, thoughtfully planned for the various usages of students, nuns, and boarding women, as a result of the Abbess’s determined renovations. It is no wonder that Martha soon came to regard her life there as worthy of envy. And if she had harbored any Protestant fears about the tyranny of Catholic religious orders, they were dispelled by the “cheerful and agreeable” nuns who took care of her. In fact, as she told Nabby Adams, the daughter of John and Abigail Adams, it seemed to Martha that the nuns actually took pleasure in making the students happy.

  As she gradually became accustomed to this new world, and even happy in it, Martha’s contentment increased further with the addition of new English-speaking students. “There comes in some new pensionars evry day,” she reported to Eliza Trist in Philadelphia. Several were daughters of English diplomats, who, notwithstanding the politics of the recently concluded American Revolution, befriended the only American girl in the school. Their surviving letters to Martha (we have none of hers) allow us an insider view of school life and girlhood friendships at Panthemont, and of the vivacious personality that endeared Martha Jefferson to everyone who met her. As an adult, Martha would be universally admired for her lively wit, high intelligence, graceful manners, and animated storytelling. One might be tempted to attribute those qualities to the grooming of her French education, but it seems she already possessed them even before she left Virginia. Begging her to write all about her Paris adventures, her cousin Judith Randolph fully expected “great entertainment from your Epistles,” for she knew that eleven-year-old Martha could already be counted on to provide it. Martha’s irrepressible temperament forbade her from indulging in isolated despair in her new situation. Instead she threw herself into speaking frequently with the other girls and drawing them, magnetlike, to her.

  It is endearing to see the list of her schoolmates that Martha kept, carefully marked with an X alongside the names of those she considered her closest friends. Julia Annesley was the thirteen-year-old daughter of Irish peer Arthur Annesley, 1st Earl of Mountnorris, who was serving in the English delegation to the French court. When Julia arrived at Panthemont, she was delighted that Martha accepted her overtures of friendship, especially the exchange of notes, although they saw each other daily. Julia pounced on the opportunity immediately, beginning confidentially, “I will first give you my opinion of the class.” But she grew impatient when Martha did not reply right away. “I am very angry with my dear Jeffy for not having yet answered my letter, and am resolved to be revenged by not speaking to you for 100 years to come, if I do not hear from you this very day,” Julia wrote playfully, after waiting a week for a response. She peppered Martha with many of the questions typical of first acquaintance: “Pray where are your friends? Do you often go out?” and “How many brothers have you? And when does your sister come? I wish you slept in our room, ask the first time there is a vacancy to come.” The letters the two exchanged while at school would bear their most important secrets, so confidentiality was crucial. “I am very glad no one here understands English,” Julia confided; nonetheless, she begged Martha to “take care not to lose the letters I write to you” and promised, in turn, that “I will take equal care of yours.” Martha would preserve her notes and a lock of Julia’s hair all her life.

  Julia was just one of a number of Martha’s classmates who had singled her out as a friend worth having. Caroline and Elizabeth Tufton also became part of Martha’s circle. They were the nieces of John Frederick Sackville, the Duke of Dorset, who was serving in Paris as the English ambassador to France. The two sisters struck up an intimate friendship with Martha. So close had they become, when they were discussing how to maintain their friendship across the ocean, Martha dispensed with the rules governing formal correspondence. They would write simple informal letters, she told Elizabeth, rather than a journal kept over time, as many young girls did
. Later, when Jefferson named one of his smaller outlying farms Tufton, it was surely in deference to a request from Martha, as a memento of her friends.

  Bettie Hawkins was a particularly close friend with whom Martha also exchanged locks of hair and shared deep confidences. Their friendship endured even after Bettie, three years older than Martha, left Panthemont to return to England in 1787. In spite of the distance between them, the girls gave each other commissions to fill: Martha sent a black cloak to Bettie, and in return Bettie sent the latest plays, books—particularly novels—and tea. Acutely missing her little circle at Panthemont as she prepared for her marriage in England, Bettie charged Martha to keep her fully informed: “I shall be indulged with every incident that has lately occur’d within your Holy Walls,” she wrote in 1789. “Give me a description of all the new pensioners that enter,” she asked in another letter, so that she could keep abreast of all the news.

  But perhaps no one was more effusive in her love for her “dear Jeff” than Marie de Botidoux. Over the course of twenty years after they had all left Panthemont, Marie wrote more than one hundred pages of journals and letters for her friend, although she only ever received one letter in return. Nevertheless, she gives us one of the most spirited glimpses of the youthful Martha, who she remembered as “always wild, your petticoat dragging on one side and with coffee stains on the other, descending the stairs four by four.” Marie also adored Martha’s father with a “veneration and an enthusiasm I cannot express” and remembered fondly her visits to his Paris home, the Hôtel de Langeac, where he patiently let them “derange his library.” “I still love you with all my heart and miss you every day,” she wrote, six months after Martha left Paris.