Jefferson's Daughters Read online

  In her loneliness, Marie had even gone for a stroll in a little lane near the house, in an attempt to relive the old times they had spent walking there. When she finally received a letter from her old friend two decades later, her pain at having been neglected for so long was palpable. Dismissing the adult Martha’s feeble excuse that she was “held back for twenty years by foolish ‘amour propre,’ ” Marie replied with disbelief, “How could you have that with me, who wrote you without pretension and who wrote very badly?” Frankness and impulsively sloppy handwriting were, for Marie, the two clearest literary signs of intimacy between friends. True friends forgave candor, errors, and ink splotches. Yet Marie was still willing to reopen the door to her heart. “At a certain age one…sees that the few pleasures of this life are in an intimate society where one can say what one thinks and feels. You have come to that age dear Jeff,” she wrote pointedly.

  Marie may have been one of the first to befriend the young Virginia girl as she began her classes and mapped her way in this very different world. Not everything was new, at least. Some of the subjects were similar to those she had studied in Philadelphia, since ideas about the necessary ornamental education required for upper-class girls transcended barriers of language, political boundaries, and even oceans. Martha continued her lessons in drawing, dancing, and music. Included in the three thousand livres Jefferson paid for her tuition, room, and board (including firewood, candles in the classes, and her instruments) were the extra fees for the respective masters, among them Claude Balbastre, the renowned church organist, who alone charged an additional 144 livres per month. Her studies expanded, however, to include classical history, French, Italian, geography, and arithmetic. She struggled through a sixteenth-century translation of Titus Livius’s History of the Roman People in an ancient version of Italian, produced landscapes for her drawing master, mastered her history “pretty well,” and worked hard at the challenging piano music her father sent her in order to be ready to perform when he called upon her. But the needlework Jefferson thought essential to prepare for the isolated life of a Virginia planter’s wife was not available in an elite school that catered to royalty. “The only kind of needlework I could learn here,” Martha informed her father in 1787, “would be embroidery, indeed netting also. But I could not do much of those in America, because of the impossibility of having proper silks.” But perhaps, she concluded doubtfully, eager to please him, “they will not be totally useless.”

  Martha Jefferson’s devoted friend during their school days, Marie de Botidoux remained so for many years after Martha returned to the United States. Her youthful exuberance, seen here in her barely repressed smile, was undimmed by Martha’s long years of silence or by the loss of half Marie’s fortune and her stint in a revolutionary prison. In an 1801 letter to Martha, Botidoux professed her delight at Jefferson’s election to the presidency and mentioned her own undying passion for republican politics.

  This much can be gleaned from the very limited number of letters that have survived of Martha’s Paris years: six letters to her father, written between March and May of 1787 as he was touring Europe, and the one she wrote to Eliza Trist in Philadelphia a year after her arrival. (Jefferson had told her not to write to him when, in the spring of 1786, he went to England to assist with the negotiations for commercial treaties; the trip was so short, he was sure he would be on his way back by the time her letter arrived.) But when we look to a broader variety of sources, we can piece together additional particulars of her reading to get a better sense of what Martha was learning and how her thinking was being shaped by the nuns’ curriculum. For example, Monticello now houses a collection of family books that include a number of volumes she owned while at Panthemont. We know that she studied natural history: Martha Jefferson’s copy of Nature Displayed. Being Discourses on Such Particulars of Natural History as Were Thought Proper to Excite the Curiosity, and Form the Minds of Youth bears a London imprint from 1750, suggesting that she may have relied on this English translation as she worked to perfect her French. Her French grammar book, inscribed “Mademoiselle Jefferson/L’Abbaye Royale de Pantemont/Paris,” was indispensable in her transition to life in Paris. It must have also been a treasured keepsake; Martha kept it and later gave it to her daughter.

  Her education immersed her in French literature: fables, novels, romances, poetry, and plays. Like most French children—even today—Martha Jefferson owned and memorized Jean de La Fontaine’s famous fables. She read Alain Lesage’s picaresque novel Gil Blas and his Diable Boiteux (Devil on Crutches), as well as Don Quixote in French. And she relished romances. Her enjoyment of novels was well known among her friends: “Are you still reading novels?” classmate Bettie Hawkins had asked her from England as she prepared to recommend another. She was introduced to the French theater in her reading by the much-respected Madame de Genlis; and she studied both French poetry and Italian, such as the work of the Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarca. Reading these works at Panthemont normalized literature that was largely discouraged for American girls, for whom romances and novels were viewed as harmful to the female character. Americans also generally frowned on the worldliness of the theater; although Virginians had a longer history of performances of plays dating back to the 1730s, Boston did not build its first theater until 1793.

  From Fontaine’s fables, Martha learned the value of work over play (“The Grasshopper and the Ant”), the dangers of flattery (“The Fox and the Crow”), and the rarity of true friendship (“The Saying of Socrates”). The novels of Alain Lesage taught her about the different levels of French society and illustrated that humanity’s foibles were not confined to the lower classes. Indeed, Lesage’s popular novels turned the hierarchical world of the ancien régime upside down: nobles were disreputable, lustful, and treacherous, but honest commoners (like Gil Blas) succeeded by dint of hard work and perseverance.

  To perfect the art of natural letter-writing, she was taught to imitate the much-vaunted style of Madame de Sévigné, whose letters exhibited the delightful spontaneity that was a standard for female writing in the eighteenth century. Panthemont students learned their Sévigné well: A letter written by Marie de Botidoux just weeks after Martha left Paris began with the teasing opener “I am going to say to you, like Mde de Sévigné, that I am giving you one hundred tries [to guess] of what news I am going to inform you.”

  Because Martha left us so little about her life in a convent school, it is helpful to compare the clues we do have about the curriculum at Panthemont with other girls’ schools in Paris, such as the highly regarded Abbaye-aux-Bois. One of its students, Hélène Massalska, remembered a typical day there as a ten-year-old: rising at seven-thirty A.M.; catechism class at eight; breakfast at nine and Mass at nine-thirty; lecture at ten; music at eleven; drawing at eleven-thirty; geography and history at noon; lunch and recreation at one P.M.; writing and arithmetic at three; dance at four; afternoon tea and recreation at five; harp or harpsichord at six; supper at seven and in bed by nine-thirty. The convent school at Liège, in Belgium—attended from 1789 to 1794 by the Marylander Catherine Carroll, who was the daughter of Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence—likewise outlined the same basic curriculum, with a few additions that Martha Jefferson would have recognized for older students: “reading and writing; the principles of English, French, and Italian; sacred and profane history; arithmetic…the art of writing letters at all stages of life…geography; use of the globes; of the sphere, &c. the principles of natural history to the extent that they are suitable for young ladies; embroidery and all needlework; drawing and the painting of flowers.” At Liège, as at Panthemont and most girls’ schools, Latin was excluded. These comparable elite schools thus help us fill out the picture of the kind of education that Martha Jefferson received at Panthemont: an acquaintance with broad varieties of knowledge, but nothing too deep to be deemed taxing for these delicately bred students.

  Following the lead of the Enlighte
nment philosophes, historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries dismissed this curriculum as providing not much more than the veneer of polished manners designed to distinguish the aristocratic society of the ancien régime from their social inferiors. But these critics ignored the seriousness with which some nuns and students took female education. Manon Phlipon, a student at the Congregation of Notre-Dame in Paris, fondly recalled her teacher, Sister Sainte-Sophie: “This good woman soon attached herself to me because of my taste for study; after having given a lesson to the entire class, she took me aside and made me recite grammar, pursue geography, extract bits of history.” Sister Sainte-Sophie’s assessment of her pupil was unerring: Phlipon, later famous as Madame Roland, would become an integral part of the radical Girondist group that challenged Robespierre during the French Revolution. Indeed, some have thought that she was the mastermind behind the work of her husband, Jean-Marie Roland de La Platière, the prominent minister of the interior in 1792.

  At Panthemont, Martha Jefferson liked her instructors and pronounced them “all very good”—except for her drawing teacher, but then again she had struggled with that subject in Philadelphia as well. She labored, too, over an older Italian translation of Titus Livius. “Titus Livius puts me out of my wits,” she cried on one occasion, and “it serves to little good in the execution of a thing almost impossible” on another. But her letters to her father, reporting both progress and struggles, show the challenges of her classes and her dogged application to her studies. So, too, does the knowing remark of a classmate, who advised Martha that she should not try so hard to impress the Abbé, their instructor, saying, “Remember, Priests can’t marry.” Certainly Martha studied hard to produce the results that would please her father and instructors. But unlike her classmates who saw their schooling as ornamental preparations for the marriage market, Martha took the content of her studies seriously. Years after the Jeffersons had left Paris, Madame de Staël, a salon host and the most famous female author in Europe, told Jefferson that “I remember her as more brilliant than all the grande dames of this old world.”

  For both serious scholars and more casual ones, the lessons taught at the convent schools were crucial to the formation of elite female identity, and perhaps none was more important than the art of letter-writing. The challenge for parents and teachers, who knew that their young charges would live lives of leisure, was to prepare them to fill their idle time profitably while still preserving the privileges of rank. The solution, as one historian explains, was writing, which was a “useful pursuit without, however, working” and “became central to the education of young ladies as it took its place in the new morality of leisured femininity.” Stiffly corseted in their robes de cour, young ladies were taught how to sit perfectly straight at their writing table (never leaning on their left hand, as men did), holding their pen just so and transcribing the words of elegant writers such as Sévigné, who would eventually serve as models for their own words. This is precisely what Martha learned at Panthemont. In fact, so standardized was this type of instruction in French schools that the distinctive lowercase d of Martha’s handwriting is almost indistinguishable from that of Marie Marguerite Émilie Lavoisier, the younger sister of the famous French nobleman and chemist, whose careful pen had traced out letters in her copybook thirty years earlier.

  Their teachers may have conveyed these lessons as a mark of rank and status, but young girls gained much more from their letter-writing. Between 1767 and 1780, for example, young Manon Phlipon maintained a voluminous correspondence with her friend Sophie Cannet, whom she met at their Paris convent school in 1765. Their friendship had begun when Manon was just eleven; it flourished through a correspondence maintained through their teens, ending when Manon married at twenty-six and became Madame Roland. In her letters, she shared her deepest thoughts, as well as those “little nothings to which friendship gives so much importance,” which she would not divulge even to her beloved mother. Today we recognize this as a process of self-differentiation, child from parent, much encouraged in the twenty-first century. But a strong sense of self was never the goal of female education for eighteenth-century French girls. Even so, it is clear that while writing to her friend, Manon grew into herself, as over time her letters conveyed fewer news reports and more reflections of an increasingly self-aware young woman who was becoming an independent and confident thinker.

  Although Manon and Sophie began their correspondence to maintain their girlhood friendship across the miles that separated them when they each returned home, Manon also gives us a clue about what these letters meant to the girls who exchanged them. “The need to write to each other made itself felt almost at the moment when we began to care about each other,” she recalled in a letter to Sophie; “the need to satisfy it put the imagination in play, forced ideas to hatch and feelings to be expressed.” For the students at Panthemont, this need to connect emerged while they were still at the school as we saw with Julia Annesley’s notes; and like Manon and Sophie did, Bettie Hawkins, Marie de Botidoux, and the Tufton sisters would use letters to bridge the thousands of miles with Martha after they had parted.

  Marie’s playful imitation of Madame de Sévigné’s letters is therefore only one small example of how girls took this lesson to heart. Friendships were serious business, and so were even the most sprightly of notes. At Panthemont, the students themselves established their own groups; the letters that Martha kept for the rest of her life from her faithful correspondents show who was in her circle. Even after her return to England, Bettie Hawkins wanted to know how those groups were reshuffling in her absence. “Tell me who are friends now at the class, who Bellecour, Botidox, D’Harcourt & your ladyship associate with? & who are my rivals?”

  Introducing new friends into the old set raised concerns for those who had left and a rethinking of their improvised rules. From London in 1789, Bettie Hawkins wrote to Martha about one of her new friends. “Tell me all about her & of your new regulations,” she asked, trying to divine, from across the channel, who had been admitted to their little circle and how candid her letters could be. Letters could also mend ruptures or mourn lost friendships. Unable to mediate at a distance, Bettie told Martha that she was “very sorry D’Harcourt & you never settled matters. A racommodement [rapprochement] would have been desirable for both parties.” (In fact, whatever the problem was between Martha and Gabrielle D’Harcourt, the two girls did settle it—at least well enough to resume the exchange of notes at school that marked particular friendships. “I am grateful to La Charière for having tried to bring us back together,” Gabrielle wrote to Martha in 1789, although she was still uncertain how to approach Martha, “because I saw that you greeted me coldly.”)

  These strongly felt alliances, and the letters that document them, show how these educated young women—American, English, and French—grew into their understandings of their identity, status, and rank. That a girl from England should address the American as “your ladyship” is telling; Martha learned to imitate the regal bearing of her aristocratic friends and to uphold strict protocols in her letter-writing. Bettie Hawkins once saucily chided her, “Your lady ship stands much on Punctilio & has a great deal of the ‘old maid’ in her composition.” The provincial American may have been a bit more naïve and restrained than her more worldly European friends. Nonetheless, she entered fully into their schoolgirl cliques, ensuring by language and the rules they created (regulations that, tellingly, were never specified in their letters) that their correspondence would remain safe from prying eyes.

  Perhaps the best example of the significance of confidences among friends can be found in Martha Jefferson’s encounter with Roman Catholicism at Panthemont. With its majestic architecture and music, mysterious rituals, and opportunities for women, Catholicism was profoundly transformational for Martha, and it was with her friends—rather than her father—that she first shared her spiritual journey. She had been struck by the beauty of Catholic churches from the
very first. On their arrival in France, as Martha and her father completed their journey from the coast to Paris, their carriage followed the roads that hugged the Seine. His planter’s eye noticed the richness of the soil, but she was taken with the beautiful architecture of the churches, which “had as many steps to go to the top as there are days in the year,” the statues, and the stunning stained-glass windows that were so foreign to American Protestants. Upon installing her at Panthemont, Jefferson had to calm the anxious fears of relatives and friends, who fretted that Catholicism would claim such an impressionable young girl. He himself seems not to have been worried. As his friend Jean Armand Tronchin, minister of the republic of Geneva to France, recalled Jefferson having told him, “The abbess in charge is a woman of the world who understands the direction of young Protestant girls. There are often English girls. The daughter of Mr Jefferson is a pupil there, and I know it is understood that one does not talk to them about religion, or rather controversial topics are not discussed. They certainly emerge quite as good Protestants as when they entered.” The Abbess’s well-known reputation in this area may explain Jefferson’s confident reassurance to his sister at home in Virginia that “there are in it as many protestants as Catholics, and not a word is ever spoken to them on the subject of religion.” His frequent visits (at least once a week when he was in town) would allow him to keep a close eye on his daughter’s interests, and the large number of English students also at the school might have convinced him of the truth of the Abbess’s assertions. As events would show, however, Jefferson miscalculated.