Jefferson's Daughters Read online

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  THE JEFFERSONS HAD NOT been in Paris two months when they invited Abigail Adams and her daughter Nabby to a profession ceremony at Panthemont’s chapel for two young women entering the convent. The setting itself was magnificent, having been restored during the Abbess’s ambitious renovations. The chapel’s arched ceilings stretched several stories high, culminating in a dome constructed of an exquisite stone, its hues gradually transfiguring from light tan to a rosy pink with the changing light of the sun during the course of the day. The chapel’s prerevolutionary incarnation may have had stained-glass windows; it certainly would have had flickering candles, fragrant incense, and a crucifix bearing the image of the slain Christ. Empty niches today suggest the presence of impressive statues of the sort that had caught Martha’s eye when she first arrived in France, before they were removed by the revolution. As she entered this lovely space, she was treated to a feast for the senses before the profession ritual had even begun.

  The betrothal ceremony they witnessed possessed all the drama of a theatrical spectacle: Nabby left a detailed description that captured all its solemnity, majesty, and pathos. It began with a procession from behind the iron grates where the nuns were usually cloistered, into the chancel. The Abbess parted the curtain and led her nuns and students, each bearing a lighted candle. Attended by two richly dressed English classmates of Martha’s, also holding candles, the two candidates for the convent followed, attired in simple cloaks and with their hair shaved, a dramatic symbol of their rejection of worldly vanities. Then began the rituals of endlessly kneeling and rising that so bewildered the Protestant Nabby that she found them “impossible to describe.” A sermon impressed upon everyone assembled, but especially the two candidates, the solemnity of the vows the young women were about to take. The priest detailed all the worldly pleasures they would forego and warned them of the privations of life within the convent. Their resolution unwavering, the young women received a kiss from each of the nuns, who then withdrew from the altar. Then “there was brought in, by eight pensioners, a pall of black, crossed with white, which was held over them.” For half an hour, while the priest prayed and the nuns chanted, the candidates lay prostrate on their faces, dead to the world under the funeral cloth. “This was an affecting sight,” Nabby admitted in spite of herself; “I could not refrain from tears.”

  Rising—symbolizing the new life into which they were being born—the pair presented themselves to the Abbess. She dressed them in the nun’s habit, “fine, white woolen dresses and white veils,” and crowned their heads with flowers. When the priest then exhorted the other students to consider following their example, Nabby noticed one of the two English attendants “looked sharp” at the other, “whose countenance expressed that she…had no such intention.” If the nuns had hoped that their participation in the profession ritual would inspire them to do so, they were sorely mistaken. Nabby agreed wholeheartedly. “Quite right she,” she judged firmly.

  At nineteen, Nabby Adams observed these proceedings with a somewhat jaundiced eye, her attitude toward Catholicism likely in concert with her mother’s, who once shamefacedly admitted her anti-Catholicism to Jefferson. But Nabby had also been touched to see the smile that lit up the face of one young nun as she received the habit she would wear for the rest of her life, and the unruffled serenity of the other. And, in spite of herself, she had been moved to the point of tears. How much more affecting might the scene have been for a less worldly twelve-year-old, who now lived within this community?

  Panthemont’s magnificent organ (1846) draws the eye to the soaring dome above. The engraved names of the four evangelists (Luke and John are seen here) survived the depredations of the church by the French revolutionaries, even if their images did not. Converted to a Protestant church in 1844, today’s Temple de Pentemont retains the magnificent carvings, proportion, and beauty that so entranced the twelve-year-old girl from Virginia.

  Martha was smitten. Nominally, at least, she was an Anglican, but her childhood religious observances had probably been limited to prayers taught by her mother and some Scripture readings at home. The first church building in Charlottesville was not completed until 1825; until then, the various sects took turns using the county courthouse, the largest assembly space in the town. So for Martha, both the profession ceremony and its setting were a striking departure from anything she would have seen in Virginia. How could it have failed to stir her imagination?

  Her curiosity piqued, Martha turned to her classmates, asking questions at first, later sharing with them her deep interest in Catholicism, and finally confiding her resolution to abjure her Protestantism. In several letters shortly after her departure from Panthemont, Bettie Hawkins asked repeatedly about a mysterious matter that had clearly been the subject of their conversations at school but that required complete discretion in their correspondence. “When do you make abjuration?” she asked abruptly on one occasion, wondering “how you intend telling your father?” In another letter, she fretted about Martha’s long silence, worrying it might have been occasioned “by some tragical event concerning your abjuration.” Bettie was sorry she could not be there to support her; “I regret much having quitted Panthemont before your revolt…my fidelity & respect at least you might have depended upon.”

  In May 1788, Bettie had been appalled to see a report in The Morning Post, an English newspaper attentively read in Paris by English and American diplomats, that the nuns “seduce[d] Miss Jefferson, daughter of the American minister, to change her religion.” The “daughter of Lord Valentia,” Julia Annesley, had also been subject to that “infection,” the paper noted, and had withdrawn from the school. Bettie raced to her writing table early the next morning to transmit “the earliest intelligence of it, that you might prepare your answer to any questions your Father (who will certainly see it) might ask you on the occasion.” Aware that father and daughter would receive the paper in the same post, Bettie strained to alert Martha, knowing that “you have never talked to him on that subject I imagine, as I think you never mentioned it to me in any of your letters.” The tumult in Martha’s soul—not to mention the danger of political embarrassment to her father, the American minister to France—was too precious for her to trust it to paper, even with all the precautions they had taken.

  A revolt (that may never have happened) or the newspaper account (that did) may well explain the nineteenth-century family legend that is still told today: After Martha sent her father a letter informing him of her desire to enter the convent, the story goes, he unceremoniously arrived at the Abbess’s doorstep and politely but firmly removed Martha from her school. (In fact, it would not be until April 1789 that Jefferson withdrew her, a full year after the newspaper notice, so it is unclear if or when Martha ever wrote such a letter.) If the point of the family story is to depict Martha’s attraction to Catholicism as a mere romantic girlish infatuation, easily dismissed, it was serious enough to have attracted the attention of the papal nuncio in Paris, Antonio Dugnani, as Martha approached her fifteenth birthday. Reporting information he had heard, probably from Jefferson himself, Dugnani told the Bishop of Baltimore that Martha “seems to have great tendencies toward the Catholic religion.” Her interest was deep enough to require her father to distract her, in hopes that she would forego making any decision before she turned eighteen. And his concern was warranted, as her closest friends knew, even better than he did. Marie de Botidoux, who had also been taken into Martha’s confidence, astutely observed that to protect her newfound faith, Martha would have lived the rest of her life as a nun, staying in France forever.

  All Martha Jefferson saw and learned at Panthemont seems to have inspired far more than a heady, youthful infatuation with ceremony, as her friends and eventually her father recognized. Bettie Hawkins’s letters do not specifically talk about reception into the Roman Church, but taken together with Dugnani’s letters (and his continued interest in Martha into the 1790s), Jefferson’s concern, and the newspaper repo
rt, that is the most likely interpretation of the revolt Martha was planning. And it was prompted by her encounter with Catholic theology, not just youthful impressionability. Almost four decades later, she could still vividly recall the earnestness of her Catholic faith, imprinted upon her layer by layer, by the daily regimen of chapel attendance, prayer at meals, catechism classes, clergy teachers, her French and English Catholic friends, and the example of the nuns—their assurances to Jefferson notwithstanding. “At your age,” she wrote to a daughter, then eighteen and thinking about converting to Catholicism, “I believed most religiously that it was the only road to heaven, and looked forward with fear and terror to the possibility of never again having it in my power [in America] to profess myself a member of that church which I believed the true, and original.” Many of her new beliefs countered those of her father. Unlike Jefferson, who took a razor to cut out every miracle narrative from his Bible, Martha thoroughly believed in them. Martha’s exposure to Catholicism raised serious philosophical questions with which she had to contend. The stakes were high. How was a young girl to judge? What if she made a mistake?

  Founded in 1772 by the Reverend Henry Bate, The Morning Post published sensational news tidbits such as that revealing Martha Jefferson’s scandalous interest in Catholicism. Anticipating today’s tabloids, paragraph men—as they were called—picked up their information from coffeehouse gossip and composed and submitted their paragraph news items, little concerned about their accuracy.

  There were very real, pragmatic reasons for a young woman to consider Catholicism. With the Reformation, the convent as an alternative to marriage had been closed to Protestant women. As Martha saw in Paris, however, the Church provided opportunities for women to teach as a profession, supported fully without having to marry: Many nuns at Panthemont were former students. For aristocratic women, such as the school’s abbess, Marie-Catherine de Béthisy de Mézières, the Church also provided opportunities to govern, not unlike running a business, and even to flex some muscle in the world beyond the convent walls. The Abbess had persuaded the Dauphin of France to lay the ceremonial cornerstone of her new chapel, and in fact was so respected—even by the revolutionaries who overthrew the old order—that she was permitted to spend the rest of her life in her quarters at Panthemont, although they had abolished her school in the summer of 1790. Indeed, nuns in revolutionary France showed the same determined resistance to government efforts to define them as their spiritual ancestors had displayed the century before. In spite of the abolition of teaching convents in August 1792, most nuns continued their adherence to the old Church. This is not to argue that the Abbess exemplified a kind of proto-feminist model that Martha Jefferson found appealing. But it is to say instead that in the old regime, with its intricate systems of hierarchy (which Martha, coming from the slave society of Virginia, would have well understood), Catholic women could offset the disadvantages of their sex in religious communities: Women of all ranks could elude the governing hand of a husband; aristocratic women could run institutions such as schools, hospitals, orphanages, and asylums, presiding over their huge government-subsidized budgets; and even women of lower orders could find fulfilling work and satisfying friendships. In such a setting, Martha Jefferson saw how the right education could firmly uphold and even improve one’s status.

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  BUT A WOMAN DID not necessarily have to be a religious to exert influence in French society. In addition to the nuns at Panthemont, other women also taught Martha the pleasures of status and learning. The daughter of the American ambassador had occasion to meet many luminaries of French high society and of its salon culture. Jefferson had immediately renewed his friendship with the Marquis de Chastellux, who had visited him at Monticello in 1782 and who (with his wife, after his marriage in 1787) was a frequent visitor to Jefferson’s Paris household. As we have seen, the Marquis had a hand in helping Jefferson find a school for Martha. As well, the Marquis de Lafayette ebulliently laid his home—barely a ten-minute walk from Panthemont—“entirely at your disposal.” He also volunteered the help of his wife, Adrienne, since her “knowledge of the country may be of use to Miss Jefferson.” Martha enjoyed excursions with her, including one to Versailles, and dined at their home. Just blocks away from Panthemont, Madame de Tessé, Adrienne de La Fayette’s aunt, presided over a salon in which she pressed a little too enthusiastically for a new constitution for France, according to the New Yorker Gouverneur Morris; indeed, she grew impatient with the rather conservative Morris (a member of the Constitutional Convention), whose views were entirely too cautious for her. With their shared interest in gardening and political sympathies, she became a great friend of Jefferson’s, corresponding with him until her death in 1814.

  Probably the most brilliant salons in Paris were presided over by Mesdames Houdetot, Helvétius, and Necker, where literature, politics, philosophy, and the sciences were the primary topics of conversation. As a young woman, Houdetot had been Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s lover and was forever memorialized as the “Julie” of his Confessions. In her fifties when Jefferson met her, she lived with the Marquis de Saint-Lambert, the poet and philosopher who would later translate into French Jefferson’s famous Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which became law in Virginia in 1786. Jefferson seems to have been better acquainted with the latter two women. Helvétius, the widow of a noted philosopher, was the beloved of Benjamin Franklin, who introduced Jefferson into her charmed circle before Franklin returned to America. Suzanne Necker was the wife of the banker and chief financier of King Louis XVI. The naturalist Buffon, whose theories about America Jefferson refuted in his Notes on the State of Virginia, was a regular attendee at her salon, as was the famed philosophe Denis Diderot. Madame Necker was the mother and teacher of the more famous Germaine de Staël, who was already published by 1786 and who presided over what Morris called “quite the first salon in Paris.” Jefferson admired the entire family.

  We have nothing in Martha’s hand to say that she knew these women, but between visits to her father’s home (and full-time residence after April 1789) and outings typical of Parisians—balls (no more than three per week, her father decreed), the opera, the Palais Royal, and Versailles—it is hard to believe that she would not have met them in one or more of these places. Gouverneur Morris made a note of many dinners at the Jefferson household “en famille,” attended by a variety of people, as did Nabby Adams. Young as she was, Nabby still accompanied her parents to dine with Madame Helvétius; Jefferson’s close association with her makes it entirely likely that Martha would have known her as well. Madame Houdetot helped Martha shop for gifts to bring home to Virginia before her departure. The affectionate relationship between the Jeffersons and the Lafayettes would have given Martha and Madame de Tessé time together and common ground on which to connect.

  Family stories of Martha’s social life in Paris include an account of a conversation with Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire. The duchess was renowned on both sides of the channel for her trendsetting fashions as well as her active political campaigning back home in Britain. Attending a dinner given by the Duchess, Martha’s height drew the attention of this celebrity. “It gives me pleasure, Miss Jefferson, to see any one as tall as myself,” Georgiana told her, smiling. Martha also socialized with the duchess on more intimate and informal terms. On one occasion, her friends Caroline and Elizabeth Tufton invited Martha to join them at their home to hear music with the Duchess. “You need not dress as there really will be nobody else,” Caroline assured Martha. On another, Caroline wrote, “the Dutchess of Devonshire will be here at eight o’ Clock, so pray come as soon as you can, as we shall be happy to see you, as much before as you like, on ne peut pas vous voir trop souvent [we cannot see you too often].”

  Family stories also preserved memories of Martha’s love of dancing and balls. At one ball, Martha danced with a member of the aristocratic Polignac family (her partner’s mother was Marie Antoinette’s great confidante) eight times. Because
etiquette forbade two dances in a row with the same person, she must have had at least sixteen dances that evening. At another ball, the Duc de Fronsac observed that she danced well that night. “And beaucoup [a lot],” was her happy rejoinder, to which the duke reiterated, “Et bien [And well].” At these balls, Martha frequently saw the celebrated salonnière Madame de Staël, who she remembered as always “surrounded by a circle of gentlemen under the spell of the wonderful charm of her conversation.” Handed down by a granddaughter, these stories may well have been burnished over the years; nonetheless, they underscore Martha’s delighted participation in a lively social scene populated by exemplary women who reveled in the life of the mind and were celebrated for it.

  Martha Jefferson kept company with less exalted women as well. Neither an aristocrat nor a salonnière, Madame de Corny was a particular favorite of the Jeffersons. Her husband had served as a commissary for the French army in America and was a minor political official in Paris. Madame de Corny devised especially amusing outings for Martha, such as escorting her to the opera and taking her out of the convent to view the Longchamp parade, an annual procession of the wealthy, in which both people and horses were arrayed in their finest livery. Jefferson’s lodgings at the Hôtel de Langeac provided the perfect vantage point from which to enjoy this annual spectacle. Kitty (Catherine) Church, Alexander Hamilton’s niece, stayed with Corny, so Martha came to know her as well.

  Jefferson’s home had quickly become a center for Paris-based Americans, many of whom Martha also met. At her father’s request, she would bring her music to entertain his guests with her latest accomplishments, although he once had to remind her to dress the part of an accomplished young woman. “Make it a rule hereafter to come dressed otherwise than in your uniform,” he admonished her, when she had not dressed to the occasion when venturing out of the school. Martha probably also knew Anne Willing Bingham, a stylish Philadelphia woman who frequented the salons and the gardens of the Palais Royal and debated gender and politics with Jefferson. Martha would have been less conflicted about Bingham than the staid New Englander Nabby Adams, who was alternately wowed by her beauty and intelligence and distressed by her enthusiastic adoption of French fashion—especially rouge.