Jefferson's Daughters Page 9

  The venues of these encounters varied, but one place where Parisians of all ranks met was the Palais Royal, which had just been converted from a private residence into a kind of walking mall. Newly opened when the Jeffersons arrived (their first lodgings on the rue de Richelieu were only a block away), the Palais Royal featured shops, cafés, and entertainments in the three galleries, which together with the original palace enclosed an enormous garden. There, Parisians dressed in their best finery gathered by day to promenade the graceful allées, sip coffee and chocolate, shop, and visit. Sundays featured concerts so crowded the air was thick with the perfume of men’s hair powder and the nosegays women carried as a refuge from the noisome city smells. Even today, the Palais Royal is breathtaking on first sight; leaving the noise of Parisian street traffic behind, one walks through an enclosed gallery until it opens to reveal a tree-lined garden oasis of beauty and elegance. Jefferson loved it; he thought it “one of the principal ornaments to the city.” Martha did, too. She, Caroline and Elizabeth Tufton, and their uncle the Duke of Dorset had made quite a day of it on one occasion, staying until nearly dusk (when all respectable women needed to leave to preserve their reputations). Perhaps one of the charms of the Palais Royal (and indeed of Paris itself) for American women was the apparent freedom enjoyed there by French women. Nabby Adams had noticed that “in company here, every one consults his own pleasure; the ladies walk about, view the pictures if there are any, chat with any one who pleases them.”

  But these freedoms also harbored perils, particularly for young women unaccustomed to them. Panthemont and other convent schools like it appealed to parents precisely because they were designed to shelter their daughters. With its strategic mix of the worldliness of the boarders and strict protocols for its students, Panthemont both prepared and protected its young charges. These older women boarders, called dames des chambres, also lived at Panthemont, although in a different wing from the students. This was a common practice in France, allowing a safe haven for women whether unmarried, widowed, or seeking refuge from a bad marriage. Although required to attend chapel, they were otherwise free to receive visitors and leave the convent at will, subject only to a nightly curfew.

  So just as profane and respectable rubbed shoulders at the Palais Royal, so too did the women and pensionnaires at Panthemont. A former student from the Parisian convent school of Port-Royal (like Panthemont, a “four star” girls’ school) remembered many evenings in which she spent two hours at a time in the rooms of the worldly boarding women, who taught her how to talk about politics with manners, wit, and style. Dining at the Abbess’s table provided Martha with lessons in deportment, voice modulation, and the art of pleasing conversation; it may have also provided her a glimpse of French marital mores, courtesy of the dames des chambres. Martha’s report (pointedly ignored by her father) of a man who killed himself because he thought his wife did not love him—concluding with her arch observation that “if every husband in Paris was to do as much, there would be nothing but widows left”—certainly echoes gossip overheard at school. The Abbess may well have tried to suppress such talk among the boarders when her students joined them, but it would not have surprised her. She was very much a woman of the world; many parents counted on her to engineer suitable connections for their daughters among the privileged and powerful families represented at the school.

  This 1788 view shows the recently refurbished Palais Royal, playground and meeting place for Parisians of all ranks. Note the promenades formed by the trees planted in allées. Shops and restaurants occupied the galleries surrounding the enclosure and the subterranean area, capped by the structure in the center.

  Other news filtered through Panthemont’s permeable walls as well. It is not surprising that the daughters of nobility, royal officials, and diplomats should be particularly interested in political news, especially in the changeable climate of 1780s France. Three princesses, distinguished by the blue ribbons they wore over their shoulders, attended the school, and a dozen of the 129 families represented at Panthemont in that decade were English. While her father was touring southern France in the spring of 1787, Martha reported that she was hearing a swirl of rumors about the political activities of the Assembly of Notables, a group of high-powered nobles and clergy called together by the king to advise him. She refused to divulge any of the rumors, however, “for fear of taking a trip to the Bastille for my pains, which I am by no means disposed to do at this moment.” On another occasion, a copy of one of the king’s speeches to this assembly was circulating in the school. So too were speculations about who was to occupy the cell at the Bastille being prepared by a minister of the king’s household. Some thought it might be Madame de Polignac, the Dauphin’s governess and the mother of one of Martha’s dance partners, who—it was whispered—might have been pocketing some of the royal allowance.

  After Martha’s departure from France, her friend Marie de Botidoux gleefully recounted heated arguments in which she delighted to take the republican view (arguing for the sovereignty of the people), was unrepentant in the face of a political conservative’s efforts to exorcise her “demon of democracy,” and begged to know what Jefferson thought of the National Assembly’s latest decrees, for “you know he is my oracle.” Botidoux’s lively letters also dispensed the latest gossip of pairings, alliances, and intrigues at court. Even lodged at Panthemont, Botidoux was able to keep up with the dizzying pace of the French Revolution: the doings of the newly renamed National Constituent Assembly that represented the common people, their fight for a constitution, and the rise and fall of various notables of Paris society.

  The Abbess had strict rules to protect her charges against the hazards of this world. Pensionnaires were allowed to leave the convent on outings, but, Martha found to her chagrin, only if the Abbess had written permission from the parents. Even when out with their parents, students had a curfew that was apparently enforced to the minute. “Know exactly at what hour they will shut your doors in the evening,” Jefferson warned his daughter, apparently stung from past experience, as she prepared to go to the opera, “and as you come down to the carriage see exactly what oclock it is by the Convent clock that we may not be deceived as to the time.”

  The Abbess also maintained strict protocols of rank, by station and age. The daughter of the Duc d’Orléans took her meals apart from the other pensionnaires, in company only with a girl whose family was also associated with the royal household. Students wore different-colored uniforms depending on their ages but were housed in common sleeping quarters. Martha’s good friend Julia Annesley complained petulantly, “I think we are kept rather too strict for such great girls, and that there ought to be some difference made between ours and an infantine age. But,” she admitted ruefully, in a clear acknowledgment of the Abbess’s iron-clad law, “it is of no use to complain, as it will not mend the matter.” Entrusted with the most prominent daughters of the land, the Abbess was immovable on matters respecting their status and virtue, knowing their futures depended upon it.

  Nevertheless, within a year of living under the Abbess’s rule, Martha was “charmed” with her new life. She had learned to speak French like a native and, in her bearing and posture, was indistinguishable from the nobility. When her sponsor, not recognizing Martha on the playground one day, was informed who she was, she replied, “Ah! Mais vraiment elle a l’air très-distingué.” (“Oh, but truly, she has a very distinguished air.”) In these critical years of her life, Martha Jefferson developed a sense of herself that was shaped by mutually reinforcing elements: the curriculum, Catholicism, and female friendships, both within and without the convent school. She learned about the benefits of status and education for women and saw the ways in which even the Roman Church not only countenanced but took full advantage of female ability. In their salons and their letters, French women had achieved the social and intellectual leadership that positioned them to take on the pressing issues that erupted in their own revolution. As the daughter of the Am
erican ambassador, it had been Martha’s enormous good fortune to live in the city at the very height of female influence and to move in those circles.

  It was the best of times for the bright, vivacious young girl, who soaked it all in.

  SO​ FRENCH HAD MARTHA BECOME by the time her sister appeared in France in 1787, three years after her own arrival, that Maria literally did not know her. But, truth to tell, neither of them would have recognized Maria, either, Thomas Jefferson admitted to Elizabeth Eppes, “had we met with her unexpectedly” on a Paris street. As it was, it fell to Jefferson’s French servant, Adrien Petit, to reintroduce Maria to her father and sister. To Maria’s great dismay, Jefferson had sent Petit to London, where her Atlantic voyage ended. She was staying with Abigail and John Adams, who had been living there since their move from Paris upon his appointment as the first American ambassador to the court of George III.

  It was a fair July day when Maria Jefferson alighted from her carriage in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Langeac, her father’s home in Paris. The warmth of the day (a balmy seventy-five degrees that afternoon) most likely persuaded her to leave off wearing her brand-new beaver hat trimmed with feathers, the latest fashion in London’s danker summer weather. Instead she may have been wearing fingerless mitts made up of soft linen diaper cloth, a gift from Abigail Adams, to keep her hands and arms protected from the sun while she traveled. She was undoubtedly wearing one of her new fine Irish linen frocks that Abigail had also provided, perhaps overlaid with a blue sash at the waist, for her first presentation to her father in almost four years.

  No one preserved the memory of those first moments of reunion on paper, perhaps because they were painfully awkward. The French-speaking Petit was in no position to smooth things over between Maria and the father who had sent him in his stead. Maria may have banished her tears at being forced to part with Abigail Adams, but she would not have met her father as happily as she might have had Jefferson gone to London himself and Abigail facilitated the introductions. “As she had left all her Friends in Virginia to come over the ocean to see you,” Adams told Jefferson, reporting Maria’s crisp assessment of Petit’s errand, “she did think you would have taken the pains to have come here for her.” How many times, during the trip across the channel and along the same roads traversed by her father and sister three years earlier, did she steal a sideways glance at Petit and add silently what she had pointedly asked Mrs. Adams: Why did her father have to send a man she could not understand? Abigail had tried to make excuses for Jefferson, but Maria remained unmoved. “I express her own words,” Adams warned him.

  Why Jefferson did not go to London himself is a puzzle. He pleaded the press of business that awaited him on his return to Paris after a three-month tour of southern France and Italy. Or perhaps the Virginia plantation owner did not want to face his two discerning New England friends as he retrieved his daughter and her beautiful young enslaved maid. Or perhaps he felt himself bound to Paris, waiting as anxiously for news of the arrival of a friend there as Maria was waiting for his in London. Maria Hadfield Cosway, the exquisite golden-haired, diminutive artist wife of miniaturist Richard Cosway, was due back in Paris that summer and Jefferson did not want to miss her.

  Introduced in August 1786 by the American artist John Trumbull, Jefferson had been immediately smitten. He admitted to dispatching “lying messengers…to every corner of the city” to cancel his many engagements so that he could spend the day in her company. For weeks, they stole time when they could—although usually in the company of others—touring the beauties of Paris and its environs. It was while on a walk with her in September that, in an ill-calculated attempt to impress the young woman with his agility, he tried to hop a fence. Instead he fell and dislocated his wrist; never properly set, it plagued him for the rest of his life. Mrs. Cosway’s departure from Paris in early October occasioned his famous “Head and Heart” letter to her, an internal debate over which should have precedence and much analyzed by scholars since. (It was a tie: Morality, goodness, and happiness could only flow from the Heart, he believed; but the Head forbade a relationship with a married woman.) In the dozens of flirtatious letters that followed, the two looked forward to her return to Paris the following summer. Whatever the reason, Jefferson had sent Petit to London.

  Now, in the summer sunshine, Maria stood before her father, resplendent in his Paris fashions, a stranger yet her family. In his absence, Elizabeth Eppes had tried to teach Maria and Lucy to love him. But as far as Maria was concerned, her family, from whom she had been torn against her will, was back in Chesterfield County. In those eyes that held nothing back—“What she thinks in her Heart You may read in her Eyes,” Abigail Adams saw—Jefferson may well have been able to read her reproach. By his own admission, he did not see the five-year-old he had left at Eppington in this extraordinarily pretty young girl, now just days away from her ninth birthday. But as his vision focused, did he begin to see traces of his wife’s features in those of his daughter, who had grown up so much in his absence? Or vague shadows of Lucy, a toddler of fifteen months the last time he had seen her? With what combination of joy and sorrow, eagerness and hesitancy, did he greet his lovely but heartsick child?

  We do not know if Martha was with her father at that moment, or at school, daily awaiting the news of Maria’s arrival. Abigail Adams had thought it would be a good idea for Jefferson to bring Martha to London with him when he came to claim Maria, the better to “reconcile her little Sister to the thoughts of taking a journey. It would be proper,” she explained, “that some person should be accustomed to her.” Well acclimated indeed, delighting in her life at Panthemont, Martha no doubt greeted her sister with affection and the confidence of experience. But apprehension may also have colored their meeting. Jefferson had been preparing Martha for Maria’s arrival for some time. “When she arrives,” he instructed his elder daughter, “she will become a precious charge on your hands. The difference of your age, and your common loss of a mother, will put that office on you.” Not yet fifteen, Martha was still a schoolgirl herself and hardly eager to take on the responsibility of motherhood to a sister she had not seen in four years. She responded dutifully that a family reunion would “render my happiness complete” but then dropped the subject.

  Now face-to-face, the sisters were a study in contrasts. No portrait was ever taken of Maria in her lifetime, and the identification of a miniature of a young redheaded woman as Martha Jefferson at seventeen has now been questioned. But verbal portraits do remain and are strikingly consistent for both. Throughout her life, Maria’s beauty was repeatedly remarked upon and admired. Abigail Adams thought her a “beautifull girl,” as did Nathaniel Cutting, a Boston ship captain who met her when she was eleven. A “lovely Girl,” he called her, whose “engaging smile ever animates her Countenance”; Maria Jefferson was “a distinguish’d ornament to her sex,” Cutting gushed. In her twenties, she was described by a family friend as “beautiful,” with “winning manners.” Her memory was still vivid to Monticello slave Isaac Jefferson more than forty years after her death. “She was low like her mother”—by this he meant petite—“and longways the handsomest, pretty lady jist like her mother,” he recalled. Her eyes, “fine blue,” another family friend remembered, “had an expression that cannot I think be described.” Her face, he said, “was divine. Her complexion was exquisite; her features all good, and so arranged as to produce an expression such as I never beheld in any other countenance: sweetness, intelligence, tenderness, beauty were exquisitely blended.”

  As much as Maria seems to have taken after her mother, Martha favored her father. A Virginia friend described her as “large, loosely made, and awkward”—probably owing to her unusual height. It may also explain why she could so easily bound down the stairs of the convent, taking them four at a time. Like her father, she had red hair and blue eyes. She was, as her good friend Margaret Bayard Smith tactfully observed, “a delicate likeness of her father.” Her children would later describ
e her “dignified and highly agreeable appearance” but concede that she “bore too many of her father’s lineaments to be termed beautiful.” Her lack of beauty was probably more apparent when she was contrasted with her sister, but without exception those who described her were drawn to a face “beaming with intelligence, benevolence and sensibility,” with features that were “flexible, playful and agreeable.” Even meeting the twelve-year-old, just two months after the Jeffersons’ arrival in Paris, Nabby Adams had been struck by the “delicacy and sensibility” that she “read in every feature.” Her lively interest and “frank, communicative disposition,” which “melts into cordiality,” was the way a granddaughter thoughtfully described Martha in her mature years.

  Now, seeing her younger sister again, did Martha, too, mark out Maria’s resemblance to their dead mother, the memory of whom would have been much more vivid for Martha than for Maria? She may have been apprehensive about the responsibility she was to bear for her. She may also have recognized a rival for the already limited time and attention of her father. So often had she been disappointed in not hearing from him that she once wrote to him purposefully to “break so painful a silence by giving you an example that I hope you will follow.” Instead Martha’s hopes were met with his rejoinders that “I have not been able to write to you so often as expected, because I am generally on the road; and when I stop any where, I am occupied in seeing what is to be seen.” Too busy with sightseeing to write to his daughter back in Paris (she received only four letters throughout his thirteen-week tour of Europe in the spring of 1787), he nonetheless admonished her that “this need not slacken your writing to me, because you have leisure.” Whatever Martha felt as she met Maria again, the benevolence for which she was known throughout her life won out as she saw the homesickness in Maria’s eyes. She moved back to the Hôtel de Langeac during Maria’s first week in France and, “leading her from time to time to the convent,” gently introduced Maria to her new life there.