David McCullough

Abigail in Paris

Abigail (Smith) Adams, by Benjamin Blyth, c. 1766. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

ABIGAIL SAILED on June 20, 1784. At age thirty-nine, having never been away from either her home or those of close relatives for more than a night or two in all her life, she, Nabby [her daughter Abigail], their two servants, and a cow went on board the Active at Rowe's Wharf, and with a "fine wind" were quickly under way.

Among the few other passengers, as Abigail recorded, were a Colonel Norton from Martha's Vineyard, a Dr. Clark, a Mr. Foster, a Mr. Spear, a "haughty Scotchman" named Green, and one other woman whose name happened also to be Adams. No sooner had the ship passed the Boston lighthouse into rougher water than they were all horribly seasick. And so it was to be for days, everyone tossed about in cramped, "excessive disagreeable" quarters together.

"We crawled upon [the] deck whenever we were able, but it was so cold and damp that we could not remain long," Abigail wrote. The ship was filthy and carrying a cargo of whale oil and potash. With every roll of the waves the whale oil leaked, the potash "smoked and fermented," contributing further to the "flavor" below.

The staterooms for the women comprised two tiny, airless cabins opening onto the main cabin where meals were served and the men slept. Nabby and the other Mrs. Adams were in one cabin, while Abigail and Esther Field shared the other. At night, to keep from suffocating, they had to leave the doors open onto the main cabin. "We can only live with our door shut whilst we dress and undress," Abigail wrote in a journal she began for her sister Mary Cranch.

Necessity has no law, but what should I have thought on shore, to have layed myself down to sleep in common with a half dozen gentlemen. We have curtains it is true, and we only partly undress ... but we have the satisfaction of falling in with a set of well behaved, decent gentlemen.

In a storm off the Grand Banks, with bottles and plates crashing to pieces all about them, the women had to be held fast in their chairs, "as some gentleman sat by us with his arm fastened in ours and his feet braced against a table or chair that was lashed down...."

Afterward, the sailors assured her it had been only a breeze. Yet the hard rocking of the ship had so badly injured her cow that the animal had to be killed and cast overboard.

In the unrelieved dampness belowdecks Abigail suffered severely from rheumatism. The food was inedible. The cook she described as a "lazy, dirty Negro with no more knowledge of his business than a savage." But with a favorable turn in the weather, finding she could get about, her usual spirit returned, and very like John Adams on board the Boston, she proceeded to "make a bustle," in her expression. "And as I found I might reign mistress on board without any offence, I soon exerted my authority with scrapers, mops, brushes, infusions of vinegar, etc., and in a few hours you would have thought yourself in a different ship."

She "took up the direction of our cabin," as she wrote in another account for her sister Elizabeth, "taught the cook to dress his victuals, and have made several puddings with my own hands." When she mastered the names of all the masts and sails, the captain said he was sure she could take over at the helm as well.

Unlike John, she loved watching the sea. Wrapped in an old camblet cloak, she spent hours on deck, her soul filled with feelings of the sublime. After a night of brilliant phosphorescence in the water, a phenomenon she had longed to witness, she wrote in ecstasy of a "blazing ocean" as far as she could see. "'Great and marvelous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty,'" she recorded reverently.

With Nabby she passed the time in the main cabin reading, writing, chatting, or playing cards with the other passengers, whose company she enjoyed. The doctor, John Clark, her favorite, was consistently cheerful, while Mr. Spear's "drollery" kept everyone in high spirits. From a book she was reading on medicine, she copied a passage about association with cheerful people being good for health, and speculated whether her husband might not benefit from a little unbending of the mind.

There was only one of the group whom they would all have been happy to do without, the "haughty Scotchman," Mr. Green, who harped incessantly on the importance of rank and social position and who himself, Abigail concluded, had neither. He paid attention to her only because she was the wife of John Adams, she saw with distaste. "I know his politeness to me is not personally upon my own account, but because of my connection which gives me importance sufficient to entitle me to his notice."

He is always inquiring who was such [and such] a general? I have felt a disposition to quarrel with him several times, but have restrained myself, and only observed mildly that merit, not titles gave a man preeminence in our country, that I did not doubt it was a mortifying circumstance to the British nobility to find themselves so often conquered by mechanics and mere husbandmen—but that we esteemed it our glory to draw characters not only into the field, but into the senate, and believed no one would deny but what they had shone in both. All our passengers enjoyed this conversation.

One of the crew came to her with a story he felt he must tell her. He had been taken prisoner during the war and held in a jail in England. When he and several others escaped to Holland, the only help they were able to get was from John Adams, who gave them money from his own pocket.

What was ahead for her, she pondered in a diary she kept for herself only. Where would she be living? "No matter where," she wrote, "so that it only be in the arms of my dearest, best of friends. I hardly dare trust my imagination or anticipate the day. Cruel sleep how you have tormented me."

When, after a month at sea and the voyage nearly over, the ship lay becalmed, she found the wait intolerable. Motion, she decided, was the most desirable state. "Man was made for action.... I am quite out of conceit with calm."

Heading up the English Channel, the ship was caught in gale winds and for three days there was little sleep for anyone. At last, orders were given to drop anchor in the Downs, the roadstead of the Channel, within sight of the little down of Deal. The passengers were lowered over the side into an open pilot boat and in squally rain and the roar of heaving waves, with everyone soaked to the skin, they made for shore.

We set off from the vessel now mounting upon the top of a wave as high as a steeple [Abigail would write], and then so low that the boat was not to be seen. I could keep myself up no other way than as one of the gentlemen stood braced up against the boat, fast hold of me and I with both arms around him. The other ladies were held in the same manner whilst every wave gave us a broadside.

Then with a sudden rush and a sound like thunder, an immense wave swept the boat broadside high up onto the beach. And thus it was, on Tuesday, July 20, 1784, that Abigail and Nabby were "safely landed upon the British coast."

Under way by post chaise the next morning, they traveled hill and dale to Canterbury, then Chatham, then on to London, seventy-two miles all in a day. Beyond Chatham, they rolled with all possible speed to pass before dark the Black Heath, dreaded for its lurking highwaymen. Fear of the road, the threat of robbery or worse at the hands of highwaymen, was something foreign to Americans. At home it was not uncommon even for women to travel alone feeling perfectly safe. "Every place we passed, and every post chaise we met were crying out a robbery," Abigail later recounted. "The robber was pursued and taken in about two miles, and we saw the poor wretch, ghastly and horrible, brought along on foot." She judged him to be no more than twenty years old. Hearing that "the lad" was certain "to swing," she shuddered. "Though every robber may deserve death, yet to exult over the wretched is what our country is not accustomed to. Long may it be free of such villainies and long may it preserve a commiseration for the wretched."

Though a "monstrous great" city, London struck Abigail as more pleasant than ever she imagined. There was even sunshine, and the small, elegant Adelphi Hotel, on a narrow street just off the Strand, near the Thames, was "as quiet as at any place in Boston." That John and John Quincy had stayed there during their visit to London gave it further appeal.

She immediately dispatched a letter to John at The Hague reporting her arrival and her extreme desire to see him. "Heaven give us a happy meeting," she wrote.

Adams replied at once. Her letter had made him "the happiest man on earth," he said. "I am twenty years younger than I was yesterday." Because of the press of business, he was unable to "fly" to her just yet, but John Quincy was proceeding at once.

Hearing that John, while in London the previous fall, had had a full-length portrait done by Copley, and that the painting was on view at the artist's studio in Haymarket, she hurried off to see it. Adams, in court dress of brown velvet, stood holding a scroll in one hand—his memorial to the Dutch Republic, perhaps, or the Treaty of Paris—while with the other hand he pointed to a map of America spread on a table. Beside the table, a globe figured prominently. He was the picture of a statesman—firm of stance, his expression one of grave resolve. He wore lace at his sleeve and a gold-handled sword. If he looked a little older and stouter than when Abigail had last seen him, she thought it "a very good likeness ... a most beautiful picture." She was delighted.

A steady stream of visitors left her little time to herself. They came every day, Americans in London who wished to pay their respects, including a number of Loyalists. She was told how young she looked, offered assistance, invited to tea. When not receiving visitors, she and Nabby went sightseeing (to Westminster Abbey, the British Museum) or shopping for new clothes, but astounded by the prices, they bought little. She was surprised at how familiar the faces of the English looked, so like Americans, that it was as if she had seen them before. "The London ladies," she also noted, "walk a vast deal and very fast."

On Friday, July 30, a servant came "puffing" up the stairs at the hotel to announce, "Young Mr. Adams." When John Quincy entered, Abigail hardly knew him. As tall as his father, he looked older than seventeen—a man nearly. The resemblance to his father was striking. Seeing him with Nabby made her feel very much the matron, she confided to her sister Mary, but "were I not their mother, I would say a likelier pair you will seldom see in a summer's day."

Nabby judged her brother a "sober lad," but one she was sure she would like once they were reacquainted. To a cousin at home John Quincy wrote, quite properly, "You can imagine what an addition has been made to my happiness by the arrival of a kind and tender mother, and a sister who fulfills my most sanguine expectations."

From The Hague, John Adams promised to be with them in a matter of days, but warned that there could be no lingering in London. He must join his colleagues in Paris.

On the morning of Saturday, August 7, Nabby had been out for a walk. When she returned, she noticed a man's hat on the table with two books in it.

Everything around appeared altered, without my knowing in what particular [she wrote that night in her diary]. I went into my room, the things were moved; I looked around.... "Why are these things moved?"—All [this] in a breath to Esther....
    "Why is all this appearance of strangeness? Whose hat is that in the other room?"... "'Tis my father's!" I said, "Where is he?"
    "In the room above."
    Up I flew, and to his chamber, where he was lying down, and received me with all the tenderness of an affectionate parent after so long an absence. Sure I am, I never felt more agitation of spirits in my life; it will not do to describe.

Abigail's only reference to the reunion with John was in passing in a letter to Mary Cranch: "You know my dear sister that poets and painters wisely draw a veil over those scenes which surpass the pen of one or the pencil of the other; we were indeed a very happy family once more met together after a separation of four years."

Early the following day they were all off for Paris.

THE JOURNEY WAS MADE in record time. They went by fast coach from London to the Channel, and by boat to Calais, landing on the shores of France at dawn the next morning, then sped on by coach-and-six. If Abigail felt still, as on shipboard, that motion was the preferred state, she must have been ecstatic.

The whole route from Calais to Paris, she and Nabby felt they were riding through scenes from a favorite novel, Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey. There were all kinds of travelers, Sterne had written—inquisitive travelers, idle travelers, vain travelers—but the true value of travel was not in strenuous sightseeing. It was in opening one's heart to feeling.

Adams had been away from Paris for nearly a year. In an effort to regain his strength after the illness that struck him down in the late summer of 1783, he had moved to a large house with a garden on the outskirts of the city, just beyond Passy in the still-rural village of Auteuil.

Long a believer in the therapeutic benefits of fresh air and exercise, he had become still more adamant on the subject during his years in Europe. If the dank atmosphere of Amsterdam had been the cause of his first terrible collapse, so the noisome air of Paris had laid him low the second time.

Like Passy, Auteuil was set on an airy hill above the Seine, and adjoined the beautiful Bois de Boulogne, where he could take his daily walks or ride horseback. But when his American doctor, James Jay, the brother of John Jay, had suggested a sojourn in England, he had gone off to London with John Quincy and later to Bath, to take the waters, an experience Adams had found little to his liking and that was cut short by a summons to return to Holland to secure still another desperately needed loan.

Adams again succeeded with the Dutch bankers, but only after one of the most horrendous episodes in all his earthly pilgrimage. Crossing a wintry North Sea, he and John Quincy had been caught in a storm. Landing on a desolate Dutch island, they had had to press on the rest of the way by foot and iceboat. "The weather was cold, we were all frequently wet," he wrote. "I was chilled to the heart, and looked I suppose, as I felt, like a withered old worn out carcass. Our polite skipper frequently eyed me and said he pitied the old man." Adams, by then forty-eight, felt that during the ordeal he had left one stage of life and entered another.

The four Adamses and their two American servants reached Paris on August 13, stopping at the Hôtel d'York on the Left Bank, where the Peace Treaty had been signed. Jefferson and his daughter had already arrived in the city the week before.

While Adams conferred with Jefferson and Franklin, Abigail and Nabby toured the city, John Quincy serving as their guide and interpreter. Then, after several days, the family moved to the rented house at Auteuil, where they were to remain for no one knew how long.

In Paris there had been talk of Jefferson succeeding Franklin as minister to France, a prospect that Adams rejoiced in. Whether Adams would be appointed to the British Court, as was also expected, remained unresolved, and though it was a position he longed for, as a capstone to his diplomatic service, he could not say so outright, and imagined quite correctly that there was stiff opposition in Congress.

Yet Adams was pleased beyond measure. "The house, the garden, the situation near the Bois de Boulogne, elevated above the river Seine and the low grounds, and distant from the putrid streets of Paris, is the best I could wish for," he recorded the day they moved in. It had been a long time since he had felt so well disposed. "I make a little America of my own family," he wrote to Arthur Lee. "I feel more at home than I have ever done in Europe," he told Cotton Tufts. He thought himself better off even than Franklin; besides, his rent was lower.

The house was enormous, three stories of trimmed limestone, and plainly in need of attention. It had once been the country villa of two extravagant, scandalous sisters, the Demoiselles Verrières—Marie and Claudine-Geneviève de Verrières. Depending on how one counted, there were forty or fifty rooms, including a small theater "gone to decay." Abigail, accustomed to a cottage of seven rooms, was nonplussed. Weeks later she would still be finding rooms she had not seen.

Reception salon, dining room, and kitchen were on the first floor, as well as quarters for the servants. The family "apartments" were above, where every room had French doors looking over the garden. The mirrors alone were said to have cost 30,000 livres. One octagonal room on the second floor was paneled entirely with mirrors.

"Why, my dear," wrote Abigail to her niece, Betsy Cranch, "you cannot turn yourself in it without being multiplied twenty times ... [and] that I do not like, for being rather clumsy, and by no means an elegant figure, I hate to have it so repeated to me."

The furnishings were sparse; there were no carpets. The whole place could do with a good scrubbing, she saw, and wondered how cold it might be in winter.

The garden, however, was "delightful," very romantic in its neglect, and it was the garden she would come to love most. There were fully five acres with rows of orange trees, stone walks overhung with grapevines, circles and octagons of flowers in bloom, pots of flowers, a Chinese fence, a fish pond, a fountain that no longer worked, and a little summerhouse, "beautiful in ruins."

The weather, like the garden, enchanted her. The days and nights of late summer were ideal, "beautiful, soft, serene." And as time passed, her affection for the place grew appreciably. She would rent furniture, purchase new table linen, china, and glassware, hire servants, acquire a songbird in a cage, and see the garden fountain restored to running order. She felt "so happy" at Auteuil, "so pleasingly situated."

The French and their ways were another matter, however. The shock experienced by John Adams on his first arrival in France was tepid compared to that of his wife.

From the morning of their landing at Calais, Abigail had been convinced that every coachman, porter, and servant was somehow trying to cheat her, an anxiety not helped by the fact that she understood nothing they said. Now the number of servants she was expected to employ and the division of labor insisted upon by them left her bewildered and exasperated. "One [servant] will not touch what belongs to the business of the other, though he or she has time enough to perform the whole," she wrote, in an effort to explain the system to her sister Mary. The coachman would do nothing but attend the carriage and horses. The cook would only cook, never wash a dish. Then there was the maâtre d'hôtel whose "business is to purchase articles into the family and oversee that nobody cheats but himself." Counting Esther Field and John Briesler, she eventually had eight in service, but that, she was told, was hardly what was expected.

She and John both worried about running into debt, given his salary from Congress of $9,000. While such a sum might be a great deal in Braintree, John wrote to Cotton Tufts, at Court it was but "a sprat in a whale's belly."

"We spend no evenings abroad, make no suppers ... avoid every expense that is not held indispensable," Abigail reported to Mary.

The shock was not so much the exorbitant expense of public life in Europe, but that extravagance was taken as the measure of one's importance. "The inquiry is not whether a person is qualified for his office," she wrote to Uncle Isaac Smith, "but how many domestics and horses does he keep." The British ambassador had fifty servants, the Spanish ambassador, seventy-five.

Fashion ruled and fashion decreed that she and Nabby have their own hairdresser in residence, a young woman named Pauline, who, as a matter of pride, refused to dust or sweep. Both the sweeping and waxing of floors was reserved for a manservant called the frotteur who went tearing about from room to room with brushes strapped to his feet, "dancing here and there like a merry Andrew," and to whom was also assigned the unenviable task of emptying the chamber pots. Why, with so much land available, there was no proper privy, Abigail could not understand.

Even her two servants from home, Esther and John, felt obliged to have their hair dressed, such was the ridicule they were subjected to by the other servants. "To be out of fashion is more criminal than to be seen in a state of nature, to which the Parisians are not averse."

She thought Paris far from appealing, for all the splendor of its public buildings. And if she had not seen all of it, she had "smelt it." Given its state of sanitation, the stench was more nearly than she could bear. With new construction under way everywhere, the narrow streets were cluttered with piles of lumber and stone, great mounds of rubble. Everything looked filthy to her. Even the handsomest buildings were black with soot. The people themselves were the "dirtiest creatures" she had ever laid eyes on, and the number of prostitutes was appalling. That any nation would condone, let alone license, such traffic, she found vile, just as she found abhorrent the French practice of arranged marriages among the rich and titled of society.

"What idea, my dear madame, can you form of the manners of a nation, one city of which furnishes (blush oh, my sex, when I name it) 52,000 unmarried females so lost to a sense of honor and shame as publicly to enroll their names in a notary office for the most abandoned purposes and to commit iniquity with impunity," she wrote in outrage to Mercy Warren. "Thousands of these miserable wretches perish annually with disease and poverty, whilst the most sacred of institutions is prostituted to unite titles and estates."

On a visit later to a Paris orphanage run by Catholic Sisters of Charity, she was shown a large room with a hundred cribs and perhaps as many infants. It was a sight both pleasing and painful—pleasing because all was so admirably clean, and the nuns especially attentive and kind, but painful because of the numbers of abandoned babies, "numbers in the arms, great numbers asleep ... several crying." In an average year 6,000 children were delivered to the orphanage, she was told by the head nun. Even as they talked, one was brought in that appeared to be three months old. In various parts of the city, it was explained, there were designated places with small boxes in which a baby could be "deposited." In winter one child in three died of exposure.

Can we draw a veil over the guilty cause [Abigail wrote], or refrain from comparing a country grown old in debauchery and lewdness with the wise laws and institutions of one wherein marriage is considered as holy and honorable, wherein industry and sobriety enable parents to rear numerous offspring, and where the laws provide resource for illegitimacy by obliging the parents to maintenance, and if not to be obtained there, they become the charge of the town or parish where they are born?

The whole French way of life seemed devoted to little else but appearances and frivolity, everybody bent on a good time, going to the theater, to concerts, public shows and spectacles. She wondered when anyone ever did any work. In London she had seen streets swarming with people, but there they appeared to have business in mind. Here pleasure alone seemed to be the business of life and no one ever to tire of it. Not even on the Sabbath was there pause. Sundays were more like election days at home, as all of Paris "poured forth" into the Bois de Boulogne, where the woods resounded with "music and dancing, jollity and mirth of every kind."

The few resident Americans she met, like the famously beautiful Anne Bingham of Philadelphia and the naval hero John Paul Jones, did not greatly impress her. Young Ann Bingham, who was married to the immensely wealthy William Bingham, was, Abigail agreed, "very handsome," but "rather too much given to the foibles" of France. "Less money and more years may make her wiser," Abigail wrote. And John Paul Jones was a decided disappointment. She had pictured him a "rough, stout, war-like Roman." Instead, he was tiny, soft-spoken, and a favorite with the French ladies, whom he flattered excessively. "I should sooner think of wrapping him up in cotton wool and putting him into my pocket, than sending him to contend with cannon ball."

But most memorable was her first encounter with a "great lady" of France. The occasion was a dinner given by Franklin at his house in Passy, shortly after the Adams family arrived. In recent years Franklin had become increasingly attached to the "sweet society" of the celebrated Madame Helvétius, whose own small estate was close by in Auteuil. Franklin had even proposed marriage to Madame Helvétius, who declined, saying they were past the age for romance. Yet she remained prominent in his life and always the center of attention at his social gatherings. Franklin told Abigail she was to meet one of the best women in the world, and Abigail, curious to see what so charmed "the good Doctor," rode to Passy full of anticipation, only to be appalled by the woman from the moment she appeared.

    She entered the room with a careless, jaunty air [Abigail began in a vivid sketch, in a letter to her niece, Lucy Cranch]. Upon seeing ladies who were strangers to her, she bawled out, "Ah, mon Dieu! where is Franklin? Why did you not tell me there were ladies here?" You must suppose her speaking all this in French. "How do I look?" said she, taking hold of a dressing chemise made of tiffany which she had on over a blue lutestring, and which looked as much upon the decay as her beauty, for she was once a handsome woman.
    Her hair was fangled [done in the latest style]; over it she had a small straw hat, with a dirty half gauze handkerchief round it, and a bit of dirtier gauze than ever my maids wore was sewed on behind. She had a black gauze scarf thrown over her shoulders.
    She ran out of the room. When she returned, the Doctor entered at one door, she at the other, upon which she ran forward to him, caught him by the hand, "Hélas, Franklin!" then gave him a double kiss, one upon each cheek, and another upon his forehead. When we went into the room to dine, she was placed between the Doctor and Mr. Adams. She carried on the chief conversation at dinner, frequently locking her hands in the Doctor's, and sometimes spreading her arms upon the backs of both gentlemen's chairs, then throwing her arm carelessly upon the Doctor's neck.
    I should have been greatly astonished at this conduct, if the good Doctor had not told me that in this lady I should see a genuine Frenchwoman, wholly free of affectation or stiffness of behavior, and one of the best women in the world. For this I must take the Doctor's word, but I should have set her down for a very bad one, although 60 years of age and a widow. I own I was highly disgusted, and never wish for an acquaintance with any ladies of this cast.
    After dinner she threw herself upon a settee, where she showed more than her feet. She had a little lap-dog who was, next to the Doctor, her favorite. This she kissed, and when he wet the floor, she wiped it up with her chemise.

To the Yankee matron from Braintree, the sloppy, ill-mannered, egotistical old woman seemed the very personification of the decadence and decay inherent in European society. Abigail hoped there might be other French ladies whose manners were more consistent with her own ideas of decency; otherwise she would wind up a recluse in France.

Yet these were only early impressions, she conceded. "I have been here so little while that it would be improper for me to pass sentence, or form judgments of people," she told Mercy Warren, implying that with time she might come to see things differently. And change—or at least soften—she did, and especially as she discovered the pleasures and glamour of the Paris theater.

Abigail had always loved to read plays, but with no theaters in Boston, she had never actually seen one performed on stage until arriving in London. Now she could go as often as she wished and in the French manner, with or without the company of her husband. She quickly became a devotee of both the new Comédie-Française and the Opéra. As little as she understood the language, she loved the actors who were "beyond the reach of my pen." The performances were far superior to what she had seen in London, the crowds considerably more polite. If only the cleanliness of the British could be joined with the civility of the French, she told Mercy, it would be a "most agreeable assemblage."

For her sister Elizabeth, Abigail described in loving detail the Comédie-Française, with its great Doric columns, its magnificent chandeliers, one of which, in the sky-blue theater itself, had two hundred candles ablaze.

Fancy, my dear Betsy, this house filled with 2,000 well dressed gentlemen and ladies! ... Suppose some tragedy represented which requires the grandest scenery, and the most superb habits of kings and queens, the parts well performed, and the passions all excited, until you imagine yourself living at the very period.

One evening the four Adamses went by carriage to the Comédie-Française to see The Marriage of Figaro, then a sensation in Paris. The work of the dashing Beaumarchais—who had been an early supporter of the American Revolution and thickly in league with Silas Deane, shipping supplies to America—the play was a satire about the triumph of virtuous servants over their aristocratic employers. In the fifth act came the famous denunciation of his master by the valet, Figaro, that invariably brought an outburst of approval from the audience.

Because you are a great noble, you think you are a great genius! Nobility, a fortune, a rank, appointments to office: all this makes a man so proud! What did you do to earn all this? You took the trouble to get born—nothing more.

Some weeks later, when her own servants, Esther and Pauline, came home from a performance thrilled by what they had seen, Abigial was delighted.

The opera was more enthralling still, the dancing such as she had never imagined, "the highest degree of perfection." At first, she was shocked, but not for long. As she wrote to sister Mary, "I have found my taste reconciling itself to habits, customs and fashions which at first disgusted me."

The dresses and beauty of the performers were enchanting, but no sooner did the dance commence that I felt my delicacy wounded, and I was shamed to be seen looking at them. Girls clothed in the thinnest silk and gauze, with their petticoats short, springing two feet from the floor, poising themselves in the air, with their feet flying, and as perfectly showing their garters and drawers, as though no petticoats had been worn, was a sight altogether new to me. Their motions are as light as air and as quick as lightning.

While the opera house was not as impressive a building as the French theater, it was more lavishly decorated, and the costumes on stage more extravagant. "And oh! the music, vocal and instrumental, it has a soft persuasive power and a dying, dying sound."

She was changing in outlook, she knew. The more she saw of Paris and French society, the more entranced she was with the "performance" of French life, and especially the women of fashion, most of whom, she was relieved to find, were nothing like Madame Helvétius. It was as if the whole of society were a stage. Life itself was a theatrical production and Frenchwomen, raised on theater, had achieved as perfect a command of the art as anyone actually on stage. Abigail could hardly take her eyes off them, studying their every expression and gesture, charmed by the sound of their voices and by their intelligence.

They are easy in their deportment, eloquent in their speech, their voices soft and musical, and their attitude pleasing. Habituated to frequent theaters from their earliest age, they became perfect mistresses of the art of insinuation and the powers of persuasion. Intelligence is communicated to every feature of the face, and to every limb of the body; so that it may be in truth said, every man of this nation is an actor, and every woman an actress.

However greatly she deplored the dictates of fashion, on principle, she was utterly fascinated by the dress of the French ladies, which she described as being like their manners, "light, airy, and genteel." She had made clothes for herself and her family for years, and little about the design and exquisite workmanship of what passed before her now escaped her eye. The fashionable shape for women was that of the wasp, "very small at the bottom of the waist and very large round the shoulders," she reported to a cousin at home, adding ruefully, "You and I, madam, must despair of being in the mode."

With her limited French and limited means, she found her social circle inevitably limited as well. But of the Frenchwomen she came to know, by far the most engaging, and the one whose company she greatly preferred, was the "sprightly" young wife of the Marquis de Lafayette—Adrienne Françios de Noailles—whose family, the Noailles, was among the wealthiest, most distinguished of France. In years past, after dining at their Paris mansion, Adams had written at length of all he had seen, the gardens, walks, pictures, and furniture, "all in the highest style of magnificence," and family portraits "ancient and numerous." Adrienne was one of five daughters of Jean de Noailles, Duc d'Ayen, and Henriette d'Arguesseau, and to Adams they constituted the most "exemplary" family he had met since arriving in Paris. Adrienne, who was still in her twenties when she and Abigail met, had been married to Lafayette in 1774 when she was fourteen and he sixteen. In contrast to most Frenchwomen, and very like Abigail, she remained openly devoted to her husband and children. Importantly, she spoke English and despite her wealth and position dressed simply and disliked pretentious display quite as much as did Abigail. Lafayette, a hero in Paris no less than in America, and himself one of the richest men in France, had recently acquired a palatial house on the Rue de Bourbon, which he made a center of hospitality for Americans in Paris.

"You would have supposed I had been some long absent friend who she dearly loved," Abigail wrote Mary Cranch of the greeting she had received the day of her first call on Madame Lafayette, and for the rest of her stay she would never fail to enjoy the young woman's company. "She is a good and amiable lady, exceedingly fond of her children ... passionately attached to her husband!!! A French lady and fond of her husband!!!" How aware Abigail may have been of the husband's frequent infidelities is not known.

Nabby, who felt she, too, had found a compatible soul in Madame Lafayette, began to see sides to French life that her own country might take lessons from. "I have often complained of a stiffness and reserve in our circles in America that was disagreeable," wrote the daughter whose mother worried that she was too stiff and reserved. "A little French ease adopted would be an improvement."

TO THE DIPLOMATIC TASKS at hand, Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, the old Revolutionary trio, gave due attention, working steadily and in easy accord. "We proceed with wonderful harmony, in good humor, and unanimity," acknowledged Adams, whose sole complaint was a gnawing feeling of "inutility." The issues before them were commercial treaties with the nations of Europe, but it was extremely slow, unexciting work and with no notable progress. The new independent United States faced commercial barriers everywhere, while desperately in need of markets for American surpluses. The American position was free trade, but very little interest was shown.

With Franklin confined to his quarters at Passy, most of the commissioners' working sessions were held there. They carried on correspondence, drew up reports, and, as obliged, appeared each Tuesday at the King's levee at Versailles, where afterward they dined with the Comte de Vergennes and the rest of the diplomatic corps. "It is curious to see forty or fifty ambassadors, ministers or other strangers of the first fashion from all the nations of Europe, assembling in the most amicable manner and conversing in the same language," wrote Jefferson's aide, Colonel Humphreys. "What heightens the pleasure is their being universally men of unaffected manners and good dispositions."

The three American commissioners tried not to get discouraged. But as Jefferson observed, "There is a want of confidence in us." Ultimately, for all their efforts, only one commercial treaty would be negotiated, that with Prussia.

Writing to a correspondent at home, Adams said philosophically, "Public life is like a long journey, in which we have immense tracks of waste countries to pass through for a few very grand and beautiful prospects. At present, I scarcely see a possibility of doing anything for the public worth the expense of maintaining me in Europe."

An equitable trade agreement with Britain was much the most important and pressing objective. But British-American relations had been strained since the Paris Peace Treaty, and the British remained maddeningly obdurate until that winter, when the commissioners were informed that His Majesty's government would welcome an American minister to "reside constantly" at the Court of St. James's. It seemed a hopeful shift in tide, but as such a matter could be decided only by Congress, the inevitable wait began.

In letters to Congress stressing the need for an envoy to Britain, Adams neither offered recommendations nor said anything of his own feelings, as ardently as he wanted the assignment. To Abigail there was no question that he would be chosen—it was his "destiny," she told Mary Cranch—and she was equally unambiguous about Jefferson's fitness for his role in France. Jefferson, she assured Cotton Tufts, was "an excellent man ... and will do honor to his country."

In marked contrast to both Franklin and Jefferson, Adams remained the picture of health. He had rarely ever looked or felt better. And indeed, life for the Adams family had settled into a routine which, if unspectacular, seemed to agree with all of them. Together almost constantly, they enjoyed a contentment such as they had seldom known.

Their days began early. With breakfast finished, weather permitting, John and John Quincy customarily set off for a five- or six-mile walk in the Bois de Boulogne before getting down to work. At two in the afternoon the family gathered for dinner. Most afternoons Adams was at Passy with Franklin and Jefferson. Tea was usually at five, by which time it was dark. In the evenings the family convened in the second-floor sitting room, to read or play cards, except for John Quincy, who was at his studies again, it having been agreed that he would return home soon to enter Harvard. Many nights Adams worked with him, happily playing the schoolmaster again and with his star pupil.

At seventeen the boy was extraordinarily accomplished. In his seven years away from home and from conventional schooling, he had benefited immeasurably from his father's interest and encouragement. His travels, his reading, the time spent in the company of men like Francis Dana and Thomas Jefferson had given him a maturity, made him conversant on a breadth of subjects that people found astonishing. He had already seen more of Europe and Russia than any American of his generation. His French was virtually perfect. He was broadly read in English and Roman history. "If you were to examine him in English and French poetry, I know not where you would find anybody his superior," wrote Adams proudly to the boy's former tutor and guardian at Leyden, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse.

He has translated Virgil's Aeneid ... the whole of Sallust and Tacitus' Agricola ... a great part of Horace, some of Ovid, and some of Caesar's Commentaries ... besides Tully's [Cicero's] Orations....
In Greek his progress has not been equal; yet he has studied morsels of Aristotle's Politics, in Plutarch's Lives, and Lucian's Dialogues. The Choice of Hercules in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several books in Homer's Iliad.
In mathematics I hope he will pass muster. In the course of the last year ... I have spent my evenings with him. We went with some accuracy through the geometry in the Preceptor, the eight books of Simpson's Euclid in Latin.... We went through plane geometry ... algebra, and the decimal fractions, arithmetical and geometrical proportions.... I then attempted a sublime flight and endeavored to give him some idea of the differential method of calculations ... [and] Sir Isaac Newton; but alas, it is thirty years since I thought of mathematics.

The picture of father and son, heads together at a table, absorbed in their work, brought Abigail satisfaction of a kind she had been long denied. "The table is covered with mathematical instruments and books, and you hear nothing 'til nine o'clock but of theorem and problems bisecting and dissecting tangents and se[quents]," she recorded one evening at Auteuil, "after which we are often called upon to relieve their brains by a game of whist."

By Nabby's account, "Pappa's hour" for bed was ten o'clock, after which she and John Quincy would have "a little conversation among themselves." "We see but little company, and visit much less," wrote Nabby, who found Auteuil less sociable than she desired. Still in a quandary over Royall Tyler, she had had almost no word from him, and while John Quincy's plans seemed neatly resolved, hers were not.

No one liked the thought of John Quincy leaving. "I feel very loath to part with my son and shall miss him more than I can express," Abigail wrote to her sister Mary. But "Master John" was now also "a man in most respects, all I may say but age," and it was his wish to go home.

She herself felt waves of extreme homesickness. A heavy snow falling over Paris filled her with emotion because it "looked so American." "What a sad misfortune it is to have the body in one place and the soul in another," she told Mary. The time in France had made her love her own country more than ever. And from the little experience she had had making the adjustment to foreign ways, and foreign speech, from what she knew now that she had not before of the intricacies and difficulties of diplomacy, she wondered how in the world "Mr. Adams" had ever "lived through the perplexing scenes he has had to encounter." Her regard for her country and for her husband had never been greater.

But of all that Abigail wrote of life en famille in the house at Auteuil, perhaps the most memorable vignette was in a letter to her niece Lucy Cranch, dated January 5, 1785. Describing a festive scene at the dinner table, she managed to capture much that was essential about each of them, including herself, but of her Mr. Adams in particular.

You must know that the religion of this country requires [an] abundance of feasting and fasting, and each person has his particular saint, as well as each calling and occupation. Tomorrow is to be celebrated le jour des rois. The day before this feast it is customary to make a large paste pie, into which one bean is put. Each person cuts his slice, and the one who is so lucky as to obtain the bean is dubbed king or queen. Accordingly, today, when I went in to dinner, I found one upon our table.
Your cousin Nabby began by taking the first slice; but alas! poor girl, no bean and no queen. In the next place, your cousin John seconded her by taking a larger cut, and as cautious as cousin T_____ when he inspects merchandise, bisected his paste with mathematical circumspection; but to him it pertained not. By this time I was ready for my part; but first I declared that I had no cravings for royalty. I accordingly separated my piece with much firmness, nowise disappointed that it fell not to me.
Your uncle, who was all this time picking his chicken bone, saw us divert ourselves without saying anything. But presently he seized the remaining half, and to crumbs went the poor paste, cut here and slash there; when behold, the bean! "And thus," said he, "are kingdoms obtained!" But the servant who stood by and saw the havoc, declared solemnly that he could not retain the title, as the laws decreed it to chance, and not to force.

DAVID McCULLOUGH has received the Pulitzer Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize and has twice won the National Book Award. This contribution is from McCullough's new biography, John Adams (2001), published by Simon & Schuster; we are grateful for permission to reproduce this material from Chapter 6.

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