Louisa (11 page)

So arrangements were
quickly made. On January 20, John Quincy came home from a ball and told Louisa, who had been at home, that Sophie Marie, Countess von Voss, the queen's
grande gouvernante—
the woman charged with enforcing where to walk, when to sit, and how to bow in the presence of a queen—had scheduled Mrs. Adams's presentation for the next day.

There was hardly time to prepare. Louisa needed a dress. She needed instructions in protocol. She needed the right gossip so that she would not blunder. She needed to learn names and titles, which was hard, because the family tree was confusing. There were three layers of royal families—the current king, Frederick William III; the family of Frederick William II, who had just died; and the people attached to Frederick the Great. It was all the more difficult to sort out because in the Prussian court, wives were known by their husbands' names if the men's ranks were higher. On the other hand, many of the women were named Louise or Luise—pronounced, more or less, “Louisa”—including the
queen. Little else was easy. Pauline Neale materialized and fed her the necessary gossip, taught her the rules, helped her find something to wear and something to make it special (Louisa bought a blue satin robe), and smiled reassuringly.

Before Louisa could give way to her fears, it was seven o'clock in the evening, and she was quivering in the queen's private apartments. Countess von Voss was the first woman she saw, and the sight of the
grande gouvernante
made her freeze. Countess von Voss, nearly seventy, stood rigid, a hoop skirt encircling her skeletal frame. A train of brocaded silk lay over her petticoats; her bodice bristled with ruffles and jewels; a little cap sat on the back of her frizzed hair. At the sight of this person, so “stiff and formal,” Louisa began to tremble, her knees turned weak, and she found herself unable to walk when Queen Luise appeared.

The queen, though
, was kind. She waved away the rules and went up to Louisa instead. “Never shall I forget with what inexpressible admiration I saw the Queen of Queens,” Louisa later wrote. She was not alone in her devotion. Queen Luise had been a monarch for only a month, but already she was a legend—famous for her charisma, her intelligent and passionate nature, and especially for her fair skin, her heart-shaped face, her little red mouth, her blond curls, her limpid blue eyes, and her body, which was painted, sculpted, worshipped. She was called a muse, an angel. When she wore a headscarf around her neck, women wore headscarfs around their necks. When she wore gauzy gowns with empire waists, chemise dresses became the fashion. These dresses suited her, because she was tall, five foot eight, and had the body of a figure painted by Botticelli. No one could overlook her erotic appeal. The clothes she wore were sometimes so thin and low cut that they seemed only to outline her sylvan form; a statue of her and her sister by Johann Gottfried Schadow, in which she stands with her arm wrapped around her sister, wearing a suggestion of a dress and looking more like a nymph than a mortal, was deemed too dangerous for public
view. Yet Queen Luise was also known for her modesty, generosity, warmth, and domesticity. She was a woman who represented, it was agreed, all a woman should be. Thousands of stern Prussian hearts had softened when, upon arriving in Berlin from Mecklenburg as a teenager to marry the heir apparent, Luise broke protocol to embrace and kiss the child who greeted her with verses on Unter den Linden. The king was known as her husband. She was known as the Queen.

It was not out
of character for her to break protocol to approach Louisa and smile sympathetically. It was typical, too, for her to inquire kindly about Louisa's health, since Queen Luise—although a year younger than Louisa—was already the mother of three and pregnant again, and since Dr. Brown, who had nursed Louisa after her miscarriage, was also the queen's own doctor. She watched Louisa sensitively, cut the interview short, and invited the American minister's young wife for supper later that night—without her husband, as was customary, as diplomats were not permitted to dine with the monarch. None of this treatment was unusual for Queen Luise. But to Louisa, the kindness was extraordinary. It put her at ease. Queen Luise embodied an ideal, a union of spirit and humble affability, modesty and allurement, power and grace. She was a fantasy, of course, something out of a fairy tale—the Queen of Queens. But for a young woman who felt alone, who was in search of a model, Queen Luise became the measure.

After her presentation
to the queen, there were countless lesser royal households to meet. Louisa was inspected, questioned, studied. She passed the tests. It helped that she spoke excellent French, the language of the court, and that she wanted to please. It probably helped, too, that—notwithstanding Miss Dorville's whispering—she was pretty. The invitations for the Adamses piled up, and she was “launched in the giddy round of fashionable life.” She was dazzled, but not afraid or intimidated by the grand personages she met. Some of them delighted her, some impressed her, some made her scowl, some summoned a smile. Nothing could have prepared Louisa, for instance,
for the sight of the queen dowager, who wore a twilled robe and skirt, her hair “scratched out on each side” “a la Crazy Jane” and overlaid with diamonds, all hooded by a black veil that fell to her feet. “It was with the utmost difficulty that I kept my
sérieux
, with the dignity suited to the Wife of a foreign dignitary,” Louisa wrote.

“When I got home [Thomas Adams] laughed with all his heart at my recital of the Scene, and the gravity assumed by Mr A. who terribly dreaded some indiscretion on my part, could not controul our mirth.”

2

J
OHN
Q
UINCY
WAS
ANXIOUS
for a reason. Some Europeans considered Americans hardly more than upstart rebels; some, as he was reminded by that suspicious lieutenant at the gates of Berlin, had not heard of the United States at all. The old great powers routinely violated American sovereign rights, carelessly insulting ships and disrupting trade, aware that there was little worry of repercussions from the United States' infant navy—the first American warships had been launched only the year before. The United States had the luxury of an ocean to separate itself from the “vortex” of Europe, but American ships on that same ocean made it vulnerable. Both the French and the British routinely disregarded American maritime rights—because they could, and because they had bigger worries than American grievances. Just as John Quincy and Louisa were arriving in Berlin, Napoleon was headed to Paris as a conquering hero, and his gaze was fixed on Britain. Prussia watched nervously.

John Quincy was determined
that neutrality in European affairs was the best path for the United States to adopt. That course would not be easy to maintain. Caught between Britain and France—with partisans of both in Congress working hard to ensure their favored
nation's advantage, even at the cost of war—the United States was in a delicate position. “Of all the dangers which encompass the liberties of a republican state,” John Quincy had written in 1793, “the intrusion of a foreign influence into the administration of their affairs, is the most alarming.” George Washington, who would soon write his Farewell Address counseling the country to avoid becoming involved with foreign powers, read those words and was deeply impressed. Prussia, although under pressure to join an alliance with or against France, was intent on maintaining its neutrality. A close and friendly relationship with the United States made sense. Renewing the expired treaty would be easy enough; the harder task was to analyze the situation in all of Europe.

To do that, John Quincy needed to cultivate contacts and sources. And to do that, he needed to attend dinners and balls. In his diaries and letters, he called these entertainments tiresome distractions, but he knew they were required. In a European court, the crucial business of making relationships happened in the social realm. Men stood in for states; diplomacy masqueraded as civility. Civility was not his strong suit.

Here is where
his wife—ignorant of all the machinations, and blithely assuming she would and should remain so—came in. His posture of dismissing this society as frivolous was partly republican and partly defensive. He knew that as a courtier, he would not shine. “The jealousy which I marked in his temper and the suspicious turn of mind have already disgusted those whom he had to do business with,” wrote the American Gouverneur Morris when he saw John Quincy in London two years before, adding that his hot temper would “do mischief here.” Morris was biased toward the British and probably somewhat jealous of John Quincy, but John Quincy himself acknowledged that he had bumbled badly in his diplomatic efforts in London. In Berlin, he needed to ingratiate himself while always keeping his distance, as a republican should.

The balance was even harder for his wife, though she had little
inkling of it at the start. She would be judged—by John Quincy as well as by others. John Quincy had little appreciation for women at court. He found them frivolous and shallow. “Political subserviency and domestic influence must be the lot of women, and those who have departed the most from their natural sphere are not those who have shown their sex in the most amiable light,” he had written in his diary while in the Netherlands. Out of context, John Quincy's contempt for women in the proximity of power is curious, in light of the forceful presence and curiosity of his mother. After all, he should have appreciated better than anyone that wives could be smart and invaluable advisers: he had his own mother for a high counselor. But he considered Abigail the exception that proved the rule, and even in her case, she could never aspire to more than to remain behind the scenes. The Adamses shared the view that courts threatened masculine mores. In England, John Adams once wrote, “luxury, effeminacy, and venality are arrived at such a shocking pitch.” The country had become, he added, “the residence of musicians, pimps, panders, and catamites.”

The American Revolution
had been a rebellion not merely against a particular king but against an idea about kings and their inevitable corruptions—corruptions that were often presented in terms of gender. The physical presence of women during political discussions was constantly held up as evidence. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, had been shocked when he saw how women “mix promiscuously in gatherings of men” in Paris. “I have ever believed that had there been no queen there would have been no [French] Revolution,” he wrote. When Philadelphia was the capital of the United States, a political cartoon lampooned its politics by personifying it as a transvestite prostitute. Female courtiers were suspected of being capable of ruining a country, both morally and financially, seen at once as too weak and too dangerously powerful, capable of “omnipotent influence,” in the words of one founder. They were assumed to make men effete and susceptible. The Adamses were more enlightened; they were less inclined to
put women on a pedestal and then shut the door and lock the key, but they were not feminists. Assumptions of Abigail Adams's political power, in fact, tend to be anachronistic. John Adams spoke to her frequently and openly about his work, and he took into account her advice, but she was not the power behind the throne. Nor did she want to be. She did not see herself as effaced by her husband. Believing that her proper place was in the home, she never questioned her supportive role. When Abigail famously told her husband to “remember the ladies,” she was not calling for voting rights but for legal protections against abuse, and even then John laughed her off. Abigail did speak her mind about the great political events of the day, and to an extraordinary degree she was a valuable adviser to her husband, but she also made it clear: she was in charge of the children and the chickens, not the capital.

John Quincy did not
push his wife to play an active public role in Berlin. Being Abigail Adams's son did not mean that he thought women should move in realms outside the home. In fact, he discouraged his wife. “I knew so little concerning politicks, I seldom heard, and never enquired what was going on,” Louisa wrote of her time in Berlin forty years later. “I only knew that it was a period of great events, which I did not understand; and in which I individually took no interest—Mr Adams had always accustomed me to believe, that women had nothing to do with politics; and as he was the glass from which my opinions were reflected, I was convinced of its truth, and sought no farther.” All the same, it would help him to have a partner—preferably a much-admired one, one who could dazzle on his behalf—and it would hurt him if she stumbled. So those presentations to the queen and the royal family mattered. She could help unlock doors for him—but a gaffe on her part might keep them both on the outside.

John Quincy did not need to worry. The presentations went off “with more success than could possibly have been anticipated.” The members of the court looked over the American minister's wife, with
her fragile aspect, her smile, her simple dress, her white satin shoes. They said, “
Elle est jolie.
”

That March, 1798, the Adamses moved from the Brandenburg Gate into apartments on Behrenstrasse, around the corner from the palaces lining Unter den Linden, a more fitting address for a diplomat and one far from the soldiers' constant drumbeats. There, Louisa moved between a world in which she was privileged and a world in which she sharply felt her disadvantage. The rent was too high for John Quincy to furnish the place decently—Congress, suspicious of foreign courts, appropriated far less than other countries for the salaries of its ministers plenipotentiary—but he and Louisa managed to gild a few rooms to fool exacting guests. Those who did catch a glimpse of the bare backstage raised their eyebrows. One good friend, Louisa remembered, “taxed us with
meanness.
” In John Quincy's library, some comforts were considered necessaries: a carpet sewn from scraps covered the floor, and the writing desk was built of mahogany. Louisa's chamber was inferior—“
no carpet
,” coarse cotton curtains, and a rough wood table. She kept a plain mirror on the table. When she looked in it and saw her long, pale face and large, dark eyes, she saw a wife, though not a mother. A woman who answered to “your
Excellency
” in palace drawing rooms but who shivered in her own bedroom for want of a fire.

It was not easy
to maintain the appearance of a Princess Royal at balls and a poor republican at home. The counts, bankers, and ambassadors who lived in the neighborhood offered standing invitations to their suppers and parties. Invitations required reciprocation, which was expensive, and sometimes her cook was drunk. The schedule was repetitive, a “tread-mill round of ceremonious heavy etiquette” during the winter season. There were layers upon layers of the court, each with its own rules of custom and deference. Gambling was common, and it was a grave affront to decline a spot at the table. On Mondays she had to go to Prince Henry's, where the “harpies”—fixtures of court life, minor members of the aristocracy bearing titles of various rank and
stripe—would descend upon her and lead her to the whist table, where they would pick her purse of the few gold pieces John Quincy had allowed her to carry. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, she and her husband visited royal advisers, or princesses, or one count or another. Wednesday was reserved for the old king's widow. Fridays offered some relief, when Louisa went to the home of Luise, known as Princess Ferdinand, where the dinners were a little less pretentious, and where Princess Ferdinand's sister, the Landgravine of Hesse-Kassel, “the most elegant woman I ever beheld,” made Louisa feel “at
home.
” On Sundays, John Quincy and Louisa joined the company of the king and queen.

She was supposed to dislike being part of the “elegant mob.” She and John Quincy had already argued during their engagement, after all, about her impressionability, the lures of luxury, and the corrupting influence of a court. She was wise, then, to bemoan the “almost constant dissipation.” And it was true: the treadmill of court parties would become “very irksome.” She had to settle into a chair without shoving her hoop into the knee of the prince sitting next to her, and to demurely deny a baron's request that they breakfast in his garden tête-à-tête
.
She had no choice of where to go, nor what to do once she was there, except when she was sick (and, in fact, she was often sick). If there were games of cards, she played cards. If summoned by royalty, she stepped forward. If she was dismissed, she had to figure out how to walk away without turning her back. It was exhausting, to be out past midnight night after night, rarely in perfect health, and to eat rich meals she did not enjoy. She was not completely lying when she wrote, to satisfy those who suspected her of harboring a fondness for silks and quadrilles, that “these duties were a torment.” She grew sick of the quivering joints of meat marbled with fat.

Her frequently poor health gave her a reason and excuse to form real and deep relationships in more intimate places. Away from the court, she learned who her true friends were. She would go to the house of her
physician, Charles Brown, a few doors away from her apartment, for suppers of bread and cheese without ceremony. The Browns' house was a refuge, “the resort of all the English foreigners of distinction.” It was familiar to her—a glimpse of Britain in Berlin. Charles Brown was Scottish and his wife Welsh. Their children were not so unlike her own siblings, and the family had a hum she would have recognized. There was bookish Margaret; little golden Fanny; William, “very handsome and very wild”; and pretty, sweet Isabella, who worshipped her.