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Summary
Summary
Early in 1815, Louisa Catherine Adams and her young son left St. Petersburg in a heavy Russian carriage and set out on a difficult journey to meet her husband, John Quincy Adams, in Paris. She traveled through the snows of eastern Europe, down the Baltic coast to Prussia, across the battlefields of Germany, and into a France then experiencing the tumultuous events of Napoleon's return from Elba. Along the way, she learned what the long years of Napoleon's wars had done to Europe, what her old friends in the royal court in Berlin had experienced during the French occupation, how it felt to have her life threatened by reckless soldiers, and how to manage fear.
The journey was a metaphor for a life spent crossing borders: born in London in 1775, she had grown up partly in France, and in 1797 had married into the most famous of American political dynasties and become the daughter-in-law of John and Abigail Adams.
The prizewinning historian Michael O'Brien reconstructs for the first time Louisa Adams's extraordinary passage. An evocative history of the experience of travel in the days of carriages and kings, Mrs. Adams in Winter offers a moving portrait of a lady, her difficult marriage, and her conflicted sense of what it meant to be a woman caught between worlds.
Author Notes
Michael O'Brien is Professor of American Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810--1860 , which won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Beginning her nearly solitary winter trek from St. Petersburg to Paris in 1815, Louisa Adams experienced 40 days of independence from the constrictions she suffered as wife to future American president John Quincy Adams. Recounting her journey in minute detail, O'Brien, Cambridge professor of American intellectual history, juxtaposes her encounters with a dazzling array of fashionable nobles with ruined towns and impoverished survivors struggling in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. O'Brien (Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860) effectively highlights Louisa's unease as a European-bred, naturalized American descended from a mother's illegitimate birth, who marries into the intimidating Puritan family of John and Abigail Adams. Using a range of sources, O'Brien reconstructs memories omitted in Louisa's memoir and delves into a 50-page diversion on her marriage, slowing the travelogue's pace. Readers of American and European history will exult in the informative contrast of postrevolutionary American values and the glittering European and Russian courts, which steadfastly ignored the horrific effects of continental warfare. 40 b&w illus., 1 map. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Though much has been written about Abigail Adams, the feisty First Lady and Revolutionary War heroine who captured the collective imaginations of generations of Americans, little interest has been paid to her daughter-in-law, Louisa Catherine Adams. Married to John Quincy Adams and the only First Lady to be born and raised outside of the U.S., she spent her formative years in England and France, never setting foot upon American soil until she was twenty-six years old. Her full-length biography is a fascinating one, but historian O'Brien has extrapolated an incredible adventure to serve as a metaphor for her life and times. During the winter of 1815, Mrs. Adams and her young son set forth from St. Petersburg, Russia, traveling overland through battle-torn Europe for 40 days, to meet her husband in Paris. Years later, Louisa penned a memoir of that arduous journey, and O'Brien has adeptly filled in her gaps with historical and sociological texturing. This compelling combination of biography, travelogue, and adventure does an admirable job resurrecting one of the many forgotten females in the annals of American history.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SHE was neither the first nor the last diplomatic wife to receive the directive, later reduced to six words: "Pay, pack and follow, at convenience." The version that reached Louisa Catherine Adams in January 1815 was less succinct - her husband was John Adams's son after all - but she could hardly have complied more swiftly. In three weeks she had crated up the St. Petersburg household, settled the accounts and prepared to set off, across 2,000 miles, to join her husband in Paris. It was winter. Europe remained pockmarked by the Napoleonic Wars. With her Mrs. Adams would take knives and forks; hidden bags of gold and silver; a governess; two servants, one of them trustworthy; and 7-year-old Charles Francis Adams, whose third language was English. They set out late on the afternoon of Feb. 12. It was Mrs. Adams's 40th birthday. There was some reason for the eager departure from Russia, to which John Quincy Adams had been posted in 1809. His was largely a ceremonial office. A St. Petersburg winter lasts from six to eight months. Neither Adams took naturally to diplomatic life, which in the court of Alexander I consisted of a debilitating round of balls, all-night marathons that left the Adamses to crawl from their beds the next afternoon with aching heads and parched throats. They endured as well the tribulation of every early American envoy abroad: how to survive in the most opulent of European courts on a preposterously low Congressional allowance? Especially to the London-bred Louisa Adams - she remains America's only foreign-born first lady - the wardrobe-related indignities abounded. She had moreover held down the fort alone for nearly a year. She averaged 64 miles a day, first on runners, over snow and ice, later on wheels, over sand and mud, with singing postilions and screeching owls, occasionally traveling through the night, across a crazy quilt of languages, currencies, customs, salaries, regulations, through the landscape of a Friedrich painting or (less happily) a Grimm fairy tale. Mrs. Adams enjoyed social outings and reunions with old friends. More often she spent sleepless nights in filthy inns. She had numerous occasions to be grateful that she was, as she put it later, "neither young nor beautiful." In central Germany she retraced the steps the Grande Armée had taken two years earlier; outside her carriage she saw demolished homesteads, scorched fields, "an immense quantity of bones." Parties of disbanded soldiers roamed freely. She got lost. The servants deserted. Mrs. Adams was not yet in Berlin when Napoleon escaped from Elba; as she reached Strasbourg imperial eagles replaced white Bourbon lilies. By the time she approached Paris she had acquired a rowdy escort of Napoleonic guards. A petrified Charles glued himself to her side. The governess was on the verge of a breakdown. The trip had taken - there was something of a biblical trial about it - 40 days. Only 21 years later did Mrs. Adams attempt to set down her account of the adventure. She wished she had done so earlier; now her details were off. A woman who titles her memoirs "The Adventures of a Nobody" may not be the ideal narrator for such a feat in the first place. To the rescue comes the historian Michael O'Brien, who sets out to both correct and amplify the record. Mrs. Adams has left him only limited material, so as she makes her daunting way across the Continent he darts backward and forward in time, fleshing out the geographic and historical details. As a tour guide to 18th-century eastern Europe he is without equal. He always knows where the best hotel is, even if he cannot say whether Mrs. Adams stayed in it. Her trip through Yiddish-speaking Russia elicited no comment in the original but sends O'Brien off to meditate on John Adams and the Jews. Although Mrs. Adams was unlikely to have attended, we have a meticulous re-creation of the Riga theater. A church spire appears in the distance; a survey of Mrs. Adams's religious formation follows. In bits and pieces O'Brien assembles a portrait of the Adams marriage, one preceded by a deeply unromantic courtship. The couple quarreled from the start. O'Brien provides a fine account of Mrs. Adams ("It is difficult to deal with sensitive women," the adult Charles Francis Adams sighs); her torturous obstetrical history (multiple miscarriages, a stillbirth, four live births, the loss of an infant); her less than ideal relationship with her husband's family. She had not so much married into a clan as a cult. No corner of Europe was so foreign to the former London society girl as Quincy, Mass. "Had I stepped into Noah's Ark I do not think I could have been more utterly astonished," she would recall, sounding as if she had met the other Addams family. Theirs was a culture to which she could not adapt; it is easy to see why O'Brien asserts that she was happy to be adrift and without responsibilities or identity for 40 days. Her father-in-law had invented America. What woman would be comfortable with pronouncement-prone Abigail looking over her shoulder? Generally the younger Mrs. Adams was a poor student of "meekness and resignation," as her husband reminded her. They disagreed about religion, child rearing, money, taste, clean shirts, female ambition and makeup. Where all this fits into Louisa Adams's trek across Europe is not exactly clear. In his acknowledgments O'Brien refers to his book as a "literary experiment," and structurally I suppose it is. The problem comes in reintroducing us to eastern Europe once we have heard Adams on the subject of rouge or his wife on the subject of independence ("Now I like very well to adopt my husband's thoughts and words when I approve them; but I do not like to repeat them like a parrot"). O'Brien is to be applauded for his encyclopedic knowledge - the reader who wants to understand how a cabriolet differs from a limonière will not be disappointed - but I would have liked less of the geography of eastern France, a little more of the woman who could not keep it straight. Whence that extraordinary title, "The Adventures of a Nobody"? What did the Americans make of Napoleon's return? Other women who proved to be lousy parrots certainly crisscrossed Europe over these years, not that Madame de Staël serves as an example of anything. Mrs. Adams set down her account to prove that she existed, to challenge the notion of "feminine imbecility." O'Brien consistently goes her one better, mining her journey for its "iconic significance." Louisa Adams became a permanent resident of the United States only at 42; O'Brien sees her trip as symbolic of the border-crossing career, as "a metaphor for how a woman could manage the difficult business of life." The trick was to rely on female solidarity; to Mrs. Adams, he maintains, "women were incomparably more important than men." I believe him entirely - but not on the basis of any evidence presented here. The claims are spirited and rousing, the voyage flat by comparison. The effect is less like discovering vodka in your water glass than water in your vodka glass. Mrs. Adams is in far better hands with Mr. O'Brien than she was in her slog across Europe, but somehow -between the welter of period detail and the lofty assertions - she herself goes missing in these pages. Louisa Adams was, as her husband reminded her, a poor student of 'meekness and resignation.' Stacy Schiff's new book, "Cleopatra," will be published this fall.
Kirkus Review
British historian O'Brien (American Intellectual History/Cambridge Univ.; Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 18101860, 2003) pursues Louisa Adams's 40-day trek through a Europe in the process of transformation. The Mrs. Adams in question is not to be confused with Abigail Adams, the Colonial matriarch and wife of the second president. Rather, Louisa Catherine Adams was her London-born daughter-in-law, the wife to Abigail's son John Quincy Adams. In early 1815, as her husband had been recalled to Paris after serving as minister to Alexander I's court in St. Petersburg, Adams was requested by letter to join him. The trip involved a grueling journey by carriage with her young son and the French nurse over the rough, frigid terrain of Russia and Prussia and through Germany to Paris. The Adamses had not seen each other in nearly a year, and Louisa was anxious to leave St. Petersburg, where the couple had been stationed for a few years. She was weary of costly court appearances, ready to close the chapter on a painful recent period involving the death of her baby girl and wondering, as O'Brien suggests, how her marriage to the evidently chilly, undemonstrative Quincy Adams would hold up. After weeks of preparation, they set off by kibitka (Russian sled), averaging 64 miles a day for the 2,000-mile trip. They passed hundreds of post stations, each one requiring the payment of taxes, and the overall cost came to $1,984.99, about $28,000 in today's money. O'Brien's narrative is richly contextual, encompassing not only the great personalities of the age, whom Mrs. Adams met, but penetrating the secrets of a complicated marriage. A wide-sweeping historical survey and original intellectual journey. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In early 1815, Louisa Adams left St Petersburg, Russia, with her young son to travel 2000 miles by horse and carriage to meet husband John Quincy Adams in Paris. As had been all too common in her marriage, she had been living alone for almost a year after her ambitious husband temporarily (it was thought) vacated his position as American minister to the tsar to participate in treaty negotiations ending the War of 1812. At about the same time, Napoleon escaped from Elba and also headed to Paris, which added drama to an adventure already daring for a lone woman (Bonaparte beat her to Paris by a day or two). Starting with Mrs. Adams's memoir of the journey, written later in life, historian O'Brien has indefatigably researched early 19th-century travel to re-create the 40-day journey through the bad inns and worse roads of Russia, Prussia, and France. Along the way, the reader gradually learns (almost as in a whodunit) the story of Mrs. Adams, the only First Lady born outside the United States. VERDICT This innovative and creatively told personal history of a forgotten figure bound by marriage to an ambitious American statesman bristles with insight into the era. Witty, informed, sophisticated, and moving; essential reading.-Stewart Desmond, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 SAINT PETERSBURG SHE WAS IN A HURRY, because anxious. And she disliked partings, all the business of embraces, regrets, and promises. So she began the journey and left the city without ceremony, while her friends were distracted at Sunday dinner, which in Saint Petersburg occurred at five o'clock. The Moika Canal sat frozen close to her small, leaking apartment, and the deep snow and the hour deadened sound.1 The unsteadiness of the horses, the ordering of the servants, the instructing of the postilions, the care of a small boy, the disposition of a heavy carriage on runners and a sled behind, the noise of three languages, the heaving of luggage, and the storing of provisions made a muffled confusion in the dusk. She was right to be anxious, because she was committing herself mostly to strangers. Though she knew her servant John Fulling, the postilions were anonymous and she barely knew the French nurse, Madame Babet, who had only been employed that day. And there was a rough soldier called Baptiste, a prisoner of war she had agreed to take westward in exchange for his ser vices. Baptiste worried her.2 To be sure, she had pieces of paper that were reassuring. There was a Russian passport from the State Board of Foreign Affairs, which had been issued five days before. Written in German, "in pursuance of the edict of His Majesty, the Sovereign Emperor Alexander Pavlovich, Ruler of all the Russias, etc., etc., etc," it gave her leave of absence and free passage from his empire. The minister of the interior, Osip Petrovich Kozodavlev, had given her the obligatory padarojna, or order for post-horses, and sent commands that she should be well treated by all the postmasters on the road "on pain of punishment."3 (Punishment from such a man was not something to contemplate lightly, for he was the tsar's spymaster and prison warden.) There was her French passport, signed in the name of the French ambassador by his secretary, but "au Nom du Roi," the restored Louis XVIII. The Prussian ambassador had given her yet another passport "im Namen seiner Majestät des Konigs von Preussen," which had a comforting ring, since she knew the Prussian king well, had danced with him, and trusted to his protective kindness. Then, too, she had hidden bags of gold and silver, as well as letters of credit to bankers along her way. For she was a fine lady of lofty rank, someone of fur and turquoise rings, someone who knew the tsar, the tsarina, a king or two, and aristocrats beyond number and often beyond remembrance. In crude post stations, in flea-bitten inns, she would be someone who might elicit deference, even fear. She would manipulate this response. To her surprise, she was a little sorry to leave. For most of her time there, she had disliked the place, with its biting cold winters and humid listless summers, and she disliked the "gaudy loneliness" of being almost the only woman of her kind in the city.4 In Saint Petersburg, she had found few friends and little comfort. On that twelfth of February--as it happened, her fortieth birthday--she entered her carriage with trepidation. All her life, she had lacked confidence and seen the world as a challenge she could not meet. This journey would be a test, or so she came to think. Being only seven, the boy had as yet little history that anyone cared to record. He was known as a child of quick passions, so wild that his mother could find him difficult to manage. But he was sweet and needy, someone who tried hard. He had lived almost all his short life in Saint Petersburg and there acquired an unstable mix of cultures. He was formed by a German nursemaid, parents who often spoke French, and servants who were Russian. English was only his third language, and he wrote letters in it blunderingly, with a pained sense of inadequacy. The city had made him grow up faster than was usual, for the Russians were uninterested in the innocence of childhood, and treated children like him as small adults. When not yet three, he had attended in fancy dress the palace of the French ambassador and opened a ball by leading out the ambassador's illegitimate daughter (at three and a half, his senior by about six months). Afterward there had been an "elegant supper" with "oceans of Champaign for the little people." For this hothouse growth his mother had been grateful in this last year, for he had discerned that she needed reassurance and had offered her "little tender assiduities; attentions gentle and affectionate" beyond his years.5 Being middle-aged and having hair streaked with gray, the boy's mother had a longer history. In appearance, she was petite and slim, though many years of a grueling social life--balls, dinners, fêtes, conversazioni--had added some weight. She was not sure this was a bad thing. ("At our time of life fat is very becoming.")6 She dressed fashionably, but she had never been a belle. She stopped no conversations when she entered a room, nor did she occasion pitiful stares. She was the middling sort, a girl and then a woman usually thought very pretty with her "heavenly blue-eyes," though her prettiness arose as much from her personality and what she did with words as from her form. She came from a family that had been acutely aware of physical appearance and had good reason to be. Her own mother had been "very lovely," "exquisitely delicate, and very finely proportioned." Her father was "the handsomest man" she ever saw, and this opinion had more basis than daughterly prejudice. Her eldest sister had an easy and graceful deportment, a fair complexion, auburn hair, a dimpled mouth, beautiful teeth, and hazel eyes with an "expression it is impossible to describe, for their brilliant gaiety seemed to call on those she looked on to be as gay and as happy as herself." Among such riches, she had felt herself inadequate, less attractive.7 Her wit had been too sharp to encourage brainless young men in drawing rooms, but people of urbanity thought of her as a peer, though only eventually. When young, she had been as "timid as a hare," had disliked to go into society, and had been a wallflower when forced into assembly rooms.8 Over time, painfully, she had acquired the knack of sociability. But she had a persistent sense that she entered society as an alien, scrutinized with skepticism by those who belonged. This anxiety meant that she made herself a close student of how society worked, of its rules and regulations, those plain and those implied. She was a closer student of those who inhabited society, for studying them helped her survive. She was sharply aware of glances, the placement of a jewel, the lifted eyebrow, the snigger in the corner, the candid smile. She warmed at kindliness, shrank from cynicism, and was offended by hypocrisy. She was not a natural inhabitant of an eighteenth-century or Regency salon, though there was nowhere else for her to live. She thought of herself as proud and haughty, a trait that went back to her childhood, when she used to stand aside from schoolgirl cliques and so had been mistrusted. In fact, she needed to connect, for she was sentimental, readily amused, and liked parties where there were gossip, smiles, English country dances, and a lingering past midnight. But she preferred a society of those she knew and trusted. She did not need to be the center of attention, but she disliked being ignored, too, and she knew the entitlements of her rank. This delicate balance was not easy to accomplish, especially for those who had to deal with her. Her emotions lay very close to the surface. Anger, happiness, and fear registered on her face and in her movements quickly, and as quickly changed. This led some to think her shallow, even insincere, but it was not so. With her, emotions ran deep, too deep. She was less sure whether her reason ran as deep. Over the years, her greatest proble Excerpted from Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon by Michael O'Brien All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations | p. viii |
Map | p. x |
Preface | p. xiii |
1 Saint Petersburg | p. 3 |
2 From Saint Petersburg to Riga | p. 44 |
3 From Riga to Berlin | p. 96 |
4 From Berlin to Eisenach | p. 138 |
5 From Eisenach to Frankfurt | p. 191 |
6 From Frankfurt to Paris | p. 262 |
Appendix: Places | p. 297 |
Notes | p. 305 |
Acknowledgments | p. 351 |
Index | p. 353 |