Louisa (19 page)

A court official led her to meet Ekaterina Vassilievna, Countess Litta, “covered with diamonds,” very fat and very kind. The countess, the grand mistress of the court (and niece and former mistress of Prince Grigori Alexandrovich Potemkin), told Louisa to stand in the middle of the long hall, facing west, where two Africans in Turkish costumes with drawn sabers were waiting to open the doors. She explained that Louisa should stand still while the empress moved toward her. When the tsarina reached her, Louisa should pretend to try to kiss her hand, “which her Majesty would not
permit
,” and when Louisa lifted her
head, she must be very careful not to touch the royal body. Then the countess moved into an alcove, and Louisa was left to wait once more, to worry about the tremor in her knees, her gloves, and perhaps the inadequate size of the small diamond arrow in her hair.

Finally, the guards opened the doors, and Louisa could see the action repeated in a long succession of halls, two African guards at the end of each room pulling back door after door, the way opening before her. The tsarina appeared and the doors closed behind her. To Louisa's surprise, the tsarina was not alone. The tsar was with her.

Alexander was handsome, tall, resplendent, with beseeching blue eyes that tended to melt both men and women. He wore his military uniform, which had the inevitably impressive effect. Next to him, Elizabeth Alexeievna was tall, slender, delicate, graceful, and quiet. For fifteen minutes, he spoke, asking questions that Louisa answered, with the tsarina “only joining in with a word or two.” Then the interview was over, the doors opened, and Louisa remained in the middle of the room by herself until the countess materialized and congratulated her on a job well done. If Louisa had heard the court gossip, she would have known that Elizabeth had watched two daughters die; that she had been unfaithful and the first child had not been Alexander's; that he did not forgive her even though his affairs were notorious from the start; that Elizabeth loved her husband and was not loved back. But in the moment, Louisa thought only of her relief.

Next came the introduction to the empress mother, Maria Feodorovna, and of the two presentations, this one may have been even more frightening. The empress mother was more exacting and formidable than either her daughter-in-law (whom she outranked) or her son. The empress mother played favorites (as the tsar's wife had learned too well). But by the end of the long walk to Maria Feodorovna's apartments, Louisa was less nervous than she had been. She was becoming practiced at this, and she was able to meet the older woman's questions with ease. Was not St. Petersburg impressive? Yes, Louisa answered.
Although she “had seen London Paris Berlin and Dresden—&c.,” she had been to “no city that equaled St. Petersburg in beauty.”

“
Ah mon dieu, vous avez tout vue!!
” the startled empress mother replied.
Oh my Lord, you have seen everything!

Louisa would remember the moment with a smile. “The Savage had been expected!”

2

T
HE
TSAR
PAID
special attention to the Americans from the moment of their arrival. Alexander had good reasons to treat John Quincy well; Russia's interests and the United States' were aligned. The United States wanted to ensure that in any general European peace settlement concluding the Napoleonic Wars, both France and Britain would respect freedom of the seas—and, because the United States would not be a party to any conference between the European nations and would not promise anything in exchange for free seas, the Russians would have to be the ones to demand it. Even more important, John Quincy was tasked with removing barriers to trade. Russia was not only a market for American goods; it made trade possible everywhere. American ships needed Russian hemp for rope, iron for chains and anchors, and flax for sails. For its part, Russia was traditionally a partner of Great Britain, but the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit had forced Alexander into Napoleon's Continental System, which forbade trade with Britain and its allies. Alexander wanted to break Napoleon's crippling hold on Russia's commercial ambitions while at the same time counterbalancing Britain's maritime prowess. He needed America's neutral ships to do it. So when John Quincy was presented to
Alexander, the tsar stepped forward in a friendly manner and said, in French, “I am so glad to see you here.”

Most of the daily
commercial responsibilities required to protect American merchants were performed by the consul, Levett Harris, who made his living officially by his work as a middleman for merchants (and unofficially by taking a little more on the side). John Quincy spent most of his time writing dispatches to Secretary of State James Monroe, which took months to reach Washington, usually too long to be helpful. His real purpose was his presence. And there—though neither would admit it aloud—Louisa was indispensable. Being amiable and appealing was not exactly John Quincy's strong suit. How a republican who attended meetings, joined committees, and studied laws, and who hated the idleness of
ancien régimes
could succeed in autocratic Russia was not an easy problem to solve. A minister plenipotentiary met with diplomats and ministers, but he could not make an appointment to see the man who mattered.
Alexander, after all
, was the law, the nation—a godlike figure. Still, John Quincy managed to make time with him. Alexander had a habit of taking daily walks along the Admiralty Embankment or Nevsky Prospect, with only a guard or two nearby, and John Quincy often met him on the quay. They would talk about the cold temperature, or the long-tailed comet that was smeared across the sky, or the coming of war—with wariness, but also with warmth.

The other job
of being present was done at night. “We have dinners, and balls, and suppers, and ice-hill parties and masquerades, almost without end,” John Quincy wrote to his mother. “How much I am delighted by all this, is unnecessary for me to say; nor how congenial it is to my temper to find extravagance and dissipation become a public
duty
.” Even more than in Berlin, it seems, he had a tendency to sit back, silent and sullen, or to drink and then talk too much. He preferred to stay at home and work on his project of comparing national weights and lengths, or write in his diary, or read his Petrarch, or pen long letters to
his sons in Massachusetts, instructing them to be useful to humanity. He was half proud of his lack of social graces. Others were appalled. One young American, John Spear Smith, who came to St. Petersburg as part of the American legation, called him the “mute of Siberia.” “He has no manners,” Smith wrote, “is gauche, never was intended for a foreign Minister, and is only fit to turn over musty law authorities.” What made John Quincy so inept was clear to Smith, and Smith was unsparing. “You would blush to see him in society, and particularly at Court circles, walking about perfectly listless, speaking to no one, and absolutely looking as if he were in a dream. . . . Dry sense alone does not do at European Courts. Something more is necessary, which something Mr. A. does not possess.”

An English lord
put it this way: “Of all the men whom it was ever my lot to accost and to waste civilities upon,” he wrote, John Quincy Adams “was the most dogged and systematically repulsive. With a vinegar aspect, cotton in his leathern ears, and hatred of England in his heart, he sat in the frivolous assemblies of Petersburg like a bull-dog among spaniels.” For reasons of personal taste and politics, both of these observers were prejudiced against the bulldog, but their assessments matched others', including John Quincy's own.

So it helped
that the minister plenipotentiary did not come to Russia alone. In St. Petersburg, the business of being important depended on court life even more than it had in Berlin. Others understood this. The Sardinian minister, Joseph de Maistre—a brilliant thinker and counterrevolutionary who was more at home in a ballroom than his friend John Quincy—requested that he be sent a secretary who was a good dancer and conversationalist, someone “who would serve me as informer with the women to learn the secrets of their husbands.” John Quincy would have ignored the parties altogether if he could. They were “so trifling and insignificant in themselves, and so important in the eyes of Princes and Courtiers”—but the importance of princes and courtiers made the events impossible to ignore. His wife was more
adept, more willing to smile at everyone and pretend to mean it. Once she had been introduced, she rode the incessant carousel of court life—sometimes accompanied by one of the American aides instead of her husband. She, after all, seems to have had the “something more” necessary to court life, the something her husband lacked.

She saw little
of the day, living almost nocturnally during the winter social season. It was “customary” to eat dinner at one in the morning and to be out until four, sometimes six. She would wake a few hours later with a splitting headache, and she would have to put on a dress again. The carousel never stopped turning. The nights were monotonously splendid—glittering palaces, marble salons, exquisite French furniture, ancient vases and statues, orchestras and polonaises, aristocrats and officers, candelabras, satin and ermine cloaks, diamonds that glittered around her like so many cold stars. All of it was “too much like a fairy tale.”

She was awed. How could she not be? The wonderment never quite wore off, but the weariness deepened as the months turned into years. It was unnatural, a jewel box of a life. She watched the wasp-waisted officers, their jackets so tightly laced that their chests swelled out, waltz with any willing women or run up unpayable gambling debts. She saw the false smiles of young women, beautifully idle but for their edgy, glancing looks. “Am constantly busy here without doing anything but dress, eat, sleep and go for drives,” complained a Dutch woman who spent a winter as a courtier in St. Petersburg. It was, Louisa later wrote, “a killing life.”

She could do it well. Louisa was thirty-four years old when she arrived—more cynical, perhaps, than she had been as an ingenue in Berlin, but also more self-possessed, better able to hold her own. One night at the palace, when Louisa was pregnant, the emperor made a show of tending to her. The master of ceremonies was ordered not to leave Louisa alone. No one could be allowed to jostle her, for an elbow could do great harm. In fact, Alexander concluded, it would be best
if Louisa joined the empress on a platform in a throne. Louisa thanked him and declined. “Don't you know that no one says no to the Emperor?” he told her.

She laughed. “But
I
am a republican,” she replied. Alexander smiled at her impertinence and bowed.

What made the moment instructive was her awareness that these small gestures, this quick banter, was not just about her charm. The social encounter was part of a complex diplomatic maneuver. “The motive of all this I presume is political,” she wrote in “Adventures.” And indeed it was. That night, the French ambassador watched the special attention paid to the Americans, complained of a headache, and left the party. Caulaincourt was accustomed to his superior position in the Russian court, by his right as an ambassador (as opposed to John Quincy's measly minister plenipotentiary) and by virtue of his unusual closeness with Alexander. The favor paid to the United States was a slight to France. The day before the ball, Alexander had issued an ukase that raised taxes on goods coming by land (France) and lowered them on goods by sea (Britain and the United States). Napoleon's noose around Britain, his Continental System, could not survive Russia's rebellion—and so neither could the Franco-Russian alliance.

Not long afterward
, John Quincy called upon the French ambassador to discuss a dispute between the United States and the French about the origin of American vessels. (Because the British often brought in goods under the cover of neutral ships, the French routinely protested the arrival of American ships.) “It seems you are favorites here,” Caulaincourt said. “You have found powerful protection, for most of your vessels have been admitted.”

 • • • 

T
HE
TSAR
wanted
their ships. While he was at it, he wanted something else. Alexander had met Kitty Johnson while on his daily walk upon the quay. Since he liked what he saw—her fresh looks, her
vivacity, her charm—he made these meetings a habit. After a while, he began to speed up his stride when he approached them. Louisa watched this with some amusement and some alarm. At one point, she hurried Kitty into a carriage when she saw Alexander's quick step turn toward them—and saw his obvious irritation when they drove off. She tried stopping their walks until the tsar's attentions turned elsewhere; when they returned to the quay, tempted by fine weather, Alexander pointedly turned his head away. Then he addressed them with “a real imperial command in its tone and manner.” He looked at Kitty directly and said he expected to meet them every day.

This was not all. At a ball at the French ambassador's house in May 1810 to celebrate the marriage of Napoleon and the Austrian archduchess Marie Louise, the tsar asked Louisa to dance, which she understood to be a great honor. Then he asked her where her sister was, and soon he had Kitty by the hand. As they danced, Kitty—too unaware, or too uncaring, of the rigid etiquette that should have restrained her—laughed and flirted, treating the tsar like an American suitor and not a god. Charmed, he prolonged the dance, delaying the ambassador's dinner for twenty-five minutes as the pair circled the hall, sweeping past courtiers, leaving gossip in their wake. When the following winter's social season began, an invitation to the theater at the Hermitage arrived, and Miss Catherine Johnson was included. Since Kitty held no position with the legation and had never been formally presented, there was some doubt about what to do until the master of ceremonies assured John Quincy that the emperor had taken the pen in hand and written Miss Catherine Johnson's name himself. The group of Americans was also invited to use the royal entrance, normally granted only to diplomats of ambassadorial (not ministerial) rank. It was, the Monsieur de Maisonneuve said with some astonishment, “a very extraordinary distinction.”

These very extraordinary marks of distinction were flattering to the United States, but not so flattering to Kitty's reputation, and they troubled Louisa. There were already whispers and wolfish grins. But
she also knew, she later wrote, that there was a danger in refusing the tsar. Everything followed from Alexander: if he wanted to make Kitty suffer, the United States could suffer too. The distinctions between world politics and social contretemps were not as clear as someone like John Quincy would have liked to allow. In 1810–11, Alexander's desire for ships, his desire to send the French a message, his desire to lure Kitty into bed were overlaid. Of these, Kitty was only a speck to the tsar, only an idle desire, one passing interest among many. Still, Kitty drew the emperor's eye toward the Americans. He lingered with them, having ways and reasons to flatter them. Louisa had to be both her sister's protector and her husband's wife, and a republican and a courtier—in this instance, conflicting roles. In the end, she let the mild flirtation play out until it dissipated, as the emperor's flirtations tended to do. For as long as it was innocent, it was amusing, and perhaps it was a slight advantage.