Louisa (20 page)

The French ambassador
Caulaincourt, whose regular mistress was the wife of a Russian military officer, once told Louisa she was too solemn for one so pretty. “When we were at Rome we must do as Rome,” he said.

She coyly replied, “If I should go to Rome perhaps I might.”

 • • • 

B
Y
M
AY
1811
, the mood had shifted. Caulaincourt was recalled to France. Napoleon was furious with Alexander's provocations against France, and a war between their countries loomed. The city's elite alternated between fervor and droll optimism as the soldiers began to muster and march. But Louisa's attention was elsewhere. In June, the tsar bought their apartment building on Nevsky Prospect from the Adamses' landlord, and so, while seven months pregnant, she had to pack up and quickly move. John Quincy rented a dacha in a profusion of flowers on Apothecary Island, northeast of the city, with views of
the river and one of the tsar's palaces. John Quincy called it their “Russian Arcadia.” Outside, barges floated by with musicians serenading the imperial family. Louisa kept the windows and doors open to hear it. She needed the refuge, the calm, the distractions. She was terrified at the prospect of giving birth.

Her family at home was never far from her mind. She thought of her sons constantly, and of her siblings and mother. It was all the harder because so little communication was possible. In May, when the first letters arrived from the United States since the previous fall, they brought terrible news. She walked into John Quincy's study one day and learned that her eldest sister, Nancy Hellen, had died in childbirth. “My heart collapsed in agony,” Louisa wrote in her diary, and, pregnant herself, she fell in a “dead fainting fit.” Unsurprisingly, she thought she was beginning to miscarry; she had already miscarried once in Russia. Only laudanum, “freely” used, calmed her down.

There was so much
riding on this unborn child. In the spring, John Quincy had learned from an old British newspaper that President Madison had nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Congress had confirmed it. His parents sent ecstatic letters about the prospect of the office and his return, and formal notice soon followed. John Quincy would be freed from the ruinous expenses in Russia. He would be able to serve his country, and in a job that would allow him to rise above partisan politics. He would come home.

But John Quincy declined
the appointment. He justified his decision by explaining that the choice was out of his hands: his wife was pregnant, and by the time she would be able to travel with an infant, ice would have trapped them. This was an excuse. He disliked practicing law and suspected he would be a bad judge. Privately, he admitted he might have declined the position even if Louisa were not pregnant. Still, it relieved him to be able to say that she was.

So she tried to relax, to distract herself from her fears. She took a
chair to the banks of the river outside the house and went fishing with her young son Charles. She liked this “indolent sort of amusement,” she wrote, “for I
do not think.
” Thinking made her “tremble.”

But, for once, the birth went smoothly. On August 11, at half past seven, Louisa gave birth to a daughter. A month later, at the English Factory Church, the Anglican minister baptized the girl as Louisa Catherine Adams. There was a small celebration at the Adamses' house on Apothecary Island afterward—a collection of counts, ambassadors, Americans. The tsar had offered to stand as godfather, which John Quincy declined, though the child's parents thought the baby did merit extraordinary attention. They studied the child's soft, small body with startled wonder. “Such a pair of eyes!” Louisa wrote. “I fear I love her too well!”

“We are daily seeking for resemblances in her countenance, and associate her in fancy with all our dearest friends,” John Quincy wrote to Abigail. “She has the eyes of one; the nose of another, the mouth of a third and the forehead of a fourth, but her chin is absolutely and exclusively her own.”

 • • • 

W
INTER
DROVE
the Adamses
off the island, back into the city, into a cramped apartment with leaky windows. The dacha was left to the wolves. Crises were coming, in both the United States and Russia. By spring, Russia and France faced a conflict over Poland. The tsar already had troops massed along the border. “Thus it ends,” Alexander told John Quincy on the cold quay in March, not long before he left to join his armies. Great Britain continued to kidnap the United States' sailors and dismiss its maritime rights. War hawks and Anglophiles worked against one another in Congress, and Madison wobbled toward war. There were crises of a domestic sort, meanwhile, in the Adamses' household. John Quincy's nephew William Smith and Kitty had some sort of romantic relationship, and Kitty was ill—possibly
pregnant. For whatever reason, John Quincy forced William to marry her, which he did in a small ceremony in the Adamses' apartment. (There is no record of a miscarriage, and Kitty would become pregnant a year later.) William's debts gave John Quincy plenty to abhor; the expense of St. Petersburg was not easy for William to bear, either, and he was not the type to let pleasure pass by. He was begging John Quincy to lend him $3,000 so that he could pay what he owed.

Letters rarely arrived from the United States that year, and when they did, they were almost always devastating. News came that Louisa's mother, Catherine, had died in an epidemic that had also killed her sister Caroline's husband. They learned that John Quincy's aunt and uncle Mary and Richard Cranch, who were taking care of Louisa's sons John and George, both died. John Quincy's sister (and William's mother) Nabby had undergone an excruciating operation to have her breast removed after a tumor had been found. Nabby's situation was, Louisa knew, “a hopeless illness.”

At the end of March
1812 John Quincy asked Abigail to send their sons to Russia—but George and John could make the long journey, he added, only if the United States and Britain were not at war, which would make the journey aboard an American ship impossible. It was not his wish for them to come, he added, but that of their mother, who was insistent. Soon after, Louisa learned that even that hope was gone. Congress declared war on Britain in June, the culmination of a long sequence of breaches between the two countries that had been building for decades: the impressment of sailors that had prompted the
Chesapeake
crisis that had led to John Quincy's departure from the Senate, trade restrictions prompted by the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, border issues with Canada, and the sense, in the United States, of persistent humiliations and insults from its former ruler. The declaration of war took place just a week before Napoleon's troops breached Russia's borders.

All of this touched
Louisa, and it didn't. She heard the bells tolling
for Te Deums and saw the illuminations after the official reports of incredible Russian victories, reports which everyone knew not to credit too much. She read in the outdated newspapers of the conflict in the United States. Most pressingly, of course, the war meant a longer separation from her older sons, a separation that brought her near despair when she dwelled on it. But she still had Charles, about to turn five years old, and the new daughter, little Louisa, and she took solace in them. The baby was a kind of gift. Little Louisa grew rapidly, and before she was one she was speaking, saying
papa
and
mama.
“I wish you could see what a good natured little mad cap she is,” Louisa wrote to her son George. The child brought Louisa inexhaustible delight. “She plays all day long.”

Then that child
, so much loved, fell sick. Louisa was filled with the terror of losing her. That summer, 1812, little Louisa began teething rapidly. Six teeth came in quickly, and then another five or six cropped up at once. Louisa weaned her in July, just before her first birthday. In the middle of that month, the baby developed dysentery. She was already small for her age, only two feet and three inches on her first birthday. She did not have much weight to lose.

For some weeks, she seemed to improve. But in mid-August, she was extremely sick. Louisa tried to begin breast-feeding her again, but it was too late. The child developed a high fever.

Outside, thousands of lamps, hung in elaborate and spectacular patterns, were lit to celebrate reports of Russia's stupendous victories over Napoleon's Grand Army, reports most knew were false. Napoleon and his army were storming toward Moscow as the Russians retreated; many predicted Napoleon would then turn north, toward St. Petersburg. An air of crisis pervaded the city. The official optimism was set grotesquely against fear.

Inside the house, there was only terrified desperation. On August 30 Louisa took the baby to Ochta, to the countryside, to see if fresh air would help. By September 8 she was back in the city. The child's
condition rapidly worsened. She was seized by convulsions. “Language cannot express the feelings of a parent beholding the long continued agonies of a lovely infant,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. Doctors tried to lance her gums. They gave her emetics, digitalis, and laudanum. They shaved her hair and used poultices to raise blisters on the back of her soft head.

Louisa, thirteen months old, died at 1:25 in the morning on September 15, 1812. Her mother, in the room next door when it happened, fainted when she learned the news. The “calm fortitude and pious resignation of my dearest friend has been as remarkable as her unbounded self-devotion,” John Quincy wrote, reading into her reaction what he needed to see. The funeral was held in the church where the child had been baptized almost exactly a year before. Afterward, the body was buried in the Lutheran Cemetery on Vasilevsky Island. Louisa did not attend the burial. But for months, she thought of nothing else.

At the end of October, Louisa turned over the marbled paper cover of a small blank book and began to write in a small hand. She needed to distract herself, she wrote, from her morbid thoughts and acid guilt. Instead, her diary became a record of her private, crushing sadness. “My heart is buried in my Louisa's grave,” she wrote in early November, “and my greatest longing is to be laid beside her.”

3

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
15
,
the day Louisa's baby died in St. Petersburg, Napoleon rode through the empty streets of Moscow. Small fires had already been lit throughout the city, only four hundred miles south of St. Petersburg, and soon the streets were ablaze. Moscow burned down within days. John Quincy observed the coincidence between the death of his daughter and the destruction of the city and saw that it meant nothing. Like Louisa, he was undone by his grief. For the first time in his life, a personal tragedy so far outweighed the public one that he could not even bring himself to focus on his work. His own country was at war and the country where he lived was going up in flames, and yet neither of these compared to the loss of his tiny child. When he wrote to his mother, six days later, to report the death of the baby, he did not mention the fire in Moscow, nor Napoleon's advance, nor the meeting John Quincy attended just before dispatching the letter, in which the tsar's foreign minister, Count Rumyantsev, had told him that Alexander was proposing to mediate between the United States and Britain. It was a proposal that could change the course of history: it could mean peace for the United States. But when John Quincy wrote to his mother, he said nothing about world events. He
wrote only that his daughter had died. Considering the normal content of their correspondence, even in prior times of tragedy, this was extraordinary. So was the struggle—almost the rage—he expressed in response to his father's call for philosophical resignation. “My lovely flower is blasted too, and I am not permitted to enquire why?” he wrote to John Adams that October. “The desire of my eyes, the darling of my heart is gone, and unavailing sorrow, and the bitter memory of what she was, is all that is left us in her stead!”

His grief stayed
with him. The knowledge that suffering was the universal fate of men, which he had so long made the basis of his philosophy, could not lessen his pain. Even a year later, his sense of loss overwhelmed him. “On the same day that my child died, Moscow was surrendered to an invader, and was consigned to the flame by its own inhabitants—Within three months after the invader himself was a wretched fugitive and his numberless host was perishing by frost, famine and the sword,” he wrote to his father. “Neither the fires of Moscow, nor the frosts which destroyed the invaders could comfort me for the loss of my child.” A year after that, two years after the event, John Quincy would tell his mother that the sight in the street of a young girl was enough to make his heart clench.

But after a time, he began to find refuge in his work, his habits, his daily walks, his books. He took comfort in routine. He was the type who knew how many strides it took him to walk a street block and who had measured the length of his stride. He mourned, but his grief ran its course, and he was able to distract himself and to recover. He had a sense of incredible responsibility and obligation. It was not so easy for his wife.

 • • • 

H
E
WATCHED
her
wander through her days. “Our domestic condition is no longer the same as before,” he wrote in his diary at the end of September, a rare acknowledgment of his wife's situation. “The
privation and the vacuity are more heavily and more constantly felt by her [Louisa] . . . than by me. The maternal cares were the business as well as the enjoyment of her life.” This was sympathetic, as far as it went. She was beside herself with grief—her health wrecked, her mind inflamed. With his typical mix of pedantry and kindness, he gave her a book by his friend Benjamin Rush,
Medical Inquiries and Observations, upon the Diseases of the Mind
, published in 1812. It postulated that madness came not from the liver or intestines (still theories worth refuting at the time) or from the brain itself, but from the overstimulation of blood vessels in the brain. Insanity was a circulatory problem, and it could be connected to feelings—joy, terror, love, shame, poverty, grief. Written for an audience of doctors, the book provided a taxonomy of madness, tracing its origins, symptoms, and possible cures. She read it, and she looked for herself in its pages. “A person is apt to fancy himself afflicted with every particular symptom described,” she wrote
in her diary
, and so she saw herself in each bleak diagnosis. She wondered if she was going insane.

She had grieved before. She had lost both of her parents, her older sister, and several friends. Yet this was different. She had not only lost her daughter; she was also half convinced that she had killed her. She blamed herself for weaning the child too early. She blamed herself for falling down with the baby in her arms, “in which I did not perceive that she had met with the slightest injury but which is said to have been the cause of her death.” She blamed herself for her “procrastination” when the infant had fallen ill. She blamed herself for her sins, convinced that her child had died as her “punishment.” She obsessed over the “secret and bitter reproaches of my heart.”

In her diary, Louisa described a nightmare that she had one night. She was playing with her healthy daughter at the dacha in Ochta, when she was summoned by her father (by then eleven years dead) to fetch wine. She asked her sister Nancy (two years dead) to go with her. At the bottom of the stairs into the cellar, Louisa stumbled over a
“body newly murdered,” and when she looked for Nancy, she saw a frozen woman “just risen from the grave.” The dream ended with thunder and lightning and words of fire in the sky. “Be of good cheer,” the words said, “thy petition is granted.” Then she woke. Her only petition, her wish she wrote in her diary again and again, was to be buried alongside her daughter in the cemetery on Vasilevsky Island. She considered suicide. “In vain I reason with myself,” she wrote, “but the desire is uncontrollable and my mind is perpetually dwelling on some means to procure this desired blessing.”

To an extent
, strong expressions of grief were expected and allowed. In her time and culture, the loss of a child was not uncommon but still no less lamented. A grieving woman could openly acknowledge the pain she felt by the black clothes that she wore. She might wear a ring stamped with a small skull and crossbones, or a bracelet made with the dead's braided hair. She could advertise her sorrow and expect to share her tears. But in St. Petersburg, Louisa had nowhere to turn but inward. Even her sister, her confidante, was almost estranged from her. Kitty had scarlet fever in the winter of 1813, and John Quincy had declared that as soon as she was well, she and her husband, his nephew and aide William Smith, would have to leave St. Petersburg. He could hardly bear to look at William, whose conduct disgusted him. (Kitty would later become pregnant, pushing back their departure until the summer of 1814.) Louisa had few other close friends in St. Petersburg. She was cut off from her family and friends in the United States; letters took six months to arrive. She had almost given up hope of seeing her two older sons ever again. Worst of all was the distance she felt from her husband. “Mr A is even more buried in study than when he left America, and has acquired so great a disrelish for society, that even his small family circle appears at times to become irksome to him,” she wrote to Abigail.

“
I am condemned
to wear out my existence, in this horrid place, without a friend, or a single human being who can participate in my feelings,” she wrote. Kitty's illness and troubling relationship with
William Smith surely affected her as much as they did John Quincy, and John Quincy's sympathy had turned to skepticism, which turned her sadness into anger. Louisa punished herself, though, as much as others. She wrote, privately, that grief had warped her personality.

They fought. When John Quincy questioned her methods of teaching Charles his prayers, Louisa stormed off. He called her “suspicious and jealous.” She accused him of coldness and neglect. In his diary, he was silent about these shows of anger. He never censured her. At the same time, he acknowledged that he could not always control his temper. In letters and in her own diary, she anticipated and tried to preempt his disapproval, which could be bullying. She begged him not to criticize her—only to have him respond, “If I am angry, I am sure it will be more for your sake and that of your children than my own.”

She wrote in her diary, “I feel what a burthen I must be to all around me.” With her own mother dead, Louisa found herself longing for her mother-in-law, forgiving and forgetting their old tensions. She found herself wishing for someone who would understand how she felt, “a comforter” and “a friend.” Someone who was not John Quincy. They fired shots at each other while pretending to claim the blame themselves. For her part, she told John Quincy, she was “perfect aware” that she was not an “agreeable companion,” having “too often been made sensible of my incapacity not to feel it most keenly.”

There were tensions
in their marriage that both had long ago realized, “differences of sentiment, of tastes, and of opinions in regard to domestic economy, and to the education of children, between us,” as John Quincy had written in his diary on their fourteenth anniversary, in 1811, even as he concluded that the marriage was a definite success. “There are natural frailties of temper in both of us; both being quick and irascible, and mine being sometimes harsh.” Their daughter's death deepened those differences and sharpened their tempers. Louisa's illnesses also worsened the dynamic between them. He had proved he could care for her, and she needed and craved his care. But sometimes
his attention made her feel guilty and him resentful. In January 1813, Louisa miscarried yet again. John Quincy wrote in his diary that he had some sense of “duty” to be by her bedside, but added that he did not have much time to spare for it. The duty to comfort her, he wrote, “does in some degree interfere” with “other duties.”

The other duties
were not insignificant. The fates of Europe and the United States were intertwined, and the tsar's invitation to mediate in the war between Britain and the United States had given John Quincy an opening to play a leading role. Napoleon had fled Russia, his Grand Army routed. A coalition of the once-vanquished European powers—Russia, Prussia, Austria, Spain, Portugal, and several German states—along with Great Britain and Sweden, were mustering over a million troops in central Europe, to pursue the Corsican; Alexander himself assumed command of the coalition army. John Quincy calculated that once the French were defeated, a peace treaty between the United States and Britain would become even more imperative. There was doubt that the United States, which had already suffered embarrassing defeats at the hands of British forces and their Native American allies in Canada and Florida, could withstand the full force of British arms freed from the fight with France. If ever there was a moment when John Quincy's country needed its minister plenipotentiary in Russia, it was now.

While her husband worked, Louisa passed much of the time in her room alone, often ill. Outside, it was cold—reaching above zero Fahrenheit only once in January. Even inside, it was almost too cold to hold a pen. She read lurid French court memoirs and books about the queen of Navarre, King Louis XIV, the Duchess de Mazarin. She took notes from a French dictionary of famous men
.
These sensational stories did not make her fantasize about living an opulent lifestyle; she had no reason to escape into a world she had glimpsed in real life and understood all too well. Instead, she read the books as cautionary tales. The “weakness and fragility of human virtue, unaided by an all-wise and
superintending providence,” she wrote in her diary, corrupted even noble ambitions. There was a fatality to this: if human nature was vain, and ambition corrosive, then even the well-intentioned individual had not much of a chance. “It has only served to convince me,” she wrote after reading the memoir of a mistress of Henry II of France, “how little we can do of ourselves.”