They met again in London, when he was thirty and she was twenty-two. She married him, he who had already been a name in diplomacy from D.C. to Russia to Amsterdam and London, who had already experienced multiple perils and adventures. Now Louisa's perils and adventures began -- starting with her father's bankruptcy and abscondence back to America while she and John Quincy were honeymooning in Scotland. Her father's bankruptcy not only lost the couple the dowry-allowance Johnson had settled upon his daughter, but the creditors demanded that John Quincy be responsible for Johnson's debts.
In the meantime the couple had spent $2500 -- a very large amount in the currency of the time, and a substantial portion of their bank account -- to send their clothes and belongings to Portugal, where he was posted as minister, only to be told the American government changed its mind and was instead sending him to Prussia. What, what to do. Somehow they did and become particularly beloved by the Prussian king and queen. Louisa miscarred more than once, which deeply concerned the queen. The queen gifted Louisa with a cosmetic set including rouge, which the Queen insisted she wear, as Louisa was pale from blood loss. John Quincy scrubbed it off her face himself, her first encounter with the impossible John Quincy, rather than the passionate, poetic, tender JQ she'd heretofore known. It was only the beginning of the impossibilities.
Perhaps the most impossible thing John Quincy did, while safely ensconced in himself, in France and the Netherlands, negotiating the Treaty of Ghent that settled the War of 1812, was to order his wife off to Paris from St. Petersburg, in the dead of winter, across the smoking ruin that was Europe in the tail end of the Napoleonic wars: hostile, conflicting armies, starvation, disease, desperation, bandits and criminals. Louisa was accompanied by her seven-year-old son, Charles Francis (Henry Adams's father), a man-servant, John Fulling, Madame Babet, a nursemaid hired the day before she departed from St. Petersburg, and Baptiste, a low-ranked prisoner of war who agreed to accompany them in exchange for his freedom. What the EFF was JQA THINKING??????? No wonder within the Adams family Louisa's journey became a thing of growing admiration and legend. Even she began to see it that way, and was persuaded to commit the experience to paper.
The tale of her perils and her brilliance in extracting her tiny company from them is told by Michael O'Brien in Mrs. Adams in Winter:A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon (2010). Like her husband's 14,000 word diary, kept from the time he was twelve, Louisa's travelogue from St. Petersburg to Paris in the winter of 1815 is a unique document in American history. Her family and Louisa were correct,deeming this is one splendid tale. Most of all, it is a tale of women, and how they do, not only Louisa, but all sorts of women she encounters along the journey.
Serendipitiously that O'Brien's book came as a gift this Christmas. Like Nicola Griffith's Hild, this is another story centering women that feels so right to read in the dark days of the year, particularly this year that has brought the U.S. and the UK such terrible weather of cold and snow, ice and flood.
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