Episode 3.4 The Jeffersons in Paris

[Transcript]

Hello, and welcome to America’s First Ladies. I’m your host, Risa Weaver-Enion.

Episode 3.4 The Jeffersons in Paris

We left off last week in May 1784. The war had officially ended the previous November, and Thomas Jefferson had been appointed by Congress to join John Adams and Benjamin Franklin in Paris to negotiate a treaty of commerce with Great Britain.

Thomas rejoined his daughter Patsy in Philadelphia, where she had been living with Mrs. Hopkinson and studying French, music, dancing, and other appropriate pursuits for an 11-year-old girl.

On May 28, Thomas and Patsy set out, accompanied by 19-year-old slave James Hemings, one of the alleged children of Betty Hemings and John Wayles, making him Patsy’s uncle. They crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey, and then spent six days in New York City before heading north through Connecticut and Rhode Island. They arrived in Boston on June 17, after traveling 270 miles over 21 days.

As we learned in episode 2.7, Thomas Jefferson first met Abigail Adams during this short stay in Boston. He offered for them to travel together, but as her plans were already settled, she left for Europe without him. The ship the Jeffersons would take wasn’t leaving until July, so Thomas found himself with time on his hands. He decided to take a tour of New England ports to learn more about their economic needs, figuring that would prove useful when negotiating a treaty of commerce with the British.

He left Patsy in the care of John Lowell, a Boston judge, even though it doesn’t seem that Thomas even knew Judge Lowell. He was relying on Lowell’s friendship with James Madison and John Adams as assurance that the judge’s family would be suitable for Patsy. The Lowells did have a lot of children, so it may have been nice for Patsy to spend some time with kids her own age. It’s possible that the Lowell household was the first time young Patsy encountered anti-slavery sentiment. Lowell had been a member of the Massachusetts constitutional convention, which basically outlawed slavery in the state.

Thomas returned to Boston on June 26, and they boarded the ship Ceres for departure on July 3, but they actually didn’t depart until 4 o’clock in the morning on July 4—the eighth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Unlike Abigail’s turbulent Atlantic crossing, the Jeffersons enjoyed good weather during their 19-day voyage. Patsy wrote, “We had a lovely passage in a beautiful new ship that had only made one voyage before. There were only six passengers, all of whom papa knew, and a fine sun shine all the way, with the sea which was as calm as a river. I should have no objection at making another voyage, if I could be sure it would be as agreeable as the first.”

They landed in England at West Cowes on the Isle of Wight. They spent four days in Portsmouth, where Patsy was treated for a fever by a local doctor. Then they crossed the English Channel, which took 13 hours thanks to bad weather. Patsy got a taste of Abigail Adams’s Atlantic voyage on her Channel crossing by being seasick the entire time and confined to a small, windowless cabin.

After finally landing on the French coast, they travelled by coach from Le Havre to Paris. Patsy was alarmed by the beggars who accosted their carriage, but charmed by the French countryside and cathedrals. In a letter to Elizabeth Trist, Patsy told her that Notre Dame de Mantes “had as many steps to go to the top as there are days in the year. There are many pretty statues in it. The architectures is beautiful. All the winers [windows] are died glass of the most beautiful colours that form all kinds of figures.”

They arrived in Paris on August 6 and spent their first few days at an inn near the Palais Royale, which was an area with gardens and shopping. Then they relocated to larger rented quarters in the Hôtel d’Orléans on the Left Bank. Thomas’s first action was to hire a valet de chambre, an homme d’affaires, and to buy 18 dozen bottles of Bordeaux wine, despite having no wine cellar. Priorities. He didn’t even hire a cook for the first year, relying on caterers to prepare meals. 

He also purchased household goods, a map of the city, and clothes for himself and Patsy. In a declaration that will remind you of Abigail Adams, Patsy wrote to Elizabeth Trist, “I am sure you would have laughed, for we were obliged to send imediately for the stay maker, the mantuamaker, the milliner and even a shoe maker, before I could go out.”

I let this word slide last season, but now that it’s come up again, I decided to figure out exactly what a mantua maker was. I suspected it was some sort of dressmaker, and I was correct. A mantua maker was a specific type of dressmaker who was skilled in cutting fabric for dresses while it was draped across the client’s body. The client would be dressed only in her corset, and this way the dressmaker ensured that the resulting dress would be a perfect fit. As we already know, the stay maker is the person making the corset, and the milliner, of course, was the hatmaker. It’s a lot of people to put together a single outfit!

Once properly outfitted, Patsy and her father dined with the Adamses, and Nabby Adams later declared that Patsy was “a sweet girl with amiable and lovely manners.”

Thomas’s next order of business was to get Patsy enrolled in a school. Paris was a huge city compared with anything in America. With 600,000 residents, Paris was 15 times larger than Philadelphia. Thomas had several options when it came to Patsy’s education: he could hire private tutors, she could attend a day school, or she could attend a boarding school. The problem with the first two options was that Patsy would also require a governess to watch over her when she wasn’t at school or engaged in private lessons. Thomas didn’t know anyone in Paris other than John and Abigail Adams, and Abigail’s low opinion of the morals of French women may have steered Thomas away from the idea of hiring a French governess.

So he decided on the third option: boarding school. As a Catholic country, France had numerous convent boarding schools, and there were more than 40 in Paris alone. The Marquis de Chastelleux, an acquaintance of Thomas’s, recommended the convent school at the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, and the Comtesse de Brionne agreed to sponsor Patsy’s admission. Patsy was enrolled and spent most of the next four and a half years at this school.

The irony of one of America’s Founding Fathers and author of the Declaration of Independence sending his daughter to a boarding school with a bunch of aristocrats should not be overlooked here. The school was very prestigious, and among the students were at least two French princesses, as well as future Emperor Napoleon’s future wife, Josephine de Beauharnais. Patsy was the only American among the 50-60 students, although one girl, Kitty Church, had an American mother and an English father.

The curriculum at Panthemont emphasized manners, music and drawing, but the girls were also taught arithmetic, geography, history, Latin, and modern languages. It was a far better education than anything Patsy would have gotten in Virginia. Although it was a convent school, not all of the students were Catholic. The Protestant students were exempt from catechism and the sacraments, but they often attended the church services.

Convent schools were becoming controversial in pre-Revolutionary Enlightenment France. As Cynthia Kierner describes in her book, Martha Jefferson Randolph: Daughter of Monticello, “Enlightenment rationalism led some French intellectuals to condemn convent schools and their curricula on pedagogical grounds. Others, who, like Jefferson, believed that young females should be trained for domesticity, assailed convent schools as impediments to the attainments of girls’ true callings as wives and mothers both because the nuns taught their pupils no domestic skills and because some of their charges decided to become nuns themselves. Some critics argued that life secluded within the convent’s walls left young women ill-equipped to meet life’s moral challenges, while others conversely portrayed the convent as a place where vice flourished, hidden from public view.”

At first, Patsy was unhappy to be separated from her father, and for the first month or two, he visited her every evening. Although there were many English girls at the school, only French was spoken, which forced Patsy to very quickly become fluent in this new language. The girls slept in four enormous rooms, had another room for lessons, and had a separate room that served as a parlor for socializing. They also had access to a large outdoor courtyard surrounded by the convent walls.

Patsy soon made friends, and stayed in correspondence with many of them, even after returning to America. The other girls seem to have called her Jeffy or Jeff as a nickname. Why her last name became the source of their nickname for her rather than just using her actual nickname, I have no idea.

Based on surviving letters sent by Patsy’s friends to her, Cynthia Kierner concludes that Patsy was “popular among her convent classmates, whose letters portray her as an intelligent and gregarious adolescent who liked jokes, mixed readily with others, and relished her limited independence. In the convent, as in Philadelphia, she enjoyed music, struggled with her drawing lessons, and was occasionally careless with her clothing and her manners.”

After the first couple of months, Patsy rarely saw her father. He was busy with official duties, as well as procuring new lodgings. In October 1784, he signed a nine-year lease on the Hôtel Landron, which was further away from the Panthemont convent, in what is now the Ninth Arrondisement of Paris. Quick note about the use of the word “Hôtel” in all these residences. Although the word hôtel is French for hotel, don’t think of these as hotels in the modern sense. It’s just what residences were called. They all had names. Hôtel was used for residences that were modest, as in, not palaces.

Thomas hired four more servants for the new house and furnished it comfortably, but he was beginning to feel the strain of the expense of living in Paris. In a letter to his friend James Monroe, Thomas wrote, “I live here about as well as we did at Annapolis. I keep a hired carriage and two horses. A riding horse I cannot afford to keep. This stile is far below the level, yet it absorbs the whole allowance. For the articles of household furniture, clothes and a carriage, I have already paid twenty eight thousand livres and have more to pay. 

For the greatest part of this I have been obliged to anticipate my salary from which however I shall never be able to repay it. I find that by a rigid economy, bordering on meanness, I can save perhaps five hundred livres a month in the summer at least. The residue goes for expenses so much of course and of necessity that I cannot avoid them without abandoning all respect to my public character. Yet I will pray you to touch this string, which I know to be a tender one with Congress, with the utmost delicacy. I’d rather be ruined in my fortune, than in their esteem.”

In short, much like Abigail and John Adams, Thomas felt that his government salary was by no means enough to cover his expenses. I don’t have the exact amount of his salary, but it’s safe to assume that it was similar to John’s salary, since they were both serving in the same role. Based on what we learned in episode 2.8, Thomas was probably earning $9000 as minister to France, which is about $278,000 in today’s money. It does seem like one should be able to furnish a house, keep some horses and servants, and buy clothes for $278,000. But maybe that’s just me.

Despite signing a nine-year lease on Hôtel Landron, Thomas changed houses a year later in the fall of 1785. His new home was the Hôtel de Langeac, which had been built for the marquise de Langeac, who was the mistress of the count de Saint-Floretin. But the marquise had been forced into exile in 1774 (I have no idea why), and now Thomas Jefferson lived in her house.

Hôtel de Langeac was larger than Hôtel de Landron, so of course Thomas had to buy more furniture and hire more servants. The house was located in a fashionable neighborhood on the Champs-Élysées, and Patsy described it as “elegant even for Paris with an extensive garden court and out-buildings in the handsomest style.”

There may have been two unrelated reasons why Thomas felt he needed a larger, grander house in Paris. First, in May 1785 the three-man ministerial delegation in Paris had been disbanded by Congress. Benjamin Franklin retired, John Adams was named minister plenipotentiary to Great Britain, and Thomas was named minister plenipotentiary to France. 

With this new, higher profile role, Thomas probably felt like he needed a grander home and social presence. These guys were all a little overly concerned with appearances and keeping them up, even when they couldn’t really afford to.

The second reason could have been that he had decided to bring his young daughter Polly over to France to join him and Patsy. This may have been prompted by the death of little Lucy Elizabeth in the fall of 1784. You’ll remember that this is the second Lucy Elizabeth. The first one had died in infancy, and Thomas and Patty had used the name again for their next child, the birth of whom had essentially killed Patty.

The second Lucy Elizabeth died of whooping cough at the age of 2 while living with her Aunt and Uncle Eppes in Virginia. It seems that the news of Lucy’s death did not reach Thomas and Patsy until January 1785, in a letter written by a Virginia friend.

In February 1785 Thomas wrote a letter to his brother-in-law Francis Eppes, acknowledging Lucy’s death, but refusing to discuss his feelings: “[it is] in vain to endeavor to describe the situation of my mind; it would be to pour balm, neither into your wounds nor mine. I will therefore pass on from the subject.” Thomas was greatly affected by the death of Lucy and began pressing the Eppses to send Polly to him. He wrote, “I must have Polly. Polly hangs on my mind night and day.” But it would be more than two years before Polly would actually arrive in France.

During her time at the Panthemont convent school, Patsy saw her father sporadically. Thomas’s detailed account books are the source for most of the information we have about when they saw each other. We know that in January, February, and May of 1785 Patsy was at home with her father when the Adams family came to dine. But from mid-March to early May, her financial allowance was delivered to her by Thomas’s maitre d’hôtel rather than by Thomas himself, indicating that he did not see his daughter at all during those six or seven weeks.

Thomas also took Patsy on various outings. Cynthia Kierner writes that he took Patsy with him on May 24, 1785 to watch the ceremonial procession of Queen Marie-Antoinette to Notre-Dame de Paris to give thanks for the birth of a son, but we know from episode 2.8 that this event actually took place in March 1785, and Abigail Adams was there too, along with John and Nabby. Maybe it’s a typo in the book that was missed in editing. I would have taken the date as a given, if I didn’t already know that the Adamses attended this event and had already left Paris by May 24 to go to London. It’s a never-ending source of frustration for me that biographers and historians can’t seem to keep their dates straight. But I digress.

Thomas also took Patsy to several concerts and the theater, but she spent most of her time at the convent school. Whenever American women were scheduled to dine with Thomas at Hôtel de Langeac, he included Patsy so that she could be exposed to “admirable” women, as opposed to French women. 

As Patsy reached her teenage years, it was clear that she was developing an independent mind. She was unimpressed with what she saw as unhappy marriages among the Parisians because of the loose behavior of the wives. In one letter to her father, she wrote, “There was a gentleman, a few days ago, that killed himself because he thought that his wife did not love him. I believe that if every husband in Paris was to do as much, there would be nothing but widows left.”

She also expressed her disapproval of slavery, writing to her father, “I wish with all my soul that the poor negroes were all freed. It grieves my heart when I think that these our fellow creatures should be treated so terribly as they are by many of our country men.”

In February 1787, Thomas left Paris for a three and a half month journey through southern France and northern Italy, at which point Patsy took it upon herself to chide her father for not writing more often. “Being disappointed in my expectation of receiving a letter from you my dear papa, I have resolved to break so painful a silence by giving you an example that I hope you will follow.”

When he did write to her, Thomas gave her his usual advice to exercise, study hard, and avoid being idle. “My expectations for you are high: yet not higher than you may attain. No body in this world can make me so happy, or so miserable as you.”

In July 1787, Patsy and Polly were reunited in Paris, after not having seen each other since Patsy and Thomas left Virginia in November 1783, when Patsy was 11 and Polly was only 5. Polly had not wanted to journey to Paris to reconnect with her father and sister. She was perfectly content with her Eppes relatives in Virginia.

In early 1785 when Thomas had first asked the Eppeses to send Polly to him, Polly had sent him a short note saying only, “I want to see you and sister Patsy, but you must come to Uncle Eppes’s house.” Thomas promised to give Polly “as many dolls and playthings as you want,” if she came to France, but Polly maintained that she would “rather stay with Aunt Eppes.”

In January 1787, Thomas’s sister Martha Jefferson Carr wrote to him that “Polly’s aversion to going to France increases daily, and … she fears she must at last be dragged like a calf to the slaughter.” Despite this, Thomas insisted that Polly make the journey.

And so, in the early summer of 1787, 9-year-old Polly Jefferson set out for a sea voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, accompanied only by a 14-year-old slave named Sally Hemings. It’s unclear how this happened. Why on earth would the Eppeses send a young girl on a sea voyage accompanied by another young girl, rather than a responsible older woman or even a respectable gentleman? I have no idea because no one bothers to tell us. I don’t even know which port Polly left from, or how she got from Eppington to that port. It’s assumed that Polly was quite comfortable with Sally as her companion. Sally had been a member of the Jefferson’s household since she was two years old, so Polly had known her for her entire life. 

At any rate, we know that Polly and Sally sailed for London when they left America, and that Abigail Adams took them in for several days in June 1787 once they arrived in London. We heard about that in episode 2.9. We also know that Thomas didn’t even come to London himself to retrieve his daughter, after making such a fuss about getting her to Paris. Instead, he sent his valet, Adrian Petit, who didn’t even speak English. And of course Polly didn’t speak French. Everything about this episode was badly managed, and really reflects poorly on Thomas’s parenting skills.

Now, let’s talk about Sally Hemings. As I described in episode 3.2, there’s a possibility that Sally Hemings was the illegitimate daughter of John Wayles and his slave Betty Hemings, which would make her Patty Jefferson’s half-sister. As I mentioned at the time, some historians take it as fact that John Wayles fathered six of Betty Hemings’s children, and others are outright dismissive of the possibility. I, personally, think it’s more likely than not that Wayles was the father of these children, and I don’t want to keep caveating it every time one of them is mentioned. So let’s stipulate that James and Sally Hemings, both of whom were now in Paris with the Jeffersons, were half-siblings to Patty Jefferson. Which means they were uncle and aunt to Patsy and Polly Jefferson.

In Paris, James Hemings was being trained as a chef, and Sally had no specific responsibilities, other than serving as chambermaid for Patsy and Polly when they were visiting their father. Sally was apparently the only female servant in the Jefferson household in Paris. When she wasn’t serving the girls, Sally probably had free time to explore Paris. She also had more freedom to explore Paris, because she wasn’t bound by all the strict social conventions that governed Thomas Jefferson’s daughters.

Interestingly, Thomas paid wages to both James and Sally while they were living in Paris. In his book, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson, William Howard Adams writes that under French law, James and Sally could have asked to be freed from bondage, and Thomas would have been forced to release them. 

But much like the Washingtons’ slaves when living in Philadelphia, there’s no evidence that James and Sally knew about this French law. And Thomas certainly wasn’t going to tell them. As a foreign slaveholder, he could have registered James and Sally to preserve their enslaved status while they resided in France, but he never did. Perhaps he didn’t want to call attention to his slave-owning status. It also would explain why he paid them wages—it would make them appear less like slaves and more like hired servants, as the rest of the staff were. 

After arriving in Paris, Polly joined her sister Patsy at the Panthemont convent school. But the two girls visited their father usually once a week. Patsy was fluent in French by this point, and was six years older than Polly, so she took charge of the young girl. Thomas paid an allowance to Patsy that was meant to cover the cost of various items for both of them. Thomas’s instructions to Patsy before her sister’s arrival were “Teach her above all things to be good. … Teach her always to be true. … Teach her never to be angry. … And teach her industry and application to useful pursuits. I will venture to assure you that if you inculcate this in her mind you will make her a happy being in herself, a most inestimable friend to you, and precious to all the world.” He also reminded Patsy to practice these virtues herself “for the additional incitement of increasing the happiness of him who loves you infinitely.”

As 1787 progressed, Thomas began exposing Patsy to more of a social education. When she was at school, she was to dine with the abbess, a noblewoman named Madame Béthisy de Mézières. Other guests of the abbess were often prominent aristocrats and important members of Paris society, and Thomas wanted to expose Patsy to a more formal style of dining. Patsy also attended, presumably with her father, a formal dinner at the home of the Marquis de Lafayette.

When dining at Hôtel de Langeac with her father and whatever guests he had on hand, Thomas instructed Patsy to “make it a rule hereafter to come dressed otherwise than in your uniform.” He wanted her to look like a young lady, not a schoolgirl.

At some point in 1788, the effects of living in a Catholic convent for the past four years had the somewhat inevitable effect of convincing teenage Patsy that she wanted to become not only a Catholic, but a nun. Her father, who believed in god, of course, but was not at all a religious man, was quite opposed to this idea. He first asked her to delay making any final decisions until she was more mature, and then he started introducing her to the wider world of Parisian society. His account books show that he began spending large sums of money on clothing for Patsy so she could attend balls and parties throughout the city. He also bought clothes for Sally, who served as Patsy’s attendant for these social outings, despite being roughly the same age as Patsy.

During the winter of 1788-89, Patsy and Polly both contracted typhus, and came to live at Hôtel de Langeac while they were ill and while they recovered. Patsy was sick for five or six weeks, but Polly was sick for more than two months. Although they returned to Panthemont after they recovered, soon afterwards Thomas pulled both of them out of the school, and from that point on they lived with him at Hôtel de Langeac. Cynthia Kierner posits that after losing his wife and four of his six children to illness, he was terrified of losing his two remaining children.

In November 1788, Thomas had finished successfully negotiating a consular convention between the United States and France. It was one of the highlights of his time as minister in France, and after its completion, Thomas began to contemplate leaving Paris to return to Virginia for a six-month leave of absence. In the end, he never returned to France, both because of the French Revolution, which was in its beginning stages in the summer of 1789, just as he was preparing to leave. But also because of events in America, which we’ll come on to soon.

By the time Patsy and Polly left the Panthemont to live with their father at Hôtel de Langeac, they all seemed to be anticipating a return to Virginia. There’s some indication in letters from a friend of Patsy’s that Patsy didn’t want to return to Virginia. It may have been because she was infatuated with a man named William Short, who was one of her father’s American secretaries in Paris. Or it may have been that after spending her teenage years in cosmopolitan Paris, she was reluctant to return to provincial Virginia.

At any rate, her last months in Paris were a glittering rotation of balls, parties, dinners, and dances. Thomas spared no expense outfitting her for these events. As Cynthia Kierner describes, “Nearly every page of the account book Jefferson kept during these months includes an entry noting his expenditures on clothes, stays, shoes, or some other item ‘for Patsy.’ He paid tailors, seamstresses, and a ‘flower mistress’ to outfit his daughter for social occasions. He bought her a ring—her first known piece of jewelry—and a ‘pocketbook,’ or wallet, which signified an adult’s ability to carry and use money, a distinction also reflected in her greatly increased monthly allowance that was six times what Polly received. Patsy resumed riding and became a good horsewoman. Jefferson also hired a dancing master and made monthly payments to both a harpsichord teacher and a guitar master.”

Whether she wanted to return to Virginia or not, there was no question that 17-year-old Patsy Jefferson would be returning as a sophisticated and accomplished young woman.

Next week, we’ll briefly cover the earliest events of the French Revolution, which the Jeffersons witnessed, and then travel home to Virginia with them.

Thanks for listening to this episode. It was produced by me, and the music is by Matthew Dull.