CHAPTER VIII ILLNESS IN EUROPE - COMMERCIAL TREATIES-MISSION TO THE COURT OF GREAT BRITAIN. IMMEDIATELY after the signature of the preliminary articles, in the manner already mentioned, Mr. Adams, in a dispatch to Mr. Livingston, transmitting them, announced his desire to resign all his employments. The principal objects for which he had consented to come to Europe at all, having been accomplished, and the definitive treaty being likely to be completed before a reply could return, he felt warranted in asking to be released from further service. Congress, however, was in no humor to comply with the request. Satisfied with the action of the commissioners in procuring the peace, they were now desirous to enlist them in the work of superadding a treaty of commerce with Great Britain. This idea had taken its rise in a suggestion made by Mr. Adams himself in a later dispatch, which lamented the revocation of the commission formerly given to him, and urged a reëstablishment of it at this auspicious moment, in the hands of one or more of the official representatives of the country, who might be left in Europe. Congress adopted it by giving the necessary powers to Messrs. Adams, Franklin, and Jay. And the receipt of this intelligence determined Mr. Adams to remain, after the signature of the definitive treaty. But the labors, anxieties, and excitement of the trials through which he had passed, had acted strongly upon his physical frame, already weakened by one violent fever taken during his residence in Holland, two years before. Scarcely were the necessary dispatches, transmitting the history of the treaty of peace, fairly in the hands of Mr. Thaxter, his secretary, who was about to return home, when he was brought down again, in Paris, with a severe illness. Inasmuch as he has himself given a familiar, careless narrative of his adventures during the few months that ensued, which makes the last of the reminiscences supplied by him for the columns of the Boston Patriot, and in which one or two curious anecdotes are related, it may afford a refreshing transition to insert whatever portions of it appear to be of any interest. "Whether the violence of exercise in riding more than a hundred miles a day, for so many days together, on my journey to Holland, in a sultry season, or whether the deleterious steams of marshes and canals in that country, so pestilential to foreigners, had filled me with the seeds of disease, I found myself, on my return to Paris, very unwell, and continued in a feeble, drooping condition till Mr. Thaxter's departure. My disorder was, in part, occasioned, perhaps, or at least aggravated, by the sedentary and inactive life to which I was obliged to submit after my return from Holland. Travellers ought never to forget that, after a course of long journeys and uncommon exercise, their transition to a sedentary life and total inactivity ought not to be sudden. My duty demanded it of me, as I thought; for every moment of time that could be spared from meals and sleep was required of me and two clerks, Mr. Thaxter and Mr. Charles Storer, to copy my own papers, and those of Mr. Jay, who had no clerk or secretary. "Mr. Thaxter was gone, and I soon fell down in a fever, not much less violent than that I had suffered two years before at Amsterdam. Sir James Jay, who had been some time in Paris, and had often visited at my house, became my physician, and I desired no better. The grand Hôtel du Roi, Place du Carousel, where I had apartments, was situated at the confluence of so many streets, that it was a kind of thoroughfare. A constant stream of carriages was rolling by it over the pavements for one and twenty hours out of the twenty-four. From two o'clock to five in the morning there was something like stillness and silence, but all the other one and twenty hours was a constant roar, like incessant rolls of thunder. When I was in my best health, I sometimes thought it would kill me; but now, reduced to extreme weakness, and burning with a violent fever, sleep was impossible. In this forlorn condition, Mr. Thaxter, who had been to me a nurse, a physician, and a comforter at Amsterdam, was separated from me forever. My American servant, Joseph Stevens, who had been useful to me in Amsterdam, had fallen in love with a pretty English girl, (how she came there, I know not,) and married her. Consequently he left my service, and soon after embarked for America, and perished at sea; at least he has never been heard of since. With none but French servants about me, of whom, however, I cannot complain, for their kindness, attention, and tenderness surprised me, I was in a deplorable condition, hopeless of life in that situation. In this critical and desperate moment, my friends all despairing of my recovery in that thoroughfare, Mr. Barclay offered me apartments in his hotel at Auteuil, and Sir James Jay thought I might be removed, and advised it. With much difficulty it was accomplished. On the 22d of September I was removed, and the silence of Auteuil, exchanged for the roar of the Carousel, the pure air of a country garden, in place of the tainted atmosphere of Paris, procured me some sleep, and, with the skill of my physician, gradually dissipated the fever, though it left me extremely emaciated and weak. "As I have never found, in the whole course of my life, any effectual resource for the preservation of health when enjoyed, or the recovery of it when lost, but exercise and simplicity of diet, as soon as I had strength, by the assistance of two servants to get into my carriage, I rode twice a day in the Bois de Boulogne. When my strength was sufficiently increased, I borrowed Mr. Jay's horse, i. e. my colleague's horse, and generally rode twice a day, until I had made myself master of that curious forest. . . . . . ..... "Lost health is not easily recovered. Neither medicine, nor diet, nor any thing would ever succeed with me, without exercise in open air. And although riding in a carriage has been found of some use, and on horseback still more, yet none of these have been found effectual with me in the last resort, but walking; walking four or five miles a day, sometimes for years together, with a patience, resolution, and perseverance, at the price of which many persons would think, and I have been sometimes inclined to think, life itself was scarcely worth purchasing. Not all the skill and kind assiduity of my physician, nor all the scrupulous care of my regimen, nor all my exercise in carriage and on the saddle, was found effectual for the restoration of my health. Still remaining feeble, emaciated, and lan guid to a great degree, my physician and all my friends advised me to go to England, and to Bath, to drink the waters and to bathe in them. The English gentlemen politely invited me, with apparent kindness, to undertake the journey. "But before I set out, I ought not to forget my physician. Gratitude demands that I should remember his benevolence. His attendance had been voluntarily assiduous, punctual, and uniformly kind and obliging; and his success had been equal to his skill in breaking the force of the distemper, and giving me a chance of a complete recovery in time. I endeavored to put twenty guineas into his hand, but he positively refused to accept them. He said the pleasure of assisting a friend and countryman in distress, in a foreign country, was reward enough for him, and he would have no other. I employed all the arguments and persuasions with him in my power, at least to receive the purchase of his medicines. He said he had used no medicines but such as he had found in my house among my little stores, and peremptorily and finally refused to receive a farthing for any thing. "As my health, though still very feeble, was now thought sufficient to bear the journey, on Monday, the 20th of October, 1783, I set out, with my son and one servant, on a journey to London. . . ...... "The post-boy (who, upon asking where I would be carried, was answered to the best inn in London, for all are alike unknown to me,') carried us to the Adelphi buildings in the Strand. Whether it was the boy's cunning, or whether it was mere chance, I know not, but I found myself in a street which was marked John's Street. The postilion turned a corner, and I was in Adam's Street. He turned another corner, and I was in John Adam's Street! I thought, surely we are arrived in Fairy land. How can all this be? "Arrived at Osborne's Adelphi Hotel, and having engaged convenient apartments, which was all I desired, and as much as my revenues could command, I inquired of Mr. Osborne, our landlord, about the oddity of meeting my own name in all the streets about his house. I was informed that the Adelphi Hotel and all the streets and buildings about it had been planned and executed by two architects by the name of Adams, two brothers from Scotland, the name of the oldest of whom was John, both under the protection and probably the support of the great Earl of Mansfield; that the hotel and many other of the buildings were elevated to a height in the air, so that the rooms for stables, stores and cellars, apparently under ground, were more spacious and capacious than all the buildings above ground; and that the elder brother, John Adams, had been permitted by Lord Mansfield to give his own name to all the streets he had erected, and the name of the Adelphi, the brothers, to the hotel.1 6 "I was not long at the Adelphi, but soon removed to private lodgings, which, by the way, were ten times more public, and took apartments at Mr. Stockdale's, in Piccadilly, where Mr. Laurens had lately lodged before me. Here I had a great opportunity of learning (for Dr. Brett was at the next door) the state of the current literature of London. I will not enlarge upon this subject at present, if ever. I found it exactly similar to what I had seen in Paris. The newspapers, the magazines, the reviews, the daily pamphlets were all in the hands of hirelings, men of no character. I will sum up all upon this subject in the words of one of the most active and extensive among the printers and booksellers to me. Sir,' said he, the men of learning are all stark mad. There are in this city at least one hundred men of the best education, the best classical students, the most accomplished writers, any one of whom I can hire for one guinea a day to go into my closet and write for me whatever I please, for or against any man or any cause. It is indifferent to them whether they write pro or con. These were the men, both in Paris and London, who preached about the progress of reason, the improvements of society, the liberty, equality, fraternity, and the rights of man. They made their experiment in France, and came very near it in England, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Geneva, and, indeed, in all the rest of Europe. It is no wonder that so many of them concurred with Tacitus and Quintilian, in avowing their doubts whether the world was governed by blind chance or eternal fate. If they had not discarded a much better and more divine philosophy, they would never have reduced the world to this anarchy and chaos. 'There were four brothers instead of two; a street was named for each of them. The surname was Adam. |