The more you know about Abigail Adams the more you want to know. McCullough's biography of John Adams wasn't nearly up to his Truman biography, but it had great moments in it. There's one scene where an ancient Voltaire goes to the Paris Opera, maybe for the last time, and meets Benjamin Franklin for the first time. The two of them embraced as all around the witnesses applauded the reunion of the silken tree and its homespun fruit. What a time to be in Paris, before that decadent bubble burst and sprayed the topiary bushes with royal blood. The whole political waltz between France and America, beginning with the French and Indian Wars and moving through to the Louisiana Purchase must have looked like a form of statutory rape to the political observers of that time, with France leading the little buck-skinned waifs to the slaughter. You can imagine what they were saying in London. And yet the rubes won the day. Louis the XVI must have imagined a series of French client states at the end of the gambit but the game ends with the doubling of the size of the United States.

I've been trying to imagine Paris through the 1784 eyes of Abigail Adams. Abigail came to a Paris that was buzzing with the Montgolfier brothers (the first brothers act in flight innovation) recent demonstration of manned flight in a hot air balloon. One imagines a city where all of the royal realms were surrounded by those heavily manicured landscapes as the rest of the city sprawled in Dickension slums. To Abigail both of these realities must have looked alien. Her New England farm existence was brutal enough to include those cold winters, a daughter with breast cancer and an absentee husband who the British meant to draw and quarter, but it wasn't the sort of hopeless squalor that the poor in Paris were enduring. It may have required red-knuckled determination, but Massachussets had hope.

When she finally eased into the more elegant Parisian scene, Abigail must have walked on air.
I've been trying to imagine it through her eyes for a poem, that won't resolve itself. As is often the case, my favorite line is almost unintelligible to a reader; "the thinnest slice of silence from the slab." It came out of thinking about her perceptions of those manicured landscapes, how surreal they must have seemed.