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was not calling for voting rights but for legal protections against abuse, and even then John laughed her off. Abigail did speak her mind about the great political events of the day, and to an extraordinary degree she was a valuable adviser to her husband, but she also made it clear: she was in charge of the children and the chickens, not the capital.
    John Quincy did not push his wife to play an active public role in Berlin. Being Abigail Adams’s son did not mean that he thought women should move in realms outside the home. In fact, he discouraged his wife. “I knew so little concerning politicks, I seldom heard, and never enquired what was going on,” Louisa wrote of her time in Berlin forty years later. “I only knew that it was a period of great events, which I did not understand; and in which I individually took no interest—Mr Adams had always accustomed me to believe, that women had nothing to do with politics; and as he was the glass from which my opinions were reflected, I was convinced of its truth, and sought no farther.” All the same, it would help him to have a partner—preferably a much-admired one, one who could dazzle on his behalf—and it would hurt him if she stumbled. So those presentations to the queen and the royal family mattered. She could help unlock doors for him—but a gaffe on her part might keep them both on the outside.
    John Quincy did not need to worry. The presentations went off “with more success than could possibly have been anticipated.” The members of the court looked over the American minister’s wife, withher fragile aspect, her smile, her simple dress, her white satin shoes. They said, “
Elle est jolie.
”
    That March, 1798, the Adamses moved from the Brandenburg Gate into apartments on Behrenstrasse, around the corner from the palaces lining Unter den Linden, a more fitting address for a diplomat and one far from the soldiers’ constant drumbeats. There, Louisa moved between a world in which she was privileged and a world in which she sharply felt her disadvantage. The rent was too high for John Quincy to furnish the place decently—Congress, suspicious of foreign courts, appropriated far less than other countries for the salaries of its ministers plenipotentiary—but he and Louisa managed to gild a few rooms to fool exacting guests. Those who did catch a glimpse of the bare backstage raised their eyebrows. One good friend, Louisa remembered, “taxed us with
meanness.
” In John Quincy’s library, some comforts were considered necessaries: a carpet sewn from scraps covered the floor, and the writing desk was built of mahogany. Louisa’s chamber was inferior—“
no carpet
,” coarse cotton curtains, and a rough wood table. She kept a plain mirror on the table. When she looked in it and saw her long, pale face and large, dark eyes, she saw a wife, though not a mother. A woman who answered to “your
Excellency
” in palace drawing rooms but who shivered in her own bedroom for want of a fire.
    It was not easy to maintain the appearance of a Princess Royal at balls and a poor republican at home. The counts, bankers, and ambassadors who lived in the neighborhood offered standing invitations to their suppers and parties. Invitations required reciprocation, which was expensive, and sometimes her cook was drunk. The schedule was repetitive, a “tread-mill round of ceremonious heavy etiquette” during the winter season. There were layers upon layers of the court, each with its own rules of custom and deference. Gambling was common, and it was a grave affront to decline a spot at the table. On Mondays she had to go to Prince Henry’s, where the “harpies”—fixtures of court life, minor members of the aristocracy bearing titles of various rank andstripe—would descend upon her and lead her to the whist table, where they would pick her purse of the few gold pieces