Early in 1815, Louisa Catherine Adams and her young son left St. Petersburg in a Russian carriage and set out to meet her husband, John Quincy Adams, in Paris. She traveled through the snows of eastern Europe, across the battlefields of Germany, and into a France then experiencing Napoleon's return from Elba. Along the way, she learned what Napoleon's wars had done to Europe, what her old friends in the royal court in Berlin had experienced during the French occupation, how it felt to have her life threatened by reckless soldiers, and how to manage fear. Historian Michael O'Brien reconstructs for the first time that extraordinary passage. This evocative history of the experience of travel in the days of carriages and kings offers a moving portrait of a lady, her difficult marriage, and her conflicted sense of what it meant to be a woman caught between worlds.--From publisher description.

The prize-winning historian O'Brien reconstructs Louisa Adams's extraordinary passage through Europe in 1815, providing both an evocative history of the experience of travel in the days of carriages and a moving portrait of her difficult marriage to John Quincy Adams.