Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph P. Lash Page B

Theodore, chiefly about his children.
    Tell Alice that Eleanor takes French lessons every day and tries hard to learn how to write so she won’t be far behind when we return. Eleanor is learning to skate too, quite well. She has some little German friends with whom she coasts and plays snow balling all day. She really talks German very well. Little Boy understands both German and English but can only say “Nein” “Mama” and “da-da” as yet. He is so fat and well. Eats all the time. He looks just like little Ted used to those days at Sagamore when I used to laugh so at his back view digging holes in the walk. And playing he was as big as the other children. Do you remember?
    Ever lovingly yours,
    Nell.
    But the Graz interlude was brief, and on the advice of Vienna specialists Elliott entered the Mariengrund sanitarium for treatment. Bamie was sent for, and persuaded the Vienna doctors to allow her to stay at Mariengrund with him. 2
    April brought a precipitate dash to Paris. It is not clear why, but the departure was so hurried that the children were left behind and traveled to Paris with their nurse Albertina and her husband—Elliot’s man Stephen. At one stop the train went off before Eleanor and Albertina managed to get back on, causing much fright and telegraphing back and forth. At the suggestion of the doctor whom they engaged to take care of the pregnant Anna, the family rented a house in Neuilly.
    Since it was a small house, it was decided that Eleanor would be better off in a convent, where she would be out of the way when the baby arrived and able to improve her French. The six-year-old child saw this as a banishment. She was miserable, made to feel like an outsider by the other little girls, whose religion she did not share and whose language she spoke awkwardly.
    Loneliness, the sense of exclusion, the hunger for praise and admiration led to the episode of the penny. When one of the other little girls became the center of excitement and attention because she had swallowed a coin, Eleanor went to the sisters and announced that she,too, had swallowed a penny. It was a pathetic but revealing bid for the limelight. The sisters did not believe her but could not budge her from her story, so they sent for her mother, who took her away in disgrace. Her father “was the only person who did not treat me as a criminal.”
    In Paris Elliott’s behavior became more frightening and erratic. He disappeared for days on end and then turned up depressed, penitent, full of promises to reform; he made violent scenes and then tried to reassure his family. Anna and he were “quietly happy,” he wrote his mother-in-law. “Anna and I walk together in the morning . . . we often sit and read for two hours at a time while the children play; that is Joss does, for Eleanor is at school except in the afternoon when she comes, too, and feeds the fishes and the ducks.” But to his Meadow Brook cronies he wrote boastfully about his good times with the Jockey Club set hunting boar with the Duc de Gramont’s hounds.
    . . . the horns played a little and then we galloped in single file up and down miles of beaten forest roads (without a chance of danger or excitement unless one should be to sleep in the saddle and fall out) guided by clever Piquers until we killed. It was fun and interesting but how I did long for a gentle school (over Hempstead Plains even) with you or one of your kind.
    The family’s breakup came soon after the birth of Hall in June, 1891. Elliott seemed to lose control of his actions completely. He feared that he was losing his mind, and the terrified family became afraid to have him with them.
    The more frenzied Elliott’s excesses, the more his unhappy, sorely tried wife, backed by Bamie, took refuge in strength and rectitude. In desperation, during one of his wilder, more prolonged bouts of drunkenness, they finally had him placed in an asylum for