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By Root 1766 0

not resist embellishing. Two days out of New York, Surprise sighted a steamer to leeward that the captain feared might be a Confederate privateer. It proved to be a British mail packet bound for Bermuda. For the president, it was the dreaded Alabama. “I have a copy of the log of the clipper ship my Mother and her Mother went to China on,” he wrote to Felix Frankfurter in April 1942. “They passed the Confederate commerce destroyer Alabama in the night but were not seen.”34 The fact is, the Alabama was lying unfinished in a shipyard near Liverpool when Surprise set sail from New York and did not put to sea until July 1862, by which time the Surprise had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and was in the Indian Ocean. The president often told the story of his mother’s narrow escape from the Alabama, and none of his friends corrected him. It was part of FDR’s charm: a good story was sometimes preferable to an accurate one. The president kept a wooden model of the Surprise on the table behind his desk, and two paintings of the ship hung on the wall of his study.

In 1864 Sara and three older children were sent home to resume their schooling. Two years later they rejoined the family in Paris. Warren Delano had succeeded far beyond his expectations in China and toyed with the idea of residing permanently in Europe, perhaps on an estate in the Pyrenees. “I should want it to be isolated from our countrymen or others who would speak English habitually, and I should want to organize my household as to combine the real comforts and proper luxuries of life with a system of order and regularity of studies, duties, exercise and recreation.”35 Finding nothing to suit him, Warren settled for an opulent Right Bank apartment in Paris overlooking the Avenue de l’Impératrice (now the Avenue Foch). It was the time of the great Paris Exposition and construction of the Eiffel Tower. Sara recalled seeing the crowned heads of Europe as they passed her balcony. Even more impressive was the sight of Count Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, walking alone and unattended from exhibit to exhibit.36

From Paris the Delanos moved to Dresden and took a commodious apartment on the Christianstrasse, near where the Roosevelts wintered the year before. Sara attended a local school, where she studied German and music, and formed a lasting appreciation for the masterpieces at the Dresdner Gemäldegalerie. In the summer of 1868 most of the family went home to Algonac while the older children remained in Germany to complete their studies. Sara attended finishing school in Celle, a medieval city north of Hannover, where she lived with the mayor’s family. Summers were spent on the island of Rügen in the Baltic and the Harz Mountains. In June 1870, as hostilities threatened, the children returned to Algonac aboard the Westphalia, the last passenger vessel to leave a German port before the Franco-Prussian War. Sara had been away from home for almost eight years, and abroad for six.

Under Warren’s tutelage, life at Algonac was a disciplined round of reading, letter writing, and entertaining, interlaced with the New York social season, archery, boating, and riding. From the age of eighteen, Sara was a regular at the balls, cotillions, and dinners of the city’s most fashionable families. Rita Halle Kleeman, Sara’s friend and biographer, reports that she was an avid dancer and could waltz an evening away to the Vienna melodies of Johann Strauss or experiment with popular new steps such as the Galop and the Boston.

If Sara fell in love, it was with the young Stanford White, whose aunt lived nearby. “Stanny” was a frequent visitor at Algonac and apparently fascinated Sara. In 1876 he commenced to court her seriously, and Sara responded. White was one year older, but at twenty-three his prospects looked dismal. Boastful, boisterous, and irreverent, he had been working for five years as one of several underpaid draftsmen for the great Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson. Yet, as White’s biographer noted, beneath the offputting exterior lay a gargantuan capacity for work