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That contributed to the seventy-three absences FDR recorded his first year and helps explain why he initially failed two of his seven courses (contracts and civil procedure). “It certainly shows the uncertainty of marks,” he wrote Sara. “I expected much lower marks in some of the others and failures in one, and thought I had done as well on the two I failed as in those I passed with B.”2 A Columbia professor saw it differently. Franklin, he said, had little aptitude for the law and “made no effort to overcome that handicap by hard work.”3 After studying haphazardly over the summer, FDR took makeup exams in contracts and civil procedure and easily passed both. His final grades were three Bs, three Cs, and a D, which placed him roughly in the middle of his class.4

FDR’s attitude toward law school was similar to Ulysses S. Grant’s view of West Point: it was a hurdle but should not be taken too seriously. At West Point, Grant—who also had enormous confidence in himself—read novels instead of field manuals and spent his free time painting in the studio of his art professor. At Columbia, FDR led an exhausting social life and wrote doggerel about his instructors:

REDFIELD ON BLEATING*

BAH! BAH! BAH!

We are little bored sheep

That have lost their way

Bah! Bah! Bah!

Gentlemen lawyers off on a spree

Wrong from here to eternity

God ha’ mercy on such as Redfield

Bah! Bah! Bah!

During the summer between first and second year, Franklin and Eleanor undertook a second honeymoon in Europe, much as James and Sara had done twenty-five years earlier. In England they dined with Whitelaw Reid, a longtime Hudson River neighbor and publisher of the New York Tribune, who had just taken up his duties as ambassador to the Court of St. James. In Scotland, visiting friends of Eleanor’s parents, they had dinner with Sidney and Beatrice Webb. “They write books on sociology,” Eleanor wrote Sara. “Franklin discussed the methods of learning at Harvard with the husband while I discussed the servant problem with the wife.”5 While in Scotland the honeymooners were asked to open a village flower show. Franklin did the honors. He was fortunate, he said, “in having had a Highland nurse, so that I passed my early years with kilts on the outside and oatmeal and scones on the interior.” With a perfectly straight face FDR went on to tout the advantages of American vegetables: “Instead of water, we cook them nearly always in milk, and this, of course, makes them more nutritious, besides bringing out the flavor.”6

From Scotland the couple went briefly to Paris, and from there to Milan, Verona, and Venice. Then the Dolomites, Switzerland, and the Black Forest. Their continental excursion lasted more than three months: Eleanor, Baedeker in hand, resolutely examining the monuments and masterpieces of Europe; Franklin, enjoying himself at the expense of one and all. In Venice, Eleanor pronounced the Titians on display “not among his best.” Franklin loped ahead through the galleries of what he called the “Academica de Belly Arty” (Accademia dei Belle Arti) briefly perusing the paintings—“chiefly indecent infants sitting or falling off clouds—or sacred apostles trying to keep the sun out of their eyes.”7 In Cortina, Eleanor went to bed early and FDR attended the hotel dance alone. To Sara he wrote, “The hotel maids, cooks, and some of the villagers did a Schuhplattler—the native dance. It beats a cake walk and a court quadrille all to pieces.… I danced with Mme. Menardi [the proprietress], and talked to the cook and smoked with a porter and had the time of my life.”8

In St. Moritz they stayed with Aunt Tissie and her husband, Stanley Mortimer, who summered there regularly. Then back to Paris for an extended stay with Aunt Dora (Sara’s sister) and Uncle Paul Forbes, who had made the City of Light their permanent home.9 They were entertained by Cousin Hortense Howland, a sparkling Parisian who was the sister-in-law of FDR’s father, James, by his first marriage, and whose salon was described by Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past. “You would have laughed