Caroline, probably a teenager, writes to her cousin Ellen, who had sailed with her to Europe in the spring and had stayed with her in Paris, where “neither of us [were] in very excellent spirits, you were about commencing a long voyage with entire strangers, and I was soon to return to prison; but how changed you are at home amusing yourself and I am still in prison, for it deserves no better name…” She writes of the “dull monotony” of her life, the boredom of school and living with her mother and aunt, who, supported by “remittances” from America, were kept busy attending “fetes” and balls and the boring social whirl of Louis Philippe's France (“how slowly the time passes, every minute seems a day…”). Rare moments of excitement were attending the funeral of Lafayette (“very splendid, all the troops were on foot but it is suspected that it was more from fear of a new émeute than from honor to the General”) and the Exposition Industrielle on the Place de la Concorde (“O! how I wish you could see it…it surpasses my expectations”).

       But the only real diversion was gossip:

       Caroline’s daily companion was Eleanor (Ellen) Percy Ware, daughter of banker Nathaniel Ware, the last acting Territorial Governor of Mississippi, who raised his two girls after his wife was committed to an insane asylum. Ellen’s sister Caroline Warfield – later to become the best-known southern woman novelist of the Civil War period – had just given birth to a son (“frightfully ugly, of course his parents and Ellen think him beautiful”), an inauspicious moment because her husband was so deeply in debt that his “creditors have got out a warrant against him and he has not been able to put his nose out of doors for several days, the commissaire has been watching for him”, while  the new mother “cried bitterly” and went off to get a loan from a friendly banker to tide her over, while awaiting the imminent arrival of her rich father, who might not “have enough money with him (please  don’t breathe a word about it not even to your dearest friends for I would not have it known for worlds particularly through me)” to cover his son-in-law's debts. It would prove a temporary embarrassment because the Warfields would soon inherit a large Mississippi plantation, worked by 85 slaves and the vast land holdings Ware was beginning to acquire in revolutionary Texas, while sister Caroline would grow up to marry a cousin of Robert E. Lee.

Warfield was not the only American of their acquaintance to be in secret financial trouble: “Mr. Carnes has failed…he is entirely ruined, they have rented their apartment on the boulevards and gone to live at Passy, poor Mrs. Carnes, what a change for her…quite distressing…no more balls now.” Caroline asked her husband not to ‘breathe a word about it” because the bankruptcy of Carnes was then – and remains today – a secret. The Carnes firm of Boston and New York made one fortune importing luxury French goods to America, and then another exploiting the China trade. History records nothing of the Carnes bankruptcy in the 1830s.

While Caroline Haslam knew much about the troubles of socially-elite Americans in Paris, she knew very little about her own family’s “affairs” – “I am shut up the whole week…when I do come home they never tell me anything…”  And with good reason. Though this letter is not signed with their surname, Caroline’s mother was apparently one of the three nieces of the fabulously wealthy eccentric, French-born Stephen Girard, each of whom inherited a small fortune when he died in 1831. Caroline’s father is only briefly mentioned in documents as John B. Haslam. But he was nowhere to be seen in 1834, when his wife was represented in Philadelphia legal matters by John Hemphill. He was certainly dead five years later when, as a widow, she married Benjamin Franklin Peale, son of painter Charles Peale and long director of the Philadelphia Mint. So, what became of Haslam? If he was the John Buckley Haslam who immigrated from England to Philadelphia in 1818 and became a lawyer in 1830, then he was probably the same man of that name who was found murdered by an unknown assailant in Baltimore in 1837. A single death notice records that he was a man of “liberal education” who had been forced by “pecuniary embarrassments” to enlist in the US Navy in 1834, the year this letter was written. On his discharge in 1837, he settled in Baltimore as a schoolteacher until he died from “violent blows” to the chest – none of which is recorded in the life of his wife’s uncle - the richest American of his time.