Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 8
1839-06-20
Clear but windy. At home occupied as usual. Evening family with us.
My time passes with so little variety now that I record its movement rather in compliance with habit than for any other reason. I gave to my Review of Tucker it’s final reading and then folded it up for dismissal. This puts me for the moment out of work. I think I shall take up the thread of our history, in connexion with an examination of the MS Papers of J.A. I look over them now without much method.
Lucan 9. 306–540. The march of Cato in Africa, highly extravagant and overwrought. It appears too like the sixth act of a play.
My father was here upon business. He has just received a letter from A. Giusta calling for money.1 This is not exactly convenient, he having already strained himself to pay off Hull Adams this year. I recommended to him a course which he will in the first place pursue. In the evening the family were with us. Read a little of Mascou.
JQA’s indebtedness to his former manservant Anthony (Antoine) Giusta is alluded to in the entry for 8 March 1837, above. The debt, incurred in 1835, would remain unliquidated for another year (JQA, Diary, 28 Nov. 1840). Giusta’s career and his relations with the Adamses are recounted in that entry as well as at vol. 6:17, above.