Lafayette (4 page)

There was a time when heroes walked the earth: Alexander, Hercules, Hector, and Lysander. In America, their names were Washington, Greene, Hancock . . . and . . .

. . . Lafayette—Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette.

Lafayette was the New World’s first—and the Old World’s last—great and gallant knight of old, sprung from Arthurian romances, in quest of honor and glory, atop his great white steed, charging through history, sword flashing, poised for attack. His warrior roots reached back across the centuries to the year 1000, when Pons Motier emerged from the mists of the Middle Ages as lord of Villa Faya—one of the small, crumbling demesnes the Romans had long ago abandoned in the forbiddingly cold, black hills of central France. Pons Motier de Villa Faya, or de La Fayette,
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as the name devolved, sired a race of swordsmen. In 1250, they rode with Saint Louis in the Sixth Crusade and seized the Crown of Thorns from Moslem infidels. A century later, Gilbert de La Fayette II repelled England’s Black Prince Edward at Poitiers, in the Hundred Years’ War. In 1428, the legendary Gilbert III, maréchal de France, attacked British lines alongside Joan of Arc at Orléans, scattering the enemy and saving the French throne for Charles VII.
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“It was natural that I grew up hearing many tales of war and glory in a family so closely tied to memories and sorrows associated with war,” Lafayette wrote.
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Indeed, from the moment he first walked and talked, his doting grandmother filled his mind, heart, and soul with wondrous tales of brave knights whose heralded mantle he would one day wear, whose honor he would have to defend, whose spilled blood he would have to avenge. His grandfather fell wounded three times, fighting for France against England; and his father, a twenty-five-year-old grenadier colonel, died in a hail of British cannon fire in the battle of Minden in Prussia and orphaned his only child when the boy was two.

Lafayette was born on September 6, 1757, in the same tower bedroom where his father had been born, in the Château de Chavaniac, a Spartan, fortresslike, stone château, built over the ruins of an old castle about one hundred miles south of the ancient Villa Faya. He was baptized in the parish church down the hill as “the very high and very mighty lord Monseigneur Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, legitimate son of the very high and very mighty lord Monseigneur Michel-Louis-Christophe-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette, baron de Vissac, lord of Saint-Romain and other places and of the very high and very mighty lady Madame Marie-Louise-Julie de La Rivière.”
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“It’s not my fault,” Lafayette quipped in his autobiography. “I was baptized like a Spaniard, with the name of every conceivable saint who might offer me more protection in battle. . . . So large a proportion of fathers and sons were killed on the field of battle that the family’s misfortunes in war became a kind of proverb throughout the province.”
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knights not married and hurriedly sired offspring before leaving for battle, the family would have died out centuries earlier.

As assiduous as they were in procreating prior to battle, Lafayette’s ancestors were even more careful to marry daughters of lords with properties that extended the family’s demesne. By the time Lafayette was born, the family fiefdom stretched thirty-five miles across the Auvergne in central France and seventy-five miles north to south.
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Lafayette’s father expanded family holdings and influence beyond the Auvergne by marrying the beautiful Marie-Louise-Julie de La Rivière, heiress of an ancient line of powerful nobles, with vast properties in Brittany and ties to the
noblesse de la robe
, the royal family’s inner circle of courtiers. Her grandfather, the famed general, comte de La Rivière, commanded the Mousquetaires du Roi, the king’s personal horse guard known as “the Black Musketeers.”
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The death of Lafayette’s father drove his distraught wife for solace from her father and grandfather in Paris. She left young Lafayette in Chavaniac with his grandmother and a maiden aunt, whose unbridled love gave him free rein to romp about the château grounds, his unruly red hair flailing, his wooden sword slashing at imaginary British villains lurking behind the corner towers. Peasant boys too young to work the fields cheerfully followed their seigneur into battle or on parade down the narrow, crooked street of
their tiny hamlet. Chavaniac was a patchwork of small stone houses that leaned against each other for support along the slope beneath the Lafayette manor. Most had apiaries and clusters of fruit trees in the rear and sometimes a few sheep or a tethered goat. The pace of daily life seldom exceeded the slow, rumbling cadence of a passing oxcart. The Lafayette château stood—and still stands—above the hamlet, on one of many small, forested hills in what was once a boiling sea of lava that poured from nearby volcanoes in the
chaîne des puys
, or chain of cones. Extinct for two million years, the
chaîne
and its valley rested peacefully until 52
B.C.,
when Caesar’s legions marched into Gaul—and the fearsome Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix
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made his epic stand that covered the plain with Roman blood and halted the advance.

“I cannot tell you whether I am a Gaul or a Frank,” Lafayette wrote, “but I hope I am a Gaul. . . . I would much rather have been Vercingetorix defending the mountains of Auvergne.”
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Whether Gaul or Frank,
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Lafayette was an exceptionally beautiful little boy, who combined the features of his handsome parents with the goodness of his grandmother and the irrepressible spirit of a feudal knight. Feudalism still reigned in rural France when Lafayette was a boy. Peasants owned no land and had few rights. Rents and taxes left them crushed by poverty and hunger—rents to the landlord to live on the land they tilled, and taxes on what was left of their meager earnings for harvesting his crops. In a nation of twenty million, the wealthiest half-million—the nobility and the clergy— were exempt from taxes, while the poorest fifteen million not only paid the most taxes but slaved under the dreaded corvée—a day’s forced labor each week to maintain public roads. Taxes so depleted peasant earnings that most fed their families from gleanings.

“Every class must share equal responsibility to preserve order in an efficient monarchy,” a Paris magistrate explained. “The clergy provides instruction, religious services and solace; the nobility counsels the sovereign and sheds its blood to defend the state; and the lowest class, which cannot render such distinguished services, fulfills its responsibility to the state with taxes, hard work and labor.”
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The death of his father in battle in 1779 left the management of Chavaniac in the hands of Lafayette’s grandmother, “a woman . . . of the highest character, respected throughout the province” and universally “venerated” for her kindness and generosity.
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Hers was an islet of liberty in a sea of feudal oppression. She invited her peasants to hunt in her forests and extracted only enough foodstuffs from her lands to meet her family’s needs, then gave the rest to the villagers. Her wise, frugal management left them with enough food to nourish themselves and their families—and a surplus to sell at market, to profit from their labors. “Village heads traveled twenty leagues from every direction to consult her,”
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according to her neighbors. In contrast to angry, perennially oppressed peasants elsewhere, Auvergnats cheered and merrily doffed their hats whenever their handsome little marquis rode by with his aunt or generous grandmother. He, in turn, grew up with deep affection for the adoring peasantry. He loved the land, fields, and forests; he loved the people, trusted them, and respected them.

When he was five, Lafayette’s widowed aunt, Charlotte, came to live at Chavaniac with her six-year-old daughter, Marie de Guèrin, who became a sister to him. Lafayette’s grandmother hired a cheerful tutor, Abbé Fayon,
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who taught the children their letters and numbers and lightened his lessons with tales of “Vercingetorix defending our mountains” and Lafayette knights riding through French history. “From the time I was eight, I longed for glory,” Lafayette recalled in his memoirs. “I remember nothing of my childhood more than my fervor for tales of glory and my plans to travel the world in quest of fame.”
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He did not wait long. When he was ten, the monstrous Beast of Gévaudan invaded the region, ravaging livestock. Hysterical—and drunken—peasants claimed it was a hyena that had slaughtered 122 women and children. The ten-year-old knight snatched his father’s musket from its wall mounts and charged into the forest, “my heart beating with excitement, to slay this
hyena.”
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With the cries of his terrified tutor and aunts echoing across the hillside, the intrepid young knight led his loyal troop of boys to find the beast’s den. “I am Lord of this village,” he protested to his grandmother afterwards. “It is up to me to defend it.”
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To his deep disappointment, a hunter found the beast first and killed what was only a larger-than-average wolf that had inspired larger-than-average exaggerations of its outrages.

When Lafayette was eleven, his mother took him from the rustic life he loved to Paris, to live with her and her grandfather, the powerful comte de La Rivière, at the sumptuous Palais du Luxembourg,
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built for King Henri IV’s queen, Marie de Médicis. Determined to raise his only heir to the highest ranks at court, the comte inscribed Lafayette’s name on the list of future Musketeers and, in the interim, enrolled the boy in the prestigious Collège du Plessis,
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a private school for young knights, where Lafayette abandoned his comfortable country clothes for a military uniform, a scabbard and sword, and a carefully coiffed powdered wig.
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The stiff dress, however, belied the new curriculum that illuminated student minds. To the classics, the Age of Enlightenment added works of the philosophes—Newton, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and others—who inspired a revolution in men’s minds long before it spread to the streets. Montesquieu challenged the divine right of kings, Abbé Raynal demanded popular rule, and Voltaire proclaimed the rights of man. The philosophes reinforced Lafayette’s own ideas of justice, and, when his teacher described an intelligent horse as one that obeyed at the sight of the rider’s whip, he contradicted him: “I described the perfect horse as one which, at the sight of the whip, had the sense to throw his rider to the ground before he could be whipped. . . . Monsieur Binet had a good sense of humor and smiled instead of getting angry.”
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