Lafayette (42 page)

Having changed the course of history in the new world, the marquis de Lafayette sailed back to France in January 1785 determined to do the same in the old. Americans and Frenchmen sensed it: Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson knew it; the king of France and other European monarchs feared it. And with good reason. Lafayette was obsessed with re-creating the America he loved in the France he loved, with sweeping social reforms and republican self-government. He had already proved his abilities to influence people and events in war and set out to do the same in peace. Although no longer an American major general, he was nonetheless a powerful French maréchal de camp, who was not only the Conqueror of Cornwallis but commander of the legendary Noailles regiment. He was an influential statesman, with easy, direct access to the king and the king’s cabinet; he was an influential diplomat—America’s friend at court in Versailles and the representative of vast American commercial interests in France; and he had immense popularity in France, not just as the Hero of Two Worlds, but as a lord who had ended the famine in Auvergne by giving away his own grain to hungry peasants and, in one province at least, breaking the monopoly of the hated
ferme
— “the firm”—which fixed prices, controlled supplies, and created famine.

Lafayette’s monthlong voyage home from America was calm. He spent mornings on board ship teaching Latin, French, and French history to his two wards, the twelve-year-old Onondaga Indian, Kayenlaha, and the fourteen-year-old orphan, John Edwards Caldwell, whose ambition was to become a doctor. Though surprised by the additions to her household, Adrienne
immediately embraced the two children. Unlike other European parents, Adrienne and Gilbert did not keep their children at a distance with stone-faced tutors and governesses. They adored their children openly—embraced them spontaneously and showed them off to all their guests, no matter how distinguished. Even the venerable Franklin had to listen patiently and force a smile as seven-year-old Anastasie and five-year-old George sang children’s songs in English—and Kayenlaha performed Indian dances with only a few feathers to cover the most sensitive parts of his body.
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At St. Jean de Crèvecoeur’s recommendation, Lafayette enrolled young Caldwell with de Crèvecoeur’s own two sons in the exclusive Pension Lemoyne,
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an outstanding boarding school across the road from Thomas Jefferson’s house on the Champs Elysées,
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which allowed boys to go home on Sundays and holidays. To Lafayette’s astonishment, however, the Benedictine teaching brothers balked at his insistence that the Protestant boy be excused from daily Catholic services. Only Lafayette’s illustrious name and ties to the court extracted the school’s reluctant assent “to ensure [Caldwell’s] perseverance in the religion of his father.”
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After the excitement of his return abated, Lafayette sent his servants scurrying through Paris with packets of letters from Americans to friends in Paris. There was one from Washington to Franklin; many from Boston to the Adamses; and a distressing letter from Richmond he had to send to Jefferson, with a personal note of condolence: Jefferson’s youngest daughter, two-year-old Lucy Elizabeth, had died from whooping cough the previous October. The unwholesome winter dampness of Paris had already laid Jefferson low, and the news of his daughter’s death added severe melancholia to his respiratory problems and prolonged his confinement until March. Adrienne had helped the widower Jefferson enroll his older daughter, Patsy, in school the previous autumn, and she and Lafayette looked in on her regularly while her father ailed.

With Lafayette home, Adrienne resumed the Monday evening American dinners, where American officials and merchants mixed with—and sought concessions from—French officials, merchants, and bankers. The Hôtel de Lafayette was open to all Americans, with Lafayette assuming the role of resident godfather to Americans in France: He bailed some out of prison, paid their debts, gave them enough money to return home, and helped them get jobs. “I thought I was in America instead of Paris,” said one of the French officers who had served in the American revolution and frequented the Lafayette home. “There were so many English and Americans there, and he speaks English as well as he speaks French. Instead of a runner, he has an American savage dressed in his native costume. The savage always calls him ‘father.’
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Everything in his house is simple. Even his little girls, as young as they are, speak English as well as they speak French. They played and laughed
in English with the Americans. . . . I admired the simplicity of so distinguished a young man in comparison to so many young people with far more advantages than he who have done nothing with their lives.”
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As before, Franklin and Adams remained fixtures at the rue de Bourbon. To Lafayette’s immense pleasure, Adams now wore a smile and no longer came alone. Abigail Adams had arrived the previous August with their twenty-year-old daughter, “Nabby,” and Adrienne had won their friendship by inviting them and seventeen-year-old Quincy to the rue de Bourbon.

Although Lafayette had looked forward to Jefferson visiting, the Virginian remained overwhelmed with grief and refused to dine out. His spirits did not revive until seven-year-old Polly, his other surviving daughter, arrived from Virginia to join Patsy and made the family as whole as possible. As spring stretched the daylight hours and the sun’s rays dispersed the last, dismal winter mists, Jefferson resumed his habitual five-mile walks, strolling down the Champs Elysées to the place Louis XV and, more and more, across the Seine to the rue de Bourbon to drop in for a chat with his old friend Lafayette. Late in March, Adrienne, who remained one of the queen’s confidantes, added to Jefferson’s cheer with an invitation from the king to join the Lafayettes and the Adams family at Nôtre-Dame Cathedral, to hear a Te Deum sung in thanks for the birth of a second prince.

A few weeks later, Congress appointed Jefferson to succeed Franklin as minister plenipotentiary in France and named Adams America’s first ambassador to Great Britain. The New Englander’s usually sour face beamed with joy at the prospects of settling in England. Apart from his dislike of France and everything French, Adams had grown “disgusted” with his and Franklin’s “inutility”
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in obtaining treaties of amity and commerce with European nations. Adams had negotiated one with the United Netherlands in 1782, and Franklin one with Sweden the following year. With Jefferson’s arrival, however, Adams had hoped to obtain treaties with twenty or more European nations, but they had failed—largely because negotiating a trade agreement with America meant negotiating thirteen agreements—one with each sovereign state. As representatives of Congress, they had no authority to negotiate a single, blanket agreement for all states. Making matters worse was the failure of France to fulfill its treaty of amity and commerce by absorbing American fish, tobacco, rice, lumber, furs, and other products that England used to buy before the Revolution. Although her treaty dated back to 1778, France and the
ferme
monopoly had still not removed the trade barriers and duties that protected French markets from competition.

After his return from America, Lafayette immediately mounted what he had told Madison were his three political “hobby horses”—strengthening the alliance between France and the United States, promoting the union of the American states, and manumission of slaves. The first would not be possible without the second, and he began peppering his political friends in America with letters urging them to form a more perfect union—eight letters on March 16 alone: to Nathanael Greene, asking that “Congress assume powers to regulate trade”
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; to Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, citing “the necessity to strengthen the Federal union, to make commercial regulations”
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; to President of Congress Richard Henry Lee, to “attend to the confederation, to union and harmony, to every regulation that can give security to the commerce, energy to the government, faith to the public creditors.”
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Unlike Adams, Jefferson was eager for Lafayette’s help in penetrating the ostensibly impenetrable French trade barriers. Jefferson knew and trusted Lafayette. As former Virginia governor, he was grateful to Lafayette for driving the British from his state, and he was personally grateful for the solicitude both Lafayettes had shown for him and his daughters in Paris. Lafayette proved himself every bit as skilled a tactician at the negotiating table as he had been on the battlefield, winning inconspicuous minor skirmishes, one by one, until they added up to victory in the war. Knowing he could not tear down the entire French tariff wall blocking entry of American whale oil, Lafayette punctured a small hole in the wall by turning to the powerful contractor who supplied oil for lighting Paris street lamps. The contractor
agreed to buy one thousand tons of inexpensive American whale oil and had enough friends in the finance ministry to win a tariff exemption for the one shipment. After setting the precedent, it was not difficult to win subsequent exemptions, and, by mid-May, the contractor was reselling American whale oil throughout France and agreed to buy four hundred thousand tons of American whale oil over the next six years, all of it to flow into France free of import duties and taxes.

Nantucket whalers were so elated they resolved “in corporation assembled” that each would contribute the milk from one of his cows for twenty-four hours, pool the total, and make a five-hundred-pound cheese to be “transmitted to the Marquis de Lafayette as a feeble, but not less sincere, testimonial of the affection and gratitude of the inhabitants of Nantucket.”
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In Paris, Jefferson and Franklin were ecstatic over Lafayette’s success in opening the first chink in the hitherto impenetrable wall of French trade barriers. Even Adams expressed admiration; author-adventurer John Ledyard wrote, “He has planted a tree in America and sits under it at Versailles.”
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In May 1785, “Quincy” Adams was about to turn eighteen, and his parents sent him back to Massachusetts to attend Harvard. Lafayette took advantage of his departure to give him seven French hounds to deliver to George Washington, along with a letter describing French discrimination against Protestants. Each time the Caldwell boy came home, he bore tales of efforts at school to proselytize him, and Lafayette invariably stormed unto the director’s office to demand that the school respect the boy’s religion. The weekly conflict infuriated Lafayette; almost all of his American friends were Protestants, and, while Catholic himself, he was a passionate Freemason and had nothing but admiration for the simplicity and democracy of American Protestantism.

“Protestants in France are under intolerable despotism,” Lafayette railed to Washington. “Marriages are not legal among them. Their wills have no force by law. Their children are to be bastards. Their parsons to be hanged. I have put it into my head to be a leader in that affair, and to have their situation changed.”
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Establishing freedom of religion in France, he surmised, would be “a work of time, and of some danger to me. . . . Don’t answer me,” he told Washington. “But when in the course of the fall or winter you will hear something . . . I wanted you to know I had a hand in it.”
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France had officially outlawed Protestantism a century earlier, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, a doctrine that had established religious tolerance. Its revocation sent two hundred thousand French Protestants fleeing to Holland and Prussia, although hundreds of thousands remained in France and continued to practice clandestinely, many in southern hill towns such as Nîmes. On the pretense of encouraging trade with America,
Lafayette traveled to Nîmes, where he met secretly with Protestant leaders. After listening to their grievances and tales of persecution, Lafayette pledged to champion their cause at Versailles. “The hero of America has become my hero,” wrote Jean-Paul Rabaut-St. Etienne, one of the persecuted leaders.
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