Lafayette (58 page)

My dear friend,

You have been acquainted with the atrocious events which have taken place in Paris, when the Jacobin faction on the 10th of August overthrew the Constitution, enslaved both the Convention and the king, the one by terror, the other by destitution and confinement, and gave signal for pillage and massacre.

I raised an opposition to Jacobin tyranny; but you know the weakness of our
honnêtes gens
[honest folks]; I was abandoned. . . . Nothing was left for me but to leave France. However, we have been stopped on our road and detained by an Austrian detachment, which is absolutely contrary to the
droits des gens
[rights of non-combatants]. . . . You will greatly oblige me, my friend, by leaving for Brussels as soon as this letter reaches you, and by insisting on seeing me. I am an American citizen, and an American officer. I am no longer in the service of France. In demanding my release, you will be acting within your rights, and I have no doubt of your immediate arrival. God bless you.
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Lafayette also wrote to his old Fayettiste ally, the philanthropist duc de La Rochefoucauld: “If I regain my liberty,” he told the duc, “I shall become once more purely American, and finding again in that happy land an enlightened people, friends of liberty, observers of the law, grateful for the happiness that I had to be useful to them. I shall relate to my great friend Washington and all my other companions from the American revolution, how, despite my efforts, the French revolution was defiled by criminals, thwarted by plotters and destroyed by the vilest of men using corruption and ignorance as instruments of destruction.”
²⁵
La Rochefoucauld never read Lafayette’s letter. Before it arrived, a Jacobin mob pulled him from his family’s carriage along a road near Paris and, as his wife and mother watched in horror, severed his head from his body before taking the two women off to prison—and the guillotine.

The murder of Lafayette’s friend began a period of unrestrained and unpredictable mob pillage and butchery that destroyed much of the nation’s most treasured art and furnishings and left more than three thousand dead— many of them defenseless priests and aristocrats in their prison cells, but just as many innocent passersby who happened along the wrong street or alley at the wrong time. The September Massacres, as historians called the savagery, began on Sunday, September 2, after the bloodthirsty Marat warned Parisians that the departure of volunteers to fight the Prussians would “leave
our families at the mercy of priests and aristocrats who may break out of prison and kill them all.” Morris summarized the mob’s response in his diary:

Sunday 2d—This afternoon they announce the murder of priests who had been shut up in the Carmes [a Carmelite monastery]. They then go to the Abbaye and murder the prisoners there.

Monday 3d.—The murdering continues all day. I am told there are about eight hundred men concerned in it.

Tuesday 4.—The Murders continue.

Thursday 6.—There is nothing new this day. The murders continue. . . .
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On September 10, Morris wrote to Secretary of State Jefferson:

We have had one week of uncheck’d murders in which some thousands have perished in this city. It began with between two and three hundred of the clergy who had been shut up because they would not take the oath prescribed by law and which they said was contrary to their conscience.
These Executors of speedy Justice
went to the Abbaye where the persons were confin’d. . . . These were dispatch’d also, and afterwards they visited the other prisons. All those who were confin’d either on the accusation or suspicion of crimes, were destroy’d. Madame de Lamballe [a friend of Queen Marie-Antoinette] was I believe the only woman killed and she was beheaded and disemboweled, the head and entrails paraded on pikes thro’ the streets, and the body dragg’d after them. They continu’d I am told in the neighborhood of the Temple until the Queen look’d out at this horrid spectacle.
²⁷

In addition to the slaughter of innocents, the mobs smashed their way into churches, mansions, and monuments. In their search for treasure, they shattered the magnificent sarcophagi of the kings and queens of France in the Basilica of Saint-Denis, destroying some of the world’s most treasured funerary art and scattering the ashes, dust, and bones of Clovis, Charlemagne, Saint-Louis, Francis I, Catherine de Médicis, and other French monarchs onto the parvis outside the church.

Even as Morris penned his letter to Jefferson, the terrifying chorus of “La Marseillaise” echoed along the narrow winding street of Chavaniac leading up to Lafayette’s château. Adrienne ordered a governess to flee with ten-year-old Virginie to a nearby farmer’s house, while the tutor Frestel rushed thirteen-year-old George-Washington into the woods to the rear and up to a hillside hut of a friendly abbé. Fifteen-year-old Anastasie hid in a secret cubby in one of the towers. Adrienne had just hidden a few of Lafayette’s papers and his ceremonial swords when Jacobin guardsmen marched into the château. As their commander read the order for her arrest—“The woman Lafayette is to be arrested, together with her children.”
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—grinning Jacobin thugs dumped the contents of armoires and
écritoires
and snatched up treasured family papers and letters “as evidence” to send her husband to the guillotine.

“Whose portraits are these?” one of the thugs asked the maid. “Famous aristocrats?”

“They are good men who are no longer with us,” she replied defiantly, “and if they were here, things would not be going this badly.”
²⁹
The man almost ran her through, but relented and satisfied his fury by slashing the canvases.

As the commander led Adrienne to the door, Lafayette’s seventy-three-year-old aunt Charlotte appeared, balancing herself unsteadily on a rustic cane, and shrilled her determination to accompany her niece. The commander obliged. Then Anastasie emerged from her hiding place and refused to leave her mother’s side. The three women climbed into the carriage. “If your father knew you were here,” Adrienne scolded her daughter gently, “he would be very worried—but also very proud of you.”
³⁰

Whatever anxieties Adrienne harbored when she climbed into her carriage at Chavaniac, she stepped out of the carriage at Le Puy, twenty-five miles away, tall, steady, and strong, her head held high and haughty, her jaw set firmly—a study in controlled fury and unyielding courage. The ragged-looking peasant guards stepped back, puzzled, somewhat frightened. She had been raised in and about the court of France and knew how to carry herself in regal fashion, how to intimidate her social inferiors with a single icy glance. She used every wile at her command as she marched into the council hall and demanded copies of all letters seized at Chavaniac and the right to read each letter aloud to the town council, to force members to hear every word of what the Jacobins charged was “evidence” against her husband. When a councilman suggested that the letters might prove painful for her, she replied, “On the contrary, Monsieur!”—she refused to call him “citizen.”

“On the contrary, Monsieur. The sentiments in them sustain me and are my consolation.”
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The councilmen had never confronted such a woman and dared not oppose her. After her reading disclosed no evidence of any crime, she denounced her imprisonment as unjustifiable and demanded the right to remain at the chateau in Chavaniac on parole until specific charges against her arrived from Paris. The council agreed and permitted her to return to the Lafayette homestead with Anastasie and Aunt Charlotte—and six guards.

“Gentlemen,” Adrienne turned on them angrily. “I renounce my parole if you put guards at my door. I am not shocked that you do not believe I am an honest woman . . . but you cannot strip me of my belief in my own integrity, and I shall not accept parole at the point of bayonets.”
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Taken aback once again by this unusual woman, the council relented and let her live at Chavaniac without guards.

She did not, however, return to a normal life. The Paris Jacobins had declared her husband an émigré and ordered his assets confiscated; the state not only owned Chavaniac, it controlled the family’s income-producing properties elsewhere in France—even the plantation in Guyana where the Lafayettes were educating slaves they had bought and freed. Without income, Adrienne and her family would have to live off the land. According to government records, Adrienne lodged a formal protest “against the enormous injustice of applying the laws governing émigrés to one who is at this very moment a prisoner of the enemies of France.”
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The Jacobins ignored her protest, with one government representative saying he “should like to tear out the entrails of Lafayette” and execute not only Adrienne but her children, whom he called “serpents that the Republic was warming in its bosom.”
³⁴

Lafayette, meanwhile, languished in chains in a Prussian prison. Of the original fifty-three soldiers who had fled with him, the Austrians had released some and sent others to prison in Antwerp. But the king of Prussia— the nephew of Frederick the Great, who had dined with Lafayette during the great summer maneuvers seven years earlier—ordered Lafayette and three other officers imprisoned indefinitely. In a curt note to Lafayette, the duke of Saxe-Teschen explained the king’s reasoning:

“We have not arrested you as a prisoner of war or a citizen or an émigré,” the duke scolded. “As it is you who fomented the revolution that overturned France, as it is you who put your king in irons, deprived him of all his rights and legitimate powers and kept him in captivity, as it is you who were the principle instrument of all the disgraces that overwhelmed that unfortunate monarch, it is only too just that those who are working to reestablish his dignity should hold you until the moment when your master, having recovered his liberty and his sovereignty, can, according to his sense of justice or clemency, dictate your fate.”
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After hearing from Lafayette, Ambassador Short wrote to Morris and to Thomas Pinckney,
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the American ambassador in London, who had been South Carolina governor and had known Lafayette during the Revolutionary War. The three ambassadors were equally distressed and began a furious, three-way correspondence that only exposed their impotence with nations like Prussia and Austria, which had yet to establish formal relations with the United States. “I search in vain some foundation whereon to establish a right to demand his liberation,” Pinckney wrote to Short. “It will afford me real pleasure to find that Mr. Morris or you upon more mature reflexion have discovered any plan to which my concurrence can add efficacy. . . . A claim of the rights as an American citizen to a person in the Marquis’s circumstances appears to me to be claiming nothing.”
³⁷

Morris agreed: “The enemy may consider him as a prisoner of war, as a deserter, or as a spy,” he said. “I do not exactly see how America could claim him.” Moreover, Morris warned, if America did claim him as a citizen and the Prussians turned him over, the United States government would be bound under American law “to put him to death for having attack’d a neutral power, or else by the very act of acquitting him declare war against those who had taken him.

“These are points of such magnitude,” Morris concluded, “that I do not feel myself competent to decide them on behalf of my country . . . until I receive express orders from the President of the United States. . . . I rather think that my interference would prove offensive and do more harm than good to Monsieur de La Fayette.”
³⁸

As the impotent American diplomats discussed his fate, leaders of the coalition of countries against France determined that “Lafayette’s existence is incompatible with the security of the governments of Europe” and that he should be held in maximum security. On September 18, Prussian authorities transferred him and the three other prisoners to Wesel, a fortress prison just across the German border from Holland, north of Dusseldorf. Ignoring his protests that he was an American citizen, guards dumped him unceremoniously into a small, dark dungeon cell by himself, with a board for his bed on the damp, dirty floor, with nothing to read and no writing instruments. Silent jailers stood beyond the door, each working two-hour shifts, noting his every move. At first, he fought off the vermin and rats that wandered through his cell, but the noxious prison food, inadequate water, and accumulating filth soon sapped his energy and spirit, and he surrendered to illness and fever.

William Short grew alarmed: “The treatment of M[r]. de la Fayette & his companions of misfortune at Wesel is cruel & rigorous in the extreme,” Short wrote to Morris in Paris, but Morris was helpless.
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A month later, Short wrote again: “As to our fellow citizen in confinement, I can only tell you that the most impenetrable secrecy has been observed. . . . It is certain that he is the individual of all France that both the Austrians & Prussians hate the most cordially—the desire of revenge & determination to punish made them commit the most flagrant act of injustice. . . . It has been reported that our fellow citizen has lost his reason & is in a state of insanity.”
⁴⁰
Although the prison doctor at Wesel urged that Lafayette be transferred to cleaner quarters and given access to fresh air, the king of Prussia refused. He suggested that Lafayette could earn more comfort only by providing military information about France—to which Lafayette replied softly, “Your king is very impertinent; even if I am his prisoner, I will suffer no insults from him.”
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“Poor Lafayette,” Morris consoled Washington, who had sent him a letter to forward to Lafayette. “Your letter for him must remain with me yet some time. His enemies here are as virulent as ever.”
⁴²

With no way of knowing her husband’s fate, Adrienne grew fearful for the survival of George-Washington—the only person who could inherit and bequeath his father’s fabled name to future generations. The tutor Frestel descended from his mountain hideaway late one night and slipped into the château to report on young Lafayette’s health and discuss his future. Adrienne and Frestel agreed on a plan for Frestel to obtain a false license and passport as a merchant and go to the fair at the port city of Bordeaux with George, who would feign the role of his apprentice. They would then book passage to England and seek help in getting to America from Thomas Pinckney. She gave Frestel a letter for Washington, George’s godfather: