Lafayette (6 page)

A month after Lafayette’s wedding, King Louis XV—“Louis the Beloved”— died, and his oldest grandson, barely twenty, assumed the throne as Louis XVI. His beautiful young wife, Marie-Antoinette, the youngest daughter of Austrian Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Francis I, became queen of France. Only nineteen, Marie-Antoinette had chafed in the austere Versailles atmosphere
for four years. Her husband, fat and taciturn, had no interest in society or sex. He loved nothing more than the solitude of a quiet room, a comfortable chair, and a history book or maps to study. Because of a disability that made arousal difficult, he was content to let his boisterous, high-strung queen enjoy herself in her own apartments—and in the royal treasury. After the old king’s death, the queen began planning a nonstop frenzy of sumptuous masked balls, banquets, and theater galas. When the social season began in September, she filled her boudoirs and ballrooms with the brightest, wittiest, most charming young noblemen and women of Paris and Versailles—an elite
société de la cour
that included Lafayette and his wife and Adrienne’s older sister, Louise, and her erudite husband, the vicomte de Noailles. From the first, Lafayette felt ill at ease. The high-pitched cacophony of giggled inanities left the country boy from Chavaniac dazed—at times, even morose—staring silently into space, while those around him convulsed hysterically at witty comments about the latest fashions in men’s wigs.

“Lafayette always seemed distant . . . with a cold, solemn look—as if he were timid or embarrassed,” wrote the comte de Ségur, a friend from the Académie de Versailles and military camp. “He was very tall and broad shouldered, but seemed awkward, danced badly and spoke little. But that distant stare, which contrasted so sharply with the light-hearted arrogance and showy loquaciousness of the people of his age, concealed a fiery spirit, a strong character and a warm soul.”
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The queen’s haughty behavior and harsh Austrian accent did not help. “It was impossible to see anything but the Queen,” commented British author Horace Walpole about the weekly balls. “She is a statue of beauty when standing or sitting; grace itself when she moves. She was dressed in silver, scattered over with laurier-roses . . . diamonds and feathers.”
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As Lafayette danced the obligatory quadrille with her one evening, “he proved so clumsy and so awkward,” Ségur reported, “that the queen laughed at him”
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—a public humiliation that left him eager to shun palace society.

“What can I say about my entrance into the world of manners?” he explained in his memoirs. “The favor I enjoyed among the young nobility was short-lived, because of the unfavorable impression created by my silence. I listened and observed but my awkward country manners—and a certain self-respect—made it impossible for me to adapt entirely to the required graces of the court.”
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Lafayette’s distaste for court life did not improve with the continued insistence of his parents-in-law that he and his wife live in separate apartments, unable to consummate their marriage. At the urging of Noailles and Ségur, he found relief in “two romances with celebrated beauties, in which my will played more of a role than my heart.” Neither lasted long: “Jealousy smashed the first one before it even got started, and, in the second, I was
less interested in conquering her than triumphing over my rival.”
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Crestfallen after his flirtations with adultery, Lafayette breached the sanctity of his wife’s apartment and “never again stopped trying to demonstrate my firm, tender love for the woman I had the good fortune to marry.” In the spring of 1775, not long after he returned to military camp, Adrienne wrote that she was pregnant with their first child.

When Adrienne’s letter arrived, the shots at Lexington were echoing across Lafayette’s camp at Metz. Hundreds of officers lined up each day to volunteer in the American Revolution and avenge the French army’s humiliation by the British in the Seven Years’ War, a dozen years earlier. Lafayette fell victim to the frenzy after his commanding general, Charles-François, comte de Broglie, a grand master Freemason, invited Lafayette, Noailles, and Ségur to “see the light” by joining the Masonic military lodge. Nowhere in the political and intellectual darkness of Europe’s autocratic monarchies did the Age of Enlightenment shine brighter than in France’s Masonic lodges, where the American Revolution represented a struggle by Freemasons like Washington and Franklin for Masonic principles and man’s right to life, liberty, and property.
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Lafayette embraced his new fraternity with all his heart. The orphaned country boy with no brothers had found an entire brotherhood—each a brother to him and he a brother to each. De Broglie invited Lafayette and other Freemasons to dine with the duke of Gloucester, the younger brother of English king George III. An outspoken foe of his brother’s policies in the American colonies, Gloucester fired Lafayette’s chivalric—and, now, Masonic—imagination with descriptions of Americans as “a people fighting for liberty.”

“Such a glorious cause,” wrote Lafayette, “had never before rallied the attention of mankind. Oppressors and oppressed would receive a powerful lesson; the great work would be accomplished or the rights of humanity would fall beneath its ruin. The destiny of France and that of her rival [England] would be decided at the same moment. . . . I gave my heart to the Americans and thought of nothing else but raising my banner and adding my colors to theirs.”
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A month later, Lafayette turned eighteen, received his captaincy and command in the Noailles Dragoons, and returned to Paris to his wife, who gave birth to their first child, Henriette, on December 15. A few days later, Lafayette, Noailles, and Ségur joined a Masonic lodge in Paris,
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where Lafayette fell under the thrall of the famed Abbé Guillaume Raynal. Raynal had discarded Jesuit robes to rail against kings, priests, and slave owners in tedious diatribes that had few readers—until the French government banned them.
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Overnight, he became the toast of Paris Masonic lodges and intellectual salons, where he assailed “barbaric” colonialism and demanded an end to slavery. He condemned the Roman Catholic Church for “destroying all principles of justice” and called for religious tolerance and an end to despotism. “Liberty is the fruition of the enactment of the rights of man,” he proclaimed. “People have a right to be sovereign.” He called for international free trade, with “all ports open to all ships, without customs, without barriers, without formalities of any kind.”
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Asked whom he considered the greatest writer of the eighteenth century, Lafayette replied without hesitation: “The Jesuit Raynal!”

Convinced that the American Revolution embodied all the principles he believed in, Lafayette told Noailles and Ségur he would go to America to fight for liberty. He found them as eager as he, and the three musketeers pledged to sail together, fight together, and, if necessary, die together.

In March 1776, the British evacuation of Boston provoked paroxysms of joy in France. Parisians poured into the streets to sing, dance, and celebrate the defeat of their ancient enemy—and laugh uncontrollably at the improbable humiliation of the world’s most powerful professional army by bands of ill-clad farmers and woodsmen with hunting muskets hiding behind trees.

With America preparing to declare independence, Congress sent Silas Deane, a naive Connecticut lawyer and merchant, to seek French aid. During a secret two-hour meeting with Louis XVI’s foreign minister, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, Deane convinced the French minister that America had ample men to bear arms but lacked the arms, ammunition, and money to defeat Britain—and ships to protect her ports. Although the bankrupt French economy could not afford another war, Vergennes saw indirect intervention in the American war as a relatively low-cost opportunity to exact revenge against England and restore French power in North America—without firing a shot. By surreptitiously filling American military needs and assuring victory in some of the rebel colonies, France would bind herself to the Americans and replace England as principal trading partner and protector. “The power of England will diminish and ours will increase accordingly,” Vergennes told the king. “Her commerce will suffer an irreparable loss while ours will increase; it is very probable that . . . we may be able to recover part of the possessions that the English seized from us in America, such as . . . Canada.”
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Vergennes proposed establishing a private trading company with secret government financing to trade surplus French arms from the Seven Years’ War for American products such as tobacco, cotton, lumber, and whale oil that would normally flow to Britain. “This exchange of traffic,” Vergennes explained, “could be made without the government appearing involved in any way.” To provide Americans with a fleet, the trading company would ship goods to the West Indies on merchantmen that the Americans could buy and refit with cannons “without our appearing as parties to the transaction.”
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In the months that followed, the French trading company lured Deane into paying six million livres for surplus French arms, ammunition, and war materiel worth only two million, and, according to Lafayette, “when the English ambassador inquired at our court in Versailles, Vergennes denied all knowledge and made a show of chasing American privateers from French ports.”
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Not long after the Americans declared independence, British and Hessian forces routed George Washington’s Patriots on Long Island and in New York, killing 1,500 Americans and capturing more than 1,000 others, including generals John Sullivan and William Alexander, Lord Stirling. The rout left Congress disillusioned with Washington’s leadership and his high
command, and Deane again turned for help to the wily Vergennes, who saw an opportunity to expand the scope of his ambitions in America. France had surplus officers as well as materiel. If they assumed command of the American army, a victory over Britain might allow them to convert some of England’s American colonies into French puppet states and begin rebuilding the French empire in North America. Vergennes urged Deane to commission top-ranking French officers for the American army and replace Washington with a French generalissimo—a military dictator, or
stathoudérat
(“stateholder”),
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with sweeping political as well as military powers.

The king opposed the plan at first, fearing it could provoke war with England, which France could not afford, but Vergennes argued that “France has the right to influence all great affairs. Her king is comparable to a supreme judge and is entitled to regard his throne as a tribunal established by Providence. England is the natural enemy of France. . . . The invariable and most cherished purpose in her politics has been, if not the destruction of France, at least her overthrow, her humiliation, and her ruin. . . . All means to reduce the power and greatness of England . . . are just, legitimate, and even necessary, provided they are efficient.”
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