Lafayette (62 page)

When Adrienne returned to Paris, the business and financial leaders who had survived the Robespierre massacres had seized the reins of government and written a new constitution that replaced Robespierre’s “people’s republic” with a “bourgeois republic.” They restricted voting to taxpaying business and property owners and replaced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen with a “Declaration of Rights
and Duties
of Citizens.” The phrase “men are born free with equal rights” was missing. As one delegate explained, “If you say that all men are equal in rights you incite to revolt.”
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The constitution created a bicameral legislature—a Council of Five Hundred (les Cinq-Cents), or lower house, and a Council of Elders (les Anciens), or upper house—and it vested executive powers in a Directory of five members, each elected for five years by the legislature.

After returning to Paris with her daughters, Adrienne took advantage of the unsettled conditions in government to convince appropriate bureaucrats that neither she nor her mother had been emigrées—indeed that neither had ever left France. As such, she insisted, she was entitled as her mother’s heir to recover ownership of La Grange, one of her mother’s properties in Brie, about seventy-five miles east of Paris, with a once-magnificent château that dated back to the Crusades. Cannonballs from the Hundred Years’ War lay embedded in its black, impregnable walls, and its enormous round towers looked over the nearby Yères and Ivron Rivers. Ten centuries of war and five years of revolution had left its interiors bare and its exterior in sad disrepair, but Adrienne saw it as a possible source of capital if property values increased and perhaps a harbor for the family if they ever returned to France.

On September 1, 1795, Monroe gave Adrienne an American passport bearing the name of Mrs. Motier of Hartford, Connecticut—the only American community that had indeed decreed her husband and his
entire
family citizens, not just his male heirs. She and the girls went to Dunkerque and boarded an American packet to Hamburg, Germany, and, a week later, stepped off, into the crushing embraces of Adrienne’s sister Pauline and her beloved aunt, the comtesse de Tessé. The countess had fled France with enough jewelry, currency, and negotiable securities to acquire property in nearby Altona as a sanctuary for family friends and relatives. After only a few days rest, however, Adrienne shocked them all by announcing, “I am going to Olmütz.”

On October 3, less than a month after leaving Paris, Adrienne and the girls were in Vienna, where her late grandfather, the marquis de Noailles, had once served as ambassador. One of his friends arranged for a private audience for her with Emperor Frederick II.

“We were with her,” her daughter Virginie recalled. “She was received politely and asked permission only to share my father’s prison cell. ‘I consent,’ the emperor replied, ‘but as for his liberty, that will be impossible; my hands are tied.’” Fearful of finding Lafayette languishing in inhuman conditions, she asked the emperor’s permission to write to him directly to ameliorate her husband’s prison life. “I consent,” the emperor said again. “But you will find Monsieur Lafayette well nourished, well treated. Your presence will add to his comfort. In addition, you will be pleased with the [prison] commandant. In our prisons we give our prisoners numbers, but every one knows your husband’s name quite well.”
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On the morning of October 15, Adrienne’s carriage approached the forbidding towers of the Olmütz city wall and the prison entrance. An hour later, Lafayette heard bolts clanking, doors creaking and slamming; suddenly the door of his cell opened and there stood his wife and two daughters, as if in a dream. He had no warning they would come. Suddenly their arms enveloped his emaciated, nearly lifeless, and all but naked body. Behind them, the doors slammed shut and the four Lafayettes huddled together on the cold, damp floor, together again for the first time in more than three years. The emotion of the moment—and the stench of the sewerage flowing beneath his window, his cell pot, his own putrescence—all but overpowered them.

While they lay entangled in each other’s arms, the guards searched the baggage of the new arrivals and confiscated everything of value—their purses and money, of course, and even the silver forks Adrienne had brought for their meals. Like Lafayette, the women learned to eat foul food with their fingers, all the while inhaling the suffocating fumes from the sewerage flowing below their window and the cell pots they used to relieve themselves. Too often, they heard the “horrible music”
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of prisoners shrieking under the pain of flogging. As night fell, the guards reentered the cell and led the girls away to be locked in a separate, adjacent cell, where they shared a single wooden pallet for their rest while their mother lay on a similar device, cradling the skeletal remains of her knight in her arms.

Each day’s routine was the same, Adrienne wrote to her aunt:

They bring us breakfast at eight, after which they lock me up with my daughters until noon. We all meet for dinner, and except for two interruptions by the jailers coming for our dinner plates and bringing our supper later, they leave us together until eight o’clock, when my daughters are
returned to their cage. . . . We have more to eat than we need, but the food is indescribably filthy. . . . Each time they use keys . . . they go through the most ridiculous precautions. . . . While an officer who dares not speak to us without witnesses watches a fat corporal with a bunch of keys unlock our doors, the whole guard is drawn up in the passage and they can all see into our rooms when the doors are opened. You would laugh to see our two girls . . . one blushing to the tips of her ears, the other making a face that is sometimes proud, sometimes comic, as they pass beneath the crossed swords and into our room—the door to which is immediately locked. What is not pleasant is that the small courtyard beyond the passage is the scene of all-too-frequent floggings. . . . We can hear the whole horrible procedure.
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Overwhelmed by the satanic surroundings, Adrienne asked to see the prison commander, who, the emperor had assured her, “would please me. The guards told me he was forbidden to have contact with me, but that I might write to him. I asked three things: 1st, to attend mass on Sundays with my daughters, 2nd to have a soldier’s wife clean their cell, 3rd, to be cared for by Monsieur de Lafayette’s two servants from the army [who were still imprisoned]. He never replied; I asked to write to the emperor; they refused, but said my requests to the commander had been sent to the proper authorities in Vienna.”
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More than two months later, two days after Christmas, Adrienne received a reply from the Austrian minister of war: “I am not in a position to defer to your requests, despite my desire to do so. I can only remind you that you consented to share your husband’s fate, and it will not now be possible to alter your situation.”
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She wrote again and again and received nothing but the same curt reply: “The Council of War and I cannot defer to any demands by prisoners of state.”
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The guards did, however, let Adrienne and the girls keep their books, and they gave them writing materials—a tactical error that would let them describe their plight to the rest of the world. Adrienne, of course, gave the girls daily school lessons and religious instruction; Lafayette read to them and lectured on the United States and other favorite topics. They kept active in other ways: Adrienne and Virginie replaced the rags that barely covered Lafayette’s skeletal torso with clothes they made from parts of their skirts, and Anastasie fashioned a pair of shoes for him from Adrienne’s corset. And they all wrote and wrote. He made notes for political tracts and paeans to American liberty and republican government. Adrienne wrote a touching biography of her mother, the duchesse d’Ayen, and Virginie followed her mother’s example by writing an equally moving biography of Adrienne.
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Adrienne coaxed the prison commander to let her write to specific family members, whom she had to identify with each letter to obtain
approval. He read every word she wrote. He rejected a letter to her son, to prevent a description of Olmütz from reaching America and embarrassing the Austrian government. Europeans accepted the horrors of prison dungeons with far more equanimity than Americans, who had not yet built such institutions and considered public humiliation in the stocks harsh enough punishment for most crimes. So Adrienne wrote instead to her sister Pauline and to her aunt, the comtesse de Tessé, and they, in turn, forwarded descriptions of the Prisoners of Olmütz to increasingly noisy Fayettistes in England, France, and the United States who demanded the Lafayettes’ release.

The Lafayettes received occasional news from the outside world. In a severely censored letter from Pauline, Adrienne learned that her son had arrived safely in Boston in September. What she did not know was that her son’s arrival plunged his godfather, the American president, into a potentially embarrassing political and diplomatic situation that posed dangers to the Lafayette family. Earlier that summer, the American Senate had ratified a treaty with Britain expanding trade and giving America’s former oppressor most-favored-nation trade status. The treaty infuriated the French government, which saw it as an abrogation of their own treaty of amity and commerce with the United States. In Paris, the French foreign minister threatened to seize American ships bound to and from Britain, and Washington recalled American ambassador Monroe, who had been instrumental in obtaining Adrienne’s release from prison. If, in addition, Washington publicly offered sanctuary to Lafayette’s son in the American capital, the French government would almost certainly interpret it as a direct insult and a hostile act.

In addition to the diplomatic hazards in Philadelphia, there were health hazards. The capital was at the epicenter of the worst yellow fever epidemic in American history; it had killed as much as 10 percent of the population from New York to Norfolk, Virginia, but had spared Boston and most of New England. Washington decided to leave the boy in New England until the government recessed later in the year and he could move to Mount Vernon with little or no fanfare. To fulfill Adrienne’s wish that George “resume his studies . . . in obscurity,” Washington asked Massachusetts senator George Cabot to enroll young Lafayette incognito at Harvard College, “the expense of which as also of every other means for his support, I will pay.” In a letter marked “private and confidential,” Washington gave Cabot

the most unequivocal assurance of my standing in the place and becoming to him a father, friend, protector and supporter . . . my friendship for his father has increased in the ratio of his misfortune . . . [but] for prudential motives, as they may relate to himself, his mother and friends, whom he has left behind, and to my official character, it would be best not to make these sentiments public; and of course it would be ineligible that he should
come to the seat of government where all the foreign characters (particularly those of his own nation) are residents, until it is seen what opinion will be excited by his arrival. . . . Let me in a few words declare that I
will
be
his friend
, but the manner of becoming so considering the obnoxious light in which his father is viewed by the French Government, and my own situation as the Executive of the United States requires more time to consider in all its relations.
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Washington also wrote to his godson: “To begin to fulfill my role of father, I advise you to apply yourself seriously to your studies. Your youth should be usefully employed, in order that you may deserve in all respects to be considered as the worthy son of your illustrious father.”
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By the time Lafayette began his studies, Bollman and Huger had arrived in America, met with Washington, and described the abortive Lafayette escape and the horrors of Olmütz prison. By then, the saga of Adrienne’s devotion to her husband, the injustice of his imprisonment, and the atrocity of two little girls languishing in prison had become the stuff of legend.
The Prisoners of Olmütz, or Conjugal Devotion
played to packed theaters in Paris and London; newspapers published epic poems such as “The Captivity of La Fayette”:

Within this gloomy prison, the prototype of Hell,

For [three] [four] [five]* years bowed beneath the weight of chains,

Forgotten in the world of man, the world of nature,

Here in the depths where light scarce penetrates,

Thus am I forced relentlessly to suffer pains

And die piecemeal, before the eyes of my oppressor.
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The Lafayettes became the subject of heated debates in the French legislature, the British Parliament, and the American Congress. Because of the American policy of neutrality, Congress rejected a resolution declaring the American government’s “ardent wish for his deliverance.”
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In London, Prime Minister Pitt, who had dined at Lafayette’s house in Paris a decade earlier, refused to debate the issue and asked a political aide to reply: “Those who start revolutions will always be, in my eyes, the object of an irresistible reprobation. I take delight in seeing them drink to the dregs the cup of human bitterness that they have prepared for the lips of others.”
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Early in 1796, three months of foul air, water, and food took its toll on Adrienne’s health: she developed a fever; her arms and legs swelled; painful
blisters punctuated the swellings. The prison doctor urged her to seek help from specialists in Vienna, and she wrote to the emperor for permission. In the seven weeks that followed, her fever worsened. Irritated by the harsh wooden pallet, her blisters erupted one by one and amalgamated into large, oozing ulcerations. The prison commander refused her the comforts of a chair or mattress, offering only straw, which he knew would intensify her pain and, he hoped, allow him to rid the prison of her embarrassing presence. In April, the emperor agreed to let her come to Vienna for medical help, but, he warned, once she left her prison cell, he would not allow her to return.