Lafayette (64 page)

“You must have foreseen, my dear Papa, how torn my heart would be on receiving your letter . . . it is by making myself one with my mother that I maintain my strength. There is no circumstance in my life which brings me closer to her than in sending my every wish for your happiness.” In a postscript, she added these words to her father’s new wife: “Duchess, you have well judged the deep and painful impression made upon my heart by your letter and by my father’s, an impression which will remain as ineffaceable as my regrets.”
⁴⁸
Adrienne and her father would never see each other again.

During the ensuing days, the families shared hours of joyful rest and play—and too many hours of tear-filled tales of family tragedies during the Terror. After a month, the Lafayettes had regained enough strength to move into a place of their own, with more spacious quarters for themselves and the girls, and a quiet study for Lafayette in which he could add his memoirs to those of previous generations of the world’s fallen, forgotten heroes. Adrienne remained weak and ill, however. Her daughters tried to comfort her, but she spent much of the day praying and weeping softly at the constant vision of her grandmother, mother, and sister riding the wooden cart to their deaths.

After a sober holiday celebration, bitter January winds from the Baltic Sea whirled about the gray stone château; eddies of mist sped by, metamorphosing into ghastly specters of relatives and friends in the grips of the Terror. Lake Ploën froze into a thick, impenetrable black block and reduced the once-joyous landscape into a silent congregation of dark, leafless trees, mourning autumns past and patiently awaiting future springs.

Then, in February, a blinding burst of sunshine exploded through the mournful winter shroud:

It was George; George had returned from America.

After the riot of embraces and kisses had subsided, George handed his father a letter:

Mount Vernon, 8 October 1797.

My dear Marquis,

This letter will, I hope, be presented to you by your son, who is worthy in every way to be your son and that of your amiable Lady. . . . The conduct of your son since he set foot on American soil has been exemplary and has earned him the trust of all who have had the pleasure of knowing him. . . . He can tell you better than I how I felt about your sufferings. . . . I hasten to congratulate you, and you may rest assured that no one does so with a deeper or more ardent affection than I. Every act of your life gives you the right to rejoice over the liberty you have recovered as well as restoration of the confidence of your nation, and if the possession of these gifts cannot recompense you entirely for the wrongs you have suffered, they will at least ease the painful memory. . . .

Mr. Frestel has been a real mentor for George; a father could not have been more attentive to an adored son, and he richly deserves the highest praise for his virtue, his good judgment and his prudence. . . . Your son and he carry with them the wishes and a sense of loss of our family [and] all who know them.

Rest assured that at no time have you ranked higher in the esteem of this nation. . . . If pleasant memories or circumstances bring you back to visit America with your Lady and your daughters, none of its inhabitants will receive you with more respect and affection than Mrs. Washington and myself; our hearts are filled with affection and admiration for you and them.
⁴⁹

*The number changed annually.

Lafayette had not seen his son for six years. George had just turned nineteen, the same age as Lafayette when he first sailed for America. George had spent two and a half years in America, with his tutor, the faithful Félix Frestel, always at his side—initially at Cambridge, then a few weeks with Alexander Hamilton in New York, before going to the Washingtons in Mount Vernon after the president’s retirement. On his return to France, George first went to Paris, where he found only the blackened stone shell of his beautiful boyhood home on the rue de Bourbon. His father’s supporters arranged an audience to plead with Napoléon to end his father’s exile, but Napoléon had left to inspect the troops, and his wife, Joséphine, received the handsome young man instead. Recognizing the advantages of cloaking her husband’s ambitions in Fayettiste republicanism, she received the boy with much fanfare, declaring, “Your father and my husband must make common cause.”
¹

George’s arrival in Holstein revived the spirits of all three exiled families. “At last, my dear aunt, our wonderful George is with us,” Lafayette wrote to Aunt Charlotte at Chavaniac, “and I can assure you we are more than pleased with him. He is perfect physically: tall, with a noble and charming face. His temperament is all that we could wish. He has the same kind heart that you remember, and his mind is far more mature than is usual for his age.”
²
Virginie was as excited as her parents. “My brother is grown so tall,” she wrote to Aunt Charlotte, “that when he arrived we could scarcely recognize him, but we have found all those qualities in him that we always knew. He is just as good a brother as he was at Chavaniac. He is so like Papa that people in the streets can see immediately that he is his son.”
³

When the first birds and buds of spring returned in 1798, Charles de La Tour-Maubourg, one of two younger brothers of Lafayette’s fellow prisoner at Olmütz, asked for twenty-year-old Anastasie’s hand. Except for Lafayette and Adrienne, members of the two families seemed shocked: the Revolution had made paupers of the two youngsters; he had no assets or income to support her; she had no dowry. The comtesse de Tessé argued that it would be the first such marriage since Adam and Eve.

Lafayette and Adrienne, however, were overjoyed. “When I think of the horrible situation of my children not long ago,” said Adrienne, “when I see all three of them about me and I am about to adopt a fourth after my own heart, I cannot thank God enough.”
⁴

Early in May, Charles and Anastasie were married at Witmold; the comtesse de Tessé provided a trousseau and the wedding feast. Adrienne all but collapsed with fever on the morning of the wedding; ugly abscesses reappeared on her arms and legs and made it impossible for her to walk. She refused to postpone the wedding, however, and George and Charles carried her into the elegant grand salon at Witmold and placed her on a couch to watch the ceremony.

Spring air and sunshine—and the joy she saw in Anastasie’s face— improved Adrienne’s health, although residual edema in her legs left her limping noticeably. Though less than sound physically, she was sound enough mentally to recognize that her family could not remain in exile indefinitely without income, living off the goodness of her aunt. With Lafayette barred from France, America seemed their only refuge. “The Americans still owe Gilbert the land he refused to accept at the end of the war,” Adrienne explained to Aunt Charlotte. “He agrees that it would be only reasonable now to take the gift then offered.”
⁵
The Lafayettes, however, did not have “enough money to keep the family six months [in America],”
⁶
and she said that as soon as she was well she would go to Paris to reclaim and sell as much as possible of the Noailles properties to raise cash for the trip and subsequent expenses.

To prepare their way in America, Lafayette wrote to his friend Alexander Hamilton, who had served as Washington’s secretary of treasury and had since become New York’s foremost attorney and most powerful political leader. Hamilton’s reply was devastating. The United States and France, Hamilton explained, were in an undeclared war with each other. President John Adams had recalled Washington from retirement to his former post as commander in chief of American armed forces and appointed Hamilton inspector general to lead the army in the field. Congress created a standing army of fifteen thousand men to repel a French invasion; it had strengthened state militias and created a new Navy department to build three
frigates and arm all merchant ships. Hamilton wrote that among “the sad results of the Revolution, I was most disappointed by the disputes that developed between our two nations and that seem to portend a complete rupture in relations. . . . I never believed that France could become a republic, and I am convinced the longer the effort continued, the more miseries it would bring.” He assured Lafayette that “my friendship for you will survive all revolutions” and that “no one believes more than I how much our nation should love you,” but concluded, “In the present state of our affairs with France, I cannot insist that you come here.”
⁷

Hamilton’s letter left Lafayette without a plan for his family’s future. Adrienne had left for Paris with Virginie, Anastasie, and Charles, to raise funds for their voyage. Isolated as he was in Holstein, he could not be aware of the depth of American furor toward France, and his years in prison left him living in an earlier world when French and American interests were one. The undeclared war had started after the Directory sent French privateers to prey on American ships in retaliation for the refusal of the United States to join France at war with Britain. French agents in the United States once again provoked anti-British riots, and the French ambassador violated diplomatic protocol by actively campaigning against the election of President Adams, who reiterated Washington’s policy of neutrality and supported trade with Britain. After his election, Adams sent emissaries to Paris to negotiate an end to French depredations, but Foreign Minister Talleyrand sent three agents—known infamously as agents
X, Y
, and
Z
—to demand a bribe of 50,000 livres as his personal price for negotiating. The Americans angrily rebuffed the demand, Talleyrand threatened war, and America, led by Adams and his Federalist Party, accepted the challenge.

“The friendship of France,” wrote New York’s Federalist editor, Noah Webster, “is to be dreaded by the citizens of the United States as the most dangerous mischief. Her
enmity
alone can save us from ruin . . . instead of respecting the rights of other nations, the French government has invaded, conquered, and annexed to France the little helpless republic of Geneva. She has conquered a part of the Swiss cantons . . . Holland is enslaved . . . , Genoa. . . . Venice has been annihilated—divided and sold!!! So much for her promised respect which France was to pay to the ‘independence of other nations,’ as far as it respects Europe. The people of America . . . do not wish for friendly intercourse with a nation which practices such cowardly acts on our national happiness.”
⁸

After receiving Hamilton’s letter, Lafayette appealed to Washington: “I have the impression that [Hamilton] fears that the unfortunate discord between the two republics will create some difficulties for me. . . . You know too well, my dear general, that my affection for America, my sense of duty
to her, make America’s shores the only appropriate place for me to retire.”
⁹
He pleaded with Washington to intervene personally in the Franco-American dispute, saying he was convinced that the French government wanted nothing but peace with its old ally.

When Adrienne and the others reached the French border, authorities refused them entry because of Charles’s status as an émigré. Charles and Anastasie turned back to Utrecht, Holland, to find lodgings, while Adrienne and Virginie continued to Paris with the added burden of getting her son-in-law’s name scratched from the émigré list. With limited funds and no family left in the French capital, Adrienne was alone with her daughter in a city that the Noailles family had all but ruled only a few years earlier. She turned to her former personal maid, the devoted Marie-Josèphe Beauchet, who had written and offered “a very comfortable room where . . . you will find a warm fire, a comfortable bed. Madame, allow me to beg you, in the name of all those feelings which attach me so closely to you to take up your residence with us. . . . You will find in me an eager waiting maid, a cook with whom you will find no fault, and a secretary of intelligence who is eager to serve you . . . and you will be close at hand to the Directory.”
¹⁰
It was an offer that reflected the love Adrienne inspired in others and one that Adrienne could not afford to refuse. Her former maid had done well for herself, had married a well-placed civil servant, and lived in a small house on the rue de l’Université, a pleasant street not far from where the Lafayettes had lived before the Jacobin destruction.