Lafayette (66 page)

True to Adrienne’s word to Bonaparte, Lafayette retired to a life of obscurity as an illegal émigré in exile at La Grange, where he spent the winter supervising repairs and redecoration while Adrienne analyzed the family’s financial situation. He had little choice. Even when he received the devastating news that his mentor, Washington, had died, he had to remain in seclusion at La Grange, while Napoléon led a lavish memorial service at the Invalides in Paris. Not only did Napoléon not invite “the friend of Washington,”
he omitted all mention of Lafayette’s name. Washington did not forget Lafayette, however. In his will, he bequeathed him “a pair of finely-wrought steel pistols, taken from the enemy in the revolutionary war.”
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True to his word to Adrienne, Bonaparte quietly and without fanfare removed Lafayette’s name from the list of émigrés and restored his French citizenship on March 1, 1800—as he did for Lafayette’s friends Bureaux de Pusy and La Tour-Maubourg and all members of the original Assemblée nationale of 1789. That summer, Adrienne took Virginie to try to recover Lafayette’s lands in Brittany, while he took advantage of his freedom as a citizen to visit his beloved old aunt Charlotte at Chavaniac for the first time in nine years. Both journeys were essential to the family’s economic survival. Adrienne had done a careful analysis of the family’s finances: they were about 200,000 livres in debt, including the moneys they owed Morris. A return to productivity of the lands at La Grange would earn them only 10,000 livres a year from farming and livestock. Timber sales from adjacent forests would yield another 5,000 livres but still leave them with only 10 percent of Lafayette’s earnings when he married Adrienne and not nearly enough to support the family and repay the family’s debts. They had to recover the lands in Brittany and restore productivity at Chavaniac.

At the end of the summer the Lafayettes gathered at La Grange. Once again, Adrienne had proved herself an astonishing negotiator. She had recovered the titles to all her husband’s lands in Brittany and sold the least productive properties for a total of 61,200 livres, with which she immediately reduced the family debts. She then contracted with tenant farmers to pay the Lafayettes monthly rents totaling 4,800 livres and raised the total family income to about 20,000 livres a month.

On September 30, the United States and France agreed to a new treaty that restored commercial and diplomatic relations. The First Consul’s older brother, Joseph Bonaparte, who spoke fluent English and helped negotiate the new treaty, invited Lafayette to a lavish two-day fête he was planning at his château north of Paris to celebrate the reconciliation of the two former allies. Fireworks illuminated the skies, a chorus sang, and the First Consul punctuated the celebration with a toast in memory of “the souls of the Frenchmen and Americans dead on the field of battle for the independence of the New World.”
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In the course of the festivities, Lafayette and Napoléon stood face to face for the second time in their lives. They had not spoken to each other the first time, when Bonaparte was a young officer amid his troops at the 1790
Fête de la Fédération
in Paris—and Lafayette was commander in chief of the National Guard administering the oath of allegiance to constitutional rule in France. Now their roles had reversed: Bonaparte was commander in chief of France as well as the French military, and Lafayette had little or no official standing as a retired officer. Though Bonaparte was
twelve years younger, they found much in common. Like Lafayette, Napoléon was of noble birth, albeit
petite noblesse Corse
—lesser Corsican nobility—but not without influence. Both were superbly educated, and, like Lafayette, Bonaparte was fluent in Latin and thoroughly versed in the works of all the philosophes of the Age of Enlightenment. Both were brilliant military tacticians and insightful leaders who had earned the devotion and unswerving loyalty of their men. Both were charming, skilled diplomats who made friends easily, and both had faced national crises that had carried them to the pinnacles of political power, but unlike Lafayette, Bonaparte eagerly seized power by whatever means he could whenever he had the opportunity.

According to Lafayette, Bonaparte sought to legitimize his dictatorship by offering Lafayette the ambassadorship to America, but Lafayette refused. “I am too American to go to America in the role of a foreigner,” he replied.
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Bonaparte resented Lafayette’s “disapproving, if not hostile attitude. No one likes to pass for a tyrant,” he grumbled. “General La Fayette seems to designate me as such.”
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Lafayette was quick to answer: “The silence of my retirement is the maximum of my deference; if Bonaparte were willing to serve the cause of liberty, I would be devoted to him. But I can neither approve an arbitrary government, nor associate myself with it.”
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In fact, Bonaparte had no need to disguise his dictatorship as anything other than what it was. He was unquestioned master of France and becoming master of Europe, with no need of Lafayette at his side. In the ensuing two years, Bonaparte extended French conquests beyond those of Louis XIV; they rivaled those of even the Roman Empire, stretching from the huge Louisiana Territory and the Caribbean islands of North America across the face of Europe and over the Mediterranean to Malta and Egypt. Napoléon planned to convert his military conquests into a new, common European Union, with France at its center, providing a common language, culture, military establishment, legal system, economy, and currency. He made French mandatory in schools, introduced the new
franc
as a common currency, and integrated the elite military units of Prussia and Austria into a Grande Armée. He reorganized European industry into a new “Continental System,” with France as the continent’s primary manufacturer and the rest of Europe relegated to raw materials production and a market for finished French goods. Raw materials were to flow into France for conversion by French manufacturers into finished goods that France would then sell throughout Europe and the world. In a referendum during the summer of 1802, 3,658,000 Frenchmen voted to make Bonaparte “Consul for life,” with Lafayette among the tiny minority of 9,000 who dared vote nay. Two years later, Napoléon emulated Charlemagne and brought the pope from Rome to Nôtre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, took the crown from the pope’s hands, and crowned himself emperor. “What a mummery,” said one of his generals. “Nothing is missing but the hundred thousand men who sacrificed themselves to do away with all this.”
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After celebrating the restoration of diplomatic and commercial ties to America at Joseph Bonaparte’s estate, Lafayette returned to La Grange, determined to re-create Mount Vernon and wait for his nation to recall him to service—as America had eventually recalled Washington. During the following year, Lafayette studied the latest techniques in agriculture and animal husbandry. He proved as brilliant and passionate as Washington in the practical application of agricultural theory, and he made the fields of La Grange the most productive and profitable in the region. He was equally gifted with livestock, carefully selecting a few Spanish merino rams and ewes and developing the largest, most productive and profitable herd of merino sheep in France—and the only one near Paris. His more than seven hundred animals produced the finest wool then available and commanded the highest prices. Meanwhile, he hired an architect to renovate the château, adding a magnificent library for himself in one of the towers and apartments for each of his children, their spouses or future spouses, and their offspring, and for Madame de Tessé and her husband. He added a room for the tutor, Frestel, of course, and several guest rooms. A landscape architect added terraces and a fish pond in the park adjacent to the château. By the end of 1801, Lafayette had transformed La Grange into a French Mount Vernon, including the constant chatter, songs, and laughter of friends, relatives, and children.

Adrienne, meanwhile, continued her supervision of the family’s financial affairs, traveling to Paris each month to negotiate with lawyers representing the family’s creditors, including Gouverneur Morris, by then a U.S. senator. She also continued badgering government officials to restore the family’s titles or obtain compensation for properties and assets seized by Jacobins. Ultimately, she recovered more than 500,000 francs in compensation for government confiscation of Noailles family properties and assets— about $2.5 million in today’s currency.

On one of her regular trips to Paris, Adrienne determined to discover where her mother, sister, and grandmother had been buried. She learned that about thirteen hundred heads and bodies from the guillotine at the place du Trône (now the place de la Nation) had been carted to two huge burial pits at nearby Picpus, near the ruined convent of the Augustines. She and her surviving sister launched an enormous letter-writing campaign to surviving relatives of the victims across France and eventually raised enough funds to build the Cimetière de Picpus, complete with a chapel adjacent to the burial pits. Although they never disinterred the dead, engraved plaques on the walls and stelae in the ground attest to their presence. Picpus remains the only private
cemetery in France reserved exclusively for direct descendants of the 1,306 victims of the guillotine on the place du Trône—among them the poet André Chénier, whose death was immortalized in the tragic opera by Giordano.

In the spring of 1802, George-Washington Lafayette married Emilie de Tracy, the daughter of Destutt de Tracy, a renowned philosopher who had served in the Constituent Assembly with Lafayette and as a cavalry commander under him at the frontier in 1792, just before Lafayette fled France. Père Carrichon, the priest who had blessed the three Noailles ladies at the guillotine, performed the ceremony. After the wedding, the Lafayette and de Tracy families went south together for a long visit to Chavaniac—“to share our newfound happiness with our old aunt, who still had all her faculties,” according to Virginie. “Nothing had been able to destroy her or embitter her.”
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During their vacation at Chavaniac, Adrienne’s sister invited a young guest, the marquis de Lasteyrie du Saillant, who fell in love with Virginie and married her the following year. Although they scheduled the wedding for February 1803, they had to postpone it after Lafayette slipped on the ice near what is now the place de la Concorde in Paris and broke his upper left leg. Concerned passersby carried him to the nearby rue d’Anjou, where Madame de Tessé, Adrienne’s aunt, now lived. Two surgeons debated whether to allow it to heal naturally and leave him with a permanent limp or treat it with a racklike machine that had just been invented to stretch broken bones into place gradually, with a turn of several screws each day. Always eager to pioneer new scientific techniques, Lafayette made the disastrous decision to try the machine. After Lafayette endured forty days and nights of excruciating pain, the inventor removed the machine to find that the straps had gripped Lafayette’s leg so tightly he had developed gangrene. The gangrene disappeared after two weeks, but he lost almost all movement of his upper leg at the hip. The surgeon never again used his machine.

Lafayette’s long confinement provoked some public interest. Old comrades in arms visited regularly, and a range of revolutionaries—some of them old has-beens, others young would-bes—sought his counsel. Through the pain, Lafayette held court as he had at the rue de Bourbon, as guests of all ranks and all nations flocked to see the fallen knight. But his endless discourses on liberty and constitutional rule grew tiresome to all but his immediate family and a few old dreamers like the Polish patriot Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who was a frequent visitor. Both men were vestiges of the past, shunned by those who controlled the present. More than ten years older than Lafayette, Kosciuszko had fought with Greene in the Carolina campaign and returned to Poland to lead an unsuccessful fight for independence. Like Lafayette, his mind remained rooted in the previous century, while his hands worked the soil of his garden in exile on the outskirts of Paris. Like Lafayette, he held fast to a dream of American liberty in his native land—a dream he would never live to see.
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