Lafayette (84 page)

51.
Mémoires
, II:80.

52.
Davenport, II:561.

53.
Adrienne Lafayette to Washington, March 13, 1793, Charavay, 345.

54.
Morris to Jefferson, Paris, January 25, 1793, Davenport, 601–602.

55.
Nothing remains of the Cimetière de la Madeleine, which blanketed an area in the present-day 8th Arrondissement of Paris, stretching from what is now the rue des Mathurins, across the Boulevard Haussmann to the Gare St.-Lazare railway station. During the Restoration, the brothers of King Louis XVI, namely, King Louis XVIII and his successor, King Charles X, undertook the impossible task of recovering their brother’s remains; they transferred some skeletal parts they claimed were those of the late king and his wife to graves in the Basilica of Saint-Denis, north of Paris, which houses the sarcophaguses of almost all the kings of France, including Clovis, Charlemagne, Saint-Louis, and Francis I. After the reburial, Charles X built a large, churchlike memorial that still stands over the part of the Madeleine Cemetery where the Jacobins dumped King Louis’s corpse. Called L’Expiatoire Louis XVI, it is surrounded by a small park on the corner of the Boulevard Haussman and the rue Pasquier, but it is open to visitors by appointment only and closed to the general public to prevent gatherings by royalist cults.

56.
American Minerva
, December 8, 1793, cited in Unger,
Noah Webster
, 180.

57.
L to Adrienne, Magdebourg, October 2, 1793,
Mémoires
, II:83.

1.
Louis-Charles de France (1785–1795?) was proclaimed King Louis XVII in absentia in Germany by his uncles (the future Louis XVIII and Charles X) and the royalist emigrés, after his father’s execution on January 21, 1793. With France at war with Austria and Prussia, the boy was a valuable pawn in negotiations between the French revolutionary government and its enemies. On July 3, 1793, he was taken from his mother and allegedly put under the surveillance of a cobbler, Antoine Simon. Marie-Antoinette was guillotined on October 16, 1793, and in January 1794 Louis was sent back to the Temple Prison, where the harsh conditions of his confinement rapidly undermined his health, and he died soon after. An inquest insisted that Louis had succumbed to scrofula (tuberculosis of the lymph glands), but so much secrecy surrounded the last months of his life that the truth remains hidden by rumors. Some contend that he did not die and escaped from the Temple. Others claim he was poisoned, while still others say he met the usual fate of prisoners—decapitation and disappearance into a mass grave with other nameless prisoners. During the decades that followed his disappearance, more than thirty persons claimed to be Louis XVII. After his abduction from his mother’s cell, French government apologists for the Revolution concocted a variety of tales regarding his fate. The most charming placed him in the care of “Simon,” a kindly, loving shoemaker, who raised the boy as a patriotic commoner, singing songs of the Revolution until his death from tuberculosis at the age of twelve. No trace of his body or documentary evidence of his fate after his abduction from his mother’s cell or how he met his death has ever been found.

2.
Tulard et al., 175.

3.
[New York]
Herald
, March 4, 1797. Unger,
Noah Webster
, 186.

4.
On the following July 4, Genêt marched in the Independence Day parade in New York City beside Governor George Clinton. A month later, he married Clinton’s daughter, Cornelia, whose dowry they used to buy a farm in Jamaica, on “longisland.” He settled down to the life of “an American cultivator,” became an American citizen, and disappeared from public life. He died on his farm on Bastille Day, July 14, 1834, at the age of seventy-one. One of his great-great-grandsons, Edmond Charles Clinton Genet, was the first American aviator killed in World War I, in the skies over France with the Lafayette Escadrille, a group of American flyers who volunteered to fight with the Allies before the United States entered the war.

5.
Maurois, 243.

6.
Tulard et al., 153.

7.
Mémoires
, II:80.

8.
Ibid., II:85.

9.
Whitlock, II:31.

10.
Maurois, 244.

11.
Tulard et al., 761.

12.
Maurois, 244. [D’Estaing’s remains were eventually transferred to the Eglise Saint-Roch, on the rue Saint-Honoré, almost across the street from the Noailles mansion. A plaque on a column near the altar, placed there by the Society of the Cincinnati, commemorates his presence and his contributions to the American War of Independence.]

13.
Ibid., 253.

14.
At 69, Rochambeau (1725–1807) was too old to return to war after his ordeal in prison. He later received the Legion of Honor and a handsome pension from Napoléon.

15.
James Monroe,
Autobiography of James Monroe
(Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1959, Stuart Gerry Brown, ed.), 70–71.

16.
Whitlock, II:50.

17.
Lasteyrie, 338–343.

18.
Taillemite, 370.

19.
C. W. Crawley, ed., “War and Peace in an Age of Upheaval, 1793–1830,”
The New Cambridge Modern History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), IX:286.

20.
Lasteyrie, 353–354.

21.
“De Madame de Lafayette à Madame de Tessé, Olmütz, le 10 mai 1796,”
Mémoires
. . . , II:96.

22.
Ibid.

23.
Mémoires
, II:92.

24.
Lasteyrie, 365.

25.
Ibid.

26.
The two biographies were later published in the previously cited, single-volume work,
Vie de Madame de Lafayette par Mme. de Lasteyrie, sa Fille, précédée d’une Notice sur sa Mère Mme. la Duchesse d’Ayen, 1737–1807
(Paris: Léon Techener Fils, 1868).

27.
Washington to Senator George Cabot, September 7, 1795, Fitzpatrick,
Writings
, II:288.

28.
Whitlock, II:69.

29.
The Captivity of La Fayette, a Heroic Epistle, with Characters and Historical Notes Not Yet Known to the Public, on the Illustrious Prisoners of Olmütz, in Moravia
, by Charles d’Agrain, cited in Maurois, 302–303.

30.
Whitlock, II:70.

31.
Ibid., 70–71.

32.
Lasteyrie, 377–379.

33.
Mémoires
, II:230.

34.
Lasteyrie, 372–373.

35.
Whitlock, II:70; Maurois, 299.

36.
Washington to the emperor of Germany, May 15, 1796, Lafayette Papers, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

37.
Maurois, 300.

38.
Ibid.

39.
Charavay, 359.

40.
Ibid., 360.

41.
Mémoires
, II:97.

42.
Ibid.

43.
Compulsory universal military service remained a basic French institution until 2001.

44.
Whitlock, II:78.

45.
Whitlock, II:81.

46.
Ibid., II: 82–83.

47.
Charavay, 365.

48.
Maurois, 325.

49.
Mémoires
, II:123–124. [On October 6 after his release from prison, Lafayette wrote to Washington, but that letter has been lost.]

1.
Whitlock, 91.

2.
Maurois, 335–336.

3.
Ibid., 336.

4.
Lasteyrie, 396–397.

5.
Ibid., 337.

6.
Whitlock, 96.

7.
Mémoires
, II:134–135.

8.
New York Spectator
, November 16, 1798, in Unger,
Noah Webster
, 234.

9.
L to Washington, August 20, 1798,
Mémoires
, II:140–142.

10.
Marie-Josèphe Beauchet to Adrienne, Paris, December 18, 1797, in Maurois, 329–331.

11.
Washington to L, December 25, 1798,
Mémoires
, II:142–144.

12.
L to Washington, Vianen, May 9, 1799,
Mémoires
, II:155–156.

13.
L to Adrienne, Vianen, August 5, 1799,
Mémoires
, II:158.

14.
L to Adrienne, Vianen, August 5, 1799,
Mémoires
, II:163.

15.
L to Adrienne, Vianen, September 19, 1799, II:169.

16.
Maurois, 370.

17.
L to Général Bonaparte, Utrecht, 9 brumaire an VIII (October 30, 1799),
Mémoires
, II:188.

18.
L to Adrienne, Vianen, October 30, 1799,
Mémoires
, II:187.

19.
Mémoires
, II:191.

20.
Lasteyrie, 403–404, and
Mémoires
, II:191–192.

21.
Sparks,
Life
, 552. [Lafayette would bequeath Washington’s pistols to Andrew Jackson, who, in turn, bequeathed them to George-Washington Lafayette. They remained in the Lafayette family until 1958, when they were sold to a private collector. In 1983, they were sold at auction in Paris for the equivalent of nearly $38,000. In 2001 they fetched about $1 million in auction in New York.]

22.
Whitlock, II:113.

23.
Mémoires
, II:197.

24.
Whitlock, II:115.

25.
Mémoires
, II:197.

26.
Ibid., 301.

27.
Lasteyrie, 408.

28.
Thaddeus Kosciusko (1746–1817) would move to Switzerland in 1816, and, after his death there, his remains were taken to the cathedral in Krakow, Poland. For his service in the American Revolution, Congress had granted him lands in the Ohio territory, and, influenced by Lafayette, he bequeathed proceeds from the sale of those lands to found the Colored School at Newark, New Jersey, one of the first educational institutions for black students established in the United States.

29.
Mémoires
, II:224.

30.
Dumas Malone,
Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801–1805
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 357.

31.
L to Jefferson, La Grange, October 8, 1804,
Mémoires
, II:224–226.

32.
L to Jefferson, La Grange, October 8, 1804,
Mémoires
, II:226.

33.
Mémoires
, II:196.

34.
L to Jefferson, La Grange, October 8, 1804,
Mémoires
, II:226.

35.
Lasteyrie, 406–407.

36.
Lasteyrie, 414–416.

37.
Ibid.

38.
Whitlock, II:144 [source not identified].

39.
Lasteyrie, 417. [In Lasteyrie, 417–459, Lafayette’s daughter Virginie included far more (though by no means all) of his letter to La Tour-Maubourg than his son, George-Washington Lafayette, included in the compilation of Lafayette’s
Mémoires
, where it appears in II:229–231, and represents, at most, about ten manuscript pages.]

1.
Maurois, 464 [source unidentified].

2.
L to Jefferson, La Grange, July 4, 1812,
Mémoires
, II:233.

3.
Jefferson to L, Monticello, November 3, 1813,
Mémoires
, II:234.

4.
Mémoires
, II:239.

5.
The route he followed remains today the route de Napoléon, a particularly beautiful, albeit narrow and treacherous, north-south road across the French Alps that carries travelers back in time, far from modern, multilane
autoroutes
.

6.
Mémoires
, II:300.

7.
Ibid.

8.
Charavay, 394.

9.
Ibid., II:285.

10.
Mémoires
, II:286.

11.
By then, Napoléon II was living in Austria with his maternal grandfather, Austrian emperor Francis II, who had changed his grandson’s name to the duke of Reichstadt. Raised as an Austrian, speaking German, and forbidden to utter a word of French, he entered an Austrian military academy, became an officer in the Austrian army, and died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-one. As a gesture of unity with the collaborationist French government, Hitler transferred Napoléon II’s ashes to the Hotêl des Invalides in Paris in 1940 to lay near his father’s tomb.

12.
Whitlock, II:192–193.

13.
Ibid, 198.

14.
L to Monroe, Paris, July 20, 1820,
Mémoires
, II:345–346.

15.
The Carbonari (Ital., “charcoal burners”) originated in Naples during the Napoleonic period to overthrow French rule. Meeting by firelight in the mountains, they organized themselves in cells of twenty men each, often not knowing each other’s real names and never knowing anyone from other cells. Each cell sent an elected leader to a central committee, which determined overall policy and action. In 1820, the Carbonari led an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the King of Naples.

16.
Whitlock, II:194.

17.
Mayor of Baltimore to the City Council, July 24, 1824, in Anne C. Loveland, “Lafayette’s Farewell Tour,”
Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds: The Art and Pageantry of His Farewell Tour of America, 1824–1825
, Essays by Stanley J. Idzerda, Anne C. Loveland, and Marc H. Miller (Flushing, New York: The Queens Museum, 1989), 89.

18.
“The Fete at Castle Garden,”
The Port Folio
, XVIII (Oct. 1824), 324, cited in Marc H. Miller, “Lafayette’s Farewell Tour and American Art,”
Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds
. . . , 112.

19.
Charavay, 441.

20.
Whitlock, II:218.

21.
Ibid., 222.

22.
Charavay, 439.

23.
Ibid., 233.

24.
Ibid.

25.
Ibid., 224.