The Painter's Chair (32 page)

Despite having expired a quarter century before, George Washington seemed to be watching his old friend at almost every stop
of his “Farewell Tour.” In Boston, a Gilbert Stuart portrait of President Washington had been installed at Lafayette’s accommodation
on Park Street.
⁷
In Quincy, where he visited the eighty-eight-year-old John Adams, the 1790 portrait of Washington that Adams had ordered
from the artist Edward Savage hung in a place of honor, as did a Savage likeness of Martha. In Philadelphia, Lafayette had
embraced his war time comrade Charles Willson Peale at the Pennsylvania State House, then insisted upon going upstairs for
a guided tour of Peale’s gallery of revolutionary worthies (more than one canvas portrayed Washington). Later, Lafayette visited
the artist’s Walnut Street Painting Room, where Peale sketched him once more.
⁸
In Princeton, as the Frenchman received a doctor of laws degree inside a circular pavilion constructed for the reception,
General Washington looked on, this time the size of life, from one of Peale’s replicas of his
Battle of Princeton.
⁹
After arriving in Washington, Lafayette had toured the Capitol, where four giant versions of John Trumbull’s history pictures,
including
The Declaration of Independence
, had been contracted for but not yet installed in the unfinished Rotunda. At the President’s House, grandly outfitted in
the French style by President Monroe, Lafayette saw the Gilbert Stuart
Washington
that Dolley Madison had saved from the fire that gutted the mansion during the War of 1812.

With dusk falling that Friday evening, Lafayette heard the rumbling of the wooden roadbed as his carriage crossed the Potomac.
Along with his son, George Washington Lafayette, he anticipated a very different evening from the recent days of grand public
occasions with thousands of hands to shake. The bridge beneath them connected the Federal City with Alexandria, Virginia,
and upon reaching the river’s western shore, the horses soon began the climb to the heights of Arlington, through a parkland
of tall oaks and elms. At the top of a bluff overlooking the city, Wash Custis and other surviving members of George and Martha’s
family awaited the Lafayettes.
¹⁰

Decades earlier, the Marquis de Lafayette had delighted in calling the plump little boy, then just three years old, “Squire
Tub,” but the family connection had been renewed in the interim. After the American War of Independence had concluded, Lafayette
had returned to France and played an important role in his own nation’s revolution (in 1789, as commander of the citizen militia,
he had ordered the demolition of the Bastille, a state prison and symbol of tyranny). When more radical factions came to power,
Lafayette had been imprisoned during the anarchic days of the Reign of Terror. His son George, then fourteen, escaped to America,
where he and his tutor found refuge with the Washingtons. The General had treated the boy more as his son than as a guest,
so to George Lafayette, now a man of forty-four, this journey was also a fond return to familiar places and faces. Thirty
years earlier he and Wash Custis, two years younger, had been playmates and friends; Nelly Custis called him “my young adopted
Brother.”
¹¹

For Lafayette these people could only bring to mind his old friend. Washington had been a private man whose intimate relationships
were closely guarded. But in twenty years of letters to “My dear Marquis,” he was warmer and more immediate than he was with
most people. As Washington himself had written to Lafayette many years before, “You know it always gives me the sincerest
plea sure to hear from you . . . that your kind letters . . . so replete with personal affection and confidential intelligence,
afford . . . me inexpressible satisfaction.”
¹²
Washington had been given to strong feelings; he was alive to love and to loss (men of his time, including Washington himself,
unabashedly cried real tears in public); and he was possessed of large hopes. Lafayette was one of few people in his life
with whom he was able to share these feelings and aspirations. Theirs was a friendship, Lafayette sensed, that endured even
in death.

Lafayette walked with a cane; it was both stylish and practical, as an old injury to his knee left him with a pronounced limp.
He maintained the firm, upright posture of the military man, looking taller than his five-foot, nine-inch stature, but he
wore a coat and vest (never a uniform or any military decoration). Despite his simple broadcloth coat, his advancing age and
creeping infirmities, his was an imposing presence. He was, wrote one who saw him that week, “a man of extraordinary attractions;
in face, much changed within thirty years. His complexion, originally clear and white, is now sunburnt; his forehead, which
is very high, is covered very low with a wig; but it is still most attractive . . . All that he says and does is distinguished
by a singular taste and good sense. He never seems for a moment to overstep the modesty of nature.”
¹³

T
HE TECHNOLOGY OF transportation having advanced since they last visited America, the Lafayettes boarded a vessel powered by
steam, the
Petersburg
, for the next leg of the journey. As the ship prepared to leave Alexandria, a large party joined the father and son on board
the
Petersburg
, including more than a dozen American military officers, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, members of Congress, and other
notable citizens. The Tent of Washington awaited them in Yorktown (it was indeed the late General’s own campaign tent, from
the Custis collection) but even by steamship, Yorktown would be an overnight passage. The passengers settled in below decks
as the ship steamed south toward the Chesapeake Bay.

After forty years, the sight of Mount Vernon, home of the man he had come to regard as his spiritual father, brought Lafayette
to his knees in “an involuntary and spontaneous movement.”
¹⁴

The
Petersburg
dropped anchor and a barge ferried the crowd to the shore—this was a scheduled stop on the tour—where the Lafayettes
père
and
fils
were given seats in a carriage. While the other guests climbed the slope to the Mansion House, the Nation’s Guest was greeted
by Washington’s nephew Lawrence Lewis, husband of Martha’s granddaughter Nelly, and one of the General’s great-nephews, John
Augustine Washington. (Another nephew, Mount Vernon’s owner, Supreme Court Associate Justice Bushrod Washington, was in Philadelphia
tending to court duties.) The younger Lafayette quickly reconnoitered the house where he had been welcomed as a teenage exile
and declared it little changed. His father stood on the piazza—the wide covered porch that overlooked the Potomac with the
vista of the Mary land hills beyond—a place where, on his last visit, he had drunk tea and shared remembrances with his “adoptive
father” during Washington’s period of retirement between the Revolution and his call to service as president.

Lafayette reappeared a few minutes later, his eyes full of tears. Taking the hands of his son George and Levasseur, he descended
a second time into the tomb, where the three Frenchmen knelt and kissed the coffin. When they emerged, Wash Custis presented
Lafayette with a large gold ring that contained a lock of the General’s chestnut hair, along with a few strands of Martha’s.
¹⁵

W

UPON RETURNING TO the Mansion House, the visitors noticed the key to the Bastille hanging in the central passage. Sent by
Lafayette to his “Beloved General,” it had arrived in 1790 along with a drawing of the “fortress of despotism” that Lafayette
had ordered demolished. The key, Lafayette had written to Washington, “is a tribute Which I owe as A Son to My Adoptive Father,
as an aid de Camp to My General, As a Missionary of liberty to its Patriarch.”
¹⁶

The visitors toured the house, including Lafayette’s old bedchamber at the head of the stairs. They walked the grounds, and
as they returned to the shore, they cut cypress branches from the trees by the tomb. The travelers returned to the
Petersburg
in silence. Only after Mount Vernon disappeared from sight did the time of quiet meditation end. Lafayette, settled on the
steamboat’s quarterdeck, talked until evening, recollecting Washington as the ship steamed toward Yorktown.

LAFAYETTE WAS AMONG the last survivors of a great generation. He had expected his American sojourn would last four months;
instead, the triumphal tour required thirteen months, covered five thousand miles, and encompassed visits to all twenty-four
states. His contribution to the American War of Independence was celebrated: he had, after all, risked his life, accepted
no salary, paid the expenses of his men, and helped persuade Louis XVI to support the American cause with more money, men,
and matériel.