Lafayette received both messages in May 1799 and told Washington that he still wanted to go to America. But after hearing of the divisions in the United States over the conflict with France, learning that his native country was at fault, and finding himself unable to influence events, he had reached the same conclusions as presented in Washington’s “candid and affectionate letter,” as well as “a hint from Hamilton.”
Lafayette had sworn off politics, but he had no asylum in either the Old World or the New, and was broke and at a loss what to do. He remained, however, an obedient son and would not sail for America until his adoptive father told him to. “Your opinion however my dear Gal has with me, as it ever had, an immence weight—I know you long to fold me to your paternal heart, yet you advise me against your own satisfaction & mine—you are better informed, & your judgement I am used to submit.”69
Lafayette did not know it, but those were the last words he would ever direct to the one person he loved most. But then there was Adrienne, struggling through her illness to assemble an estate for them, battling bureaucrats and politicians to return him to France. She was an amazing woman, and the longer she was gone the more he missed her. He finally fell in love with the brave lady who had joined him in prison and managed his business affairs ever since. Sitting in a little cottage in Holland, where he had moved in January, he wrote her almost every day. They were real love letters. “I was just thinking very sadly but very tenderly of you, my dear Adrienne,” he began one. He wanted to repay her for all she had done for him, and had been planning a farm for her, “either in the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah…or in the prairies of New England.” It was a wistful dream.70
Across the ocean, Washington fretted. He had not received Lafayette’s promise to obey his wishes, so he assumed that his adopted son was on his way to the United States. He asked those going to France to talk him into staying there if he had not left. His letters echoed those that described how George had left despite his best advice. He need not have worried. Lafayette would do as his adoptive father told him, just as he had during the Virginia Campaign of 1781. Sadly, the two of them parted forever with a misunderstanding between them.71
Lafayette had moved to Holland after a Fayettiste revolution there, but he was not safe, because an Anglo-Russian army had invaded the country. In October 1799, Adrienne confronted Napoleon directly. The two of them hit it off, he admiring her drive and intelligence, she his magnificent appearance and thoughtful expression. “Your husband’s life is bound up with the preservation of the Republic,” he told her. Interpreting that as a declaration against monarchy, she told Lafayette to write him a flattering letter. Since she commanded the family, he did as he would have if the order had come from Washington.
On November 9, 1799, Napoleon suspended the Constitution and replaced the government with a three-man Consulate, with himself as First Consul. This stroke came with a blare of noise about liberalism, speeches that sounded as if Lafayette had written them. It caused confusion in the ministries—Talleyrand, as usual, was the only holdover from the previous government—and Adrienne saw her chance. She told her husband to come to Paris at once, under an assumed name. When Lafayette arrived, she urged him to write the First Consul to announce his presence and promise to retire to La Grange. He did, but in an annoying way. He arrogated to himself the authority to end his exile and reminded the new dictator of the republican principles they both were supposed to represent.
Napoleon had seriously considered offering Lafayette a marshal’s commission in the army, but at Lafayette’s letter he exploded in rage, telling him to leave the country. Adrienne calmed the First Consul down. She had other allies in the government, and one of them shuttled back and forth between the two stubborn generals. When Adrienne pointed out that Napoleon had not ordered him to leave but had advised it, Lafayette saw an opening. He told the delegate that he had voluntarily decided to leave Paris, but not the country. “I confined myself to saying that I was little disposed to take notice of Bonaparte’s threats, but that I felt myself to be bound by his advice,” he recalled.
Everyone’s honor was satisfied. Lafayette and his family set out for Fontenay-en-Brie, a château near La Grange, which was not then in habitable condition. He would have preferred Chavaniac, where his aunt still lived, but that would have been pushing his luck too far. He and Adrienne had their little farm at last.72
At Mount Vernon, Washington went about his rounds and worried about his adopted son and his godson. He had no other confidential friend, and he missed that kind of intimate companionship, even at long distance. On December 12 he rode out into a cold rain and returned soaking wet. The next day he complained of a sore throat and went to bed. Doctors were summoned and bled him excessively. Near midnight on December 14, 1799, he spoke his last words, “’Tis well,” and died. He was buried in the vault at Mount Vernon, in a Masonic funeral.73
George Washington near the end of his life, attributed to Ellen Sharples, after James Sharples Senior, ca. 1796–1810. (INDEPENDENCE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)
Knowing that the death he had long predicted was on its way, Washington had prepared a twenty-nine-page handwritten will in July. In a long list of small personal bequests, just after Lord Fairfax and ahead of two sisters-in-law, he wrote, “To General de la Fayette I give a pair of finely wrought steel pistols, taken from the enemy in the Revolutionary War.”
There was something else. Washington freed his slaves, on his wife’s death, and provided for their support in the only way Virginia law would let him. He was the only American Founding Father to do that. Whether intentionally so, or simply in answer to his own conscience, this act can be seen as Washington’s last and fondest gift to his adopted son, Lafayette, who had started him on the road to emancipation.74
ENVOI
Le Vashington Français
(JANUARY 1800–MAY 1834)
Such characters should live to posterity, when kings and the crowns they wear must have mouldered into dust.
—CHARLES JAMES FOX
News of Washington’s death reached France early in February 1800. “This great man fought against tyranny; he established the liberty of his country,” Napoleon proclaimed. The American’s memory, he predicted, would always be dear to the French people, and especially to French soldiers, who, like Washington, fought for liberty and equality. The First Consul ordered that all flags and guidons in the republic be draped in crepe for ten days, and that a statue of Washington be erected in Paris.
Napoleon held a funeral ceremony at the Temple of Mars (Hôtel des Invalides) on February 8. The grieving Lafayette and Adrienne were not allowed to attend. A member of the Consulate delivered a eulogy, an endless rant praising France for praising Washington, rather than any tribute to the general himself. Napoleon was a new, improved version of Washington, thundered the orator.
La Grange, Lafayette’s home after his release from prison. (LILLY LIBRARY, INDIANA UNIVERSITY)
The great American had been reclaimed as a French hero after being a villain since the Jay Treaty. As early as 1797 Bonaparte had proposed having himself officially described as the Washington of France. That title, le Vashington français, had belonged to Lafayette before 1792. He wanted it back.1
THE SOUL HAS DISAPPEARED FROM LA GRANGE
That honor might better have gone to Adrienne, who implemented her husband’s plans for La Grange. She traveled ceaselessly to recover Lafayette estates seized during the Terror or to press for restitution where she could not regain the land. She also worked the family out of debt. After picking up a half-million francs (as livres had been renamed) for lost Noailles properties, in 1803 she told Gouverneur Morris that she would repay his 100,000-livre loan from 1793—with 53,000 francs, just over half the amount she owed him, without interest. She said she was obeying a new law converting debts incurred during revolutionary inflation. He did not believe that, but he let it go. “I only wish them a clear conscience,” he sighed. The Lafayettes had lost a frie
nd, but they were nearly solvent.2
Adrienne searched out the mass grave where her mother, grandmother, and sister rested among 1,300 other victims of the guillotine, near a ruined convent at Picpus. She established a private cemetery for the victims, with a chapel and memorial plaques. She wanted to be buried there.
Adrienne after prison. She worked herself to death for her husband, and it showed. (SKILLMAN LIBRARY, LAFAYETTE COLLEGE)
Adrienne also continued her campaign to remove her husband from the list of émigrés, restoring his citizenship and freedom of movement. Lafayette was stuck at La Grange, and he wanted to go to Paris, “if only for a pair of boots and a wig,” he said. He also hoped to visit an American peace delegation, recently arrived in the capital. On March 1, 1800, the First Consul granted him reprieve. The two of them met later at the Tuileries, where France’s dictator had installed himself. Lafayette claimed in his memoirs that Napoleon offered him the ambassadorship to the United States, but he turned it down. That seems unlikely, because Bonaparte viewed Lafayette as his chief rival and excluded him from all offices. He allowed him to buy a townhouse in Paris, however.3
On October 1, 1800, France and the United States signed a peace treaty, ending the Quasi War. Napoleon threw a grand celebration at his brother Joseph’s luxurious estate, Mortefontaine, and made the mistake of inviting the Lafayettes. They were the center of attention in the crowd, and stole the First Consul’s thunder, so he banned them from all future public events. The tense standoff between the two generals persisted, and intensified after Napoleon was elected Consul for Life in 1802. Nearly 4 million people favored that, with 9,000 opposed. Lafayette publicly denounced Napoleon’s betrayal of everything Washington had stood for.4
La Grange looked more like Mount Vernon every day. Besides agricultural experiments, it filled up with grandchildren. George married, and so did Virginie and Anastasie. When George and the sons-in-law were away in Napoleon’s armies, the women stayed in the château with their broods. After failing to preserve the freedom of the former slaves on his seized plantation in Cayenne, in 1802 Lafayette quit-claimed the property and received 140,000 francs. Then calamity hit.
In February 1803 Lafayette slipped on the ice in Paris and broke his femur. Surgeons gave him a choice between reduction of the fracture, which would leave him a cripple, or forty days of excruciating pain in a new device, which would heal him. He chose the pain. When the instrument of torture was removed, he had lost part of his thigh and his foot was crushed. More painful weeks of normal healing followed, and he came out of it needing a cane to hobble around.5
As Lafayette struggled with his injury, the Consul for Life made him a rich man, without meaning to. France had reacquired Louisiana from Spain in 1800, and in 1802 Napoleon advised the United States that he might sell the territory. His brothers objected, but he had sound reasons. France had lost Saint-Domingue to the Haitian slave revolt, and the Royal Navy had been beating up the French one. He could use 60 million francs to pay for his military campaigns. Besides, sale to the Americans would deny the territory to Britain and make the United States potentially a great maritime rival to the detested Anglais. The American government agreed to pay him the asking price ($12 million) in installments, and another 20 million francs ($4 million) to pay off its debts in France.
James Monroe visited Lafayette on his way to complete the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and delivered an act of Congress granting him 11,520 acres of western lands as a bounty for his service during the American Revolution. President Jefferson, Secretary of State Madison, and Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin together had been trying to relieve Lafayette’s financial problems, and took Congress’ grant as an opportunity to solve them once and for all. The lawmakers had assumed that the lands would be in the Ohio country, where the best lands had already been taken. Jefferson got authority to select the lands for the Frenchman and handed him property in Louisiana after Lafayette sent him a blank power of attorney. It took four years of locating, assaying, and selling, but it cleared his debts; lots in New Orleans alone sold for $200,000, almost as much as he had spent in the American Revolution. He was no longer a fugitive from debt collectors, including Gouverneur Morris, whom he paid off at last.6
Jefferson urged Lafayette to move his family to Louisiana, and once the Purchase was complete, he offered him the governorship. The president said that he would rather have Lafayette in Louisiana than “an army of 10,000 men.” He thought the former marquis would immediately win the loyalty of the territory’s French inhabitants to himself and to the United States. Lafayette turned the offer down, because Adrienne was too sick to travel, his aunt was nearing the end of her days, and he could not simply unload his affairs in France. With his son and both sons-in-law in the service, he might endanger them if he gave up his French citizenship to become an American official.7
Lafayette presided over La Grange as Washington had at Mount Vernon, receiving a steady stream of visitors. His leg hampered his movements, and he could no longer sit a horse, so his slight frame took on padding. In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself emperor and made a final attempt to win Lafayette’s favor, awarding him the Legion of Honor and appointing him a Peer of the Realm. The French Washington declined both, claiming that he wanted to stay in retirement. He said privately that he would have taken the office under a democratic regime, but not this one. That was not the only unhappiness in the household. Lafayette’s brother-in-law Noailles died in Haiti, and Hamilton died in a duel. But after Napoleon’s victories over the Austrians, the Prussians, and the Russians late in 1805, George and the sons-in-law came home.8
Then Lafayette’s world fell apart. In August 1807 he and George went to Chavaniac. Shortly after he left, Adrienne came down with fever and vomiting. She had been literally working herself to death for him, and it finally caught up with her. Anastasie moved her to Paris and sent for Lafayette. She lingered for weeks, often delirious, sores and blisters breaking out all over. He was at her bedside constantly, holding her hand, talking during her lucid spells.
Adrienne had always been devoutly religious, but told Lafayette that she had come to terms with his lack of belief. She repeatedly expressed her love for him and asked for assurance that he loved her in turn. “How grateful I am to God,” she cried, “that so violent a passion should also have been a duty! How happy I have been, in having had the wonderful good fortune to be your wife.” When he told her how much he loved her, she replied, “Is that true? Is that really true? How good you are! Say it again, for to hear it gives me pleasure.” He was devastated, watching his wife disintegrate before his eyes. All his neglect of her came back to him, overwhelming him with guilt. She asked him, “Have you any grudge against me?” He answered, “What grudge could I have, my dearest? You have always been so sweet, so good.” She whispered, “So I have been a pleasant companion for you?” He reassured her that she had. “Then bless me,” she begged.
It was apparent by December 25 that Adrienne was near death. The family assembled, and a priest delivered the last rites. Lafayette held her hand throughout the day. “What joy! How happy I am to belong to you!” she told him near the end. Then she breathed her last. “Je suis toute à vous” (I am entirely yours), she said, and then said no more.9
Anastasie wrote her last words down, and Lafayette carried that paper the rest of his life. With it in his wallet was another, in his own hand, saying:
This thinking spark,
This vibrant thing and pure,
Which lives on after I am dead,
Wants still to follow where you lead.10
Lafayette buried his wife in Picpus cemetery and returned to La Grange, where he walled up the entrance to Adrienne’s bedroom and built a secret door for himself. Whenever he was there, on certain anniversaries that he explained to nobody, he went into the room to commune with Adrienne. When he was not there, he dedicated part of every morning to thinking about her. “Before this blow,” he told Jefferson, also a widower, “I did not know w
hat it was to be unhappy…. Pity me, my dear Jefferson.”11
“I am more unhappy than I believed I could bear,” Lafayette cried to Madame de Staël. Part of himself had died with Adrienne, he said. “I recognize the impossibility of lifting the weight of this pain.” When she read that, she said, “The soul has disappeared from La Grange.”12
HE HAS NOT RETREATED AN INCH
Lafayette relieved his grief by basking in his family and concentrating on his agriculture. His animals won ribbons at country fairs, and his estates prospered. He dictated his memoirs to his son, George, revising his early life to make it appear that he had always been a dedicated republican, even altering old documents. He wrote letters supporting revolutionary and antislavery movements wherever they appeared. His last close friend in America was Jefferson, and they exchanged letters and gifts.
Adélaïde moved into La Grange and stayed for a while, but she kept to her own room. He had cut off his relationship with her when she remarried some years earlier. Lafayette developed strong bonds with other women, most of them active in the arts, letters, and politics. The first was with Madame de Staël, whom he had known since she was a little girl. He kept up a close friendship with the witty social commentator until her death in 1817. As with the others, however, evidence of a sexual partnership is not clear. Out of belated loyalty to Adrienne, outwardly Lafayette appeared to become a faithful husband at last, although in later years his passes at young women earned him a reputation as a dirty old man.
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