Lafayette_Courtier to Crown Fugitive, 1757-1777

by S. P. Grogan

  The coach took a fair size bounce that the metal springs did not cushion and all three of them left their seats for air, and a plop in return.

  “It will be hard to read on these bad roads but I shall try.”

  “Would be better to smell the scents of the woods,” replied Blasse, “and try to name the birds by their calls. As we get closer to the city your nose will begin snorting all ill odors we call ‘civilized’ and there is a roughness to all you shall meet. Everyone will have their hand held out for alms or seeking a way to find your pocket. Be wary. If you wish to become a great gentleman listen to those who have found success and gauge their wisdom.”

  Gilbert did listen upon that remark as being a wise course to follow.

  “Paris is a wicked place,” stated the Abbè with certain conviction.

  “But the place is rife with cathedrals,” intoned Blasse with a smile, “whose spires reach heaven and thick in each neighborhood small parish churches and convents; should not the flood of sin be dammed away by now?”

  Another lively conversation ensued, and Gilbert, turned to the first page of Robinson Crusoe, a man who he suddenly empathized with as the young boy knew he would come to understand the concept of being stranded over the next two weeks of dry-land sailing.

  6.

  INTO THE FIFTH DAY of the trip, when the roadway seem to be a little wider and in some places before and after passing through sizable villages the track whence they followed shuffled over crushed rock, all of a sudden the coach lurched to a halt, and the driver shouted out, “Fallen tree!”

  Gilbert had never seen a man as Giles Blasse, like a cat startled, so quickly dart from a sleeping snore to eyes wary. In a fluid motion Blasse thrust his hand under a cushion into a hidden shelf, the boy had not previously noticed. A polished wood box was retrieved.

  “By the Saints,” exclaimed the Abbe, “what are you doing?”

  “Here take this. Cock it. Powder and ball are fresh.”

  The pistol first thrust at the tutor was immediately refused with a facial expression of being aghast at such a thought. Gilbert now found himself grasping the weapon. Somewhat alarmed he thought, what danger do we face? The pistol was a flintlock but not cumbersome with a slower pull on the trigger. What he held was a weightier dueling pistol, a longer barrel, primed for action. With the match of the lethal pair in his hand, Blasse jumped from the carriage as he heard the driver shout and another man’s voice return in anger. Gilbert stuck his head out the window to see. Highwaymen. Two of them were in front of the fallen tree, waving menacing short swords.

  Just that moment, a glance to his side vision, revealed another man racing from the woods, holding a sharp-bladed dirk. Grasping the door handle he shouted, ‘Give up your d’or or écu, or give up your health!’ Abbé Fayon winced and pushed his own body into an opposite corner. Gilbert faced in close quarters a scoundrel in ragged apparel, far dirtier than dirt itself, his scowling face abruptly changed to surprise as Gilbert pointed the pistol to the robber’s head.

  Unfortunately, the pistol’s weight was awkward, and either the heftiness of the weapon or Gilbert’s own trembling gave the brigand a moment of new courage, and the knife blade the man held extended for a lunge, when with a jerked motion the highwayman was yanked from behind and flung to the ground.

  Shaken and angry the man rose quickly to his feet with a curse to his lips, his blade swinging at a threat, but the loud report of a pistol’s discharge flung the man back, wailing, “I am murdered!”

  Blasse leaned into the carriage. “Might I trouble you for your weapon, my lord? There are two more of the rascals who need convincing of our determination.”

  Shaking, and visibly so, Gilbert moved to catch his breath, to listen to more pistol shots, but there were none. Gaining dominance over his emotions, he carefully eased his head out to see the driver with a blunderbuss swinging between the two surviving highwaymen who under silent protest were lifting the deliberately placed tree to the side of the pathway. Blasse held the lead horses to steady them with one hand, a retrieved cutlass stuck in the ground at his feet. The man, his servant, looked like a fearsome pirate, the other cutlass along with Gilbert’s unfired pistol stuck in the servant’s waistband.

  As he edged out of the carriage, letting his feet gain strength to fully stand without fainting he saw the dead man. Curiosity, even if feeble, brought him closer. The blood stain on the man’s shirt covered the front. He did not look peaceful, nor at sleep. Frozen in grimace, that’s what Gilbert saw.

  “First time to view a man’s end,” questioned Blasse.

  The boy nodded numbly viewing the corpse. “I have seen the deaths of cows and sheep, but never this, so violent.”

  “Remember my lord, our world and lives are of a violent nature. God has made birthing terrible, and he smites all around us with affliction and poxes. Like your Monsieur Crusoe you must endure to out survive your adversaries and unforgiving Nature. God, Himself, will let you know when you must join him. And usually, like this lawbreaker, it comes as a surprise.”

  “And what of the other rogues?” Gilbert looked to the sorry-looking men sitting now on the fallen tree, pushed to the road’s edge, their heads bowed before the driver’s angry guard.

  “Well, if I were a King’s man, I’d hang them from that tree over there and give the crows a feast.

  “But, sire, I can understand where this evil might spring from, out of empty stomachs. These men are not professional cutpurses, no, merely lost souls without a future. See their weapons. Naval cutlasses, I can tell. See the sun burned in their faces, the rough hands. I would guess they were former high yard men in the King’s navy. What with the peace, there are probably more like these unfortunates on the road before us. I can’t pave the highway with their blood. We shall keep good counsel and be watchful for the rest of the trip. Let this dead knave rotting be a signpost for any other scoundrels. Keep in mind, my lord, we are the law and the judges in this wicked world, and morality must remain pure in your heart. Shall we hang them, my Lord?”

  Gilbert saw his shaking under better control and bit back his bluster to demand immediate execution of the two remaining villains, but did indeed listened to the servant Blasse, who seemed to have a broader view of the world, of worldly justice, something I must be tolerant to understand, Gilbert came to accept.

  “No,” said the young marquis, “you hopefully scared them back into a better employment.”

  Gilbert and the servant Blasse turned to watch the Abbè who had regained his own calm giving a prayer of future redemption to the dead man. Blasse’s opinion was a grunt, and he turned away to settle down the horses and certainly to give dire threat against further careers in thievery to the two surviving yet unsuccessful knaves.

  At the evening meal where they found lodging, Gilbert and Blasse ate at their bread and pork stew, a tankard of mead in front of them both. Gilbert hardly drank of spirits, perhaps occasional watered wine. His taste buds preferred the fruity wines of the grapes found along the Allier River, so he could not distinguish if the grog before him was good or swill, but in these times, after this day’s adventure, any drink was accepted and probably far better against where the local water might have been drawn from.

  Their other trip companion, Abbè Fayon, had absented himself with an excuse of exhaustion and the coachman would take his meal and lodging in the stables to guard both horses and carriage from petty larceny.

  Gilbert finally had deciphered the events of the day into a plausible question.

  “You were not sent as my valet but more as my protector?”

  “My lord, you are to be a man of importance, and I have been tasked to deliver you to the bosom of your mother. Safely.”

  “Until I win fame I will only be a country squire, nothing greater than that. And seem to be lesser than that the closer we come to the city. It is a fact that I noticed more recently in the last way stop the people of the villages did not doff their hats to my presence. Shall that b
e the same in the city?”

  “There are those with great names who deserve little respect, and those of little means, like a village priest, who are more likely to join the saints. You have a burden to bear, young sire, as I hear even the Abbé drill into your skull by the naming of all your ancestors. The duty of a great heritage is a burden not even I could bear on my shoulders. You spring from the roots of a noble history, du Mortier and La Rivière families are in your blood, even a tinge of ancient royalty. How shall you grow? Like our Crusoe, master of only a small island domain?”

  “I have not reached those pages but I am aware he will command the blackskin, the cannibal called Friday. Is that to suggest we are to be masters of all people of color?”

  Blasse laughed.

  “Regardless, your good Abbé’s opinion that all men of color are inferior to our milky complexion, I have seen yellow and black skin rule over white skin, and they have the minds to do so. You will soon read Crusoe early in life was captured by a black Moorish pirate. The blacks who are slaves in the Indies plantations were brought there, first captured by blacks, overseen by the Spanish dagoes with mixed Indian blood. Keep your mind open like a hungry tree full of new leafing, pull from the soil, let the rain refresh. Never close that mind, my master La Fayette. The world awaits you.”

  Gilbert, knocked the weevils from his bread, and sopped up the rest of his meal with his crusted bread. Again, the servant seemed to bear good sense. The boy thought this might be a real hero of his readings and his mouth ran too fast.

  “You were once a brigand, weren’t you? That’s why we let those fellows go. You saw something of you in them.”

  “Ah, the tree flowers with boldness.” Blasse turned to the barmaid and ordered another foaming tankard.

  “Let’s just say I saw mistakes that could be corrected if given another choice than scaffold and gibbet. Remember, given such choices man must always choose freedom.” The servant gave pause to a silent reflection. “Being free is life itself.” And the subject of Gilbert’s curiosity to the servant’s pedigree was artfully changed by Giles Blasse reminding his travelling ward that he faced a greater challenge ahead, that of the will and dictates of the La Rivière family.

  The next day, Gilbert imposed upon the other three of the party a solemn pledge of secrecy, against pain of dismissal. That no mention of the attempted robbery and the death of the highwayman to be spoken upon arrival.

  “Do you not want to add that adventure to your diary?” lightly teased Blasse.

  “I keep no diary; others will write my story. This could not be an entry in such a ledger. I did not acquit myself accordingly.”

  “A fear of death is nothing to be ashamed of,” said the Abbè Fayon, perhaps thinking of his own reaction to the ambush.

  Gilbert rankled.

  “I was not fearful, nor of cowardice. I am not yet experienced to respond with forceful action. In time I will face death and push it aside.”

  For once the tutor and servant exchanged to each other smiles of seeing a child defining what was expected in his manhood.

  To satisfy his concerns in various fashions they gave him sworn oaths of inviolate secrecy, though as the trip resumed, they all could hear above them the coachman laughing as he flicked his whip with a cracking snap sending them towards the journey’s completion, to turn a rough-hewn country boy into a frilly laced courtier.

  7.

  1768

  Within a hundred and fifty years an American author would write: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” So true as Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette found himself perched on the coach for the last ten miles of roadway into the southern suburbs of Paris. His eyes were wide and he breathed in the feasting of his senses.

  He was still the child at the height of his curiosity yet void of the history and circumstances about this approaching metropolis of nearly 600,000 souls. By the end of the 1760’s the outskirts of Paris still maintained a rural feel of farms and thatch cottage villages, providing the vegetables and meats for the city. Already, unaware as he was, there existed undercurrent anger to the pastoral scenes he viewed from his perch next to the driver. For example, Gilbert had no understanding that while serfdom was on the decline being replaced by freehold tenancy, and though his Grand-mère’s workers were such tenants now paying tithes to use her wells, rental to plant and harvest her land by providing produce, many noble landowners in Auvergne and elsewhere in the kingdom maintained serfdom, its form of farm slavery, with the Catholic Church the main abuser of this feudal system. Further, those who toiled the land near Paris faced tolls and tariffs at the four main compass portes [gates] to bring their fresh produce to the city markets, leaving them little coin to purchase for their own bare necessities in existing.

  Gilbert understood none of such economic politics as his coach bounced along close to its destination. With his manservant-guard Blasse and Abbé Fayon, and his luggage of clothes and books on Latin and Crusoe, they had made the Chavaniac to Paris travel in the expected two weeks, only delayed by two broken wheels, and disagreement over change horses that were wormed and colic. Within this last stretch only did his mood brighten as he could see the dirt road become more packed and well-traveled.

  As the coach drew closer, wood and brick buildings replaced farms and were seen packed tight together, but being on the south side of the River Seine, known as the Left Bank, they first drove past the hovels of the servants and lower class merchant families. Gilbert’s eyes skipped over such poverty for he had come from a region that except for scattered manors and minor castles such basic living was commonplace. Here, now, his eyes took in and lingered on the great ‘hôtels’, those suburban mansions of the great families surrounded by their manicured gardens.

  What a magnificent city, Gilbert considered, as the road turned to crushed rock, then a few patches of brick cobblestones, back to dirt, then to paving stones, and a new rattling sound from the coach wheels and hard clopping of the horses. Houses lined each side of what now he knew was a great pathway. According to the coachman, they were on the Rue de St. Jacque, he instructed to make their way to the Rue de Vaugirard and to the Luxembourg Palace where several of the apartments affixed to the main edifice had been set aside for the Comte de Rivière and his family by the King’s discretion to the noble’s past service. The Comte recently had retired as commandant of the Second Company of the King’s own Black Musketeers, a fact which did not escape Gilbert’s reasoning in leaving countryside for the city, and his wish to go a’soldiering.

  Gilbert inhaled Paris by its overpowering smells and lingering odors, each mile a new sniff to question what created such impact on his nose. The Chavaniac manor house at least took their human waste to the fields for manure, night soil, they called it. Here, raw effluent was tossed from houses to any ditch that might collect water or await rain to move the waste further towards the river. Smells were of animals or of the unwashed population, which consisted of all citizens, bathing at this time considered the cause of deathly ills. And then there were smells he knew were those of death as he viewed a charnel cart burdened with a corpse being pulled by two men as they made their rounds, calling for the dead to be brought out.

  Gilbert, in this fast passage, barely noticed the walls of Paris, those built by Charles V, later replaced by better fortress walls of Louis XIII, were almost all now torn down on the orders of Louis XIV, the Sun King, who had considered his armies strong, thus believing Paris safe from foreign invasion. Here and there Gilbert might have noticed the remaining crumbled battlements, or saw new entry towers for tolls being built, with stones of the past reused, even going back to use the rock work of ancient Roman fortress encampments.

  Had Gilbert’s coach continued up the Rue de St. Jacque, they would have reached the Seine River and crossed the Petit Pont, and viewed the scaffolding around the Church of Notre Dame undergoing another e
mbellishment of construction in that year. Paris in time of peace felt the assuredness that new construction would be a good investment.

  Gilbert breathed all in, most so, viewing the people, as their fashion moved from soiled peasant to store workers to well decorated servants of the nobility out on their errands. He was amazed to see the beginning of sidewalks and as his carriage began its angled route to his new home, he began to see what he identified as students, boisterous and energetic, heading towards what he knew must be the colleges of the Sorbonne, one of them the Collège du Plessis, a lower boarding school, where his great grandfather had enrolled him.

  And then, he saw the two of them. Two blacks, a man and a woman. Not dressed in island dress of Crusoe’s man Friday, but in fashionable clothes, along a promenade, the man with cane, the woman with umbrella, smiling and talking to each other. What a sight to behold. Real black skins; how could the desert people from Algeria look like that, so refined, or perhaps the man, passing as a gentleman, was a prince from the fabled Solomon dynasty of Abyssinia? These unusual personages did not act as the stupid oafs, as preached by Abbé Fayon, and he now considered a teacher might be wrong with his own knowledge of the distant world.

  “Do you see them?” yelled Gilbert, leaning over from the driver’s box, holding tight, shouting into the carriage at his tutor and man servant. Just then, a passing carriage bumping along the thoroughfare hit a rutted puddle, and spotted Gilbert with a brown splashed coating, of what he prayed for was only mud.

  8.

  MARIE LOUISE JOLIE de La Rivière, the 31 year old widow La Fayette, known to her family as Julie, did not see so much her son standing before her as she viewed an almost stranger, an awkward country bumpkin, shifting from foot to foot. She viewed the boy as an embarrassment. His clothes were in disarray, mud spattered, and she thought she could smell the farm yards of Auvergne. He had bowed to her and acknowledged her with a ‘dearest mama’. She could not embrace him, in fact, held up a hand to ward off any such entreaty of a rushed hugging, for he had always been demonstratively emotional in famille greetings. She was not a cold person and would have embraced him lightly if she had not been dressed, wide flowing hooped skirt, overflowing décolletage, her white painted face with rouge highlights, all poised and anxious to be away for the evening levee at the Versailles Court, the travelling, a hard distance of nearly 22 kilometers.