by S. P. Grogan
Asked an officer at the table when a moment became offered. “Does this then mean the hostilities will soon be over?” There did seem to be several disappointed faces among the officer corps. Where peace was a virtue; war always sang the siren’s song.
The Duke slammed his fist down on the table. “No, not at all! My stubborn—I mean the king has already let his ministers know that any attempt at peaceful resolution is over. Only laying down of arms and the surrender of the traitors will be accepted. He is still in a fit over this battle near this Charles Town. Boston remains a besieged city. That is no victory as the papers report.” He caught his breath, and used his wine glass and several moments of sipping to calm himself.
“There are no more supporters of colonial reconciliation in Parliament. Perhaps only the Whig Edmund Burke speaks for peace by compromise.” The Duke pulled from his jacket a tattered newspaper clipping.
“Burke has that Dublin Irish voice of a Cicero.” He looked to the officers in the room, to the Comte, and knew somewhat the audience he spoke to. “He is a very strong man for Catholic Emancipation in the Kingdom.” That gained him some appreciative mutterings. “Let me read a paragraph I enjoyed from one of his recent House of Common speeches, given two months ago, but only recently published:
“‘The people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen.... They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles. The people are Protestants... a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it.... My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government—they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation—the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain; they may have it from Prussia. But, until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you.’”
He let the room stay silent for a moment, soaking in the message.
“Whether you are English or French, you cannot dismiss the patriotism of any man who seeks to avoid battle between brothers from failed understandings.”
Even the soldiers gave consent. Wars derived in the fog of vagueness were not honorable.
“Sire, if this is war, how long do you see such a war?” The question came from a young officer at the far end of the table. The Comte de Broglie leaned over and whispered to the Duke.
“Indeed, a fair question, Marquis de la Fayette.” The Duke’s words were translated. “But as you can see, and one of my frustrations, I am not before you as an officer of any rank.” There was slight laughter for a king’s brother still trumped a general. “I would leave your expertise in strategies as the proper conclusion. I would however point out England does not take well for any hatchling to leave the mother’s nest. We are sending over 25,000 troops, a fleet of ships, and on the scene we have sent our best generals, Burgoyne, Howe, and Clinton. I am surmising but because of the loss of life on our side at Breed’s Hill, General Gage who is currently in command might be found packing back home for more enlightenment on how the battles of Lexington and Breed’s Hill were waged with such an unfavorable outcome to His Majesty’s troops.”
Gilbert had found an instructor of the global map and sensitive not to make himself the fool, he put forth with caution another question. He would be not timid. Had I not just stood up to another king’s brother?
“Sire, to your point on strategy, it seems that this North America is so large, that no size of an army can easily subjugate these armed farmers, if as I have heard they do not fight like a standing army. Certainly British troops held the battleground at Breed’s Hill and thus the required laurels of victory. But does it matter when your foes depart to reform another day?”
The Duke gave the boy a hard stare, yet with a smile of indulgence.
“I might point out that our small island gained a great jewel in the east with only 3,000 troops.” His listeners said nothing, for the competition to gain colonial territories still bore grudges. The Duke was inferring to the Battle of Plassey in 1757 in India, where France was the ally to the losing side in the battle. Then, the Duke laughed to break the somber memories.
“These days I am a mere traveler and no general to lead armies. That is your vocation. However, I think our generals on the scene in the Colonies intend to form a plan of divide and conquer. There are 13 separate states in these colonies, all with different opinions and jealousies. Division among your forces, as you well know, will not win battles. Still, I do have sympathy for these Americans as they lose what they thought were justifiable causes. Let me paraphrase one last time from the politician Burke. He spoke it in oratorical prophesy: ‘There is America – which at this day serves little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men, and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, shall show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world’. Whether that is true or not, we shall soon see, shan’t we?”
He had ended his table-side congenial conversation, and dipped his head to the Comte in graciousness. The dinner party soon broke up, the Duke and Duchess taking leave, the officers back to their quarters.
Perhaps some might have, as they retired for the evening, but only Gilbert knew as he stayed up late into the night, pondering: a small war in America, fighting over unjust taxes; is this far-off place where I can become distinguished? His questioning fell away into sleep with dreams of marching legions.
38.
1775 FALL-WINTER
England: October 26 – King George III announces to Parliament a “Proclamation of Rebellion” and urges Parliament to move quickly to end the revolt and bring order to the colonies.
France: Autumn: Rioters in Paris demand cheap bread after a disastrous harvest. September—Minister Verginnes dispatches secret agent Achard de Bonvouloir to meet this new Continental Congress in America. He arrives December in Philadelphia and is to discern if the American insurgents have any chance of winning, and if so can they be sustained by French secret aid.
America: November 29 – The Continental Congress establishes the Committee of Correspondence to communicate with colonial agents in Britain and “friends in ... other parts of the world.” The most active committee member is Benjamin Franklin. On December 12, Franklin writes to Don Gabriel de Bourbon, a prince of the Spanish royal family and one of Franklin's scholarly associates. In his letter, Franklin strongly hints at the advantages of a Spanish alliance with the American revolutionaries. Franklin dispatches similar letters to American sympathizers in France.
HIS LIFE, UPON HIS return from Metz, filled with the same jammed schedule of activities that a courtier must face, taken up as if he had never departed for the summer. His reunion with Adrienne was full of emotion, on both sides. He sincerely missed her. Their exchanged letters had spoken of love and cherish, though granted, he boasted of himself too often in his letters, and teased her with his flirtations with other women, he saw as jest, she saw as the physical enjoyment she could no longer give him, heavy she was with child.
Gilbert had been put on notice by his step-mother that due to Adrienne
’s youth that there would be a month of her lying-in prior to the anticipated date of birth, so the expectant mother might have the strength of childbirth, and the baby received healthy. He accepted that fact as being the normal condition of gentle women of her caste. He would find his pleasures elsewhere though different than before would not seem to be a prowling beast looking to conquer some female prey. What might occur would happen as circumstances came within his grasp, so to speak.
A lot of his emotions of these times were mixed with rushed uncertainties. In September he arrived at eighteen years. The prospect that Fatherhood was close by gave minor pause for it would cause him little distraction. He had performed his duty. The wife, then doctor, nursing maid, then nanny all would perform their duties. His only anticipation is that the arrival of a ‘boy’ heir would quiet all the family nervousness and he could go about his business. And that was the rub. What was his business?
The salons of Paris and the gaiety of the Versailles court charged on with such a ferocity he felt his man Blasse would have to hold two outfits of dress just so he may go from one to the other events without rest. The Society of the Wooden Swords renewed their staged plays and card games at the Queen’s Petit Trianon. Even the Queen laughed with him on occasion and not at him. All this he twirled within, yet as his new age came upon him, there were changes circulating. The feeling of acting busy but as a life adrift. He had a hard time explaining this emptiness he felt when he sat at a café with Segur or in small talk with Marc Noailles in a drawing room setting after a formal dinner. His friends sought to include him on their own outings.
Segur pushed Gilbert to the Masonic Lodge Saint-Jean de la Candeur to hear more talks from Abbé Raynal. Gilbert was attentive because Raynal talked about the ongoing conflict in the American colonies and talked in the abstract about liberty and freedoms. Of course for an entitled gentleman, where one might consider themselves ‘liberal’, the talk of ‘liberty’ meant solely for the privileged class; ‘fraternitié’ meant to be a brotherhood among those of certain social standings. Lafayette was listening and his own speech soon took on phrases like ‘those held down by unlawful authority had the right to rebel’. He was repeating Segur repeating Raynal and such statements meant no admonition against the royal authority of the King of France. He was casting his stones against the actions of the King of England.
It was the current unsettled events in the American Colonies that grew his interest because it was not only news but exciting for a young military officer. Here was action! No sooner than they all had returned from Metz to Paris did they hear the delayed news that back in May in the wilderness of North America that the ‘Insurgents’, as was now the common vernacular in speech, that these peasant soldiers had captured British held Fort Ticonderoga in a surprise raid [formerly France’s Fort Carillon in the days of the French & Indian War]. An amazing feat and much the talk among the young officers and nobles who met with regularity at court as well as the race track, the Parisian coffee shops, and the gaming tables.
These recent insurgent actions so impressed Marc Noailles that he searched among the Mouchy family library to find an old copy he knew existed: The Journal of Major George Washington: An Account of His First Official Mission, Made as Emissary from the Governor of Virginia to the Commandant of the French Forces on the Ohio, Oct. 1753-Jan. 1754. After he had perused the London printed monograph, he dismissed it as British propaganda to establish their claim to the Ohio territory, but he passed along the document to Gilbert who had a translator read it to him listening closely, visualizing in his mind what attributes would lead this young man, 21 years old at the time, to become twenty-two years later a general in the American forces.
Without knowing, like a slow burn in a forest, a tinder spark that swirls to a conflagration, so went the flamed heat within Gilbert for all information of what was happening in this brushfire war against his enemy. Only once was he distracted.
On December 15th, Adrienne gave birth to a daughter, to be baptized Henriette. A squawking pretty babe, the attending mid-wife told the doctor, but she could tell the child was not blessed with the pink of good health.
Abbot Raynal (1713-1796.) His ‘The History of Two Indies’ a best-seller on globalization about anti-slavery, freedom & free thinking.had a profound influence as prophet to American Revolution, and bible to French Revolution.
39.
THEY WERE SEEN AS THE perfect noble couple. From Gilbert de la Fayette’s return from summer maneuvers in Metz in August and his reunion with his ‘beloved’ Adrienne (as stated in his letters to her) it would seem they were living in a magical world of pomp and circumstance. The Noailles family, with two army Marshals to boast of, were now the most powerful family in the land behind the royal houses of Bourbon and Orleans. The Duchess D’Ayen’s salons and private suppers were the place to be seen at.
But all was not jovial under the surface of the royal court’s glamour of balls, the displaying the new styled gowns. Back in 1774, the Queen had had enough of Madame Etiquette, Anne d’Arpajon, the Vicomtess de Noailles (Adrienne’s aunt) and had dismissed her. The Lady Ann moved in with the Mesdames Tantes, the unmarried sisters of the King, at Belleview Palace. These sisters were no friends to the Austrian-born Queen and the gossip from that place spewed out with quiet malice.
And what had been the wild and fun-seeking, the satyr-type party life of Queen Marie Antoinette’s little clique, that the La Fayettes were part of, took on a more somber if not embittered atmosphere. After nearly six years of marriage Marie Antoinette had not yet given the country a male heir to the throne. The failure was hardly a court secret: the couple could not perform in bed. The latest news from the bedchamber was that the king had a foreskin problem with his penis and his climaxes came too quickly, supplying no physical satisfaction nor required duty of insemination.
This grated on the Queen even worse in August when the wife of the king’s younger brother, the Princess of Savoy, known at court as the Comtesse d’Artois gave birth to a boy, a Bourbon prince, endangering the Orléans branch of succession. Worse in humiliation for it was the etiquette of the times that the royal personages must be present in the birthing chamber and bear witness the child exited from the womb and not, as in past shady histories, swapped by nurses from girl baby to boy child for political ambition.
The Queen’s chilly mood was directly felt by the Marquise de la Fayette, when Adrienne appeared in court on two occasions, and received dagger stares at her heavy laden condition. Adrienne would not thereafter appear in court until the next year when she once again could display her slim figure with her breasts now ample.
The lack of sexual potency between the royal couple brought dampening in the court’s atmosphere, and attendees felt an estrangement between king and queen. Marie Antoinette changed her style of play somewhat, and not to the good. She began to gamble more, taking higher and higher stakes at the tables when her entourage played at the Petit Trianon. She also turned away from younger men in her flirtations, seeing too much virility, her virtue not ready to loosen neither her scruples nor her bodice for a jolly romp. Thus, older gentlemen, in their thirties, received more preferential treatment, and several of them in a mood, since the peace between countries still existed, brought to court a faddish style of Anglophile, from couture fashion like the robe à l'anglaise [or close-bodied gown] for women to new forms in horseracing, as in the steeple chase, a derivative of the across field fox hunt. Such new trends even Gilbert could ignore since he now played the part of a ‘family man’ and since he was never a close favorite of the Queen believed his absence from any minor social gatherings would not be offending, nor hardly noticed.
40.
1776 – WINTER-SPRING
America: January 2nd The American rebels create their revolutionary flag.
England: February 17th The first volume published of Gibbons’s “Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire
THE SNOW STORM OF JANUARY, 1776, buried Paris. Antique sleighs were pu
lled from sheds, and their bells could be heard along the boulevards. Enthusiasts of the cold could take to the frozen canals and small lakes and practice new movements in ice skating, circles and figure eights, from the first book of skating forms published in 1772. Many of the meagerly clothed poor perished and would not be found until weeks later after snow melt. Those living in sturdy housing built their home fires, played their parlor games, and accomplished needlepoint with pastoral designs of Spring. Perhaps they read their Bibles, or read le Diable amoureux (The Devil in Love) by Jacques Cazotte or shut themselves behind closed doors and read and re-read the libertine novels les Bijoux indiscrets (The indiscreet jewels) and La Religieuse (The Nun) by the Encylopédie editor Diederot. And then for others...
Adrienne rapped lightly on Gilbert’s door. No answer. Again, more persistently. No answer. She pushed the door open unsure of what gave him his silence.
“Gilbert, are you all right?”
He leaned over the large table before the ice-crystal edged window. Outside a world lay buried in a cold white shroud.
He turned to see Adrienne come in, followed behind by the wet nurse and his first child, Henriette.
“Oh, my dear, I did not hear you enter.” He put down a ruler he held and came to both mother and child, his hand stroking both, kisses for each. Adrienne nodded to the servant and she departed quietly with the sleeping child.
“Your hand is cold,” said Adrienne, walking to the fireplace. “And you have let the fire in the hearth die away. What concerns your mind so that you might become an icicle?”