Édouard’s death, in 1740, left his infant son and two daughters in the hands of his wife, Marie-Catherine de Chavaniac-Lafayette, a formidable woman who, many years later, would be Lafayette’s grandmother, godmother, and primary caretaker. Abandoning her husband’s château at Vissac, the widowed Marquise de Lafayette moved the household some ten miles northeast to the newer and larger Château de Chavaniac, inherited through her father. There, as Lafayette remembered it, his grandmother grew into something of a local legend; she was held in such high regard that people took onerous journeys from the farthest reaches of the province to seek her advice.
Roch-Gilbert became the first of his line to marry into the prestigious nobility of the court—the men and women who lived in the circles of the royal family. Thanks to the intervention of Jean Bretagne Charles de La Trémoïlle, whose grandmother belonged to the influential senior branch of the Lafayette family, Roch-Gilbert wed Marie-Julie de La Rivière on May 22, 1754. Like the Motiers, the Rivières had been ennobled for centuries, but Julie’s family was more distinguished, better connected, and far wealthier than her husband’s. Julie’s paternal grandfather, the Comte de La Rivière, had performed brilliantly in his military career and in 1756 would be awarded the Grand Cross—the highest class of membership in the chivalric Order of Saint Louis— in recognition of his service. Julie’s mother, who died a year before the marriage, had served as a lady-in-waiting to Madame Adélaïde, the powerful maiden daughter of King Louis XV, while her father, the Marquis de La Rivière, devoted himself to his lucrative Breton estates and amassed a fortune in the process. Whenever they were in Paris, the Rivière men resided in grand apartments at the Luxembourg Palace granted by the king. At the time of the betrothal, Julie too was living in Paris, in the convent where she had been educated.
Despite her family’s wealth, Julie brought only modest resources to the union. She had an older brother whose interests took precedence over hers, and her father—renowned for his parsimonious habits—was willing to part with no more than a small dowry that would generate about 1,000 livres a year. It was not a lot by the standards of high society, but the Marquis de La Rivière was willing to send his daughter to live in the Auvergne, an idea to which Julie herself obligingly raised no objection. This was no small sacrifice. By permitting Julie to trade Paris for Chavaniac, the Rivières effectively abandoned hope that she might advance their dynastic ambition at court, and their benevolent attitude toward the newly married couple didn’t end there. Thanks to Rivière influence, Roch-Gilbert received a commission as colonel in the elite grenadiers. It was a higher rank than any Motier had previously attained but, alas, Roch-Gilbert did not enjoy it for long. On August 1, 1759, he was fighting in the conflict known today as the Seven Years’ War when he was killed by an English cannonball at Minden, in northern Germany. With that fatal injury, Roch-Gilbert’s two-year-old son—Gilbert, our Lafayette—became a full-fledged marquis.
For the second time in two decades, Lafayette’s grandmother found herself at the head of a household, responsible for the well-being of a boy who had lost his father. Concerned about her grandson’s precarious finances, she wrote to Louis XV in October, requesting a pension for the child. As she explained to the king, Roch-Gilbert’s four campaigns had drained the family resources. Most of the income from their estates and investments had gone to feeding, clothing, and arming the men under Roch-Gilbert’s command—obligations that traditionally fell to commanding officers. Making matters worse, Roch-Gilbert had failed to draft a will. As a result of this oversight, most of Julie’s dowry would revert to the Rivière family. Without the benefit of royal generosity, she suggested, no funds would be available to educate the young Marquis de Lafayette.
A modest pension was awarded, but Lafayette did not have to rely on such largesse for long: in 1761, the early death of Lafayette’s uncle—his mother’s brother—promised a lifetime of financial security as Lafayette, suddenly and unexpectedly, became the heir to the substantial Rivière fortune. At that point, it was his mother’s turn to act. The widowed Julie de La Rivière returned to Paris to live with her family, and on February 28, 1762, she was presented at court, where she began building a network of connections that would pave her son’s path to Versailles.
Over the next five years, Lafayette saw his mother for only a scant few months at a time, when she returned to the Auvergne for visits. To modern sensibilities, such separation might seem heart-wrenching, but members of the French nobility routinely handed infants over to wet nurses and placed older children under the control of governesses and tutors. Raised by a devoted grandmother, Lafayette was luckier than most. “Although my mother loved me a great deal,” he later wrote, “the thought of taking me away from my grandmother La Fayette never crossed her mind.” A honeyed sense of nostalgia infuses his descriptions of his childhood, which he spent in the close-knit company of his grandmother, her two grown daughters (one was widowed, the other never married), and a female cousin just a year older than he. His grandmother made considerable efforts to further his social and financial interests and did everything in her power to fill the boy with family pride. Lafayette remembered thrilling to tales of his father’s, grandfather’s, and uncles’ heroic battlefield exploits; if he ever learned that the stories were embellished for his benefit, he never let on.
These grand stories were, no doubt, in the back of his mind when, at the age of eight, Lafayette began to hope that he might attain glory for himself in the very near future. The fearsome and mysterious Beast of the Gévaudan was roaming the hills of south-central France, devouring livestock and murdering women and children in the vicinity of Lafayette’s home—or so people said. Between 1764 and 1767, scores of human deaths were attributed to this chimerical predator, whose rampages quickly became the stuff of tall tales and folklore. Living at the epicenter of the putative carnage, Lafayette might well have been frightened—he was still a child, after all—but instead he saw the creature as an opportunity for him to leave a mark on the world. Drafting his memoirs a dozen years later, he recalled that “my heart Beat” for the beast, “and the hope of Encountering it Enlivened my walks.”
The Beast of the Gévaudan as pictured in a 1765 broadside. (illustration credit 1.2)
What, exactly, was this beast? Lafayette called it a hyena; others said it was a wolf; one particularly inventive account described a monstrous hybrid the size of a bull with talons “the length of a finger” and a mouth “measuring at least a foot” wide. Some insisted the creature had been sent by the devil. Though two centuries have passed, conflicting theories still abound. The “real” Beast of the Gévaudan has been variously described as an exceptionally large lynx, a cross between a wolf and a dog, or a villain of the human variety. Maybe its exploits were the inventions of a greedy landlord intent on extracting protection from his tenants. Or perhaps, as some have maliciously suggested, the fable was an ingenious cover story concocted by a bloodthirsty Protestant exacting a gruesome revenge for decades of Catholic oppression. In all likelihood, more than one creature was responsible for the carnage; an overabundant population of wolves seems a plausible culprit. Then again, the beast may have been nothing more than a figment of mass hysteria. One thing, however, is clear: Lafayette never encountered the fabled creature.
Whatever else it may have been, the Beast of the Gévaudan was the talk of France. Chilling stories of its lethal exploits spread from the villages of the Massif Central to the salons of Paris and the court of Versailles. Government officials were implored to capture it, while earnest journalists, high-handed moralists, and hack writers alike exploited its potential to sell newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides. No less a figure than King Louis XV took a keen interest in the uproar, sending hunters and bloodhounds to the countryside with instructions to capture and kill the beast. Members of the local nobility assembled their own hunting parties, and over the course of three years, several wolves and other creatures were slain, dissected, and documented, with their measur
ements widely reported and their images disseminated through engravings. The culprit may well have been slaughtered, or it may have died a natural death, although popular legends contend that the beast continues to wander the fields and mountains, possessed of a supernatural spirit.
When Lafayette first wrote down his recollections of the beast, during a hiatus from General Washington’s army, the tale was still a cause célèbre ripped from the headlines. So familiar was the terrifying creature that a reference needed no explanation. In his winningly self-deprecating manner, Lafayette played down the horror that had gripped the land, describing the beast as having “caused some damage, and even more commotion.” Only in later drafts of the much-revised memoirs did he go on to elaborate the crimes laid at the creature’s feet. But in 1780, the mere mention of his yearning for the beast stood as sufficient proof of Lafayette’s central claim: “I recall nothing in my life that preceded my enthusiasm for glorious tales or my plans to travel the world in search of renown.”
Although Lafayette dreamed of world travel, he was wary when the time came for him to accompany his mother on a two-week journey to Paris, in December 1767. The ten-year-old Lafayette had never imagined that his life might be different from that of his father or grandfather, and he “separated with the utmost chagrin from a grandmother, two aunts, and a cousin whom I adored.” Shortly after the carriage bearing mother and child started its northward journey, Lafayette sensed that everything was about to change. At home, local adults had treated him with the respect required by the rank of marquis, and village children had been too daunted by his station to approach him. On the road to Paris, he noticed something unusual: the men he passed did not tip their hats in deference to his position. For most of us, the process of growing up entails discovering the limits of our own, individual significance. But few people can pinpoint with precision the exact moment of that humbling realization. For Lafayette, it was seared into his memory.
Lafayette’s first home in Paris, the Luxembourg Palace. (illustration credit 1.3)
When Lafayette descended from the carriage in the courtyard of the Luxembourg Palace, in Paris, he stood before a building that had no equal in the Auvergne. One of the greatest architectural achievements of seventeenth-century France, the palace was located in the university quarter, on the Left Bank of the Seine. In a 1765 essay on Paris, Louis, Chevalier de Jaucourt ranked the Luxembourg on par with the Tuileries and the still-unfinished Louvre as one of the city’s “three superb palaces, distinguished above all the others.” Designed in 1615 for Marie de’ Medici, wife of King Henri IV, it had been loosely inspired by the Medicis’ Pitti Palace, in Florence; it catered to Marie’s Italianate taste and incorporated the classicizing tendencies of its primary architect, Salomon de Brosse. Extensive gardens added to the grandeur of the place, with a broad parterre branching into wide allées bordered with carefully trimmed rows of yew and boxwood. The garden’s intricate symmetries suggested the power of culture to bend nature to its will. Once Lafayette settled into the apartments where his grandfather and great-grandfather lived at the discretion of the king, he too would have to be shaped in conformity with the refined ways of the capital.
Paris in the mid-1700s was a thriving metropolis of 700,000 people and the second most populous city in Europe, surpassed only by London. Both capitals had seen their populations double since the first wave of mass urbanization began sweeping across the continent and the British Isles at the turn of the century. An incomparable center of cultural excellence, Paris boasted three theatrical companies, five public libraries, six Royal Academies, scores of churches, monasteries, and convents, and one world-renowned university, with thirty-six subordinate colleges. For the rich and well-connected, the city was an opulent playground where renowned artists, writers, and thinkers mingled with political leaders, ecclesiastical dignitaries, and financial titans in chic cafés and stylish salons. Shop windows displayed merchandise from the four corners of the globe, and luxury goods fabricated in the city—fashions, tapestries, mirrors, and more—were coveted throughout Europe and beyond. In short, the taste of the Western world was formed in Paris. For a provincial youth who had spent his first decade at the top of the only society he knew, this was a brave new world indeed.
The ways of Paris were equally foreign to the Abbé Fayon, Lafayette’s longtime tutor, who accompanied his young charge to Paris. In the Auvergne, Fayon had supplied Lafayette with an education entirely in keeping with tradition among the Nobility of the Sword—families like Lafayette’s whose inherited privileges derived from generations of military service. Boys of Lafayette’s station were schooled in the history of their lineages, and their intellects were stretched just enough to equip them with a smattering of Greek and Latin. Destined to become army officers and feudal landholders, noble boys from the provinces seldom needed much in the way of book learning. But Lafayette was no longer such a boy, and although Fayon remained in Lafayette’s employ for the rest of his life, the good abbé’s lessons were no longer sufficient.
In Paris, a new era was dawning in education and in most areas of life as rational principles of Enlightenment philosophy ushered in sweeping reassessments of society’s most fundamental assumptions and cherished institutions. By the time Lafayette began daydreaming about the Beast of the Gévaudan, seventeen volumes of the magisterial Encylopédie, edited by two of the era’s most influential philosophers—the author and art critic Denis Diderot and the mathematician and physicist Jean Le Rond d’Alembert—had already been published. This vast and formidable undertaking was intended to be nothing less than a compendium of all human knowledge. The Encyclopédie represented the pinnacle of Enlightenment-era erudition, offering lengthy entries on ideas and practices from reason and faith to wigmaking and apiculture.
When it came to education, the Encyclopédie authors and other reformist philosophers insisted that instilling virtue should be the primary goal of a noble’s course of study. As Charles Rollin, former rector of the University of Paris, put it in his influential Treatise on Education (1726), “virtue alone puts men in a position to fill public offices.… It is virtue that gives [a man] the taste for true and solid glory, which inspires in him love of the patrie and the desire to serve it well, which teaches him always to prefer the public good to private good.” For Rollin, such a solid moral footing could be attained only by studying the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity. Noble boys, he argued, should emulate the selfless actions of ancient heroes rather than fanciful tales passed down through family lore.
On a practical level, studying philosophy, rhetoric, and the other classical disciplines was becoming a necessity for scions of the sword nobility, who, for the first time in anyone’s memory, had to consider careers outside the army. France’s humiliation in the Seven Years’ War had generated loud calls for changes in the way the army selected and promoted its personnel. As critics pointed out, a sterling genealogy was no guarantee of strong leadership, yet lineage and wealth had been the only prerequisites for advancement to influential positions. Reformers insisted that merit alone should determine who rose through the ranks. As high posts gradually opened up to qualified commoners, young noblemen from military families could no longer count on living military lives.
All of this left Lafayette in a bind: when it came to seeking an occupation, his options were quite limited. Noblemen were prohibited by longstanding tradition from engaging in commercial professions; to become a tradesman or a financier would be to suffer dérogeance—the loss of the rights and privileges that accompanied noble status. Nor could Lafayette have entered the clergy. That he lacked any religious calling was not the problem. French ecclesiastical rosters were filled with second sons who, expecting no inheritance, were unable to marry, yet lived fully carnal lives despite their vows; faith and devotion were afterthoughts in such circumstances. But as his family’s sole heir, Lafayette had to marry, procreate, and continue the line. Of course, a provincial nobleman could always stay close to home and tend
to his lands and dependencies, but to widen his family’s circle of influence Lafayette would need to find a place at court or in public service, perhaps undertaking a diplomatic career. Whatever route he followed, he would almost certainly require a more rigorous formal education than his father had received.
In 1768, Lafayette’s family enrolled him in the Collège du Plessis, one of the competitive secondary schools under the jurisdiction of the University of Paris. Located on the Rue Saint-Jacques, the Collège du Plessis was just a short walk away from the lodgings of Lafayette’s family. The school dated back to 1322, but its building was much newer, having been reconstructed in the seventeenth century, thanks to a bequest from Louis XIII’s powerful chief minister, Armand Jean du Plessis—the famed Cardinal Richelieu—a descendant of the founder.
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