Ségur, Lafayette’s friend, was one of the few people who understood that the young marquis’s cold exterior “concealed the most active spirit, the firmest character, and the most burning soul.” Ségur had firsthand knowledge of Lafayette’s hidden fervor, recounting in his memoirs that, in the mid-1770s, Lafayette “had become attached to a lady as amiable as she was beautiful.” Mistakenly believing Ségur to be his rival, Lafayette flew into “a fit of jealousy” and “spent almost an entire night” attempting to goad him into a duel. Ségur recalled the difficulty he experienced in reasoning with Lafayette, who was determined “to persuade me to fight with him, sword in hand, over the heart of a beauty on whom I did not have the least claim.” Ségur was amused when, just a few days later, the Maréchal de Noailles asked what could be done to breathe some life into his taciturn in-law—“to rouse him from his indolence, and to add a little fire in his character.”
Ségur knew well that Lafayette’s difficulties arose not from innate timidity but from being trapped in an atmosphere to which he was temperamentally unsuited. Now, as a member of the Noailles clan, Lafayette was expected to socialize with the fast-living young men and women who occupied the upper tier of the court nobility. High-stakes gambling on cards and horses, constant, heavy drinking, and all manner of carousing were the favorite pastimes of this privileged set, which included not only the Vicomte de Noailles (the favored son-in-law) but also the Comte d’Artois, the Duc de Chartres (a cousin of the French royal family), and at times even Marie Antoinette herself. Throwing propriety to the wind, they amused themselves by racing sleek, lightweight cabriolets through the streets of Paris and slumming at workmen’s dance halls on the outskirts of the city. Seasoned courtiers looked askance at such goings-on and reprimanded Lafayette and his companions on at least one occasion for mounting an amateur theatrical performance that mocked the pretensions of the arriviste robe nobility. The farce, which parodied the bureaucratic procedures and legalistic posturing of lesser-born nobles, was not only unkind but—more ominously—it was also politically tone-deaf.
An awkward adolescent eager to be liked, Lafayette did his best to keep up. He was generous to a fault and happy to put his copious resources—money, horses, hospitality—at the disposal of his companions, even those with ample fortunes of their own. But the memoirs of his contemporaries make it clear that he was not cut out for a life of distraction and dissolution. Some of the most pointed examples of Lafayette’s social discomfort come from the writings of the Comte de La Marck, a Belgian nobleman in the French army and a confidant of Marie Antoinette’s. La Marck, who traveled in the circles of the Noailles family in the 1770s, described Lafayette as perpetually striving to affect a “bon air” and often failing spectacularly. The Belgian oozed disdain as he recalled that Lafayette “danced without grace [and] sat badly on his horse.” At his most cutting, La Marck describes an episode when, thanks to the Noailleses, Lafayette secured a coveted invitation to a quadrille hosted by Marie Antoinette and “proved himself to be so maladroit” at the sprightly dance “that the Queen could not stop herself from laughing.” On another night out, Lafayette reportedly drank so much that he had to be helped to his waiting carriage and, once deposited inside, was disappointed to realize that the Vicomte de Noailles, whom he always wanted to impress, was not among the company that evening. All the way home, Lafayette pleaded with his companions, “Don’t forget to tell Noailles how well I drank!”
As long as Lafayette remained in the realm of the Noailleses, the prospects before him were bleak. Although he possessed neither the desire nor the personality to succeed at court, his in-laws continued to hope against hope that they might guide him in that direction. The most disastrous moment came in 1775, when the Maréchal de Noailles sought to place Lafayette in the service of the Comte de Provence, the elder of Louis XVI’s two brothers. A natural-born courtier who had performed regularly in the operas staged by Madame de Pompadour, the official mistress of Louis XV, the maréchal seems not to have understood how completely the notion of courtly behavior ran against the grain of Lafayette’s character.
The maréchal’s plan horrified Lafayette. Determined as he was “to travel the world in search of renown,” he saw no path to glory emerging from the entourage of the king’s brother, and he followed the first escape route that presented itself. As Lafayette later told the story to his physician and confidant Jules Cloquet, the opportunity arose at one of the masked balls that traditionally enlivened Paris in the weeks before Lent. There, Lafayette reported, he went out of his way to insult his prospective employer. As Lafayette and Provence were conversing, the young royal began to boast of his superior memory. Unable to abide bluster, even when it issued from the mouth of a prince, Lafayette interjected with his opinion that “memory is a fool’s intellect.” In deference to the maréchal, Provence was willing to give Lafayette the benefit of the doubt. Provence had, after all, been disguised in costume; perhaps Lafayette had genuinely failed to recognize him. The following day, Provence asked Lafayette if he knew whom he had insulted. Yes, Lafayette replied, it was the man then standing before him. After that conversation, there was no more talk of placing Lafayette at Versailles. Lafayette was pleased to have spared himself the inglorious life of a courtier but he had mortified his in-laws in the process.
For all their differences, Lafayette and the Noailleses saw eye to eye on at least one matter: they believed that a man of the sword nobility must possess an honorable military rank. To Lafayette and his in-laws, the brass buttons of an officer’s uniform were far more than ornaments; they were signs of personal and family pride. On April 7, 1773, thanks to the intervention of the Duc d’Ayen, Lafayette was named lieutenant in the mounted regiment of the French army known as the Noailles Dragoons. Like most military commissions of the period, this one had been bought and paid for, yet money alone could never have procured such a place for a provincial, even if the provincial in question was a marquis. D’Ayen had to pull every string he could at the Ministry of War to clear the young man’s way. Before Lafayette had spent a day in training, Ayen secured him the promise of a promotion. In the summer of 1774, when the regiment set off for its annual exercises in the northeastern French town of Metz, near the German border, the untested Lafayette was on his way to the army career he had always dreamed of. Or so he thought. When Lafayette returned to Metz in the summer of 1775, now wearing the insignia of captain and commanding a full company, he could not have known that his life was about to change forever.
Long before most Frenchmen heard about the conflict brewing in England’s American colonies, one man had been following the rebellion with great interest—the Comte de Broglie, a former ambassador to the court of Poland, who was serving as the governor of Metz. During the reign of Louis XV, Broglie had played a central role in the king’s “Secret Ministry,” maintaining a covert correspondence with the monarch and implementing private policies that the French court deemed too controversial or embarrassing to acknowledge in public. Reestablishing France’s supremacy over England in the wake of the Seven Years’ War had been a priority for Broglie since at least 1765, when, at the behest of the king, he’d crafted a plan to invade England. In 1775, the Americans’ efforts to throw off the English yoke cheered Broglie’s heart. The American cause struck Broglie not only as an opportunity for France but also as a chance for personal advancement; a master manipulator with a taste for subterfuge, Broglie wrongly believed that George Washington was eminently replaceable, and envisioned himself at the helm of the rebel forces. It was no coincidence that Lafayette—a rich, free-spending young man in search of a worthy cause—attracted Broglie’s attention.
Lafayette, who knew nothing of these background intrigues, perceived only the best in Broglie. Broglie was not generally well-liked—contemporaries described him as a small, headstrong man whose “sparkling eyes” signaled a “restless spirit” and whose overweening ambition kept him on constant alert for new prey—but Lafayette saw only a senior off
icer and accomplished courtier who took an interest in him and, refreshingly, did not attempt to transform him into someone he could never become. Broglie brought Lafayette into his circle, treated him as an equal, and introduced him to influential friends and innovative ideas. A grand master in the international society of Freemasons, Broglie might well have sparked Lafayette’s interest in that fraternal organization, launching an affiliation that Lafayette retained throughout his life. Freemasonry may be best known today for its esoteric mystical system rooted in Newtonian science; emphasizing the rationality of the universe, the society refers to God as the Great Architect and adapts symbols from the building trades—calipers, T squares, levels—to represent and convey its tenets. But in Lafayette’s time, the order helped advance reformist political views by propounding universal principles of virtue, espousing meritocracy as its organizing structure, and promoting a social vision that the historian Margaret C. Jacob has described as “stability under a strong, but constitutional monarchy.”
Thanks in part to its universally legible symbols, Freemasonry became a worldwide phenomenon. Having arrived in France as an English import in the early 1700s, the society grew increasingly popular throughout the nation as the eighteenth century progressed; Jacob counted 62 lodges (as Masonic meetinghouses are called) in France in 1759, and 314 by 1770. Members of the bourgeoisie and the nobility mingled in the lodges, which also sprouted in the Holy Roman Empire, the Dutch Republic, and elsewhere on the European continent. Crucially for Lafayette, who appears to have joined the Parisian lodge of Saint-Jean de la Candeur in December 1775, Freemasonry also crossed the Atlantic. George Washington, who had been inducted into the Masonic lodge in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1752, was one of the many Founding Fathers who embraced Freemasonry, and when Lafayette arrived in America, Freemasonry would serve as a bond that united him to his comrades-in-arms.
Broglie’s role in facilitating Lafayette’s initiation into the order remains undocumented, but it is certain that Broglie introduced Lafayette to one of Freemasonry’s highest-ranking members, Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, who was also England’s most controversial spokesman for the American cause. Gloucester, as he was generally known, was King George III’s younger brother and the black sheep of the royal family—a profligate spender whose secret marriage to Maria Walpole, the widowed niece of the writer and politician Horace Walpole, scandalized king and court when it became known. Equally vexing to George III was Gloucester’s support of the liberal minority in the House of Lords, where the independent-minded prince joined a chorus of peers who objected to the king’s American policies and sympathized with the colonists’ grievances.
During the summer of 1775, Gloucester and his wife traveled through France en route to Italy, where the warmer climate was deemed beneficial to Gloucester’s delicate health. Along the way, the French king allowed the English prince to tour fortifications throughout the nation and to inspect the royal troops. Such a visit brought Gloucester to Metz, where, one day in August, he sat down to dine at the table of the Comte de Broglie and found Lafayette among the invited guests. That dinner ignited Lafayette’s passion for the American cause. In 1828 Lafayette told his American biographer, Jared Sparks, that he had “listened with ardent curiosity” throughout the meal and “pressed the duke with questions.” The responses he received inspired him so fully that, before he left the table, “he had conceived of the idea of going to America.”
The looming fight against the British could almost have been tailor-made to appeal to Lafayette, whose initial enthusiasm for the American cause quickly transformed into an urgent mission. For Lafayette, aiding the colonists represented an opportunity to right the wrongs of the Seven Years’ War by avenging both his father’s death and his nation’s losses. Moreover, the prospect of assisting a rebellion excited the always active imagination of the adolescent Lafayette, who craved self-determination and who, according to his memoirs, once responded to a schoolmaster’s prompt by describing an ideal horse as one that threw off its rider. Although his determination to serve under the banner of liberty was nothing if not earnest, Lafayette also had a more immediate reason to join the fight: America might well have been the only land where Lafayette could continue to wear the uniform of an officer.
When King Louis XVI of France named the Comte de Saint-Germain his minister of war, on October 25, 1775, it was only a matter of time before wide-ranging changes would sound the death knell for Lafayette’s military career. Saint-Germain’s goals were commendable; committed to making the army both a more equitable institution and a more effective fighting force, he introduced reforms designed to ensure that merit, rather than ties to Versailles, would determine who rose through the ranks. For Saint-Germain, the matter was personal. Born in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France, he had firsthand experience with the injustices suffered by hardworking officers from rural areas: having won commendations for his conduct on the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War, he’d seen his bids for promotion scuttled by the machinations of better-connected rivals. In his memoirs, Saint-Germain lamented the army’s “pernicious distinction between the nobility of the Court and that of the provinces … between the rich and the poor, such that one has everything, without meriting anything, and the other gets nothing, no matter what they merit.” As minister of war, Saint-Germain devised a wholesale reorganization of the army intended to spare others the indignities he had suffered. Only a portion of his proposed changes were adopted before he tendered his resignation in the face of stiff opposition, but those changes were enough to place many young noblemen in the army reserves until such time as their services were required. With the nation now at peace, that time might be long in coming. On June 11, 1776, Saint-Germain’s plans forced Lafayette out of active duty; in the euphemistic parlance of the day, Lafayette had been “reformed.”
Having given no serious thought to the possibility of a career outside of the military, and having definitively closed the door to an appointment at court, Lafayette had no clear path forward. Throwing his lack of direction into high relief, Adrienne was blossoming in her role as wife and mother, having given birth to a daughter, Henriette, in December 1775. When Lafayette had learned of Adrienne’s pregnancy, he had been overjoyed at the prospect of becoming “the father of a wonderfully loving family.” But, according to the reigning mores of the day, fatherhood—unlike motherhood—could not be a vocation. To live an honorable life, Lafayette had to devote himself to some project that would benefit the public good, and to attain the renown that he dreamed of, his service would have to be widely recognized. Thanks to clandestine negotiations held six months earlier, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, just such an endeavor would soon be at hand.
CHAPTER 3
LES INSURGENTS
On a dark December night in 1775, the sixty-nine-year-old Benjamin Franklin and two other members of the Committee of Congress for Secret Correspondence set out for a meeting at Carpenters’ Hall—the elegant Georgian building that had hosted the Continental Congress in 1774. Although the men shared a destination, they traced separate paths through the streets of Philadelphia to avoid being followed. Reaching Carpenters’ Hall, Franklin climbed the stairs to the second-floor headquarters of the Library Company of Philadelphia where, surrounded by books that he had helped amass, he sat down with his colleagues to begin a series of talks with an emissary from the French court. The topic? Joining forces against Great Britain, France’s traditional enemy, in a war that was already under way.
Julien-Alexandre Achard de Bonvouloir, the French secret agent who visited Carpenters’ Hall that night, had been sent by Louis XVI to assess the likelihood of American success and the wisdom of forging a covert Franco-American alliance against King George III. Following explicit orders given by France’s foreign minister, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, Bonvouloir was to leave no evidence of collusion that might fall into the hands of British spies. And although overt French support would
have been invaluable for the Americans, they too kept the discussions quiet—Franklin’s committee sent no official notification to Congress—in order to avoid public embarrassment in case of failure, which probably seemed like a distinct possibility to many rational observers. A French-American alliance was not a natural fit; not only were the two peoples divided by distinctions of language, manners, and mores but they harbored deep-seated mutual suspicions grounded in religious and political differences. In the recent past, long-standing animosities between the nominally Catholic French and the predominantly Protestant Americans had been compounded by fierce fighting in the French and Indian War, which had left lingering resentments on both sides. Yet the men who met at Carpenters’ Hall during Christmas week in 1775 were somehow able to bridge the divide well enough to agree on a tentative plan that was designed to be disavowed if the need ever arose.
On July 6, 1776, Connecticut lawyer-turned-businessman Silas Deane arrived in Paris to pick up where the Philadelphia discussions left off. Deane had instructions to keep his presence and purpose under wraps; if anyone asked, he was to identify himself as an American merchant “engaged in the business of providing goods for the Indian trade.” Meanwhile, a handful of trustworthy allies would work behind the scenes to arrange an audience with Vergennes. Once the introduction was made, Deane was to ask Vergennes to supply the Continental Army with four military engineers, “clothing and arms for twenty-five thousand men with a suitable quantity of ammunition, and one hundred field pieces,” all to be acquired on credit. Deane had little to offer in return, but he was to suggest that, if France would help free the colonies, “it is likely [that a] great part of our commerce will naturally fall to the share of France.” That part of the plan worked smoothly: by July 20, Deane and Vergennes had agreed that the crown would send clothing, guns, and ammunition—all the while denying any involvement in American affairs. Deane’s cover story, however, was short-lived.
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