With so much going on, Lafayette’s arrival initially attracted scant notice. He had sailed on the Courier de New York, one of a fleet of five French packet ships that had begun making monthly crossings in September 1783. The landing of the ship, which was carrying the June mail from Europe, was widely announced, but several papers neglected to mention its most famous passenger. It did not, however, take long for the news to spread. Approaching Philadelphia on the evening of August 9, Lafayette was escorted into the city by a ceremonial detachment of the local militia and welcomed by the sound of tolling church bells. On September 7, James Madison observed that “wherever [Lafayette] passes he receives the most flattering tokens of sincere affection from all ranks.” And on September 14, during Lafayette’s next trip through New York, Mayor James Duane and the city’s Common Council presented Lafayette with a gold box containing a certificate that declared him to be “admitted and received a Freeman and Citizen of the City of New York.”
For the next five months Lafayette and his aide, the eighteen-year-old Chevalier de Caraman, captain in the Noailles Dragoons, traced and retraced routes up and down the eastern seaboard, traveling by carriage, ship, barge, horseback, and, at times, on foot. The pair visited nine states from Virginia to New Hampshire; Lafayette was feted every step along the way with banquets, balls, and toasts that fixed in American minds the image of the marquis as a hero. But Lafayette, who had turned twenty-seven in Philadelphia that September, was still a young man, and he had come to America not only to celebrate his past but also to shape his future. Since Yorktown, he had begun to see himself as more than a soldier, and his first peacetime visit to the United States gave him an opportunity to try out new roles and explore emerging interests. In America, the expectations of family, court, and tradition weighed less heavily on Lafayette than they did in France. Here, he could experiment with newfound concerns; some proved to be passing fancies, but others became lifelong passions.
In the 1780s, Lafayette became a citizen of two republics: one was the United States; the other was the imagined community known as the Republic of Letters. A loosely knit international society with no geographic boundaries, the Republic of Letters was populated by educated men and women committed to the Enlightenment ideal of disseminating thought and knowledge with no restrictions based on nationality, social status, or other distinctions. Its citizens might reside anywhere and could adhere to a range of political and intellectual views, but they were bound together by the belief, articulated by the historian Dena Goodman in 1994, that “the search for knowledge was now subordinated to the higher good of society, even of humanity as a whole.” To enter, one had only to support the free and open exchange of ideas. This could mean joining an academy, subscribing to a periodical, maintaining an international correspondence, or attending one of the salons—regularly scheduled gatherings of writers, artists, political figures, and other social and intellectual luminaries—that were often hosted by prominent women and were especially influential in eighteenth-century Paris. Lafayette, who was never entirely at ease with the rigid protocols of life at court, had a greater affinity for the more open-minded and outward-looking sensibility of the Republic of Letters. It offered him an alternative path to reputation and esteem.
In one of the first organized events of his 1784 visit, Lafayette proclaimed his citizenship in this ideal realm. The occasion was a meeting of the American Philosophical Society—or, as it was officially known, the “American Philosophical Society, Held at Philadelphia, for the Promoting of Useful Knowledge.” Founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, the society spelled out its goals and by-laws in a 1769 act of incorporation that laid out the founding principle that “the cultivation of useful knowledge, and the advancement of the liberal arts and sciences in any country, have the most direct tendency towards the improvement of agriculture, the enlargement of trade, the ease and comfort of life, the ornament of society, and the increase and happiness of mankind.” To promote such endeavors, the society would maintain a collection containing “all specimens of natural Productions, whether of the Animal, Vegetable, or Fossil kingdom; all models of machines and instruments”—in short, any objects whose study might explain the laws of nature or further the progress of mankind. It would publish papers chosen for “the importance or singularity of their subjects, or the advantageous manner of treating them, without pretending to answer, or to make the society answerable, for the certainty of the facts, or propriety of the reasonings.” Its members, who were to meet twice a month, would be divided into six committees, investigating topics ranging from “Geography, Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Astronomy” to “Husbandry and American Improvements.”
Lafayette had been admitted on January 19, 1781, but he remained a silent member for the better part of three years. The Marquis de Chastellux, Lafayette’s countryman and comrade-in-arms who was then serving as a major general in the French army under Rochambeau, was elected at the same time. In light of his established intellectual credentials, Chastellux was probably the more viable candidate. A well-known figure in Enlightenment circles, Chastellux had written a two-volume book titled On Public Happiness (1772) that won high praise from Voltaire and earned its author admission to the French Academy in 1775. Lafayette could boast of no such learned accomplishments. In fact, as Chastelllux recalled, Lafayette’s nomination had initially been rejected; embarrassed by this ungenerous treatment of a beloved hero, the society later let it be known that the blackballing was “thought to be a mistake.”
Although Lafayette had exhibited little interest in the world of letters before joining the society, he soon entered wholeheartedly into the craze for things scientific that was captivating the imagination of Paris. On July 12, 1782, he paid the 96 livres required to become a “protector” of the “Establishment for the Correspondence of the Sciences and the Arts,” or the “Salon de la Correspondance,” as the enterprise was often called. It had been founded in 1779 by a young man who called himself Pahin de la Blancherie, who’d conceived of it as a for-profit version of the American Philosophical Society. To facilitate the dissemination of knowledge, La Blancherie published a weekly newsletter and invited “men of letters and artists” to gather in rented rooms near the Sorbonne and discuss the diverse objects exhibited there on a rotating basis. Jean-Baptiste Le Paon, the painter who had reimagined Lafayette’s portrait of Washington as an exotic battlefield scene, was among the artists who exhibited at the Salon de la Correspondance, where his works appeared alongside “books, paintings, mechanical devices, specimens of natural history, sculptural models and, finally, all types of ancient or modern works with which one would want to be acquainted, or to learn … the value, the existence, or the author,” as La Blancherie put it in his self-published newsletter. Not incidentally, all items on view were for sale unless otherwise indicated.
The American Philosophical Society was pursuing a similar range of interests, albeit without La Blancherie’s eye to financial gain. Meetings held in 1783 and 1784 witnessed discussions of topics including the aurora borealis (May 2, 1783), “a serpent in a horse’s eye” (September 26, 1783), an “improved method of quilling a harpsichord” (November 21, 1783), and “the preserving of parsnips for drying” (April 16, 1784). Cutting-edge scientific instruments were also presented and analyzed, including five thermometers (February 20, 1784), a microscope “framed in a mahogany trunked cone and stand” (March 5, 1784), and an orrery— a model of the solar system—commissioned by the society, at the suggestion of Thomas Jefferson, to be produced by David Rittenhouse as a gift to Louis XVI (January 13 and March 6, 1783).
In the spirit of transatlantic conversation, Lafayette wrote to the society on December 10, 1783, about a marvelous invention that was then the talk of Paris: the hot air balloon. On September 19, the brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier had astonished the French nation when they’d launched from the grounds of Versailles a balloon, made of toile, measuring fifty-seven feet high by forty-one feet in di
ameter and carrying a sheep, a duck, and a rooster in its basket. According to Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, the assistant director of the Jardin du Roi and the author of the first full account of the Montgolfiers’ experiments, all of “the grandest, most illustrious, and wisest” men in France gathered as witnesses, “as if for a concert, to render a solemn homage to the sciences.” French newspapers fed the balloon-mania with articles celebrating the possibilities of flight, while gossip sheets touted stories of inventors claiming to have gotten there first. Soon, fashionable women took to wearing their tresses in the coiffure à la montgolfière—piled high on the head with a small hot air balloon embedded in the mound—and lighthearted vignettes involving the airborne marvels appeared on curtains made from printed fabrics known as toiles de Jouy. The influential furniture maker Georges Jacob even supplied Marie Antoinette with a pair of side chairs, now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that feature gilded walnut finials carved into the shape of balloons. For his part, Lafayette sent a letter “enclosing an authentic narrative of the Experiments lately made in France with air Balloons, drawn up by Mr. Sage, an able Cheymist in the Academy of Sciences, with two Copper Plates Prints of those machines.” Although the learned organization had already received news of the discovery from Benjamin Franklin, Lafayette’s letter was presented at the group’s meeting of April 2, 1784, and “duplicated by one of the secretaries.”
Frontispiece to Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond’s de- scription of the hot air balloon flight launched from Versailles in 1783. (illustration credit 9.1)
When it came to matters scientific, Lafayette’s enthusiasm sometimes trumped his good sense. The curious marquis was taken in by an attention-seeking ploy perpetrated in December 1783 when the daily Journal de Paris announced that it was collecting funds to be awarded to a man who claimed to have invented a pair of elastic shoes that made it possible to walk on water. As the renowned scholar of eighteenth-century “underground” literature Robert Darnton has discussed, the inventor, identified only as “D,” pledged to cross the Seine on foot on New Year’s Day and to pick up the proceeds when he reached the other side. Lafayette made one of the largest contributions to the pot, which was ultimately donated to charity.
A similar triumph of wishful thinking was on exhibit in Philadelphia on August 12, 1784, when Lafayette gave a presentation to the American Philosophical Society in front of twenty-two members gathered in Carpenters’ Hall—in the same room where, some nine years earlier, Louis XVI’s undercover agent Bonvouloir had first met with Franklin to discuss covert Franco-American cooperation in the fight against England. Lafayette’s visit was of a far more public nature, but he, too, had come to share a European secret with American friends. Lafayette’s topic was mesmerism—more commonly known at the time as “Animal Magnetism.” The theory, developed by the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer, posited the existence of an invisible but manipulable fluid contained within and around every object in the universe.
Mesmer had taken Paris by storm when, in February 1778, he’d arrived claiming to have discovered a means of curing various ailments by using magnetic currents to rechannel the flow of the mysterious fluid within a person’s body. More grandly, Mesmer held that universal harmony—a worldwide state of perfect physical and moral health in which man and nature would coexist in ideal balance—could be achieved through similar means. It did not take long for the sick and the curious to begin flocking to Mesmer’s music-filled rooms at the Place Vendôme. There, supplicants encountered an apparatus involving a large tub surrounded by several ropes, iron rods, and human chains. When activated, the eccentric machine would send mixed groups of men and women into spasms that sometimes required the afflicted to be carried off to an adjacent “crisis room,” where they could recover on the mattress-lined floor.
Some deemed Mesmer a common charlatan who lined his pockets by bilking the desperate and the credulous. The academies of Paris were among the skeptics, as were Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and scores of satirists who produced poems and caricatures that played up the orgiastic undertones of Mesmer’s convulsive groups. But those who were willing to suspend disbelief saw a promise of earthly salvation in Mesmer’s omnipresent fluid, and the specter of tyranny in any attempts to squelch such a well-intentioned philosophy.
Lafayette, who was always looking for new ways to ameliorate both individual and societal ills, saw mesmerism in the best possible light. Spreading liberty was one means of bettering the world; Lafayette hoped that mesmerism might be another. He joined Mesmer’s Society of Harmony (which counted Benjamin Franklin’s grandson among its notable members), and shortly before departing for America, he wrote to Washington that Mesmer has “made the greatest discovery upon animal magnetism.… He has instructed scholars, among whom your humble servant is called one of the most enthusiastic.” Perhaps acknowledging the boastful overtones of that statement, Lafayette added, with self-deprecating humor, “I know as much as any conjurer ever did.” Still, he took mesmerism seriously enough to promise to let Washington in on “the secret of Mesmer, which you may depend upon is a grand philosophical discovery.” Lafayette went so far as to chide Benjamin Franklin for agreeing to serve on a French royal commission investigating Mesmer’s claims: writing to Franklin on May 20, Lafayette observed that “Sciences and letters are frighted a way By the Hand of despotism.”
Caricature of Mesmer’s tub in Paris. (illustration credit 9.2)
Franklin was not swayed. In fact, at the very moment that Lafayette was regaling the American Philosophical Society with tales of animal magnetism, Franklin’s scientific commission was drafting its devastating assessment of Mesmer’s claims. By the late autumn of 1784, news of the debunking reached American shores. In the months that followed, newspapers from Massachusetts to South Carolina gradually relayed to their readers the disappointing verdict that animal magnetism was no more than a “chimera.” Lafayette never renounced the discredited theory, which continued to win adherents into the twentieth century, but neither was he tainted by association with it. One American author seems to have had Lafayette in mind when he excused the credulity of “characters distinguished for their good sense and benevolence—men, who were willing to believe almost anything that had even a shadow of probability of doing good to mankind.” Incapable of knowingly perpetrating such a deception, men of good faith might simply “think it impossible that any one should be so devoid of honesty as to attempt an imposition” in a matter of such grave concern.
For Lafayette, the highlight of his American sojourn came at his next destination, Mount Vernon, the Virginia estate of George Washington. Having relinquished his military commission on December 23, 1783, Washington was enjoying the tranquil existence of a “private citizen … under the shadow of my own vine and my own Fig tree, free from the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life,” as he wrote to Lafayette on February 1, 1784. “Come … and view me in my domestic walks,” Washington proposed. “No man could receive you in them with more friendship and affection that I should do.” Lafayette happily accepted the invitation.
Lafayette and the Chevalier de Caraman, his traveling companion, reached Mount Vernon on August 17, 1784, and stayed as Washington’s guests for ten days. In that time, Lafayette left the grounds only once, to dine with local gentry at Lomax’s Tavern, the Alexandria, Virginia, terminus of the Baltimore stagecoach route. The other days were spent in the vicinity of the house in a state of uninterrupted serenity that Lafayette had not experienced since leaving Chavaniac, and his letters to Adrienne wax lyrical about the casual atmosphere of sociable retirement that he found at “the retreat of General Washington.” Each day, Lafayette observed, was given over to a pleasurable sequence of “lunching, talking, writing, dining, talking, writing, and supping.” He fretted only that the young Caraman—“poor Maurice,” as Lafayette called him—might “find it a bit monotonous.”
At Mount Vernon, Lafayette reflected on the full meaning of the Cincinnatus
analogy, observing how Washington had turned his retirement into an expression of personal values by following the prescription offered by Horace in his epodes: “Beatus ille qui procul negotiis / ut prisca gens mortalium / paterna rura bubus exercet suis” (“Blessed is he who, leaving business behind him, works his life out on his ancestral land among the cattle”). Taking this as a model for his own behavior, Lafayette articulated in his letter to Adrienne an ideal vision for their new house in Paris, which was still undergoing renovations. “Since I am surrounded by domestic details, I will yield to the example of the true Cincinnatus, and although I may be a less retired Cincinnatus, I will also speak of the arrangements for the house.” Lafayette directed Adrienne’s “attention to my cabinet”—roughly the equivalent of his study or office—which he wanted to fill with objects that were emblematic of his interests in scientific progress and the young United States. He wrote that “there should be placed a barometer, a Declaration of Independence, and a smoke machine” (presumably a device intended to cut down on the smoke emanating from fireplaces) acquired during this tour of America. He added that Monsieur Pilon, one of his servants, “knows what must be done with my busts and monuments.” Almost as an aside, Lafayette noted that “a rug wouldn’t harm anything.”
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