Transportation, however, left much to be desired. After a few days’ journey, Barbé-Marbois found that his phaeton carriage—lightweight, sporty, and prone to overturning—was no match for the treacherous roads and had to be abandoned. The last miles to Fort Stanwix were traversed on horseback, with stacks of blankets serving as makeshift saddles. Still, the company reached the assigned meeting place several days before the government commissioners were expected. Eager “to see the Indians in their villages, and to get acquainted with their customs,” Lafayette and his companions set off once again. Here, they found the roads to be “really barbarous and wild” as they made their way on horseback, guided by Oneida scouts, through a dense forest whose only paths were chiefly intended for travel by foot. As Barbé-Marbois described it, the ground was “a muddy marsh, into which we sank at each step.” They “traveled in dark and rainy weather” and “lost [their] way once” before finally emerging from the wood and crossing a series of “rivers by fording them, and sometimes by swimming our horses.” At last, the company “arrived, very wet and very tired, in the territory of the Oneidas.” Lafayette, as usual, offered a more upbeat version of events, describing his arrival as something of a homecoming. “My companions,” he wrote to Adrienne from Fort Stanwix, “were quite surprised to find me as familiar with this country” as with the Faubourg St.-Germain.
Throughout the eighteenth century, Europeans—especially the French—were fascinated by Native American peoples and cultures. Few of the philosophers or scientists who wrote on the subject had traveled to the New World or encountered its indigenous inhabitants, but a lack of firsthand knowledge did not prevent them from citing the Indians to support their own theories about human nature. The eminent French naturalist the Comte de Buffon believed that Native Americans suffered from the “degeneration” that afflicted everything—plants, animals, people—subjected to the supposedly unhealthful conditions of the New World climate. The Abbé Raynal, who traveled in the circles of the forward-thinking men of letters who wrote and edited the Encyclopédie and is believed to have cowritten his controversial History of the Two Indies with Diderot, espoused an opposing view. Raynal’s description of the native peoples encountered by the French in Canada reads like a catalog of virtues associated with the “noble savage”—a term coined by the seventeenth-century English poet John Dryden. According to the History, native societies were marked by good faith, mutual respect, and selfless benevolence. Unspoiled by the vanity and artifice of Europe, the Canadian Indians were said to understand that nature created all men equal and to scorn “the respect that we have for titles, dignities, and especially hereditary nobility.” Raynal, like many French authors, referred to these people as sauvages, but the Encyclopedists inflected the word with positive connotations absent from the English term “savage”; as the Chevalier de Jaucourt wrote, “One calls sauvages all the Indian peoples who are not subject to the yoke of the nation and who live apart.… Out of the way in the forests and mountains, they preserve their liberty.”
Lafayette owned the works of Buffon and Raynal, as well as other books on the customs of the Native Americans, but his attitude toward these indigenous peoples was largely free from the judgments, either for or against, that issued from the scholars’ pens. Instead, Lafayette gazed with ingenuous wonder upon people who, in his view, were so deeply connected to the American land he loved yet whose manners seemed so intensely foreign to him. Perhaps he felt a kinship with a people out of place in their own home. In memoirs drafted in 1780, Lafayette vividly described his first glimpse of a Native American assembly. He recalled seeing “five hundred men, women, and children, colored with paints and feathers, their ears pierced, their noses ornamented with jewels, and their nearly naked bodies marked with varied designs.” Although he opined that “drunkenness” seemed to be an obstacle that the society had yet to overcome, he noted with approval that “as the old men smoked, they discoursed very well on politics.” The sincerity with which Lafayette approached his hosts must have communicated across language barriers because, as he put it, the Iroquois “adopted” him “and gave him the name Kayewla, which had formerly been borne by one of their warriors.” With a justifiable measure of pride, he noted that “whenever the army needed Indians or there was any business to be conducted with those tribes,” the American leadership always turned to him for advice, counsel, and assistance.
Barbé-Marbois was less kindly disposed toward the Oneidas, in whom he perceived neither wisdom nor eloquence, yet he was moved by the realization that he was bearing witness to a vanishing way of life. He urged “Europeans who are curious to know” the Indians not to “lose time, for the advance of the European population is extremely rapid in this continent.… In a few centuries,” he foretold, “when civilization will have extended its effects over all the world, people will be tempted to regard the reports of travelers as the ingenious dreams of a philosopher who is seeking the origin of society and is tracing the history of its advances from his imagination.” In a particularly poetic passage, Barbé-Marbois envisioned the inevitable transformation of the landscape in upstate New York:
In a century, and perhaps sooner, agriculture and commerce will give life to this savage desert. This rock will furnish stones to the city which will be built on the banks of that stream. There will be a bridge here and a quay there. Instead of this marsh there will be a public fountain; elegantly dressed ladies will stroll in the very place where I walk carefully for fear of rattlesnakes: it will be a public park, adorned with statues and fountains. A few ancient trees will be exhibited as the precious remains of the forest which to-day covers the mountain. I see already the square where the college, the academy, the house for the legislature, and the other public buildings will be placed.
As Barbé-Marbois predicted, it took far less than a hundred years for the region to be transformed. On July 4, 1817, a shovel thrust into the ground at Rome, New York, marked the beginning of the great construction project that produced the Erie Canal.
The landscape might not have shown it, but the Oneida world had been changing for some time. After decades of trading, negotiating, and warring with Europeans, many of the continent’s native societies had fully incorporated foreign goods and customs into their more traditional ways of life. Barbé-Marbois noticed as much when his group arrived in the Oneida village. Entering the Council Hall, where the nation’s chiefs and warriors were awaiting their guests, Barbé-Marbois recognized one of the “venerable leaders” as Great Grasshopper, who was attired in his finest regalia—“a Bavarian court hunting costume,” received as a gift from the Chevalier de la Luzerne, “which he wears on all important occasions.” When the meeting of the Great Council at Fort Stanwix began the following day, the forty men representing the region’s native nations—Oneidas, Tuscaroras, Mohawks, Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, and more—appeared in costumes ranging from traditional capes made of untanned bearskin to the daintiest of embroidered European waistcoats. During the Revolutionary War, only the Oneidas and the Tuscaroras sided with the rebellious colonists, and many of their men distinguished themselves from members of the other nations by wearing belts, necklaces, and other accoutrements received from the Americans. Items given to them by Lafayette were particularly prized.
When the conference opened on October 3—a piercingly cold day—Lafayette was the first to address the assembly. Although he spoke in French, he underscored his respect and affection for local cultures by lacing his talk with references to figures and concepts gleaned from Iroquois lore. He thanked “the Great Manitou who has brought me to this spot of peace, where I find you all smoking the calumet of friendship” and praised the two nations that had joined with the Americans. Reprising the speech he had delivered six years earlier, Lafayette reiterated his promise that, if they allied with the Americans, “the great Onontio [the Indian name for the administrator of New France] like the sun will clear away the clouds which hang over your heads, and the schemes of your enemies will vanish l
ike smoke.”
Although Lafayette played no official role in the proceedings, his address became the centerpiece of the conference—much to the chagrin of his European and American colleagues. Over the course of two days, each of the chiefs replied in turn, referring to Lafayette as “our father,” as the Iroquois had termed the French for at least a century, thanking him for his words and, in the case of the nations that had joined the English, apologizing for failing to heed his advice. Arthur Lee, one of the congressmen, complained to Madison “of the immoderate stress laid on the influence of the M.” Apparently, Lee did not hesitate to tell Lafayette what he thought, but if he hoped to encourage Lafayette’s departure, it was to no avail. Madison reported to Jefferson that Lafayette “was the only conspicuous figure” throughout the entire event, and that he had “eclipsed” the three commissioners from Congress. Trying to make sense of Lafayette’s star turn, Madison offered a measured view of the marquis, writing, “I take him to be as amiable a man as his vanity will admit and as sincere an American as any Frenchman can be.” Madison seems to have misconstrued Lafayette’s enthusiasm as narcissism, but his assessment of Lafayette’s French-American character was spot-on.
For his part, Lafayette was gratified by the warm welcome he received. Writing to Adrienne, he expressed surprise that his “personal credit with the sauvages … has proved to be much greater than I had imagined.” “They made me great promises,” he wrote, “and I love to think that I have contributed to a treaty that will give us a small stream of commerce and will ensure the tranquility of the Americans.” Still, he was glad to be leaving his “little bark hut,” which he found “about as comfortable as a taffeta suit in the month of January.” On October 6, Lafayette and Caraman collected their belongings, bade good-bye to Barbé-Marbois and the others at the fort, and boarded a boat rowed by five men that was heading down the Mohawk River to Albany in weather that Lafayette described as “beautiful.”
Lafayette and Caraman spent the next two months traveling as far north as New Hampshire and as far south as Virginia, visiting old friends, making new ones, and enjoying the banquets, balls, and receptions that sprang up wherever they went. Lafayette’s travels were fueled, in large part, by nostalgia for his days in the army and curiosity about the nation he had helped create.
Interested though he was in the past and the present, Lafayette was also concerned about the future. One of his goals in coming to America had been to ensure the survival of his American reputation, and he attended to the matter with considerable care. Lafayette was well aware that the first histories of the American Revolution were being written even as he was being feted at a string of celebrations that had no precedent in the young country. Abigail Adams’s friend Mercy Otis Warren was collecting the materials that would go into her History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805); David Ramsay, a legislator from South Carolina, was doing the same for his History of the American Revolution (1789); and William Gordon, an irascible Massachusetts parson, was already well along in writing The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America, Including an Account of the Late War; and of the Thirteen Colonies, from Their Origin to That Period (1788).
Lafayette was most concerned about Gordon, and with good reason. Parson Gordon had already made enemies of men as eminent—and as different—as John Hancock and Alexander Hamilton. John Adams described him as “an eternal Talker, and somewhat vain, and not accurate nor judicious.” Hoping to protect his own reputation from Gordon’s injudicious pen, Lafayette asked James McHenry, his former aide-de-camp, to “recollect the train of his military proceedings and commit them to paper” and to forward the resulting text to Washington. Washington, in turn, was asked to send McHenry’s thoughts to Gordon for inclusion in Gordon’s History. Washington and Gordon enjoyed cordial relations of the sort that might facilitate the granting of favors; along with letters on the subject of the marquis, the men exchanged tulips, redbud trees, and other flowering plants, as part of a collective effort undertaken by many of the Founding Fathers to spread the vegetation of their respective regions throughout the new nation.
Yet even the promise of a magnolia tree from Virginia was insufficient to persuade Gordon to accept the memoir handcrafted by McHenry. “In certain places,” complained Gordon, “the colouring is too strong.” For instance, he refused to cast as particularly meritorious Lafayette’s decision to abandon his planned incursion into Canada, observing that “it did not require the bold judgment of a most experienced general to relinquish” the project “when there were not the means of prosecuting it with any reasonable prospect of success.” He was still less kind in his assessment of Lafayette’s retreat at Barren Hill. Revealing, perhaps, a lack of military experience, Gordon insisted that “there was no great maneuvering in his extricating himself from the critical situation into which he had been brought.” To this he added the unfounded assertion that Lafayette was partly to blame for his predicament because he had dropped “the night before the hint of his meaning to remain upon the spot till the next morning, and which was forwarded to the British commander.” In defense of his unflattering words concerning Lafayette’s actions at Barren Hill, Gordon cited General Knox, whose assessment of the retreat was that “here we were saved by pure providence without any interposition of our own.” In the end, Barren Hill was not mentioned in Gordon’s four-volume history. Whether because the author mellowed as he wrote the book or because Lafayette’s fame grew too great to contest, Gordon’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America ultimately portrayed Lafayette as the hero he had become.
CHAPTER 10
AN “AMERICAN” NOBLEMAN IN PARIS
By the time Lafayette reached his mid-twenties, he had come out of his shell and fully embraced the extravagant lifestyle of a typical Parisian aristocrat. He was tremendously wealthy, and yet his expenditures grew so lavish that they outpaced his sizable income—a common predicament for men and women of his class, who routinely leveraged their assets to the hilt in order to maintain an appearance of limitless riches. Despite their devil-may-care demeanors, many Parisian nobles subsisted on a system of credit that was as complicated as it was shaky.
Lafayette’s financial problems developed gradually, over a period of years. In 1782, his receipts still covered his outlays quite tidily. He was obliged to pay down substantial debt incurred during his American voyages, but his lands, investments, and inheritance brought in 224,743 livres, while his total expenses amounted to only 200,889 livres, leaving him a healthy surplus of 23,854 livres. By 1785, however, Lafayette was essentially breaking even, taking in just 845 livres more than he spent. And by June 1788, his finances were in a state of disarray; his annual income had shrunk to 115,381 livres, while his expenses remained nearly constant at 190,462, leaving a staggering deficit of 75,081 livres.
In a memo of June 30, 1788, Jacques-Philippe Grattepain-Morizot, the attorney who oversaw Lafayette’s accounts, expressed alarm. Grattepain-Morizot acknowledged that some unnecessary expenses on the part of the household staff could be reined in, but he impressed upon Lafayette that even “the greatest surveillance” would never yield enough savings to balance such a lopsided budget. Instead, he insisted that the discipline required to reach “that happy state of affairs, in which one spends only what one takes in and transmits to one’s children the property of their late father, can come only from you.” Underscoring his point, Grattepain-Morizot produced a table featuring eight columns of flowing cursive script and carefully inked numerals that categorized Lafayette’s expenses—salaries and pensions, merchants, household, children, and so on. Of the totals at the bottom of each column, the largest by far represented Lafayette’s discretionary spending. Amounting to 52,284 livres, Lafayette’s personal costs included such miscellany as a box at the opera (450 livres), subscriptions to publications (416 livres), and tailoring (3,215 livres). Take
n together, these outlays exceeded the combined total of 49,208 livres that went to household expenses (domestic servants, linens, lighting, etc.), the children (their governess, clothing, smallpox inoculations, etc.), and Adrienne’s personal needs. Lafayette’s leisure activities necessitated ever greater expenditures on horses and carriages, including large sums, as Grattepain-Morizot observed, for maintenance due to Lafayette’s frequent voyages and fondness for carriage races. The memo concluded by directing Lafayette’s attention to a proposed austerity budget Grattepain-Morizot had drawn up, adamant that it “must commence tomorrow.”
Lafayette’s financial turmoil began, as is so often the case, with a real estate investment. On September 6, 1782, Lafayette reached the age of majority, finally enjoying unfettered access to his copious assets, and two months later he purchased the Left Bank town house on the Rue de Bourbon (the modern-day Rue de Lille) that he would make over entirely as his own. According to the sales contract, Lafayette paid 150,000 livres for the house and land, which stretched the length of a block, plus 50,000 livres for the furnishings, carved wood paneling, and decorations already in place. He then plowed 100,000 livres into renovations, bringing the total cost basis of the property to some 300,000 livres—an amount he raised by selling several income-producing properties, thus causing his revenues to plunge even as his expenses were growing.
Then, as now, location was all in matters of residential real estate, and Lafayette opted for a fashionable milieu quite distinct from the staid grandeur preferred by his in-laws. Whereas the Hôtel de Noailles stood on the Rue Saint-Honoré near the Tuileries Palace, Lafayette’s house was located on the other side of the Seine in the stylish Faubourg Saint-Germain. Compared with the home he left behind, Lafayette’s Rue de Bourbon house was rather modest. Not only was the Hôtel de Noailles several times larger than Lafayette’s town house, but the grandeur of its design both reflected and facilitated the family’s high social aspirations. The Duc de Noailles had created a stir when he’d erected a barrier outside his front door; previously, such structures had marked only the entrances to the homes of princes of the blood. Indoors, too, the Duc de Noailles had mimicked the royal family by creating a formal bedroom for receiving guests. There, in a canopied bed divided from the rest of the room by an ornate railing, the host could recline in luxurious comfort while visitors were obliged to stand—although guests of sufficiently high rank might sit on stools placed on the other side of the balustrade.
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