The Marquis

by Laura Auricchio

  These and other preparations were in progress when Louis XVI and his entourage returned bearing new orders. The king had passed the Parisian women as he made his way back from the hunt and had been gratified to hear cries of “Vive le roi!” from the crowd. Reassured that he would be safe at Versailles, he called off the move to Rambouillet. And, worried that a show of royal force would cause, rather than prevent, an escalation of violence, he ordered the Flanders Regiment to retire to its barracks. The men dutifully obeyed, but as they made their way from the Place d’Armes to their quarters, they found themselves pelted with rocks and gunshot. When Louis heard the news he began to reconsider his decisions but, as Madame Campan put it, “the moment to flee was lost.”

  Lafayette knew none of this as he rode slowly toward Versailles to meet a fate that was uncertain at best. As Morris described events in his diary, Lafayette “marched by Compulsion, guarded by his own Troops who suspect and threaten him.” Yet this was the selfsame Lafayette who had managed to keep his head at Barren Hill as the redcoats bore down on his detachment from three sides, and now, in 1789, he still possessed the composure that had served him so well in 1778. With scores of lives in his hands—not only his own and his companions’ but also the lives of the royal family—he did everything in his power to ensure a peaceful resolution. With the sound of drums and the flicker of torches heralding his approach, Lafayette halted the march at around eleven o’clock near the National Assembly’s meeting hall in Versailles. There, he administered an oath to remind his troops of their allegiances; the men swore to honor “the nation, the law, and the king” before continuing on. While two officers were sent ahead to the château bearing assurances that Lafayette came to protect the king and not to oust him, a representative of the king appeared to inform Lafayette that Louis “saw his approach with pleasure” and “had just accepted his declaration of rights.” Happily, everyone was in agreement on one point: they wanted to see as little bloodshed as possible.

  Expectant cries filled the air as Lafayette drew closer to the palace. “Long live the King! Long live the Nation! Long live Lafayette and Liberty!” shouted the contingent of Parisians, who had been driven by fear and desperation to slog through miles of mud on the road to Versailles. Leaving his troops, Lafayette approached the Place d’Armes around midnight, accompanied by two civilians representing the Paris city government. Facing him from the other side of the padlocked grille, the Swiss Guard hesitated; wary though they were of Lafayette’s motives, they admitted him to the courtyard and from there into the château, up the stairs, and to the Salon de l’Oeil de Boeuf—the very antechamber where he had awaited the king in 1774, when he was presented at court. But on this occasion, the room was filled with shouts instead of whispers. “There’s Cromwell!” went the cry, but Lafayette rejected the comparison to the British general who had helped orchestrate the execution of King Charles I during the English Civil War. “Monsieur,” Lafayette snapped, “Cromwell would not have entered alone.” Still, the accusation struck a chord. Lafayette knew all too well that, with one false move, “instead of being a guardian, he would have been a usurper.” As the Marquise de La Tour du Pin remembered the scene, Lafayette’s voice filled with emotion as he explained to Louis the reasoning that compelled him to march: “Sire, I thought it better to come here, to die at the feet of Your Majesty, than to die uselessly on the Place de Grève.” Louis XVI was in no position to argue. He gave Lafayette free run of Versailles.

  By two in the morning some semblance of order had been established. With the king’s guards maintaining calm inside the palace and National Guardsmen patrolling the grounds, Marie Antoinette felt secure enough to go to sleep with four ladies stationed in chairs pushed up against her bedroom door. At four-thirty, hearing shouts and gunshots ringing through the palace, they roused her. Giving the queen no time to dress, they hustled her through a narrow door and down a back passageway toward the king’s chambers, tossing a petticoat after her. As though in a French farce gone grievously awry, the ladies reached the king’s door only to find it locked. They knocked and were let in, but by then Louis was gone—he had taken the more public route to the queen’s bedroom at the first sound of alarm. In the adjacent Salon de l’Oeil de Boeuf, royal guards faced off against armed citizens while the queen, reunited with her children, retreated to the bedroom. At last, a rapprochement involving the exchange of cockades was reached in the Salon de l’Oeil de Boeuf, and calm returned to the château.

  Daybreak found Lafayette conferring with the king and queen in their apartments, where the Parisian troops now fraternized with the royal guardsmen. From the marble court below, the clamor grew louder and more menacing. The people were calling in angry tones for Marie Antoinette. At first, they got only Lafayette, who harangued them from the balcony to little effect. He stepped back inside, and speaking again with the uneasy monarchs, he brokered yet another deal. If they came with him to Paris, as the crowd demanded, he would guarantee their safety. They agreed. With that, Lafayette turned to the queen:

  “Come with me.”

  “What? Alone on the balcony?”

  “Yes, Madame. Let us go.”

  Together, Lafayette and Marie Antoinette appeared before the angry crowd. Unable to make himself heard, Lafayette resorted to a gesture that would later be cited by his enemies as a sign of double-dealing: he kissed the hand of the queen. With this gallant pantomime, Lafayette bestowed his blessing on Marie Antoinette and changed the hearts of the people. “Long live the general! Long live the queen!” To the sound of cheers, the pair left the balcony and began preparing for the journey ahead.

  At approximately one o’clock in the afternoon on October 6, 1789, the royal family set out from Versailles in a carriage. Inside, Marie Antoinette clutched her coffer of diamonds. Outside, Lafayette rode beside the monarchs on a handsome white horse, keeping pace with the coach. A hundred carriages followed behind, bearing the National Assembly’s deputies, while thousands of exhausted citizens and soldiers joined the historic journey on foot. It was six in the evening before Lafayette reached the Hôtel de Ville and quite dark by the time the royal family moved into a rambling suite of hastily evacuated apartments in their new home, the Tuileries Palace, which stretched along the banks of the Seine just west of the Louvre. There, Louis was fated to live by Lafayette’s rules and under Lafayette’s authority. On the morning of October 7, Lafayette attended what could only have been a very awkward ceremonial levee in the king’s new chambers. For better or for worse, it seemed that Louis XVI would always have Lafayette at his side.

  That the march to Versailles ended so calmly was nothing short of extraordinary. October 5 had witnessed its share of fatalities—the heads of two royal bodyguards had been transported to Paris on pikes—but large-scale carnage had been avoided, and much of the credit belonged to Lafayette. His uncommon ability to think clearly under pressure and his unparalleled credibility with the crowd had allowed him to wrest control from mayhem. That night, Lafayette proved to the world that he deserved his reputation as Washington’s protégé. But the future would bring challenges that might have been too much for any man.

  CHAPTER 15

  TRIUMPH

  Lafayette emerged victorious from a night that could well have been his last, but the time for celebration was not yet at hand. A seasoned general, he quickly surveyed the available options, assessed strategies, and then picked his next battle. He would spend the week from October 7 to October 14 embroiled in a political struggle with his old nemesis the Duc d’Orléans, who, having burnished his populist credentials, now called himself Philippe Égalité.

  No one was certain how the tumult of October 5 began—the question remains open to this day—but several theories pinned the blame on Orléans. According to Madame Campan, “Many people averred that they had recognized the duc d’Orléans at four-thirty in the morning … at the top of the marble staircase pointing the way to the guardroom that led to the queen’s bedchamber.” The self-styled pr
ince of equality was said to have been wearing a “redingote” (the word derives from the French attempt to pronounce “riding coat”)—a style of jacket imported from Orléans’s beloved England—and an unstructured hat with a turned-down brim. The chapeau rabattu would have been doubly handy; not only was the style generally worn by commoners, but its drooping edges were useful for shielding one’s face from unwanted scrutiny. A pamphlet spelled out what Campan only implied—that Orléans had instigated the march on Versailles as part of a regicide plot that would have rendered him regent, if not king.

  Lafayette might or might not have helped spread these rumors, but he was certainly happy to capitalize on them. Meeting with Orléans three times in a span of seven days, Lafayette succeeded in convincing the highborn Anglophile that London might prove a safer haven than Paris, and on Wednesday, October 14, Orléans appeared before the National Assembly to request a passport, claiming that he had been “charged by His Majesty with an important mission.” In a letter to his ally Mounier, Lafayette admitted to having no proof that Orléans was conspiring against the king. If he had any, he wrote, “I would have denounced him.” Yet Orléans did not call his bluff. Whether acting out of guilt or fear, or perhaps some combination of the two, the duke decamped for England on October 15.

  Out of sight was, however, not out of mind. The possibility that Orléans might return to Paris weighed heavily on Lafayette, who enlisted the help of the Chevalier de la Luzerne—then serving as ambassador to London—to keep tabs on the duke’s movements. Lafayette also dispatched one of his former aides-de-camp to the British capital to tell Orléans “that it would suit neither you nor [Lafayette] for you to return to Paris before the end of the Revolution.” Indeed, if Orléans were to head for home, Lafayette would see him “as his enemy” and would challenge him to a duel on the morning after his arrival.

  Even as Lafayette eased Orléans into exile, he choreographed an intricate political dance to stabilize the leadership of the nation and to ensure his own place in the power structure. His town house became a locus of coalition building as a steady stream of carriages made their way to the Rue de Bourbon filled with men seeking places for themselves or their friends in what they hoped might soon be a new government. That Lafayette had no legal authority to establish such a government, much less distribute appointments within it, seems to have been a matter of little concern.

  Lafayette’s strength rested in part on his military might, which had grown considerably on October 7, when Louis XVI had granted him control over any troops within a forty-five-mile radius of Paris, so that he might guarantee the “provisioning of the capital.” Lafayette also wielded another, more symbolic, form of power, deriving from his symbolic role as the French embodiment of American liberty. In the wake of the October Days (as the events of October 5 and 6 became known), journalists friendly to Lafayette repeatedly emphasized the importance of this connection for the benefit of their readers. The Courrier de Versailles à Paris et Paris à Versailles, which was edited by Lafayette’s former classmate Antoine-Joseph Gorsas, proclaimed on October 8 that the names of “Lafayette and Liberty” were “synonyms … made to be reunited.” And on October 12, the paper hailed Lafayette as “the champion of liberty in two worlds.”

  Lafayette played the role to the hilt. The candidates and lobbyists who flocked to his cabinet struck deals in a room lined with English-language books on American politics—William Gordon’s The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment of the Independence of the United States of America (1788), Joel Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus (1787), and various works by Jefferson, Adams, and other leaders of the American Revolution—and decorated with the golden Declaration of Independence that Lafayette had commissioned in 1784. No one could have emerged from the study unaware of Lafayette’s deep connection to the cause of liberty in the New World.

  Morris was a frequent visitor to Lafayette’s cabinet in these days. Reveling in the gamesmanship of French politics, he and Madame de Flahaut had already drawn up their ideal list of government ministers, and on Sunday, October 11, a visit to Lafayette was the first stop on Morris’s busy social itinerary. He arrived at nine in the morning but was obliged to wait, as Lafayette was already occupied in conversation despite the early hour. Morris had friends—or, more precisely, friends of friends—whom he wished to see well placed, but first he would have to loosen Lafayette’s grip on the reins of power. Morris tried to explain “that [Lafayette] cannot possibly act both as Minister and Soldier, still less as Minister of every Department. That he must have Coadjutors in whom he can confide.” Lafayette raised moral objections to some of the names proposed by Morris, but the stubborn New Yorker would not take no for an answer. Continuing his quest to shake Lafayette from the optimism that, remarkably, seems not to have deserted him even during this period of radical social upheaval, Morris insisted that “Men do not go into Administration as the direct Road to Heaven … they are prompted by Ambition or Avarice and therefore … the only Way to secure the most virtuous is by making it in their Interest to act rightly.”

  To Morris, it would seem, bedfellows made strange politics. One of the men on whose behalf he was lobbying was his mistress’s other lover, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the bishop of Autun and a representative to the National Assembly—known to history simply as Talleyrand. As the firstborn son of a noble family, Talleyrand should have inherited the family fortune and carried on the name by the rule of primogeniture. But after a childhood accident left him with a clubfoot, his image-conscious family settled all of his rights and privileges on a younger brother; they instead steered Talleyrand toward a path traditionally followed by second sons by sending him to the clergy. And yet he was a clergyman more in name than in spirit, as amply evidenced by the Comtesse de Flauhaut’s giving birth to his child (a son) in 1784. No cause for embarrassment in the context of Parisian aristocratic mores, the lad was welcomed by the Comte de Flahaut, who was well aware that Talleyrand was the boy’s father, and the infant was even portrayed with his mother in a scene of maternal tenderness painted by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, one of the premier portraitists in Paris, and exhibited at the 1785 Salon. Morris and Talleyrand met frequently at the Hôtel de Flahaut—sometimes one arrived as the other departed, and at other times they sat and chatted amiably with or without the object of their mutual affection.

  On Tuesday, November 3, Morris and Talleyrand visited Lafayette together. According to Morris’s diary, Talleyrand concluded “that La Fayette has no fixed Plan,” and Morris gathered that Lafayette had “a great Deal of the Intriguant in his Character” but that “he must be used by others because he has not talents enough to make use of them.” Perhaps their jaded ways prevented them from seeing what Lafayette was about. He was in fact quite certain of the end he wished to achieve: a constitutional monarchy that guaranteed the liberty of the French people. But being unsure of the best way to attain his objective, Lafayette adopted the technique he had learned as a nineteen-year-old member of Washington’s military family, methodically gathering advisers around himself so that he might listen to their thoughts before doing what generals inevitably must do: command and sally forth.

  Many people got Lafayette wrong in those days, almost as though they couldn’t believe that his single-minded dedication to the project of a constitutional monarchy might be genuine. Marie Antoinette suspected that Lafayette intended to usurp her husband’s throne. As she confided in a conversation with Madame Campan, the queen felt sure “that the whole army was devoted to him and that everything he said about the pressure used against him to make him march on Versailles was merely a feint.” In her opinion, Lafayette had orchestrated the October Days to showcase his own power, and rumors that Lafayette was fomenting crises to advance his own interests had been spreading through Paris at least since September. One popular pamphlet asked “Why, Citizens! have Lafayette, Bailly, and the chefs of the Commune left you wanting for bread? … Imbecile residents of Paris and Versailles!
… These villains [scélérats] think that you have too much life in you.” Parisians were fools to believe that their lives were more secure, insisted the anonymous author, “in the hands of the traitor La Fayette, this scoundrel, this vampire, than in those of your good king.”

  In a rare case of agreement across a growing political divide, agitators on the extreme left concurred with traditionalists on the political right on the issue of Lafayette: it was universally acknowledged that he posed a grave threat to the liberty of the nation. Jean-Paul Marat, a writer and the publisher of the radical newspaper L’ami du peuple, was among the first and most outspoken of the republican firebrands who believed Lafayette to be a military dictator in the making. Marat is perhaps best remembered today for his dramatic demise; he was stabbed to death in his bathtub by a female assassin in 1793—an episode brilliantly memorialized by Jacques-Louis David, who was an ardent Jacobin for a few years and arguably the greatest French painter of the eighteenth century. But before Marat became a martyr for the revolution, he was a journalistic force to be reckoned with. Publicizing scandals, fanning the flames of conspiracy theories, and issuing warnings of imminent doom were among Marat’s weapons of choice. Marat’s tasks, in his own eyes, included “inciting an ignorant, cowardly, and corrupt people to break its tyrants’ yoke.” Defending his methods with chilling logic, Marat insisted that “everything is permitted to shake the populace out of its deadly lethargy, recall to it the sense of its rights, inspire it with the courage to defend them.” Lafayette’s friend Gorsas saw Marat rather differently, however, roundly denouncing him as “a vile and accursed man having neither honor to lose nor virtues to risk, but a cowardly pen to prostitute and black bile with which to infect paper.”