The Marquis

by Laura Auricchio

  When October arrived with no sign of help from America, Adrienne took matters into her own hands. From that moment on, she would be Lafayette’s most ardent champion. On October 8, she wrote directly to George Washington. Where her husband’s commands had failed, perhaps her sentimental invocation might succeed. “In this abyss of grief,” she wrote, “the idea of owing to the U.S. and to M. Washington—the life and liberty of M. Lafayette re-animates my heart with some hope. I hope every thing from the goodness of a people with whom he has set an example of that liberty of which he is now the victim.… Shall I dare speak what I hope?” She dared. Her wish was that an envoy be sent “to reclaim him in the name of the Republic of the U.S.” and to carry him to the “bosoms” of the American people. Casting Lafayette as a beloved husband and cherished father, she added that “if his wife & his Children could be comprised in this happy mission, it is easy to judge how sweet it would be to her and to them; but if this would retard or embarrass, in any degree, the process or his success—we will defer the happiness of a reunion yet longer.”

  Sympathetic though he surely was, there was very little Washington could do about an international affair in which the United States was not a party. He handed the problem over to Vice President Jefferson with only the vaguest of instructions: “Enclosed is a letter from poor Madam La Fayette! How desirable it would be, if something could be done to relieve that family from their unhappy Situation.” Three weeks later, he wrote again to Jefferson, asking him to ghostwrite a reply to the distraught Adrienne, sending her “all the consolation I can with propriety give her consistent with my public character and the National policy; circumstanced as things are.” Although Washington had issued a gift of personal funds to Adrienne, he deemed it wise to keep the country out of European affairs. At most, he was willing to authorize Morris “to neglect no favorable opportunity of expressing informally the sentiments and wishes of this Country respecting M. de la Fayette.” Three months would pass before Washington would express his “sincere sympathy” to Adrienne. To this, he added only his “most ardent prayers that you may be again united to M. de Lafayette under circumstances that may be joyful to you both—and that the evening of that life, whose morning has been devoted to the cause of liberty and humanity, may be crowned with the best of heaven’s blessings.” With that, Washington signed off.

  At Chavaniac, Adrienne struggled. She had married one of the wealthiest men in France, but now she was on the verge of penury. As Gouverneur Morris described Lafayette’s finances in an August 22 letter to Jefferson, “His circle is completed. He has spent his fortune on a revolution and is now crushed by the wheel which he put in motion.” Arch as always, Morris added, “He lasted longer than I expected.” Lafayette admitted as much in his letter to Adrienne. Disappointed though he was that he had failed to set France on a safe course, what weighed on him more heavily was that his attempts to do so had depleted the fortunes of his dependents. Still, he insisted that he would “make no excuse, neither to my children, nor to you, for having ruined my family. There is not a person among you who would want to owe your fortune to conduct contrary to my conscience.” Lafayette could not even afford to pay for his own upkeep—a grim requirement for prisoners who wished to enjoy a modicum of comfort. On January 23, 1793, Morris instructed agents in Amsterdam to place ten thousand florins at Lafayette’s disposal. America could not free its stalwart friend, but it would see to his needs as best it could.

  By the time Adrienne received her husband’s letter of August 21, it was clear that she and her children would soon be left with nothing. Before the month was out, Lafayette’s name had been added to the nation’s rapidly expanding list of men and women officially designated as émigrés—a designation with very real consequences. The law required that the belongings of émigrés be inventoried, seized, and, if the nation so desired, sold. By choosing exile, Lafayette had effectively forfeited all of his possessions. On August 30, 1792, four men appointed by local authorities arrived at Chavaniac to begin the inventory. Adrienne and Lafayette’s aunt Madame de Chavaniac could only look on as the men opened every door, counted every item, and rifled through every piece of paper in every room of the house. For two days the men worked their way from the kitchen (“42 red copper casseroles …”) to the chapel (“1 silver-plated Christ …”) to the barnyard and stables (“2 black cows, one with a calf …”), taking note whenever Madame de Chavaniac tried to protect what she could by claiming animals and objects as her own personal property—not that of her émigré nephew.

  Madame de Chavaniac had lived in the château far longer than Lafayette, but his imprint was everywhere. When a more expert commission of inspectors arrived in February to assign values to everything they found, they came across mementos of Lafayette’s public life scattered about the estate. A stone from the Bastille carved in the shape of the prison and a foot-high statuette of Liberty personified were stashed in an outbuilding near the stables. A framed portrait of George Washington decorated a small room on the second floor of the main house. And the walls of Adrienne’s cabinet, where she relaxed by playing the piano or with a game of trictrac, featured five small scenes depicting battles of the American Revolution and a two-foot-wide painting commemorating the storming of the Bastille. All of it would be confiscated, and little was ever returned.

  A stone from the Bastille carved in its shape. A similar object was found among Lafayette’s belongings at Chavaniac. (illustration credit 18.1)

  Far more tragic were the seizures of Lafayette’s possessions in Cayenne, where he had purchased three plantations and the slaves who worked them in order to conduct an experiment in gradual emancipation. Although Lafayette had always intended to free these slaves, he had never actually done so. Now these men, women, and children were the property of an émigré, and they would be impounded, inventoried, and sold like any other assets. On November 28, 1792, Adrienne wrote a pleading letter to the Ministry of the Marine, whose director was also in charge of the colonies, asking for help. Moved by “sentiments of humanity,” she hoped to protect “the small number of blacks” who lived on Lafayette’s land. Instead of selling the plantations, she suggested, the treasury might instead leave them be while enjoying all the profits they produced. She wrote, too, to the plantations’ overseer, Louis de Geneste, explaining that “nothing could have ever impelled me to sell” these people but that she did not have the funds to purchase them from new owners.

  When the plantation of Saint Régis was inventoried on April 5, 1794, each family of slaves counted as one item. Sixty-three people, ranging from a newborn girl not yet named to a sixty-six-year-old man named André, appeared under item numbers 31 to 57 and were valued at 73,250 livres. They constituted, by far, the most valuable portion of the plantation’s holdings, estimated to be worth 87,068 livres in all. Although the colonial administrators rejected Adrienne’s proposal, they made a gesture toward humanitarianism by agreeing to acquire the slaves for the nation. This way, “people accustomed to living together” would not be separated. The sale was completed on June 24, 1795.

  After Lafayette’s name was stricken from the list of émigrés in 1799, he wrote to the Ministry of the Marine hoping to be reimbursed for “at least 48” of the slaves taken from him. By that time, slavery had been abolished in the French colonies. The people were free, and Lafayette would not be compensated. At an earlier moment in his life, before financial concerns began to impinge on his idealism, Lafayette might not have asked for reimbursement. Condorcet’s 1781 Reflections on Negro Slavery—which had influenced Lafayette’s thinking on the subject—had stated quite clearly that, when slaves are freed, “the Sovereign owes no reparations to the slave master, just as nothing is owed to a thief except a judgment upon depriving him of a stolen object.” In this instance, Lafayette seems to have felt that he simply could not afford his principles.

  Adrienne’s pleas to liberate the slaves came while she was deprived of her own freedom. If several brave men—some friends,
some strangers—had not come to her aid, she would not have survived. On August 19, 1792, the day Lafayette crossed the border, a warrant was signed in Paris for the arrest of Adrienne and any of her children found with her. On August 25, Adrienne added an addendum to her last will and testament leaving the management of household affairs to her brother-in-law; it was at least the fourth time in eighteen months she had annotated her will. Adrienne and Anastasie, the elder of her two daughters, were taken into custody at eight o’clock on the morning of September 10. George had been away from home and Virginie hiding in the house when Alphonse Aulagnier, the justice of the peace charged with their capture, arrived at Chavaniac. Aulagnier had traveled through the night from the departmental capital of Le Puy, accompanied by eighty-six soldiers, gendarmes, and members of the National Guard. It was a massive show of force, far out of proportion to any resistance Adrienne might conceivably have offered, but apparently Aulagnier was quietly sympathetic to his captives’ plight. Explicitly disobeying orders to escort the women to a prison in Paris, Aulagnier kept them in his municipality. As he explained to Minister of the Interior Jean-Marie Roland, “the events of September 2 and 3” made it clear “what fate would await my illustrious prisoners” in the capital. Aulagnier was referring to the September massacres of 1792, when the streets of Paris ran red with the blood of more than a thousand men, women, and children and triumphant murderers processed through the streets carrying the head (and, according to some accounts, the entrails) of the Princesse de Lamballe, a close ally of Marie Antoinette’s. Roland—who might well have fallen victim himself had the bloodshed continued—ultimately relented, allowing Adrienne and Anastasie to return to Chavaniac under house arrest until further notice.

  Anxiety filled Adrienne’s days. News of her husband arrived only sporadically, and when it did, it generally took the form of rumor or speculation. Even his location was often uncertain, as he was shuttled from city to city and prison to prison, spending time in Nivelles, Luxembourg, and Wesel before arriving at Magdeburg, where he remained for all of 1793. The couple’s financial woes also continued unabated. Despite Grattepain-Morizot’s wishful insistence that “after all debts have been settled, there will still be a balance left of nearly two million” livres, the seizure of all of Lafayette’s lands and resources meant that there was no balance left at all. Had it not been for a loan of 100,000 livres extended personally by Gouverneur Morris in June 1793, Adrienne would not have been able to pay her most basic bills.

  Adrienne’s situation was hardly unique: fear and uncertainty gripped French households throughout 1793 as the nation lurched from crisis to crisis and the National Convention clung to power with an increasing sense of desperation. Events transpired at lightning speed. The month of March, which opened with the war abroad going badly, saw the implementation of a massive conscription effort, the outbreak of a full-fledged counterrevolutionary revolt in the Vendée region of western France, and the National Convention’s establishment of a Revolutionary Tribunal and a Committee of Surveillance, each vested with extraordinary powers. On April 6, the Jacobin-dominated convention created the Committee of Public Safety—a super-legislative body of nine members (later increased to twelve) authorized to “deliberate in secret,” to “oversee and accelerate administrative actions delegated to the Provisional Executive Council,” to suspend the council’s decrees “when it deems them contrary to the national interest,” and “to take, in urgent circumstances, measures for general external and internal defense.” With power thus consolidated, a purge of the National Convention’s moderates began. And when the “incorruptible” Robespierre—a purist, in his way, who believed that the success of the revolution justified any actions taken on its behalf—joined the Committee of Public Safety on July 27, 1793, the stage was set for the climactic act of the French Revolution’s lethal drama: the Reign of Terror.

  On September 5, 1793, leaders of Paris’s forty-eight sections, joined by the Jacobin Club, appeared before the National Convention to demand drastic measures. Observing that “the nation’s dangers are extreme,” the deputation insisted that “the remedies must be equally so.” Just as the convention had instituted a nationwide draft to repulse foreign attackers, so too must the republic expel “the traitors within, who divide us, who pit us one against the other.” The representatives further noted that a “revolutionary army” must be established with powerful tribunals that would make it “a terrible instrument of vengeance,” and that they must remain active “until the soil of the Republic is purged of traitors, and until the death of the last of the conspirators.” “Terror,” their petition demanded, must become “the order of the day.” Presiding over the National Convention, and speaking on its behalf, Robespierre averred that “all the French” would bless the Jacobin Club and the city of Paris for seeking such “imperious and definitive measures.” He concluded with a promise: “All villains will perish on the scaffold, the Convention solemnly swears it.”

  On September 17, 1793, the National Convention began to make good on Robespierre’s pledge by passing the Law of Suspects. This law, which Adrienne termed the “fatal decree,” declared that “all suspects found in the territory of the Republic, and who are still at liberty, will be placed under arrest.” The operative definition of “suspects” was both broad and vague. It encompassed not only those who had emigrated, been refused certificates of good citizenship, or been suspended from public functions by the National Convention, but also “those who, whether by their conduct, their relations, their intentions or their writings, have shown themselves to be partisans of tyranny or federalism and enemies of liberty.” Likewise targeted for arrest were “those former nobles, including husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons or daughters, sisters or brothers, and agents of émigrés, who have not constantly demonstrated their attachment to the Revolution.” According to these definitions, Adrienne and her entire family were enemies of the people.

  Roundups began almost immediately. Adrienne’s mother, the Du- chesse d’Ayen, and her sister, the Maréchale de Noailles, were arrested in early October. They were permitted to remain under surveillance in the Hôtel de Noailles until April, at which time they were transferred to the Luxembourg Palace, Lafayette’s first home in Paris, which had been requisitioned for use as a prison. Madame de Chavaniac was placed under house arrest in January 1794. Adrienne was imprisoned on November 13 in Brioude—the closest town to Chavaniac—and was subsequently moved to the prison of La Force in Paris. By the time of her arrival in the capital on June 7, some sixty people per day were being sent to the guillotine.

  The months leading up to Adrienne’s transfer had been bloody indeed, and many of the men who played roles in Lafayette’s rise and fall justly or unjustly met their demise. Marat was murdered in his bathtub on July 13, 1793; Jacques-Pierre Brissot went to the guillotine on October 31, 1793; the Duc d’Orléans was guillotined, despite his new republican name of Philippe Égalité, on November 6, 1793; Jean-Sylvain Bailly, former mayor of Paris, followed on November 12; Antoine Barnave, the triumvir who’d developed an affection for Marie Antoinette while escorting her back from Varennes, was guillotined on November 29; the abolitionist philosopher Condorcet died in prison—a likely suicide—on March 28, 1794; Danton was executed on April 5, 1794.

  On July 22, 1794, Adrienne’s mother, sister, and grandmother joined the roster of victims. Robespierre himself, who had orchestrated the executions of so many real and perceived enemies, was guillotined less than one week later. Had the Noailles women lived just a few days longer, they would have survived the revolution. Adrienne, concluding her privately published narrative of her mother’s life, wrote, “I have given up trying to explain anything because what I feel is inexplicable.”

  Adrienne escaped her family’s fate thanks to American intervention. When Gouverneur Morris learned that Adrienne had been transferred to Paris, he understood the dire implications of the move and hastened to her aid. Morris had no official authorization, but he also ha
d no time to spare. Waiting for approval to cross the Atlantic would have taken weeks under the best of circumstances, and recently Morris’s letters had been suffering greater delays than usual because, as he wrote to his brother, “the Comité de Surveillance have done me the honor to peruse some of them.” So he would have to act first and inform Washington later. As he explained to the president, he had written to France’s minister of foreign affairs, Philibert Buchot, on June 29 “as a citizen and not as a commissioner.” While taking pains to stress to Buchot that his was an unofficial letter, Morris reminded the minister of Lafayette’s place in the hearts of the American public: “The family of Lafayette is beloved in America,” he wrote, adding,

  that without examining his conduct in this country … my fellow-citizens confine themselves to the grateful remembrance of the services he has rendered us, and that therefore the death of his wife might lessen the attachment of some among them to the French Republic; that it would furnish the partisans of England with means of misrepresenting what passes here; that I cannot but think her existence of very little consequence to this government; and that I am sure its enemies will rejoice at the destruction of anything which bears the name of Lafayette.

  Morris never received a reply, but Adrienne believed ever after that he had saved her life. Lafayette, whose feelings about Morris were actually quite mixed, preferred to credit Morris’s successor—his former comrade-in-arms James Monroe. Whatever the impetus may have been, Adrienne was liberated on February 2, 1795.