His thoughts were drifting inevitably away from Europe toward home—to Katherine and their sons and daughter—then back again to Africa and Caleb and Eagle’s crew, when suddenly he heard a commotion behind him and a man shouting: “Vous avez raison! Richard Cutler, ici en France!”
Richard whirled toward the voice. Fast approaching up the gentle incline, his long stride leaving behind two soldiers struggling to keep pace with him, came Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, the marquis de Lafayette. He was dressed impeccably in a red, white, and blue uniform, his rank indicated by a tricolor cockade pinned to his bicorne hat. He came close to Richard before he removed his hat and bowed low in courtly fashion, just as Richard had watched him do when they had first met aboard Bonhomme Richard in Lorient a decade earlier. He took Richard’s extended hand in both of his and pressed it warmly.
“Bonjour, mon général,” Richard greeted him, adding, with a smile, “It is good to see you again.”
“The joy is mine, sir,” Lafayette replied gallantly in practiced English. His leaf-green eyes took in Richard at equal height, though it came at once to Richard that height was one of the few traits they still had in common. They were of similar age, both approaching thirty, but the years since the war had been less kind to the French general. His hairline was receding, as had become evident the moment he removed his hat, and what hair remained was streaked with white. But it was his eyes that told a more distressing story. They were bloodshot and red-rimmed, and beneath them were dark shadows of fatigue. His grayish skin was etched by worry. Even when he smiled, as he was doing now, it seemed forced good cheer, strained optimism, the antithesis of the dashing young chevalier Richard had so admired in America who had radiated la gloire de la guerre as he led his men into battle. “Though I wish to God we were meeting under better circumstances,” the marquis added glumly. He indicated a grove of stately oaks where they could speak in private.
“What is happening here, General?” Richard asked after they had walked away from the astonished gape of his two fellow coach passengers. “Why are we being detained? Why are there German regiments in France? And why are you wearing the uniform of the National Guard?”
Lafayette smiled. “So many questions, my friend,” he said. “Alas, I have little time to answer them. I must return to my post. Still, I had to come here, for the joy of seeing you. I also came to warn you. You have chosen a bad time to travel to Paris.”
“The timing was not of my choosing,” Richard replied. He asked again what was happening in Paris.
“The Germans are mercenaries,” Lafayette replied disgustedly to one of Richard’s questions, sidestepping the more important ones. ”They fight for profit. We saw them in America fighting for the British. Now we see them in France preparing to fight for our king—or rather his queen, if you believe the rumors that say it was she who invited them. Whoever is responsible, it was a very foolish thing to do. It has made the people very angry and it has made the crisis much worse. I fear the consequences will be terrible.” Lafayette’s gaze shifted northward. “Those bells in the distance? It is the signal that many of us in France have prayed we would never hear.”
“The signal for what?”
“For the people to take to the streets. They have already sacked Les Invalides and the Abbé de Saint-Lazare. Do you understand what I am telling you, mon ami? The good citizens of Paris have plundered a hospital and they have looted a monastery. A monastery! A house of God!”
“Why?” Richard struggled to make sense of what Lafayette was telling him. “Why would they do such things?”
“Les Invalides? To seize weapons. Muskets, pistols, cannon, every weapon you can imagine is stored in there. I should say was stored in there, since the citizens have taken the forty thousand muskets to the streets. It is a hospital, yes, but also a royal arsenal. The monastery? Inside, the people believe, is grain that the priests have been hoarding for months, enough to feed many mouths. But the hospital and the monastery, these were not enough. Not for these citizens. Now they have their sights set on a bigger prize. We are informed that the Bastille is under siege.”
“The Bastille? Isn’t that a royal fortress?”
“It once was a fortress. Today it serves as a prison. Inside there are only six prisoners. Two have been judged insane and a third is the son of a marquis who had him put there for disobedience. But that is of minor consequence. It is not freedom for the prisoners that the citizens desire.”
“What, then?” Richard was almost afraid to ask.
“Powder. For the muskets and cannon they took from Les Invalides. No arsenal in France holds more powder than the Bastille. That is why it is guarded by a hundred soldiers of the Royal Army.”
“Can a hundred soldiers defend it against such a mob? Will they?”
Lafayette gave a typically Gallic shrug, then said, “I fear we shall soon find out.”
Powder? Muskets? Cannon? Richard’s brain was unwilling to grasp the ramifications. “This is not just another bread riot, is it, General.” The instant he said it, he felt foolish.
Lafayette sadly shook his head. “No, my friend, this is not just another bread riot. This, God save us, is the revolution.”
THE REALITY OF WHAT was happening in France became clearer to Richard the next day, July 15. His coach remained where it was—military units had cordoned off Paris, denying access or egress to anyone not on official business—but Lafayette arranged accommodations for him in his base camp after he understood Richard’s purpose in going to Paris. He strongly advised him, however, to finish his business quickly and leave. He feared the worst, he told Richard, and if his fears were justified, no one in France was safe.
It was a warning Richard took seriously, given its source. Lafayette, he soon came to learn, was in a most precarious position, notwithstanding his military rank and appointment as vice president of the National Assembly. In these deeply troubled times, with the nerves of the nation shredded to ribbons, Lafayette was, at least for the moment, a leader acceptable both to the king and to those demanding that the king’s power either be checked by a parliamentary body or checkmated and done away with altogether. As a marquis, scion of an old line of titled blood, he had the trust even of Marie Antoinette, a queen who publicly professed concern and sympathy for her subjects but who, the rumors accused, privately urged her husband to send troops into the National Assembly and arrest the ringleaders of the revolution. Too, she had urged him to seek military intervention from her mother, the Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa, she who had arranged a marriage for her daughter at the tender age of fifteen to strengthen ties with France.
At the same time, honored for his service in an American army that had overthrown royal authority, Lafayette remained the third estate’s champion for his widely publicized view that France should follow the American example, but with a constitutional monarchy. With the consent of the National Assembly, King Louis had recently appointed Lafayette commander of the newly formed National Guard, a quasi-military, quasi-police force that had the unenviable task of preventing the French Royal Army from crushing the will of the people, on the one hand, while on the other preventing the will of the people from spilling over into senseless violence aimed at France’s élite.
His friend’s duty was as difficult for Richard to fathom as it was for Lafayette to execute. Here, on the outskirts of Paris, all was quiet. The National Guard and French army units mingled, at ease with each other, mindful of, but no longer stricken by, the sporadic gunfire and puffs of smoke rising into the sky just a few miles away. The Bastille had fallen; reports were filtering in that the commander of the royal garrison had opened fire on the mob, and that in retaliation the mob had perpetrated unspeakable acts of barbarism on the soldiers and on the commander himself once he had yielded to the inevitable and ordered his men to stand down. An untold number of corpses littered the streets near the Bastille. Why, Richard wondered, was the French military doing nothing to restore order?
&nbs
p; During a rare moment with Lafayette on the second day, the sixteenth, Richard asked that question as the two of them sat together outside the French general’s tent.
Lafayette gave him a rueful smile. “You have never witnessed a mob in the heat of passion, have you?” he asked.
Richard confessed that he had not.
“I thought as much. I can assure you, my friend, it is not something you would wish to see. There is no sense to anything; violence becomes irrational, insane. Everyone realizes it, even the rioters, but no one can stop it; it takes on a life and purpose of its own. It is like a fire raging out of control, and like such a fire, it must burn itself out. Marshal Broglie of the Royal Army agrees that our intervention would make matters worse, especially since many of my soldiers, and even some of his own, would break ranks and join the rioters. When the riots end—which they must do soon because people cannot sustain such rage for long—we will go in and do what we can.”
“When will that be?”
“Perhaps tomorrow. We shall see. King Louis is at Versailles, and he has ordered his soldiers to disperse and the Germans to go home. It is a wise decision, though he had no choice and it comes too late. When we go in, you may go in with us. I will provide an escort to take you to your consul, Mr. Jefferson. He is my friend and a friend of the National Assembly. He is helping the Assembly prepare a new constitution, one I have seen and one I approve. You will be safe in his company, although again I urge you to leave France as soon you can.”
“Thank you, General. You have been most helpful to me, and I am glad for this opportunity to renew our friendship, whatever the circumstances. I will take your advice. My schooner should already be in Lorient. I will leave Paris after I report to Captain Jones. I must meet with him, General. I owe it to my brother, and to many others as well.”
“I understand, my friend.” Lafayette offered his hand. “Bon chance, mon ami. We have been through much together, you and I. When you return to America, I ask you to send my regards to General Washington. I love him as a father—I have named my own son George Washington Lafayette—and I was delighted to learn that he is America’s first president. I would give much to see him again, but alas, that day will never come.” He made to take his leave, turned back as if with an afterthought. “If I may be of further service to you during your stay in Paris, you may approach any National Guard soldier and ask for me. He will know where to find me.”
ELEVEN YEARS HAD PASSED since Richard had last entered Paris. When the war with England was in its most critical stages, Richard had served as aide-de-camp to Captain John Paul Jones and had stayed in Passy in what had then served as the first American consulate in Europe. Richard had found both excitement and romance in France’s capital—a city grander and more gratifying than anything his imagination had dreamed. Paris had seemed to him the cradle of civilization, a magnificent city preserving the best of its past while opening its future to the contemporary thinking of Rousseau, Voltaire, Locke, and other intellectuals busily sowing the seeds of the Enlightenment in the fertile soil of Parisian cafés and salons.
What Richard witnessed today, through the flaps of the enclosed military wagon in which he rode with two National Guardsmen, was a sight he had rarely seen during those earlier days: the actual citizens of Paris—people of humble birth dressed not in fine silks and linens and gold thread but in homespun cloth or rags, people who for centuries had remained invisible to la haute société as they huddled in the shadows of the great buildings rising above the broad boulevards. The Florentine architecture, a stately reminder of the Italian influence on Parisian architecture during the glorious age of construction following the marriage of Catherine de Médicis to King Henri II three centuries earlier, remained, but Paris was today a very different place. The once invisible poor were visible everywhere now, and those in hiding were the people who for so long had disdained and tormented them. Nor did citizens avoid eye contact with Richard as they had in Lyons and other stops along the way to Paris. They stared back at him with defiance, as they did at anyone who might dare blame them for the rape and pillage of their once beautiful city.
As the covered wagon lumbered past the Louvre on its way to La Place Louis XV, Richard caught a glimpse of the Tuilleries Palace and its majestic gardens, where colorful hot-air balloons had once enticed the well-to-do to pay for lofty rides over Paris on warm summer afternoons. As he looked out, a wave of fond remembrance washed over him. It was here, at the Théâtre de la Nation, that he and Anne-Marie had attended a performance of The Barber of Seville, a play by Beaumarchais performed by the Comédie Française. It had been her gift to him on his eighteenth birthday, and he smiled at the recollection. They had stayed only through the first act in the private alcove Anne-Marie had reserved for them before rising in a mutual desire to return to the privacy of her château in Passy. In the intervening years he had not forgotten her or that night, or the nights that followed until duty and his captain commanded him back to his ship. He had not seen her since, but the memory of her remained forever tucked away in that secret refuge of the mind where life’s most cherished memories are kept.
The military wagon had approached Paris from the south to avoid the area around the Bastille on the Right Bank, where remnants of rioting lingered, as well as the Hôtel de Ville, where thousands of Parisians had gathered to cheer King Louis for ordering the German regiments out of France. They thus avoided the sight of angry citizens dismantling the Bastille brick by brick and the spectacle of dead bodies heaped one on top of another in horse-drawn carts. The rank smell of the dead fouled the air nonetheless, and the stench turned Richard’s stomach. Or perhaps it was just the thought of those putrefying corpses, their rotting flesh food for rabid, half-starved dogs.
Suddenly there came a sharp bang! against the wooden base of the wagon, followed by another and another and another. The two horses reared up as the driver pulled hard on the reins, causing the wagon to shudder and lift, throwing Richard and the two soldiers off the plank on which they had been sitting and into crates of what had been neatly stacked supplies. Cursing, Richard got to his knees and crawled to the back of the wagon. He pulled aside the canvas flap to see a knot of young boys, several not yet in their teens, running away—needlessly, for there was no one in pursuit. Hurling rocks at a military wagon, an offense that a week ago would have been dealt with severely, was today une petite délinquance.
When the wagon arrived at 19, avenue des Champs-Élysées, the wagon creaked to a halt in front of a three-story gray building of modest yet attractive design. The three rectangular windows facing the avenue on each of the upper two floors were embraced by blue wooden shutters on each side and intricate black ironwork beneath. Above the red mansard roof fluttered the stars and stripes of the American flag.
The driver glanced back at Richard. “Nous sommes arrivés,” he said, adding, as if in apology for the broadside of rocks, “Je regrette le dérangement, monsieur.”
“Pas de quoi,” Richard said, stepping down. A National Guard soldier handed him his sea bag and satchel, and the driver flicked the reins. As the wagon rumbled on, Richard walked up the shrub-lined pathway to the front of the building and knocked on the door.
His knock was answered by a liveried servant wearing a glossy red coat and a white peruke, its long strands tied back at the nape of his neck with a black silk bow. The man did not step aside and offer entrance, but instead remained standing in the doorway, his eyes asking who this visitor was and what he wanted.
“Bonjour,” Richard said. “Je m’appelle Richard Cutler. Je suis américain et je viens pour voir Monsieur Jefferson.”
“Très bien, Monsieur Cutler,” the footman replied deferentially. “Attendez ici pour un moment, s’il vous plaît.”
His footsteps clicked across the black-and-white-tiled floor until he reached a door at the far end of the hallway, on which he knocked and announced the visitor. The door opened and a man emerged. Even at that distance Richard could see that he
was tall—taller than himself—and appeared gangly, gawky even. He was dressed in a suit of brown cloth that at first blush did not seem to fit him properly. But that impression vanished as the man began walking toward him. It was his smile that first captivated Richard, so open and sincere, but he quickly noted the man’s handsome patrician features—long face, thin lips, and aquiline nose—and the easy, fluid way he walked. He was, Richard knew, in his middle fifties, married with two daughters, and came from Charlottesville, Virginia. That was almost all he knew about the man, except that he had served as American minister to France since taking the reins from Benjamin Franklin.
“Good day, Mr. Jefferson,” Richard said. He removed his tricorne hat and bowed from the waist. “I am Richard Cutler. I trust you have received my letters?”
“I have indeed, Mr. Cutler,” Jefferson replied in the aristocratic accent of Tidewater Virginia, “and I am relieved to see that you have arrived safely. That, in and of itself, is no small feat. I have received three letters from you, and I am holding a number of others on your behalf. No doubt you wish to review them. But first, if you are agreeable, I was just having a cup of chocolate with an acquaintance. You are most welcome to join us. I’ll have the letters and your baggage sent upstairs to your room while we chat. I am eager to hear what you have to report.”
For Love of Country Page 22