Lafayette (43 page)

Both Adrienne and her mother, the duchesse d’Ayen, joined Lafayette’s crusade for equal rights for Protestants. “My mother shared his beliefs,” said Adrienne’s daughter Virginie, “and received with great warmth the Protestant ministers that came to our door because of his work. My mother’s tolerance was based on the basic principles of her own religion. She believed it a heinous crime to interfere with liberties that God granted to all men.”
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When Lafayette returned to Paris, Jefferson commissioned Jean-Antoine Houdon, France’s most celebrated sculptor, to sculpt busts of Washington and Lafayette for the Richmond and Paris city halls. He had already sculpted magnificent heads of Franklin, Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire, and, after making a plaster life mask of Lafayette, he sailed off to America to sculpt Washington at Mount Vernon. Lafayette gave him a letter of introduction, along with a set of dinner plates Adrienne had found for Martha. No ship plied the Atlantic between France and the United States without carrying gifts from the Lafayettes to the Washingtons and vice versa. The two couples seemed bent on personally building trade between their two nations by themselves, with Martha sending Adrienne a variety of seeds and plants, ranging from ginseng to corn, and Lafayette sending hounds and two Spanish jackasses to Mount Vernon—the last, actually, the gift of the king of Spain. Each letter heralded another exchange of gifts—French pheasants and red partridges from Lafayette; wild ducks and hams from Washington— although “the poor ducks were dead on arrival at Le Havre.” Lafayette asked Washington to send mockingbirds, which were unknown in France, and Washington asked for nightingales, which were unknown in America. Even the children joined in the flow of goods, with Lafayette sending Washington’s granddaughters French dolls, complete with dressing tables and delicate handmade accessories that made French dolls the envy of children throughout the Western world.
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With diplomatic activity at its usual summer standstill in Versailles, Lafayette acted to enhance his standing as a military and political leader by accepting Frederick the Great’s invitation to join Europe’s highest-ranking officers at the legendary summer maneuvers of the Prussian army, then considered the best-trained, best-disciplined troops in Europe. Cornwallis would be there, with King George III’s second son, the duke of York, and other military leaders from Britain, France, Russia, and Sweden. Frederick’s incongruous invitation to the sworn enemy of despotism and champion of republicanism reflected the Prussian leader’s eagerness to appear an enlightened ruler before the world—and to establish a link to America’s unbounded
wealth. Lafayette said his last good-byes to Franklin and his grandson before they returned to America, and he left for Potsdam and three weeks of lavish banquets and balls at the court of Frederick the Great.

“Despite all I had heard about him,” Lafayette wrote to Washington, “I was stunned by his clothes and appearance—like an old, dirty, decrepit corporal, covered with Spanish snuff, his head bent to one side onto his shoulder and his fingers almost dislocated by gout [arthritis].” Three weeks later, however, the seventy-three-year-old monarch metamorphosed into the great military commander he had once been: “When he is at the head of his army, I was surprised by the fire and occasional calmness in the most magnificent eyes I ever saw, which gave his face an expression at once captivating and brutal.”
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The maneuvers were an overwhelming experience—and a revelation— for Lafayette, who had never seen, let alone commanded, an army of more than 10,000 men. Out on the vast plain, an army of thirty-one battalions— 30,000 men—and seventy-five cavalry squadrons, 100 horsemen per squadron, passed in review with a precision that left Lafayette and Frederick’s other guests agasp. Then, the battalions and squadrons broke off into various maneuvers that ended in sham battles.

“Nothing can compare to the magnificence of the Prussian troops, to the discipline that reigns in all ranks,” Lafayette wrote Washington. “It is a fine tuned machine. . . . With every imaginable situation in war and every appropriate reaction inculcated in their heads, they respond like machines. . . . This entire journey was very useful for my military education.” His experiences in the American bush, however, left him mocking European infantry tactics: “Nothing could be more ridiculous: two lines coming up within six yards of one another, and firing in one another’s faces till they had no ammunition left.”
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Each day’s maneuvers ended with an elaborate, three-hour banquet. Frederick, who had but a year to live, sat at the head of the table with his nephew, Crown Prince Frederick William, who would later revel in punishing Lafayette for his republican views. Frederick the Great sat Lafayette between the duke of York and Lord Cornwallis and deliberately directed all his questions to the French general—largely about the United States and the Revolutionary War. Cornwallis found the dinners offensive: “My reception . . . was not flattering; there was a most marked preference for La Fayette.”
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When Lafayette predicted that the United States would never entertain an aristocracy or a king, Frederick responded, “Monsieur, I knew a young man who, after having visited countries where liberty and equality reigned, got it into his head to establish all that in his own country. Do you know what happened to him?”

“No, Sire,” Lafayette replied.

“Monsieur,” the king grinned, “he was hanged.”
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From Germany, Lafayette went to Vienna, where Marie-Antoinette’s brother Joseph II reigned as king of Germany and emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. He was as eager as Frederick to appear an enlightened ruler and establish a link to the New World by receiving the liberal friend of Washington as his guest. Although Lafayette got on well with Joseph, Lafayette’s republican views alienated Archduke Francis, who would succeed Joseph as emperor seven years later and, like his Prussian counterpart, retaliate cruelly against the Frenchman. Lafayette took a long route home to France through Bohemia and Saxony, to watch more military exercises near Prague, Dresden, Potsdam, and Magdeburg. “Every where I went, my dear general, I had the pleasure to hear your name uttered with respect and enthusiasm,” he wrote to Washington after his return to France. “Every conversation about America began with your praises, which, as your friend, your disciple and your adoptive son, filled my heart with pride. I only wish that other feelings about America had been as satisfying. . . . I often was mortified to hear that the lack of Congressional powers and lack of union between the states will render the confederation insignificant. . . . [Americans] will lose the respect of the world if they do not strengthen the confederation and do not give Congress sufficient power to regulate commerce, pay the debt . . . establish a well organized militia, and, in one sentence, put into effect the measures which you have recommended. I shall give Congress my honest opinion on this subject and I shall write to all my friends across the Atlantic as well.”
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When Lafayette returned to Paris, he resumed his role as America’s trade negotiator. When Nathanael Greene wrote for help selling timber from lands he had bought on Cumberland Island, Georgia, Lafayette sold the minister of the navy on the advantages of high-quality American timber in shipbuilding. Greene received an order for one thousand cubic feet of oak. Lafayette convinced a major French fur merchant to buy 400,000 livres of American furs from a group of former comrades in arms in Boston. Jefferson enlisted Lafayette’s aid in opening French markets to American tobacco, Virginia’s (and the Jefferson plantation’s) most important export. The
ferme’s
duties doubled the price of American tobacco and priced it out of French markets. “It is contrary to the spirit of trade,” Jefferson complained, “to carry a commodity to any market where but one person is allowed to buy it, and where, of course, that person fixes the prices.” He suggested reducing the
ferme’s
markup to 5 percent, which, he predicted, would so stimulate trade that the
ferme
and the king, as well as American planters and merchants, would reap more revenues. Although Lafayette made little headway on the tobacco issue, he used his all but daily assaults at Versailles to win concessions in other areas, using tactics similar to those he learned in the
Virginia campaign—attacking the tobacco issue and retreating after winning a concession on books; resuming the assault on the
ferme
over tobacco, but withdrawing when he won a concession on paper . . . then shrubs, trees, and seeds. He amazed Jefferson with the number of concessions he extracted from the French government—all without a sou of remuneration. Calling Lafayette “my most powerful auxiliary and advocate,” Jefferson told Madison, “his zeal is unbounded and his weight with those in power, great. His education having been merely military, commerce was an unknown field to him. But his good sense enabling him to comprehend perfectly whatever is explained to him, his agency has been very efficacious.”
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Indeed, Lafayette’s success in breaching French tariff walls increased American exports to France by one million livres. Years later, Jefferson would toast Lafayette at a dinner in Charlottesville and recall their days together in Paris, when Lafayette had made “our cause his own. His influence and connections were great. All doors of all departments were open to him at all times; to me only formally and at appointed times. In truth, I only held the nail, he drove it in.”
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Lafayette’s constant presence at Versailles not only strengthened the alliance between France and the United States, it strengthened Lafayette’s ties to the king, who sought to add luster to his dull image with Lafayette at his side. Louis was only slightly older than Lafayette, but they had attended riding school together, and shared common interests in history, geography, political science, and military strategy. Despite Lafayette’s radical ideas for social reform, Louis XVI enjoyed his company and invited him constantly to dine and play cards at all his palaces—Versailles, Marly, the Tuileries, Fontainebleau, and Compiègne. Whenever Lafayette broached issues of social reform such as religious toleration for Protestants and manumission, the indecisive king simply sighed and said nothing. The king invited Lafayette to spend three days with him, inaugurating a huge new engineering project to expand the port at Cherbourg. Not only was Lafayette on the royal barge in the harbor, he rode back to Paris with the king in the royal coach—a conspicuous honor usually reserved for heads of state, but one which Louis gladly proffered to “the friend of Washington.” Louis considered Lafayette his personal link to the New World and gave Lafayette three Maltese donkeys and some pheasants and partridges from the royal aviary to send to Washington as a personal gift. Although the birds “drooped and died,” Washington interbred the donkeys with the Spanish asses Lafayette had sent earlier and produced a new breed of draft and carriage animal he named Compound.
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With the king unwilling to respond on the abolition issue, Lafayette acted on his own. He purchased a 125,000-livre sugarcane plantation, worked by slaves, in Cayenne, French Guyana, and, as he explained to Henry Knox, began “the experiment for enfranchising our Negro brethren. God grant that
it may be propagated.”
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Lafayette sent a young engineer–social scientist to take charge of La Belle Gabrielle, as the plantation was called, and to established a program of education and gradual emancipation. He forbade the sale of any slaves, paid each slave according to his production, introduced literacy programs and schooling for the children, and applied rules and punishment equally to blacks and whites. Adrienne and her mother, the duchesse d’Ayen, both embraced the project, with Adrienne arranging for seminarians in Cayenne to educate the slaves and their children.

“My mother had a deep need to propagate good and was horrified by all injustice,” Virginie explained. “She was thrilled by my father’s decision to work for abolition of the slave trade. When he bought La Belle Gabrielle, her zealous belief in just and liberal ideas made her search ardently for means to put those ideas into immediate practice. My father gave her a large part of the responsibility for the enterprise, in which she believed education was the primary need.”
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In the years that followed, Lafayette added lands to the plantation and ordered his superintendent to acquire more slaves to emancipate. Adrienne remained in constant touch with the seminarians to improve education. “If only we still had her correspondence,” her daughter lamented. “We would see the good work she had started and that she planned continuing.”
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Lafayette’s Cayenne project moved Washington to write, “The goodness of your heart displays itself in all circumstances, and I am never surprised when you give new proofs of it; your acquisition of a plantation in Cayenne, with a view to emancipating the slaves, is a generous and noble proof of your humanity. God grant that a similar spirit will animate all the people of this country! but I despair of ever seeing that happen. A few petitions for the abolition of slavery were presented to the last session of the [Virginia] assembly, but they barely obtained a reading. Sudden emancipation would bring many evils, I believe; but certainly it could be, it should be accomplished gradually and by legislative authority.”
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In September 1786, Houdon returned from America and completed the busts of Washington and Lafayette for Jefferson to present as gifts from the state of Virginia to the city of Paris. Before the ceremony, Jefferson fell and broke his wrist, and William Short, a Jefferson protégé from Virginia who served as secretary of the American legation, presented the statues, crowned in laurel wreaths, for placement among the busts of French kings and other great men in the Grande Salle of the Hôtel de Ville, or city hall. As the illustrious audience cheered, Adrienne heard Short hail her husband as a “Knight of liberty” and “hero of two worlds.”
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