Lafayette (63 page)

“The price of my health care,” she replied defiantly, “is not acceptable. I have not forgotten that while we faced death—I from Robespierre’s tyranny, Monsieur de Lafayette from the moral and physical sufferings of his imprisonment—his children and I were unable to obtain any news about him nor was he able to learn whether we were still even alive. I will not again expose myself to such horrors by another separation.

“Whatever the state of my health and the discomfort for my daughters, we will share every moment of this imprisonment with full appreciation for His Majesty’s kindness.”
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And, as usual, she signed her letter with the aristocratic signature “Noailles Lafayette.” As Lafayette would later write of her with pride, “What a brave, but foolish heart to remain almost the only woman in France compromised by her name who refused to change it.”
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Adrienne’s illness worsened, with swelling and edema depriving her of motion in both arms. Fever plunged her into long periods of restless sleep. When she awoke and saw her husband and daughters hovering about her anxiously, a smile inevitably crossed her face. “Despite her suffering,” Virginie recalled, “she seemed happier than she had ever been. It is hard for me to describe how happy she was. To understand, you have to recognize the fear she had lived with for so long—during the frequent separations and endless adventures that took my father away from home into great danger. She had spent the previous three horrible years almost without hope of ever finding him again. Now her lifelong dream was fulfilled. Each day, she saw the influence of her presence on my father’s health and all the comfort her presence provided him. She was surprised to recover her ability to feel so happy and even felt somewhat guilty knowing that it came at the expense of keeping my father prisoner.”
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Adrienne’s illness—and her bold refusal to abandon her husband— raised the level of worldwide debate over the Prisoners of Olmütz to fever pitch. Even President Washington, the apostle of American neutrality, abandoned diplomatic discretion. He was in the last year of his second term as president and planned to retire. Dispensing with diplomatic caution, he sent a personal note instructing Pinckney in London “to make known to the
Austrian Ambassador” the American president’s desire to see his friend Lafayette set free. “I need hardly mention how much my sensibility has been hurt by the treatment this Gentleman has met with; or how anxious I am to see him liberated therefrom.”
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In May, he ignored the lack of formal diplomatic relations with Austria and sent a personal, handwritten letter to the Austrian emperor:

It will readily occur to your Majesty that occasions may sometimes exist, on which official considerations would constrain the Chief of a Nation to be silent and passive, in relation to objects which affect his sensibility, and claim his interposition, as a man. Finding myself precisely in this situation at present, I take the liberty of writing this
private
letter to Your Majesty, being persuaded that my motives will also be my apology for it.

In common with the People of this Country, I retain a strong and cordial sense of the services rendered to them by the Marquis de la Fayette; and my friendship for him has been constant and sincere. It is natural therefore that I should sympathize with him and his family in their misfortunes, and endeavor to mitigate the calamities which they experience, among which his present confinement is not the least distressing.

I forbear to enlarge on this delicate subject. Permit me only to submit to your majesty’s consideration whether his long imprisonment and the confiscation of his Estate and the indigence and dispersion of his family— and the painful anxieties incident to all these circumstances, do not form an assemblage of sufferings, which recommend him to the mediation of Humanity? Allow me, Sir! on this occasion to be its organ; and to ask that he may be permitted to come to this country, on such conditions and under such restrictions, as your Majesty may think it expedient to prescribe.
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A torrent of letters flowed to Vienna, from England as well as America, from political leaders, men and women of letters, and ordinary citizens, but, like Washington’s letter, they had no effect—and Adrienne’s health continued to deteriorate by the day. “Because of the condition of my blood and the excessively unsanitary conditions of this prison,” she wrote to Robert Parish, the American consul at Hamburg, “my arms have been for some time unbelievably swollen, and my fingers incapable of movement. . . . My skin is peeling. . . . The pain, the impossibility of my closing my hands, and the spasms in my whole nervous system make my life more than a little disagreeable.”
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Under increasing pressure from the American public, Congress instructed Gouverneur Morris to go to Vienna to negotiate Lafayette’s release. He reached Vienna in September, but waited three months before the Austrian chancellor granted him an interview, prefacing it with a disdainful statement that Morris had no standing at court. Austria, he grumbled, would not
negotiate with a nation with which it had no diplomatic ties and which was an ally of France, with whom Austria was at war. He did, however, admit that Lafayette’s situation had become an embarrassment—and noted that England was Austria’s ally. “If England were to ask us for Lafayette,” he declared, “we would be all too happy to rid ourselves of him.”
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Knowing that Adrienne’s condition was worsening, Morris rushed word to London Fayettistes, who forced a vote in Parliament—but lost, 132 to 52.

The saga of the Prisoners of Olmütz continued into the new year— behind the dungeon walls in Austria and in the pages of periodicals in the world beyond. Fayettistes were gaining more influence in the French legislature and in the salons of power. “We must return La Fayette to France and to the Republic,” Madame de Staël, the renowned French author, wrote to a member of the Directory. “I guarantee that he will be the best citizen—after you, of course.”
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In May 1797, the Directory yielded, deciding it could enhance its own popular support by freeing the Prisoners of Olmütz. It instructed Napoléon Bonaparte, commander in chief of the French army in Italy, to demand Lafayette’s release in peace discussions then under way between Austria and France. Napoléon’s army had humiliated Austrian forces in Italy, seized Venice, and encamped seventy miles away from Vienna, poised to capture the capital and crush the rest of Austria. “Obtain, as a condition, if you can, the freedom of La Fayette, Bureaux de Pusy and La Tour-Maubourg,” said the order to Bonaparte. “The national honor is at stake in their release from prison, where they are held only because they started the [French] Revolution.”
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The French demand was nothing short of blackmail. Napoléon was not a man to be denied. With each conquest, he exacted reparations that covered French military costs and not only enriched France but stripped the nations he conquered of their wealth. Envisioning a French guillotine in the courtyard of the magnificent Schönbrunn Palace and all its art transferred to the Louvre in Paris, the Austrian emperor sued for peace. On July 24, an Austrian officer arrived at Olmütz from Vienna and entered Lafayette’s cell with a court decree: “Because Monsieur de Lafayette is regarded as author of a new doctrine whose principles are incompatible with the tranquillity of the Austrian monarch, His Majesty the emperor and king owes it to reasons of state not to restore his freedom until he pledges not to return to Austrian territory without special permission of the emperor.”
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Lafayette all but laughed: “The emperor does me honor by treating me as one power to another and by believing that as a simple individual I am so strong a threat to a vast monarchy with so many armies and devoted subjects.” Lafayette rejected the emperor’s terms, saying he had been arrested and imprisoned illegally. “I have no wish ever again to set foot in the court
of the emperor or in his country even with his permission, but I owe it to my principles to refuse to recognize that the Austrian government has any right over me.” Moreover, he demanded that the Austrians release his comrades La Tour-Maubourg and Bureaux de Pusy and their aides.
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Lafayette’s intransigence was ill-timed and almost cost him, his family, and his friends years of additional imprisonment. A royalist counterrevolution had broken out again in France, and Napoléon pulled a division of troops from the Austrian front and returned to France to crush internal dissent. His emissary broke off negotiations for Lafayette’s release to await further instructions. Before returning to Austria, Napoléon helped stage a coup d’état that replaced the Directory with a three-man junta that added political powers to Napoléon’s military powers. At Napoléon’s suggestion, the “New Directory” decreed five years of universal compulsory military service for all twenty-year-old men in France. The decree not only expanded the army and gave Napoléon free rein to conquer foreign lands, it removed the most rebellious elements from the streets of French cities and scattered them across the face of Europe, where they could no longer threaten the French government.
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When negotiations resumed for Lafayette’s release, the new French régime made it clear he was no more welcome in France than in Austria. His fervor for constitutional, republican rule threatened the New Directory as much as it had the Austrian emperor. Napoléon himself saw Lafayette as a threat to his own growing popularity. The French and the Austrians soon agreed that the solution lay in exiling Lafayette from Europe in America. They opened negotiations with Robert Parish, the American consul at Hamburg, then an independent city state with commercial ties to the United States and an important funnel for American trade to midcontinent countries like Prussia and Austria with no formal relations with the United States. Gouverneur Morris was in Hamburg on business and helped Parish negotiate America’s agreement to receive “the entire caravan of La Fayettes, wife, children and their companions” at the consulate and assure their departure within twelve days—presumably to America.
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On September 19, 1797, five years and a month after the Austrians had taken Lafayette prisoner and twenty-three months after Adrienne, Anastasie, and Virginie had joined him, an Austrian major led the Lafayette family and their friends out of Olmütz on the road to Hamburg, four hundred miles to the northwest. Crowds hailed them along the way with cheers, flowers, and expressions of sympathy. Messengers intercepted them with pleas from Paris Fayettistes to return and seize power from the Directory. “I might have exploited popular enthusiasm, the devotion of the National Guard and all that for my own profit,” he recalled, but he was unwilling to violate his principles by seizing power unconstitutionally.
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Two weeks later, the caravan reached the banks of the Elbe River, across from Hamburg. To his and his family’s amazement, American ships clogged the harbor, with flags flying high in his honor. An American captain invited them to dine on board, and it was late afternoon before American sailors rowed them from the ship to the Hamburg side of the river. Robert Parish stood in front of a cheering crowd to greet them and lead them to the consulate, where the two Lafayettes collapsed on a sofa and sobbed uncontrollably. The French knight seemed a broken man. When he finally found the strength to stand, he embraced Parish and sobbed, “My friend, my dearest friend, my deliverer! See the work of your generosity. My poor, poor wife.” Prison life had eroded Adrienne’s beauty and aristocratic bearing. She had not yet turned forty, but her hair had grayed, the hauteur of her cheeks and forehead had collapsed; her once-graceful alabaster limbs had swollen out of shape into thick, scarlet, scabrous appendages. Moved to tears himself, Parish retreated to his study and sent word to Morris, who came with the Austrian minister to effect the official transfer of the prisoners to American custody.
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The Lafayettes had little rest during the few days permitted them in Hamburg. Lafayette, Maubourg, and Pusy visited the French consul, who offered them Foreign Minister Talleyrand’s promise of passports to France if they pledged allegiance to the New Directory. Once a member of Lafayette’s liberal Society of Thirty, the wily chameleon had survived the Terror by fleeing to America, where he made a small fortune speculating in finance before returning to France to serve Napoléon. Lafayette and the others sent a dutiful message of thanks to Napoléon:

Citizen general,

The prisoners of Olmütz, fortunate in owing their deliverance to the benevolence of their nation and to your irresistible military strength, rejoiced, while in captivity, in the knowledge that their liberty and their lives were tied to the victories of the Republic and to your personal glory. Today, they rejoice in the homage they wish to pay to their liberator.
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After signing the letter with the others, Lafayette remained true to his principles, however, and refused to swear allegiance to the new government, which had come to power by unconstitutional means. Infuriated by Lafayette’s rejection, Talleyrand ordered Lafayette’s lands in Brittany, hitherto untouched, sold at public auction. At forty-one, Lafayette was not only deeply in debt, but the sale of his last properties left him a pauper, without income, without property, and without a country.

After nearly two weeks, Adrienne was still too weak and ill to voyage to America, and the Lafayette caravan crossed into Denmark, where, fifty miles
to the north, Adrienne’s aunt, the comtesse de Tessé, had purchased a large estate at Witmold, on the north shore of Lake Ploën. Adrienne’s sister Pauline and her husband, who had fled to England during the Terror, had joined the countess and were waiting when the Lafayettes arrived—as were surviving members of the La Tour-Maubourg and Bureaux de Pusy families. To Adrienne’s distress, one surviving member of the Noailles family was absent: her father, the duc d’Ayen—now the duc de Noailles, since his father’s death. Still in exile in Switzerland, he sent his daughter a clumsy, almost distant letter that only added to her pain when he explained the reason for his absence: he had remarried. The new duchesse de Noailles sent a note welcoming Adrienne back from prison and expressing hope that her father’s remarriage would not pain her. Too devout a Roman Catholic to countenance her father’s remarriage—and too devoted to her mother— Adrienne was devastated and replied in uncharacteristically bitter tones: