Lafayette (65 page)

Adrienne set about her tasks the following morning, with sixteen-year-old Virginie at her side. Her weighty, edematous legs moved slowly over the uneven paving stones, each painful limp shunting her from side to side as she made her way to ministry after ministry, up and down endless flights of stairs, waiting hours on hallway benches for the chance to ask, argue with, beg, or bribe faceless clerks and officials to recover her rightful inheritance. But the answer was always the same: a shrug of regret and another form to fill for submission to another clerk at another ministry, across another courtyard, up another staircase to another hallway bench. The futile exercise continued until the end of the year—and, ironically, actually helped her rebuild strength and recover her health, if not her lands.

In January, Lafayette received a letter from Washington that was even more discouraging than Hamilton’s. By then, Congress had formally repealed all its treaties with France, and the two nations had stepped up their undeclared naval war to all-out naval hostilities. Washington tried to explain the American position:

While [French] agents constantly uttered the word peace and pretended that they did not want to involve us in their quarrel with Great Britain, they took steps here which would inevitably lead to war. . . . They were guilty of violating treaties, international law and all the rules of justice and decency. But they fooled only themselves . . . for once the citizens of this country recognized the nature of the quarrel [with France], they rose up as one, they offered their services, their lives, their fortunes to defend the government they had chosen. . . . They have pledged, if the French should try to invade . . . to repel such an attack.

You mentioned that the Directory is disposed to resolve our differences. . . . If that is the case, let them prove so with deeds! Simple words will have no effect at present. . . . The tactic of France . . . has been to assume that those who work for peace acted because of ties to Great Britain. You can rest assured that this assertion rests on no foundation and has no other goal but to excite public clamor against men of peace. . . . Once harmony is restored with France, no one would receive you with more open arms and more ardent affection than I. But it would be less than honest and altogether contrary to the friendship that I have for you to say that I want you to arrive before then . . . the scenes you would witness,
the role you might be forced to play . . . would place you in an untenable position. . . .

I hope Madame de Lafayette will succeed on her voyage to France, and that she will return in a better state of health. Please accept my congratulations on the marriage of your older daughter. Give them both and Virginia my most affectionate regards. I have written to George; Mrs. Washington joins me, as would the rest of the family if they were here. We wish you all the blessings that this life can offer, in compensation for your sufferings.

I would add what you already know, that it is with the most sincere friendship and the warmest esteem, that I remain, etc.

“G. Washington.”
¹¹

Lafayette was crestfallen; Washington’s letter shattered his dream of becoming an American in the land whose liberty he had helped assure. The two nations he loved most—his native land and his adopted land—had both rejected him. Overwhelmed by loneliness, he longed for Adrienne and his daughters. Anastasie was expecting her first child in February, and Charles had leased a country house at Vianen, not far from Utrecht. With the help of a member of the Directory who had been a Fayettiste, Adrienne was able to get Lafayette a passport to Holland, and the family reunited at Vianen a few weeks before Anastasie gave birth to twin girls—Lafayette’s first grandchildren.

In May, Lafayette accepted the inevitable and replied to Washington: “Your opinion, my dear general, is as it has always been for me, an immense influence. I know your paternal heart cannot wait to embrace me, and yet you turn me away from the voyage that would give us both so much pleasure.”
¹²
In fact, the undeclared war between the United States and France had intensified—as had the wars, both undeclared and declared, between France and just about every other nation in the Atlantic, European, and Mediterranean worlds. Although the American navy had fought the French to a stalemate by trading victories in the Caribbean and Atlantic, other nations were less fortunate. The French had swept down the Italian peninsula through Rome and Naples, while the French fleet in the Mediterranean had seized Malta from the British and carried Napoléon’s armies into Egypt.

Adrienne returned to Paris, this time with George, who, she believed, might intimidate government clerks more than Virginie. With Anastasie still nursing her twins, Lafayette had little to do but plant a cottage garden and relive the past. He had not realized how dependent he had grown on Adrienne in prison: “I am sad and all alone,” he wrote to her, “and even though this separation is no different from last year it takes less to make me feel pained. I am already impatient to see you and impatient for our reunion. . . .
I hope it will not be three months before you return. . . . Adieu, my darling Adrienne, my heart longs for you, worships you, and loves you tenderly.”
¹³

Without George to prod him, Lafayette lost patience with his
Mémoires
— struggling to remember what he may have said or written, never certain, and, in the end, always writing the same, long, tiresome paean for American liberty. Even he now realized that the ruthless advance of French forces was as unrelated to the rights of man and the French Revolution he had fostered as the French crusades had been to Christianity at the beginning of the millennium. Napoléon and the French armies were enslaving every conquered people, converting each nation into vassal states and looting their treasure. Boatloads of gold, silver, jewelry, tapestries, statuary, paintings, and other stolen treasure sailed into French harbors from all parts of the Mediterranean. Paris became the greatest repository of stolen European, Egyptian, and Middle Eastern art in the world.

By mid-1799, Adrienne had become so adept at law—and in bureaucratic thinking—that she reacquired full ownership of La Grange, along with a French passport and restoration of citizenship for her son-in-law, Charles de La Tour-Maubourg, and his brother Victor. George returned to Vianen to look after his father, whose loneliness for his wife had turned to despondency: “I was thinking very sadly but tenderly of you the day before yesterday, my dear Adrienne, when suddenly George entered my room. . . . When will we see the entire family together again?

“George and I have spent the time since yesterday planning a farm for you; either in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley, in the back country of the state of Virginia, not far from
Federal-City
and Mount Vernon, or in the beautiful prairies of New England, within reach of Boston, for which you know my predilection.”
¹⁴

On September 6, 1799, Lafayette turned forty-two, and two weeks later reminded Adrienne, “It is two years today, dear Adrienne, since we left the prison to which you came, bringing me consolation and life. . . . How can we arrange our spending the winter together?”
¹⁵

Unfortunately, the recovery of her title to La Grange did not end Adrienne’s work in Paris; she still faced the task of removing her husband’s name from the list of émigrés, restoring his citizenship and titles to his lands. In mid-October Bonaparte returned to France with another shipload of looted art. All Paris turned out to cheer his arrival, and, while he bathed buoyantly in adulation, Adrienne stepped forward smartly and offered to add to his laurels by personally presenting the collective praises of the Prisoners of Olmütz if he would grant her an audience to do so. It was an offer he could not resist. Now a master politician, Adrienne arrived with seventeen-year-old Virginie dressed to perfection as a picture of abused innocence. After
presenting her compliments, Adrienne elicited the pronouncement she had sought: “Your husband’s life,” Bonaparte declared, “is bound to the preservation of the republic.”
¹⁶

Adrienne sent Lafayette an urgent message to dispatch an obsequious letter to Napoléon—immediately! Ironically, it was she who now commanded the family’s struggles: she managed the family’s finances; she, not Lafayette, was in touch with the world’s political and social realities. “Here is my letter for Bonaparte,” he answered obediently. “I have followed your advice about making it short.”

“My love of liberty and our nation,” Lafayette wrote to Bonaparte, “would have been enough to fill me with joy and hope at your arrival in France. To my concern for the public good, I add an enthusiastic and profound appreciation for my liberator. The welcome that you gave the prisoners of Olmütz has been reported to me by her whose life I owe to you; I rejoice in my obligations to you, Citizen General, and in the happy conviction that to applaud your glory and hope for your success is a civic duty as well as an act of attachment and gratitude.”
¹⁷

Although he followed Adrienne’s advice to the letter, he still lived in the past, with visions of a France that would never be: “Meanwhile, my darling Adrienne,” he asked pathetically, “what should I do . . . to lend my influence . . . to reestablish the doctrine of liberty?”
¹⁸

Adrienne’s sense of timing could not have been better. On November 9, ten days after she delivered her husband’s letter to Bonaparte, the Corsican staged another coup d’état, suspending the constitution, dismissing the legislature, and establishing dictatorial rule under a three-man, Roman-style Consulate, with himself as First Consul. Of the previous government, only the political chameleon Talleyrand remained at his post as foreign affairs minister. The quick-thinking Adrienne took advantage of the confusion in other ministries, however, to obtain a passport with an assumed name for her husband and sent a family friend racing north to Holland with instructions to return to France immediately.

“A couple of hours later I was on my way,” Lafayette wrote in his memoirs.
¹⁹

After he arrived in Paris, Adrienne urged him to notify Bonaparte and Talleyrand. Bonaparte flew into a rage, and Talleyrand demanded that Lafayette return to Holland immediately, but Adrienne believed the two were simply posing. She recognized it would be too impolitic even for Bonaparte to discard the political benefits as “liberator of the Prisoners of Olmütz” by expelling Lafayette—especially while trying to consolidate his control of a shaky new government that had seized power illegally. To solidify his own political foundation, Napoléon needed, above all, to reconcile the feuding
political factions that divided France—royalists, Jacobins, and Fayettiste republicans. All could still organize enough street riots to threaten almost any government. Adrienne offered Bonaparte a diplomatic solution he could not refuse. Lafayette would pledge his support to Bonaparte, then disappear from public life and retire to obscurity as a gentleman farmer at the Noailles family’s Château de La Grange, in the isolated countryside of Brie, seventy-five miles east of Paris.

Bonaparte saluted Adrienne’s astonishing political skills and courage before dictating terms to her. “I am proud to know you, Madame,” he told her. “You have a great deal of character and intelligence. But you may not fully understand the situation. The arrival of Monsieur de La Fayette embarrasses me. . . . You may not understand me, Madame, but General La Fayette, finding himself no longer in the center of things, will understand me. . . . I implore him, therefore, to avoid all political activities. I rely on his patriotism.”
²⁰
Bonaparte agreed to let Lafayette stay in France, but he would remain so illegally, still officially an émigré in exile, without French citizenship, and subject to summary arrest. If Lafayette refrained from all political activities, however, Napoléon pledged eventually to restore his citizenship. Adrienne understood completely and hustled her husband off to the obscurity of Brie.

With Lafayette’s embarrassing presence removed, Napoléon moved swiftly to consolidate his power. Under his direction, the Consulate replaced the previous, meaningless French constitutions with a new, meaningless constitution—much shorter than the others, but nevertheless labeled “constitution.” It omitted the rights of man, liberty, equality, and fraternity. Although it created a bicameral legislature of sorts, it gave the First Consul exclusive legislative and executive powers: only he could initiate laws; only he could nominate ministers, generals, civil servants, and judges. In December 1799, a staged plebiscite approved Bonaparte’s new Consulate and constitution and officially ended the French Revolution. In effect, it set the French political clock back a century to the era of Louis XIV, creating a military dictatorship where a monarchical dictatorship had once reigned, but it restored peace and personal security to the nation for the first time in more than a decade, and, if the plebiscite was any indication, the vast majority approved. With bayonets at every polling station, they had little choice.