Lafayette (67 page)

An unexpected visit in April lifted Lafayette’s and Adrienne’s spirits to euphoric levels: James Monroe arrived unexpectedly, having come as the special envoy of President Thomas Jefferson to negotiate the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France. Napoléon had acquired the territory from Spain in 1800, in hopes of restoring the French empire in North America, but President Jefferson issued a thinly veiled threat of war, and Napoléon agreed to sell it and focus his empire-building efforts in Europe. Monroe had not seen Lafayette in twenty years and Adrienne in nine. Normally austere, he could not resist the enveloping embrace and tears of Adrienne, who could only think of him and his wife as her angelic redeemers. Monroe’s visit proved as providential financially for the Lafayettes as it was emotional. Congress had allocated tens of thousands of acres in the Ohio Territory to veterans of the Revolutionary War and assigned Lafayette 11,500 acres on the banks of the Ohio River. Although there was no question of the Lafayettes emigrating, Adrienne asked whether the land could be used to generate income, and Monroe agreed to act as an intermediary to secure a sizable loan against the property at low interest from a London bank, Baring Brothers. The loan allowed the Lafayettes to wipe out all their debts, including the old Morris loan. In effect, they were solvent for the first time since the Jacobin Revolution, with their only obligation secured by their own unneeded property in America. Monroe had once again proved an angelic friend to the Lafayettes.

After Lafayette returned to La Grange, he refused to let his injury prevent him from supervising his farm and gardens. Every morning, his family helped him to a cushioned chaise longue by the window of his library, where he shouted instructions to his foreman and workers through a megaphone.

Late in the year, Lafayette received a letter from President Thomas Jefferson, asking him to become governor of the new territory of Louisiana to ensure a bond between the local French and American populations. “I would prefer your presence to an army of 10,000 men to assure the tranquillity of the country,” Jefferson wrote. “The old French inhabitants would immediately attach themselves to you and to the United States. You would annul the efforts of the foreign agitators who are arriving in droves.”
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To make the invitation more attractive, Jefferson decreed a transfer of Lafayette’s Ohio land grant to a far more valuable parcel in Louisiana that would guarantee Lafayette immense wealth to complement the fame and power he would obtain as governor of America’s largest single territory. Congress had approved the appointment, and Jefferson assured Lafayette that his “great services and established fame” had made him “peculiarly acceptable to the nation at large.”
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True to form, Lafayette again rejected an opportunity for power. He found all sorts of excuses to postpone his decision. Italy had just rebelled
against French rule, he explained to Jefferson, and his son and two sons-in-law had been called to military service. Adrienne and he were responsible for caring for his daughters and their two children, and for George’s wife, who had just given birth to a little girl. Moreover, with his son and sons-in-law in the military, he feared, with good reason, that his departure and renunciation of allegiance to France would expose them and the rest of his family to harsh government retaliation—not to mention his own possible arrest and imprisonment if French vessels stopped his ship on the way to America.

He nevertheless did not want to reject forever the chance for asylum in America. After debating for more than six months, he wrote to Jefferson a second time:

I cannot continue without expressing my deep appreciation to Congress and to you. You, my dear friend, have seen my hopes for French and American liberty; you shared those hopes. The cause of humanity has been victorious and been reaffirmed in America; nothing can stop it anymore, or displace it or tarnish its progress. Here, it is deemed irrevocably lost, but for me to pronounce this sentence and to do so through expatriation goes against my hopeful character. I cannot see how, unless some force placed me in physical constraints, I could abandon even the smallest hope. . . . I tell myself that I, the promoter of the revolution, I must not recognize the impossibility of seeing reestablished, during our lifetime, a just and generous liberty, American liberty.

Now that I have opened my heart to you, will it seem unreasonable to you or ungrateful to defer a decision that will force me to bid a formal adieu to Europe and establish a definitive tie to America.
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But Jefferson could no longer wait, and, in fact, Jefferson knew Lafayette so intimately that he had already dismissed the idea of appointing him, recognizing that Lafayette’s roots stretched too far and deep in his native land ever to abandon it.

Just as Jefferson reached out to Lafayette, Napoléon made a similar gesture by awarding him the Legion of Honor and an appointment as a Peer of the Realm in the Senate—an honor that carried no responsibilities and was equivalent to a seat in the British House of Lords. “I replied to members of the government and to Bonaparte himself,” Lafayette told Jefferson, “that I am determined to live in complete retirement.”
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In fact, Lafayette had other reasons for rejecting the emperor’s awards. “I would have accepted eagerly,” he confided to a friend in Paris, “under a democratic regime in which a senate seat would have given me the occasional opportunity to serve the principles of liberty and my country.”
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Lafayette’s rejection left the sensitive emperor deeply insulted. He retaliated by blocking the army promotions of Lafayette’s son and sons-in-law, despite the highest recommendations
of their commanders, who cited their gallant service. Indeed, George suffered a minor wound saving the life of his general.

Adrienne was not unhappy with either of Lafayette’s decisions, nor did Lafayette have any regrets. Both had tired of political intrigues. Both wanted nothing more than to share each other’s love and companionship in the peace and beauty of their magnificent estate at Château de La Grange, surrounded by their children and grandchildren, their relatives and in-laws, and the stream of friends and neighbors that flowed through their huge home. In 1804, Virginie added another granddaughter to the burgeoning Lafayette household—her first child and the Lafayettes’ fourth grandchild. With so large a family at La Grange, neither Adrienne nor her knight had any reason to return to Paris; he had no political or military agendae, and she had straightened out the family finances in brilliant fashion to ensure their comfort for the remainder of their lives. Moreover, he had found a calling he loved in agriculture: his innovations in animal husbandry and land management had made La Grange so profitable that he was able to buy adjoining lands and expand his estate without dipping into capital. He priced all produce himself, sending enormous cartloads to market each day. The only sadness that intruded in their lives was the inevitable news that a friend or relative had died. Their brother-in-law the vicomte de Noailles was killed fighting a slave rebellion in Haiti, and not long thereafter, Lafayette learned that he had lost another friend, whom he considered a brother: Alexander Hamilton had died of a bullet wound in a duel with Aaron Burr in New Jersey.

“The deplorable death of my friend Hamilton hurt me deeply,” he wrote Jefferson for solace. “I am sure that, regardless of the differences between your two parties, you always admired him and feel his loss as deeply as I.”
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The Lafayettes kept the gates of La Grange open at all times, and travelers inevitably peeked in to stare at the famous hero who chatted amiably with strangers about America, Indians, Washington, Cornwallis, and other exotic subjects. As his grandmother had done at Chavaniac, he permitted the less fortunate to glean whatever the reapers left in the fields, along with tree trimmings to burn in their ovens and hearths. He routinely forgave poachers who hunted on his property or chopped down trees to heat their homes.

In 1805, Russia and Austria joined Britain in a new coalition against France, but French armies swept northward through Austria and crushed a combined Austro-Russian army at the decisive battle of Austerlitz in Moravia (now the eastern part of the Czech Republic). Two days later Austria sued for peace, and the Russian army limped home to Mother Russia to lick its collective wounds. In 1806, Napoléon destroyed the Prussian army at Iéna and extended the French Empire eastward to Warsaw. With peace
apparently at hand, with no chance for promotion, and with their military commitments complete, George-Washington Lafayette and the two Lafayette sons-in-law resigned their commissions. Although Lafayette grumbled at the emperor’s pettiness, Adrienne rejoiced to have the boys home safely; she wanted no more knights in the family and reveled in the presence of the three young couples and their children, all of whom made La Grange their permanent home.

“The rest of her precious life was consecrated to us,” Virginie recounted. “She felt too deep, too passionate a love for family life to want any other type of existence. Neither the grandeur that she had witnessed nor the fame seen close up provoked as much happiness as her simple existence [at La Grange]. She filled her entire life with love.”
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Filling one’s life with love was not difficult at La Grange: Lafayette had fashioned the estate into a self-contained, self-sufficient community, with ample supplies of every imaginable human need—even entertainment on Sunday evenings, with dancing to an abbé’s fiddle and picnics under the trees with neighbors and ever-present guests. Every day saw the justifiably proud Lafayette limp through the sheep pens, cow sheds, and dairy, leading a line of often-famous guests who feigned interest in his lectures on the latest scientific advances in agriculture and animal husbandry as they slogged and slid through ankle-deep animal wastes. The pride and admiration in the faces of his workmen, from the foremen to the youngest shepherd, mirrored that of his loyal foot soldiers in Virginia.

In August 1807, as Lafayette neared his fiftieth birthday, he and George went to visit Aunt Charlotte and inspect the Chavaniac properties. In their absence, Adrienne developed terrible pains and high fever; she began vomiting uncontrollably, unable to retain any food or liquid. Anastasie moved her to Madame de Tessé’s house in Paris to be near her doctor. In the days that followed, her fever increased. Lafayette and George raced up from Chavaniac, and the rest of the family came from La Grange. Lafayette refused to leave her bedside.

“Is it not indiscreet for so many of us to be here?” she asked him.

“No, not at all,” he smiled. “We are only sixteen to feed.” When she pleaded with him to spend some time with the others, he protested, “I have nothing else to do but to care for you.”
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In the days that followed, the pain increased and she drifted in and out of comatose sleep. “God and my father occupied all her thoughts during those last moments,” Virginie recalled. “It is impossible to understand how much she meant to him and he to her, even in the midst of her delirium, in total silence; their faces were portraits of infinite tenderness and devotion.

“On Christmas night, at midnight, in the year 1807, we lost her. She had blessed us all that morning. That evening, her last words to us were,
‘I am not suffering.’ Then she looked at my father and whispered: ‘I am yours entirely.’”—
“Je suis toute à vous.”
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Adrienne’s death plunged Lafayette into depression. She was only forty-eight years old; he only fifty. With Washington gone; Greene, Hamilton— all those he loved—gone, he had no one to turn to for solace among his old friends but Jefferson, who had lost his own wife two years before coming to Paris: “Who better than you can sympathize for the loss of a beloved wife? The angel who for thirty-four years has blessed my life was to you an affectionate, grateful friend. Pity me, my dear Jefferson.”
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In January, he unburdened himself to La Tour-Maubourg, a Masonic brother who had experienced the horrors of Olmütz and whose younger brother had married Anastasie. Day after day he wrote—revealing himself as he had never done before, on more than fifty manuscript pages. “Until now,” he admitted, “you have always seen me able to overcome circumstances; today, circumstance is stronger than I. I will never recover.

“For thirty-four years of a marriage in which her love, her goodness, the greatness, the tenderness, the goodness of her soul honored my life, I grew so accustomed to all that she was for me that she became an indistinguishable element of my own existence. . . . I knew I loved her a great deal, that I needed her, but it is only in losing her that I have been able to separate myself from what is left of me for the rest of a life which had once seemed to me so full and will now forever be empty of happiness and comfort.”
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Lafayette buried Adrienne in a corner of the Picpus cemetery, where, somewhere beneath the earth nearby, lay the martyred bodies of her sister, mother, and grandmother and thirteen hundred other innocents. He returned to La Grange and walled up the entrance to her apartment. It remained as she had left it, untouched for the rest of his life—an inviolable sanctuary, penetrated by only a small, secret door through which he alone disappeared on certain days of the year to be with her.