Lafayette (77 page)

20.
Now called the Lycée Louis le Grand (Louis the Great [Louis XIV] High School), the school still stands on its original site and is the equivalent of an American “magnet” high school, a public school open only to those with the highest scores on a series of competitive examinations—in effect, limiting its student body to the most intellectually gifted children in Paris. The school, across the rue Saint-Jacques from the Sorbonne, has interior gardens that rank among the most beautiful in Paris, but they are not open to the public.

21.
Ibid.

22.
The
livre
, literally
pound
, was the unit of French currency, as the franc is today. Officially called the
livre tournois
because it was minted in the city of Tours, the livre was a gold coin that was subdivided into twenty
sols
, or coins, which later came to be called
sous
. The purchasing power of the eighteenth-century livre was equal to about one-tenth of a modern U.S. dollar. (Source: 1999–2000 Britannica.com Inc.)

23.
Charavay, 535.

24.
The House of Bourbon was the ruling royal family of France. The quotation was that of John Adams, in Charles Francis Adams, ed.,
The Works of John Adams
(Boston, 1851), III:149–150.

25.
Originally signifying a type of carbine whose barrel seemed to spit fire like a dragon,
dragoon (dragon
, in French) was later applied to a heavily armed mounted soldier carrying such weaponry.

26.
In the Middle Ages, each feudal estate had its own army, which the lord equipped and financed himself, and which was bound to serve the king at the latter’s request. The practice continued into the late eighteenth century, with many regiments in
the king’s army still under the patronage—and often the command—of nobles such as the duc d’Ayen.

27.
Most of the huge Hôtel de Noailles was destroyed during the many revolutions that raged in Paris during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The front and rear façades of the central portion of the once palatial structure, however, still stand and are incorporated in the Saint James & Albany Hotel on the rue de Rivoli. Visitors may view the rear façade from the open-air tea garden in the central courtyard. The front façade is visible from the gateway on the rue Saint-Honoré. Prior to the French Revolution, the Hôtel de Noailles was one of the social centers of Paris, far more than the seldom-used Palais des Tuileries across the park. In addition to hosting balls there, the d’Ayens hosted major concerts by such luminaries as Austria’s renowned boy pianist Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who stayed at the Hôtel de Noailles with his father, Leopold, for at least a week. One musicologist claims that Wolfgang composed two
Noailles Sonatas
for piano during his visit, but I have been unable to substantiate the claim in either the Köchel listings or
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
.

The nearby Tuileries Palace, which Communards destroyed in the riots of 1871, stretched north to south across the Tuileries Gardens, connecting each of two pavilions that are now incorporated into the ends of the projecting arms of the Louvre Palace. Louis XIV had virtually abandoned it in favor of Versailles, which became the seat of most royal social and diplomatic functions and relegated the Tuileries Palace to a pied-à-terre in town, when, after attending a late-evening social function, the royal family was too tired for the trip back to the country.

28.
Vie de Madame de Lafayette par Mme. de Lasteyrie, sa Fille, précédée d’une Notice sur sa Mère Mme. la Duchesse d’Ayen
, 1737–1807 (Paris: Léon Techener Fils, 1868), 43. [Henceforth referred to as “Lasteyrie.”]

29.
Ibid., 12.

30.
Ibid., 43–44.

31.
Ibid., 45–46.

32.
Ibid., 48.

33.
A French
académie
was a school at the university level, offering, in addition to the standard academic curriculum, a range of training (dancing, fencing, riding, etc.) to finish every aspect of the nobleman’s education and produce a “compleat” courtier.

34.
Ibid.

35.
Brand Whitlock,
La Fayette
(New York: D. Appleton, 1929, 2 vols.), I:18.

36.
Comte Louis-Philippe de Ségur,
Mémoires ou souvenirs et anecdotes
(Paris, 1824– 1826, 3 vols.), I:109.

37.
Mémoires
, 11–12.

38.
Stanley J. Idzerda, ed.,
Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution, Selected Letters and Papers, 1776–1790
(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977–1983, 5 vols.), I:389. This citation is one of many not included in Lafayette’s published
Mémoires
, which his son, George-Washington de Lafayette, edited and expurgated after his father’s death. As Idzerda explains, Lafayette’s son eliminated many passages from his father’s original documents and letters to avoid tarnishing his father’s reputation and embarrassing surviving family members. Although there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of this particular citation—or, indeed, Idzerda’s scholarship—many works were published during Lafayette’s lifetime and after his death for the sole purpose of defaming him, for reasons that will become clear in Part II of this book.

39.
From fewer than a dozen lodges in 1740, the Freemasons in France had expanded to more than 550 lodges, with one hundred thousand members, by the mid-1770s—60 of them in Paris and 68 in the French Royal Army.

40.
Mémoires
, 12.

41.
Although there is some controversy over the identity of the lodge they joined, the most convincing evidence—from archival research at the central Grande Orient lodge in Paris—indicates it was Le Contrat Social, a particularly liberal lodge with an appropriate Rousseauvian name. Reference: “L’Initiation du Général Lafayette,”
Le Symbolisme, Organe Mensuel d’Inititation à la Philsophie du Grand Art de la Construction Universelle
(Paris: Direction et Administration, 1923), 246.

42.
Abbé Raynal’s seminal work was published in 1773 bearing the forbidding title
Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements du Commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes
(Paris, 1773).

43.
Raynal,
Histoire philosophique
. . . , 242 ff.

1.
Doniol, I:244. Vergennes detailed his proposal in what remains one of the most important documents in American history. Entitled
Réflexions
, it was the first policy paper on French intervention in the American Revolution. For the entire text of Vergennes’
Réflexions
, see Doniol, I:243–249.

2.
Ibid. After winning approval for his scheme, Vergennes turned to famed playwright Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–1799), the assumed name of Pierre-Augustin Caron, to head his secret new enterprise. Celebrated as a carefree bon vivant, Beaumarchais had long lived a double life as an unlikely and effective government spy. A master of intrigue, he was as addicted to participating in adventure, espionage, and speculation as he was to writing about them. Indeed, he was every bit as cunning and resourceful as Figaro, the fictional valet hero in his popular comedy,
Le Barbier de Séville (The Barber of Seville
), which had opened the 1775 Paris theater season. Backed by credits of 2 million livres (about $20 million in modern currency)—half from the king and half from the king’s uncle, Charles III of Spain—Beaumarchais established a company in the Spanish West Indies called Hortalès et Cie. to sell surplus French and Spanish arms, ammunition, and other war materiel to the Americans. Deane proved no match for the wily playwright, who sold the American surplus cannons, field pieces, muskets, mortars, powder, cannon and balls, tools, clothing, tents, and blankets worth less than 2 million livres for American whale oil, tobacco, and other products worth three times that amount. He pocketed a small fortune, earned his royal backers a return of twice their original investment, helped reduce the French national debt, and unloaded huge stocks of obsolete French arms and ammunitions. He described his shipments in a letter to Congress, of February 28, 1777: “Gentlemen, I have the honor to fit out for the service of Congress, by the way of Hispaniola, the ship
Amelia
, loaded with field and ordinance pieces, powder and leaden pigs. . . . This is the fourth ship I have addressed to you since December last; the other three have steered their course towards your eastern ports . . . the
Amphitrite
of 480 tons . . . loaded with cannons, muskets, tents, intrenching tools, tin, powder, clothing, etc. . . . the
Seine
. . . of 350 tons, loaded with muskets, tents, mortars, powder, tin, cannons, musket balls, etc. . . . the
Mercury
, of 317 tons . . . loaded with one
hundred tons of powder, 12,000 muskets, the remainder in cloth, linen, caps, shoes, stockings, blankets, and other necessary articles for the clothing of the troops.”

Beaumarchais wrote
Le Mariage de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro
), the decidedly antiaristocratic sequel to
Le Barbier de Séville
, in 1785, and Mozart transformed it into the opera
Le Nozze di Figaro
, which opened the following year. It was not until 1816 that the Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini converted
Le Barbier de Séville
into the popular opera
Il barbiere di Siviglia
. Beaumarchais’s life rivaled that of the scheming barber Figaro. The son of a watchmaker, he started out as an inventor, but legal actions over patents for one of his inventions provoked him to study law, and his brilliant arguments won him acclaim among jurists and the French court. The secretary for foreign affairs began sending Beaumarchais on secret royal missions to England and Germany as early as 1773, and despite his growing popularity as a dramatist, he suffered so many losses from financial speculation that he gladly accepted the Vergennes assignment to establish a company to trade arms and war materiel to the American colonists in exchange for American products. The conspicuous wealth he accumulated in the venture led to his imprisonment by French revolutionaries in 1792, but the intervention of a well-connected former mistress led to his release, and he died of natural causes.

3.
Mémoires
, I:13.

4.
“Le Stathoudérat du Comte de Broglie,” in Doniol, II:50–97.

5.
Comte de Vergennes,
Mémoire
[memorandum] to Louis XVI, April 18, 1778, in Flassan, VI:140; Doniol, I:244, from
Etats-Unis, Mémoires et Documents, 1765 à 1778
, Archives, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, quai d’Orsay, Paris.

6.
Friedrich Kapp,
The Life of John Kalb, major-general in the Revolutionary army
(New York, 1870), 94–95 [originally published as
Leben des amerikanischen Generals, Johann Kalb
(Stuttgart, 1862)], as cited in Edwin S. Corwin,
French Policy and the American Alliance of 1778
(Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1969), 90–91.

7.
Ibid.

8.
“Deane to the Committee of Secret Correspondence, Paris, December 6, 1776,” Francis Wharton,
The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1889, 6 vols.), II:218.

9.
“Deane to the committee of secret [Congressional] correspondence, Paris, November 6, 1776,” Wharton, II:191.

10.
Jared Sparks,
The Writings of George Washington
(Boston: Tappan and Dennet, 1834, 12 vols.), V:446.

11.
Mémoires
, I:13.

12.
Ibid.

13.
“Deane to the Committee of Secret Correspondence, Paris, December 6, 1776,” Wharton, II:220–221.

14.
Doniol, II:375.

15.
M. Dubois-Martin, secretary to the comte de Broglie to Kalb, December 8, 1776, in Charlemagne Tower, Jr.,
The Marquis de La Fayatte in the American Revolution, with some account of the Attitude of France toward the War of Independence
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1895, 2 vols.), I:28.

16.
William A. Duer, ed.,
Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette, Published by His Family
(New York: Saunders and Otley Ann Street and Conduit Street London, 1837 [only vol. I published of the eight originally anticipated]), 9–10.

17.
Mercy-Argenteau [ambassador at Versailles] to Maria Theresa [Austrian Empress and mother of Marie-Antoinette], February 15, 1777, A. Arneth and A. Geffroy, ed.,
Correspondence secrète entre Marie-Thérèse et Mercy-Argenteau
(Paris, 1874–1875, 3 vols.), III:20, in Louis Gottschalk,
Lafayette Comes to America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935), 117.

18.
William Petty, 1st Marquis of Lansdowne and 2d Earl of Shelburne (1737– 1805), had opposed the Stamp Act of 1764 and, as secretary of state under Pitt (1766–1768), was dismissed for attempting to effect a reconciliation with the colonies. From 1768 to 1782, he led the unsuccessful parliamentary opposition to the government’s policies in the American colonies.

19.
Mémoires
, I:13–14.

20.
L. to duc d’Ayen, March 9, 1777,
Mémoires
, I:37–38. [Although Lafayette dated the letter
“Londres, 9 mars 1777,”
he only started the letter in London and did not finish it until he arrived in Paris. He did not arrange for its delivery until March 17, the morning after he had left for Bordeaux.]

21.
Lasteyrie, 55–57. [Years later, a book of letters turned up, all in the handwriting of Adrienne de Lafayette, and including her reconstruction, based on her recollection, of letters she had received from her husband during his voyage to America. Included among those from his first voyage was a short, undated one that she entitled, cryptically, “First letter, at the moment of his departure, of which I had known nothing.” A part of the Dean Collection of Lafayette manuscripts at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, it has never been cited as an authentic document by any respected historian or Lafayette biographer in the 170 years since his death. Indeed, there is no way to authenticate it as having been originally the product of Lafayette’s pen, because it is not in his handwriting. Eager to assure his stature in history as a virtuous as well as a courageous man, Lafayette and his family purged some disagreeable elements of his life from his autobiography, manuscripts, and letters. It is not unreasonable to assume that after the French Revolution as he and his family tried to reconstruct their personal papers from memory, they may have invented some letters and documents that had not been there before the revolution, to shed a warmer light on his otherwise thoughtless acts. Certainly, a farewell letter to his wife would make Lafayette seem less the thoughtless adolescent than he surely was. There is, however, no evidence—not even a brief mention—that he ever wrote his wife before his abrupt departure to America—not in his original autobiography, nor in hers, both of which are careful to note and cite the letter he wrote to his father-in-law, the duc d’Ayen. There is much evidence, however, to indicate that it was not his work but hers. It is undated; it is in her handwriting; and the language, wording, and punctuation are not consistent with his writing. It is more the language of an adolescent girl than that of the nineteen-year-old Lafayette. “I am too guilty, to justify myself, I am punished too cruelly not to be worthy of [your] pardon. If I had known my sacrifices would make me feel so horrible, I would not now be the most miserable of men. . . . [Your father] will explain my blunders. . . . ” [and so on]. Nowhere does Lafayette ever refer to his adventure as
une folie
—a blunder. Indeed, in his letter to his father-in-law, who considered it a blunder, Lafayette writes of it as “a unique opportunity to distinguish myself and learn my craft [as a soldier]. To his wife, he writes of it as “striving for glory” as a “defender of liberty.”