LAFAYETTE’S INSISTENCE THAT he be treated as a neutral non-combatant was never taken seriously. The Austrian general who would have made that decision, reading a note sent by a subaltern to explain the situation, got only as far as his name. “Lafayette! Lafayette! Run quick, tell the Duke of Brunswick!…His Highness at Brussels!…Lafayette! Lafayette!”
His second thought was to claim American citizenship. He wrote to William Short, now minister at the Hague: “You will greatly oblige me, my dear friend, by insisting on seeing me. I am an American citizen, and an American officer. I am no longer in the service of France. In demanding my release you will be acting within your rights, and I have no doubt of your immediate arrival. God bless you.”
Short wrote for advice to Gouverneur Morris in Paris, and on September 12 Morris tactfully replied: “I do not exactly see how the United States could claim him. If claimed and delivered up, would [America] not be bound to put him to death for having attacked a neutral power; or else, by the very act of acquitting him, declare war against those who had taken him?” Morris felt for Lafayette’s plight, but his advice to Short was in perfect accordance with instructions he had received directly from Washington: “[T]he less we meddle in the great quarrel which agitates Europe the better it will be for us.” Whatever their “private feelings,” as diplomats they had “higher duties to fulfill.” If Morris were in Short’s position, he said, “I should (I think) confine myself to prayer and solicitation until I received express orders from the President of the United States.”
Such orders would not be coming. No one would have wished more fervently to liberate Lafayette than Washington, but as the president of an infant nation among great powers, and one moreover that was already allied by treaty with France, his position was beyond ticklish.
His first reaction was to write Adrienne. Not knowing where a letter would find her, he sent it with a friend who was setting sail for Europe. His letter to her said all that he was in a position to say, which was not much.
If I had words that could convey to you an adequate idea of my feelings on the present situation…this letter would appear to you in a different garb. The sole object in writing to you now is to inform you that I have deposited in the hands of Mr. Nicholas Van Staphorst of Amsterdam two thousand three hundred and ten guilders Holland currency, equal to two hundred guineas subject to your orders. This sum is, I am certain, the least I am indebted for services rendered me by Mr. de la Fayette, of which I never yet have received the account. I could add much, but it is best perhaps that I should say little on this subject. Your goodness will supply my deficiency.
The money was, of course, his own, since a gift from the United States to the family of a proscribed and convicted émigré, much less a Lafayette, would have been a scalding diplomatic insult.
In February 1793, he received a letter that Adrienne had written to him the previous October, which indicated that she had been hoping for a good deal more from her husband’s hero and her son’s namesake. “In this abyss of misery, the thought of owing to the United States and to Washington the life and liberty of La Fayette causes a ray of hope to shine in my heart,” she wrote. “I expect everything from the kindness of the people in whose land he helped to form a model of that liberty of which he is now the victim.” Washington passed this letter along to Jefferson with a pained request that he draft a reply that would contain “all the consolation I can with propriety give her, consistent with my public character and the national policy, circumstanced as things are.”
Jefferson did his best, which was very good, but finally he just had to say it. Despite “my friendship for him, and with ardent desires for his relief, in which sentiment I know that my fellow-citizens participate…the measures which you were pleased to intimate in your letter are perhaps not exactly those which I could pursue.” He said all he could when he assured her that he was “not inattentive to his condition, nor contenting myself with inactive wishes for his liberation. My affection to his nation and to himself are unabated….”
In fact, Washington’s affection for France was being sorely tested at that moment, and it helped matters not at all that his own senior advisers and diplomats were in open conflict over what American policy should be. Even before Lafayette’s flight and the September Massacres, the American ministers closest to the scene—Morris in Paris and Short at the Hague—were in emphatic agreement that the French Revolution was insupportable and had gone utterly out of control. Morris’s reports to Jefferson were modulated to suit his audience, but Short’s were not. “Those mad and corrupt people in France…have destroyed their government,” he wrote in one of his reports to Jefferson. Power rested now “in the hands of the most mad, wicked, and atrocious assembly that was ever collected in any country.”
News that the Prussian army had been turned back with the victory at Valmy in September 1792 was thrilling to Jefferson, who boasted that his fellow Republicans were now proudly calling themselves Jacobins. Short, however, considered all French victories “unquestionably evils for humanity…. I should not be at all surprised to hear of the present leaders being hung by the people. Such has been the moral of this revolution from the beginning.”
By January 1793, Jefferson had had more than enough of Short’s negativity. Complaining of the “extreme warmth” of Short’s views, Jefferson wished to let his former secretary know that “99 in a hundred” Americans supported the French Revolution. Then he let his rhetoric and his temper get entirely away from him, which is why this letter, apart from the Declaration of Independence, is perhaps Jefferson’s most famous prose:
Was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country and left free, it would be better than it now is.
He warned Short to moderate his tone in the future and to “be cautious” in what he wrote to Hamilton especially, since it amounted to giving him ammunition for his attacks on the French Revolution and its democratic ideals.
Hamilton did not need Short’s letters to confirm him in his “dread” of France’s “philosophic politicians” when he had the Brissotins, who were even then enshrining their exuberant plans for world conquest in instructions for France’s new minister to America, Edmond-Charles-Edouard Genêt. “We cannot rest until all Europe is ablaze!” Brissot declared. “What puny projects were those of Richelieu…compared with the worldwide risings, the gigantic revolutions, that we are called upon to achieve!”
In the elections to the new government of the Convention, the Brissotins did well in the provinces, but Paris elected more radical delegates. Brissot himself was named to the Convention without receiving a single vote in the capital. The most radical contingent, who took over the highest benches in the assembly, were referred to as “the Mountain,” or Montagnards, and in short order, led by Danton, Robespierre, and others, they took over the Revolution itself.*
In a way, the Brissotins became victims of their successful call to war: The Mountain were able to blame them successfully for early battlefield defeats and use the same defeats as a way to recruit the sans-culottes to the revolutionary cause at home and abroad. They could then take credit for the resulting victories.
The recruits called out by Danton after the defeats just before the September Massacres had indeed made the difference on September 20 at Valmy, where the victory was won precisely by numbers and revolutionary zeal. In the defeated Prussian camp that night, the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe tried to console his comrades with a prophecy: “Here and today a new epoch in the history of the world has begun, and you can boast that you were present at its birth.” A subsequent string of French triumphs on the battlefield seemed to suggest that he was right.
On the day of the victory at Valmy, the new government of the Convention met for the first time, and their first order of business was what to do with the king. The discovery of a hidden strongbox containing evidence of Louis’s conspiracy with Austria assured his guilt. The only question was his punishment, and the only substantive question about that was whether or not he should be executed. The Brissotins favored exile, and making the debate over the king’s execution a test of patriotism was one way that the Montagnards were able to push the Brissotins toward the soft, suspect center. Even with such pressure from the radical left, a decree for the king’s immediate execution passed by the barest possible majority, 361 votes to 360.
The crowd that came to watch as he met his end in the place de la Révolution on the morning of January 21, 1793, seemed equally ambivalent. Louis XVI went to his death with composure and courage. He is said to have mounted the scaffold “with a firm step,” and he was heard to declare in a loud voice: “I die perfectly innocent of the so-called crimes of which I was accused. I pardon those who are the cause of my misfortunes. Indeed, I hope that the shedding of my blood will contribute to the happiness of France and you, my unfortunate people….” He said something more, but a roll of drums drowned him out, and the last that was heard of him was “a frightful cry as the blade fell.” The executioner Sanson helpfully filled a bucket with the king’s blood so that people could dip in their handkerchiefs and other items for souvenirs.
Jefferson and the Republicans took Louis’s execution as a heartening sign of victory over despotism by a faithful revolutionary ally. Hamilton and the Federalists thought the French had gone completely mad. Washington, who was more than skeptical about national “friendships” and knew France had only acted in its own interest in supporting the American Revolution, was also mindful as perhaps no one else of what Louis’s aid had meant at the end of winter at Valley Forge, at Yorktown, and for the outcome of the war. In any case, he did not write and is not recorded as having said so much as a word on the subject of Louis’s death. Jefferson thought he seemed dejected by the news.
The first report of the execution came to Philadelphia on March 27, 1793, at the same time word came that France had declared war on England. This had been suspected, because no packets from France had arrived for the past three months. Even ships’ captains were bringing no news into Philadelphia, which raised the suspicion that blockades might already be in place as part of a general European war. The news being less than definitive even now, Washington decided to leave for a respite in Mount Vernon that day as planned. The reports that reached him there on April 8, however, were clear and even worse than he had feared: France had declared war not only on England but on Spain and Holland as well. Washington immediately sped back to Philadelphia for urgent meetings with his cabinet about the U. S. response.
On the same day that news of war reached Mount Vernon, the new minister Citizen Genêt landed in Charleston to a hero’s welcome. He carried with him the certainty of the French government that their revolutionary ally would be with them in this hour of need.
Washington was no less certain that America should remain neutral in the conflict. He had no problem convincing Hamilton or Jefferson of the wisdom of neutrality, though neither of them understood the logic or necessity of it as he did. Both thought it should be used as leverage with the belligerents, Jefferson wishing to place conditions on England that would offset a sense of betrayal in France, Hamilton hoping that the French Revolution and its like-minded friends in the United States would take American neutrality as a sharp stick in the eye and that Britain would be mollified by it.
Washington disagreed with both of them, wishing to show no tilt in the direction of either nation. By then, however, Genêt had already done a great deal to undermine the U. S. position. His instructions, which had been drafted principally by Brissot himself as leader of the Convention’s diplomatic committee, were breathtaking in scope, and seemed to take for granted not only America’s cooperation in France’s vast ambitions but also France’s right to construe for itself America’s best interests.
The plan called for Genêt to issue commissions to American officers (they gave him 250 blanks) to lead an assault on any and all Spanish and British outposts in North America, including Canada, and in particular to invade and occupy Spain’s Mississippi Territory, where they would “deliver our former brothers of Louisiana from the tyrannical yoke of Spain.” While admitting that the language in the Franco-American Treaty of 1778 had been ambiguous, Genêt was instructed to insist on France’s reading of it, which was that America’s ports would be closed to all of its enemies, and that French ships could use American ports for any purpose, not to exclude commissioning American ships as privateers and outfitting whatever British vessels could be captured as French warships. Genêt was to get a new treaty signed that would eliminate any ambiguity on this score. He was also to insist on accelerated payment of the entire French war debt.
True to his mandate and warmed by his reception, Genêt got to work even before he left Charleston, signing up American recruits for the expedition against Spanish Florida and commissioning his first four American privateers. In no time at all they began bringing captured British ships into coastal ports from Charleston to Philadelphia. Genêt also set up a French Admiralty Court in Charleston to adjudicate disputes over captured prizes. His first report to his foreign minister was ebullient.
The rest of Genêt’s mission to America was a wonderful demonstration of some of the differences between the American and French revolutions, but enacted as farce. It was as if Genêt took as part of his instructions that the world, at least the United States, was obliged to operate according to the rules of revolutionary France, and in fact his instructions did imply that. The title they gave him, for example, was “Minister Plenipotentiary to…the Congress of the United States” rather than “to the President,” which is understandable only in the French context, where the Convention was all-powerful and there was now no executive at all. Such a small mistake was easy to overlook. Not so was his insistence that if any of his plans were thwarted, as virtually all of them were, he would simply go over the head of the president and the State Department and appeal directly to Congress and the people, whose sovereignty he never tired of invoking and who after all had always been the first recourse of reformers in France. The gala receptions given him on his way north and then in Philadelphia demonstrated to his satisfaction that the people were on the side of France, and it was a revolutionary axiom that the people would have their way.
Genêt was quickly informed that his Admiralty Courts were an infringement on the sovereignty of the United States and would have to be dissolved; that he could not commission privateers or dispose of prizes in American ports; and that Americans serving aboard French privateers were breaking the law by violating American neutrality.
“No one has the right to shackle our [privateering] operations,” Genêt shot back, and, whatever Washington and Jefferson might think, he was quite sure Congress, when it reconvened, would agree with him since the “fraternal voice” of the American people had spoken. For the moment he would agree only to make sure his ships’ captains were faithful to the “political opinions of the President, until the representatives of the sovereign [people] shall have confirmed or rejected them.”
When two Americans serving aboard his privateers were subsequently arrested for violation of America’s neutrality, Genêt exploded. He could not imagine their offense, he wrote to Jefferson, unless it was perhaps “the crime which my mind cannot conceive, and which my pen almost refuses to state…of serving France, and defending with her children the common and glorious cause of liberty.”
The worst problem for Genêt was that Washington refused to accelerate the payment of America’s debt. Hamilton told Genêt that giving France the wherewithal to purchase weapons of war—not to mention repaying the debt in war materiel—would by itself be a violation of American neutrality. Genêt was furious: He had counted on that money to fund his wars in Florida and Louisiana, and he attributed Washington’s position to the fact that the president was in the camp of counterrevolutionaries, no better than a despotic monarch himself, driven by the “infernal system of the King of England, and of the other kings, his accomplices, to destroy by famine the French republicans and liberty….”
By this time Genêt’s view of Washington was coming to be shared by a large and growing number of Americans, who mistook the president’s official formality for pretension and linked that to what seemed a tilt toward British monarchy and away from the republican values of the French. His motivation, however, had nothing to do with either country but stemmed, as the policy of neutrality did, from his understanding of the American situation: The country was young, its government brand new, and above all it needed to establish what he always called a national “character,” by which he meant something more than a sense of its unity and strength. It wanted a reputation and stature in the world, and he took it as his highest calling as the nation’s first chief executive to nurture that character and to embody it. The man who could at many times have become a dictator had he wanted to and in 1782 had viewed “with abhorrence” and rebuffed “with severity” an overt plea that he become “King of America” was nevertheless taxed with self-aggrandizement, evidence being the way he bowed instead of shaking hands at his levees, and the fact that he held levees at all. Benjamin Franklin Bache’s pro-French newspaper, the Aurora, Washington’s most reliably scathing critic, ran a satirical help-wanted ad for a national poet laureate addressed to “the Noblesse and Courtiers of the United States.” The winning applicant’s poetry, it said, would demonstrate the ability to put across “certain monarchical prettinesses…such as levies, drawing rooms, stately nods instead of shaking hands, titles of office, seclusion from the people, &c. &c.”
Another satirical jab at Washington’s pretension, which was brought up at a cabinet meeting where the Neutrality Proclamation was discussed, had Washington on the way to the guillotine. At this, his famous temper made one of its rare appearances, and Jefferson took wickedly careful notes. The president was
much inflamed; got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself; ran on much on the personal abuse which had been bestowed on him; defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done on the purest movies. That he had never repented but once having [lost] the moment of resigning his office, and that was every moment since. That by God he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation. That he had rather be on his farm than to be made Emperor of the World. And yet they were charging him with wanting to be a King….
Knowing Washington’s sensitivity to criticism and his lifelong concern about living up to and leaving behind an honorable reputation, the fact that he took so many decisions that invited such animus (and never made a move to stop the criticism, as Adams would do with the Sedition Act) must be marked a signal and even moving sign of his commitment to the welfare of the new nation above all—a commitment that was never so tested as it was by his policies toward France and Britain during his second term in office.
Although Washington has often been thought closer to Hamilton and Britain than to Jefferson and France, the record suggests that he was party to neither man and no country but the United States, whose neutrality he sought so that it could recover economically from the war, discover its “character” independent of any foreign influence, and exploit its land and other resources so that it could achieve the prosperity that was the fount of every nation’s greatness. As long as America remained free of European politics and free to trade with all nations, he said, Americans “shall be the gainers, whether the powers of the old world may be in peace or war”—and especially, added the realist, if they were at war, in which case “our importance will certainly increase and our friendship be courted.” Yet at the time it was proclaimed, the policy of neutrality was popular with virtually no one—least of all of course with Citizen Genêt.
In part because Jefferson was initially so optimistic about Genêt’s mission, he had tried to help him understand American politics and in the process made matters incalculably worse. In trying to explain the policy of neutrality and how Genêt’s initiatives could be rejected in the face of such evident popular support, Jefferson shared with him the division in the cabinet between the pro-British and pro-French forces, urging him to be aware that feelings were running high on both sides.
After this Genêt actually redoubled his efforts, eventually leading to Washington’s exasperated demand that France recall him. Obviously Genêt had assumed from what Jefferson said not that he should moderate his behavior to accommodate competing views, but that one side or the other was going to wind up defeated or dead, which was the way of things in France.
He would not know it for some time, but that is exactly what was happening then in Paris, as the man who had written his instructions, along with more than a few of his fellow Brissotins, having lost to Robespierre and the Montagnards, were in prison and on their way to the guillotine.*
Someone once said that wherever you find a philosopher you will find a long-suffering spouse. Perhaps the same is true of revolutionaries. It was certainly true of the Lafayettes. Even her deep religious conviction cannot explain how Adrienne could remain so devoted to a man who had sailed to war on another continent, leaving her at sixteen with one child and another on the way; who had had at least two very public affairs; and whose career choices seemed always to be both life-threatening and a complete surprise to her. This observation is no doubt somewhat anachronistic and overdrawn. His flight to America had made him a hero, after all; everyone had affairs in eighteenth-century Paris (which would have erased the social stigma if not her sadness and sense of personal betrayal); and as frantically worried about him as she often was, during the war in America and on the streets of Paris, she never asked him to change. On the contrary, she is often quoted as saying she loved him for his courage, never more than when he demonstrated the courage of his convictions, even when they were convictions she did not share. In any case, when her love for him and a great deal more than that was tested, Adrienne demonstrated an almost inhuman strength of character and an unmatched quality of devotion. That test began on August 19, 1792, when he crossed into enemy territory from his even more threatening homeland.
When he left them for the war, Adrienne and the children had stayed at Chavaniac, away from the tumults of Paris. Knowing of his outspoken opposition to the Jacobins, she thought after the events of August 10 that he might have been arrested and even executed as a counterrevolutionary traitor. At the end of August she found out he had left the country, which at least meant he was probably still alive; and some weeks later she got her first letter from him, which had obviously been written the day after he was first stopped at the Austrian front line, by now almost two months in the past. “I cannot believe that our captors will have the dishonesty to confine [us] for long,” he wrote. He was hoping to get to England, and then to America, where as a family they would “find the liberty which no longer exists in France, and my love shall try as best it can to console you for all the happiness you have lost.”
Just days after he wrote that, however, Lafayette was separated from everyone who left France with him except for three fellow officers—Latour-Maubourg, Alexandre de Lameth, Bureaux de Pusy—and their servants (aristocracy still had its privileges, at least for the moment). They were sent first into Prussian custody and confined in the fortress prison at Wesel. A note from the duke of Saxe-Teschen, to whom Lafayette had appealed for safe passage, explained why the request was denied:
As it is you who are responsible for the revolution that has overturned France, as it is you who put your king in irons, despoiled him of all his rights and legitimate powers, and kept him in captivity, as it is you who were the principal instrument of all the disgraces that overwhelm this unhappy monarch, it is only too just that…your master, after having recovered his liberty and his sovereignty, can, in his justice or his clemency, decide on your fate.
At Wesel, his servants and fellow officers were imprisoned separately. Lafayette was put in solitary confinement in a damp dungeon cell, and there he spent twenty-four hours of every day being watched by guards on two-hour rotation, deprived of exercise, sunlight, books, and mail. At first he found it difficult to sleep because of the guards’ close watch and the rats scurrying about in his cell. The damp cold brought on a fever and chest pain apparently caused by a recurrence of his chronic lung disorder. When he complained of trouble breathing, the prison doctor recommended exercise, but it was forbidden. He and his fellow inmates developed a crude form of signal communication. At one point Latour-Maubourg was convinced that Lafayette was going to die. Permission for a final visit with him was denied.
They had been brought to Wesel by coach. In late December, they were transferred to Magdeburg in a cart, in chains. The open air proved restorative despite the cold, as did their first conversation in three months; but at Magdeburg the cells were dark and damp, the walls thick with mold. Lafayette was once again placed in solitary confinement, and his fever and chest pain returned. He had still received no word of his wife and children, but he was able to bribe a guard for scraps of paper, and by improvising pen and ink with a toothpick and soot, he managed to get letters out. One of them was to be forwarded to the American consul in London, to whom he wrote of his ever more desperate hope that his adopted country would claim him as a citizen: “My physical constitution has almost as much need of liberty as my moral constitution.”
In almost every letter he talked of his gratitude for American efforts for his release, but in fact there was still very little the American government could do. Through Jefferson, Washington did express to his ambassadors his “great and sincere” interest in Lafayette’s well-being and asked them to do whatever they could, consistent with their responsibilities, to encourage his release. Gouverneur Morris drafted an appeal for Adrienne to send to the king, and William Short sent 10,000 florins, with which Lafayette was at least able to improve the food he and his companions received and bribe the guards to smuggle out his letters.
Finally, whether in response to an appeal by the American minister in London or Adrienne’s letter or both, the Prussian king instructed the prison to inform Lafayette that his wife and children were alive and to allow him to write them a letter. Pen and ink were brought to his cell, and with the governor of the prison looking on, he wrote: “I am permitted…to certify to you that I am still living.” He told her that “Chavaniac,” the nickname of one of his servants, was being permitted to visit him during several hours of the day. “We talk of our village and our fellow-citizens. Please give six louis to his father the tailor….” Though he could not see his other servant, Felix, “I am assured that he is as well as such a situation will permit.” At that, he said, “Monsieur le Commandant, who watches me write, must find the time long. I kiss you as tenderly as I love you.” Adrienne probably never received this letter. By the time he wrote it, she was in prison herself.
Less than a month after Lafayette escaped to Austria, soldiers arrived at Chavaniac with orders from the Convention in Paris: “The woman Lafayette is to be arrested, together with her children if they are found with her, and confined in a house of detention.” Making an excuse to get away from the soldiers for a moment, Adrienne managed to hide ten-year-old Virginie with one of the servants, but the men had already seen Anastasie, now fourteen, and Lafayette’s aged Aunt Chavaniac refused to let Adrienne and her niece be imprisoned without her. (George, then thirteen, had already been sent to the mountains, disguised as a peasant, to live with a local priest.
The three women were taken to the nearby village of Le Puy and there, under custody of the municipal authority, were allowed to stay in the city hall rather than a prison. By appealing directly to Brissot, Adrienne managed to have her confinement changed to house arrest at Chavaniac and finally to have her arrest lifted completely at the end of 1792; but the authorities in Paris were not finished with Lafayette, whose fortune and property were confiscated. Adrienne would then have been virtually penniless but for the kindness of family and friends, including not only George Washington but also Gouverneur Morris, who made her a personal loan of 100,000 livres.
During 1793, her prospects continued to decline with the fall of the Brissotins and the ascent of the Mountain. After the king’s execution and the declaration of war on England, Holland, and Spain that followed, the Montagnards worked relentlessly to consolidate their hold on power, notably with a wholesale purge of the Brissotin leadership, who were excoriated, then arrested, tried, and found guilty of counterrevolutionary treason. The Brissotin leadership, including Brissot, followed Marie-Antoinette to the guillotine by two weeks in the early fall of 1793.
With the Brissotin leaders dead and their faction discredited, the Mountain began to enact a rigorous agenda to take hold of both the Convention and the nation itself, a program that would lead to a despotism in the name of the people that was far more severe than any Bourbon king’s. Its Committee of Public Safety set up nationwide “watch committees” to carry out “domiciliary visits” aimed at ferreting out “suspects” from their hiding places; they were to be “run to earth in their burrows by day and by night.” Local authorities were instructed to arrest anyone who “either by their conduct, their contacts, their words or their writings, showed themselves to be supporters of tyranny…or to be enemies of liberty.” This would include all former nobles “who have not constantly manifested their attachment to the revolution.” Family members of the émigrés were especially large targets for suspicion, at a time when suspicion meant arrest, and arrest meant execution.
The Terror, which was declared “the order of the day” by vote of the Convention on September 5, 1793, did not arrive at Chavaniac until November. Aunt Chavaniac and the children were not arrested because of their age, but Adrienne was taken to a makeshift prison at Brioude, a few miles away. There she was informed that no appeal would be possible this time. She was at least able to see her children occasionally, however, and Virginie and Anastasie made an arrangement with the woman who did the prison laundry to smuggle in notes to their mother.
After six months there, in May 1794, just as the Terror in the capital was approaching its gruesome height, Adrienne received the terrifying news that she was to be transferred to La Force prison in Paris, one of several halfway stations to the guillotine. She said her final farewells to her children, making them promise to try to find their father if she was killed, as she fully and justifiably expected to be.
By the time she arrived at La Force, sixty people a day were going to the guillotine, and many more were pouring into the prisons every day. In part simply to make room for them by putting people more speedily to death, new judges and jurors had recently been hired and a new judicial code put in place that eliminated the need for witnesses and gave juries a choice between only two possible verdicts: acquittal or death.
Adrienne did not know it then, but her older sister Louise, her mother, and her grandmother were confined at the same time in the Luxembourg Palace, one of Paris’s many converted prisons. Two weeks after Adrienne arrived at La Force, they were moved to the Conciergerie, little more than a holding pen for the condemned. Before the guillotine, though, there was a circus trial at the Revolutionary Tribunal, where the ancient maréchale de Noailles, senile and profoundly deaf, probably did not even hear herself accused of being part of conspiracy “to dissolve the National Convention and to assassinate the members of the Committee of Public Safety.”
When the judge asked her if she admitted her guilt, she pointed her ear trumpet at him. “What is that you are saying? You must forgive me, Citizen, I am extremely deaf.”
“So, you were a deaf conspirator,” he said, to great laughter from the court and gallery.
That was the end of her interrogation. Adrienne’s mother and sister were not questioned at all. The jury dutifully declared that it was their “sincere and honest” opinion that all of the Noailles should be executed as traitors. They were held over until six o’clock that evening, when the tumbrels began the evening shuttle to the place de la Révolution.
Adrienne did not hear about any of this until some time later when the family confessor, a non-juring priest named Père Carrichon, visited her at La Force disguised as a carpenter. He had followed them to the scaffold, he told her, watching them from a discreet distance. The maréchale was in the first cart, writhing on the hard bench, trying to keep her balance as her hands were tied behind her. He could see that the back of her neck had been shaved. Adrienne’s mother had a blue-striped shawl over her shoulders, and Louise was wearing a white dress. Despite the fact that it was evening, it was very hot, and then it began to rain. He told Adrienne that he had caught their eye as they got close to the guillotine, and that when they saw him give them absolution, he “was struck by their look of…serenity.”
Forty-five people were to be killed that night, and they were formed up by the guillotine in rows. The maréchale was taken third, Carrichon remembered, and Adrienne’s mother, who was tenth, looked “pleased to know that she was to die before her daughter.” All he remembered beside a shocking amount of “bright red blood” spurting from heads and necks that night was that both Adrienne’s mother and her sister Louise were wearing hats that were pinned in place. He noticed that because both times, when the executioner ripped them off, they winced.