TWENTY-TWO

ADRIENNE

Paris

July 1782

Who was Lafayette’s lover?

Stabbing my needle into my embroidery, I could not stop wondering. From the moment my husband returned from America, the whole nation flung laurels—and ladies—into his lap. I remembered an incident at an opera performed at the Salle du Palais-Royal. Our gilded box with its ornate carved cherubs had the best view of the stage, where we saw unveiled a statue of my husband in the place the Greek hero Achilles ought to have been. While the crowd cheered and the chorus sang about how no beautiful woman could or should resist a hero, the soprano draped my husband’s statue in laurel and offered him a flirtatious wave, as if volunteering to become his mistress.

I had easily endured this because she was an actress, but then the crowd’s eyes turned, unmistakably, expectantly, toward one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Some chanted that she should offer the hero a kiss. Fortunately—as he would do again under more perilous circumstances—Gilbert played to the audience and decency, kissing her hand. Still, half the bedroom doors in Paris lay open to my husband, and now I knew he had walked through at least one of them . . .

Who was she?

Not the soprano—my husband was too careful of his reputation to risk bedding a performer or harlot. It must be a lady, then.

Did he love her?

I couldn’t imagine so. Not when, on Anastasie’s birthday, he presented her with a pristine white pony and me with a pair of pearl earrings. Kissing my lips, he said, “These jewels scarcely compensate you for bringing my daughter safely into this world. Nor for all that you are to me, my dear heart. A wife and partner, precious and rare.”

As far as I knew, he had been faithful to our marriage bed for seven years—truly an oddity in France. My father, my grandfather, my brother-in-law . . . nearly every man I knew took a mistress. I had only hoped Lafayette would be an exception in this, as he was in everything else. And, as I have said, I had been encouraged in that hope because the Americans he so admired considered adultery to be a scandal . . .

Alas, my husband was a Frenchman, and as the saying went at court, Every great man must have a mistress. Grand-mère sometimes opined, A man without a mistress is the subject of ridicule! She also said the benefit of such affairs was that the wife would be credited with her husband’s best qualities, while the mistress would be blamed for his faults. I knew I should not consider my husband’s taking a mistress to be a comment on my merit. Certainly my father’s infidelities did not reflect Maman’s worth. Nor did my brother-in-law’s adventures tarnish my sister Louise. The women of my family handled these infidelities with grace and delicacy, yet I had conceived of my marriage differently. Thought of it as a fortress against all enemies, one we built together stone by stone. Realizing that he had lowered the drawbridge, my feelings were frightening in intensity, and I feared to dissolve into tears at the slightest provocation. If I should now, whilst Lafayette was in the throes of a new passion, redraw the portrait of myself he kept in his heart as some shrew, fat with child . . . No. I would not allow it. So I forced myself to smile, terrified to betray my inner turmoil even though the effort of restraint left me trembling every time Gilbert departed. I never asked the question: Who is she?

By the time I learned the answer, the talk was on the lips of every person from dirty cutpurses to bejeweled aristocrats. None other than Aglaé d’Hunolstein was said to receive my husband any hour of day or night at the Palais-Royal, in the home of her more regular lover.

It was a humiliation for Philippe, and in a vain attempt at a fig leaf, he told anyone who would listen, I had long since tired of her; Lafayette is welcome to my leavings. I imagined my husband’s satisfaction in tasting sweet revenge. Then again, I could scarcely think Gilbert petty enough to seduce a woman only for revenge. How long had it been going on? Perhaps it was a relationship of duration. It hurt to think he might have feelings for a creature like Aglaé. I had loved Gilbert when he was an awkward boy, and she had laughed at him.

How could he forget?

At least in this, Grand-mère agreed. “Lafayette could do better than that brainless trollop. A mistress should at least be the charming sort with whom a wife enjoys taking tea!”

“Please hush, Grand-mère,” said Louise, alone suspecting the depth of my despair. I dared not ask how many such teas my sister or Grand-mère or Maman had had to endure with women their husbands were bedding. All I wanted was for Gilbert and me to cleave only to each other as God decreed. Yet the world in which I lived decreed this to be unnatural . . .

My mind was filled with spiteful thoughts. Plots of petty revenge upon her . . . upon him . . . truly, I was wretched! Then one day on the way to church, my daughter Anastasie hugged my pregnant belly and asked, “Maman, why are you so sad?”

Her question shamed me. My own sainted mother had kept every manner of distress from me, always restraining her own emotions for my sake. I should do the same. Thus, in confessional I begged God’s pardon for my weakness and ingratitude. The lord had, after all, answered so many of my prayers. My life was filled with riches in every conceivable way: wealth, power, family, children, and a husband who—even with a mistress—never missed an opportunity to show his love.

Wasn’t it vanity to ask for more?

I left that church with sore knees and a humbled heart, determined to be of good cheer.

Unfortunately, this resolution lasted only until, on a rare outing with my father, after which he would make his way to a meeting of the science academy, we glimpsed the two lovers in passing. I saw Gilbert motion to some trinket in a shop display, and Aglaé stroked his cheek. I reeled back from the carriage window, burying my face against the seat, hoping my father would not realize the cause of my distress. In this effort, I failed.

My father cleared his throat, adjusted his cravat, then cleared his throat again. “You realize this matter of the girl has nothing to do with you.”

To my great shame, I crumpled against him, sobbing. And my father seemed not to have the faintest idea what to do. Awkwardly, he patted my back, his mouth a thin, grim line all the while. I took it for censure and tried to dry my eyes. I had not, after all, sobbed when Gilbert left for America, when I was younger and had better excuse.

“Do not put your child at risk,” my father finally said.

“I cannot bear it,” I sobbed. “I cannot bear it!”

My father glanced down at my pregnant belly, then cupped my chin and made me look at him. “Calm yourself. This is a temporary problem, I promise you. Do you understand?”

I did not—not entirely. Though I should have. How surprised I was, the very next morning, to hear that Aglaé had been abandoned by her husband. It was a catastrophe for her, because an agreeable husband was the polite fiction behind which a mistress was afforded respect; what harm was there in adultery, after all, if the spouse did not object? But how suspicious it all seemed that he suddenly did object. Aglaé’s husband had not minded his wife’s behavior for years. Why, quite suddenly, did he find her affairs intolerable? It almost offended me to think her husband might object to Gilbert as a rival, when he had not minded Philippe. But if she continued without her husband’s blessing, she would bring down her whole family.

That evening, Gilbert rolled out over my knees an architectural plan for a new house. A house designed in every way to please me and to get us both out from under my family’s thumb.

It is over with Aglaé, then?

I couldn’t ask, and distressed beyond measure, I pleaded illness and retreated to my apartment. There, in September, two months early, I gave birth to our third daughter. Like Henriette, she was sickly and small and I despaired for her survival.

We named her Marie Antoinette Virginie in honor of the queen and the Virgin Mary—or at least that is what I told Grand-mère. Lafayette told Dr. Franklin that our new baby was named in honor of the state of Virginia. Franklin sent his congratulations and a wish that I should birth twelve more, naming one after each state. Miss Carolina and Miss Georgiana will do nicely for the girls, Franklin suggested. But Massachusetts and Connecticut may be too harsh for even boys unless you raise them to be savages.

Alas, there would be no more children for me. The birthing of Virginie left me ravaged, without even milk in my breasts for my infant. The physician said there likely would not—and likely should not—be more children. To be all but barren at the age of twenty-two was a new calamity, and I mourned my womanhood as bitterly as I mourned my lost innocence about my marriage.

And I mourned John Laurens too.

The man I had helped secure an audience with the king—and the crucial aid that won the war—had perished in some trifling skirmish. A tragic loss. The news struck both Gilbert and me deeply. Remembering how Laurens and I had worked together at Versailles, I took the little drawing of a songbird he drew for my daughter and framed it upon our mantelpiece, which touched my husband. I was comforted to know that Gilbert still unburdened his grief to me, but was still wretched to think he gave some other part of himself to Aglaé.

I knew the affair must be ongoing despite the growing scandal, for Maman was particularly solicitous, distracting me with charitable projects. It was on my way to giving food for the poor that my carriage stopped at an intersection and the door suddenly opened.

“Aglaé,” I said, startled, as the porcelain-skinned beauty stepped inside. This was the sort of laughing trick she might have played to amuse the queen when we were young and Philippe would goad her to dress in breeches like a groom.

She was not laughing now. Eyes bloodshot, a kerchief clutched in hand, she cried, “I am on the verge of ruin! Does that make you happy, Adrienne?”

I had not a single notion how to reply.

“I have tried to break things off with Lafayette,” she said, leaning so close I could smell her orange-scented perfume. “Believe me, I have tried. Every time we quarrel, he reaches to comfort me, and then—”

“Mon Dieu.” I gasped, wanting to leap out of the carriage. “I don’t want to hear it! Have a care for decency.”

“Is it decent to spread rumors I’m a prostitute, selling my favors at the Palais-Royal?” she asked hotly. “They say Lafayette is my customer. You may be glad when this rumor destroys me, but must you blacken the name of my children too?”

Indignation rose in my breast. “I have spread no such rumor. How can you believe it of me?”

“How, indeed?” Her cheeks splotched with temper. “Your husband believes you are a veritable angel. A perfect saint, without a speck of sin or jealousy in your heart, but we know better, don’t we?”

My heart was, in fact, so black with jealousy I felt the need to say, “I am sorry for these rumors, but they are not my doing. Your husband—”

“You sent your father to poison my husband against me!”

I was so stunned by the accusation that I wanted to deny it at once. Yet the possibility my father had done this for my sake—and the fear Gilbert might suspect as much—mortified me into silence.

“No one will receive me until I reconcile with my husband,” Aglaé continued. “Yet your father has made reconciliation impossible. He has my husband doubting even if our children belong to him. And now my family plans to shut me away in a nunnery.”

I stared at her agonized painted face and a new and sudden pain throbbed beneath my breast. Despite my distaste for this woman, despite the offenses she had done me, I knew there was, in all this, something unjust. Aglaé was suffering not only for her own actions, but also because of Gilbert’s fame. Whilst my husband was away at war, I had played the faithful Penelope to his Odysseus—but the song needed a Circe, a seductress, and Aglaé had foolishly taken the role. “I did not send my father, but I am sorry nevertheless.”

All traces of hubris gone, she asked, “Do I deserve to be locked away for the crime of loving Lafayette? You have everything, Adrienne. You have Lafayette. He is yours for life. His kisses were mine only for a few moments that have cost me everything. I beg your mercy.”

To have her beg my mercy was too much. I was not the angel Gilbert supposed. I wanted to scratch her eyes out. I wanted to throw her out of the carriage and see her land in the mud . . . but I did not wish for her to be locked away for the rest of her life, and even more so, I did not want her children to be deprived of a mother’s love. Thus I found myself asking, “What is it you think I can do to help?”

“Call off your father. Prevail upon Lafayette. If he will not give me written proof the affair is over, my husband will never take me back.”

Under no circumstances could I bring myself to confront my father, if only because the duc d’Ayen, through this ill-conceived gesture, had finally demonstrated the love for me I had so hungered for when I was a girl. It had been humiliating enough to sob into my father’s handkerchief; I could not now tell him I wished to be of service to the very woman who had occasioned those tears.

Gilbert was another matter.

That night I found my husband laboring over his “Observations on Commerce between France and the United States.” He wanted to establish free trade with American merchants now, before peace could be concluded with Britain, giving us competition. Taking a breath for courage, I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and adopted a teasing tone. “I have caught you begging favors for your mistress. Fortunately, Mademoiselle America is such a worthy lady I have never resented her!”

Gilbert stopped writing. His eyes met mine, apprehensive.

The sadness he must have seen there made him wince. Yet that is all I gave him in that moment. Only a glimpse of my sadness, because I would never lower myself to start a quarrel with him over a woman. And because I was too proud to allow him to see any petty impulse, I merely said, “I remember when you left me for America, I resolved never to show discontent—”

“Adrienne,” he rasped.

For a moment I feared that he might bring a jealous quarrel into the open. I would not allow him that salve for his conscience either. I would allow no open discussion of this affair, and he would simply have to bear it. As if I did not hear the strained regret in his voice, I went on breezily, forcing a little laugh. “Even if America were not a worthy rival, I could always take pride in your decency in courting her. After all, you have defended her honor, and always done by her what is right, no matter the cost to your pride . . . even when it meant stepping aside. You are far too honorable a man to allow any lady to suffer.”

Gilbert put down his pen and reached a trembling hand for mine. He tried to say something, but no words came. They did not need to. He would break with his mistress, this I knew. What I did not suspect was that he would go to Chavaniac to do it.

The next morning his trunks were packed. “I have been gone too long from the place that made me. I have somehow lost my way.”

“You are leaving?” These words cut their way out of me; what I really meant to ask was: Are you leaving me? It was my greatest fear. To be abandoned as a wife—as my mother had been abandoned—would open a deeper wound than could ever be healed.

Gilbert must have known it, for his gaze softened. “I will send for you and the children as soon as I can show myself to be a decent man.”