TWENTY-SEVEN

ADRIENNE

Versailles

May 1789

Since the day Lafayette signed his name in a defiant flourish two years earlier, he had been agitating across the countryside for a government that represented the people.

Now the king had given in and summoned the Estates-General.

The Noailles had come, en masse, to bear witness, because my family could never be far from the center of great events, and no one had seen anything like this for two hundred years. But at the family home in Versailles, battle lines were drawn with sighs over the silver and pouts between poached eggs. It was Grand-mère who brought the schism into the open.

“You and Gilbert will both find yourselves imprisoned in the Bastille for treason,” she warned, in poor temper after having salted her breakfast chocolate and sugared her omelette. “You must cease these commotions for dangerous innovations.”

My younger sister Pauline agreed. “Grand-mère is right. This is a dangerous innovation.”

Patiently, I asked, “How can it be an innovation, when the Estates-General is one of France’s oldest traditions?”

“Because your husband forced the king to it by threat of civil war!”

Gilbert did light the spark that was now burning its way across our hungry country, but he never raised arms against the king. “That is not true.”

“It is nearly true,” Pauline countered. “Your husband wrote, To throw off the yoke of despotism, I have tried everything short of civil war, which I could have accomplished except that I feared its horrors.”

Our older sister, Louise, was prone to mediate quarrels, but now took my side. “Lafayette is not the only member of the family to participate in the reform of France—”

Pauline slammed down her fork. “Your husband is just as much to blame. Marc truly wishes to abolish noble titles? It would dismantle hundreds of years of French history—and dissolve the prestige of our family!”

“Titles earned only by virtue of birth divide us from our fellow human beings,” Louise said softly.

In this, Louise and I were in complete agreement, and I had no patience for those who did not see the need for momentous change. France had suffered a severe drought followed by a hailstorm so violent it beggared description. Livestock and game animals knocked dead to the ground. Olive and citrus groves smashed to bits. Wheat and barley fields decimated. All this followed by the most bitter winter in living memory—so cold it killed what remained of vineyards and orchards. Mountains of snow buried Paris, and the river froze solid, locking out shipments of grain. Flour was now so precious that even wealthy hostesses submitted to the indignity of asking guests to bring their own bread. Famine had us in her jaws, sending impoverished peasants into the streets, begging for charity. Yet here my family sat at our beautiful table in Versailles, eating off gilt-edged plates and drinking from porcelain cups, complaining that Gilbert was doing too much to help.

Even Maman was unnerved. “I do not like how the people treat the queen these days.”

I did not like it either. In Paris, they called her Madame Déficit and hissed at her in the opera. The country’s finances weren’t in ruin because of the queen. Still, I knew that her every diamond, gilded carriage, and silver-dusted cake was paid for by crippling taxes on starving peasantry. Taxes from which nobles and clergy were exempt.

The people resented this, and who could blame them? The only remedy was good democratic reform. But when I said so, Pauline scoffed. “Mr. Jefferson and his soaring words have filled your head with dreams.”

“It is not only Americans who dream of a better future,” I said. For I had hosted some of the finest thinkers in France, from Turgot to Condorcet to Brissot and more. They all believed in liberty, and so did I. The convocation of the Estates-General was the natural step to bring it about. “You will all soon see that with reforms, we can enjoy a kinder standard of humanity for rich and poor alike.”

To provoke me, Grand-mère drew up a list of proposals for the deputies on how to make non-Catholics suffer, each idea more terrible than the next. She loathed Protestants, claiming, Nothing short of castration for heretics! She had even worse plans for Jews. I chose to believe she did not really wish such evil on her fellow human beings, but merely wished to prove a point to me about the dangers and excesses of self-government. Yet I burned with faith. On the day of the convocation, I intruded upon my husband’s toilette as his valet dressed him in the costume dictated by court protocol.

Gilbert scowled at the silly plume, but I was overcome. “What a picture you make, husband . . .” At thirty-two, Gilbert’s once–fiery red hair had darkened to chestnut, but his years sat well on him; he had never been so masculine nor desirable. Yet he flipped the end of his cloth-of-gold cape with disdain. “I should wear black and march with the common people in sympathy.”

Fastening his glittering diamond pin through the lace of his cravat, I said, “Everyone knows none of this would be happening if not for you.”

“They should know it would not be happening but for you,” he replied, touching his forehead to mine. “For standing by me when no one else would. For seeing through what I start . . .”

How happy he made me feel. How loved and appreciated . . . It moved me more than the trumpets heralding the pageantry of that glorious spring day when every budding tree seemed to strain with the nation to blossom into being. First in the procession came the king, resplendent in gold, his cap ornamented by the largest diamond in the realm. “Vive le roi!” people cried, waving from curbsides, windows, and rooftops. Then came the queen in silver. “Vive la reine!” was heard, though not as warmly.

From a balcony, pressed between my sisters all straining to see, I added my voice to the cries of rejoicing, for there was no holding back the tides of change now . . .

A month and a half later, while rain poured down upon Versailles in buckets, the deputies found their hall locked, and the defiant reformers splashed their way to the royal tennis court to vow never to separate, and to meet wherever circumstances demand, until a constitution of the kingdom is established and affirmed on solid foundations.

A week later, the king gave in.

France would at last have a constitutional monarchy. A government by and for the people with a declaration of rights—and my husband was determined to write that declaration. I cannot describe the mood that night. I lost count of toasts, and with the American delegation, I became giddy as a girl on champagne. Alone amongst them, only the peg-legged Gouverneur Morris refused to join in our jubilation.

Mr. Morris had written the preamble to the new Constitution of the United States and was, therefore, worthy of the hospitality always afforded to him. But he was also a sybaritic fellow, better known for furtive love affairs in the shadows of the Louvre than he was for enlightened ideals. And that night he warned we were plunging headlong into destruction, adding that the history and character of the French does not mold itself so easily to liberty.

This was too much to bear in silence, and with a rather overfilled glass of wine, I said, “Surely you do not mean to say that we French are somehow inferior in character to you Americans . . .”

Morris drank deeply of his red claret. “I don’t think you understand the forces you are toying with, or the sorts of people waiting to take advantage.”

It astonished me to think a man who had lived in France less than a year might consider himself such an expert. “Sir, the alternative to reform is letting our people freeze and starve . . .”

Morris laughed. “None of the beggars I’ve seen complain to me of cold. They all ask for a morsel of bread, and by bread they mean wine, and by wine they mean liquor.”

His lack of compassion startled me; perhaps he had not seen the true suffering I had witnessed in visiting prisons and almshouses, or in the countryside near Chavaniac. Or perhaps he did not wish to see it. As so many in my class did not wish to see. “You are an aristocrat, sir.”

Morris laughed again. “If I am the aristocrat here, Madame Lafayette, what does that make you?”

“I suppose it makes me the American.”

Lafayette guffawed at that, eyes shining with pride.

“Touché!” Morris refilled his glass. “Forgive me. My opinions are drawn only from human nature and ought not therefore to have much respect in this age of refinement.”

I did not like how he mocked us. And it vexed me to learn he was being considered as the replacement for the inspiring Minister Jefferson, who, after years of service in France, was now keen to return with his daughters to Virginia. We would be sorry to see the Jeffersons go, something I expressed with emotion on the Fourth of July celebration at the American embassy.

There Jefferson kissed my hand. “How sorry we are to quit your country, madame, but after five years, I sorely miss mine.”

He invited me, with all sincerity, to visit Monticello, his mountaintop estate in Virginia, and left us with silhouettes of his image to remember him by. “I hope I will be remembered as having been of some service to your husband in drafting a declaration of rights for France.”

Gilbert smiled with as much modesty as he could muster. A French declaration of rights had been his desire from the start—from the first moment he hung the American Declaration of Independence in a double-paned frame, determined to fill the empty half with its match.

My husband had already fought tyranny with a sword; it would be to his greater glory if he could fight with ink. Every night now, Gilbert was working over a writing table—scratching out words, putting them back, adopting suggestions, debating clauses. Some believed it impious folly to declare all of mankind deserving of equal and fair treatment of the laws, entitled to free expression and exercise of religion. Yet I believed it was the wish of a loving God for his children. It is certainly what I wished for mine.

I was warned by friends in the queen’s circle that my husband was a marked man. Yet I could see no reason the royals would wish to punish Lafayette for spelling out the rights of every citizen, unless the king’s agreement to a constitutional monarchy was insincere. Was the king himself—a king for whom I had much affection—dishonorable? And if he were so dishonorable as to lie to his entire nation, would he stoop to arrest my husband . . . or kill him?

Lafayette did not seem frightened. “This is not my first warning,” he told me. “Philippe sent an emissary to tell me the king intends to strike out at us both. He proposes that I join forces with him.”

The suggestion startled me. “You and Philippe, join forces?”

Gilbert snorted at the absurd idea. “Truthfully, I believe that since he inherited his father’s title as the duc d’Orléans, Philippe has been scheming to take the throne for himself . . . and I will never help him do it.”

What a knave Philippe was. I knew he now styled himself a champion of the people, and had curried favor by opening up his Palais-Royale to the public. As a prince of the blood and a cousin to the king, he had some distant claim to the throne, but did he dare make a play for it? Or did he simply intend to embroil my husband in treason?

“You must not fear, my dear heart. If I am taken up by the king’s guards, Jefferson will claim me as an American citizen.” Lafayette said this mostly in jest, but it was all very serious now. Jefferson had been courageous to pen the American Declaration of Independence in defiance of his English king. That king had been across the ocean. Our king’s palace gate was no more than a hundred steps from where my husband slept at Versailles. Our defiance was more dangerous in every way, but who else had the stature and moral standing to take the risk?

Gilbert said, “To give France a declaration of rights, Adrienne, will be the greatest day of my life, even if I am dragged to the dungeon for it.”

Which is why I would not dissuade him. He feared for the children and me to see him shackled by the king’s soldiers and hauled away to the Bastille, so we were trundled off to Paris, where I was left to read in the gazettes how my husband rose to read his Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

They said he was resolute and cool, but that his words set the chamber aflame. Royalists said this was a dangerous document. An insult. That it was too American. That above all, this declaration must not be circulated, lest it incite the public. But it was already far too late.

The French Revolution was begun . . .