THIRTY-FOUR

ADRIENNE

Paris

June 1791

I crumpled the pamphlet, which featured a drawing of my husband kneeling before the queen, stroking her exposed genitalia. In another pamphlet, he gave himself over to a ménage à trois. I crumpled this one too, but they were all over Paris—and I knew who was to blame.

With the new constitution on secure footing, in a high-minded flourish, Gilbert had allowed the duc d’Orléans to come home—and the moment that depraved schemer set foot on French soil, vile rumors erupted about my husband and Marie Antoinette, who would sooner spit in my husband’s face than kiss it.

These pornographic drawings both entertained and outraged the mob. Royalists and traditionalists barked that my husband was the king’s jailer. Radicals and reformers snarled that my husband was the king’s apologist. Our abolitionist friend Brissot believed my husband too hard on the mob; our relations believed him too soft. And rising politicians like Maximilien Robespierre demanded inquiries . . .

It was endless and exhausting.

Caught between scoundrels on both sides, Lafayette complained, “In America I saw attacks on George Washington too. Admittedly, none so vile. Yet I must endure with as much grace as possible these slings and arrows to my reputation, so long as everyone keeps faith with the new French government.”

These words were no sooner out of his mouth than young Jean-Louis Romeuf, my husband’s aide-de-camp, marched into the parlor to announce, “The king is missing!”

“What can you mean, missing?” Lafayette snapped. “I just saw him last night near midnight.”

“He’s gone, sir,” reported Romeuf. “The entire royal family. We’ve searched the Tuileries Palace from courtyard to rooftop; they aren’t there.”

My husband’s face went white to the tip of his nose. And I sputtered, “The duc d’Orléans should be brought in for questioning.”

If our old enemy had designs on the throne, was it too far-fetched to think that he had kidnapped or murdered the royals with the help of British agents? The same thing must have occurred to my husband, who ordered, “Put out the word that the king has been abducted. We must prevent the kidnappers from harming him or removing him from the city.”

Only once his officers scattered in different directions did my husband reveal to me that he did not truly believe the king had been abducted. Rather, he believed the king had run off to raise an army against us. My husband had a well-deserved reputation for keeping his wits about him in a crisis, but his hands now shook as he buttoned his coat with its military braids, his expression torn between disillusionment and dishonor. “To think King Louis gave his oath upon a field with hundreds of thousands of witnesses . . .”

It was Lafayette’s responsibility to defend the king from the people. But it was also his responsibility to defend the people from the king. My heart ached to see the fear in his eyes that he had failed at one duty or the other—and would be blamed for both.

Crowds were already gathering outside, shouting that my husband must have helped his lover, the queen, escape to Austria to lead a counterrevolution. “Traitors pay with their heads!”

With the alarm of the tocsin bells ringing, I tried to keep calm, sending our girls upstairs and advising my husband that he needed to go before the National Assembly at once. But to do it, he had to fight his way out of our house. I watched him go, the crowd kicking and punching some of his officers. My heart was in my throat as I wondered if I dared to follow. He might need my support, perhaps even my witness as to his whereabouts last evening. I had determined to join him when a bruised and battered aide-de-camp stumbled into my toilette, carrying news—a statement by the king himself.

I read the missive, so startled by its contents that I accidentally knocked little bottles of perfumes and pots of cosmetics from my dressing table. I read it again. A statement by the king denouncing the constitution. King Louis groused that the Tuileries Palace was not as comfortable as Versailles. He bemoaned the privileges he had lost. He expressed fury that he should be accountable for his expenditures, even to the nation who paid for them.

This sounded like the king—his cadence and word choice. Still, I did not want to believe that he would write such a thing unless a pistol had been pressed to his temple. Surely he knew this would embolden his enemies and mortify his friends. Few but the most staunch royalist left in the country would defend such a petulant manifesto!

Meanwhile, the people raged outside. What competent commander lets an entire royal family disappear into the night? Lafayette is either a traitor or unfit to lead!

And I began to fear that if my husband did not find the king and drag him back, we would all be torn to pieces.

Thank God for young Romeuf. The king had been recognized on the road by an ordinary citizen who compared his profile to the portrait of the king on an assignat in his pocket. Led by Romeuf, my husband’s forces fetched the royal family and escorted their caravan back to Paris—an ignominious return filled with shame for all of us.

Badly shaken by the king’s betrayal, Lafayette received the king outside the Tuileries Palace with the words, “Your Majesty, I have always said that if you made me choose between you and the people, I would choose the people . . .”

“That is true,” the king admitted.

Not knowing what else to do, Lafayette reverted to ancient protocol. “Does Your Majesty have any orders?”

King Louis barked with bitter laughter. “It seems I take your orders now.”

That bitter laughter unraveled my remaining love for the king. I realized now that he had always been insincere, and that he had sworn falsely before God and the nation. However personable and well-intentioned he might seem, King Louis was no longer seeking the good of his people, if ever he was before. His actions were meant only to assure his own personal power. He truly was a despot, and this realization broke my heart.

That night I told Gilbert, “I fear for his life if people should believe he was going to raise a foreign army against us . . .”

Gilbert agreed. “They will tear him to pieces.”

Many would say we should let them. King Louis liked to think of himself as a merciful and enlightened king, but his bad governance had killed hundreds of thousands—some through starvation, others through torture. He might say that was ignorance, or that he was badly advised, but his determination to reinstate an absolute monarchy at the point of a gun was with knowledge aforethought and with no consideration of mercy to those he left behind. Those like my family and me . . .

Perhaps he deserved to be torn limb from limb, but as a Christian, I did not believe justice could be served through murder. I wanted mercy for the king, but more than that, I wanted mercy for the nation, and to my profound shame, the only way to achieve both was through deception.

My husband, whose oaths and principles and sympathies also stood in opposition to one another, now admitted, “Some excuse will have to be made for the king’s escape.”

The official story put out by the National Assembly was that the royal family had been kidnapped. This was the first time my husband put his reputation behind a lie. As a woman of scruple, I should have abhorred it, but it was the only way, unless we wished to throw our lot in with the bloodthirsty zealots wishing to murder all the royals.

Our friends warned, In running a middle course, you run the risk of being hated by both sides . . .

And my family was wavering. My younger sisters Pauline and Rosalie left for the countryside. My father fled the country with his mistress to Switzerland. Even Maman sided now with the royals, for radicals in the new assembly were bent upon destroying the Catholic Church.

All the clergy were now required to swear a civic oath breaking their allegiance to the pope and promising to hold the laws of the nation as more sacrosanct than those of God. I didn’t understand how a movement for religious liberty could devolve into persecutions of priests. I would not support that, and was glad to take Communion with my sister Louise at Saint-Sulpice when the curé announced his refusal to take the oath.

As a result, I found myself denounced in the papers for treason.

“This hurts us,” Gilbert said, throwing the paper into the fire. “Your support for nonjuring priests.”

He did not share my faith, but believed always in the right of every person to freedom of religion. I had sacrificed much to support him as a champion of that idea, but I would not sacrifice this. “Do not ask me.”

“I ask only discretion,” Gilbert said.

“Do not ask that either.” It pained me to distress him, and yet in this, I had to. “I have stood by you, every moment of our marriage, every moment you have expressed controversial beliefs, no matter the danger. Now we come to my own principles and you must stand by me.”

Gilbert stared as if I had grown two heads. Never before had I asserted myself this way. So accustomed to our being in accord in every particular, he did not seem to know what to do or say. So he said nothing—wordlessly slamming out the door in haste to some appointment.

My heart physically ached. I had chosen now, of all times, when he was in the most precarious position, to stake out ground that could ruin us, but how could I give way?

Gilbert scarcely uttered a word to me in the days that followed. And when I refused to play hostess to the new bishop of Paris, who was persecuting nonjuring priests, I feared Lafayette would never forgive me. We are going to become like my parents, alienated and cold.

Even so, I would not change my mind—this was a matter of faith; I had not fought and sacrificed for a revolution that would, in turn, oppress others. What I could do—I decided at the last moment—was explain myself to the bishop. Thus, I dressed and went down to the dining room. I had not yet entered, however, when I heard the bishop say, “Your wife sets a bad example, and it reflects poorly on you that you cannot control her. You must crush this spirit of dissent in your own house, just as I will crush it on the streets of Paris.”

I trembled, there at the threshold, wanting to turn back but too upset to move. Especially as the silence dragged on, and I began to worry for what Lafayette would say. At long last, I heard my husband’s voice rise up over the clank of his fork settling on the dinner plate.

“Sir,” Lafayette began, “I do not share my wife’s religious beliefs, but if you knew my marriage, you would realize that she is not my subject, nor would I wish her to be. She is a woman of high-minded principle and the model of kindness; of a character we would all do well to emulate. I would no more crush my wife’s spirit than I would persecute any other citizen for matters of conscience. And I promise that if you try to crush her spirit, you will find me in your way, sword in hand.”

Oh, the nameless satisfaction I took in his defense of me! I would not have minded even if my husband stayed away that evening, but he came to our bedchamber and wrapped me in his embrace, murmuring apologies. “I will always stand by you, my dear heart.”

The next morning, he was awake early, and furious. “Someone has been in the locked compartment of my desk . . .” Our children knew better than to touch their papa’s papers, much less unlatch the chambers he kept fastened. My heart sank to think we might have in our house a spy. Truly, so many people came and went, it could be anyone, and I said so.

“Have the locks changed. All of them,” Lafayette said.

We had enemies, and because of me, we would now have more.

Let us go away to Chavaniac, I wanted to say. Yet I knew if we left Paris now, our carriage too might be dragged back to the city while people spat upon it and pelted it with rocks. And I also knew the first person to throw a stone would be Philippe Égalité—which was the name that the duc d’Orléans now went by to please the mob.

I heard it said everywhere now in the Palais-Royale that King Louis was an untrustworthy despot, but Philippe Égalité would be a faithful king of the Free French. Thus, Philippe started a petition to demand an investigation into the king’s treachery. His supporters intended to gather to sign this petition on the Champ de Mars upon the same altar where my husband led our oath to the constitution. Even our friends the Condorcets intended to sign. Not because they wished Philippe to be king, but because they asked, “What kind of constitutional monarchy can exist when the monarch so obviously despises it? We now have the opportunity to form the government we should have had in the first place. A republic without any king at all.”

They make a fair point, I thought. I did not say so, because I saw the danger of upending what we had accomplished so far. It had been difficult enough to achieve a constitutional monarchy. The last thing we needed was to start over and return to days of anarchy and violence.

Yet anarchy and violence are what we got . . .

On the day people went to the Champ de Mars to sign Philippe’s petition, my husband and his National Guard were on hand to keep order. I was at home with the girls, carrying a tray with tea, when I heard the crack of musket fire in the streets. Glancing out of my windows, I saw a mass of people racing down the Rue de Bourbon for my house. I backed away, somehow managing to set the tray down without spilling anything as I retreated, but as the guardsman sprang to action, flying out of the house, ready for battle, I was spotted by an angry brute whose face pressed against my glass. “There she is! Kill her!”

I stumbled back as someone else screamed, “Let’s make Lafayette a present of his wife’s head!”

“Get out of sight, madame,” said Romeuf, my husband’s aide-de-camp, pulling me behind him. I had fed these men with my own hands and had faith in them; if they could defend us, they would. And so it was with an eerie sense of composure that I withdrew, setting about bolting the shutters and gathering my tearful children.

Hearing the shake of leaves against the side of the house, I realized the mob was trying to come in through the garden. “Up the stairs,” I told the children. “Quickly!” Not wishing for them to be afraid, I added, “Praise God these marauders are here and not at the Champ de Mars. If they have come for me, it is because they cannot get to your father, and he will be safe and come to our rescue.”

“Madame,” a blue-and-white-clad guardsman called after me. “We will die before we let them take you.”

“God preserve you, sir!” I cried.

The sounds of fighting echoed. Punching, kicking, shouting. Then galloping horses as my husband and his guardsmen rounded the house to drive away our attackers. No one was killed at our home that day, but on the Champ de Mars, corpses littered the ground. The number, we did not know. It was being called a massacre. And that night, Gilbert leaned against the door of my chamber and closed his eyes.

“Two drunkards were caught sleeping beneath the altar,” he explained. “The mob accused them of trying to set off explosives to prevent people from signing the petition. I fired warning shots, but it did no good. I was left with the choice of complicity with murder or firing on the people . . . so I fired. Nevertheless, the unfortunates were torn to pieces.”

“You did all you could.”

He put his head in his hands. “Adrienne, in the melee someone aimed a pistol in my face and pulled the trigger.” My heart stopped. “The gun misfired, but now I wonder if this near-death angered me so much that I did the wrong thing.”

“No,” I said, my heart thumping wildly with gratitude that God had spared my husband’s life. It made me more firm in my conviction. “You are no butcher, Gilbert.”

Surely he knew it, and yet this self-doubt broke something in him.

In September, the king ratified the new constitution. After he forswore his oath to a constitutional monarchy, I would never trust the honor of King Louis again. I did, however, think he could not possibly be foolish enough to risk all our lives a second time. Thanks to Lafayette, he had survived the turmoil, remained one of the richest men in the world, and kept his crown. He could now rule in the same way the British king did.

All he had to do was keep his word.

Nevertheless, the royal family made clear that they did not wish for my husband’s help or protection any longer. The royals resentfully celebrated every dent in my husband’s armor—even as he shielded them with it. Though he had saved their lives, they scorned him. Now they believed they were in better hands, and I hoped they were.

I wished no ill on the queen’s family even though she wished much ill upon mine. The royals said Lafayette was now welcome to leave public life altogether. Perhaps they thought to test his integrity. Some people still accused Lafayette of wanting to be king. Others wanted him to be king.

Yet I knew he wanted to be George Washington.

Which is why, with peace restored, my husband twined his fingers in mine and asked, “Will you steal away with me to Chavaniac—the only place we can be free?”