FORTY-FIVE

ADRIENNE

Le Puy

September 1792

It was too generous to call the assemblage of armed men who arrested me soldiers, but they wore the tricolor cockades my husband had popularized at the start of the Revolution. There were some amongst them, at least, who still gave a care to duty, offering courteous hands to help me, my daughter, and Aunt Charlotte in and out of the carriage at our stops along the journey. “It’s the women of Chavaniac!” someone cried when we rolled into Le Puy. A mob formed around us, and a rock cracked against the glass window, causing my daughter to jolt. I squeezed her hand to keep her calm. And Anastasie did the same for Aunt Charlotte.

Not wanting either of them to see my fear, I stared straight ahead. Alas, this only inflamed the sans-culottes. Wearing red Phrygian caps, wielding pitchforks and pikes, they shouted, “Look at the aristocrats. Still so arrogant!”

My cheeks burned, because I’d never been called arrogant before. My gown was modest, bosom covered in a fichu made for me by local lacemakers from the school I had established. I wore no jewelry but my wedding ring and a small holy cross dangling from my neck—which I supposed would be counted against me in godless Paris, where blood flowed in the streets.

Another volley of stones slammed into the carriage, causing a shrill whinny from the agitated horses, and when the glass shattered, I yelped, hastily brushing shards away, even as they opened little cuts in my hands. I couldn’t understand how this could be happening. Not so long ago, the people of France called my husband the Hero of Two Worlds, the father of our new nation, and some called me its mother. Now people I didn’t know spewed torrents of abuse against me.

“If Lafayette were here, we’d tear out his bowels, so let his bitch be his substitute!”

My daughter’s hand tightened upon mine, and I felt the slick sweat of her fear. Seated across from us was a tenderhearted guardsman I’d known since his youth, and I saw his jaw was so tight he might crack his teeth. “My child is with me, sir,” I said, as if he could restore decency.

And he tried. He shouted at the mob out the shattered window to have a care for innocent ears. It made no difference. “Citizen,” they called back. “Her children are only parasites nurtured at her bosom.”

I should have prayed for the souls of anyone depraved enough to say such a thing, but indignation filled my heart. It’s barbarism to take vengeance upon the women, children, and elderly relations of public men. But barbarity had been unleashed in France by Philippe and the Jacobins. The sacrifices we made for liberté, égalité, fraternité were now wasted by these lawless criminals. Everything we honored was desecrated, every dream corrupted, every ideal defiled . . .

I gasped with relief when the soldiers somehow beat back the crowd, and our damaged carriage clacked its way down the stone road. It was not the end, by far, of the danger. A trembling worked its way into my knees, my mind scrambling for some way out of this situation. I tried to think what my husband would do. “Sir,” I whispered to the guardsman whose eyes brimmed with sympathy, “do you think it is possible I should find the means of escaping?”

Blanching, he could not meet my eyes. “It would not be possible for a person bearing your name . . .”

I knew what he was suggesting. The hope he was holding out. Half the aristocratic women I knew—amongst them even loving and religious wives—had divorced to keep their property or save their lives. Some renounced or even denounced their husbands. If I did the same, maybe I too could go free.

My heart beat wilder with hope that my family might one day be reunited if I made this concession. What was a name in these days when divorce, forbidden under the ancien régime, was now so prevalent, and titles meant nothing? I was born with my father’s name—of the house of Noailles. Then I exchanged it for my husband’s name. Why not change my name again for survival? Perhaps, like Philippe, I could simply choose a new one.

These thoughts buzzed like stinging insects in my poor brain until, at last, the carriage stopped before the department in Le Puy. This was the crucial moment. If they took me all the way to Paris, I would be murdered, but if I could convince these men to set me free, here in this friendlier, faraway province, there was a chance.

My daughter and her aunt insisted upon going with me into the room where I wrote a petition protesting the injustice of my arrest. They looked to me for guidance, because Lafayette couldn’t give it. He was a prisoner. Lafayette, the Hero of Two Worlds, the invincible soldier who never raised a sword to conquer, only to liberate. Nevertheless, he had conquered my heart, and now I feared I would never see him again. So what did it matter now if I put more distance between us?

If I gave up his name . . .

As I reached the place on the page where I was to sign, the tenderhearted guardsman stared intently as if willing me to choose expediency. My pen hesitated. The quill pen shook in my fingers, one of which bled from the glass. That was but a trifle considering the amount of blood they said gushes from the neck when the guillotine falls.

Yes, it is but a trifle, the guardsman’s eyes seemed to say. A name means nothing. Honor means nothing anymore either.

I glanced at Anastasie, so like her father, with an intrepid spirit and the heart of a lion. I was already in agony that my children might soon be orphans, and blinked away tears to think of them shamed by the one thing their father and I could still leave them. Our name.

Already, Lafayette was a name people had died for. A name that meant everything to me, but also a name that didn’t belong only to me. It belonged to the ages, where I hoped it might yet inspire great deeds. So I signed in large letters and bold ink what might be my death sentence: la femme Lafayette.