FIFTY-EIGHT
ADRIENNE
The Prison of Olmütz
Austria
December 1795
It was the same every day in this prison, this Austrian Bastille. My daughters were permitted to come to us each morning at eight o’clock for a breakfast of bitter coffee or weak chocolate. At noon, the Prussian guards delivered food upon dirtied plates swarmed by flies. A thin soup, braised meat of indeterminate animal, and a slop of vegetables, usually garnished with little bits of tobacco and ash from someone’s pipe. Even the most bloodthirsty French Jacobin jailer had more pride than to abuse cuisine this way!
We were obliged to scoop up food with filthy hands and wash it down with our ration of Hungarian wine. “Not the best vintage,” Gilbert observed. “But more healthful than water.”
After our meals, he read to us, delighting Virginie by imitating voices like a stage actor. Alas, our little joys were interrupted by the screams of prisoners being lashed in the courtyard. These Prussians were as cruel as Jacobins were arbitrary and capricious. Yet they seemed to take to the task of tormenting prisoners with rigid exactness.
With jingling keys, a round guardsman would fetch the girls back to their cage in the evening. During these transfers, seemingly every guard in the compound gathered to watch, a great show being made of checking locks and chains, my girls being obliged to pass under crossed sabers to prevent their escape. This ludicrous show of force was too much. Every day, Virginie would flush with indignant anger. Anastasie, however, began to make faces at the guards, sometimes with the haughty bearing of a Noailles and sometimes in silly mockery.
“They bear up so well,” Lafayette whispered.
I worried imprisonment would become more difficult for them over time. How had my husband endured this, alone, for so long? Despite the misery of our conditions, I found myself content to see my husband eat, to see his health improve, to know our presence was a balm. I felt a guilty happiness too, to have him to myself.
We had years of conversation to catch up on, and I told him everything I had done in his absence. How gratifying to know he approved of my decisions with pleasure and pride. And sometimes a little amazement. “What noble imprudence to be the only woman in France endangered by the name she bore, but who always refused to change it! You could have divorced me.” I was overpaid by his tender words, but he wasn’t finished, his eyes now lowered in humility. “I have always known I loved and needed you, Adrienne, but did not always appreciate how incomparable a woman I had the good fortune to marry.”
I gave him a melting smile, feeling that it was God who had given us to each other, not fickle fortune, but how blessed we were for it. That night, nestled in the crook of his arm upon a fetid bed, I mused, “What a novelty it is to wake up with you each morning without having to watch you dash off on your horse to save someone’s life—I don’t know that we’ve had so many uninterrupted hours together since the king made you my prisoner . . .”
A sliver of moonlight through prison bars allowed me to see him grin. “That was a far more pleasant confinement than this.”
“Yes, but perhaps if we close our eyes, we can remember the softness of our feather bed.”
“The softness of the bed left less impression upon me than the softness of the girl upon it,” he said, stroking my hair. “I counted myself so fortunate to have a feminine little wife. I loved the silk of your lips and the tenderness of your gaze. I did not yet know your gentleness is a velvet drape over steel . . .”
“Is this a compliment, sir, or a reproach?”
He kissed me. “The highest compliment, but a reproach to me every day I do not find the firmness in my own character to command the guards to eject you from this terrible place.”
“It is not so terrible,” I said.
He snorted, twining his fingers with mine. “Look how swollen your hands are. It will get worse with the vapors rising from the moat of sewage outside.”
“Gilbert, I am happier with you in a prison than I could be anywhere in the world without you.”
I’m uncertain he believed me; nevertheless, it was true. And I did not yet despair of regaining our freedom. Gilbert was allowed no contact with the outside world, but the same restriction did not apply to me. I obtained with bribery some paper and ink. I was forbidden to write our son in America because our captors were uneasy about news of Lafayette reaching the United States. I was warned not to reveal the conditions of our imprisonment or to write anything that might embarrass them. Yet, I hoped my sharp-eyed friends would divine enough from what I did not say to shout it to the world.
Despite the winter’s frost, I burned with fever. “Morbus sanguinis,” said the physician, where I lay plagued with headaches and swollen extremities.
“Blood infection,” Gilbert translated from Latin, as it was the language he shared in common with the doctor. “He wants to send you to Vienna for treatment.”
“No. If I go, I will never see you again.”
Gilbert pressed a cloth to my brow. “That is your fever talking.”
My daughters sat near to the stove, warming their hands, both frowning. “We will stay with Papa whilst you are gone,” Anastasie insisted. “You need not worry. I will do exactly as you would in my place.”
I believed my courageous girl. She understood how necessary our presence had been to saving her father’s life. Still, the thought of being separated again was too terrifying. I did not realize I said this aloud until Gilbert thumped the wooden table in frustration. “You may well be separated from us by the grave if you do not go. Petition the emperor.” I started to shake my head, but he resorted to his general’s bark. “Obey me, Adrienne. As my wife it is your duty.”
He had seldom commanded me in anything—and had told the bishop of Paris that I was not his subject. I nearly rebelled, but remembering it was a mutiny of his soldiers that brought us all to this place, I relented, writing my petition to the emperor even though I suspected his reply would be precisely what it was: You will be allowed to go to Vienna for treatment, madame, but if you leave the prison, you will not be permitted to return.
“Accept at once,” said Gilbert.
My daughters understood why I did not, but I alone seemed to understand the triumph when the emperor demanded a written answer. “He wants evidence,” I said with the greatest satisfaction. “No monarch needs evidence of anything unless he fears the judgment of humanity. He regrets letting us join you. The censorious eyes of the world are now upon him, and the only way he can justify keeping you here is if we abandon you.”
Lafayette seemed not to care, shaking his louse-ridden head as if he thought the fever was robbing me of good sense. “I cannot stand by and watch you expose your life to a struggle with a tyrant.”
“Why not?” I asked softly. “You asked it of me every day of our marriage since you first stole off to America. Day after day, year after year, I was obliged to swallow my fears whilst you risked life and limb. Now you will simply have to do the same.”
My husband flung his hands up. “Mon Dieu, Adrienne, you are not a soldier, and it is not the cause of humanity at stake. It is only me.”
“You’re mistaken. Glory is a bittersweet wreath of both flowers and thorns. Your name, your house, your wife, your story—we are all now inextricably woven together with the cause of humanity. Your officers rode across the border with you for this reason; some of them are rotting in this prison too. That is to say nothing of simple patriots who tried to help you escape. Many people who are not soldiers have lost their lives for our causes. I cannot dishonor these sacrifices.”
“Adrienne,” he groaned, hiding his face in his hands. “How much guilt do you think I can bear?”
I stroked his beard. “Have faith in me, my dear heart . . .”
All I had to do was endure.
Already my spirits were bolstered knowing I had, in the eyes of the emperor, become a troublesome woman and a thorn in his royal side. Your terms can never be acceptable to me, I replied. I remember how, when my husband and I were both near death—I because of Robespierre’s tyranny and Lafayette because of the torments of his captivity—I was neither able to hear news of him nor to send word that his children and I were still alive. I will not willingly expose myself to the horrors of another such separation.
To bear up under a red prickly rash, I remembered the patience of my dear martyred mother. I had no paper, but the wide margins of a book became my parchment as I scratched out her biography with a toothpick dipped in ink, for my pen had been seized. I wanted this keepsake, these memories, for my children.
Eventually, though, my hands became too swollen to write. My arms too heavy to lift. When my legs pained me too much to sit upon the wooden bench, I requested to purchase an armchair to ease my discomfort. When this was denied, I felt more satisfaction. “How frightened the emperor is of a little suffering woman that he denies me the comforts of a chair. He is trying to force me out; he is testing my resolve.”
“And you are testing mine,” Gilbert growled.
Why was it, I wondered in my fevered state, that every damsel sighs in gratitude to be rescued by a knight, but the knight himself hates to find his fate in the hands of the damsel?
Well, he would simply have to endure it too.