Adopted Son Page 4

  On March 14, the duc and duchesse de Noailles presented Lafayette and Adrienne at court, and King Louis XV signed the marriage contract. Their wedding took place on April 11, 1774, in the chapel of the Hôtel de Noailles in Paris. The same abbé who had baptized Lafayette presided; he was now the archbishop of Paris. There was a houseful of high nobility in attendance for the big event. Afterward, the royal family and hundreds of aristocrats flooded the place for a feast of more than one hundred courses and forty-six desserts. When it was all over, the duchesse sent the newlyweds off to their separate apartments. They were too young to consummate the marriage, in her opinion; the groom was sixteen, the bride fourteen.

  Lafayette at eighteen, captain of dragoons, all arms and legs. Portrait by Boilly. (LILLY LIBRARY, INDIANA UNIVERSITY)

  As a wedding present, the duc promised Lafayette promotion to the rank of captain, with command of a company in the Noailles Dragoons. He arranged that in May. A few days after the wedding, the frustrated bridegroom rode off to Metz for summer training with his regiment.29

  I DID NOT HESITATE TO BE DISAGREEABLE

  Lafayette wrote to Adrienne occasionally that summer. Expressing no more than ritual affection, his letters dripped with adolescent self-absorption, whining that she did not write to him often enough. Her feelings did not seem to concern him.30

  He did not lack diversion. He made his first real friends, two fellow officers in the Noailles Dragoons, both about his age. The dominant one was his brother-in-law, the vicomte de Noailles, who cut a dashing figure in uniform. A hard rider, harder drinker, and even harder gambler, he was a natural leader among the teenagers. The other was Louis, comte de Ségur, who, like Lafayette, was a follower, trotting after the wild Noailles. Their revels continued after they returned to Versailles in the fall.31

  They returned from Metz in September 1774 to find a smallpox epidemic raging in Paris and Versailles. Lafayette decided to do something that was not generally approved—receive “inoculations” against the disease. That involved scratching the skin and painting the wound with secretions taken from a pustule of an infected person. It was potentially as dangerous as it was curative, and because the church frowned on the practice, it had to be done in secret. Adrienne and her mother supported this medical rebellion. He rented a small house in the Paris suburb of Chaillot, where he and Adrienne stayed for the two weeks it took for the inoculation to prove itself. It worked, while the newlyweds spent their first time together outside the d’Ayen household—suitably chaperoned, however. The duchesse was not about to take any chances.32

  That reinforced Lafayette’s frustration at not being allowed to sleep with his beautiful bride. Noailles and Ségur urged him to follow the road customary among the French nobility—have an affair. He tried. “I shall spare you also the confession of an unedifying youth,” he wrote a few years later, “and even of the story of two romances dedicated to beauties who were then very celebrated, in which my head had a larger part than my heart. The first, scarcely begun, broke against the obstacles of jealousy with which I collided head-on. The other…I pursued, despite long interruptions, on every possible occasion.”33

  The identity of the first lady remains a mystery. The second was probably Aglaé, comtesse d’Hunolstein, a married noblewoman. Court gossip linked him with her when he was in America in 1778, and he definitely connected with her later. She was beautiful and unusually promiscuous, even for her time and place.

  When Lafayette panted up her trail for the first time she was the mistress of the duc de Chartres, son and heir to the duc d’Orléans, so she spurned him at first. The duc was a member of the royal family, so the marquis could not challenge him to a duel over the lady’s affections. Instead, he showed up drunk at his friend Ségur’s place one night, and took him on. His fellow officer recalled that Lafayette spent the whole night “in a fit of jealousy, trying to persuade me to fight with him, swords drawn, for the heart of a beauty on which I had no claim.”34

  Adrienne, etching by Albert Rosenthal from a miniature copy of her wedding portrait. After she died, Lafayette carried this miniature in a locket around his neck for the rest of his life. (SKILLMAN LIBRARY, LAFAYETTE COLLEGE)

  Those with modern standards of sexual propriety may be shocked by the escapades of the nobility during the eighteenth century, for whom affairs were a normal, and expected, escape from arranged, often loveless marriages. Lafayette was the product of his time as well as his place, and he was at a stage in a boy’s life when his hormones boiled over. Rebelling against the restrictions imposed by his in-laws, during the winter of 1774–75 he began to sneak into Adrienne’s apartment. Soon it was a nightly habit, demonstrating (as he put the best face on it) his “tender and stable affection” for his wife. In the spring of 1775, Adrienne wrote him that she was pregnant.35

  When they were not chasing ladies, Lafayette, Noailles, Ségur, and other young bloods raised merry hell. Louis XV had died the previous summer, and the new king, Louis XVI—and especially his lusty queen, Marie-Antoinette—had attracted a younger set to the social whirl of Versailles. The boys showed youthful rebellion, parading around in costumes from the early fifteenth century. The queen and the younger courtiers were amused, while the older ones were visibly annoyed, which was the point of it all. With Noailles in the lead, the youngsters established a fad for horse racing; the old-clothes fashion wore away, but the turf sport remained.

  The young set called themselves the Court Club and adopted yet another diversion, making the rounds of new cafés springing up on the Right Bank of the River Seine through Paris, abandoning the Left Bank hideouts favored by their elders. When the boys were in their cups, they put on exaggerated plays and declamations. They stirred up political trouble by appearing to oppose royal absolutism, and more seriously by making fun of the high courts known as les Parlements. All over Paris and Versailles, noble elders wailed their version of humankind’s oldest refrain: “What’s the matter with kids these days?”36

  These boyish hijinks were not a sign, let alone a cause, of the approaching decline and fall of France, but a youthful reaction to a process already under way. “Through centuries of strife and vicissitude,” said the historian Francis Parkman, “the French monarchy had triumphed over nobles, parliaments, and people, gathered to itself all the forces of the State, beamed with illusive splendors under Louis the Great, and shone with the phosphorescence of decay under his contemptible successor; till now, robbed of prestige, burdened with debt, and mined with corruption, it was moving swiftly and more swiftly towards the abyss of ruin.”37

  The rotten heart of this decaying realm was Versailles, the seat of court a few miles outside Paris. It had begun in the 1660s as a love nest for Louis XIV and expanded into an elaborate assembly of buildings and gardens that became a sort of gilded cage for the aristocracy. There its complex set of social hierarchies trapped them in endless competition for preferment and enrichment. Its ornate marble bathing rooms introduced and made fashionable the taking of baths, reinstating a habit abandoned a thousand years before. Less positively, Versailles established a tradition of excessive expenditure by the royal families who succeeded the Great Louis. Everything about Versailles and its inhabitants showed the grossest self-indulgence, at the expense of the country, on the part of royalty and nobility.38

  When Louis XIV moved his court from Paris to Versailles, requiring the aristocracy to join him there, it was part of a comprehensive plan to establish his “absolute” control over the country. That required taming the nobility, the chief rivals for the king’s power, because they had their own armies, or resources to hire mercenaries. He dared not go so far as to tax them—that burden remained on the peasants—but he could redirect their energies. Palaces at Versailles, in addition to their homes, drained their income, as did expensive entertaining. Their propensity for troublemaking was restricted by their presence at Versailles under the king’s eye. It was also diverted into backstabbing and gossip, through competition for such silly
honors as determining who would sit nearer the king at the next banquet. When Louis saw how slavishly the once rebellious nobility followed his lead, he donned outlandish costumes, which the nobles had to copy, spending their resources on cloth and tailors and wigmakers.

  To tame the nobles’ sons, he ended mercenarism, perfected the “regular” army (meaning it was under the king’s control), and sent the boys to become officers in royal regiments. The rising, educated middle class was tamed by sending its sons to military academies to study engineering, artillery, and logistics. Instead of rebels, the young men became loyal subjects, thinning their own ranks by leading troops in battle.

  Such was the world Lafayette entered in the fall of 1774. He did not fit in. “I have still less to tell you of my entry into society,” he said later, “and of the unfavorable opinion that I incurred through my silence, because I did not heed and scarcely listened to things that did not appear to be worthy of discussion. That ill effect…was not moderated by the awkwardness of my manners, which, without being improper on great occasions, never succumbed to the graces of the court or to the charms of a supper in the capital.”39

  In this instance he was an honest judge of his own behavior. “Lafayette always seemed so distant,” Ségur recalled. He had “a cold, solemn look.” He seemed awkward, danced badly, and spoke little.40

  It was not that Lafayette did not try to fit in, at least in the beginning, when the duchesse d’Ayen took her married daughters and their husbands to social events. It had one lasting effect on him—he became a clotheshorse. His own clothing was hopelessly out of fashion when he made his first appearance among the swiftly changing styles of the court. For the rest of his life, even when he was broke, he made sure that he dressed in the finest of garb.

  A distant cousin observed Lafayette trying to keep up with his profligate friends in gambling, horse racing, and drinking. He also saw him at court and in the Versailles salons. The marquis, he remembered, “carefully sought what he believed to be the most fashionable, both in people and in things, but despite his taste for fashion, he was altogether awkward; he was terribly tall, his hair was red; he danced without grace, rode poorly.” As if that was not enough, when Marie-Antoinette saw Lafayette trying to dance at one of her balls, he was “so awkward and gauche that the Queen could not help laughing.” It was worse than that: he tripped and fell on his face. Given the customs of the servile court, everyone else in the place also laughed at him. He was humiliated as only a seventeen-year-old could be.41

  The marquis was taller than the average Frenchman, but he was not too tall; he topped out eventually at about five feet nine inches. He gained his height rapidly during his teen years, and that made him clumsy. Nor was his hair too red; rather, it was a light red, strawberry blond. In an environment where fashion was obeyed slavishly, being different in any way made him feel outcast. There was more: in Auvergne he had mixed happily with peasant boys, a galaxy away from him on the social scale, but here he was among his own kind. This was a conclave of nobles presided over by an ineffectual king who let his queen run wild. Even the king’s mistress went out of her way to shock and embarrass him.42

  Lafayette started to rebel against the forces hemming him in, beginning with his father-in-law. The man who might have been like a father to him was instead, in his youthful mind, a tyrant bent on curbing his behavior, denying him the freedom to live his own life. If the duc d’Ayen loved anything about Lafayette, it was his fortune. Otherwise, he seemed to assume that the young marquis would achieve nothing on his own. With the best of intentions, he tried to win Lafayette a place as a retainer of the comte de Provence, the king’s brother. That would have been a significant social advance, but Lafayette thought the honor would make him a permanent lackey at court. He sabotaged the duc’s plans by deliberately insulting Provence in a private conversation. As he explained later, “I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence.”43

  The only career still open to him was as a soldier, but that was what he had wanted all along. He did not entirely look the part, all arms and legs, no shoulders or hips, so slender that he appeared frail, but that was deceptive. He had a heart-shaped face, owing to a wide forehead broadened by an already receding hairline, with a rather pointed chin. It was bisected by a long, straight nose. Big hazel eyes sparkled under arched brows, and he had a lush mouth, a ruddy complexion, and a sprinkling of freckles. He was no longer as beautiful as he had been, but he was still attractive. The ladies thought so, anyway. He was about to discover that older men also could find him appealing, although not in the same way. It was his puppylike charm, which later would be called “inexplicable,” the endearing radiance of someone young, vulnerable, trusting, loyal, a threat to no one.

  Lafayette was likable, at least to his peers and to commoners. He liked people, and he wanted to be liked. He wanted approval, especially from those he could respect, and he wanted the applause of the many. He wanted a father, someone he could honor. The duc d’Ayen had not measured up.

  THE DESTINIES OF FRANCE AND HER RIVAL WERE BOTH TO BE DECIDED

  Then Lafayette met Charles-François, duc de Broglie, commander of the Army of the East. The young captain of the Noailles Dragoons came under his command—though separated by layers of senior officers who stood between the lowly company leader and the highest general—when his regiment reported to Metz for its annual training in late spring 1775.

  De Broglie was a well-padded man with a chubby face, wide, deep eyes, and a kindly expression, which flattered someone who had been a fighting soldier all his life. He had been victorious during the Seven Years’ War, under the command of his brother, Victor-François, comte de Broglie, until the incompetence of others at Minden erased their gains against the Prussians. He was also a relentless schemer and plotter who had been active in the secret intrigues of Louis XV’s government, especially in Poland. He had lost influence since the war ended in 1763, but in the 1770s he was regaining it as a relentless advocate of a renewed war against England. De Broglie had the worst instincts of a pirate and the best talents of a cutthroat. Thomas Jefferson saw him riding at the head of troops in Paris in 1789 and aptly described him as “a high-flying aristocrat, cool and capable of everything.” His ample exterior cloaked his sinister nature. In person he was friendly, hearty, and indulgent to the young.44

  The general knew that he had under him junior officers whose military rank did not reflect the power of their family connections. Nor had it escaped his notice that Lafayette had a lot of money. De Broglie was grand master of a traveling (military) lodge of the Freemasons. In that capacity he invited Lafayette, Noailles, Ségur, and a few other young officers to join. Flattered, they found themselves for the first time in a real “brotherhood.” It was especially intriguing for the country boy from Auvergne. The Masons were a social organization, but they talked about the equality of men and the rights of all—loaded political ideas in an absolutist monarchy. That was a message congenial to a young Frenchman schooled in the ideals of the Roman Republic and exposed to fiery notions about the “social contract” preached by the latest philosophers.

  Fighting had broken out in America in the spring of 1775, and the news touched off a frenzy among soldiers in France. The young ones, fired by Enlightenment ideas, hungered for a taste of the action. The elders wanted revenge against England for the French defeat in 1763. It was a popular subject at meetings of the military lodge, where Lafayette and the other boys first heard about American leaders such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin—with the additional news that they were Masons.

  In August 1775, the Duke of Gloucester, brother of Britain’s King George III, passed through Metz. De Broglie invited him to a dinner with fellow Masons, including Lafayette and his friends. Gloucester expressed his sympathy for the Americans and his opinion that his brother was being boneheaded about it all. Here, the boys agreed, was an opportunity for glory, and for revenge against the Anglais, all in a good, even noble cause
.45

  De Broglie had plans of his own for the American Revolution, but he did not let the young officers in on them. He hoped that when they returned to Versailles and Paris at the end of the summer they would influence public and court opinion in favor of French intervention into Britain’s colonial troubles. He knew that an official shift in policy toward the Americans would not happen overnight, but he was as patient as he was crafty. He might seem fatherly to Lafayette and the others, but he was really taking advantage of their connections and their youthful sympathies for the American struggle.

  Lafayette later claimed that he was won over immediately. “Such a glorious cause,” he said in his memoirs, “had never before rallied the attention of mankind.” Waving his pen like a sword, he concluded, “I gave my heart to the Americans and thought of nothing else but raising my banner and adding my colors to theirs.”46

  That was written decades later to present Lafayette in hindsight as a democratic republican from the outset. In 1775, however, he was still a French aristocrat, uncomfortable in Versailles but not opposed to the form of government that it represented. He had been raised to hate the Anglais and was infected by the rage for revanche (vengeance) that permeated the French army after the Seven Years’ War. Above all else, he was consumed with a boyish desire for glory in battle. The uprising in America was not to him a beacon of freedom. It was the only military game in town, and he wanted to take a hand in it.