ONE
La Victoire
Lanky and redheaded, the nineteen-year-old French nobleman stood as if in a trance on the three-masted ship’s quarterdeck. Seventy-four feet long, with a twenty-six-foot beam, La Victoire was as stubby as it was crowded. And as the sea rolled beneath the young man’s feet, a northeasterly wind swelled his ship’s sails, nudging it down the final hours of its four-month, four-thousand-mile Atlantic crossing.
Just before noon, on June 13, 1777, the marquis de Lafayette reached for his telescope. Scanning the western horizon, unmindful of the summer morning’s merciless brightness and searing heat, he longed for his first sighting of South Carolina’s coast. For the past few days he and his crew had spotted birds associated with land. He had grown so convinced of their imminent landfall that, as a precaution against hostile ships possibly lurking close to the shore, he had taken to ordering the ship to sail without lights at night. Increasing their discomfiture, the voyage had been badly planned, and they were running low on food and water.
Ironically, however, those privations only sweetened that morning’s renewed spirits. As Lafayette scanned the horizon, his shipmates—each man at his station—optimistically prepared for their long journey’s conclusion. Even so, amid the morning’s gathering joy, if Lafayette still appeared anxious, all understood his reasons: If expectations proved sound, he was about to set foot upon the terra firma of a lifelong dream.1
* * *
Since childhood Lafayette had hungered for martial glory. What he never contemplated was realizing that dream in the uniform of a foreign army. With a general’s commission in hand, he would soon report for duty in the Continental army, the military arm of the United States of America, an improbable republic declared two years earlier. The ill-equipped, poorly trained army was now slogging through the third year of a dispiriting insurgent war against the superior forces of Great Britain, against whose empire its former North American colonists were now rebelling.
In reality much of the brave, leveling rhetoric of that young nation’s self-described “Patriots”—from “Give me liberty or give me death” to “All men are created equal”—carried a hollow, abstract resonance for the young, wealthy French nobleman. His Enlightenment education, venerating safely distant ancient republics, disposed him in principle to share such sentiments. But in day-to-day life Lafayette also remained a loyal subject of his own country’s monarch, Louis XVI, whose absolutism made Britain’s king George III appear, by comparison, a zealot of democratic principles.
Other considerations, however, drew Lafayette to the Patriots’ cause. Fourteen years earlier, in the Seven Years’ War, the same British forces that the Americans now faced had defeated those of the marquis’s native land. Personalizing that sting, his father, fighting for France, had died in the conflict. Lafayette was just two years old when his father—Michel-Louis-Christophe-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, from whom he inherited his title—died. But in the coming years, as the fallen soldier’s only son grew up in an extended family that revered military service, Lafayette père acquired, in the mind of that son, an almost mythic scale.2
* * *
Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier was born on September 6, 1757, in south-central France’s province of Auvergne—three years after his parents’ marriage in Paris. The boy’s father had generational ties to Auvergne. His mother, Marie Louise Jolie de La Rivière, was the daughter of a rich nobleman from Brittany.
Auvergne lay inside the Massif Central, landlocked mountains indented by deep-valley forests teeming with tall oaks, chestnuts, firs, and beech trees; high plateaus; and sublime uplands crowned with domed, rocky outcrops. Lafayette spent his childhood at the Château de Chavaniac, an eighteen-room mansion set on a hillock amid the area’s volcano-sculpted mountains. The Lafayette family, its lineage deeply embedded in France’s history, could lay claim to celebrated figures. But recent generations, though retaining noble titles and landholdings, had scant ties to Versailles’s reigning Bourbon dynasty. Recalled Lafayette, the family by then “left the provinces only to make war and played no role at court.”
Jacques-Roch du Motier, the older brother of Lafayette’s father, died in 1734, at age eighteen, fighting Austrian forces in the War of the Polish Succession. Two years later Éduoard du Motier, a recently titled marquis—father of the two brothers—died in an equestrian accident while serving as a bodyguard for Louis XV. From Éduoard—Lafayette’s paternal grandfather—Lafayette’s own father, Michel-Louis-Christophe-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, had inherited the marquis title. And after his death at age twenty-six—in August 1759, killed by a British cannonball during the Battle of Minden in the Seven Years’ War, in what is today’s northern Germany—the title fell to his son, Gilbert, then just weeks shy of his second birthday.
An extended configuration of the Lafayette clan, overseen by Gilbert’s paternal grandmother, was, by then, living at the Château de Chavaniac. And by February 1762—apparently traumatized by her husband’s death—Gilbert’s mother, Mary Louise Jolie de La Rivière, a native of Paris, had returned there to live with her family. Her son, Gilbert, thus spent his formative years living amid a ménage of aunts, cousins, and servants, all dominated by his formidable paternal grandmother.
During Gilbert’s lifetime his name was often spelled “La Fayette” and variations thereof. It was an age, after all, that had yet to standardize spellings; and many, including some who knew him, were unaware of how Lafayette spelled the family name. But he himself, when referring to himself, spelled it as one word, though whether as “LaFayette” or “Lafayette,” his autograph—its F indecipherable as to lower- or uppercase—makes it impossible to render any final conclusion.
For five years during the 1760s, Lafayette saw his mother only during her occasional visits to the Auvergne. While the thought of a mother leaving a child to be raised by others may seem harsh to modern sensibilities, in the world of eighteenth-century French nobility it was accepted practice: Infants were often turned over to wet nurses; and older children to governesses, tutors, and grandparents: “Although my mother loved me a great deal,” Lafayette remembered, “the thought of taking me away from my grandmother La Fayette never crossed her mind.”
At Chavaniac, beyond what he learned from the family’s hired tutors, Lafayette grew up transfixed by stories, doubtless embellished, of the glorious deeds of his father, uncle, and other relatives who had perished in service to France. Gilbert also relished adolescent explorations of the wildernesses that lay within his childhood’s reach. In the Auvergne’s highlands, canyons, and forests, he cultivated a fertile imagination—one that made room for a legendary creature, the Beast of the Gévaudan, reputed to roam south-central France.
Its size and predations exaggerated in local folklore, the “beast” was likely a large lynx, some other known species of forest mammal, or even a human being. Whatever the legend’s origins, the chimerical creature had reputedly killed livestock and even women and children. And while Lafayette never claimed to have actually seen the beast, his contemplations of it—his ponderings of its powers and size—inflamed his imagination. And along with tales of his relatives’ military exploits, the Beast of the Gévaudan nourished an early taste for romantic adventure: “I recall nothing in my life that preceded my enthusiasm for glorious tales or my plans to travel the world in search of renown.” Moreover, he recalled, himself “burning with the desire to have a uniform.”3
By 1767 Lafayette’s mother had decided that it was time for her son to join her in Paris. Soon returning to Chavaniac that December, Marie Louise Jolie and Gilbert commenced a two-week journey to Paris and her Luxembourg Palace apartment. Later recalling his first months in Paris, he remembered being “separated with the utmost chagrin from a grandmother, two aunts, and a cousin, whom I adored.” Even so—though taken aback by the lack of deference shown him in Paris, compared with that accorded him in the Auvergne—the city stamped an indelible impression on him.
In 1768 Gilbert was enrolled in Paris’s Collège du Plessis, a secondary school run by the University of Paris, on the rue Saint-Jacques, not far from the Lafayette family’s residence. Most of his Plessis classmates came from families whose social status derived from the Nobility of the Robe, a category derived from government or judicial service.
Nobles among Lafayette’s family, by contrast, belonged to the Nobility of the Sword, a more prestigious ranking, derived from military service to the court. At the Collège du Plessis, Lafayette—heretofore having spent much of his free time in rural isolation—now reveled in the company of other boys. Moreover, he blossomed into a popular and gifted student (excelling in Latin) and quickly established himself as a leader among his classmates.
With his growing proficiency in Latin, he also commenced his lifelong love of the writings of Cicero, Plutarch, Virgil, Horace, and other classical writers who celebrated the heroes of ancient Rome and Greece. But—at least initially for Lafayette, as was the tendency among other students of his generation and court milieu—those readings tended to foster a republicanism more ornamental than active, rarely producing antimonarchist actions. “One comes away from the study of the Latin language with a taste for republics,” observed a contemporary. But, he added, upon graduation those same young men realize that they “must lose and forget” such tastes—“for their safety, for their advancement and for their happiness.”
Even so, attesting to the imaginative powers of such readings, Lafayette—like other young Frenchmen in his circle—tended to view the American leaders and emissaries they met, at least initially, as latter-day avatars of classical Greece or Rome. As a Lafayette friend recalled after meeting Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and other American diplomats in Paris, he could not help but view the exotic, foreign-speaking emissaries as “some wise contemporaries of Plato, or republicans from the time of Cato and Fabius.”
* * *
In April 1770, upon the deaths of his mother and, weeks later, an even wealthier grandfather—both heavily invested in land, the latter in Brittany—Gilbert became rich. Indeed, his combined inheritances made the twelve-year-old orphan one of the wealthiest souls in all of France. In 1774, when he was sixteen, those riches grew still more: In an arranged marriage he wed fourteen-year-old Marie-Adrienne-Françoise de Noailles, the daughter of a wealthy, well-connected Parisian nobleman. For Lafayette’s relatives, who arranged the union, the Noailleses promised social entrée; for the Noailleses—with five daughters to marry off—the groom offered solid finances, funds that lessened the family’s burden, at least in Adrienne’s case, of their dowry-provision obligations.
Adrienne’s father, Jean-Paul-François de Noailles, duc d’Ayen, a chemist and courtier, favored the union. But given the couple’s youth when the marriage arrangements were made—Adrienne was only twelve—her mother, Henriette-Anne-Louise d’Aguesseau, duchesse d’Ayen, insisted that the wedding be delayed for two years. In the interim Gilbert moved into a separate wing of the Hôtel de Noailles, the family’s capacious Paris town house. There, for two years, he lived not as a family member, but as a tenant—albeit a pampered one, paying rent and for his own food, fuel, and servants. All the while, hoping to keep the couple’s union unconsummated until their marriage, Gilbert’s future in-laws did their best to keep watchful eyes upon him.
Before and after the couple’s eventual wedding, on April 11, 1774, Lafayette, through the Noailleses, expanded his social ties into court society’s upper tiers. In contrast, however, to the ease of his adjustment to the Collège du Plessis, his entry into those circles proved difficult. His provincial origins discomfited him, and his former ease collapsed into awkwardness and self-conscious reticence.
Acquiring what became a lifelong indulgence, he spent lavishly on clothes. Otherwise, adapting to the high-spending, high-living ways of young men and women of Versailles and Paris court society, he took up—at least during those years—heavy drinking and high-stakes wagering on card games and horses. In time his closest friends even formed their own club, the “Society of the Wooden Sword.” Named after a favorite cabaret, its members included Adrienne’s friend, Vienna-born Marie Antoinette. Then barely twenty and recently arrived at Versailles, Marie Antoinette, with her husband, Louis XVI, would, upon the death of Louis XV in 1774, assume France’s Bourbon throne.
In the end, however, despite Lafayette’s strivings, he often felt undone “by the gaucheness of [his] manners which, without being out of place on any important occasion, never yielded to the graces of the court or the charms of supper in the capital.” The Comte de la Marck, a Belgian nobleman who often socialized with the Noailleses, regarded Lafayette as a hopeless arriviste—disdainfully recalled that he “danced without grace [and] sat badly on his horse.” He also recalled an episode in which Lafayette, assisted by his in-laws, secured an invitation to an evening of dancing hosted by Marie Antoinette; but when Lafayette’s moment arrived to dance with the queen, La Marck noted that the scion of Chavaniac proved himself to be so “maladroit … that the Queen could not stop herself from laughing.”
Making matters worse, Lafayette’s native wit often rendered it difficult for him to abide the intellectual pretensions of generational peers in such elevated circles. On one occasion, as the comte de Provence, the elder of Louis XVI’s two brothers, boasted ad nauseam of the capacity of his memory, an irritated Lafayette could not resist a tart retort: “Memory,” he shot back, “is a fool’s intellect.” Until that moment, as Lafayette was aware, he had been under consideration by the comte de Provence for a court sinecure arranged by his in-laws. But the experience apparently left him unchastened, for it was not the last time that an impolitic impulse would cost him royal favor.4
TWO
“My Heart Was Enlisted”
Even as Lafayette struggled at the Hôtel de Noailles with his new life’s social demands, he still pined for military glory. In April 1775, that goal suddenly seemed within reach when his father-in-law—through a purchase from the minister of defense, as was that day’s tradition—obtained for him a commission as second lieutenant in a regiment sponsored by the marquis de Noailles, an uncle of Adrienne’s.
Alas, however, France was then fighting no wars; and, over the coming months, as Lafayette contemplated his command’s scant prospects for battlefield engagement, and the fact that his appointment was largely honorary, he grew disconsolate. In the end, however, the commission did prove fortuitous.
On August 8, 1775, while in the northeastern French town of Metz for training exercises, Lafayette attended a dinner honoring a visiting young English prince—the Duke of Gloucester, a younger brother of Britain’s king George III. The prince, accompanied by his wife, was en route to Italy, where, hoping to restore the prince’s fragile health, the couple planned to spend the winter. Along the way, with the permission of Louis XVI, Gloucester was conducting a ceremonial inspection tour of selected French military fortifications.
Already drawn to the views of political radicals such as John Wilkes, Gloucester had compounded his brother’s disfavor by marrying an illegitimate granddaughter of the former prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. Emblematic of the enmity between the siblings, during the dinner at Metz, the duke mocked the monarch’s suppression of the Patriots in Britain’s rebellious North American colonies and voiced support for them.
Hosting the meal was Lafayette’s commanding officer, Charles-François de Broglie. Fifty-six years old, Broglie was a former ambassador to Poland and by then serving as governor of Metz. A man of small physical stature who won the affections of few, he was nonetheless described by contemporaries as possessed of “sparkling eyes” and a “restless spirit.”
During the reign of Louis XV, Broglie had served in the court’s “Secret Ministry”—tasked with implementing policies with which the king preferred not to be publicly associated. Similarly, as France’s envoy in Poland during the Seven Years’ War, Broglie came to be associated with pro-French intrigues. Upon Louis XV’s death Broglie ingratiated himself with the successor court; and, since 1774, he had been consumed with avenging Britain’s defeat of France in the Seven Years’ War—even planning, with royal encouragement, a (never-attempted) invasion of England.
In fall 1776, a year after hosting the dinner attended by Lafayette, Broglie organized an expedition to support the Patriots. Joining him were Silas Deane, a secret agent in Paris for the U.S. government, Johann Kalb, a Prussian-born military officer, and Pierre Beaumarchais, a mysterious agent with ties to the French government. Their plot entailed the departure, from France’s port of Le Havre, of three ships to America—each carrying supplies and recruits for the Patriot cause, among the latter sixteen officers selected by Kalb. In mid-December, however, upon learning of the plot, David Lord Stormont, Britain’s ambassador in France, alerted royal officials. Embarrassed ministers at Versailles, forced to act, disrupted the plot.
* * *
Prior to his August 1775 dinner for the Duke of Gloucester, Broglie had introduced Lafayette to a circle of European supporters of America’s Patriots. Further influencing Lafayette, Broglie, by the time he and Lafayette met, had grown obsessed with America’s Patriots—viewed French assistance to them as a means of achieving his goal of avenging England for its earlier victory over France.
For Lafayette, Broglie’s August 1775 dinner marked a turning point. Then and there, like other callow aristocrats of his generation, he became infatuated with the American cause. Over the evening, Lafayette recalled, he “listened with ardent curiosity” and “pressed the duke with questions”; and by the dinner’s end “he had conceived the idea of going to America.” Moreover, in the days ahead, his conversion to the American cause remained firm: “When I first learned of that quarrel, my heart was enlisted, and I thought only of joining my colors to those of the revolutionaries.”
Also attending Broglie’s dinner was Johann Kalb, the fifty-year-old Prussia-born officer sympathetic to the American rebels. A contemporary recalled Kalb as “a tall, raw-boned man.” Born in Bavaria of peasant stock, he had married well and, buoyed by his wife’s fortune, soon affected aristocratic pretensions—becoming von Kalb in Prussia, de Kalb in France. In 1768 he had visited America for four months as a covert French government agent—assessing whether anti-British feeling in the colonies had reached a level sufficient to risk open French support of a rebellion there. By the trip’s end Kalb concluded that Britain’s government would mollify discontent in the colonies before it flared into open revolt.
By 1776, however, Kalb believed that the time was ripe for French assistance to America’s Patriots. Although more than three decades Lafayette’s senior, Kalb and the marquis established an easy rapport. Rendering the Prussian all the more useful to the young French officer, Kalb, unlike Lafayette, spoke English; he also knew Silas Deane, the American agent in Paris. Soon enough Lafayette and Kalb—the latter acting as translator—became regular callers at Deane’s Paris apartment near the Pont Royal, on the rue de l’Université—increasingly watched by British spies.
Copyright © 2019 by Tom Chaffin