Lafayette (21 page)

The
Alliance
had a mixed crew—some Americans, but mostly French volunteers eager to return home and English deserters who hoped, eventually, to sneak home to England after landing in France. Once under way, the English deserters hungered for the profits they could pocket by seizing the ship and its famous French passenger and sailing directly to England to claim a lavish bounty for the ship and offer Lafayette to the king in exchange for full pardons.

“The cry of
Sail!
was to be raised at four in the morning,” Lafayette recounted, “and when the passengers and officers came on deck, four cannon, loaded with grape shot . . . were to blow them to pieces.”
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One of the mutineers, however, reported the plot, and an hour before the scheduled mutiny, Lafayette led a team of forty officers and passengers to the crew’s quarters, sliced the hammock cords of the four sleeping ringleaders, and, when they dropped to the floor, bound them and clapped them into irons.
Before the day was out, thirty-eight crewmen were in irons, and the ship sailed safely to France, putting into Brest, on the western tip of Brittany, ten days later, on February 6, 1779.

Nearly twenty-two months had elapsed since Lafayette had set foot on his native soil. He had left a fugitive, subject to immediate arrest for defying the king’s orders. Now, the king’s cannons roared their welcome to the heroic knight. After recovering his land legs, Lafayette rode to Versailles to seek the king’s pardon and present a raft of letters and documents from Congress to Prime Minister Maurepas, Foreign Minister Vergennes, and to the king himself. He arrived at two in the morning—too late to breach the palace gates, but not too late to appear, unannounced, at a ball at his cousin’s stately mansion, a few steps away. The handsome uniform of an American major general caused a stir. At first, they did not recognize him. He was a boy when he left; he now returned looking far older—and somewhat balder—than his twenty-one years. After a few moments of disbelief, applause broke out, then loud cheers. “I had left as rebel and fugitive,” he exulted, “and returned in triumph as an idol.”
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He looked about the ballroom for his wife, but in his absence she had foregone most social life and remained at home with her mother in the Noailles mansion in Paris. “He had arrived at the very moment no one expected,” Adrienne recalled. “My mother tried to prepare me for his arrival herself. I will not even try to paint a picture of the joy we shared at that moment.”
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The next morning, Lafayette went to the palace to see Maurepas, Vergennes, and, he hoped, the king. The two ministers gave him careful, extended, respectful audiences. He was, after all, the reigning French authority on all things American, a close personal friend of the legendary George Washington, a confidante of America’s national political and military leaders, a major general and distinguished soldier in the American army, and as much an official emissary of the United States Congress as Benjamin Franklin himself. And, of course, he remained a French officer and nobleman, whose marriage had united two of France’s most distinguished families.

“At my arrival, I had the honor to be consulted by all the ministers, and, what was even better,” Lafayette recalled coyly, “to be kissed by all the ladies of the court. The kisses ended the next day, but I retained the confidence of the [king’s] cabinet.”
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At the end of the first day’s discussions, only the matter of the king’s arrest warrant remained unsettled. Assistant ministers, their assistants, and their assistants’ assistants shuffled hurriedly back and forth all day between the king’s apartments and the ministerial chambers, breathlessly whispering in each other’s ears, passing notes back and forth. Finally, the king’s word arrived: he refused to grant Lafayette an audience and ordered him punished. “I was interrogated, complimented, and exiled,” Lafayette explained, “but to Paris. Instead of honoring me with a cell in the Bastille, as some of the king’s advisors proposed, the king chose the precincts of the Hôtel de Noailles as my prison for the next week.”
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Before he left the palace, the queen sent word of her desire to see him, although she could not do so officially. A minister’s assistant arranged for Lafayette to walk across the courtyard as her carriage drove by, allowing her to stop briefly to extend her hand. He then went to his own carriage for the trip home to his lavish “prison” on the rue Saint-Honoré. His wife, still childlike at nineteen, all but fainted in his arms as she and her family welcomed him home. He was still her knight, and he played his role as gallantly in the salon and bedroom as he had on the battlefield.

The most illustrious men and women of Paris threw themselves at his feet during his week of “house arrest,” but, at the end of each evening’s entertainment, Adrienne had her husband to herself for the first time in nearly two years. Unlike wives in most arranged marriages of feudal France, Adrienne loved her husband completely. “My joy is impossible to describe,” she wrote to Lafayette’s aging aunts at Chavaniac. “Monsieur de La Fayette has come back to me as modest and as charming as when he went away. . . . For the moment, he is in disgrace with the king and is forbidden to show
himself in public. God has preserved, in the midst of tremendous dangers, the most lovable person in all the world. . . . When I reflect on my good fortune at being his wife, I am truly grateful to God.”
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Paris society—and, indeed, his wife and her family—discovered a new Lafayette. The awkward country manners and clumsiness that once provoked Queen Marie-Antoinette’s disdainful laughter had vanished. No longer timid or embarrassed, Lafayette stood tall and proud, and chatted easily, even brilliantly, displaying what one French journalist would later describe as “a sensitive and polished intelligence . . . a lively unaffected power of describing the famous persons he had met.”
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His house arrest did not interfere with his diplomatic mission. Benjamin Franklin rode into Paris from Passy and John Adams from Auteuil to see him, and they agreed to work together to promote a French attack in North America.

“A strong Armament of Ships of the Line, with five thousand Troops,” Adams wrote Lafayette by way of confirmation the next morning, “directed against Halifax, Rhode-Island or New York, must infallibly succeed—So it must against the Floridas—So it must against Canada, or any one of the West India Islands. . . . The French have a great advantage in carrying on this kind of War. . . . I should be happy to have further Conversations with you, Sir, upon those Subjects.”
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Although the queen could not pay her respects during his house arrest, she did arrange for his promotion in the French army from reserve captain to
mestre de camp
, or colonel, in the cavalry. He was “given”—that is, allowed to purchase—command of a regiment of the king’s dragoons, at the hefty price of 80,000 livres, or $800,000 in today’s dollars.
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During his house arrest, he and his powerful in-laws—the duc d’Ayen and the duke’s father, the duc de Noailles—carefully composed the requisite letter of apology and obeisance to the king, along with a plea for forgiveness. It was a masterpiece of feudal diplomacy:

The misfortune of having displeased Your Majesty has saddened me so painfully that, rather than try to excuse myself, I shall try to explain the motives that inspired my misdeeds. My love for my country, my desire to see her enemies humiliated, and political feelings that the recent treaty would seem to justify, those, Sire, are the reasons that made me decide to help the American cause.

When I received Your Majesty’s orders, I attributed them to the tender concerns of my family rather than to any considerations of our nation’s policies towards England. The emotions of my heart overcame my reason. . . . I would not dare, Sire, to try to justify an act of disobedience of which you disapprove and for which I must repent . . . but it is important for my own peace that Your Majesty attribute to its true motives the conduct which has disgraced me in your eyes. The nature of my wrongs makes me hope that I may expunge them. It is to Your Majesty’s goodness that I shall owe the happiness of absolving myself by whatever means you deign to serve you, in whatever country and in whatever way possible. I am with the most profound Respect, Sire, your Majesty’s humble and obedient servant and loyal subject.
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A few days later, the king received Lafayette, officially ended his house arrest with a
réprimande douce
, and began several hours of questioning his former riding-school companion about America, its people, and the progress of the war. Before dismissing his new colonel of cavalry, the king complimented Lafayette on his successes in America and on the glory he had earned for his
name and for France. Lafayette’s return to Paris society was now complete. The king invited him on hunts through Marly Forest; his entrance into the salons of Paris drew swoons; his appearance at the theater, opera, and other public places invariably provoked thunderous ovations. At the Comédie Française, the great theater founded by Louis XIV for Molière, Lafayette’s appearance one evening provoked additional words on stage to acknowledge his presence: “Behold this youthful courtier . . . his mind and soul inflamed. . . .”
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The audience roared its approval.

“I enjoyed both the favors of the court of Versailles and celebrity status in Paris society,” Lafayette recalled with delight. “They spoke well of me in all circles . . . I had everything I had always wanted—public acclaim and the affection of those I love. In the midst of all the excitement surrounding my arrival, however, I never lost sight of our revolution, whose success was still very much in doubt. . . . Accustomed to seeing matters of great import sustained by slender means in America, I said to myself that the price of one evening’s dinner in Paris would have resupplied the United States army; as Monsieur Maurepas suggested, I would have gladly stripped Versailles of its furnishings to have clothed those men.”
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In the weeks that followed, Lafayette shuttled back and forth between Paris, Versailles, and Franklin’s embassy and home in Passy, where the venerable doctor conspired with the young Frenchman to develop a myriad of schemes to attack Britain and weaken her hold on the United States. He was now statesman and strategist—and sensitive to the changing moods at Versailles. By early spring, Lafayette recognized that Versailles was losing interest in promoting American independence. The French motive for supporting the American Revolution was to weaken Britain and replace her as the world’s dominant commercial and military power. But the Revolution was going badly; the French military effort at Newport had failed, and French financial aid to the Americans was bankrupting the treasury. French ministers now agreed that a quicker, less costly way to weaken Britain was to abandon expensive adventures in faraway North America and strike directly at Britain, a mere twenty miles away across the Channel. Lafayette, Franklin, and Adams did not disagree; a French assault on Britain might force her to recall forces from the United States to protect her own shores and give Washington’s Continental army enough of a military advantage to win the war.

With Franklin’s help, Lafayette devised a plan to raid coastal cities in Britain and Ireland. Franklin had spent eighteen years in Britain as agent for three American colonies and knew the physical as well as the economic terrain. “I admire much the activity of your genius,” Franklin told Lafayette. “It is certain that the coasts of England and Scotland are extremely open and defenseless. There are also many rich towns near the sea which four or five
thousand men landing unexpectedly might easily surprise and destroy or exact from them a heavy contribution, taking a part in ready money and hostages for the rest . . . forty-eight millions of livres might be demanded of Bristol for the town and shipping; twelve millions of livres from Bath; forty-eight millions from Liverpool; six millions for Lancaster, and twelve millions from Whitehaven.”
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