Lafayette (61 page)

While Adrienne languished in prison, Paris guillotines chopped almost nonstop during the day. Growing ever more paranoid, Robespierre turned
La Terreur
into
La Grande Terreur
, converting almost every mansion in Paris into a prison and supplementing the guillotine on the place de la Révolution with killing machines on the place de la Bastille and the place du Trône (now the place de la Nation), on the east edge of Paris near Vincennes. Each of the blades lopped off twenty or more heads a day, accommodating “clients” from every segment of the social and political spectrum: the abolitionist Malesherbes; the scientist Lavoisier; and King Louis XVI’s younger sister, the gentle and harmless Madame Elizabeth. The comte d’Estaing, who led the French fleet at Newport, went under the knife for protesting the execution of Marie-Antoinette. “The gods are thirsty,” Desmoulins grinned.
¹⁰

The guillotine even claimed Jourdan Coupe-Tête, the butcher of Versailles and Avignon, who cut off one head too many to save his own. Only renowned foreign prisoners, such as Tom Paine, and a few, select French “friends of America,” such as Adrienne de Lafayette and the comte de Rochambeau, escaped the call to the guillotine—largely to avoid provoking the American government, which, on paper, remained a French ally.

As Robespierre’s paranoia became the target of Paris satirists, he closed all theaters and made the steady chop-chop-chop of the guillotines the only entertainment in town—a precursor of the short plays of violence, horror, and sadism that became popular a century later at the Théâtre du Grand Guignol. Enterprising innkeepers turned the Terror into a profitable enterprise by setting up outdoor cafés on nearby embankments to sell food and drink to spectators while they watched the performances.

As prison space grew scarcer, Desmoulins had the temerity to urge the release of women and children. “They have been given the name of suspects,” he declared, “but this is a term completely foreign to the spirit of justice.”
¹¹
Desmoulins’s forbearance infuriated Robespierre: “The Terror
is
Justice,” he thundered, “prompt, severe, inflexible.”
¹²
He then arrested Desmoulins and Danton, and, in April 1794, they and their followers climbed the steps of death on the guillotine and left the insane Robespierre the uncontested leader of the Revolution. Terrified members of the Convention elected him
president and, at his command, unanimously passed a decree ending even mock trials for suspects, because they slowed the journey to the guillotine. In the next thirty days, the guillotines of Paris alone claimed more than 1,250 victims, an average of more than thirty a day.

Early in July, a judge convicted Adrienne’s grandmother, mother, and sister of “planning to dissolve the National Convention and assassinate the members of the Committee of Public Safety.”
¹³
The family priest followed the cart to the guillotine at the place du Trône (or “place du Trône renverse”—“Square of the Overturned Throne”—as the Jacobins called it by then) and managed to get close enough to give them absolution before watching them die. The old lady was first; the duchesse d’Ayen was tenth— quickly, like all the others. Death was precise and mechanical: three executioner’s assistants seized the duchesse by the arms, while others strapped her upright against a hinged vertical plank, face forward, ripped the clothing off the back of her neck, and stepped back quickly to avoid the splatter of blood.

The huge crowd of onlookers fell silent.

Thud; thud; thud
. The sounds resounded across the square.

Thud:
the hinged plank with its body slammed to the horizontal, positioning the victim’s neck beneath the blade.

Thud:
the neckpiece dropped and pinned the head firmly in place.

Thud:
the blade struck home, and the head fell softly into the basket beneath a spray of blood as the crowd roared its approval.

The assistants moved swiftly, releasing the corpse and dropping it into a cart at the base of the scaffold, where street peddlers pounced like hyenas to its side and stripped off shoes and other salable items of clothing with professional efficiency and speed. After holding high the severed head by its hair to display it to the cheering crowd, the executioner tossed it into the cart and turned to clean the blade of his instrument.

By the end of July, Robespierre’s paranoia reached proportions that grew intolerable for even his most loyal supporters. After accusing his own Jacobin clubs of plotting against him, he demanded the immediate arrest and execution of the entire Convention—every member. It was one demand too many. By then the number of widows and orphans had reached staggering proportions; the very women who had marched to Versailles to demand the king’s head on a pike, and the Jacobins who had led them, turned against Robespierre. Tens of thousands of suspects came out of hiding to join them. As the mob outside cried
“A bas Robespierre!”
Convention delegates summoned up the courage to defy him and demand that he name those he suspected of treason; he refused, and the following day the once-timid Convention staged a coup, abolishing his Committee of Public Safety and ordering his arrest and that of his terrorist confederates. That evening, July 23, 1794, a pistol shot
blew off half his jaw; some said he had attempted suicide, but a guard claimed he had shot Robespierre trying to escape. The source of the shot was immaterial. With his head swathed in blood-soaked bandages, Robespierre lay in agony for but one night; the guillotine put him out of his misery the following day, with nineteen of his closest political allies, including his brother. While a mob watched in silent disbelief, seventy-one more Robespierristes followed him to the same fate the following day in a bloody finale to the Terror. The final toll would remain unmatched in the civilized world until the twentieth century. In only two years, the French sent one million of their own men, women, and children to prison. In a nation of twenty-six million, about two hundred thousand are
known
to have died; untold thousands of others—many of them simply nameless, homeless, jobless peasants and workers—were killed summarily without knowing why and dumped into mass graves. Ironically, the “popular” revolution claimed far more commoners than aristocrats: 28 percent of the dead were peasants and 31 percent were craftsmen. Only 2 percent were clergymen. The guillotine alone killed nearly seventeen thousand; police and soldiers killed the others, often in counterrevolutionary uprisings in the provinces.

“You must give thanks to God, who has saved my life,” Adrienne wrote to console her children after learning that the guillotine had claimed her mother, sister, and grandmother.

After Robespierre’s death, moderates moved into seats of power, and, during the ensuing months, they outlawed Jacobin clubs, abolished vigilance committees, restored economic and commercial freedom, and released several hundred thousand imprisoned “suspects” from prison, including General Rochambeau and other badly needed military leaders.
¹⁴
The new government also released most political prisoners, including seventy-three surviving Girondins and all but a relative handful of aristocrats and others deemed enemies of the state. While former suspects danced in the streets to celebrate the end of the Terror, Adrienne, to her dismay, remained imprisoned for reasons she still did not and could not understand.

Fortunately, a new American ambassador had arrived in Paris: James Monroe, the former Continental army captain who had kept watch over the wounded Lafayette after the Battle of Brandywine. Although Monroe won the release of Tom Paine and a few American citizens, Adrienne could not claim United States citizenship under the reorganized American government, which had stripped the states of control over citizenship. In France, moreover, she remained the wife of a French deserter. Monroe did not want to make a diplomatic misstep that could prolong her detention. Instead of making a formal demand that French authorities could reject, he adopted a subtle approach to embarrass the government into releasing her: he sent his wife to visit Adrienne in prison.

“As soon as she [Mrs. Monroe] entered the street,” Monroe wrote, “the public attention was drawn to [her carriage], and at the prison gate the crowd gathered round it. Inquiry was made, whose carriage was it? The answer given was, that of the American minister. Who is in it? His wife. What brought her here? To see Madame LaFayette. . . . On hearing that the wife of the American Minister had called with the most friendly motives to see her, she became frantic, and in that state they met. The scene was most affecting. The sensibility of all the beholders was deeply excited. The report of the interview spread through Paris and had the happiest effect.” A few days later, Monroe joined his wife and the two made frequent visits to Adrienne together, always with armfuls of provisions that drew the attention of public and press—and embarrassed the Committee of Public Safety, which had no explanation for her continuing incarceration. “Informal communications took place in consequence between Mr. Monroe and the members of the Committee, and the liberation of Madame LaFayette soon followed.”
¹⁵

The end of the Terror also encouraged Lafayette’s friends and supporters in Europe, England, and America to demand his release from the inhuman conditions of Olmütz. In London, a group of exiled Fayettistes organized a plan for his escape. Justus-Erich Bollmann, a young German doctor, agreed to go to the Inn of the Three Swans at Olmütz. He learned that the prison doctor had ordered guards to take Lafayette on a carriage ride into the countryside for his health every other day. By an incredible coincidence, a twenty-one-year-old American student from South Carolina was also at the inn— Francis Huger, son of Major Benjamin Huger, Lafayette’s host when he first landed in South Carolina, more than seventeen years earlier. Young Huger eagerly joined the Bollmann plot, and, on November 8, a sunny Saturday morning, the two trotted up to Lafayette’s carriage, leaped from their saddles, subdued the guard, and shouted breathlessly to Lafayette to mount one of the horses and “Go-t’Hoff, Go-t’Hoff; we will follow.” The carriage driver bounded forward to seek help and was well down the road, leaving Lafayette’s two rescuers with but one horse to make their escape. Knowing he had less to fear than the German doctor if captured by the Austrians, Huger sent Bollmann off to Hoff, a small post on the German border, where a carriage was waiting to take them to safety in Germany. When Bollmann arrived, however, Lafayette was nowhere to be found. Lafayette had misunderstood the Huger-Bollmann chorus—“Go t’Hoff”—to mean “Go off; go off.” So he raced “off,” following the main road and missing the small lane that turned “to Hoff.” Soldiers caught and arrested all three conspirators and threw them in irons in solitary dungeon cells at Olmütz. Believing they were part of an international political plot, the humiliated prison commander confronted Lafayette angrily and pledged that the two young men “will be hanged before your window, and I shall take pleasure in serving them as
hangman.” They were, in fact, sentenced to six months of hard labor and released.
¹⁶

On January 22, 1795, after sixteen months’ imprisonment without formal charges or trial, Adrienne Lafayette walked out the prison gates in Paris, firmly resolved to flee with her family to America’s tranquil shores and escape forever the madness and savagery of France. She determined to smuggle George to his godfather in America immediately, to isolate him from his father’s enemies. She would then go to Austria with her daughters and remain with Lafayette until his release permitted them to join their son. She went directly to the Monroe house on the rue de Clichy and asked his help in getting passports for her and the children. Six days later, Frestel arrived with fourteen-year-old George-Washington Lafayette, and a few weeks later, Monroe obtained government counterstamps on their passports for them to go to America, with the boy traveling as “George Motier.” Adrienne gave Frestel a letter for President Washington written in French, which she hoped the American president would be able to read and understand:

Monsieur
,

Je vous envoie mon fils avec une confiance
. . .

[Sir, I send you my son. . . . It is with deep and sincere confidence that I entrust this dear child to the protection of the United States (which he has long regarded as his second country and which I have long regarded as our sanctuary), and to the particular protection of their president, whose feelings towards the boy’s father I well know.

[The bearer of this letter, sir, has, during our troubles, been our support, our resource, our consolation, my son’s guide. I want him to continue in that role. . . . I want them to remain inseparable until the day we have the joy of reuniting in the land of liberty. I owe my own life and those of my children to this man’s generous attention. . . .

[My wish is for my son to live in obscurity in America; that he resume the studies that three years of misfortune have interrupted, and that far from lands that might crush his spirit or arouse his violent indignation, he can work to fulfill the responsibilities of a citizen of the United States. . . .

[I will say nothing here about my own circumstances, nor those of one for whom I feel far greater concern than I do for myself. I leave it to the friend who will present this letter to you to express the feelings of a heart which has suffered too much to be conscious of anything but gratitude, of which I owe much to Mr. Monroe. . . .

[I beg you, Monsieur Washington, to accept my deepest sense of obligation, confidence, respect and devotion.]

As she had done since her husband’s imprisonment, she signed it defiantly “Noailles Lafayette,” to display proudly the two old noble names she bore.
¹⁷

After a heartbreaking separation from her son, Adrienne went to Chavaniac to find her daughters and Lafayette’s elderly aunt. To ensure her aunt a safe haven, she again drew, albeit reluctantly, on the Morris account to repurchase the château from the government. “It is true,” she wrote to the American, “that this is a tiny obligation in comparison to the one I owe you for my very life, but permit me to acknowledge both debts, which I will always remember with feelings of warmth and gratitude.”
¹⁸