Lafayette (5 page)

In a tragic coincidence, Lafayette’s mother and great-grandfather died within weeks of each other in the spring of 1770; they left him—at twelve—one of the richest aristocrats in France. To his vast estates in the Auvergne he now added his mother’s huge properties in Brittany—and an annual income of 120,000
livres
, or about $1.2 million in today’s currency.
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“Burning with desire to be in uniform,” he entered the Black Musketeers at the Palace of Versailles, as a second lieutenant. Selected for their decorative value on horseback rather than any combat skills, the musketeers were the tallest, most handsome, most charming young men. By the time he turned thirteen in September, Lafayette had evolved into just such a young man and began training at the royal riding school at Versailles with the king’s three grandsons—the comte d’Artois, who was Lafayette’s age, and the count’s older brothers, the comte de Provence and the dauphin, or crown prince. Each would eventually inherit the French throne.

As a Black Musketeer, Lafayette rode in the daily palace ceremony, with a musketeer chosen each day to trot up to the king to receive royal orders and high-trot back to the musketeer commander. “The King told me that all was well and that he had no orders,” Lafayette wrote of his first encounter with Louis XV. “I returned to my commanding officer to repeat words he heard repeated three hundred sixty-five days a year.”
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Just before Lafayette’s fifteenth birthday, the powerful brigadier general of the King’s Armies, Jean-Paul-François de Noailles, the duc d’Ayen, picked him from among the musketeers to marry his second daughter, Adrienne, then only twelve years old. The duke’s selection enraged his wife, the duchess. She refused to permit her daughter to marry at so young an age, without a semblance of womanly maturity, before she completed her education—or the Lafayette boy, for that matter, completed his. The quarrel over Adrienne’s marriage raged for weeks, spilling into every fashionable and unfashionable Paris salon. The Noailles were among the oldest, wealthiest, proudest members of the French nobility—“more powerful than the House of Bourbon,”
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according to some. They counted bishops, cardinals, field marshals, admirals, diplomats, and cabinet ministers among their forebears. The family patriarch, the duc de Noailles, was a near-legendary military figure who commanded the historic regiment of dragoons, Les Dragons de Noailles,
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inherited by the family, generation after generation.
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His friendship with the king extended beneath the royal bedsheets into the arms of a mistress they shared. To be near his king, Noailles maintained small palaces adjacent to each of the king’s two large ones at Versailles and Paris. Unable to live in both at the same time, he lived at Versailles, and let his son the duc d’Ayen live with his family at the Paris mansion near the older, seldom used Tuileries Palace.
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But the duchesse d’Ayen came from an equally powerful family; her father had been one of France’s greatest jurists and chancellor of France. When, therefore, the duke and duchess disagreed, neither ceded quickly. “You don’t know my wife,” complained the duc d’Ayen. “No matter how bitterly she argues, she’ll apologize like a rueful little girl if you show her she is wrong, but she will never budge if she doesn’t see it.”
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At the heart of the conflict lay the duchess’s deep fear of separation from her children. She had lost her firstborn, and when her second, a little girl, fell gravely ill, she was distraught. “My mother thought she would go out of her mind with grief,” Adrienne wrote later, “but heaven restored her daughter’s health. A year later [November 2, 1759], I was born and we two became the center of her life, although she bore three more daughters.”
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But the duke wanted a son and heir to bear the family name, and he waited
impatiently as his wife gave him nothing but girls. Convinced he would never have sons of his own, he searched the realm for the most eligible young noblemen to marry his daughters and give him grandsons to assume the family arms. He chose two from the king’s musketeers: Louis de Noailles, a young cousin, five months older than Lafayette, would marry the oldest d’Ayen daughter, Louise, and perpetuate the family name; Lafayette would marry his second-oldest daughter, Adrienne, and unite two of the nation’s most distinguished ancestries and family fortunes.

The duchesse d’Ayen was incensed by the prospects of her oldest daughter marrying a cousin and her twelve-year-old “baby” marrying a fourteen-year-old soldier. “My sister and I had no idea what was going on,” Adrienne recalled in her memoirs. “My mother and father were constantly quarreling—and refused to tell us why.” To restore peace, d’Ayen promised “to defer the marriage for two years and assured my mother that I would live at home with my husband during the first years of marriage. In the meantime, he would personally see to it that Lafayette finished his education.” When the duchesse met the young officer, Adrienne wrote, “she cherished him ever after as the most beloved of sons. I cannot describe our joy at the reconciliation between our parents.”
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Adrienne’s father and Lafayette’s uncle drew up the marriage contract. Romantic marriages were all but unheard of in European aristocracy; the bride and groom had no say in the contract or marriage and often did not meet until their wedding. After weeks of tangled offers and counter offers, Adrienne’s father agreed to provide a dowry of 200,000 livres (about $2 million in today’s currency).

“The two marriages were arranged,” Adrienne wrote, “but only on condition that no one was to mention them to my sister before a year had passed and to me before eighteen months. My mother agreed that Monsieur de Noailles and Monsieur de Lafayette would meet us haphazardly from time to time, either at my mother’s home or on walks. But my mother did not want us to be distracted from our education.”
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Although her mother never spoke Lafayette’s name as a potential mate, Adrienne fell irretrievably in love with him, conquered by the knightly image he worked hard to project in his musketeer’s uniform. While others found him awkward, shy, or out of place, Adrienne found him irresistible. “What joy it was for me to learn, after more than a year, that my mother already looked at him as her son. . . . I was only fourteen years old.”
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In February 1773, fifteen-year-old Lafayette moved into the Noailles mansion at Versailles, where Adrienne’s grandfather enrolled him and the young vicomte de Noailles in the prestigious Académie de Versailles,
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a school for princes of the blood and sons of the king’s courtiers and ministers. The duc and duchesse d’Ayen embraced him as a son. He was, after all, a sweet and exceptionally handsome boy, if not yet terribly clever, and he eagerly reciprocated their love, basking for the first time in his life in the warmth of a large family, complete with mother, father, and a bevy of happy, chattering little sisters, one of whom—doll-like in appearance and dress— was to be his wife. The young knight saw her as more child than woman and treated her with appropriate kindness, but without a hint of romantic inclination. She, on the other hand, all but swooned at his every glance.

On March 14, 1774, a year after Lafayette had joined their family, the duc de Noailles and the duc and duchesse d’Ayen presented their future son-in-law at court. Because Lafayette’s bloodlines tied him to the
noblesse de la robe
, King Louis XV himself signed the marriage contract, as did his three grandsons—the future kings Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, and Charles X. With the king’s blessing, Marie-Adrienne-Françoise de Noailles married Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, on Monday, April 11, 1774, in a quiet ceremony in the chapel of the Hôtel de Noailles, the bride’s family mansion in Paris. The archbishop of Paris presided, and only the immediate families witnessed the ceremony—thirty-one aunts, uncles, sisters, and other relatives of the bride and nine relatives of the groom. With his vows, Lafayette acquired the mantle of the most celebrated family of France to wear with those of his own distinguished ancestors. As a wedding gift, the duc de Noailles promised the young man a captain’s rank and command of a company in the Noailles Dragoons when he turned eighteen.

In contrast to the simple wedding ceremony, the reception saw the royal family, members of the court, and Europe’s most illustrious aristocrats and diplomats flock to the Noailles mansion for a Rabelaisian feast of more than one hundred platters of appetizers and hors d’oeuvres, twelve soups, eight stews, two dozen kinds of meat pies, thirty salads, and thirty platters of roasted meats—baby boar, venison, game birds, lamb, chickens, turkeys, ducks, pigeons, and the like—with a half side of veal and beef at either end of the long buffet table for carvers to slice and serve to the gargantuan gathering. Forty-six desserts ended the meal, before the two newlyweds shyly slipped away for the night—she to her apartment, he to his, both still pure in body and spirit. For the moment, her mother refused to permit the consummation of their marriage, and a few days later Lafayette and his brother-in-law, Louis, vicomte de Noailles, rode off to Metz, in northeastern France, for summer training as future company commanders in the Noailles Regiment.