The pause on the other end of the line went on so long I feared we’d lost our connection. Finally, he said, “Give me a reason to get well. When this is all over, promise me I’ll have a wife waiting for me at home.”
I forgot the war, I forgot Max Furlaud, I forgot everything but Willie. “Of course you will. That’s a promise!”
TWENTY-SEVEN
ADRIENNE
Versailles
May 1789
Since the day Lafayette signed his name in a defiant flourish two years earlier, he had been agitating across the countryside for a government that represented the people.
Now the king had given in and summoned the Estates-General.
The Noailles had come, en masse, to bear witness, because my family could never be far from the center of great events, and no one had seen anything like this for two hundred years. But at the family home in Versailles, battle lines were drawn with sighs over the silver and pouts between poached eggs. It was Grand-mère who brought the schism into the open.
“You and Gilbert will both find yourselves imprisoned in the Bastille for treason,” she warned, in poor temper after having salted her breakfast chocolate and sugared her omelette. “You must cease these commotions for dangerous innovations.”
My younger sister Pauline agreed. “Grand-mère is right. This is a dangerous innovation.”
Patiently, I asked, “How can it be an innovation, when the Estates-General is one of France’s oldest traditions?”
“Because your husband forced the king to it by threat of civil war!”
Gilbert did light the spark that was now burning its way across our hungry country, but he never raised arms against the king. “That is not true.”
“It is nearly true,” Pauline countered. “Your husband wrote, To throw off the yoke of despotism, I have tried everything short of civil war, which I could have accomplished except that I feared its horrors.”
Our older sister, Louise, was prone to mediate quarrels, but now took my side. “Lafayette is not the only member of the family to participate in the reform of France—”
Pauline slammed down her fork. “Your husband is just as much to blame. Marc truly wishes to abolish noble titles? It would dismantle hundreds of years of French history—and dissolve the prestige of our family!”
“Titles earned only by virtue of birth divide us from our fellow human beings,” Louise said softly.
In this, Louise and I were in complete agreement, and I had no patience for those who did not see the need for momentous change. France had suffered a severe drought followed by a hailstorm so violent it beggared description. Livestock and game animals knocked dead to the ground. Olive and citrus groves smashed to bits. Wheat and barley fields decimated. All this followed by the most bitter winter in living memory—so cold it killed what remained of vineyards and orchards. Mountains of snow buried Paris, and the river froze solid, locking out shipments of grain. Flour was now so precious that even wealthy hostesses submitted to the indignity of asking guests to bring their own bread. Famine had us in her jaws, sending impoverished peasants into the streets, begging for charity. Yet here my family sat at our beautiful table in Versailles, eating off gilt-edged plates and drinking from porcelain cups, complaining that Gilbert was doing too much to help.
Even Maman was unnerved. “I do not like how the people treat the queen these days.”
I did not like it either. In Paris, they called her Madame Déficit and hissed at her in the opera. The country’s finances weren’t in ruin because of the queen. Still, I knew that her every diamond, gilded carriage, and silver-dusted cake was paid for by crippling taxes on starving peasantry. Taxes from which nobles and clergy were exempt.
The people resented this, and who could blame them? The only remedy was good democratic reform. But when I said so, Pauline scoffed. “Mr. Jefferson and his soaring words have filled your head with dreams.”
“It is not only Americans who dream of a better future,” I said. For I had hosted some of the finest thinkers in France, from Turgot to Condorcet to Brissot and more. They all believed in liberty, and so did I. The convocation of the Estates-General was the natural step to bring it about. “You will all soon see that with reforms, we can enjoy a kinder standard of humanity for rich and poor alike.”
To provoke me, Grand-mère drew up a list of proposals for the deputies on how to make non-Catholics suffer, each idea more terrible than the next. She loathed Protestants, claiming, Nothing short of castration for heretics! She had even worse plans for Jews. I chose to believe she did not really wish such evil on her fellow human beings, but merely wished to prove a point to me about the dangers and excesses of self-government. Yet I burned with faith. On the day of the convocation, I intruded upon my husband’s toilette as his valet dressed him in the costume dictated by court protocol.