I worried for the common guardsmen to hear her compare a sumptuous royal palace to a jail, when we all knew of the rats, starvation, cold, and other horrors of actual prisons under the ancien régime. “He saved your life.”
“Perhaps, but I would rather die than be in his debt.”
I hoped, for her sake, that she did not mean this. I left her chambers praying she could find it within herself to relinquish ideas of absolute power and be the gracious queen of a free nation—a nation we would soon celebrate on the Champ de Mars, where a giant stadium was being constructed to celebrate the constitution.
Everyone was joining to help erect a triumphal arch and an altar of liberty; both my husband and the king wielded shovels to assist—a touching sight. Instead of wielding weapons in violence, my husband led the citizenry in carrying away carts of earth, slinging buckets of mortar, and driving poles for pavilions into the ground.
We would have music, entertainments, and a grand ball. Illuminations too, as in the happier days. Lafayette insisted our son, Georges, be with him to mark the passing of the torch of liberty from our generation to that of our children. So I told my boy, “You must be very well behaved and set the best example.”
Our home was still overrun, every day, with officials and visitors; I fed sometimes three hundred in my parlor, courtyard, and hall. Anywhere there might be room for a table or a bedroll, men wearing the tricolor wedged themselves in. Some of them gifted us with keepsakes from the recent struggles, including a stone and a cannonball from the Bastille. Others were in desperate need of our charity.
I enlisted my daughters to serve and make our guests comfortable, wondering if even our considerable finances could withstand the increasing expense. Lafayette was right to decline a salary—the royalists would portray him as self-interested if he took a single assignat—but our coffers drained quickly.
We had scarcely any time alone, yet in stolen moments we risked making love, because with the coming Fête de la Fédération to celebrate the constitution, everything felt as if it were new.
Only storm clouds threatened our grand occasion. “Damn this rain,” Gilbert said the morning of the spectacle. “It will keep the crowds away.”
“It did not keep them from marching to Versailles,” I reminded him.
And it did not keep them away this time either. Despite the weather, the procession through the magnificent arches went on, hour after hour. The army, the officials, the veterans, circus performers—it was a magnificent, if wet, parade. At long last, the crucial moment arrived, and drums beat wildly to hurry my husband’s footsteps. Maybe even God himself was a Fayettist, because as my husband prepared to make his oath with our boy at his side, the rain stopped and the sun broke through!
Lafayette put his golden-hilted sword upon the altar. Then all of us—hundreds of thousands—together mouthed the words of the oath of allegiance to the constitution, its king, and the nation in which we would all have a part. Even the king, without crown or scepter, made his oath before God. My faith had been shaken, but now it was restored.
The Revolution was over.
The Revolution was won.
If I was the Mother of the Nation, then this day of liberation was everything I hoped for my children. All the millions of them alive now, and yet to come . . .
THIRTY-TWO
BEATRICE
New York City
July 1916
The war that killed my nephew had now come to our shores. Walking the streets of New York, I surveyed the damage, glass shards glittering like diamonds on the pavement. There’d been an explosion the night before. The Statue of Liberty had been hit. Her torch was severely damaged by shrapnel, and if that wasn’t a metaphor for the current standing of America in the world, I didn’t know what was . . .
The boys and I had only just returned from Newport, still disoriented by grief. Awakened in our suite at the Vanderbilt by a blast in the night, I’d half believed myself to be back in war-torn Paris, thinking one of the kaiser’s zeppelins must have gotten through the air defenses and dropped a bomb on the city. Now, in the light of dawn, I saw the reality. This was New York.
As I would learn from bleary-eyed hotel guests in robes and pajamas who were reading the headlines, the munitions depot had exploded. The barges were still burning in the harbor. Two known dead. Scores more hurt. A sneak attack by the kaiser—I knew it in my bones.
No one knew if we should expect another explosion. Windows had shattered everywhere in lower Manhattan, to say nothing of the stained glass windows in Saint Patrick’s. Another national humiliation; how many more were we to endure?