I trembled, there at the threshold, wanting to turn back but too upset to move. Especially as the silence dragged on, and I began to worry for what Lafayette would say. At long last, I heard my husband’s voice rise up over the clank of his fork settling on the dinner plate.
“Sir,” Lafayette began, “I do not share my wife’s religious beliefs, but if you knew my marriage, you would realize that she is not my subject, nor would I wish her to be. She is a woman of high-minded principle and the model of kindness; of a character we would all do well to emulate. I would no more crush my wife’s spirit than I would persecute any other citizen for matters of conscience. And I promise that if you try to crush her spirit, you will find me in your way, sword in hand.”
Oh, the nameless satisfaction I took in his defense of me! I would not have minded even if my husband stayed away that evening, but he came to our bedchamber and wrapped me in his embrace, murmuring apologies. “I will always stand by you, my dear heart.”
The next morning, he was awake early, and furious. “Someone has been in the locked compartment of my desk . . .” Our children knew better than to touch their papa’s papers, much less unlatch the chambers he kept fastened. My heart sank to think we might have in our house a spy. Truly, so many people came and went, it could be anyone, and I said so.
“Have the locks changed. All of them,” Lafayette said.
We had enemies, and because of me, we would now have more.
Let us go away to Chavaniac, I wanted to say. Yet I knew if we left Paris now, our carriage too might be dragged back to the city while people spat upon it and pelted it with rocks. And I also knew the first person to throw a stone would be Philippe égalité—which was the name that the duc d’Orléans now went by to please the mob.
I heard it said everywhere now in the Palais-Royale that King Louis was an untrustworthy despot, but Philippe égalité would be a faithful king of the Free French. Thus, Philippe started a petition to demand an investigation into the king’s treachery. His supporters intended to gather to sign this petition on the Champ de Mars upon the same altar where my husband led our oath to the constitution. Even our friends the Condorcets intended to sign. Not because they wished Philippe to be king, but because they asked, “What kind of constitutional monarchy can exist when the monarch so obviously despises it? We now have the opportunity to form the government we should have had in the first place. A republic without any king at all.”
They make a fair point, I thought. I did not say so, because I saw the danger of upending what we had accomplished so far. It had been difficult enough to achieve a constitutional monarchy. The last thing we needed was to start over and return to days of anarchy and violence.
Yet anarchy and violence are what we got . . .
On the day people went to the Champ de Mars to sign Philippe’s petition, my husband and his National Guard were on hand to keep order. I was at home with the girls, carrying a tray with tea, when I heard the crack of musket fire in the streets. Glancing out of my windows, I saw a mass of people racing down the Rue de Bourbon for my house. I backed away, somehow managing to set the tray down without spilling anything as I retreated, but as the guardsman sprang to action, flying out of the house, ready for battle, I was spotted by an angry brute whose face pressed against my glass. “There she is! Kill her!”
I stumbled back as someone else screamed, “Let’s make Lafayette a present of his wife’s head!”
“Get out of sight, madame,” said Romeuf, my husband’s aide-de-camp, pulling me behind him. I had fed these men with my own hands and had faith in them; if they could defend us, they would. And so it was with an eerie sense of composure that I withdrew, setting about bolting the shutters and gathering my tearful children.
Hearing the shake of leaves against the side of the house, I realized the mob was trying to come in through the garden. “Up the stairs,” I told the children. “Quickly!” Not wishing for them to be afraid, I added, “Praise God these marauders are here and not at the Champ de Mars. If they have come for me, it is because they cannot get to your father, and he will be safe and come to our rescue.”
“Madame,” a blue-and-white-clad guardsman called after me. “We will die before we let them take you.”
“God preserve you, sir!” I cried.
The sounds of fighting echoed. Punching, kicking, shouting. Then galloping horses as my husband and his guardsmen rounded the house to drive away our attackers. No one was killed at our home that day, but on the Champ de Mars, corpses littered the ground. The number, we did not know. It was being called a massacre. And that night, Gilbert leaned against the door of my chamber and closed his eyes.