It was for the same reason I had long ago stopped asking why.
Alas, thinking back upon the days of endless social and ceremonial visits leading up to our wedding, I couldn’t think of anything about my intended groom that I would shape differently. In young Lafayette, my father saw a timid, bookish provincial lad, seemingly incapable of witty repartee. Yet I saw a freckled boy with wild red hair, whose guileless nature seemed true purity of heart—a heart I wanted for my own.
Thus, I was glad to hear the organ music that finally signaled my wedding in the family chapel. My father led me up the candlelit aisle past rows of bejeweled friends, rivals, and relations. My sisters beamed and Maman wept happy tears, but my eyes were all for Gilbert du Motier, where he stood in blue silk, the braided loop of an officer in the king’s musketeers upon one shoulder. My groom took my hands, then the priest recited the words before an altar perfumed by burning incense, and we whispered our vows. At last, the orphaned boy slipped a ring upon my finger and lifted my veil for a kiss so fleeting that I pressed my fingertips to the spot, as if to hold it there.
At the feast, the groom and I sat together in tall gilded chairs upon a festooned dais in the banquet hall whilst liveried servants brought gleaming silver platters with food in endless variety. Sugar-dusted pastries, steaming turtle soup, pureed asparagus, lettuces, snails, patés. Heaps of mussels, baked fish, sauced chicken. Sizzling beef, mint-laced mutton, a fat pheasant decorated with its tail feathers, medallions of veal on a bed of greens, and a roasted boar with an apple in its mouth. Then came the parade of pigeon eggs, pigeon bisque, pigeon pie, pigeon au gratin, pigeon in wine, and pigeon stuffed with songbird. All to be followed by silvered cakes and marzipan dusted with gold . . .
It was a display of Noailles wealth, though my father thought it best that the bride and groom peck only at bits of bread and not partake in the excess until later, lest we spill a drop of soup or let a fork clatter in company.
In the roar of boasting lords and flirting ladies, my eyes began to weary, and beside me, my groom’s fingers tapped an impatient dance on the arm of his chair. It was unseemly to fidget under the scrutiny of so many guests, any of whom might gossip about irregularity in our conduct. Remembering it was my task to smooth my groom’s rough edges, I attempted to still young Lafayette’s drumming fingers with my own. And in complaint, he whispered, “Now I have lost count of how many ways pigeon can be served.”
I sputtered a laugh, hiding it behind my napkin.
His knee bouncing with pent-up energy, he went on. “We raise pigeons in Chavaniac too. We fatten them up in a dovecote up high, just as we are kept on this dais.”
A strange comparison, considering our spare plates. “We are not being fattened . . .”
“Yet I feel as if we are on the menu.”
I smothered a smile. “You would rather be a guest than the groom?”
“I would rather steal you away,” he said with a rakish lift of his ginger brow.
Steal me away? The thrilling suggestion emboldened me to attempt the courtly arts, sweeping my lashes enticingly low. “But, my lord husband, you cannot steal what is already yours.”
I hoped he would reply with flirtation in kind. Instead, his hazel eyes lit with mischief, glance flicking to the door through which servants ferried crystal wineglasses. “We can escape that way.”
Realizing he did not jest, I smothered a frisson of panic. My father had worried Lafayette was timid, preferring to read the old Latin political histories, but now seemed hardly the time for him to develop a sense of adventure. “We cannot leave our wedding banquet, sir.”
“Cur non?”
I tilted my head, and he smiled at my confusion. “It is my family motto,” he explained. “It means: Why not?”
What a charming expression! The notion of my groom as a person apt to question the world tugged upon an old forgotten part of me. And it challenged me too. To ask why was only to demand justification.
To ask why not assumed endless possibility . . .
“Wouldn’t you rather be in fresh air?” he asked.
Yes. I would rather be in the garden, the stables, the courtyard—anywhere but here, perspiring, confined by my stays, drowning in leagues of lace and silver brocade. I dared not admit it; still he seemed to know. Gesturing at the feasting tables, he asked, “How long would it take them to notice we were gone? It is our wedding, yet has little to do with us.”
Perhaps so. Unlike my older sister, Louise, who had married our cousin the vicomte de Noailles, Gilbert and I were considered too young to have our own household; we would remain, like children, under my mother’s protective guidance. Everything had been, and would be, decided for us. We were simply part of the decor; not even like pigeons in a dovecote. More like pretty caged songbirds, without even the dignity of a song.