My heart beat wilder with hope that my family might one day be reunited if I made this concession. What was a name in these days when divorce, forbidden under the ancien régime, was now so prevalent, and titles meant nothing? I was born with my father’s name—of the house of Noailles. Then I exchanged it for my husband’s name. Why not change my name again for survival? Perhaps, like Philippe, I could simply choose a new one.
These thoughts buzzed like stinging insects in my poor brain until, at last, the carriage stopped before the department in Le Puy. This was the crucial moment. If they took me all the way to Paris, I would be murdered, but if I could convince these men to set me free, here in this friendlier, faraway province, there was a chance.
My daughter and her aunt insisted upon going with me into the room where I wrote a petition protesting the injustice of my arrest. They looked to me for guidance, because Lafayette couldn’t give it. He was a prisoner. Lafayette, the Hero of Two Worlds, the invincible soldier who never raised a sword to conquer, only to liberate. Nevertheless, he had conquered my heart, and now I feared I would never see him again. So what did it matter now if I put more distance between us?
If I gave up his name . . .
As I reached the place on the page where I was to sign, the tenderhearted guardsman stared intently as if willing me to choose expediency. My pen hesitated. The quill pen shook in my fingers, one of which bled from the glass. That was but a trifle considering the amount of blood they said gushes from the neck when the guillotine falls.
Yes, it is but a trifle, the guardsman’s eyes seemed to say. A name means nothing. Honor means nothing anymore either.
I glanced at Anastasie, so like her father, with an intrepid spirit and the heart of a lion. I was already in agony that my children might soon be orphans, and blinked away tears to think of them shamed by the one thing their father and I could still leave them. Our name.
Already, Lafayette was a name people had died for. A name that meant everything to me, but also a name that didn’t belong only to me. It belonged to the ages, where I hoped it might yet inspire great deeds. So I signed in large letters and bold ink what might be my death sentence: la femme Lafayette.
FORTY-SIX
BEATRICE
Paris
May 1917
How glad I was to leave the barren landscape behind, both the one at the war front and the one that had been my fidelity to an empty marriage. These last days with Max had been glorious, and the time flew by too quickly. It is always so when one is happy in the paradise reserved for lovers . . .
In Paris I purchased an apartment—a private bungalow tucked away behind the Monnaie de Paris, where the Condorcets hosted salons for Lafayette and Americans like Jefferson and Paine. When I explained this, Max grinned. “So we’re walking in the footsteps of freedom . . .”
In truth, we were only free inside the apartment with the curtains drawn, shielded from the judgment of the world. There, drinking rations of bad wine and eating candlelit suppers of cold duck, I didn’t want to think of anything, or anyone, else.
For the world played no part in this new life of mine.
Why, then, did the world insist upon intruding?
Thanks to Clara and her connections, our work at Chavaniac had received government recognition as a public utility, which meant we had access to labor and raw materials in preference to civilians. As secretary-general, she would help preside over a Paris school for boys like Uriah Kohn who needed not immediately travel to Chavaniac. And thanks to Emily’s accounting, I now realized that I was managing almost two million dollars of public works.
Chavaniac was set to open for forty orphans by the first of June, so I spent my days purchasing and shipping furnishings, dishes, linens, bedding—everything they might need. My nights, however, were spent with Max by the fire. One night, he whispered, “I have to return to duty soon.”
In a dreamy haze, I murmured, “I’d rather you stayed. What a lack of discernment in the powers that be that so valuable a man should be wasted thus at the front!”
He chuckled. “Wasted? I’m at least a little useful, if not necessary.”
Whether he was necessary to my happiness was a burning question. I was in love, and that love was now the compass that guided my thoughts, my desires, and without which I felt certain I would founder. I traced his shirt button. “But if you go back to the front now, you’ll miss my birthday.”
I shouldn’t have said it; after all, the last thing I wanted was for this man to think of me as a creature who aged. I wanted him to think of me like Paris—a timeless beauty dressing for romance with an evening visitor, her lights enveloped in a mantle or shade. Unfortunately, the visitors who came to Paris at night were unfriendly, and our idyll was interrupted by the blare of horns as military motors zoomed below my windows.