“Madame! Awaken, s’il vous pla?t!” I did not want to be awakened, torn away from my dream castle. Yet the stranger persisted. “Have my coat, you poor shivering woman,” he said, wrapping me in the warmth of wool.
I took him for a carpenter sent to patch the holes in the roof. He was, in fact, a priest in disguise, having contrived this excuse to be alone with me. “Madame, I must speak swiftly. I don’t have long. I am the man who gave last rites to your mother, sister, and grandmother.”
The mention of them made me groan as if run through, and I again curled in on myself with fresh pain.
“In their final moments, they commended their love to you, and I have come to deliver it,” he said.
Could it be true? That they might have felt love for me in such a moment was both grace and a torment.
He told me how he walked beside their tumbril as it rattled through the streets in a rainstorm. How my angelic sister Louise, all dressed in white, comforted Maman. How the executioner tore Grand-mère’s black taffeta gown to expose her pale neck to the blade. How Maman, in blue and white stripes, said she was grateful to die before her child. How the executioner yanked her cap, forgetting to unpin it, causing her to flinch in pain. How courageous Louise stopped upon the bloody stairs to ask God’s forgiveness for a man in the crowd who tormented her. Then Louise too suffered the pain of her cap being torn from her head before the blade severed her neck, spraying the jeering crowd with crimson.
It was a long time before I could speak. Into the abyss of my dark silence, the priest whispered, “They were shorn before their executions. Louise sent her hair for her children. She would like for them to join their father in America.”
My eyes closed at the reminder that Marc was by now across the sea, pleading our cause with the Americans, quite probably ignorant to the fate of his wife and parents. When he learned this, he would feel he had abandoned them. He would feel as if they had been murdered in his name. He would never recover from it. The self-reproach would surely kill him as it was killing me . . .
All I wanted was to know the final resting place of my butchered family, but the priest said they had been carried away in secret to prevent proper burial. What spite and savagery! The intolerable horror of this made me wish to beat my head against the stone wall.
And when the priest left, I would have begged for beheading.
Instead, I learned I was to be set free.
On a blustery winter day—after more than a year of imprisonment—I limped through the cobbled streets like a beggar, unrecognized and unmolested in my reduced state.
Not knowing where else to go, I walked to the American embassy. There, Mrs. Monroe hastened to wrap me in a blanket, sending her servants to fetch biscuits, jam, and hot tea. What a fright I looked; how wretched I felt, trembling when the warm porcelain cup with its dainty flowers was put into my dirty hands. Minister Monroe appeared at the threshold, and I put my cup down to kneel in gratitude before him.
“Please, madame,” he drawled, trying to keep me upright. “It was and remains my honor to render any service to the wife of my dear friend. My countrymen owe Lafayette a sacred debt. It is the only thing upon which all factions agree.”
How sweet to hear these words. I remembered the cagey Franklin. The prickly Adams. The dashing Laurens. The eloquent Jefferson. The earnest Short. The witty Morris. All those American envoys had expressed appreciation for my husband. But the unguarded zeal in Monroe’s gray eyes gave me courage for what I must do next. My fourteen-year-old son was still especially vulnerable. They had guillotined boys his age, and at present, there was no place for a boy with the name Lafayette but America. So by Monroe’s special envoys, I sent another letter.
To President Washington:
Sir, I send you my son. Although I have not had the consolation of being listened to nor of obtaining from you those good offices likely to bring about his father’s delivery from the hands of our enemies, it is with sincere confidence that I put my dear child under the protection of the United States.
I have nurtured in my son a love of country where his father is disowned and persecuted, and where his mother was sixteen months confined in prison. But he has been taught to regard America as his second country. I shall not say anything of my own position, nor of the one which interests me still more than mine. I will only cherish the hope that my son should lead a secluded life in America, resume his studies, and become fit to fulfill the duties of a citizen of the United States.
To send my boy away tore my withered heart and made me remember I still had one. I closed my eyes, remembering every freckle upon my boy’s nose, reassuring myself that Washington would not, could not, turn away his namesake. Yet I would not wait upon the Americans. I had learned I could not wait on anyone. Cur non? It was now my motto too. I must use my freedom while I had it. I had rescued a priest from certain death.