We were obliged to scoop up food with filthy hands and wash it down with our ration of Hungarian wine. “Not the best vintage,” Gilbert observed. “But more healthful than water.”
After our meals, he read to us, delighting Virginie by imitating voices like a stage actor. Alas, our little joys were interrupted by the screams of prisoners being lashed in the courtyard. These Prussians were as cruel as Jacobins were arbitrary and capricious. Yet they seemed to take to the task of tormenting prisoners with rigid exactness.
With jingling keys, a round guardsman would fetch the girls back to their cage in the evening. During these transfers, seemingly every guard in the compound gathered to watch, a great show being made of checking locks and chains, my girls being obliged to pass under crossed sabers to prevent their escape. This ludicrous show of force was too much. Every day, Virginie would flush with indignant anger. Anastasie, however, began to make faces at the guards, sometimes with the haughty bearing of a Noailles and sometimes in silly mockery.
“They bear up so well,” Lafayette whispered.
I worried imprisonment would become more difficult for them over time. How had my husband endured this, alone, for so long? Despite the misery of our conditions, I found myself content to see my husband eat, to see his health improve, to know our presence was a balm. I felt a guilty happiness too, to have him to myself.
We had years of conversation to catch up on, and I told him everything I had done in his absence. How gratifying to know he approved of my decisions with pleasure and pride. And sometimes a little amazement. “What noble imprudence to be the only woman in France endangered by the name she bore, but who always refused to change it! You could have divorced me.” I was overpaid by his tender words, but he wasn’t finished, his eyes now lowered in humility. “I have always known I loved and needed you, Adrienne, but did not always appreciate how incomparable a woman I had the good fortune to marry.”
I gave him a melting smile, feeling that it was God who had given us to each other, not fickle fortune, but how blessed we were for it. That night, nestled in the crook of his arm upon a fetid bed, I mused, “What a novelty it is to wake up with you each morning without having to watch you dash off on your horse to save someone’s life—I don’t know that we’ve had so many uninterrupted hours together since the king made you my prisoner . . .”
A sliver of moonlight through prison bars allowed me to see him grin. “That was a far more pleasant confinement than this.”
“Yes, but perhaps if we close our eyes, we can remember the softness of our feather bed.”
“The softness of the bed left less impression upon me than the softness of the girl upon it,” he said, stroking my hair. “I counted myself so fortunate to have a feminine little wife. I loved the silk of your lips and the tenderness of your gaze. I did not yet know your gentleness is a velvet drape over steel . . .”
“Is this a compliment, sir, or a reproach?”
He kissed me. “The highest compliment, but a reproach to me every day I do not find the firmness in my own character to command the guards to eject you from this terrible place.”
“It is not so terrible,” I said.
He snorted, twining his fingers with mine. “Look how swollen your hands are. It will get worse with the vapors rising from the moat of sewage outside.”
“Gilbert, I am happier with you in a prison than I could be anywhere in the world without you.”
I’m uncertain he believed me; nevertheless, it was true. And I did not yet despair of regaining our freedom. Gilbert was allowed no contact with the outside world, but the same restriction did not apply to me. I obtained with bribery some paper and ink. I was forbidden to write our son in America because our captors were uneasy about news of Lafayette reaching the United States. I was warned not to reveal the conditions of our imprisonment or to write anything that might embarrass them. Yet, I hoped my sharp-eyed friends would divine enough from what I did not say to shout it to the world.
* * *
—
Despite the winter’s frost, I burned with fever. “Morbus sanguinis,” said the physician, where I lay plagued with headaches and swollen extremities.
“Blood infection,” Gilbert translated from Latin, as it was the language he shared in common with the doctor. “He wants to send you to Vienna for treatment.”
“No. If I go, I will never see you again.”
Gilbert pressed a cloth to my brow. “That is your fever talking.”
My daughters sat near to the stove, warming their hands, both frowning. “We will stay with Papa whilst you are gone,” Anastasie insisted. “You need not worry. I will do exactly as you would in my place.”