I believed my courageous girl. She understood how necessary our presence had been to saving her father’s life. Still, the thought of being separated again was too terrifying. I did not realize I said this aloud until Gilbert thumped the wooden table in frustration. “You may well be separated from us by the grave if you do not go. Petition the emperor.” I started to shake my head, but he resorted to his general’s bark. “Obey me, Adrienne. As my wife it is your duty.”
He had seldom commanded me in anything—and had told the bishop of Paris that I was not his subject. I nearly rebelled, but remembering it was a mutiny of his soldiers that brought us all to this place, I relented, writing my petition to the emperor even though I suspected his reply would be precisely what it was: You will be allowed to go to Vienna for treatment, madame, but if you leave the prison, you will not be permitted to return.
“Accept at once,” said Gilbert.
My daughters understood why I did not, but I alone seemed to understand the triumph when the emperor demanded a written answer. “He wants evidence,” I said with the greatest satisfaction. “No monarch needs evidence of anything unless he fears the judgment of humanity. He regrets letting us join you. The censorious eyes of the world are now upon him, and the only way he can justify keeping you here is if we abandon you.”
Lafayette seemed not to care, shaking his louse-ridden head as if he thought the fever was robbing me of good sense. “I cannot stand by and watch you expose your life to a struggle with a tyrant.”
“Why not?” I asked softly. “You asked it of me every day of our marriage since you first stole off to America. Day after day, year after year, I was obliged to swallow my fears whilst you risked life and limb. Now you will simply have to do the same.”
My husband flung his hands up. “Mon Dieu, Adrienne, you are not a soldier, and it is not the cause of humanity at stake. It is only me.”
“You’re mistaken. Glory is a bittersweet wreath of both flowers and thorns. Your name, your house, your wife, your story—we are all now inextricably woven together with the cause of humanity. Your officers rode across the border with you for this reason; some of them are rotting in this prison too. That is to say nothing of simple patriots who tried to help you escape. Many people who are not soldiers have lost their lives for our causes. I cannot dishonor these sacrifices.”
“Adrienne,” he groaned, hiding his face in his hands. “How much guilt do you think I can bear?”
I stroked his beard. “Have faith in me, my dear heart . . .”
All I had to do was endure.
Already my spirits were bolstered knowing I had, in the eyes of the emperor, become a troublesome woman and a thorn in his royal side. Your terms can never be acceptable to me, I replied. I remember how, when my husband and I were both near death—I because of Robespierre’s tyranny and Lafayette because of the torments of his captivity—I was neither able to hear news of him nor to send word that his children and I were still alive. I will not willingly expose myself to the horrors of another such separation.
To bear up under a red prickly rash, I remembered the patience of my dear martyred mother. I had no paper, but the wide margins of a book became my parchment as I scratched out her biography with a toothpick dipped in ink, for my pen had been seized. I wanted this keepsake, these memories, for my children.
Eventually, though, my hands became too swollen to write. My arms too heavy to lift. When my legs pained me too much to sit upon the wooden bench, I requested to purchase an armchair to ease my discomfort. When this was denied, I felt more satisfaction. “How frightened the emperor is of a little suffering woman that he denies me the comforts of a chair. He is trying to force me out; he is testing my resolve.”
“And you are testing mine,” Gilbert growled.
Why was it, I wondered in my fevered state, that every damsel sighs in gratitude to be rescued by a knight, but the knight himself hates to find his fate in the hands of the damsel?
Well, he would simply have to endure it too.
FIFTY-NINE
MARTHE
Chavaniac-Lafayette
May 15, 1944
Imagining that Gestapo officers will soon search the preventorium building by building, room by room—I’m grateful that Gabriella, Josephine, and Daniel are all safe in the woods, camped with their scout troops not far from where maquisards train.
But now I have the fifteen Jewish girls from the convent to think of. If I can get them in the camion, I’ll drive south like a bat out of hell, but then I find that the old truck is out of petrol again.