Even as I unlock the door, I know I can’t go with them. I know, because I remember that at every opportunity Adrienne Lafayette risked herself so others could get away. And she had more to lose than I do . . .
“When you get to the stream,” I tell the girls, “follow it east. In a few miles, you’re going to stumble on a campsite with a couple hundred Lafayette kids. Find a girl named Josephine Beaufort. You can trust her. Tell her to take you deeper into the woods to Mandaix, where we saw the maquisards training. They’ll know what to do.”
With that, I kiss each of their heads like a sacrament, knowing that beyond this door is a different kind of tunnel. One that’s older, abandoned, and primordial. They’ll have to run through cobwebs and deeper darkness, pinching their noses against the ammonia scent of bat droppings and dead rodents, but then mottled daylight will break through where the tunnel lets out, and they’ll be free.
Even if I can never be . . .
SIXTY
ADRIENNE
The Prison of Olmütz
July 1797
Anastasie used her thumbnail to draw a portrait of the cruelest guard and flirted with the friendly ones, which vexed her father. “Do not draw their attentions,” Gilbert said, swishing away flies. “You are too beautiful to put yourself at their mercy.”
“Perhaps my beauty puts them at my mercy,” Anastasie argued. “The guard who passes beneath our window every night has a hungry look. I teased I would give him our ration if he smuggled messages, and he did not flinch.”
It amused me to see Gilbert fuss and fume at a daughter who was so like him in daring and ingenuity. In the weeks that followed, she not only charmed guards into sneaking letters, she also transformed herself into a veritable cobbler, making new shoes out of leather strips she finagled off a young guardsman. She took dictation using my little toothpick and ink. And due to her efforts, we soon had news from the outside.
“We are being talked about everywhere!” our eldest cried. “In America they clamor for our release, and in the English Parliament ministers have been moved to tears. Someone has even written a play called The Prisoner of Olmütz.”
I smiled to think we had not been forgotten! We’d also learned a French Revolutionary army was marching across the Alps toward Austria. The emperor was not so secure in his power now, was he? Did I dare hope the Republic of France had come to free my husband—who was rotting in jail for having started the Revolution in the first place? I had been too long in this prison to know whether France was now led by good or wicked men. Yet I promised my family, “It will not be long now until we are free.”
I believed this, even if our freedom would come too late for me. My blood infection had lately left my arms red and raw, exposed by peeling skin. I could no longer close my hands, and my entire nervous system was afflicted by spasms. Yet in some perverse way I welcomed the pain as a manner of expiation, and knew that the sharper my suffering, the better my weapon. For above all, the emperor did not want me to die in his prison . . .
Not with public sentiment running in our favor on both sides of the ocean. Americans finally bestirred themselves to push for our release. French persons too, including friends and my surviving family. Our most unexpected champion was a young military commander named Napoléon Bonaparte, who was sent by the Directoire to negotiate our release.
One morning, my husband and the loyal officers who had been arrested with him were suddenly reunited in our cell. To lay eyes upon one another for the first time after such long confinement was a sweet torment, and the men burst into tears to see how wretched they had become. They were told, “You may be set at liberty, under the condition that Lafayette promises never again to set foot in Austria.”
But for me, my husband would have refused this offer. For five years he had been caged unjustly, and his honor should not allow him to be treated as if he had committed a crime. However, for once in his life, Lafayette seemed ready to compromise.
Yet I did not want him to give an inch. We were a headache the emperor did not need. This was still my battle with the tyrant—one I meant to win. Like all despots, the emperor had thought to break us. Because of who we were, because of the causes to which we had devoted our lives, it would matter a great deal how we left this jail—dead or alive.
The next offer came. We could be free if we would blame our ill-treatment upon the lowest-ranked guards and absolve the emperor of guilt. This too we refused. The emperor finally negotiated our release directly with Bonaparte, who took matters out of our hands. In mid-September, the doors of our prison swung open. We were to be taken directly to Hamburg, then handed over to the American consul.