I wrap my arms around him. “I meant where are you taking me after the war. You said we could go someplace nice. Travel the world—or what’s left of it . . .”
He meets my eyes. How did I never notice before that his are as dark as fertile volcanic soil? Now they glisten, because he remembers the rest of what he said that night. We could make life, after the war. We could go someplace nice. Travel the world—or what’s left of it. Make a baby. Who knows? Maybe you fall in love with me someday. Or maybe you leave me for someone else. That’s life. But we have to survive to live it.
Somehow, we survived. Now I want to live.
Yves holds me close. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
And these are the words I’ve been waiting to hear all my life . . .
SIXTY-FOUR
ADRIENNE
December 24, 1807
It is Christmas Eve again at Chavaniac, and a glazed ham is destined for a table I’ve set with garlands of evergreen. My surviving sisters Pauline and Rosalie, and Lafayette’s elderly aunt Charlotte, join us at the table, where we take turns lighting a candle over the brioche. Gathered too are our best beloved children. Tall, upright Georges, who looks so like his father that strangers on the street know him at once for Lafayette’s son. Courageous Anastasie, now a mother and loving wife. Virginie, who has been my devoted aide-de-camp in the battles fought to regain our lost fortunes. On the slope of our forested hills, my grandchildren are sledding, and I smile to hear their laughter, knowing we have at last made a home where happy children can laugh and play without fear of man or beast . . .
I don’t know how much of this is true, for I am in delirium. Beset with illness, I have a makeshift head on a mortifying body, so I don’t know exactly where I am now. Yet I prefer to think it is Chavaniac. That’s where we were going, anyway, when I was afflicted. The doctors treated me with tinctures of lead, and since then hallucinations have transported me to biblical times and back again.
“I’ve gone mad, have I not?” I whisper, certain only of Lafayette at my bedside, hand in mine. “Tell me if I’ve lost my reason.”
With kindly eyes he says, “My dear heart, I would be very distressed if I thought all your charming words of love to me were absurdities.”
In recent days, I have told him I love him in every way possible. As a Christian, a human, passionately, even voluptuously, or I would if I still had any senses left. “But I have said strange things too, and you are pretending otherwise,” I accuse. “Here I am, married to the most sincere of men, yet I cannot get the truth. Tell me and I will resign myself to the shame of being mad!”
He kisses my fingers as if we were still at Versailles. “You are only sick, my dear heart. And we will care for you. Be comforted that you are highly regarded and loved.”
“I care less to be highly regarded so long as I am still loved . . . but I cannot remember now these years since our liberation. Help me find myself again. It is ten years we’ve had together since Olmütz, is it not?”
He nods. “Ten years of freedom, and every one of them precious. Years of watching you crusade for the restoration of our friends and family, years in which I have had to accustom myself to the novelty of thinking of you as my commanding officer.”
Despite his teary smile, I am tremulous to ask the next question. “And in that time, did I become . . . I am not empress, am I?”
How relieved I am to hear Lafayette chuckle. “No. That was a fevered nightmare.”
“I thought so, because if I was empress, then you would be emperor, and that would weigh heavy on your conscience!”
“Indeed. But you did battle an emperor,” he reminds me. “Two of them, actually. If you had not won Napoléon Bonaparte’s admiration, I would have remained forever in exile.”
Ah, yes! I remember now. General Bonaparte’s pretty round face, in which I should have seen a devil in an angel’s guise. When I thanked him for negotiating our release, I found him quite cold. We were too dangerous, he believed, to return to France. Equally dangerous, according to the Americans, for us to go there. And when I pleaded with Bonaparte that it would do much for his reputation to let a champion of freedom come home, he told me I understood nothing of politics.
Yet I knew enough to arrange for a false passport for Gilbert and to summon my husband home at the precise moment it was too politically inconvenient for Bonaparte to send him away again. Thus we have lived together with our children and grandchildren in France.