Telling that story required not only Adrienne, but two additional heroines, and I’d like to explain the choices and changes I made in fitting their narratives together.
ADRIENNE
In the lyrics of Hamilton: An American Musical, Lafayette is called “America’s favorite fighting Frenchman.” While Laura Kamoie and I were writing America’s First Daughter and My Dear Hamilton, Lafayette certainly became a favorite of ours.
As a grieving widower, Lafayette wrote a letter extolling Adrienne’s virtues, giving her credit for his honorable life, and describing their union as so close that he “could not draw a line of distinction between her existence and [his] own.” I had to know more about the woman whose death the buoyant French hero characterized as the first misfortune of his life that he wouldn’t be able to recover from. As it happens, Adrienne’s good works, unassuming self-sacrifice, and raw courage helped carve out a world-changing democratic legacy that is still playing out in our lives today. She was a founding mother of not one but two nations: America and France. And quite a bit of historical evidence survives in Adrienne’s own hand, which made her a perfect heroine for a novel.
With biographies, letters, and accounts by her husband and daughter, I had such an abundance of information, I didn’t have room for her many family members, friends, and acquaintances—important persons almost every one. Another challenge was that Adrienne was almost too perfect a heroine. So rarely did she complain, she didn’t mention a miscarriage she suffered early in her marriage. （And because she omitted it, I chose to leave it out too.）
Her contemporaries described her as lacking all jealousy or pettiness, though she had ample excuse for both. When Lafayette returned triumphant from America, his tragic affair with Aglaé inspired ballads, and the crowd at the opera really did encourage him to kiss the queen’s lady-in-waiting. What I left out of the story is that the lady he was encouraged to kiss was Diane, the comtesse de Simiane, with whom he enjoyed a love affair that transformed into a friendship of many decades. I was able to infer Adrienne’s unhappiness about Lafayette’s affair with Aglaé because her powerful family raised a fuss, but I found no evidence of her distress about his relationship with Diane. In fact, Adrienne seems to have liked this mistress. So much so that she encouraged her children to call Diane aunt, and often met with her socially without Lafayette. Perhaps Adrienne felt pity for Diane, whose homosexual husband died under mysterious circumstances. The subsequent scandal put a dent in Lafayette’s reputation, but Adrienne stood by both Lafayette and his mistress. All this begged for a more in-depth exploration than I could provide in a novel that is primarily about the legacy at Chavaniac. Thus, it seemed better to omit this otherwise fascinating drama, to portray Adrienne as having already come to terms with her husband’s youthful affairs, and to assume that the comtesse de Simiane was “the charming sort with whom a wife enjoys taking tea.”
Perhaps Adrienne simply banished jealousy as un-Christian. After all, surviving portraits describe her as a deeply religious woman who risked her life in service of her faith. But that faith was hard-won. According to her daughter, young Adrienne was “tormented” by religious doubts; she declined to take her first Communion until after she was married. Her husband would later say Adrienne’s religious beliefs were “amiable heresies,” fervently entwined with his revolutionary ideals. Maybe that’s why, as she lay dying, she jested that they were both Fayettists, a sect for which she would willingly give her life.
Adrienne’s spirituality is fascinating, but I wanted to explore the way she navigated the world politically. She understood finances and took command of them. She joined abolitionist organizations and personally managed the project of purchasing plantations to emancipate the people working them. She took in wards and transformed the economy of Chavaniac. She cared for National Guardsmen and saved the lives of at least two people we know about—not even counting her husband. She had the temerity to poke at Washington’s conscience, then travel to a foreign country under an assumed name to join her husband in a dungeon . . .
As in all my historical novels, the most outrageous bits are true. Adrienne’s grandmother really did have a habit of stealing holy relics—and was nearly excommunicated for it. Adrienne had personal relationships with many famous Americans of the founding generation, including Benjamin Franklin, John and Abigail Adams, John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay, Angelica Church, Thomas Jefferson and his daughter Patsy, William Short, and James and Elizabeth Monroe. It’s even true that her relationship with Gouverneur Morris was testy and that she verbally jousted with two emperors. And Adrienne did die on Christmas Eve, hallucinating, likely due to lead poisoning.