But of course, in every historical novel, a few things must be altered for the sake of brevity. For example, Lafayette wasn’t given the cross of Saint Louis until after the American war, but I put it sooner. The duc d’Ayen didn’t entirely oppose the idea of his son-in-law, the vicomte de Noailles, going to fight in America, but he didn’t think Lafayette could handle himself. The duc might not have been quite as terrible a father as I’ve portrayed him to be, but Adrienne’s tactfully expressed frustrations with him are evident in the historical record. As Laura Auricchio makes clear in The Marquis, Lafayette’s meetings with his coconspirator, the Baron de Kalb, took place in Adrienne’s home, so perhaps Adrienne wasn’t as much in the dark as she portrayed to the world, and her easy forgiveness of Lafayette, as well as her steadfast support, was because she already knew of his plans.
Finally, while the incident with John Laurens at Versailles is based on historical fact, how great a role Adrienne took in his argument with the minister and audience with the king is unknown. However, since Lafayette asked Adrienne to introduce Laurens around court and help him at Versailles, it seemed fair to assume she did so.
BEATRICE
While Adrienne was the starting point, this novel was swiftly overtaken by the formidable personality of Beatrice Chanler—a founding mother of a different sort. Like most people, I surrendered to Beatrice’s charms, never guessing the journey ahead!
As a celebrity, Beatrice was frequently mentioned and photographed in old digitized newspapers. Yet her amusingly casual relationship with the truth on official documents became the bane of my research existence. She did, in fact, put “See Who’s Who” on a passport application in March 1918. And this was only part of a pattern of obfuscation. She frequently changed her middle name as well as her date and place of birth. I was stymied until, shortly after my return from a research trip to Chavaniac, I stumbled upon a wonderful article in The Gazette of the American Friends of Lafayette written by Beatrice’s grandson, William A. Chanler.
I took a chance and reached out to him, and a heartwarming correspondence commenced. Bill—who, like his grandmother, is a generous soul and an author in his own right—shared family letters with me, and together we tried to guess the identities of people Beatrice mentioned, like the mysterious Pierre and the even more mysterious Kate. On the surface, the letters painted a deceptively simple picture of a well-heeled society maven whose troubled marriage somehow survived the Great War and gave way to remarkable philanthropy at Lafayette’s castle in Auvergne.
Though dazzling Beatrice and her colorful husband Willie had separated on amicable terms before the First World War, reconciliations were attempted. Unfortunately, according to her letters, her brilliant but boorish husband sometimes aggravated her to exhaustion. They often bickered—sometimes about the children, with Beatrice comparing Willie to a stern Roman father. Beatrice admitted to having black moods when she considered the future of their marriage, saying in one letter that Willie was “mad as a hatter” and that others feared for her safety, though she wasn’t in the least concerned.
In the wake of her husband’s leg injury in 1913 （the exact cause of which remains a mystery）， Beatrice sat at her husband’s hospital bedside. But by springtime of 1915, they seem to have been so estranged that she mentions not having heard from Willie, and even being unsure of his whereabouts. In fact, the newspapers appear to have been better informed, since they’d already printed where he was.
Other family letters confirm Beatrice’s frustration with her husband’s alcoholism. This would get worse in the wake of amputation and a morphine addiction. Beatrice implied in one letter that Willie was “unbalanced.” She may have been referring to his conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic beliefs—beliefs that would become more virulent before he died in 1934. Fortunately, his wife appears never to have shared his views. Beatrice seems to have taken in Jewish children at the chateau, but I found a correspondence with John Moffat in which she agreed it should be kept quiet, presumably lest it scare off bigoted donors. Moreover, Beatrice would ultimately go on to serve as vice chairwoman of the National Citizens Committee in Aid of the United Nations War Crimes Commission after World War II, advocating a strong response to Nazi crimes against Jews, and she championed Jewish congressman Emanuel Celler, a critic of America’s insufficient response to the Holocaust.
So why did Beatrice stay married to a man like Willie?
That she loved him and his garrulous extended family is beyond question. “Operatic” Chanler family dramas—described in both The Astor Orphans: A Pride of Lions by Lately Thomas and Sargent’s Women by Donna M. Lucey—no doubt entertained Beatrice. But, having come from a fractured family herself （more on that later）， Beatrice perhaps welcomed being a part of a close-knit group, and it might’ve pained her to lose those family connections by pursuing a divorce. Certainly she wouldn’t have wished to fall afoul of her starchy sister-in-law Margaret, who ostracized divorced family members. Another possibility is that Beatrice had Catholic sympathies that made divorce, for her, out of the question. If so, these sympathies weren’t ones that she would’ve easily shared with her anti-Catholic husband or anti-Catholic brother-in-law, Jack Chapman. But Beatrice once described herself as being “too pagan” for the spirit to descend upon her, so I searched for other clues.