I found them among twenty-six unsorted boxes of papers at the New-York Historical Society.
When I first discovered a sheaf of unaddressed letters tucked into a Valentine’s Day folder, I wasn’t sure what I’d found. Love letters, to be sure, but they weren’t from Willie. Beatrice’s eldest son had labeled these “Maxime Furlaud & other letters from Front in France 1918,” but I didn’t remember having come across the name Furlaud before. The author of these love letters openly worried about the prying eyes of the censors, expressing love for someone called Marthe while seeming to refer to himself as Catherine.
And I began to wonder if Catherine could be the mysterious Kate of Beatrice’s private letters.
To find out, I cataloged and transcribed the private family letters, putting them into correct historical order and lining them up with this new correspondence. They fit together like two sides of a zipper! Had I uncovered a century-old secret love affair? To confirm my suspicions, I dug into immigration records. As it happens, Beatrice mentions Kate visiting her children at the same time Maxime Furlaud was visiting New York. I also found a ship’s manifest for 1917 in which Beatrice and Maxime Furlaud later traveled to America together. And of course, every now and then, Beatrice would drop the code and call him F or Furlaud.
That Beatrice apparently had a romantic attachment to this French officer did not shock me; after all, in our first interview, Bill Chanler told me he assumed both his grandparents likely had companions or relationships outside their ruined marriage. （Certainly Beatrice’s letters evidenced admirers such as Pierre and the vicomte de Breteuil, the latter of whom she said “worship[ped] at [her] shrine.”） What did shock me was that the romance with Furlaud was so serious—serious enough that he loaned her money, may have given her a car, and seems to have suggested marriage, children, and a future together.
That Beatrice stayed married to Willie anyway raised more questions than it answered.
I set about rewriting Beatrice’s narrative as a doomed wartime love affair when the story changed yet again in an even more dramatic way. In January of 2019, Bill Chanler let me know about a discovery he’d made upon reviewing photos I sent of his grandmother’s papers from the NYHS. Bill had dived down the rabbit hole of genealogical discovery. The rabbit he found was extraordinary.
It seems Beatrice was born Minnie Collins in 1880, illegitimate daughter of an Irish immigrant line. Growing up, she went by Minnie Ashley, either in honor of the Boston butcher with whom her mother was living, or in the probably mistaken belief that she was his child. （She would later claim this was just a stage name.）
Beatrice wasn’t born in Charlottesville, as she so often said; her childhood address was in Boston’s Chinatown—not far from Lafayette Mall. And she was older than she wanted people to believe. She was six years old when the Statue of Liberty—a gift from France—was dedicated in New York Harbor. She was eight when the butcher died, and nine when a kindly French instructor took pity on her reduced circumstances and gave her free dance lessons. She attended a charity school for impoverished children, and while other kids her age worked in factories, twelve-year-old Minnie found a job on the stage.
That this flamboyant polymath had such humble beginnings was, for me, a deeply moving discovery. The genesis of Beatrice’s generosity—her single-minded devotion to war relief work, and how much she wanted to think herself “capable of great deeds”—came into stark focus. I understood for the first time that Beatrice wasn’t merely an agent of the Lafayette legacy; she was an embodiment of it. She was his American dream in living flesh.
In all the desperate children she helped, she likely saw herself. And to the husband who helped her leave those humble beginnings behind, she likely felt a gratitude and loyalty that made divorcing him impossible.
Because I wanted this book to honor Beatrice’s truth—the one she felt she had to hide—I incorporated as many of her own words from her letters as I could, and as many authentic historical details as were available to me. In Paris, Beatrice really did stay at the St. James & D’Albany—the remnants of Adrienne Lafayette’s childhood home. She did lose a personal friend on the Lusitania, and of course she also lost her nephew Victor Chapman, with whom she said she used to talk about love, marriage, and philosophy. If she was Victor’s champion before the war, I don’t know; but after, she certainly was. And it seems fitting that he was a founding member of the Lafayette Escadrille.