“You will thank me when you give birth to the long-awaited Noailles heir.”
I drank the water—then had a servant return the chalice to the church. Meanwhile, my sister Louise, who was herself finally pregnant, pressed a silk pouch of wet tea leaves to my closed eyes. Maman said tea leaves would leave me looking fresh and cheerful, which I intended to be on the occasion of a family wedding at which I knew everyone would be trying to divine signs of my unhappiness with which to condemn Gilbert as a cruel husband and unfeeling father. “I must make everyone understand that in leaving for America, Lafayette is motivated by only the finest sentiments.”
“They will,” Maman assured me. “If not now, then one day.”
Would it be soon enough? Of the family elders, only Grand-mère tempered her disapproval with begrudging admiration. “Who could’ve guessed the dullard from Chavaniac had it in him?”
I forgave Grand-mère because she did not have all her faculties, but it was more difficult to forgive Aunt Claude when, at the wedding banquet, she said, “Lafayette will be fortunate if the king forgives the follies of his youth. If not, pray poor Adrienne and her unborn child do not die of shame.”
At that utterance, the wedding guests turned, and a dozen pairs of eyes pinned me where I sat. Under a table that glittered with crystal and silver, Louise squeezed my hand, and I waited for the heat of embarrassment. I felt only the prickle of anger. Since my aunt did not worry about propriety in quite nearly wishing me and my child dead, indignant motherhood as much as marital devotion drove me to say, “I am not ashamed of Lafayette. I am proud to call myself the wife of a gallant knight of liberty, gone to fight for the future of humanity.”
This was not, for me, merely talk of a loyal wife. I believed that there must be a more enlightened way to exist, where each person had freedom of conscience. I was beginning to embrace a fierce pride in the idea that I might be a part of this experiment in self-government across the sea, even if my only contribution was holding firm against my family’s displeasure.
After the wedding festivities, the duc d’Ayen told the young men of the family, “Don’t any of you think to follow Lafayette.”
He did not know his days of frightening everyone into submission were nearly at an end, but I sensed it when my brother-in-law gave a silky smile. “The wind is blowing against you, sir. It will be difficult for you to find husbands for your other daughters if this is the way you treat heroism in a son-in-law!”
Marc knew the French love a daring hero. Especially one with a fine pedigree.
Thus, stories spread like wildfire, more exaggerated with every telling. How the young marquis de Lafayette disguised himself as a postilion, hiding from the king’s soldiers in barns and haystacks, winking at pretty farmers’ daughters to keep his secret before making a mad gallop for the border. Lafayette’s drama—as it was whispered in Paris back alleys and compiled into official reports in the gilded halls of Versailles—tugged at the sympathies of my countrymen.
Finally, one afternoon, whilst Henriette fussed in my arms, my sister Louise burst into my chamber. “Lafayette is away! He went without noble title—Gilbert du Motier, a mere chevalier de Chavaniac. He made it aboard the Victoire and has set sail for America.”
I held my baby tighter in silent thanksgiving, knowing the risk was only beginning. Lafayette’s ship could still be stopped by a British blockade, and then he’d be thrown into irons. Even if my husband arrived safely in America, he might still be killed in the war there. Yet my heart still welled with joy. “Your papa is free,” I whispered to Henriette. “He’s free.”
And in some sense, so was I.
* * *
—
In June, while I was so heavily pregnant I could scarcely rise from my canopied bed without the help of my maid, Lafayette came ashore in South Carolina and traversed nine hundred miles under the sweltering sun through mosquito-infested swamps.
In July, while I labored in the dire heat to bring forth a daughter with bright copper curls, my husband reached Philadelphia and received his commission in the Continental army.
In August, while I christened our new baby Anastasie Louise after my loyal sister, my husband became a trusted aide to George Washington.
And in September, while Louise was giving birth to a boy, my husband was wounded at the Battle of the Brandywine.
I learned all this only after the fact, as word took weeks, sometimes months, to cross a war-torn sea, and because my mother conspired to keep the more upsetting news from me. In the meantime, I took solace in my own babies. I gave not a fig that another daughter meant another disappointment for my family. Anastasie was so sunny a baby I couldn’t wish for her to be anything other than herself, and I hoped she and Henriette would grow up to be good friends.