Lafayette_Courtier to Crown Fugitive, 1757-1777 Read online

  Again she questioned. “What were you thinking about?”

  “That we live in a house of 18 rooms once a fortified manor. That through our village marched the ancient Romans. All around me is history but I am not part of it. I am of today and these days do not offer events that some scribe would ever record and especially not write my name down as important to that record.”

  “Gilbert you are only eleven years old, plenty of time. When you become famous you can write your memoirs, so your victories are seen through the victor’s eyes.”

  “A hero has no time to sit and write. To be historic you must do great deeds and have witnesses and let others write of your deeds. But, yes, it would not be to my benefit to accomplish much and not have anyone notice.”

  “While you can have your one page of glory and find yourself in a history book I would rather have no words written of me but instead discover myself in a beautiful romance with everlasting love.”

  “Of course, you would, but love might be as much tragic as blessed.” Gilbert pointed at her reading, “Does not your heroine marry wrong, falls in love with another and then when discovered, believes it her duty to follow the wishes of her dying husband; so in the end joins a convent? I have not thought much of these visions you have of romantic love. In fact, I have not thought of love at all except as it might be applied in the duty one has to love one’s family and strive for their happiness. A knight must have only pure love.”

  “Oh, Gilbert, you know nothing, yet you own a romantic’s soul, that I do know. Your time of enlightenment will come.”

  “I’d rather be an explorer of the wilderness, not of the heart.”

  “Or a conqueror of both? If you would be a questing knight, I would gladly give you a handkerchief blessed by the Pope to carry on your lance.”

  “And I shall give you my own silks or a locket of my hair to remember me by, and ask you burn a candle each day in the chapel, to pray for my safety.”

  “I would certainly do so, Gil. And wear any token you give against my heart.” She let her eyes give him an intent look of a young girl’s own musings, but saw he was paying her no attention. “And when will such exploration of my knight errant begin? It seems we live in the midst of the wilds already, if not pastoral here and there.”

  Gilbert looked around at his surroundings, squinting. “I have walked all this land even to the shrines on the top of the hills. This my home and I suppose forever, but I don’t know...” The conversation ended as they heard Abbé Fayon call from the house asking him to attend to his lessons.

  “What are you now studying?” asked Marie, turning back to her book.

  “Abbé Fayon, is much better than the Jesuits who pushed me to memorize catechisms as a five year old. At least the Abbé [tutor-priest] tells me the tales of our Auvergne neighborhood and allows me to read the histories of Plutarch, even if in Latin.” He rose from his repose but turned to Marie, “I would be proud to wear your favor into battle.” Such sudden comment of romantic maturity shocked her and she saw from his countenance a sprite of manliness, and like the heroine Princess in her readings something stirred in her. Then he ran, with laughter shouting “Nihil est conanti quod effici non possit!” [Literal: Nothing is impossible if tried by the courageous]

  Dearest Gilbert, she sighed, smiling at his departure, what is the world to do with you? She spoke from her memory, from the book before her: Elle ne se flatta plus de l’espérance de ne le pas aimer; elle songea seulement à ne lui en donner jamais aucune marque... Her thoughts ran on jumbled in confusion. Better to quench these strange feelings inside her, she thought, and continue to play as children.

  “To whom are you writing, ma mére,” asked oldest daughter Marguerite-Madeline, glancing up from her lacework, pleasantly sitting in the window’s casement, where she found the sunlight most convenient for the small detail of the design. Every once in a while she could glance outside to see her widowed sister, Louise-Charlotte, directing the Chateaux ’s gardener at his pruning within the stone-fenced plot of herbs used for every-day meal preparation. Today’s gatherings would be used in tonight’s fare, Lapin a la Cocotte.

  “I am composing a missive to Gilbert’s mother,” said Mme du Mortier, continuing with her quill pen flourishes. “I believe it is time she retrieved him and took the boy back to Paris. It has been eight years since she took her mourning grief of my son’s death and fled to the distraction of the Court. At that time I accepted being left with Michel’s child as being the proper situation, who better than I to offer a secure home, and with you all present he has received a hayloft full of maternal nurturing. But I see he is growing too fast, child to youth. I can do no more. You have over-seen his education, Marguerite, along and with Fayon’s instruction; do you see what more can be imparted?”

  “Yes, I would agree. As it is said, ‘The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.’

  “Such observation, my dear; those words sound more of your cynical philosopher Rousseau. I hope you have not been dousing Gilbert with too much of this ‘free will’ talk.”

  “I do not need to teach my nephew as he learns himself in his romps into the glens and up a mountain peak. I agree with you. It cannot go on forever. We here at Chavinac provide him the safety of a natural world. He must see the world as it is but I fear if you send him forth to Paris the corruption there will be the Devil’s temptation.”

  “True, but are we not becoming malingers to his education when we only barely smooth the rough edges by our simple teachings of grammar and religion? That would suffice if he were to be just a country squire, only lord of this manor—. Gilbert is much more. In his small grasp he wields the future of several clans.

  “If I had not bought up these lands and their feudal rights we would be beholding to some other lord and at best we would have all lived in a stone cottage. As it is, Gilbert, if he stays here and when of age, will be such a high positioned country gentleman he will owe his allegiance to no other master but directly to the royal family. He needs to go to Paris, to the court, to be educated to his titled worth.”

  “We all, dear mother, including Gilbert, appreciate you managerial acumen of the estates. But these responsibilities of inheritance are with your good health in the distant future, and what I was saying was of today. For Gilbert, we could continue to provide the basics of learning, especially his needs in math. It is certain Gilbert has no sense with numbers. Or value to money. He has no experience at all when it comes to such matters as he has no place here to spend for necessities of want, needful or even frivolous. He does need his mother’s artistry of fashion and poise, to become the proper gentleman. Yes, I see your wisdom, the time does approach, and this year is as good as any. Let some Parisian academy instruct his mind in more meaningful pursuits than his fancy in chasing and slaying dragons. ”

  “Or beasts of the forest. Yes, that hunting adventure last summer was for naught, returning with no slain predator, whether wolf or hyena. Poor boy. Such demoralization of spirit, and how he suffered with his horrid silence, no game killed except a brace of lowland pheasants. If I recall it took us all a week to set him off on a new obsession, catching the largest carp from the pond, as I recall.”

  Mme du Motier finished her letter to Gilbert’s mother, Julie, and set it aside to dry. She continued on her rationalization of this heart-torn decision. She loved the boy and would miss his rampant energy, never walking but always charging forward, and his rambling chatter if many times bothersome merely masked her grandson’s inquisitiveness.

  She continued her thoughts aloud.

  “It is his mother’s side of the family, the La Rivière branch of Breton nobles with blood descent from Saint Louis himself that can do most for his approaching life choices. We of the Champetière were mere soldiers with little wealth.”

  As usual, Madame Chavaniac-La Fayette, who had lived at Chateaux Chavaniac since the year 1701 spoke cryptic of the family lineage that i
mpacted so prominently within the social caste aristocracy of France. Gilbert grew up hearing from his aunts, and Abbè Fayon, the puffed and embellished stories of chivalrous militaristic deeds of his ancestors. One military forebear, a Marshall of France, fought side-by-side with Joan of Arc. Another, an uncle, more recent, in the War of the Polish Succession, offered a captured Austrian prisoner, a gentleman officer, a ride on his horse for protection on the battlefield to be ignobly rewarded with a bullet in his back.

  There was more underlying in these childhood stories. Details of births, deaths and situations lay within the archives of the palaces where scribes took great care in tracking lineage, legitimizing the herald rights by genealogical maps of what a child might expect to become as one grew into adulthood. A title helped the first advantage in career advancement, a definite placement within the society that formed around the King and his court, those 3,000 souls of the noble aristocracy living in Paris or at the palace of Versailles all inter-linked and dependent upon the King’s favor to provide sustenance and further pecuniary grants of land and pensionnes for achievement or rewards for mere entertainment pleasure.

  In Gilbert’s background, on his father’s side, there was a tenuous tie to the historical ranking, for only two or three generations earlier, the family was neither of the Motiers nor Champetière direct line, merely offshoot branches of second sons, and only by death without issue among other distant family scions, most notably in the 1690’s, did titles and land by legal default end up offering up to the current clan the distinguished name de La Fayette, with a marquis appellation attached.

  From his mother’s line, he gained further titles, including a drop of historic royal blood dating back to the 1100’s. His family relations were of importance, and critically, came with comfortable wealth. Gilbert may have been a boy without a father but the La Rivière relations, as his Grandmother knew them, were entrenched, or entangled as other opinions might consider, within the Court of Louis XV, far better situated to help the boy. Gilbert du Motier only required proper training by his mother and her ‘uncles’ to walk the treacherous halls of court life and its dictums, to become a courtier.

  His grandmother feared, and rightly so, that the boy might gain his true wish and become a soldier like his father, and worse as he before, slain too young, leaving more sadness in her heart. She rang her desk bell for the chambermaid to post the letter, while at the same time, she could smile, on hearing the boy’s voice, arising from the main floor below, the clopping of running shoes, shouting and yelling, in mirth and happiness. All too soon this Chateaux would have to muddle on in awkward silence. How would those in the city, at court, accept this ‘countrified lord’? Even with making this hard choice for the boy’s future, accepting that further higher education to mold a young man was required, she felt she had sheltered him much too long and worried that he would be unprepared for the real world, especially, the world of Paris and its vices.

  5.

  1768

  As the two-horse coach wheeled forward to discover all ruts and rocks upon the rural road leading away from Chavaniac towards Paris, Gilbert resigned to this jostling, swallowed hard, recalled the pain to his parting from those of his extended family. I am a man for I did not cry, considered the boy with satisfaction. The women, even the kitchen cook, let flow torrents of tears. All wondered if the separation would be for months or years or forever. A person in these times living to the age of 40 years was considered to be a very old person since life faced many tribulations. Not too long back his grandmother, Mme du Motier, as a young widow, could vividly recall the pestilence of 1722 which cut wide swaths of Black Death through Marseilles and Toulon, victims covered with pustule lesions, drowning in bloody coughs.

  Such fears or not, Marie, his cousin and playmate, sobbed the loudest and threw her arms around him. Grandmère broke up this demonstration by thrusting a parcel-wrapped book at Marie who then reverently placed the package into his hands as he entered the coach. Standing on the steps of the chateau, Marie dabbed her eyes in exaggerated fashion with a blue handkerchief to stand on the steps and waved. It was his silk handkerchief, his farewell token to her, a fairy tale princess for the moment seeking to staunch the flow of sadness as her brave knight disappeared down the hill and into the broken forest.

  A few miles later, as the carriage slipped in and out of the mire left on the road from a passing storm, the passengers trying to adjust to the awkward rhythm of grinding wood wheels and squeaky axle, poorly smeared with pitch, the question was asked of him.

  “Are you not going to see what your la petite ami gave you?”

  He would not be alone on his journey. Besides the hired carriage driver, sitting outside on the box, the name he had no reason to recall, his great grandfather, the Comte de La Rivière had sent a servant from his estate at Keroflais in Brittany. The man introduced himself as one Giles Blasse. And sitting next to that servant, absorbed in a book of psalms, sat Abbè Fayon, directed to attend and remain in Paris as the boy’s tutor.

  The question concerning the gift came from the servant, which the boy felt was an inquiry made too forward in the asking as by the comparative social status in this traveling companion. The man must be regarded with high esteem by his great grandfather, thought Gilbert, if to travel such a distance just to convey him to his mother to her residence in the apartments of the Luxemburg Palace.

  “I am sure the gift is from all of them. They do wish me well.” Gilbert undid the twine and pulled away the soft leather covering. He opened to the title page and his eyes widened and he beamed only as a gift receiving child might.

  “Robinson Crusoe. I did indeed want to read that.” He read the entire title aloud as if it would reveal all mystery to the interior contents. “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pirates.” Inward, this book gave him excitement. More times than he could count had he devoured the books in the library at Chavinac, wearing down the pages of stories of Crusaders or the wars of Caesar’s legions.

  Servant Blasse gave his opinion.

  “Crusoe. A good adventure and better to be the reader than to live the woes that befall the stranded sailor.”

  The Abbè, an educated man if limited to those basic texts of education and religion, gave reply.

  “That is to be expected of this Crusoe, I heard, when a man goes to sea and does evil against God.”

  “Could not, good teacher, an innocent be faced with such tribulation?”

  “In all tragedy, there is, first, a root fault in the man.”

  “Could not God forgive first, if he is a just God, and spare any man or woman of future misadventure?”

  As the two men carried on this dialogue, Gilbert knew it would be a long trip.

  The boy observed that as the servant Blasse discoursed his eyes were not on him or the Abbè but always to the passing panorama outside the coach, like he wanted to feel the closeness of the deep forests they were traveling through, listening to branches swipe the sides of their carriage. Gilbert gave regard to the man who would spend the next two weeks with him on the road, who would take care of all his comforting needs at the various taverns, inns and way stations; who held the purse and would deal with all accounts. The man seemed to be in his late twenties, yet his face suggested much wear. A scar from his ear down his neck went hidden beneath his livery uniform, his teeth brown with a side tooth rotted away. He had spoken little as the journey began, and part of the time he would ride on the box with the driver with a plan to trade off the tasks to keep the travel less boring. But Blasse, senior to the driver, and liege servant to Gilbert’s great grandfather, the Comte de Reviere, seemed to believe, as Gilbert noticed the order of activity, that Blasse held the
right to ride with the boy and occasionally speak without being first prompted. And every once in a while, a word or two unknown to Gilbert slipped into the conversation, and he guessed such words were of Spanish or Portuguese origin, which gave a better opinion of Blasse, in the boy’s mind. Gilbert had already noticed that Giles Blasse spoke his tongue with a little more education than a tenant field worker, suggesting his rank in his great grandfather’s household was perhaps as a senior valet, master of horse perhaps, as he seemed of the rough sort.

  To Gilbert’s other coach companion, his teacher, Abbè Fayon, he would be tolerated as the unruly student accepts the taskmaster. Neither cold nor compassionate, the Abbè, the religious term applied to teachers as well as priests, Fayon being the latter from an Auvergne parish school, took the charge of educating his pupil with deep seriousness. Gilbert did not respond with revolt against the severity of those books of tedium he was required to read and at times the arduous task in memorizing passages. Nor did he embrace cold teachings. There was still a sense of duty in his learning process. Drummed into him to from an early age was the prime factor that to follow in his father’s footsteps he must bear the unpleasant and become educated.

  As the men sought to make their points of debate, Gilbert thumbed the pages of his gift, happy for something to hold his attention and to pass the time. Finally, he asked of both men.

  “This mariner, Crusoe, to be marooned, was an adventurer, was he not? To brave the ocean, at least?”

  “Any man who must look to his own wits to survive, indeed faces adventure,” said his great grandfather’s servant, Giles Blasse.