Madame de Lafayette and her family

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Chapter I

IN this day, when the white light of historical research has fallen on even the most obscure characters, bringing into prominence those details which, for the sake of bygone reputations, were better deep buried in the past of the oblivion, it is more than remarkable that the wife of that world-renowned man, the Marquis de Lafayette, should remain practically unknown. Had she been one of those " fair, frail women," an extravagant mistress, whose slender fingers meddled in the skein of political intrigue, we should know her intimately merely from her connection with so famous a character. The most trivial details of her personality would be at our tongues' end — her preferred colour, the perfume which wafted from her silken skirts, and long ago we should have been possessed of that intimate knowledge which we have gleaned anent the various ladies of that epoch. Being his wife, the mother of his children, she is, to the present generation, hidden by the mists of indifferent obscurity. By her contemporaries, Adrienne de Noailles, Marquise de Lafayette, was known and highly esteemed for the qualities which made her stand first among those of her day as a pure and undefiled type of the finest womanhood. It is sad that a woman of such noble character, intrepidity of action and spirit, such dauntless courage, should be forgotten in the hundred years which have passed since she breathed her last.

I

0^atiame ht Xafapette

France had no finer blood than that flowing in her veins. She came of a long line of ancestors, on both sides noted for their services to king and country. Her courtesy, fearlessness, and pride of birth showed the blood of the Noailles; her sweetness of disposition, unselfishness, lack of ostentation, and passionate love of husband and children were the characteristics of her mother, Henriette d'Agusseau, daughter of the famous chancellor. From the chancellor came that calm, wellbalanced mind, the result of generations of legal training. Indeed, in most traits she favoured the distaff side of the family. She was unselfish to the point of self-immolation — a characteristic not obtrusive in the family of de Noailles — and, withal, had that fearlessness which, even at the steps of the scaffold, made her refuse to forswear those principles professed by her husband which had cost her so dearly. The love which she bore her husband stands " seldom equalled, never excelled," in the annals of devotion, declared Fox. In every breath she drew was displayed that wonderful, unfaltering adherence to his cause which made her loyally and intrepidly, in those terrible days when the name of Lafayette was a death warrant in itself, begin all her petitions with the bold words: "La femme Lafayette."

Of her immediate maternal ancestors, her great-grandfather, the chancellor, Henri d'Agusseau, was the most famous for the part which he played in the affairs of the Regency. Born in 1668 — a year remarkable, among other things, for the conclusion of the Triple Alliance between England, Holland, and Sweden, brought about by the offense given by the pompous Louis to the rest of Europe; and, more locally, the establishment of a Supreme Court of Judicature at Tournay, which in 1686 "was erected into a Parliament." At this time also was the fourteenth Louis at the zenith of his arrogant splendour — his court the cynosure of the world.

HENRY FRANCOIS DAGUESSEAU

GREAT-GRANDFATHER OF MME. DE LAFAYETTE From a print in the collection of the author anil l^er familp

D'Agusseau's father, the great-great-grandfather of Mme. de Lafayette, was Councillor of State and Intendant of Languedoc at the time of his son's birth. He possessed such influence with the king that his son was appointed, at the unprecedented age of twenty-two and a half years, to be one of the three Avocats General, the eloquence of his maiden speech making him famous ere the concluding periods had fallen from his lips. He justified the brilliance of his first appearance — in 1700 being made Procureur General ; Chancellor, and Keeper of the Seals in 17 17, at the age of forty-eight. Among the wild excesses of the day he remained unscathed, remarkable for the purity of his life, preferring the society of the grave and educated few to the rabble surrounding the Regent. Boileau and Racine were two of his most cherished companions.

In his office of Procureur General, d'Agusseau gained immense popularity with the masses by the justice and leniency he displayed in criminal cases and for his strictly conscientious and honest care and administration of the public hospitals under his charge. He was held in high esteem by the Regent, probably from the fact of his incorruptibility and absolute refusal to act in a manner opposed to his conscience and ideas of right and wrong — a trait seldom found in those surrounding Philippe d'Orleans. D'Agusseau was stubbornly opposed to the projects of the famous Law, who had artfully filled the mind of the greedy regent with tales of untold gold. Being made chancellor in 17 17, his position enabled him to place before his master the consequences which must follow such schemes, though even he never dreamed of the scenes of frenzied excitement later to be enacted by the mad populace of Paris. He would not be cajoled into approval, and, after several stormy interviews with the regent, was deprived of the seals of his office, and banished by that bewitched individual to his country seat at Fresnes. His recall, five years later, is said to have been due to the influence a^atiame He Xafapette of Law and Cardinal Fleury, but that and the remainder of his life is too well known to necessitate description or comment.

Of the five years of his banishment, filled with research and study, he always spoke with the greatest pleasure. He was able to devote much time to his favourite occupation of gardening, and lived the life of a simple country gentleman, surrounded by his family and friends. Once freed " from the madding crowd," he did not sigh for the position which had been his. Philosophically he sat in patriarchal state, watching the follies which his wise brain had predicted; grieved that his countrymen should be as imbecile children in the hands of the Scotch adventurer. He studied, read, and compared the Scriptures in many languages; made deep researches into the jurisprudence of his own and other countries, a matter which had always been of the most profound interest to him, though one, to which until now, he had never been able to devote much time. Thirteen volumes come to us comprising his works, mostly on legal subjects. His lighter hours were filled with literature and the study of philosophy. On his recall to office, he laboured and did much to adjust the laws prevailing in different parts of France, so that a uniform code should be used at all courts and trials. As a magistrate, he was so conscientious that St. Simon complains he spent too much time over the cases which came before him I Legal France owes inestimable benefit to his labours, what he did being invaluable to the fraternity, and causing him to rank with Lemoigne and L'Hopital in his achievements.

He retained his rank of chancellor until his death in 1750, though he had relinquished his duties the preceding year. His good qualities seem to have been transmitted to his descendants in a conspicuous degree, their history forming a sharp contrast to the majority of the families of the day and generation. He had several sisters who married well, but possess little interest now, not being noted in one way or another. It was his son, Jean Baptist d'Agusseau de Fresnes, who, in the year 1736, married the lovely and gentle Anne- Louise Frangoise Dupre, " Dame de La Grange-Bleneau-en-Brie,'* grandmother to Mme. de Lafayette. The union was conducted with sufficient pomp and ceremony; was happy, too, during the brief time it lasted, for, alas I the following year the poor young wife died, leaving in her place a tiny girl, who was later Duchesse d'Ayen, mother of Mme. de Lafayette. Until she was three years old Henriette lived under the care of her grandparents, and there is nothing of interest to chronicle but the usual catalogue of infantile ailments and the consequent lustily yelled protest when retribution, in the form of a noxious dose, overtook the rebellious patient.

Her father, a year after the death of his wife, remarried, and, being for the second time a widower, again submitted to the matrimonial yoke. He might without exaggeration be termed a much married man, though the cares and worries of the holy state of matrimony fretted him little, and he died at a ripe old age, surrounded and regretted by his numerous descendants, among whom were a son, afterwards senateur et pair de France^ member of the Academie Frangaise, who died in 1826, and two daughters. One, Angelique Frangoise Rosalie, married Bouchard de Saron, later premier president du Parlement de Paris; the other, Claire Genevieve Pauline, became the wife of M. de Segur, well known in the world of diplomacy and art.

The first child, Henriette, was of a curious and most precocious disposition. At the age of three she was sent, with her devoted nurse, to the Convent du Visitation de Saint Denis ^ there being under the particular and especial care of one of the nuns, Mme. de Hericourt, a woman of rarely extraordinary charm of manner, blended with gentle determination of character. The little orphan was much petted by the good Sisters, but the judicious care of Mme. de Hericourt and the a^atiame be Xafapette watchful jealousy of her nurse kept the sweetness of her disposition from becoming spoiled by excessive adulation. Of Mme. de Hericourt, Mme. de Lafayette wrote later that she possessed rare talent for education, " and knew how to make virtue attractive to her pupils. But toward virtue my mother^s heart was naturally inclined/* she continues, " and to its practice she applied herself from her earliest childhood with that rectitude which was her special characteristic; so much so, that with an irresolute though superior mind, with a physical and mental inclination to be alarmed and troubled in all circumstances, this disquietude and anxiety could be traced to one sole cause superior to all others. To her always could be applied the words of Psalm cxix : * My soul is continually in my hand, yet do I not forget thy law ' ; such were the feelings of my mother's heart."

" From her earliest years the integrity of her heart united with the sterling qualities of her mind to give an excellent foundation to her education.'' She read much, and books which would have been beyond the comprehension and liking of the average child. She was very religious, and once, when scarcely more than five years old, finding a volume of " Les Peres du Desert," unlike most children, who would have been amused with the visions it contained, she became greatly terrified that, should she become too great a saint, she might be seized with similar hallucinations I She showed from her earliest childhood a marked character, and, though brought up in and knowing no other sphere than the strict convent with its daily routine and all-pervading religious atmosphere, never became then or at any time in after life, even in the faintest degree, bigoted in matters of religion. She was a true and earnest Christian, and as such, beyond the petty distinctions, the narrowness of creed and dogma.

She cared little for riches, and, on receiving a very considerable property on the death of her maternal grandfather, earnestly begged that it should be charged with sufficient legacies to diminish its value. Whether or not the less benevolent guardians of the generous young woman took this rather unusual view of the matter, history does not say, but it is more than probable that they put in a place of safety and carefully husbanded the wealth of the deceased M. Dupre until such time as his granddaughter became legally its mistress. This happened just after she had been taken from the convent to live permanently with her father and stepmother, Mme. de Fresnes, to whom she became deeply attached. She was at this time in the constant care of her governess, and faithful friend in after life, Mile. Aufroy, and very busy completing her education, the religious portion of which was under the celebrated cure of St. Paul. For the next four years she lived the quiet, uneventful life of a French girl of her day. Her disposition was cheerful and happy, full of natural gaiety. She played with her pets, worked a piece of impossible embroidery, performed upon the harpsichord with more than indifferent skill, and took some pleasure in learning the latest minuet de la Cour. Happy for her that in the fearful events of her later life she was able to gain a few minutes' retrospective pleasure amid the horrors surrounding her ! She passed much time in devotion and in acts of charity to the poor people on the estate, to whom she dispensed alms mingled with gentle admonition. She preferred to live in the country, sharing the hobby of her grandfather, the chancellor, with whom she passed many hours at Fresnes, pottering about in those gardens of which he was so fond and proud. His death, which happened when she was thirteen, was a great shock to her excitable religious temperament. Some of the letters passing between Henriette and the chancellor, written between 1743-47, are still in existence, or, at least, copies of them, showing how her mind, even at that tender age, was taken up and employed in serious reading.

O^abame tie S^afapette

Unfortunately, it is impossible to find details of her marriage in 1755, when, on the fifth day of January, she wedded Jean Paul Frangois, Due d'Ayen, after the death of his father in 1793, Due de Noailles. He was born on the sixteenth of October, 1739, being thus nearly two years her junior, and lived until 1824, having managed to escape from France during the Terror. They were a happy couple, and she was tenderly attached to him ; living after their marriage at the Hotel de Noailles, in the rue St. Honore, the Paris home of the family, where that patriarch, Adrien, second Marechal de Noailles, gathered round him each year all the living members of the family.

Though the society of the day was as brilliant and entertainingly wicked as heart could wish, and the rank of her husband's family, and his intimacy at court made it almost unheard of, young Mme. de Noailles lived a life of nunlike seclusion. The health and recluse habits of her mother-in-law were ill adapted for gaiety, and the bride only went to court for her presentation, or on a few formal occasions. Not so M. le Due d'Ayen. He differed from the rest of the family, and, while Henriette pursued her domestic occupations under the sheltering wing of her father and mother-in-law, he danced attendance on the monarch and the gorgeous throng surrounding him. It is a matter for conjecture that perhaps the young Duchesse d'Ayen would have been wiser had she followed more intimately the pursuits and inclinations of her husband.

She was one of those to whom the pleasures of the imagination were more enjoyable than the actual happenings of everyday life. Affairs outside her little circle presented no temptation, and when a butterfly friend dropped in brimming with the latest gossip, a vagary more than heretofore wanton, of la Dubarri or her predecessors, a surmise as to the probable successor, a new hon mot^ Mme. d'Ayen breathed a silent breath of thankful relief — after the visitor had departed — that of necessity her career was not that of her friend. Her life was at once lofty and introspective; her ideas very peculiar, her prejudices strong. Sheltered by the history-stained walls of the Hotel de Noailles, she passed the first two years after her marriage. At the end of this time a son was born.

Describing her after this happening, Adrienne says : " The fervour of her first maternal passion was greater than can be imagined," and yet, when twelve months later her idolized son died, her faith in Heaven was so great that, absorbed in the thought of her child's eternal bliss, she says that she often found herself believing that there was no greater saint in heaven." That the heir of the Noailles was no more meant little to her; she cared nothing for worldly pomp and state, and her child was now beyond temptation.

To follow in detail all the trivial events of her life at this period would be tedious and uninteresting. What must be borne in mind is that she was a woman of extraordinary character, strictly truthful, sincere, and, before all, naturally religious, but not in the faintest degree bigoted or intolerant of others. She possessed the most passionate love for her children and relatives, even to the most remote degrees. These latter were her most strongly marked traits. She was " tenderly attached to her husband," but he was more than secondary to her children and family.

She had, in course of time, four daughters : Louise, afterwards married to her cousin, the Vicomte de Noailles, born November ii, 1758, and her mother's " greatest comfort " ; Adrienne, Mme. de Lafayette, born November 2, 1759; Mme. de Thesan, 1763, who was the first of that devoted family to pass from this world; and Pauline, 1766, married to the Marquis de Grammont. It was a grief, renewed at the birth of each little girl, that there was yet no heir to bear the proud old title. But, resigned to a divine will, Mme. d'Ayen was utterly happy in the society of these merry little a^aiiame tie Eafapette girls, to whose care and education she devoted herself, heart and soul. No slight task, for the four minds were very dissimilar in their tastes ; though, even at that early age, remarkable for that wonderful love of each other which so distinguished them in after life. The simple, healthy existence they led might have been that of the humblest bourgeoisie. Their mother was the soul, the embodiment of domesticity, and perhaps it is due to this fact that she did not have much of the society of her husband; for, as she confessed in after life, she somewhat neglected les moyens de plaire^ which would have made her personality and society more necessary to the due. There was fault on both sides : on one, the fault of too much goodness; on the other, a nature better tuned to the airs of court life than those of the simple home melody. The more sceptical and not devout mind of the due was inclined to attribute sundry suggestions and wishes of his wife to the promptings of the clergy and her confessor; this he resented, and consequently a slight barrier grew between them, restricting the intimacy of everyday life, though in any matter of importance he was always at the call of Mme. d'Ayen.

Her promising little family of four, from ten years of age to the infant scarce five, was brought up in her own company, under her constant care and supervision, very unusual for the children of a great family in those days, as was the education they received — part of which was entrusted to Mile. Marin, but mostly directed and in every detail overlooked by their mother. They were taught to dictate letters before they were able to read or write. They learned the " Petit Catechism de Fleury," and the " Grand Catechism " of the same author; an abridgment of the Old Testament, and the " Elements de Geographic," which they studied on the map; the " Magasin des Enfants," and a great many stories from mythology were read to them by their mother. Strange as it may seem, they were never told any fairy tales or ghost stories, such as form the food ami 1$tt f amilp of most infant minds. Anecdotes from the Old Testament, little stories of the trivial happenings in the convent where Mme. d'Ayen had passed her childhood, related by her old nurse, served to amuse them and passed the play hours of these easily pleased little people. It was a most unusual education in more ways than one, especially for that day and generation. A vein of mental indolence in their mother prevented her ever being " too thorough in what she undertook." She possessed much vivacity of disposition," allowed her children to argue and question, though not in a forward manner, and at one time remarked " that they were less obedient than most children of their age," to which Adrienne replied: " That may be, madame, because you allow us to argue and reason with you, but you shall see that at fifteen we shall be more obedient than other children."

" There was nothing absolute in her way of teaching, guiding, or correcting us ; she thought she had done nothing when she had not thoroughly convinced the child she was speaking to, and, though she was naturally indolent and too little accustomed to repress the vivacity of her temper, she would listen to her children's reasonings with praiseworthy kindness. Her dislike for charlatanry and pedantry gave her, perhaps, too great a dislike for order and method; this was sometimes a cause of loss of time."

In 1768, that fearful scourge of the times, smallpox, laid Mme. d'Ayen low. For days her life was despaired of, and the birth of a son, while she was in this terrible condition, complicated matters to such a degree that, at times, the doctors would promise no hope of recovery. She suffered terribly, and the long-hopedfor and desired heir received but scant attention at the hands of his father, who scarcely left the bedside of his wife. She was not told the nature of her illness, and once expressing a wish to see her children, their father instantly had them brought to the bedside, though

II a^atiame ixt Xafapette they had never had the smallpox, and the risk they ran was appalling to contemplate. Luckily, the little ones ' suffered no ill effect. The pleasure of again seeing them cheered the sufferer, who from that time began to mend. The idea of death is a difficult one for the childish mind to grasp, and all the anxieties of their mother's nearly fatal illness made less impression on them than, when her convalescence allowed her to be moved, they saw her for the first time sitting in her window disfigured, as then were the victims of the disease, and were told that they would never see " chere maman as she used to be. . . y " None of the misfortunes which have since befallen me have ever effaced the remembrance of our sorrow, at the thought that we should never see my mother as she had formerly been," Adrienne wrote at a later date.

It was the will of Heaven, and Mme. d'Ayen did not repine over her lost beauty, but devoted herself to the last born, whose arrival completed the family. She had never cared for the world and its gaieties, and the welfare and education of her children occupied her to the exclusion of all else. She was, indeed, a devoted mother.

In the summer they went, not half frequently enough from their point of view, to visit their grandfather, the Marechal de Noailles, whose health obliged him to live most of the time at Saint Germain-en-Laye. He always received them with the most stately and cordial politeness, walked with them in the beautiful forest near by, which then existed in all its famed sylvan loveliness. *' In the evening he cheerfully squandered time and money playing loto for their amusement." They often went on hilarious picnics to Meudon, rode donkeys as far as Mont Valerian, on which occasions those noble beasts of burden usually bore themselves with the stately grace and deliberation characteristic of their race. With her five charges — Mile. Saron, the niece of Mme. d'Ayen, and the Miles. Montmerail — Mile. Marin had her hands full. This excellent lady, " in full panoply,'* directed the cavalcade with the generalship of a marechal de camp, though it must be admitted that her forces were not distinguished for their discipline and obedience. " She was a tiny person, blonde, pinched, touchy, and devoted to her duties, punctilious in their performance. Once mounted on her donkey, she absolutely lost her sang froid, and appeared so wild-eyed, scared, and so stiff that you could not look at her without being seized with an irrepressible desire for mirth, which made her angry; though what angered her the most was the peal of childish laughter greeting her ears when she tumbled off her steed, an acrobatic exhibition which she seldom failed to give at least once on each of these excursions. As the pace of her steed was not rapid, and she fell upon the grass, she sustained no injury, and the frolicsome squadron laughingly filed by her; and, did one of the riders pause to aid the mortified lady to rise, her sole recompense was ill humour and a scolding."

Once every year, in the autumn, did Mme. d'Ayen proceed with her numerous family and retinue to visit her father at Fresnes. These visits lacked the exuberance of those paid to the Marechal de Noailles, as M. d'Agusseau was very deaf and very old, and, though a dear old gentleman, lacked the gaiety of heart which generally distinguished members of the family of Noailles. The atmosphere of Fresnes had always been scholastic, severe, and rather conventual in its routine, and it is probably to this early environment and training that Mme. d^Ayen owed her ideas of life and nunlike manner of living. But any severity which might have chilled the young children was dispelled by the devotion of the third wife of M. d'Agusseau, whom the children called " stepmother," or " grandmere," the relationship being somewhat nebulous owing to the frequent nuptials of this much married old gentleman. They paid visits to M. de Saron at Saron, and sometimes to other a^dtiame tie S^afapette relatives, but these visits were always brief, as Mme. d'Ayen did not like to be separated from those of her family who were too young to go, or, in the case of her husband^s father, too old to travel. She was known to have possessed a great love for the country, which she always preferred to a town life, but some of the many scruples ever agitating her mind made her deny herself the pleasure of living among " green fields and pastures new.'* She was one of those women utterly miserable unless surrounded by family and relatives to every degree.

But the children did not suffer. Their life was one of mild and pleasant monotony. They had their little pleasures and amusements with the other children of their age, and were extraordinarily fond of playing in the beautiful gardens of the Hotel de Noailles, one of the finest in Paris, celebrated for its marvellously kept flower beds, formal and prim, as the taste of the day demanded. Between these wound devious walks bordered with trim, clipped hedges and neat paths, an ideal spot for hide and seek. A stately flight of steps, thirteen in number, led from the house into this charming spot, and on either side three rows of trees threw the drowsy charm of their shadows upon those who dallied beneath their branches. At the foot of the garden stretched the magnificent vista of the Tuileries, and, where to-day the rush and never-ceasing stream of carriages flows to and fro on the rue de Rivoli, the garden wall bounded the promenade of those who walked in that stately garden. On the right was the famous convent of the Feuillans, where the unfortunate Louis and Marie Antoinette fled on that dreadful day when royalty fell.

How different is it all to-day! How few passing through this neighbourhood ever give even a thought to the memory of those who have lived and loved in those quaint courts, those narrow and stilted houses! Should the ghosts of past events gather in that tortuous atnti 1$n Jamilp street where the pale wraith of Marie Antoinette is recalled by the sight of the busy charettes, once used for so sinister a purpose; where the bloodthirsty Jacobins conspired to ruin their country; where the cannons of young Bonaparte swept the rebellious citizens from the steps of Saint Roch ; where ten thousand things have happened — what a concourse there would be as the witching hour " rang from the storm-beaten bell which alone marks the flight of time: unchanged, indifferent !

At the beginning of the day Mme. d'Ayen's first care was for her children. Pausing each morning on her way to hear mass at the Jacobins' nearly opposite, she embraced them tenderly and listened to their eager prattle, for they never failed to place themselves in her path, and would every afternoon desert their play in the garden rather than miss their mother on her way to the church of Saint Roch. At three o'clock she dined with them, and, on the days when she did not attend mass, they followed her to her bedroom, a spacious apartment, hung in crimson satin damask, embroidered in gold," and containing one of those awe-inspiring beds of the epoch.

The duchesse usually seated herself in a large easychair (bergere) near the fireplace, having conveniently at hand her snuff-box and knitting and her books. The four daughters grouped themselves around her, the eldest occupying chairs, the younger ones stools, all disputing pleasantly for the coveted place near the bergere.^^ Of this time, Adrienne writes: