Free Lafayette by Harlow Giles Unger Page B

returned a fanatically ultra-Royalist Chamber of Deputies, which ruthlessly sheared the Constitutional Charter of individual rights. It permitted the imprisonment of suspects without trial, imposed harsh punishment of authors for criticizing the regime, subjected antigovernment demonstrators to trial by courts-martial, and allowed for the exile or execution of military leaders who supported Napoléon during the Hundred Days. The second Restoration set off a new round of internecine French savagery. During the White Terror—so named for the color of the Bourbon monarchy’s flag—mobs of royalists and former émigrés dragged Jacobins, Bonapartists, and republicans from their homes, beating and killing untold thousands, especially in royalist provinces in the south and west. Although allied troops eventually ended the slaughter, the White Terror silenced the voices of French extremists on the left—and brought peace to Europe for the first time in seventy-five years. The intervention of British friends in the allied high command restored La Grange to Lafayette in the autumn of 1815, and he returned to private life.
    Three years of startling economic gains followed and produced such surprising political and social stability in France that the allies believed the French had, at last, learned the advantages of peace at home and abroad. They withdrew their troops two years early, in 1818 instead of 1820, and the government eased restrictions on individual rights and the press. At La Grange, Lafayette’s flock of merino sheep multiplied to more than one thousand head; his dairy herd grew to fifty cows; and his more than five thousand apple trees yielded a delicious cider that became the staple beverage in the region and one of the most sought-after ciders in France.
    La Grange became a vastly profitable enterprise that kept Lafayette riding about in his trap each day from six or seven o’clock in the morning until three in the afternoon. He awoke with the sun, at five in summer—usually after seven hours of restful sleep. He spent an hour in bed reading and sometimes writing, then sat, or, if the pain in his joints permitted, knelt to talk silently to Adrienne for a quarter hour, holding before him the miniature portrait of her when she was fourteen. Inscribed on the frame were her dying words,
“Je suis toute à vous”
—“I am yours entirely.” In it, also, was a lock ofher hair. By seven o’clock, he was ready to tour his “plantation,” as he liked to call it. With George hovering always at his side, he took a short respite for a mid-morning breakfast—often in one of the help’s cottages, sitting with his men, whose reverence for him increased accordingly.
    His return from the fields took him into his study, where George helped him with his
Mémoires
and his voluminous correspondence. At six each evening, the courtyard bell sounded dinner, and as many as thirty people poured into the huge dining room—his children and grandchildren, of course, and an endless procession of guests. Lafayette sat in the middle of the long board, with Virginie and Anastasie opposite as hostesses, and the various grandchildren climbing over each other to sit near their grandfather. George always sat at his father’s side, growing more amazed each day as he gained new insights into the man he called Papa. George’s faithful former tutor, Frestel, brought the total number of family members at the table each night to a dozen, but guests arrived continually to swell the number to unpredictable levels. Lafayette’s in-laws, the Tracys, La Tour-Maubourgs, and Lasteyries, visited regularly, as did his old friends the Ségurs, retired generals like de Broglie, and an endless parade of illustrious guests, many from America for whom a visit to La Grange was a patriotic duty. Worldly men like Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher, came to discuss political science with the author of the French “Rights of Man,” and less worldly,