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Rights of Man and the Citizen with a “Declaration of Rights
and Duties
of Citizens.” The phrase “men are born free with equal rights” was missing. As one delegate explained, “If you say that all men are equal in rights you incite to revolt.” 19 The constitution created a bicameral legislature—a Council of Five Hundred (les Cinq-Cents), or lower house, and a Council of Elders (les Anciens), or upper house—and it vested executive powers in a Directory of five members, each elected for five years by the legislature.
    After returning to Paris with her daughters, Adrienne took advantage of the unsettled conditions in government to convince appropriate bureaucrats that neither she nor her mother had been emigrées—indeed that neither had ever left France. As such, she insisted, she was entitled as her mother’s heir to recover ownership of La Grange, one of her mother’s properties in Brie, about seventy-five miles east of Paris, with a once-magnificent château that dated back to the Crusades. Cannonballs from the Hundred Years’ War lay embedded in its black, impregnable walls, and its enormous round towers looked over the nearby Yères and Ivron Rivers. Ten centuries of war and five years of revolution had left its interiors bare and its exterior in sad disrepair, but Adrienne saw it as a possible source of capital if property values increased and perhaps a harbor for the family if they ever returned to France.
    On September 1, 1795, Monroe gave Adrienne an American passport bearing the name of Mrs. Motier of Hartford, Connecticut—the only American community that had indeed decreed her husband and his
entire
family citizens, not just his male heirs. She and the girls went to Dunkerque and boarded an American packet to Hamburg, Germany, and, a week later, stepped off, into the crushing embraces of Adrienne’s sister Pauline and her beloved aunt, the comtesse de Tessé. The countess had fled France with enough jewelry, currency, and negotiable securities to acquire property in nearby Altona as a sanctuary for family friends and relatives. After only a few days rest, however, Adrienne shocked them all by announcing, “I am going to Olmütz.”
    On October 3, less than a month after leaving Paris, Adrienne and the girls were in Vienna, where her late grandfather, the marquis de Noailles, had once served as ambassador. One of his friends arranged for a private audience for her with Emperor Frederick II.
    “We were with her,” her daughter Virginie recalled. “She was received politely and asked permission only to share my father’s prison cell. ‘I consent,’ the emperor replied, ‘but as for his liberty, that will be impossible; my hands are tied.’” Fearful of finding Lafayette languishing in inhuman conditions, she asked the emperor’s permission to write to him directly to ameliorate her husband’s prison life. “I consent,” the emperor said again. “But you will find Monsieur Lafayette well nourished, well treated. Your presence will add to his comfort. In addition, you will be pleased with the [prison] commandant. In our prisons we give our prisoners numbers, but every one knows your husband’s name quite well.” 20
    On the morning of October 15, Adrienne’s carriage approached the forbidding towers of the Olmütz city wall and the prison entrance. An hour later, Lafayette heard bolts clanking, doors creaking and slamming; suddenly the door of his cell opened and there stood his wife and two daughters, as if in a dream. He had no warning they would come. Suddenly their arms enveloped his emaciated, nearly lifeless, and all but naked body. Behind them, the doors slammed shut and the four Lafayettes huddled together on the cold, damp floor, together again for the first time in more than three years. The emotion of the moment—and the stench of the sewerage flowing beneath his window, his cell pot, his own putrescence—all but overpowered them.
    While they lay entangled in each