Read Lafayette for Free Online Page B

other’s arms, the guards searched the baggage of the new arrivals and confiscated everything of value—their purses and money, of course, and even the silver forks Adrienne had brought for their meals. Like Lafayette, the women learned to eat foul food with their fingers, all the while inhaling the suffocating fumes from the sewerage flowing below their window and the cell pots they used to relieve themselves. Too often, they heard the “horrible music” 21 of prisoners shrieking under the pain of flogging. As night fell, the guards reentered the cell and led the girls away to be locked in a separate, adjacent cell, where they shared a single wooden pallet for their rest while their mother lay on a similar device, cradling the skeletal remains of her knight in her arms.
    Each day’s routine was the same, Adrienne wrote to her aunt:
    They bring us breakfast at eight, after which they lock me up with my daughters until noon. We all meet for dinner, and except for two interruptions by the jailers coming for our dinner plates and bringing our supper later, they leave us together until eight o’clock, when my daughters arereturned to their cage. . . . We have more to eat than we need, but the food is indescribably filthy. . . . Each time they use keys . . . they go through the most ridiculous precautions. . . . While an officer who dares not speak to us without witnesses watches a fat corporal with a bunch of keys unlock our doors, the whole guard is drawn up in the passage and they can all see into our rooms when the doors are opened. You would laugh to see our two girls . . . one blushing to the tips of her ears, the other making a face that is sometimes proud, sometimes comic, as they pass beneath the crossed swords and into our room—the door to which is immediately locked. What is not pleasant is that the small courtyard beyond the passage is the scene of all-too-frequent floggings. . . . We can hear the whole horrible procedure. 22
    Overwhelmed by the satanic surroundings, Adrienne asked to see the prison commander, who, the emperor had assured her, “would please me. The guards told me he was forbidden to have contact with me, but that I might write to him. I asked three things: 1st, to attend mass on Sundays with my daughters, 2nd to have a soldier’s wife clean their cell, 3rd, to be cared for by Monsieur de Lafayette’s two servants from the army [who were still imprisoned]. He never replied; I asked to write to the emperor; they refused, but said my requests to the commander had been sent to the proper authorities in Vienna.” 23 More than two months later, two days after Christmas, Adrienne received a reply from the Austrian minister of war: “I am not in a position to defer to your requests, despite my desire to do so. I can only remind you that you consented to share your husband’s fate, and it will not now be possible to alter your situation.” 24 She wrote again and again and received nothing but the same curt reply: “The Council of War and I cannot defer to any demands by prisoners of state.” 25
    The guards did, however, let Adrienne and the girls keep their books, and they gave them writing materials—a tactical error that would let them describe their plight to the rest of the world. Adrienne, of course, gave the girls daily school lessons and religious instruction; Lafayette read to them and lectured on the United States and other favorite topics. They kept active in other ways: Adrienne and Virginie replaced the rags that barely covered Lafayette’s skeletal torso with clothes they made from parts of their skirts, and Anastasie fashioned a pair of shoes for him from Adrienne’s corset. And they all wrote and wrote. He made notes for political tracts and paeans to American liberty and republican government. Adrienne wrote a touching biography of her mother, the duchesse d’Ayen, and Virginie followed her mother’s example by writing an equally moving biography of Adrienne. 26 Adrienne