The Boys Life of Lafayette 2

The Boys Life of Lafayette 2

Until he was eleven they all lived together in the gloomy old château

where he was born. This has been described as "great and rather heavy."

It had been fortified in the fourteenth century. Two round towers with

steep, pointed roofs flanked it on the right and left. Across its front

high French windows let in light to the upper floors. From them there

was a far-reaching view over plain and river, and steep hills dotted

with clumps of trees. But loopholes on each side of an inhospitable

narrow doorway told of a time when its situation had been more prized

for defense than for mere beauty of scenery. It had a dungeon and other

grim conveniences of life in the Middle Ages, which must have stamped

themselves deep on the mind of an impressionable child. The castles of

Wissac and Saint-Romain, of which the boy was also lord, could be seen

higher up among the hills. There were glimpses, too, of peasant homes,

but these were neither neat nor prosperous. Bad laws, and abuse of law

that had been going on for centuries, had brought France to a point

where a few people were growing inordinately rich at the expense of all

[Pg 6]the rest. The king suffered from this as well as the peasants.

The country was overrun by an army of tax-collectors, one for every

one hundred and thirty souls in France, each of them bent on giving up

as little as possible of the money he collected. To curry favor with

the great nobles, who were more powerful than the king himself, their

property was not taxed so heavily as it should have been, while poorer

people, especially the peasants, were robbed to make up the difference.

"The people of our country live in misery; they have neither furniture

nor beds; during part of the year the most of them have no nourishment

except bread made of oats and barley, and even this they must snatch

from their own mouths and those of their children in order to pay the

taxes." That was written about this very region of Auvergne a few years

before Lafayette was born. In self-defense the peasants made their

homes look even more wretched than they really were. On occasion, when

convinced that the stranger knocking at their door was no spy, they

could bring a wheaten loaf and a bottle of wine from their secret store

and do the honors most hospitably.

 

The La Fayettes were not rich, though they were the great people of

their neighborhood. Only one Frenchman in a hundred belonged to the

nobility, but that one received more consideration than all the other

ninety-nine combined. When the boy marquis rode out with his mother,

or that stately lady his grandmother, the peasants in the little

village which had grown up around the walls of Chavaniac, clinging to

it for protection, bowed down as though the child were a sovereign.

[Pg 7]Some of them knelt in the dust as the coach passed by. Truly it

was strange soil for the growth of democratic ideas. It was well for

the boy's soul that in spite of lands and honor the household was of

necessity a frugal one. The wide acres were unproductive. Men who had

fought so often and so well for their princes had found little leisure

to gather wealth for their children. Besides, it was thought out of the

question for a nobleman to engage in gainful pursuits. The wealth such

men enjoyed came through favor at court; and in this household of women

there was no longer any one able to render the kind of service likely

to be noticed and rewarded by a king.

 

[Illustration: THE MANOR-HOUSE OF CHAVANIAC

 

Birthplace of Lafayette]

 

So the lad grew from babyhood in an atmosphere of much ceremony and

very little luxury. On the whole, his was a happy childhood, though by

no means gay. He loved the women who cherished him so devotedly. In his

_Memoirs_, written late in life, he calls them "tender and venerated

relatives." They looked forward to the day when in his turn he should

become a soldier, dreading it, as women will, but accepting it, as

such women do, in the spirit of _noblesse oblige_, believing it the

one possible calling for a young man of his station. To prepare him

for it he was trained in manly exercises, by means of which he outgrew

the delicacy of his earliest years and became tall and strong for his

age. He was trained also in horsemanship, to which he took kindly, for

he loved all spirited animals. In books, to which he did not object,

[Pg 8]though he was never wholly a scholar, he followed such studies as

could be taught him by the kindly Abbé Feyon, his tutor.

 

On his rides, when he met the ragged, threadbare people who lived among

the hills, they saluted him and looked upon him almost with a sense of

ownership. Was he not one of their Lafayettes who had been fighting

and dying gallantly for hundreds of years? As for him, his friendly,

boyish eyes looked a little deeper through their rags into their

sterling peasant hearts than either he or they realized. In the old

manor-house his day-dreams were all of "riding over the world in search

of reputation," he tells us; a reputation to be won by doing gallant

deeds. "You ask me," we read in his _Memoirs_, "at what time I felt

the earliest longings for glory and liberty. I cannot recall anything

earlier than my enthusiasm for tales of heroism. At the age of eight

my heart beat fast at thought of a hyena which had done some damage

and made even more noise in the neighborhood. The hope of meeting that

beast animated all my excursions." Had the encounter taken place, it

might have been thrilling in the extreme. It might even have deprived

history of a bright page; for it was nothing less than hunger which

drove such beasts out of the woods in winter to make raids upon lonely

farms--even to terrify villagers at the very gates of Chavaniac.

 

 

[Pg 9]II

 

EDUCATING A MARQUIS

 

 

The first period of Gilbert's life came to an end when he was eleven

years old. His mother was by no means ignorant of the ways of the world

and she had powerful relatives at court. She realized how much they

could do to advance her boy's career by speaking an occasional word in

his behalf; and also how much truth there is in the old saying "Out

of sight, out of mind." They might easily forget all about her and

her boy if they remained hidden in the provinces. So they went up to

Paris together, and she had herself presented at court and took up her

residence in the French capital, while Gilbert became a student at the

Collège Du Plessis, a favorite school for sons of French noblemen. His

mother's uncle, the Comte de la Rivière, entered his name upon the army

lists as member of a regiment of Black Mousquetaires, to secure him the

benefit of early promotion. He was enrolled, too, among the pages of

Marie Leszczynska, the Polish wife of King Louis XV, but his duties,

as page and soldier, were merely nominal. He does not say a word about

[Pg 10]being page in his _Memoirs_. Of the regiment he merely says that

it served to get him excused from classes when there was to be a parade.

 

He remained three years at Du Plessis. He found studying according to

rule decidedly irksome, and very different from the solitary lessons at

Chavaniac, where the few rules in force had been made for his benefit,

if not for his convenience. He tells us that he was "distracted from

study only by the desire to study without restraint," and that such

success as he gained was "inspired by a desire for glory and troubled

by the desire for liberty." Sometimes the latter triumphed. It amused

him, when he was old, to recall how, being ordered to write an essay on

"the perfect steed," he sacrificed a good mark and the praise of his

teachers to the pleasure of describing a spirited horse that threw his

rider at the very sight of a whip.

 

The Collège Du Plessis must have been almost like a monastery. Each

boy had a stuffy little cell into which he was locked at night. No

member of a student's family might cross the threshold, and the many

careful rules for health and diet were quite the opposite of those

now practised. This period of Lafayette's school-days was a time when

men's ideas on a variety of subjects were undergoing vast change. The

old notion that learning was something to be jealously guarded and

made as difficult and disagreeable as possible died hard. It is true

that the good Fénelon, who believed in teaching children to read from

books printed in French instead of in Latin, and who thought it could

[Pg 11]do them no harm if the books were "well bound and gilded on

the edge," had gone to his reward half a century before; but he had

been writing about the education of girls! When Lafayette was only

five years old one Jean Jacques Rousseau had published a fantastic

story called _Émile_, which was nothing in the world but a treatise on

education in disguise. In this he objected to the doctrine of original

sin, holding that children were not born bad; and he reasoned that they

did not learn better nor more quickly for having knowledge beaten into

them with rods. But this man Rousseau was looked upon as an infidel

and a dangerous character. Probably at Du Plessis the discipline and

course of study belonged to the old order of things, though there

were concessions in the way of teaching the young gentlemen manners

and poetry and polite letter-writing, which they would need later in

their fashionable life at court. History as taught them was hopelessly

tangled up in heraldry, being all about the coats of arms and the

quarrels of nobles in France and neighboring countries. When something

about justice and liberty and the rights of the people did creep into

the history lesson the tall young student from Auvergne fell upon it

with avidity. Perhaps it was because of such bits scattered through

the pages of Roman authors that he learned considerable Latin, and

learned it well enough to remember it forty years later, when he found

it useful to piece out his ignorance of German in talking with his

Austrian jailers.

 

In spite of queer notions about hygiene, like those which bade him

[Pg 12]shut out fresh air from his room at night and avoid the risk of

eating fresh fruit, he grew in body as well as in mind during the years

at Du Plessis, and he had almost reached his man's height of five feet

eleven inches, when one day in 1770 a messenger came to the college,

bringing the news that his mother had just died. A very few days later

her death was followed by that of her father, who was wealthy and had

made the boy his heir. Thus, almost within a week, he found himself

infinitely poorer than he had ever been before, yet very rich, deprived

of those dearest to him and in possession of a large fortune.

 

People began to take a sudden lively interest in him. The son of a

young widow studying in the Collège Du Plessis was of consequence only

to himself and his mother. But the young Marquis de Lafayette, of such

old and excellent family, such good disposition, such a record in his

studies, such a very large income--above all, a generous young man with

no near relatives to give meddling advice about how he should spend his

money, became fair prey for all the fortune-hunters prowling around the

corrupt court of old Louis XV.

 

These were many. The king was bored as well as old. His days were

filled with a succession of tiresome ceremonies. A crowd of bowing

courtiers was admitted to his bedroom before he got up in the morning.

Crowds attended him at every turn, even assisting in his toilet at

night. Frederick the Great had said, "If I were king of France, the