Superstition

15

His mother's eyes were red from having cried all night. He wanted to put his arms around her and promise her that everything would be all right, that they would see each other again one day. But that was not how things were done in their family. He could no more tell her that he loved her and would weep for missing her than she could tell him how bitter was the sense of her impending loss. Her only son was going to France with the great General Lafayette, and in some part of herself she knew with certainty that she would never see him again. Yet when he'd asked her why her eyes were red, she'd brushed him aside with an impatient answer. The dust was troubling her. She had a sensitivity to the grass and flowers in the summer, and to the fine white powder that hung like a mist in the air of the grain mill. “Eat up, now,” was all she said. “You have a day's ride before you and you cannot journey on an empty stomach.”

She busied herself with unnecessary tasks, frowning sternly through the noise and clatter that she made with pots and pans and crockery while her son ate his final breakfast in her kitchen. Through the window she could see her husband, Joseph, saddling up the horses with Edward, the young groom. He started toward the house, moving with his habitual solemn gait, and she knew the moment was upon them. She took a deep breath and prepared herself for parting.

They embraced stiffly, mother and son, unused to such contact. He gripped the Bible she had pressed into his hand and promised he would treasure it. She watched from the yard as they rode together down the track and toward the trees. He turned back once and raised his hand. She raised hers, too far away for him to see it tremble. As they disappeared beneath the dense green foliage, she turned quickly and walked back into her kitchen.

Adam Wyatt felt a weight fall gradually from his shoulders as he rode beside his silent father down the Hudson River toward New York. The lack of contact between them that had been at first oppressive ceased to trouble him, and his thoughts turned toward the great adventure that was opening up before him. It was pure chance that had brought him to the notice of the great Frenchman, an unthinking deed that passed for bravery in the crucible of war. A horse had broken loose and would have betrayed the position of Lafayette's troops as they dug in to lay final siege, under General Washington's command, to the British at Yorktown. It mattered little whether Adam's bold action in preventing the animal's escape had made one jot of difference to the outcome of the engagement; General Lafayette himself had witnessed the incident and had the young man brought to him for commendation. He had taken a liking to the young American and had him transferred to his command. Adam's intelligent and questioning nature-about everything from political theory to science and philosophy-had further recommended him to the sophisticated and good-hearted Frenchman. He had even arranged for the boy to have lessons in the French language when he showed interest in it. Now here he was, not two years on and just turned twenty years of age, heading for France as one of the general's personal staff. He would see and learn things he had so far never dreamed of; and of course he would be seen as something of an ambassador for his new and vigorous young country with its commitment to equality and freedom, ideals that were fast gaining currency in Europe.

He shook his father's solemnly proffered hand on the outskirts of New York, then Joseph Wyatt turned to head for home. His only reason for making the journey had been to take back the horse that Adam had ridden, and he had no wish to linger amid the festive crowds still celebrating George Washington's triumphant return to the city. Adam wandered happily for several hours, drinking in the sights and sounds of celebration, then presented himself at the appointed dock for embarkation on the great sailing ship that would set forth at first tide on the five-week voyage to Bordeaux in France.

The sickness of the first few days (it was the first time he had been to sea) soon passed, and he found himself invigorated by the salty cleanness of the wind that gusted them briskly on their way. He didn't see a great deal of the general on the trip-or “Marquis,” as he was instructed to call him henceforth; the war was over and military titles could be set aside. He was given daily lessons in French, and instructed on protocol in readiness for his arrival. The Marquis de Lafayette, for all his commitment to libertarian politics and the dignity of man, remained an aristocrat who moved in the highest court and diplomatic circles, and those who moved with him were expected to behave appropriately. During those five weeks at sea Adam learned how to speak, move, and even think more like a nobleman than the farmer he had always been. The food onboard was simple, but he grew accustomed to having it served to him by deferential crew members, who also filled his glass with wines of an astounding subtlety and richness of taste the like of which he had never known. The Adam Wyatt who finally set foot on French soil in the port of Bordeaux was no longer the same Adam Wyatt who had embarked in New York.

The next months saw the transformation complete. Lafayette was as much the hero of the hour in France as he had been in America. At every, level of society the French people reveled in the defeat of their old adversary, Britain, and were proud beyond words of the role played in it by Lafayette and the troops he had persuaded the government to send. Lafayette was lionized not only in France but in all the liberal courts and salons of Europe; and, wherever he went, Adam Wyatt went with him. At Versailles he was presented to Louis XVI and his beautiful young queen, Marie Antoinette. In Paris he was introduced to Thomas Jefferson, there to negotiate trade agreements with America. He spoke at length with the elderly and still brilliant Benjamin Franklin, present as a roving ambassador. They were heady times for a young man of his origins. Sometimes it seemed to him that those years of puritan simplicity were all a dream from which he had now woken. At other times he feared that his new life was the dream, and that he would awake to a scolding from his mother for some minor infraction, then have to go out on a cold morning to bring in the herd for milking.

But he didn't wake up, and after a couple of years of his new life he stopped fearing that he was going to. He wrote home dutifully, though infrequently, and received short, awkwardly written letters from his mother, usually with a brief postscript added by his father. The news they contained struck him as increasingly banal and uninteresting, evoking a world that seemed remote and unattractive, a far cry from the life of one of the principal secretaries to the Marquis de Lafayette, to which exalted rank young Adam Wyatt had now been appointed. Although his patron had made a return visit to America in 1784, Adam had not accompanied him; he was, he wrote to his parents, too busy with his master's affairs to think of leaving France. Later, of course, it would be possible, though he could not be sure exactly when.

What he did not mention was that he was in love not only with Paris but with Angelique. She was the daughter of a noble family who were friends of the marquis. They shared his reforming zeal and his conviction that the future must belong to all men and not just the privileged few. At the same time, like the marquis, it never occurred to them that the monarchy was any obstacle to such reform. The king was king of all men, a symbol of the country's unity. That there was unity in the country, sufficient at any rate to carry through such democratic reforms as might be necessary, was something taken for granted by everyone in the rarefied atmosphere in which Adam moved. The young queen, Marie Antoinette, might be criticized for her extravagance and occasional folly, but these were minor matters. The king, though indecisive and a poor leader, was nonetheless accorded the respect due to his position and enjoyed the loyal support of even the most liberal of the nobility and the great majority of the country.

Angelique had become a favorite at court and was a regular companion of the queen. Adam himself began increasingly to be received there. The fact of his being an American hero with a quick wit and a now near perfect command of the language made him a fashionable and fascinating figure. When he and Angelique married in the summer of 1787, their wedding was one of the season's more glittering affairs. His wife's dowry was sufficient for the purchase of a fine house in the Faubourg Saint-Honore in Paris and an estate in the Loire Valley. Adam Wyatt was now a man of substance, treated as an equal by those he had originally come to serve. If America had pointed out the direction in which the future lay, Europe, and especially France, he believed, was the place were it would be most swiftly and successfully achieved.

He continued to believe this throughout the summer of 1788 even as evidence mounted that the country was on the verge of bankruptcy. The single greatest contribution to this state of affairs was the cost to France of its involvement in the American War of Independence. Adam noted with interest that nobody pointed the finger of accusation at either him or his country; the only subject of debate was how to make up the deficit. In the autumn it was agreed that the Estates General should be called in the spring of 1789. This was a kind of national parliament made up of clergy, nobles, and elected representatives of the people. It had not met since 1614 and was the only body with the constitutional authority to decide how new taxes could be levied to deal with the crisis.

No one, least of all the liberal and enlightened minority to which Lafayette and now Adam Wyatt belonged, anticipated how this event would serve as a focus for discontents that went back far in time and ran deep throughout the country. An arctic winter had triggered food riots and fueled the deep resentment that the vast majority of the poor felt toward the privileged few. When those privileged few, in the form of the clergy and the nobility, tried to assert their will over the newly elected representatives of the people in the Estates General, the dam broke.

The court, Angelique among them, continued to amuse themselves as usual, unconscious that anything was seriously amiss. The enlightened nobility, such as Lafayette, welcomed and participated in the changes that were now becoming inevitable. None of them, however, imagined that these changes would amount to anything more than a controlled redistribution of power: a constitutional instead of an absolute monarchy; a fairer distribution of wealth; a lifting of the grinding poverty to which 90 percent of the population, laborers and peasants, had for too long been subjected. Nobody anticipated outright, bloody revolution.

Perhaps because he was a foreigner and for all his newfound wealth and privilege still an outsider looking in, Adam sensed that what was happening here was very different from the so-called revolution in America. The enemy there had been the old colonial power in Europe; here in France the enemy was visible through the windows of the royal palaces and fine houses such as Adam's own. He walked the teeming streets, sometimes accompanied by two armed servants for protection, sometimes alone but dressed in rags to avoid becoming the target of attack or robbery. He saw the king and queen and ministers of government burned in effigy; saw shops and warehouses broken into by the starving poor, their owners beaten and murdered for protecting what they thought of as their own; watched as mobs tore down the hated ring of customs barriers around the city and overran the frightened soldiers sent to quell their rioting. He was present when the Bastille, the hated feudal prison and symbol of oppression, was stormed and the heads of its governor and guards mounted on pikes and paraded through the streets to cheering crowds. Adam sensed that there was worse, much worse, to come, and felt a kind of fear that he had not known before.

After the fall of the Bastille Lafayette was made, by popular acclaim, commander of the National Guard, a new volunteer army that would henceforth be the ultimate authority behind each step of the revolution-for such all now acknowledged it to be. Yet there was still no suggestion from the men who emerged as its leaders-Robespierre, Danton, Mirabeau, Desmoulins-that the monarchy should be forfeited. On the contrary, hated though it was by the people, it was seen by thinkers and reformers as essential to society's stability, its safety guaranteed by Lafayette and the same National Guard that was born out of revolution.

Adam was with Angelique at the court at Versailles on the fifth of October, 1789. There had been a grand banquet celebrating the arrival of the Flanders Regiment for a routine change of garrison. Fine food and wines had led to expressions of sentimental support for the king and queen in the face of continuing criticism from the revolutionary National Assembly. Adam looked on with misgivings as the revolutionary red and blue cockades which the soldiers had been ordered to wear were torn off and trampled underfoot. He knew too well that these excesses would be reported and could only aggravate the situation. Sure enough, an angry mob descended on the palace, slaughtering guards and breaking into the royal apartments. The king and queen and all their court had feared for their lives. Adam had hidden with Angelique in a wardrobe in one of the royal bedchambers. Only the intervention of Lafayette and his National Guard had saved them. But Lafayette's authority was slipping; the mob threatened to turn on him and hang him unless he and his troops forced the royal family to return with them to Paris and live henceforth in the more modest Tuileries Palace, where they would in effect be prisoners.

It was the turning point in Adam's life in France. He loved his wife and was caught between the now doomed world they had so happily inhabited for too short a time and the rising tide of blood that the revolution had become. Events proceeded with an almost hypnotic inexorability. Adam knew that he and Angelique would be forced sooner or later to flee, but they were held for the moment by bonds of loyalty, he to Lafayette, she to the queen. Faction after faction seized revolutionary power, each one sweeping forward on fresh tides of blood. The guillotine worked day and night; the stench of death was everywhere. By the end of 1792 Lafayette had been arrested in Austria and thrown into prison as a “dangerous revolutionary.” Shortly afterward the king was executed in Paris. Suddenly it was too late to run. Adam and Angelique went into hiding, living in daily fear for their lives. He held her in his arms and tried to stifle her heartbroken sobs as they watched the queen dragged to the scaffold, only thirty-seven but looking like an old and broken woman, her hair prematurely white. The crowd around them danced and cheered with a vicious joy…and someone, seeing a young couple not sharing the revolutionary fervor of the moment, pointed them out to the local militia.

They ran, but it was hopeless. The crowd had them in its power, and Adam feared they would be torn limb from limb. It was in that moment of raw panic that he did the thing that would haunt him to his grave and beyond: when he saw his wife seized and, in her despair, screaming her love for the dead queen and her contempt for the wretches who had killed her, he protested that he did not know this woman.

The lie did not work. Worse, Angelique had witnessed his betrayal. She became strangely quiet, gazing at him as though across a void of time and space, no longer caring what would happen to her.

He saw her carried off, to what fate he never knew, and called out after her to beg forgiveness and swear his undying love. But it was too late. Too late for everything.

That night he gazed out through the bars of a prison cell, oblivious of the stinking mass of humanity around him. Tomorrow they would all be dead. Until then was time enough to mourn for his life, regret the country he had left, the new life he had too easily been seduced by, the errors he had made by loving first too well, and finally not well enough.

Come morning, he embraced his fate with a bitter equanimity that passed, in others’ eyes, for bravery. He gave a grim laugh, remembering it was something that passed for bravery that had brought him to this present circumstance. With that thought he mounted the steps to the scaffold on which the queen had died the day before, and on which, for all he knew, his wife had died already; then knelt as though in prayer, hands tied behind his back, and closed his eyes to meet his death.