CHAPTER 19
On February 8, 1800, the chapel of the Invalides—which had been deconsecrated during the revolution and renamed the Temple of Mars—hosted a magnificent memorial service celebrating the life and legacy of George Washington. Government officials, army officers, veterans, and other dignitaries gathered beneath the building’s soaring dome to gaze upon a sculpted bust of Washington while listening to orations praising the “warrior … legislator … citizen above reproach!” These panegyrics were dedicated to Washington, but they had been carefully designed to celebrate another soldier-turned-ruler as well: Napoleon Bonaparte, who was the mastermind of the day’s events. Handpicked by Napoleon to deliver the official eulogy, the poet Louis de Fontanes lauded Washington in terms that the consul might well have applied to himself. As Fontanes put it, Washington belonged to history’s select group of “prodigious men who appear, from time to time, on the world stage,” where they are destined by a higher power either “to build a cradle or to repair the ruins of empires.” Such men are born for greatness, Fontanes declared. They can only “try in vain … to blend into the crowd; the hand of fortune suddenly carries them off and speeds them from obstacle to obstacle, from triumph to triumph, until they reach the summit of power.”
If the ceremony’s speeches hinted at parallels between Washington and Bonaparte, its decorations made clear which man was more glorious. A vibrant array of ninety-six flags seized by the French army during its Egyptian expedition flew high above the assembly, proclaiming Napoleon’s recent triumphs and dwarfing the lifeless bust of Washington, who was effectively upstaged at his own memorial, his honor co-opted and his legacy twisted to legitimate Napoleon’s thirst for power. It’s probably for the best that neither Lafayette, nor his son, nor any representative of the United States was permitted to attend; true friends of Washington’s would have found little to appreciate in the spectacle.
A more suitable homage to Washington was beginning to take shape at La Grange, where Lafayette was transforming Adrienne’s ancestral estate into a French version of Mount Vernon. Memories of Washington’s retirement on the banks of the Potomac had stayed with Lafayette since his 1784 visit to the United States, and the dream of emulating the American Cincinnatus continued to inspire him. As Lafayette remembered it, his own interest in agriculture had redoubled during the years he spent “within the four walls of a prison,” when he read any books he could find on the subject and imagined the pleasures of laboring in the open air. Writing from Vianen in 1799, Lafayette confided to Washington that he dreamed of “retirement on a small farm,” and although the details of his plan remained unsettled for quite a while—at times he considered plots of land in Virginia, New England, or New York; at other times he envisioned tending fields in France—he never doubted that he would follow in Washington’s footsteps. Whatever its location, the farm would meld ancient virtue with Enlightenment science and civic duty, becoming a site, Lafayette hoped, where new methods would be introduced, tested, and perfected, and the lessons learned shared widely for the betterment of all mankind.
Such were Lafayette’s goals when he began afresh at La Grange the agricultural projects that he had abandoned at Chavaniac, and this work would occupy him for the rest of his life. Between 1800 and 1834, Lafayette reconfigured nearly every feature of the 700-acre estate, which, in 1807, included some 416 acres of arable fields, 70 acres of pastureland, and 134 acres of woods and park, crisscrossed by a web of walking, riding, and carriage paths as well as ponds, streams, and irrigation ditches. Lafayette rerouted miles of roads, undertook the large-scale felling of trees, and purchased thousands of plants and seeds, which served a combination of decorative and economic purposes. In one 1806 delivery alone, Lafayette received 203 pear trees and 165 apple trees, which, together with other trees and vines on the property, filled Lafayette’s tables with a bountiful selection of preserves and desserts. Not only did Lafayette grow wheat, oats, potatoes, barley, and corn and keep pigs, sheep, cows, turkeys, pigeons, and fish but,determined to make his lands at least as profitable as those of his neighbors, he maintained meticulous records documenting each year’s income and expenditures, sought advice from experts near and far, and took copious notes on matters ranging from the best practices in crop rotation to new processes for preparing feed.
Obliged to desist from political activities because of his agreement with Napoleon, Lafayette remained eager to put his energies to good use and became as enthusiastic about his farm as he had once been about the American Revolution; to judge by reports of visitors to La Grange, agriculture ranked with liberty among Lafayette’s favorite topics of conversation. Describing an 1802 stay with Lafayette, William Taylor of Norwich wrote, “Before breakfast Lafayette took me over his farm” while speaking of both political and agricultural reform. Taylor was a leading translator of German Romantic literature with no particular expertise in land management, but he was a cousin of John Dyson—the English farmer who had spent a year at Chavaniac back in 1791 and 1792—and the family tie was good enough for Lafayette. Taylor described having been “obliged to answer questions about [Dyson’s] farm at Gunton” and quipped that “having by great good-luck fancied that beans would grow on the stiffer and bluer upland … I was presented to his farmer as Sir Oracle.”
Aesthetic changes were also afoot at La Grange, where, Taylor observed, “the taste of the owner is giving it the appearance of an English park.” In late 1800 or early 1801 Lafayette hired Hubert Robert, one of the foremost landscape painters of the day, to design gardens in the “picturesque” manner at La Grange. Sometimes termed “English” because the fashion originated in the United Kingdom, the picturesque style of gardening had become popular in France in the last decades of the eighteenth century as some of the more forward-looking landowners stripped their grounds of symmetrical allées and topiaries pruned à la française and replaced them with meandering pathways and plantings that conveyed an air of naturalness. Taylor, who visited while Lafayette’s garden was being remodeled, described the changes in progress, noting that the moat around the château “is in part filled up, and is about to assume the form of a passing rivulet.… Irregular vistas are breaking into the dark circle of wood … [and a few] tall oaks have been singled out on the lawn.” The result was a landscape that appeared to be as informal and unaffected as Lafayette himself.
Lafayette’s tastes similarly infused the château’s interior, which quietly reminded visitors of their host’s values and achievements. Taylor wrote to his cousin that he initially found “the bed-chambers … furnished with a simplicity which struck me … as nakedness.” But gradually he “learnt to perceive that not the minutest wish was unforeseen; that the two chairs were enough; that pen, ink, paper, shaving-glass were all at hand.” Lafayette’s past was displayed proudly in the “round saloon of the south-west tower,” where breakfast and tea were served. Taylor described seeing four paintings there: a “portrait of the young Lafayette in his first uniform,” as well as a view of the Victoire—the “ship which Lafayette at his own expense equipped to carry succour to the army of Washington”— and scenes of “the demolition of the Bastille” and the Festival of Federation. In the library, located in a “round room of the south-east tower,” Taylor noted a preponderance of “works on agricultural and political topics, both French andEnglish.”
Of the forty-five habitable rooms in the château, the library was the one closest to Lafayette’s heart. Nowhere was the link between agriculture and ideas more visible than here, as Sydney, Lady Morgan, the noted Irish author and outspoken advocate of humanitarian causes, observed. In an excerpt from the book France (1817), reproduced in American newspapers, Lady Morgan wrote that Lafayette’s “elegant and well chosen collection of books, occupies the highest apartments in one of the towers of the château, and like the study of Montaigne, hangs over the farm-yard of the philosophical agriculturalist.” As she remembered it, she was standing in the library with Lafayette one day, “looking out of the window at some flocks that were passing beneath,” when Lafayette confessed that the lure of the fields often distracted him from his reading: “It frequently happens … that my merinos, and my hay carts, dispute my attention with your Hume, or our own Voltaire.” An 1826 visitor from the United States drew out the uniquely American implications of the vista, recalling that the library windows “command a view of a rural domain, such as Cincinnatus or Washington would have enjoyed, and such as its own proprietor would not exchange for an empire.”
The arrangement was no coincidence; Lafayette had worked closely with Vaudoyer—the same architect he had hired to transform Chavaniac—to design every feature of the library. On May 18, 1802, Lafayette spelled out a decorative scheme, still visible today, featuring nine painted cameos and an array of trophies placed in a ring around the tops of the bookshelves, each commemorating one of his fallen comrades. Of the nine men depicted in paint, two are Americans (Washington and Franklin) and one is a Dutchman—Albert van Ryssel, who led the Dutch Patriot forces in 1787 and lived the next five years in exile in France as punishment for having adhered to his principles. The other six depict Frenchmen whose deaths resonated deeply with Lafayette. During the French Revolution, all six had shared Lafayette’s commitment to a constitutional monarchy, and all were executed on account of it. Among them were Jean-Sylvain Bailly, guillotined on November 12, 1793; Louis-Georges Desrousseaux, the mayor of Sedan, who had been among some two dozen men condemned to death for supporting Lafayette in 1792; and Louis-Alexandre, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, a member of the liberal nobility and a friend of Franklin’s; he was assassinated during the September massacres, shortly after Lafayette’s flight to Belgium.
The specters of these men accompanied Lafayette for the rest of his life, and they were with him as he sat at a custom-made desk in an alcove of the library—within shouting distance of the farmyard—writing and rewriting his memoirs, one segment of which (a passage of nearly one hundred pages) consists of a letter to the deceased Van Ryssel. This missive to a man who could never read it was completed in 1807—the year Adrienne, who had been plagued by illness since her time in Olmutz, died at the Paris home of her aunt Madame de Tessé. Wrestling with grief while trying to make sense of a tangled life, Lafayette used the letter to Van Ryssel as a forum for examining his vexed relationship to Napoleon. Acknowledging that he had once had faith that Bonaparte might carry on the values of the revolution, Lafayette conceded that he was mistaken. Bonaparte, he had come to understand, was an enemy of freedom. Addressing Van Ryssel directly, Lafayette dedicated the document to “your memory” and posed a poignant question: “Why should I not imagine the text before your eyes when it is the sacred memory of a few friends, more than the opinion of the living universe, to which I wish to report my actions and my thoughts.”
Like Washington, Lafayette allowed himself to be lured out of retirement for only one reason: to serve the nation. When Napoleon began to falter in 1814, Lafayette reentered French politics as a staunch opponent of restoring the Bourbon monarchy. Personally and politically, a great deal of bad blood flowed between Lafayette and the returning royals. King Louis XVIII, who took up residence in the Tuileries Palace on May 3, 1814, was no stranger to the aging marquis; formerly Comte de Provence, he was the elder of Louis XVI’s brothers and the man Lafayette had famously snubbed in 1776. Nor was the subsequent king, Charles X, crowned in 1824, a fresh face; he was Louis XVI’s younger brother, formerly Comte d’Artois. As Charles X, he kept Lafayette under close scrutiny, lest he conspire to overthrow the monarchy—and it wasn’t a case of paranoia; Lafayette was involved with a host of anti-Bourbon conspiracies. None of them came close to succeeding, but all of them kept the government understandably on edge.
Isidore Laurent Deroy, La Grange East View, lithograph, c. 1825, after a painting by Alvan Fisher. (illustration credit 19.1)
Library at La Grange, designed by Antoine Vaudoyer, c. 1800. (illustration credit 19.2)
Thanks to the Charter of 1814, however, which established a constitutional monarchy in France, Lafayette was able to participate openly in national politics for the first time in more than two decades by putting himself forward for elected office, supporting opposition journalists, and agitating on behalf of liberal causes. Although he did not immediately win a seat in the Chamber of Deputies (as France’s lower legislative house was known), he spent the first years of the Bourbon restoration playing the role of civic gadfly. As he put it in an 1816 letter, Lafayette saw Louis XVIII as little more than a pawn of the allied forces that defeated Napoleon, “the protégé, the humble follower, not the leader” of the European monarchies, who wished only to turn back the clock to France’s old regime. And Lafayette, who had devoted his life to ending the abuses of absolutism, was determined to do what he could to prevent any such backsliding.
On October 30, 1818, the sixty-one-year-old Lafayette was voted into public office for the first time since the Estates-Gereral. Having failed to win election to the Chamber of Deputies as a representative of the department of the Seine-et-Marne, his home region, he instead went to the legislature as a representative of the department of the Sarthe, located some 150 miles west-southwest of La Grange. In the Sarthe, which imposed no residency requirements on its representatives, Lafayette was fortunate enough to enjoy the support of the liberal journalist Charles Guyot, who, in an 1819 pamphlet, praised his fellow inhabitants of the Sarthe for their choice. “The great, good La Fayette,” wrote Guyot, “was not appreciated by his own department; and you supported him for the position that his great virtues deserved—and the only [position] worthy of his immortal name!”
In the weeks leading up to his swearing in on December 10, 1818, Lafayette was once again the talk of Paris. The Chamber of Deputies became the hottest ticket in town, as well-heeled individuals vied for a chance to witness the return of Lafayette—a return that immediately revived the battles over Lafayette’s image that had lain dormant during Napoleon’s reign. An ally of Lafayette’s, the romantic author and leading liberal theorist Benjamin Constant, who would join Lafayette as a representative of the Sarthe in 1819, employed the power of his pen to burnish Lafayette’s tarnished credentials as a defender of liberty and to put the best possible spin on the attention Lafayette was generating. Writing in the liberal organ La Minerve française, Constant reported that the “curiosity” that animated the audience in the Chamber of Deputies as Lafayette rose to swear his oath could be “easily explained: so many memories of different sorts and all honorable are attached to that name!” In contrast, the ultraroyalist journal Le conservateur mocked Lafayette’s reappearance by resurrecting the critical conceit that conflated the veneration of Lafayette with that of his horse after the 1790 Festival of Federation and expressing astonishment that “a famous white horse, a horse that shared with its master the idolatrous love of the good people of Paris … has not terminated his valorous career: he still lives.” Harking back to the wordplay that peppered the political journalism of the old regime, the Conservateur concluded by asserting that “the marquis, the master of this horse, is still riding the same hobbyhorse.”
Although the newspapers differed wildly in their assessments of Lafayette, they were in complete agreement on one point: the reputation of the general (a title that Lafayette preferred to the aristocratic “marquis”) had been formed, for better or for worse, by his actions during the French Revolution. Still, Lafayette continued to take up new causes in the Chamber of Deputies and was often joined in his efforts by his son and fellow deputy, George Washington Lafayette. Singly and together the Lafayettes, père et fils, advocated such domestic policies as the establishment of free public education and the lowering of voting requirements, and addressed such contentious international issues as the revolutions and insurgencies in Greece, Italy, and Poland (which they supported) and the slave trade (which they opposed). Almost always, their speeches and letters were laced with references to the years before 1791, when Lafayette’s French reputation had seemed unassailable.
Of course, there was still one place where Lafayette’s reputation remained uncontested, and Lafayette had not given up on returning to the nation he considered his spiritual homeland. On November 25, 1823, Lafayette wrote to the American president James Monroe expressing his desire to rejoin “the friends with whom I can once more enjoy the sweetest memories, and visit the happy shores of an adopted land which has so filled my first and most presumptuous hopes.” He was, he told Monroe, too occupied with his work in the Chamber of Deputies to contemplate an immediate voyage. Yet, he concluded, “I often dream of the day when I will be able, without remorse, to enjoy the happiness of finding myself once again on American ground.” Considering the time required for transatlantic mail, Monroe’s reply came swiftly. On February 7, 1824, Monroe informed Lafayette that “Congress had passed a resolution … to express to you the sincere attachment of the entire nation, and its ardent desire to receive you again.” And on July 13, 1824, having lost his seat in the Chamber of Deputies, Lafayette sailed from Le Havre to begin his final tour of the United States, which was to be the grandest celebration the young nation had ever seen.
On August 16, 1824, Lafayette disembarked the packet ship Cadmus in lower New York Bay. Unlike Lafayette’s first arrival in New York, in 1784, which had gone virtually unnoticed for some time, his second visit was hotly anticipated. Over the course of thirteen months, Lafayette, his son, and his secretary, Auguste Levasseur, stopped in each of the twenty-four states of the union. Municipalities from Vermont to Virginia hailed Lafayette with events ranging from intimate meals in the homes of local dignitaries to balloon ascents witnessed by thousands, and everywhere they went the men were treated to dinners at local taverns, tours of historic battlefields, and reviews of militias and regiments. They marched in parades and attended services at churches of every denomination, often encountering septuagenarian and octogenarian veterans of the War of Independence who wept openly for joy or schoolchildren who serenaded “the nation’s guest” with songs written specially for the occasion.
By 1824, many members of America’s founding generation had long since passed away—Gouverneur Morris in 1816, Washington in 1799, and Franklin nine years before Washington. Most of the living founders were too frail to revel in the limelight as Lafayette did on this journey; Jefferson and Adams, who were famously fated to die on the same day, July 4, 1826, were eighty-one and eighty-nine years old, respectively. At sixty-seven—roughly the same age as President Monroe, the last president to have participated in the nation’s birth—Lafayette was comparatively young and remarkably robust. He was a celebrity. And yet he was more than that. He was a living embodiment of the nation’s founding principles, and his enduring vitality augured well for the future of his adopted land.
Every town and county laid out its best for Lafayette, but surely no celebration could have outshone the gala festivities held in New York City on the night of September 14, 1824. Lafayette called it “the most brilliant and magnificent scene ever witnessed in the United States.” The event was held at Castle Garden, a decommissioned fort on a man-made island that was linked to lower Manhattan by a bridge and had recently been converted into America’s largest commercial pleasure ground. Some six thousand partygoers attended by two hundred servants paid three dollars apiece to join in the revelry. They danced and drank beneath a canopy decorated with the flags of the world and illuminated by a giant chandelier supporting thirteen smaller ones—one for each of the original states. Evoking the grandeur of antiquity, a triumphal arch, nearly ninety feet wide, decorated with sprigs of laurel and surmounted by a bust of George Washington, marked the entrance to the island pavilion. When the guest of honor arrived at ten p.m., he found inside a large transparency, lit from behind, that brought to life the château at La Grange—a structure that, in time, became almost synonymous with Lafayette, as its image was reproduced on objects of all kind, created around the world for sale in the American market, for many years to come. People who attended saved their tickets, their dresses, their gloves—anything that might remind them of the occasion. And those objects have since made their own way throughout the United States, where they have been collected by museums, libraries, and historical societies and exhibited to celebrate patriotic occasions of every variety.
Why did the celebrations in honor of Lafayette loom so large in people’s minds? In part, the phenomenon reflected a genuine outpouring of affection and appreciation for a man who had come to our nation’s aid at a moment of need and whose dramatic life story had unfolded in the pages of American newspapers, books, magazines, and prints for the better part of fifty years. Words of gratitude and admiration for the French hero of the American Revolution filled the songs and poems written in his honor. One typical set of lyrics was meant to be sung to the tune of “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. Renamed “Hail! Lafayette!” it implored listeners to “think how then the illustrious stranger, / spurn’d rank and ease.… His counsel, sword, and wealth supplying … amidst the famish’d—naked—dying!” (Few of those singing the American version would have been aware that the song was originally dedicated to Marshal Nicolas Luckner, the commander of the French Army of the Rhine with whom Lafayette was accused of conspiring against France in 1792 and who was sent to the guillotine in 1794.)
Blue-and-white transfer-printed plate depicting Lafayette’s home at La Grange. Nineteenth-century American. (illustration credit 19.3)
But something more than gratitude was involved, for Lafayette arrived at a time when Americans were beginning to think about their nation’s fiftieth anniversary. In many ways, Lafayette’s triumphal tour kicked off the jubilation. In celebrating Lafayette, Americans were celebrating their own past and honoring all of the country’s early leaders. Nowhere was the collective nature of the tribute more evident than in the entertainments offered on Monday, June 20, 1825, at the Boston Theater in Massachusetts—an imposing, neoclassical edifice located at the intersection of Federal and Franklin Streets in what is now the heart of Boston’s Financial District. A broadside advertising that evening’s show announced not only that Lafayette would be in attendance, where he would watch Charles II, “a comedy in two acts,” but also that the auditorium would be ornamented with “appropriate Decorations in honor of the Nation’s Guest.” These decorations, though, had little if anything to do with Lafayette: the names of every governor of Massachusetts would ring the boxes, while seats in the upper tier would feature the governors of each of the thirteen original states. A new “drop scene” would depict a temple with Corinthian columns described as “a monumental structure to the memory of General Washington,” as well as an equestrian statue of Washington and a “correct view of Washington’s Tomb at Mount Vernon.” Toward the end of the evening, “the Grand Washington Transparency containing a brief sketch of the civil and military life of this illustrious hero” would be displayed.
Fan depicting Lafayette, Marie Antoinette, and an allegory of French patriotism, carried to a ball celebrating Lafayette at Castle Garden on September 14, 1824. (illustration credit 19.4)
Other Lafayette celebrations looked forward to the nation’s bright future. One of these was held on September 11, 1824, the forty-seventh anniversary of the Battle of Brandywine, when Lafayette enjoyed a spectacular dinner hosted by the French residents of New York at Washington Hall, located on the northeast corner of Broadway and Chambers Street in lower Manhattan. That night, Washington Hall was reimagined as the crossroads of the globe: four faux-marble piers representing the four corners of the earth were erected at fifty-foot intervals, and a large model of the sun hung from the center of the ceiling, some thirty feet off the ground. All of the decorations were magnificent, but the pièce de résistance was an astonishingly detailed centerpiece representing theErie Canal that ran the length of a seventy-foot-long table. As described by the Evening Post of September 13, “at one end was to be seen Lake Erie—in the centre Lake Ontario, and at the other end Lake Champlain.… Passage boats with passengers and baggage” dotted the water, which ran a “winding course” through the mock canals, while “at a distance various kinds of water fowl” sailed gracefully “to and fro.” Adding to the “most charming effect” of the scene, the “rich verdure” of the canal’s “mossy banks, studded now and then with roses, was here and there interrupted by aqueducts, rocks, and bridges which were thrown over the canal at different places.”
To men living in New York as the long-anticipated canal was nearing completion, the visiting marquis and the grand engineering project represented much the same thing: the great potential of the United States to serve as a beacon to all nations and the promise that the New World would, one day, triumph over the Old. By linking the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, which, in turn, flows into New York Harbor—the gateway to the Atlantic Ocean—the canal was destined to become the first waterway to facilitate European commerce with the American interior. More than twenty years earlier, Gouverneur Morris had rhapsodized about the possibilities that such a canal might offer. Writing to his friend John Parish on January 20, 1801, Morris had described his summer travels in upstate New York and lower Canada, asking, “Shall I lead your astonishment up to the verge of incredulity?” He answered his own question: “I will.” Recounting the rush of thoughts that came to him on the shores of Lake Erie, Morris predicted that a relatively small investment of funds dedicated to constructing an inland navigation system “would enable ships to sail from London, through Hudson’s River, into Lake Erie,” providing unfettered access to the inner reaches of the continent, which, he explained, “excels the part we inhabit in soil, in climate, in everything.” Making a bold but prescient forecast, Morris boasted that “the proudest empire in Europe, is but a bauble compared to what America will be, must be, in the course of two centuries; perhaps of one!” Morris did not live long enough to witness the creation of the transformative waterway he envisioned, but the guests assembled in Washington Hall on the night of Lafayette’s fete were about to see Morris’s dream fully realized. Soon, America’s promise would be one step closer to fulfillment.
Washington Hall, New York City. (illustration credit 19.5)
As it happened, Lafayette’s triumphal tour also coincided with America’s bitterly fought presidential campaign of 1824. The election ended infamously: with no candidate winning a majority of electoral college votes, the decision was thrown into the House of Representatives, which selected John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson, who had won the plurality of both the electoral and the popular votes. To this day, the outcome is sometimes referred to as the “corrupt bargain.” With praising Lafayette being tantamount to praising America, and with every elected representative setting out to prove himself more patriotic than his neighbor, politicians and their spokesmen throughout the land did everything in their power to associate themselves with the “Nation’s Guest.” The House and the Senate heard innumerable orations filled with acclaim for Lafayette, and at the urging of Jefferson and Monroe, who were well aware of Lafayette’s tight fiscal straits, Congress awarded two lavish gifts to the visiting hero. On December 2, 1824—the final day of electoral college voting—a bill was introduced to the Senate issuing Lafayette $200,000 in stock and 24,000 acres of land, whose location would be determined by the president at a later date. These were certainly gifts of considerable monetary value, but they also had layers of symbolic meaning. In literal terms, they were meant to reimburse Lafayette for the money he had spent during the revolution. To Lafayette, who’d had to borrow heavily to pay for his ocean crossing, the sums received were most welcome. And to Americans, the ability to repay this long-standing debt of gratitude to an old friend signaled their own prosperity and reminded them how far their country had come in just fifty years.
On September 9, 1825, Lafayette’s party sailed for France on the frigate Brandywine, but Lafayette never quite put the tour behind him. In the course of his thirteen-month stay he had made a host of new American acquaintances and initiated close friendships that lasted until his death. The artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, who painted Lafayette’s portrait on commission from the Common Council of the City of New York, described feeling nearly overcome with admiration for his sitter. And the author James Fenimore Cooper, whom Lafayette met in New York, would become a long-term guest at La Grange. In 1828, acting at Lafayette’s behest, Cooper published a fictionalized account of Lafayette’s tour as Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor. In America, Lafayette had been enriched by a great deal more than money. He had gained a wealth of admiration and, perhaps most significantly, had solidified his place in American memory as states, municipalities, and institutions of all variety immortalized him by naming towns, counties, schools, and streets in his honor.
Lafayette returned to France with an enormous quantity of gifts that he cherished for the remainder of his life, ranging from a canoe, the American Star, which had won a race against an English boat on December 9, 1824, and would be kept in a specially built shed at La Grange, to smaller objects, including Native American ornaments, fragments of weapons collected on the Brandywine battlefield, and maps of various states of the union. Much of this material was kept in Lafayette’s library, the contents of which, in the words of Jules Cloquet, the doctor who attended Lafayette’s final illness, “could constitute a museum.” As the years went by, Lafayette’s American collections continued to grow, and a tour of these artifacts became part of the standard itinerary for the droves of Americans who flocked to La Grange to pay homage to their aging hero. Indeed, anyone who has the privilege of visiting La Grange today can still see a selection of objects displayed as they were in Lafayette’s time.
Although many details of Lafayette’s living quarters have been reconstructed according to Cloquet’s careful descriptions of daily routines at La Grange, modern-day visitors must use their imaginations to envision the American fauna that once roamed Lafayette’s lands. Throughout his years at La Grange, Lafayette maintained an active correspondence with members of America’s agricultural community and participated in exchanges of animals, plants, machinery, and ideas. Two cows, a bull, and a sow from Baltimore, a wild turkey and several chickens from Virginia, as well as American deer, tortoises, terrapins, and even a woodpecker were among the creatures that made the transatlantic journey to La Grange, some more successfully than others. American farming equipment was there too: a steaming machine for preparing animal feed, a threshing machine, a Virginia plow, and much else. Seen together as a collection, these varied creatures and objects helped Lafayette propagate the notion that the La Grange was essentially American. He said as much to Mrs. Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts, who visited in 1829. Describing the carriage ride from Paris to Lafayette’s estate, Mrs. Cushing recalled that “at length we approached the end of our journey, and as we entered the boundaries of La Grange,—‘Now,’ cried the General, ‘we are upon American ground.’ ”
One of the last known portraits of Lafayette emphasizes his attachment to those grounds. Seated in dappled shade on a mossy rock, Lafayette, dressed in business attire, has set aside his walking stick and top hat. The rolled-up newspaper jutting from the hat suggests that he has even set aside the outside world, if only for a moment, to enjoy the peace of La Grange. Behind him are an expanse of grass and a curtain of trees that opens just enough to reveal a bit of sky at the upper right, where the pointed top of a cypress tree rises like a church spire in the distance. Lafayette had never been a religious man, but he was known as an apostle of liberty, and La Grange had become a pilgrimage site.
In this portrait, Louise-Adéone Drölling (Madame Joubert) depicted Lafayette seated among the trees at La Grange. (illustration credit 19.6)