Adopted Son Washington, Lafayette, And the Friendship That Saved the Revolution

Chapter One I Was All on Fire to Have a Uniform (SEPTEMBER 1757-DECEMBER 1775) Of all the animals in the world, the most unmanageable is the boy. Plato Auvergne was a region of ancient lava flows and eroded volcanic necks, an eerie landscape, rugged and heavily forested, where ghosts and monsters and strange beasts lurked. In its level spaces it supported farming on its rich volcanic soil. Sheep grazed on the gentler slopes surrounding the fields, and hogs rooted on the edges of the woodlands. Around them, the tortured, wooded mountains inspired fears. It was a land of ignorance, superstition, hard labor, and poverty. A journey to Paris, about 200 miles north, took more than two weeks in 1757. The area had always been isolated, owing to the rugged landscape and bad roads. Those same qualities had given the province a tragic place in history. In 52 bc, the town of Alesia in Auvergne was the last stronghold of the Celtic Gauls (called the Avernii by the Romans). Under Vercingetorix, they had fought the conquering Roman armies through years of brutal combat. The mighty power of the Roman Empire told on the Gauls, however, until the last resisters, about 80,000 of them, were surrounded by Julius Caesar's troops and earthworks. An army of Belgii, another Celtic nation, marched to their relief, but the Romans slaughtered them to the last man. Vercingetorix offered to surrender Alesia and offer himself as a hostage to spare the lives of his people. Caesar accepted, then ordered his troops to massacre the Gaulish soldiers and sold the people into slavery, scattering them across the Empire. He sent Vercingetorix to Rome, where he was beheaded as aninsurgentus. Gaul ceased to exist except as a province of the Roman Empire. Celtic was no longer spoken and was replaced by the Low Latin of the Roman soldiers. Over the centuries, that Latin became French, and what once was Gaul became France. THE FAMILY'S MISFORTUNES IN WAR BECAME A KIND OF PROVERB Lafayette was born on September 6, 1757, in the same room of the Chateau de Chavaniac as his father before him, the top-floor chamber of one of the building's corner towers. The housebuilt in the pseudo-castle "Chateau style" on the foundations of a real castle that had burned down in the 1690swas a Normanesque pile of stone with twenty large rooms and a slate roof. It was as cold as a barn in the winter despite its many large fireplaces. The Chateau was separated from the neighboring village of Chavaniac by a moat, just as its neighborhood was separated from the rest of France by the forbidding landscape of Auvergne. The hereditary title of marquis, for a nobleman of middling rank, had been in the family for three generations, a reward for military service to the king. The clan could be traced back as far as the year 1000, and members had served in France's wars ever since. But Lafayette was descended from a line of younger sons (eldest sons inherited properties and titles), most of them Champetieres who traced back to the thirteenth century. The history of Lafayette's forebears was a litany of younger sons who started out in poverty, married well, sired offspring, and went off to war to die young. They were close enough to Paris and Versailles to answer the call to arms but not near enough to be influential at court. They were provincial nobility, country bumpkins compared to the courtiers, glittering peacocks who surrounded the throne. Nearly all Lafayette's ancestors had been warriors of greater or lesser repute. His great-grandfather Charles, a veteran soldier with a sterling reputation, began the family's rise out of recurrent poverty, founding its permanent fortune and receiving the title marquis de La Fayette. Charles' son Edouard married very well, acquiriClary, David A. is the author of 'Adopted Son Washington, Lafayette, And the Friendship That Saved the Revolution', published 2007 under ISBN 9780553804355 and ISBN 0553804359.