First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [99]
In Paris, Rodney—receiving no messages or remittances—wrote in agony of mind to his wife, “Delays are worse than death, especially at this critical time when every hour teems with momentary expectation of war.” A French squadron, he reports, has sailed at the end of January for America along with a convoy of 13 sail and 2 ships of war “belonging to the Congress of twenty-eight guns each who saluted the French Admiral under Congress colours and had their salute openly and publicly returned, by which France seems to own them as a Republic—the greatest insult they could offer us.”
Besides the agony of inaction, Rodney was now in acute embarrassment for living expenses. At this moment an unexpected hand of friendship was extended to him, so unexpected and from so unlikely a source as to seem unreal. A French nobleman, the Maréchal Duc de Biron, Marshal of France, Colonel of the Gardes Françaises and commander of the troops of Paris, having heard of his enforced detention, proposed, Rodney wrote, “that his purse was at my service,” saying that “whatever sum I might want, even to £2,000 he would immediately let me have,” and the English friends in whose home the proposal was made would be asked to inform certain bankers to advance the sum which the Maréchal would pay. After Rodney’s initial reluctance to accept such astonishing generosity, the Duc de Biron assured him in the hearing of the English guests present “that it was not a French gasconnade but an offer of pure friendship and regard,” that “all France was sensible of the services I had rendered my country and that the treatment they all knew I had received was a disgrace to the nation and to its ministers” and that the Maréchal would be extremely happy if he were allowed to make this proof of his “esteem and good will” in order that “I may leave Paris without being reproached.” The Frenchman’s offer was made in May, after the French alliance was concluded with the American rebels but before France’s actual declaration of war on Britain. Biron certainly knew that he was releasing a formidable opponent, for he was reproached by many of his countrymen for doing so when his intervention became known. It was on this occasion that he consulted the French Chef de Cabinet Maurepas, who thought the matter of no great consequence because naval combat in his opinion was “piff poff.” Biron also went to Versailles to ask the King’s permission to give Rodney his freedom. “Je vous envie d’avoir eu cette idée,” the King replied, according to Biron family records. “Elle est Française et digne de vous.” (I wish I had had your idea. It is French and worthy of you.) If it was French, it was perhaps a reflection of medieval chivalry in which fellow-knights felt joined by brotherhood in the transnational chivalric order and more obligated to each other than to any other loyalty.
The Duc de Biron belonged to the Gontaut-Lauzun family, one-time partisans of the usurper Henri Quatre of Navarre. An ancestor, Charles de Biron, was named Admiral and Marshal of France before he suffered the common fate of prominence too close to a King. On being accused of conspiracy and tried for treason, he was beheaded by order of the erratic monarch he served. The family nevertheless prospered in royal service and by Rodney’s time had acquired an excess of riches, judging by the startling expenditures of Biron’s nephew Armand Louis de Gontaut, born 1747, who took the title Duc de Lauzun. He is recorded as having bought a colonelcy for 1.5 million livres (then worth about $400,000). His mansion was the present Ritz Hotel. He spent 1,337 livres and 10 sous for half a box at the opera, 1,500 for half a box at the Théâtre des Italiens and the same for a box at the Comédie Française. In between theatrical distractions and keeping count of amours that seemed likely to match Leporello’s proud record for Don Giovanni in Spain of