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Born into an illustrious family in 1757, Lafayette bore a baptismal name of stupefying grandeur: Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette. “I was baptized like a Spaniard,” he wrote, “with the name of every conceivable saint who might offer me more protection in battle.”62 When he was only two, his father was cut down by a British cannon. This untimely loss and his upbringing on a vast estate in central France bred dreams of military honor: “I remember nothing of my childhood more than my fervor for tales of glory and my plans to travel the world in quest of fame.”63 When he was twelve, his mother died, leaving the orphan with a huge inheritance and relatives sprinkled throughout the French aristocracy. He attended an exclusive riding school at Versailles, socializing with the king’s grand-sons and mingling with grandees. At age sixteen, he married fourteen-year-old Adrienne de Noailles, thereby attaching himself to one of France’s noblest families; the marriage contract was signed by King Louis XV himself. Lafayette joined a Masonic military lodge and captained the Noailles Dragoons. He and his young bride became habitués of the masked balls and banquets hosted by Louis XVI and his foreign bride, Marie-Antoinette. Finding Versailles pretentious and decadent, Lafayette was convinced that he lacked the social talents to thrive there as a courtier: “My awkward manner made it impossible for me to bend to the graces of the court or to the charms of a supper in the capital.”64 So gauche was he that when he once danced with Marie-Antoinette, the queen threw back her head and laughed at him outright.
Perhaps Lafayette was searching for some escape when he attended a dinner in 1775 and heard rousing tales of the American independence movement: “When I first heard of [the colonists’] quarrel, my heart was enlisted, and I thought only of joining my colors to those of the revolutionaries.”65 He was then in a military camp at Metz, and Adrienne was pregnant with their first child, but he began to plot a path to North America. In April 1777 Lafayette, only nineteen, took charge of a cargo boat named La Victoire, stocked it with food and munitions, and secretly set sail in defiance of a royal order. The beau monde of Paris was electrified by this quixotic deed, and Voltaire knelt before Adrienne in homage to her husband. On the voyage, between bouts of seasickness, Lafayette brushed up on his English and studied military strategy. Already intoxicated with revolutionary rhetoric, he wrote to his wife, “The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind.”66
In June Lafayette landed in South Carolina and viewed this new land through rose-colored glasses. “What charms me here is that all the citizens are brothers,” he told his wife. “In America there are no paupers, or even the sort of people we call peasants.”67 Armed with a letter from Benjamin Franklin, the starry-eyed young nobleman went straight to Philadelphia and met John Hancock. In his letter Franklin recommended that the well-connected Lafayette be coddled and shielded from danger, expressing hope that “his bravery and ardent desire to distinguish himself will be a little restrained by . . . prudence, so as not to permit his being hazarded much but on some important occasion.”68 Lafayette was so young that his friends wanted to send him money via Washington, who would then dole it out like an allowance. Heeding Franklin’s advice, Congress found a way both to flatter and to constrain Lafayette: he would enjoy the rank of major general, with the caveat that the title was strictly honorary.
Washington first met Lafayette at the City Tavern in Philadelphia on the evening of July 31, 1777. On the spot the young man, already decked out in a major general’s sash, was awestruck. “Although [Washington] was surrounded by officers and citizens,” Lafayette wrote home, “the majesty of his figure and his height were unmistakable.”69