An 18th Century Marriage

ADRIENNE: THE LIFE OF THE MARQUISE DE LA FAYETTE (482 pp.)--Andre Mourois--McGraw-Hill ($7.95).

The 16-year-old bridegroom was already dreaming of cutting a swath through battlefield and boudoir. The 14-year-old bride thought only of venerating church, husband and home. On April 11, 1774, as arranged by two of France's first families, Gilbert Motier de La Fayette married Adrienne d'Ayen. The bride had barely left the altar when she was forced to begin a lifelong struggle to preserve her marriage to the soldier who became a hero of the American Revolution, a prime mover of the French Revolution, and a roving gallant who collected mistresses like medals.

Little was known of the wifely woes of Adrienne de La Fayette until 1955, when a store of her letters and mementos was found in a stone tower of La Grange, one of the family estates outside Paris. Using this untapped source material and other fresh documents collected by La Fayette's descendants, Veteran Biographer Andre Maurois (Protist, Disraeli, Dickens] has described the virtuous Adrienne in tones of solemn wonder. Adrienne's sole fault was that she was almost too good to be true--and certainly was much too good to be interesting for 482 pages. But Old Master Maurois, 76, wisely lets La Fayette dominate great stretches of the book, just as he dominated much of Adrienne's life. The result is not only a glimpse of history as seen from a much neglected boudoir, but a study of matrimony in an age when marriage was sealed by God or society (depending on one's religious feelings) but had very little to do with love.

Reform & Rebellion. When word came of revolt in the American Colonies, the idealistic La Fayette got himself appointed a major general in the Revolutionary forces and, without bothering to send word to the pregnant Adrienne, set sail to bring freedom to North America. Five years later, he returned a hero, and Adrienne was so overcome that she fainted at their reunion. Scarcely pausing to bring her round, he eagerly went into politics, called for a constitutional monarchy, and hung the U.S. Bill of Rights on his wall with an empty frame beside it, explaining to visitors: "It is intended to contain a similar document for France." On July 11, 1789, La Fayette tried to fill the frame by presenting to the States-General his radical Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens. But the Revolution quickly became too violent and ugly for his aristocratic reformer's views, and La Fayette was forced to flee France, leaving Adrienne and their three children behind to fend for themselves.

Eventually he was taken captive by the nations allied against France, and imprisoned at Olmuetz in Austria. Now began Adrienne's real struggle. The revolutionary regime confiscated most of the family property; her sister, mother and grandmother died under the guillotine. Adrienne herself was saved only by the intervention of U.S. Minister Gouverneur Morris, who warned that her death would anger the U.S. With the help of a later U.S. envoy, James Monroe, Adrienne was finally released from her French prison and promptly set out to join her husband in his Austrian one. She collected her two daughters (her son, George Washington de La Fayette, had been sent to the U.S.), argued approval out of Austrian Emperor Francis II, and eventually marched through the jail door to join an astonished and emaciated La Fayette.

Once in jail, Adrienne's next move was to get herself and her family out again. She sent dozens of pleas to officials and obligingly wrote La Fayette's old mistresses about his troubles. Somehow she managed to get back to France herself to lead the fight for La Fayette's return. In the end, she forged a passport for her husband, got him into the country, and then persuaded Napoleon to let the old firebrand stay. She thereupon took on the job of rebuilding the family fortune--and being polite to La Fayette's newest muddle of mistresses.

Wave of Honey. To judge from her portraits, she was handsome rather than beautiful and, from her letters, commonsensical rather than brilliant; she certainly had none of the literary sex appeal that marked her contemporaries, Madame Recamier and Madame de Stael. She was nevertheless remarkable for her courage and dogged devotion to her husband; as a patrician and a thoroughly unemancipated woman, she never felt released either from wifely duty or wifely affection simply because her husband was a confirmed philanderer. In fact, as Biographer Maurois tells it, in a somewhat simpering, grandfatherly style, Adrienne was so relentlessly virtuous that it sometimes seems as if La Fayette simply had to seek out other women in order to keep from being drowned in a wave of honey.

But he appears to have had no complaints, and was probably genuinely devoted to her--proving once again that, in certain cases, love has nothing to do with fidelity. One day in 1807, Adrienne de La Fayette was seized by a high fever. "I am going to die," she told her husband. "Have you any grudge against me?"

La Fayette answered: "What grudge could I have, my dearest? You have always been so sweet, so good."

"So I have been a pleasant companion for you?"

"Indeed you have."

"Then bless me."

La Fayette was shattered by her death. "Her tenderness, her goodness and generosity charmed and embellished my life and made of it an honorable thing," he wrote a friend. "I came to be so used to all she meant to me that I could not draw a line of distinction between her existence and my own." Until his own death in 1834. the repentant La Fayette spent 15 minutes a day in prayer over a lock of Adrienne's hair.

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