My sisters cowered, but I argued, “If we are disobedient, it is because you let us question. When we grow older, you will find us more obedient than other daughters because we will have come to understand the reasons for your commands.”
Maman liked my answer, and I drank in her approbation like a holy elixir, for my sisters and I loved our mother with passionate devotion—as if, by silent conspiracy, we could somehow compensate for the one unhappy fact of our lives: that our father did not love our mother at all.
Our father, Jean de Noailles, the duc d’Ayen—commander of the king’s guard—had little patience for his wife’s independence of mind. Thus, they went on as most married nobles in France did then, living separate lives. He with a mistress, court life, and scientific pursuits. She with books, religion, and domestic duties.
I had been given little reason to believe my own marriage would be different. And, on the day of my wedding, my father reminded me, “Marriage, Adrienne, above all, is a duty to your family.” My most important duty. So believed my father, a man with five daughters who needed sons. Since he could no longer get sons upon my mother—who had been viciously ravaged by smallpox—he’d set out to procure sons-in-law, entering into negotiations for my marriage before I turned twelve.
I was fourteen now. And on this, my wedding day, I hungered desperately for my father’s affection, or even a show of approval. Yet in preparing to give me in marriage, he did not smile like a sentimental patriarch. No, the duc d’Ayen’s dark gaze swept over my bridal attire like I was one of his guards on inspection. My gown was a heavy silver brocade that shimmered like moonlight, the sleeves dripping fine lace. Glittering diamonds had been sewn into the bodice, and from my ears dangled more diamonds, these the size of quail eggs, for no expense had been spared.
My stays were pulled tight, my hair perfumed with pomatum, my locks ruthlessly teased and pinned. Then I’d been powdered just short of asphyxiation. All this met my father’s standards, but my eager smile must have disconcerted him, for he said, “I bid you again to remember, the purpose of marriage is not romantic love.”
Not its purpose, perhaps; I knew my groom had been chosen primarily for his immense fortune and presumed virility, yet, quite happily, I was still young enough to believe love could be found under the careful watch of chaperones, in shy blushing smiles, halting conversation, and the agreeable pattern of freckles on my betrothed’s nose.
That was enough to make my wedding day welcome to me.
No doubt, my buoyant mood made my father wish to pull me back to earth. “Royals are in attendance and we cannot afford a single misstep.”
“Yes, Father,” I said, though I knew it was not my manners that worried him, for in our family, the gestures of a courtier were as natural as breathing. I knew how to behave because I was of the Noailles.
But my groom was a Lafayette.
Oh, the Lafayettes boasted distinguished persons in their line, but as provincial nobility with a crumbling castle in the mountains, they had no standing with the king. By contrast, my family was high in favor, filling at least a hundred royal offices. In Versailles, we had a home merely steps from the palace gates, and we boasted that in the city of Paris itself, the Hôtel de Noailles had room enough for the king to stable an entire regiment of his cavalry, then hunt fox without ever leaving the walls of our estate. Hence, in the course of ordinary events, a boy like Gilbert du Motier, the last of the Lafayettes, would never have been considered a worthy candidate for my hand. We would not have been matched but for a calamitous series of tragic deaths in his family that orphaned him and left him wealthy, making him a candidate for my hand, because my father believed the sixteen-year-old could be taken into our family and molded. “Lafayette’s edges are rough,” my father said. “Still, edges can be filed down. He can be made into a Noailles, and it will be your task to shape him.”
“Yes, Father,” I said again, my head bowed with the weight of the only responsibility ever given to me. A responsibility I took to heart, for I still wished to make my father love me as if I’d been born a boy, capable of bringing glory to our family name.
It was for the same reason I had long ago stopped asking why.
Alas, thinking back upon the days of endless social and ceremonial visits leading up to our wedding, I couldn’t think of anything about my intended groom that I would shape differently. In young Lafayette, my father saw a timid, bookish provincial lad, seemingly incapable of witty repartee. Yet I saw a freckled boy with wild red hair, whose guileless nature seemed true purity of heart—a heart I wanted for my own.
Thus, I was glad to hear the organ music that finally signaled my wedding in the family chapel. My father led me up the candlelit aisle past rows of bejeweled friends, rivals, and relations. My sisters beamed and Maman wept happy tears, but my eyes were all for Gilbert du Motier, where he stood in blue silk, the braided loop of an officer in the king’s musketeers upon one shoulder. My groom took my hands, then the priest recited the words before an altar perfumed by burning incense, and we whispered our vows. At last, the orphaned boy slipped a ring upon my finger and lifted my veil for a kiss so fleeting that I pressed my fingertips to the spot, as if to hold it there.
At the feast, the groom and I sat together in tall gilded chairs upon a festooned dais in the banquet hall whilst liveried servants brought gleaming silver platters with food in endless variety. Sugar-dusted pastries, steaming turtle soup, pureed asparagus, lettuces, snails, pâtés. Heaps of mussels, baked fish, sauced chicken. Sizzling beef, mint-laced mutton, a fat pheasant decorated with its tail feathers, medallions of veal on a bed of greens, and a roasted boar with an apple in its mouth. Then came the parade of pigeon eggs, pigeon bisque, pigeon pie, pigeon au gratin, pigeon in wine, and pigeon stuffed with songbird. All to be followed by silvered cakes and marzipan dusted with gold . . .
It was a display of Noailles wealth, though my father thought it best that the bride and groom peck only at bits of bread and not partake in the excess until later, lest we spill a drop of soup or let a fork clatter in company.
In the roar of boasting lords and flirting ladies, my eyes began to weary, and beside me, my groom’s fingers tapped an impatient dance on the arm of his chair. It was unseemly to fidget under the scrutiny of so many guests, any of whom might gossip about irregularity in our conduct. Remembering it was my task to smooth my groom’s rough edges, I attempted to still young Lafayette’s drumming fingers with my own. And in complaint, he whispered, “Now I have lost count of how many ways pigeon can be served.”
I sputtered a laugh, hiding it behind my napkin.
His knee bouncing with pent-up energy, he went on. “We raise pigeons in Chavaniac too. We fatten them up in a dovecote up high, just as we are kept on this dais.”
A strange comparison, considering our spare plates. “We are not being fattened . . .”
“Yet I feel as if we are on the menu.”