CHAPTER 1 An Ancient Family of Warriors From the time I was eight, I longed for glory. -Marquis de Lafayette1 MARIE JOSEPH PAUL YVES ROCH GILBERT DU MOTIER DE LA FAYETTE, the man we know as the Marquis de Lafayette, was born on September 6, 1757. He came into this world in an ornate bedchamber on the top floor of his family's eighteen-room, two-towered, fourteenth-century Normanesque stone castle known as the Chateau de Chavaniac. Surrounded by a moat, formal gardens, and ponds, the imposing chateau sits outside its namesake small village, Chavaniac-Lafayette, about 300 miles south of Paris in the mountainous Auvergne region of south-central France.2 Historians have traced Lafayette's venerable paternal line back to about the year 1000. Nearly all of the family's males made their mark fighting in France's wars, from the Crusades to the Seven Years' War, and many of them perished on the field of battle. One of the most honored of Lafayette's ancestors-one who did not die in battle-was Gilbert Motier de La Fayette. One of Gilbert de La Fayette's notable accomplishments during his long, distinguished military career was leading combined French and Scottish forces in defeating the English on March 21, 1421.

The site was the Battle of Baugé, near Angers in Normandy, during the Hundred Years' War. According to family lore, in that pivotal engagement, de La Fayette, whose motto was Cur non? ("Why not?"), had a hand in the killing of the first Duke of Clarence, the second son of England's King Henry V. France's King Charles VI honored Gilbert de La Fayette by naming him Marshal of France ( maréchal de france ) in 1421. He also is remembered for fighting at the side of the iconic French national heroine Joan of Arc at the famed 1428 siege of Orléans. The Motier de La Fayette family settled in Auvergne in the eleventh century. Lafayette's great-grandfather Charles, another illustrious military man, received the title of marquis for his valor on the battlefield. Charles's son Edouard purchased the Chateau de Chavaniac, which dated from the fourteenth century but had burned to the ground and was rebuilt beginning in the last years of the seventeenth century. Members of the La Fayette family were among Auvergne's most prominent citizens for generations.

However, none of them were well known on the French national stage or at the Versailles court. Edouard's son Gilbert, Lafayette's father, was a colonel in the French grenadiers. He died, along with thousands of other French soldiers, on August 1, 1759, at the Battle of Minden in Westphalia (in northern Germany) during the Seven Years' War. His older brother, Jacques-Roch, died in a 1733 battle in Austria, leaving the marquis title to the much-younger Gilbert. Lafayette's mother, Marie-Louise, was a member of the La Rivières, one of the oldest and most influential noble French families. 3 Lafayette's great-grandfather Charles-Ives-Thibault, the Comte de La Rivière, was a highly decorated lieutenant in the French royal army. He received the Grand Cross for exceptional merit of the Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis, the French king's highest military award. Until he retired in 1766, La Rivière was a captain-lieutenant and the commandant of the Black Musketeers, the Second Company of the Mousquetaires du Roi, the king's Musketeers.

The musketeers were the real-life personal bodyguards of the French kings, immortalized by the French novelist Alexandre Dumas in his famed 1844 story of four swashbuckling young men in the court of King Louis XIII. When Lafayette's father, Gilbert, married Marie-Louise-Julie de La Rivière, she had an extensive dowry, including properties in Brittany, along with an entrée into royal society in Versailles. Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, the couple's first child, was baptized at the small Catholic church near the family chateau. Neither his mother nor his father attended the ceremony. Marie-Louise was still recovering from giving birth; Gilbert was off fighting and, in fact, died before seeing his son. The death of Lafayette's father at the hands of the British-he was, Lafayette later wrote, "carried off by a ball from an English battery, commanded by a certain General Phillips"-had a strong impact on the young boy.4 Growing up, his grandmother repeatedly and forcefully reminded him that his father had been killed by the British. Lafayette lived the life of a pampered, doted-upon noble child at Chavaniac.

Following the death of his infant sister in 1760, Lafayette's mother spent long periods of time at the Versailles court and in Paris with her father and grandfather. The young Gilbert stayed home in Chavaniac, where he came under the tutelage of his grandmother and two aunts, and grew up in the company of his cousin Marie de Guèrin, a surrogate younger sister. He was the pampered young male heir-a handsome, red-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned boy who ran wild in the forests and along the village's streets, wooden sword in hand, playing war games with the peasant boys of the town. Gilbert and Marie's tutor, Abbé Fayon, spiced up his reading, writing, arithmetic, and language (French and Latin) lessons with tales of the exploits of the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix, who waged guerrilla war against Caesar's Roman legions in Auvergne. Fayon also recounted stories of the military triumphs of generations of Lafayette men. "It was natural that I grew up hearing many tales of war and glory in the family so closely tied to memories and sorrows associated with war," Lafayette later said.5 "From the time I was eight," he wrote in his memoirs, "I longed for glory. 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.

"6 The idyllic life ended at Chavaniac in 1768 when Lafayette, not yet twelve years old, submitted to his mother and great-grandfather's will and moved north to Paris. He was to live with them and with his maternal grandfather, the Comte de La Rivière, who was a widower as was Lafayette's great-grandfather. Lafayette's new home was a spacious suite of self-contained luxury apartments given to his great-grandfather by the king in the opulent Palais du Luxembourg on Paris's Left Bank in the Latin Quarter. It took a week for Lafayette's carriage to reach Paris, where he joined his mother and for the first time met his great-grandfather, his grandfather (Joseph-Yves-Thibauld-Hyacinthe, the Comte de La Rivière), and uncle (the Comte de Lusignem). The world of the young man who was the center of his small provincial universe abruptly changed. Although his tutor, Abbé Fayon, came with him to Paris, young Gilbert left behind the carefree, lord-of-the-manor existence at Chavaniac and faced life in France's largest city as a naïve, young, pampered boy from the provinces. It was soon decided that the boy would carry on family tradition and become a military man, something that Lafayette happily accepted. The first step was to enroll him in the Collège du Plessis, an exclusive school for children of the nobility.

Faculty from the nearby Sorbonne supervised the teaching at the Collège, where for four years Lafayette studied mathematics, history, geography, French literature, theology, law, and rhetoric. He also read the works of the later Roman Republic's poets and philosophers (including Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch) and Caesar's Commentaries, all in the original Latin. His Latin studies at the Collège included accounts of Vercingetorix's heroic defense of Lafayette's Auvergne homeland against the Romans in the first century BC, Something that cemented the boy's appreciation for the military exploits of his hometown hero. Lafayette later said that he "had a higher regard for Vercingetorix defending our mountains than for Clovis [who first united France] and his successors." He added that he "would much rather have been Vercingetorix defending the mountains of Auvergne."7 On April 3, 1770, tragedy struck when, after a brief illness, Lafayette's mother died at age thirty-two at Luxembourg Palace. Just three weeks later, his grief-stricken great-grandfather, the Comte de La Rivière, also died. With those deaths, the thirteen-year-old Lafayette inherited an enormous fortune.

Overnight he became one of the richest people in France, inheriting vast lands in Brittany and an income of 120,000 livres a year, roughly equivalent to more than a million of today's American dollars. Before he died, Lafayette's great-grandfather saw to it that the young boy enrolled in his old royal regiment, the Black Musketeers. And on April 9, 1771, six months before his fourteenth birthday and almost exactly one year after his mother and great-grandfather's deaths, Lafayette was commissioned a sous-lieutenant (the lowest officer rank). It was a largely ceremonial job, one that barely took him away from his studies. But the youthful lieutenant did get to take part in Black Musketeer activities such as marching in military reviews and parades and presenting himself in uniform at court in Versailles to King Louis XV. Through his connections at the court, Lafayette's great-grandfather arranged for the young teenager to marry into another immensely wealthy French.