Some of the cafés were very humble, some very expensive, but none were strictly fashionable. To be seen dining in such a place indicated that a man had no invitations to dinner, so the eighteen or twenty thousand fops who, curled and perfumed, went from house to house cared little for cafés. They ate like grasshoppers, through the welcome of one host on Monday and another on Tuesday, and so down the week, "knowing neither the price of meat nor of bread, and consuming not one-quarter of that which was set before them," while thousands went hungry—which is the reason that after a time the men in the cafés rose and took a terrible revenge. Paris was by no means all France, but whatever Paris did and felt the other towns were doing also; and slowly but surely the passions animating them would make their way to the loneliest peasant hut on the remotest edge of the kingdom.
Thus, while the nobles in their gardens still dreamed pleasantly of the power that was passing from them, the people were slowly rousing from torpor to resentment. It is well to linger over these conditions in order to understand fully all that Lafayette's acts meant in the society in which he moved. He was not one of the twenty thousand fops, but he belonged to the fortunate class to whom every door seemed open during the early years of the new reign. His military duties were agreeable and light, he had plenty of money, a charming wife, powerful family connections, and he was admitted to the inmost circle at court. If he had longings to experiment with the democratic theories set forth by radical authors like Rousseau, even that was not forbidden him. Their writings had attracted much attention and had already brought about increased liberality of manners. While the court at Versailles and the city of Paris were very distinct, Paris being only a huge town near at hand, the distance between them was but fourteen miles, and it was quite possible for young men like Lafayette to go visiting, so to speak, in circles not their own. Lafayette's friend, the Comte de Ségur, has left a picture of life as the young men of their circle knew it.
"Devoting all our time to society, fêtes, and pleasure, ... we enjoyed at one and the same time all the advantages we had inherited from our ancient institutions, and all the liberty permitted by new fashions. The one ministered to our vanity, the other to our love of pleasure. In our castles, among our peasants, our guards, and our bailiffs, we still exercised some vestiges of our ancient feudal power. At court and in the city we enjoyed all the distinctions of birth. In camp our illustrious names alone were enough to raise us to superior command, while at the same time we were at perfect liberty to mix unhindered and without ostentation with all our co-citizens and thus to taste the pleasures of plebeian equality. The short years of our springtime of life rolled by in a series of illusions—a kind of well-being which could have been ours, I think, at no other age of the world."
IV
AN UNRULY COURTIER
During the winter after Adrienne's marriage the Duchesse d'Ayen took her two daughters regularly to the balls given each week by the queen, and after the balls invited the friends of her sons-in-law to supper, in a pathetically conscientious effort to make the home of the De Noailles a more agreeable place for the husbands of her children than it had been for her own. Adrienne inherited much of her mother's seriousness, but she was young enough to enjoy dancing, and, feeling that duty as well as inclination smiled upon this life, she was very happy. In December of that year her first child was born, a daughter who was named Henriette.
Lafayette tells us in his Memoirs that he did not feel thoroughly at ease in the gay society Marie Antoinette drew about her. Nor did the queen altogether approve of him, because of his silence and an awkwardness which did not measure up to the standards of deportment she had set for this circle of intimate friends. "I was silent," he says, "because I did not hear anything which seemed worth repeating; and I certainly had no thoughts of my own worthy of being put into words." Some of his friends, who knew him better than the queen, realized that there was plenty of fire in him, in spite of his cold manner and slow speech. De Ségur was one of these, for at some period of his youth Lafayette, smitten with sudden and mistaken jealousy, had spent nearly an entire night trying to persuade De Ségur to fight a duel with him about a beauty for whom De Ségur did not care at all.
Adrienne's family, wishing to do their best by him, tried to secure a place for him in the household of the prince who afterward became Louis XVIII. Lafayette did not want to hurt their feelings; neither did he fancy himself in the rôle they had chosen for him, where he believed he would be forced to govern his actions by another man's opinions. He kept his own counsel,but, "in order to save his independence," managed to have the prince overhear a remark which he made with the deliberate purpose of angering him. The office was of course given to some one else, and another bit of ill will went to swell the breezes blowing over the terraces at Versailles.