Far off in Virginia, La Fayette lay at Richmond with a handful of men. Cornwallis made a dash for him and failed, marched back, burning and plundering, to the coast, received a confused tangle of orders, entered Yorktown and awaited the English fleet. Washington had heard how Grasse in the West Indies would sail with the French fleet; he marched southward to join the French commanders. With him was young Fersen, who for so long had not seen France and who was there volunteered for America; with him also was Rochambeau and all his men, and they hurried to victory together through the wet, heavy summer of 1781 along the Atlantic plain.
Meanwhile in Versailles nothing was toward. The Court had lost its old gaiety in the stress of the war and of the “economies.” The Queen awaited and implored a son. The Emperor, coming in July 1781 for the second time to a country he despised, “found much improvement,” was entertained at Trianon, and went away. It was August, hot, drowsy, and silent; it was September, and an intense anxiety for the birth—now at last, if it might be—of an heir.
And as that September passed, two things came into this strange life upon which so many varied things arose and joined darkly in their dates; each accident was quite unknown to the Queen.
The first was this, that the British fleet coming up to save Cornwallis found Grasse already within the bay, was beaten off, and with it the chance of succour; so that La Fayette and Washington meeting could and did, just as the month ended, lay siege.
The second was this: that up in the mountains of Alsace a lady, a friend, introduced a younger lady and a poor one to the notice of the Bishop of Strasburg. He was that coadjutor to the see, now succeeded to it, whom Marie Antoinette had seen as a child—the first to meet her in France after her crossing of the Rhine. He was now the Grand Almoner, and was spending the end of the hot season in his palace of Saverne. It was thus that the woman La Motte first touched her victim, the Cardinal de Rohan. And it so happened that the Cardinal de Rohan, who had been the first to greet the Queen on her passage of the Rhine as a child, now aspired to be her lover, or—as his fatuous misconception of her would have put it—“one of her lovers.” She for her part had resolutely avoided him. He was odious to her. Upon his ambition and credulity this woman La Motte was to play.
It had been upon April 25 that Cornwallis in the Carolinas had broken camp and started northward, to conquer and to hold the central seaports of the rebels as he had conquered and held Charlestown. On the 20th of May his two hundred miles were marched, and he had joined the troops in Virginia.
That march was not followed in Versailles—and even had it been followed, nothing would have been thought of its progress. The war had lingered so long, the issue had so dragged, that no chance could be foreseen, and the tangle of those wildernesses without roads, hardly with towns, was beyond European imagining. They knew that young La Fayette was still desolate somewhere there—they knew no more. Fersen—if more than his bright image came to her, if rumours of his letters home could come to her—must have given the woman who remembered him something of his own lassitude: cooped up as was that Swede in New England, without supplies, without money, cursing the Americans, telling the French Cabinet they were masters of folly, saying the Southern States were conquered by the British, and complaining with a Northern complaint of the indiscipline of the French. But there was greater business to engage attention at Versailles: the Queen was again with child; and Necker, failing at the vast financial tangle, had fallen.
Just as Cornwallis and the army in Virginia met to complete the war, Necker had been sent back from his command of the exchequer to those private and less reputable dealings with which the Puritan was more familiar and at which he was more successful than in the financing of a military nation. The Queen, who had not driven him forth at all, who would have had him remain, was blamed because she did not save him. The rising democratic opinion of Paris had already vaguely begun to favour Necker’s ineptitude: he was a foreigner; he had no faith (save the Genevese mask); but he was novel, he was a change—he was therefore demanded, and his dishonesty was not comprehended; yet that dishonesty was even then about to cost some price to the French State, for by his counsel and after his dismissal appeared that first sham Exchequer Statement to deceive the nation, to cajole it into a loan, to embitter it for the future; and the blame of the trick was to fall on the Crown and not on him, its author.