To a friend he said in after years: “You ask me at what period I first experienced my ardent love for liberty and glory. I recollect no time of life anterior to my enthusiasm for anecdotes of glorious deeds, and to my projects of travelling over the world to acquire fame. At eight years of age my heart beat when I heard of a wolf that had done some injury, and caused still more alarm in our neighborhood, and the hope of meeting it was the object of all my walks. When I arrived at college, nothing ever interrupted my studies except my ardent wish to study without restraint. I never deserved to be chastised, but, in spite of my usual gentleness, it would have been dangerous to attempt to do so. I recollect with pleasure that, when I was to describe in rhetoric a perfect courser, I sacrificed the hope of obtaining a prize, and described the one which, on perceiving the whip, threw his rider.
“Republican anecdotes always delighted me, and when my new connections wished to obtain for me a place at court, I did not hesitate displeasing them to preserve my independence.”
CHÂTEAU OF CHAVANIAC.—LAFAYETTE’S BIRTHPLACE.
At the age of twelve years La Fayette was entered at the college of Louis le Grand, in Paris, where he zealously pursued his studies. In Latin and Greek classics he became especially proficient. Owing to his high rank his literary pursuits were subject to frequent interruptions, for he early gained the attention of royalty, and the gay French court was very alluring to a youth passionately fond of brilliant society. However, his love for study and his enthusiasm for the military calling prevented his becoming a courtier. By the death of his mother in 1770, and of his grandfather a short time after, he became possessed of great wealth, which, being entirely at his own control, surrounded him with a crowd of fawning flatterers. At the age of fifteen he became a page to Queen Marie Antoinette, and was enrolled a member of the Mousquetaires du Roi, the body-guard of the king, which was composed solely of the descendants of the most highly titled families in France. Through the influence of the queen, he was promoted to the rank of a commissioned officer in this corps. Speaking of which, he said “that his military services only interrupted his studies on review days.”
At the age of sixteen La Fayette was married to the Comtesse de Noailles, daughter of the Duke d’Ayen. Madame de La Fayette herself gives the following account of her somewhat strange wooing.
“I was scarcely twelve years old, when M. de La Fayette was proposed to my mother for one of us. He himself was only fourteen. His extreme youth, no parents to guide him,—having lost all his near relatives, and having no one in whom he could repose confidence,—a large fortune already in his possession, which my mother looked upon as a dangerous gift—all these considerations made her at first refuse him, notwithstanding the good opinion she had acquired of his personal qualities. She persisted several months in her refusal; but my father was not discouraged, and as one of his friends observed to him that my mother had gone too far ever to change her mind, he did justice to her straightforwardness in the midst of his anger against her. ‘You do not know Madame d’Ayen,’ he said; ‘however far she may have gone, you will see that she will give way like a child if you prove to her that she is in the wrong; but, on the other hand, she will never yield if she does not see her mistake.’
“Accordingly, when she was told that her daughter would not leave her during the first years of her marriage, and that it would only be celebrated at the end of two years, after M. de La Fayette had finished his education, she accepted him whom she cherished ever after as the most tenderly beloved son, whom she valued from the first moment that she became acquainted with him, and who alone could have sustained the strength of my heart after having lost her.
“It was some time after my mother’s consent that I was spoken to of M. de La Fayette, towards whom I was already attracted by feeble forerunners of that deep and tender affection which every day has united us more and more in the midst of all the vicissitudes of this life, in the midst of the blessings and misfortunes which have filled it for the last twenty-four years.
“With what pleasures I learned that, for more than a year, my mother had looked upon him and loved him as a son! She told me all the good she had heard with regard to him, all she thought of him herself, and I saw that he already felt for her that filial affection which was to be the blessing of my life. She tried to calm my poor weak brain, which was over-excited by the importance of the coming event. She taught me to pray—she prayed herself—for the blessings of Heaven on my future happiness. As I had the happiness of remaining with her, my only feelings were those of deep emotion. I was then fourteen and a half.”