Book Description

Excerpt from Madame De Lafayette and Her Family From the memoirs, real and fictitious, written in such profusion during the last days of Royal France, one is apt to form, in judging the character of the grande dame of that period, an erroneous estimate, and to forget that there existed other and nobler women than those celebrated for extravagance and intrigue: hundreds to whom the salons of Versailles were preferably terra incognita. Of this latter type was the wife of Lafayette. Aside from the prominent part she played, no woman of the Revolution possesses a more interesting personality than Adrienne de Noailles. "She was, wrote the Count de Segur, "a model of heroism. She was one of the few whose unsullied reputation received new lustre from the misfortunes of the Revolution." During the stormy days of the Terror the position of Mme. de Lafayette was one of extreme danger. Only the constant, frantic efforts of her friends and the repeated appeals of the American minister saved her from that tragic guillotine where, within the hour, mother, sister, and grandmother perished. Young and enthusiastic, she encouraged in Lafayette those republican tendencies which, bitterly opposed by their relatives, cost them at a later date so dearly. Stifling her heartache, she sped the husband on that hazardous voyage across distant seas to aid the great cause of liberty in far-off America - a land, as her quaint letters to Washington show, she always loved and longed to visit. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.