Lafayette

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Frederick Brown, Lafayette on Two Shores; At 19, in 1776, he purchased a merchant vessel, equipped it with cannon and sailed for America with 45 volunteers. Wall Street Journal, Oct 11, 2014
online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-marquis-by-laura-auricchio-1412972341
(book review on Laura Auricchio, The Marquis; Lafayette reconsidered. Knopf, 2014)

Excerpt in the window of print: “Lafayette extolled animal magnetism to George Washington as ‘a grand philosophical discovery.’

Note:
(a) “In 1824, at President James Monroe ’s invitation, Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, took a triumphal tour of America.”
(i) Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_du_Motier,_Marquis_de_Lafayette
(1757 – 1834; a key figure in the French Revolution of 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830; section 1 Early life; section 9 Grand tour of the United States)

two consecutive paragraphs from section 1:

“Lafayette's father, struck by a cannonball while fighting a British-led coalition at the Battle of Minden in Westphalia, died [in] 1759. Lafayette became marquis and Lord of Chavaniac, but the estate went to his mother. Devastated by the loss of her husband, she went to live in Paris with her father and grandfather. Lafayette was raised by his paternal grandmother, Mme de Chavaniac, who had brought the château [where Gilbert was born] into the family with her dowry.

“In 1768, when Lafayette was 11, he was summoned to Paris to live with his mother and great-grandfather at the comte's apartments in the Luxembourg Palace. The boy was sent to school at the Collège du Plessis (Lycée Louis-le-Grand), and it was decided that he would carry on the family martial tradition. The comte enrolled the boy in a program to train future Musketeers. Lafayette's mother and her grandfather died, on 3 and 24 April 1770 respectively

(ii) His name is also written this way: Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette, where Lafayette is the surname and “la” is the definite article
(A) The southern French surname Lafayette: “diminutive [thanks to ‘-ette’] of Lafaye, a topographic name for someone living near a beech tree or beech wood, from Old French fage, variant of fou ‘beech’ (Latin fagus)”
(B) Lafayette (etymology: French surname from Occitan, "the little beech tree")
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Lafayette

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(b) “Born in 1757, at the end of Louis XV ’s reign, he died in 1834, four years after the July Revolution, which brought a constitutional monarch to power in France. The family seat was a 14th-century castle ensconced in the mountainous Auvergne in south-central France—hundreds of miles from Versailles, to which so many nobles of ancient lineage had migrated under Louis XIV, abandoning their feudal domains for court life. Lafayette’s birthplace did not redound to his social advantage. Indeed, a mover and shaker coming out of ‘la France profonde’ was an eagle hatched in a crow’s nest. Lafayette made much of this anomaly in his posthumously published memoirs, as if to portray himself as a self-made man rather than a child of privilege. He had been ‘born poor,’ he wrote”
(i) Louis XV  (1710-1774; reign 1715-1774; Louis XVI was his oldest grandson, because his only surviving son died young, at age 36 (1729–1765).
(ii) Chavaniac-Lafayette
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavaniac-Lafayette
(a commune in the [present-day] Haute-Loire department; “The Château de Chavaniac [qv], located in the commune, was the birthplace of Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette in 1757. Originally named Chavaniac, the commune was renamed Chavaniac-Lafayette in 1884 in honor of its most famous resident")
(iii) The commune Chavaniac WAS in
Auvergne (province)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auvergne_%28province%29
(a historic province [no longer extant]; deriving its name from the Arverni, a Gallic tribe who once occupied the area; In 1790, the historical province was divided into the modern-day départements of Puy-de-Dôme, Cantal, Haute-Loire, and Allier)
(iv) redound (vi): “to have an effect for good or ill <new power alignments which may or may not redound to the faculty's benefit — GW Bonham>”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictinary/redound
(v) France profonde
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_profonde
(vi) French English dictionary
* profonde (adj): “feminine form of profond”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/profonde
* profond (adjective masculine; Latin profundus): “1: deep; 2: profound”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/profond

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(c) “Lafayette was just 2 years old when his father was killed. His mother moved to Paris, leaving him behind to be raised by his paternal grandmother. Images of Paris glittered in his head like fairy dust sprinkled on homespun.”

homespun (n): “cloth made at home or made of yarn spun at home”
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/homespun


(d) “Paris became real for Lafayette in 1767 [age 10], when his mother summoned him to be groomed for public office. Lafayette later wrote that his earliest ambition had been to win renown on the field of honor, but at the Collège du Plessis on the Rue Saint-Jacques, where he spent four years, the curriculum spoke to ideals of the Enlightenment rather than to those of the old military class.”
(i) Collège du Plessis
(A) The Encyclopaedia Britannica or Dictionary or Arts, Sciences, and General Literature. Vol XX!. 8th ed. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co (1853-1860), at page 447
books.google.com/books?id=0Dg_AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA447&lpg=PA447&dq=%22du+plessis%22+college+%22university+of+paris%22&source=bl&ots=CMhj0QnHnJ&sig=TUOGUE6QsABObov6IoWdwHjdA7Y&hl=en&sa=X&ei=mR87VOHrFPSUsQS-lYLQDw&ved=0CDsQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=%22du%20plessis%22%20college%20%22university%20of%20paris%22&f=true
(University of "Paris was the university in which collegiate establishments were first founded. * * * During the fourteenth century many new colleges were founded, the most celebrated of which were those of Navarre and Du [sic] Plessis. The former, which is said sometimes to have contained 700 pupils, was founded by Joanna, queen of Philip the Fair, in 1304; and the latter by Geoffroi du Plessis, apostolical secretary to Philip V, in 1322")
(B) University of Paris
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Paris
(section 2.4 Colleges: Thus were founded the colleges (colligere, to assemble); meaning not centers of instruction, but simple student boarding-houses)

* Latin English dictionary
* colligere: “present active infinitive of colligō”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/colligere
* colligō (v; con- +‎ legō “bring together, gather, collect”): “I gather, draw, bring or collect (together), assemble”

Lego
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego
(The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (born 7 April 1891), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932. In 1934, his company came to be called "Lego", from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means "play well")
(C)
* Plessis
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessis
(Plessis (Afrikaans: du Plessis) Plessy, and de Plessis are related surnames of French origin)
* The French surname Duplessis meant “someone who lived by a quickset fence, Old French pleis (from Latin plexum past participle of plectere ‘plait’, ‘weave’), with fused preposition and definite article du ‘from the.’ This is a Huguenot name, well established in South Africa and elsewhere.”
Dictionary of American Family Names, by Oxford University Press.
* quickset (n):
“(mainly British)
1: a live slip or cutting, as of hawthorn, planted with others to grow into a hedge
2: a hedge, as of hawthorn”
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/american/quickset
* hedge
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge
(section 6 Hedge types, section 6.1 Quickset hedge)
(ii) Rue Saint-Jacques
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rue_Saint-Jacques
(in French, literally "Saint James Street")
(iii) Not only is College du Plessis a constituent college of University of Paris, it is clustered with several other constituent colleges of the University.

Jean Plattard, The Life of Francois Rabelais. London: Frank Cass and Co, Ltd (1st ed 1930, new impression 1968), at page 86
books.google.com/books?id=kpk1WL4aPfwC&pg=PA86&lpg=PA86&dq=%22du+plessis%22+college+Sorbonne+Rue+Saint-Jacques&source=bl&ots=DkXkJMkSIF&sig=sI-CY1XFyGtfoP-Iwz3dgRwcNXg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6ik7VO6aK-_gsASHjIKwDQ&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22du%20plessis%22%20college%20Sorbonne%20Rue%20Saint-Jacques&f=false
Much more numerous were those colleges founded in the 13th and 14th centuries by churchmen and laymen, to house poor youths, who were thus spared the worries of material life for the duration of their studies. The most famous were * * * Navarre, with its seventy scholars, and in the great Rue Saint-Jacques, opposite the Collège du Plessis, the Collège de Sorbonne”)

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(e) “the young man [Lafayette] beheld George Washington as a hero in the mold of Cato and Fabius. And from high on his pedestal, Washington cast the shadow of Lafayette’s father, who had been killed in a war [Seven Years' War, 1754 or 1756--1763] with England that had cost France most of its North American territories. For Lafayette, the American Revolution presented an opportunity to avenge both France and father”

Cato the Elder
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_the_Elder
(234 BC – 149 BC; Cato was born in 234 BC, in the year before the first Consulship of Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus [qv])
(f) “by 1776 the ‘insurgents,’ as the revolutionaries were called, had become all the rage in Paris’s elite circles. When Benjamin Franklin [ambassador to France: 1776–1785] arrived in Paris, he was grandly received in the most fashionable salons.“

(g) “Two years later, after seeing combat at Brandywine and Barren Hill, he was back in France urging Louis XVI to send Washington a detachment of regulars. We know what role they played during the Siege of Yorktown, marching under the command of Gen. Rochambeau. Had Lafayette’s life been cut short by an English cannonball at Yorktown, as his father’s had been at Minden in 1759, there would still have been astonishingly rich material for a biography. But his life continued full tilt, and Ms. Auricchio gives us an excellent account of his causes and enthusiasms during the postwar period”
(i) Battle of Brandywine
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Brandywine
(also known as the Battle of Brandywine Creek; Sept 11, 1777; near Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania; Result  British victory)
(ii) Battle of Barren Hill
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Barren_Hill
(iii) Battle of Minden
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Minden
(at Minden, Prussia (now North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany))
(iv) Why can “enthusiasm”be in plural form?
(A) enthusiasm (n): "something inspiring zeal or fervor <his enthusiasms include sailing and fishing>"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/enthusiasm
(B) enthusiasm (n): "an object of keen interest"
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/enthusiasm

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(h)
(i) “Elected to the National Assembly in 1789, Lafayette embarked upon his parliamentary career as a reformer faithful to Mesmer’s creed. In the legislature he had prominent company, notably Jacques Brissot, a provincial lawyer * * * Nor were the powers-that-be in power any longer when Brissot mounted the scaffold in 1793.”
(A) Brissot mounted the scaffold in 1793 to execute “powers-that be.” But quickly he was guillotined.
(B) Jacques Pierre Brissot
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Pierre_Brissot
(1754-1793; section 1 Biography: “Following the arrest of King Louis XVI on charges of corruption, Brissot” opposed king’s execution; section 3 Arrest and execution)
(ii) “On Aug. 19, 1792, he fled to the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium today), officially accused of ‘plotting against liberty and of treason against the nation.’ Austria and Prussia, delighted to have an illustrious revolutionary in their grasp, thereupon shuttled him from one prison fortress to another. Washington, torn between gratitude to a courageous veteran of America’s Revolutionary War and fear of European embroilments, did nothing to honor Lafayette’s petition for asylum. And so he languished in solitary confinement until 1795, when Adrienne de Lafayette, having narrowly escaped the guillotine (unlike her grandmother, mother and sister), insisted on joining him in prison. His wife’s superb gift of self may have done more than anything else to rescue Lafayette from oblivion. Poems were written about it. Images were engraved. Sympathy was universal. Washington asked Emperor Franz II to free Lafayette in the name of humanity. It was 1797 before the marquis and his wife regained their freedom. He had reached the age of 40 and would live another 37 years.”
(A) Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_du_Motier,_Marquis_de_Lafayette
(section 6 Prisoner)
(B) “gift of self” or “making a gift of self” is just plain meaning, without need to explain.
(iii) “After the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy [Louis XVIII (younger brother of Louis XI; 1755-1824; reign 1814-1815; 1815-1824)], Lafayette was elected to the Chamber of Deputies and served in it, advocating liberal causes until Charles X abolished the legislature. Back to the farm he went. During the Revolution of 1830, Paris beckoned. Like Cincinnatus leaving his plow, he became once again, at 73, Commander of the National Guard. His brief association with King Louis-Philippe resulted in another disillusioned withdrawal from public life.”
(A) “After the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy”

Louis XVIII of France
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XVIII_of_France
(younger brother of Louis XVI; 1755-1824; reign 1814-1815; 1815-1824; Louis had no children; therefore, upon his death, the crown passed to his brother, Charles [altogether there were three brothers, all becoming kings])
(B) Charles X of France
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_X_of_France
(1757 – 1836; reign 1824-1830; “His rule of almost six years ended in the July Revolution of 1830, which resulted in his abdication and the election of Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans, as King of the French. Exiled once again, Charles died in Gorizia, then part of the Austrian Empire”)