THE LITTLE MARQUISE: MADAME LAFAYETTE

At fourteen Adrienne d'Ayer became the wife of Gilbert Lafayette. Separate strands of episodes and incident record the story of this daughter of France who married an aristocrat, saw him off to fight with Washington, endured the mounting horrors of Paris in the French Revolution, and preserved the unity of her family through voluntary imprisonment in Austria. A record of rare devotion and a telling recreation of sacrifice with a shifting focus which embraces the glints of court chandeliers and the piled perfection of powdered wigs in the days before and after the French Revolution, when France was more in need of prisons than of schools. A lustrous and polished recreation of significant lives.