Adrienne de Noailles : Apartments

Situated on the noble floor, behind the façade overlooking the East entrance, this salon, also called Chavaniac’s green study, was a room to receive all of society.

The furniture is finished off with a canapé, five armchairs and two chairs from the Louis XIV period. All the pieces are covered with a toile de Jouy bearing motifs from the “four seasons,” which will certainly remind you of what you have just seen in the Lafayette chambre natale. At your feet, you will observe a magnificent “Versailles” parquet floor dating back to the 18th Century, in which four types of wood are combined: Oak, sycamore, walnut and ash.

The wallpaper panels

Wallpaper began to be established in France in the 1770s, several decades after England. From the 1780s to the end of the 18th Century, young French manufacturers successfully introduced hundreds of arabesque motifs into the market.
The designers imitated and reinterpreted, though without copying, the models by the painter Raphael, illustrated works on the antiquity and ornamentalist plates. There, they introduced motifs in fashion at the time, such as flowers, birds, insects, people and mythical animals.

We can count 14: Observe 4 decorated lintels, 4 pilasters, 4 bird panels and 2 figure panels. Installed here at the beginning of the 20th Century, these panels were nevertheless created around 1790 in Paris by the “Manufacture Réveillon.” They bear witness to a décor that became very much the fashion at the end of the 18th Century.

We find wallpaper panels all over the map in Europe, often in castles and manors. In France, their presence is recorded in about twenty châteaux, including the Chavaniac-Lafayette château.

Adrienne de Noailles, marchioness de Lafayette.

Adrienne, dignified as well as courageous and sublime… nevertheless remains poorly known. Hence, we suggest that you get to know this character.

She was born on the 2nd November 1759 in Paris, her parents being Henriette d’Aguesseau and Jean de Noailles, Duke of Ayen. She spent her youth at the Hôtel de Noailles in the company of her four sisters. Adrienne asserted herself as a believing and practicing Catholic.

At the age of 14, she married the young Marquis de Lafayette, aged 16, orphan and heir to the immense fortune of his maternal grandfather, the Marquis de la Rivière. It was an arranged marriage, but from the first days of her marital life, Adrienne held a lively and tender sentiment for her husband who was also her hero. She soon discovered flaws that her imagination converted into virtues.

Often left alone by her husband who was to become the Hero of Two Worlds, she suffered in her dignity as a woman. However, she went on to manage the couples’ property and businesses, both those of the de Lafayettes and those of the de Noailles, in Auvergne, Brittany, Berry, Touraine, Paris, Guyana, and America. Adrienne watched over the political and private interests of the General Marquis, while facing with courage and determination the very difficult hours of the Revolution.

When she left prison in January 1795, her first wish was to join her husband and two daughters, to share their captivity in the Olmutz fortress in Austria.
Weakened by the years of captivity and sick, Adrienne died in Paris in December 1807. She was just 48 years old. According to her wish, she was buried in the Picpus cemetery, near the communal grave where her family was laid to rest. She wished that the chosen grave would enable her husband to be near her. Thus the Marquis de Lafayette was buried there in May 1834.