The American flag has flown over the tomb of Brother and Marquis de Lafayette every day for about 180 years.

During the Nazi occupation of France in World War II, it was the only American Flag to wave in occupied Europe.

The body of Brother Lafayette is buried in soil that was brought from the United States of America, and rests in a tiny cemetery at Rue de Picpus 25 in Paris, France. Behind that snug little cemetery and “the flag that never came down,” there is an incredible story of a woman, Lafayette’s wife, Adrienne, who lovingly built the cemetery in 1800.

The tiny cemetery can veritably be described as one of the world’s most unusual burial grounds. Inside the small enclosure are the graves of the 1,306 beheaded victims of the French Revolution, and also that of the immortal, idealistic, French poet, Andre Chenier, about whom Umberto Giordano wrote a masterpiece opera that is still done today in Europe. For more than 180 years, two or more white-robed nuns have recited prayers in the cemetery convent, which was designed by Mme. Lafayette, 24 hours around the clock, in honor of the victims of the Reign of Terror in 1794.

General Lafayette died in 1834, and at the time the state of Virginia shipped to France the earth in which he was to be buried – so that Bro. Lafayette might lie eternally under American soil.

On July 4th every year, direct descendants of Brother Lafayette – who have had honorary American citizenship conferred on them by the U.S. Congress – proceed for official ceremonies to Lafayette’s grave, for which the U.S ambassador and his staff are in attendance.

Lafayette’s papers reveal a story that has yet been told about his remarkable wife, who died in 1807 and is buried alongside her husband.

As the daughter of the Duke d’ Ayen Noaille, Adrienne was a woman of nobility and at the high point of the Reign of Terror; she saw her mother, grandmother, and one of her sisters taken to the guillotine. Though she was scheduled to be the next victim, she was saved in the nick of time by the American minister in Paris and coincidentally, by the fall of Robespierre.

On the day she was freed from the French prison, after languishing three years in a cell, she took her two little daughters to join her husband, locked up in an Austrian dungeon. Although Brother Lafayette had been a Major General in Brother George Washington’s army and had served gallantly on many a battlefield [on one of which, Yorktown, he had played a key role], he had been imprisoned by the Austrian emperor when captured by Austria’s troops, which were part of a counter-revolutionary Allied Army.

With great difficulty, Adrienne managed an audience with the emperor, and although he flatly refused to liberate Brother Lafayette, he gave Adrienne permission to join her husband in his prison cell in Olmutz. Cooped up for two long years, the Lafayette’s shared a miserable life of hardship in the bare dungeon, which had neither a toilet nor water. The Lafayette’s were released after Napoleon’s victories over the Austrians.

Once back in Paris, Adrienne sought to find the hidden pit where the bodies of her family and the other guillotine victims had been buried. After she located the huge common grave, she conceived the idea of creating a memorial cemetery around the burial hole. Having built a new chapel on the site, she arranged for the walls that now enclose the Picpus Cemetery – which today may be visited by applying to the caretaker.

Adrienne died on Christmas Eve, 1807, after a remarkable self-sacrifice and devotion to her husband and family. Moments before she died, she whispered her last words to Bro. Lafayette – Je suis toute a vous!” [“I am completely yours!”] From that day on, until he died 27 years later, Brother Lafayette wore her locket, on which he had inscribed those five words. The locket is buried with him.

The sisters of the Order of the Sacred Heart and Perpetual Adoration, who occupy the convent that Adrienne built, and who has agreed to recite the prayers around the clock, eternally, offer the same prayer, one that Adrienne reportedly wrote on her deathbed. Today, when you visit the chapel, which is a few feet away from the Lafayette grave, you will see at least two nuns kneeling in prayer, reciting the following:

“Bestow upon them, O Lord, eternal tranquility and grant your forgiveness unto all those who did not know how to forgive.”

Source: The Philalethes Magazine, October 1984