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Updated: May 3, 2025
When revolutionists took possession of the Lafayette home in Chaviniac, they sought in every nook and cranny to find evidence that they would have been glad to use against these representatives of the nobility. Madame de Lafayette had carefully stuffed all the letters she could find into the maw of the immense old range in the castle kitchen.
Then there came into his mind the motto that he had since boyhood seen upon the shield of one of his famous ancestors in the castle at Chaviniac "Cur non," Why not? He adopted this motto for his own and placed it as a device upon his coat of arms, that it might be an encouragement to himself as well as an answer to the objections of others.
Never came opportunity more richly laden to the doorway of any youth. He chose to be a soldier. The double-barred doors of iron, the lofty, protected windows, the military pictures on the walls of his home all spoke to the Chaviniac child of warfare and conflict. There was the portrait of his father in cuirass and helmet. There were far-away ancestors in glistening armor and laced jackets.
The child first opened his eyes in a sorrowful home at the old Château Chaviniac, for word had come, only a month before, that Lafayette's father had been killed at the battle of Minden, leaving the young mother a widow. The boy, however, grew in strength with the years. Naturally, all was done that could be done to keep him in health.
During the summer before Lafayette's birth, his father, the young chevalier and colonel, not then twenty-five, had been living quietly in the Château Chaviniac. But a great conflict was going on the Seven Years' War was being waged. He heard the call of his country and he felt it his duty to respond.
Letters from his wife also made a strong appeal. A little child now brightened their home; yet the young husband and father must have reflected that his own father had left a young and beautiful wife; that the young soldier had torn himself away from his home and bride in Chaviniac, following the lure of arms, and had, but a few weeks before his own son's birth, rushed off to the battlefield where he ran the risk of returning no more.
Rows of lofty French windows are built across the upper part of the front, and the small, ungenerous doorway below has a line of portholes on either side that suggest a thought of warlike days gone by. This castle, built in the fourteenth century, is called the Château de Chaviniac de Lafayette.
The birth of Lafayette is recorded in the yellow and timeworn parish register of Chaviniac.
One day, in 1789, he was walking in the grand gallery of the Château de Chaviniac with a gentleman of the neighborhood. They spoke together of what the emancipation of the peasant would mean to the people of the Auvergne region. At that moment a group of peasants from his estate came in to offer Lafayette some nosegays and cheeses.
Other Auvergne estates were added to the Chaviniac acres as the years went by, some with old castles high up in the mountains behind Chaviniac, and all these were inherited by the father of America's famous champion. Lafayette's father was a notable warrior, as his father had been and his and his away back to the days of the Crusades.
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