In the summer of 1777 during the American Revolutionary War, a nineteen-year-old Continental Army captain from Virginia met a twenty-year-old French aristocrat, recently commissioned a major general by Congress. The two became fast friends, experiencing combat at Brandywine, getting better acquainted during the Valley Forge winter, and each playing a heroic role at Monmouth Court House. Over the next five decades, the lives of these two patriots intersected during revolutions, war, and political intrigue. Years of separation only tightened the bond between them, including the heroic meeting between their courageous wives during the last violent days of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, when the two ladies took part in an event Charles Dickens could not have dreamed up.