XXV
VOLUNTEERS IN MISFORTUNE

His master had need of all Felix's cheer to help him bear up against the anxiety that grew with each bit of news from France, and grew greater still because of the absence of news from those he loved best. For the first seven months he heard not a word from wife and children, though soon after his capture he learned about the early days of September in Paris, when the barriers had been closed and houses were searched and prisons "purged" of those suspected of sympathy with the aristocracy. Since then he had heard from his wife; but he had also learned of the trial and death of the king; and rumors had come to him of the Terror. Adrienne's steadfastness had been demonstrated to him through all the years of their married life. Where principle was involved he knew she would not falter; and he had little hope that she could have escaped imprisonment or a worse fate. He had heard absolutely nothing from her now for eighteen months. His captivity has been called "a night five years long," and this was its darkest hour.

Then one day, without the least previous warning, the bolts and bars of his cell creaked at an unusual hour; they were pushed back—and he looked into the faces of his wife and daughters. The authorities broke in upon the first instant of incredulous recognition to search their new charges; possessed themselves of their purses and the three silver forks in their modest luggage, and disappeared. The complaining bolts slid into place once more and a new prison routine began, difficult to bear in spite of the companionship, when he saw unnecessary hardships press cruelly upon these devoted women. Bit by bit he learned what had happened in the outside world: events of national importance of which he had not heard in his dungeon, and also little incidents that touched only his personal history; for instance, the ceremonies with which the Commune publicly broke the mold for the Lafayette medal, and how the mob had howled around his Paris house, clamoring to tear it down and raise a "column of infamy" in its place. He forbore to ask questions at first, knowing how tragic the tale must be, and it was only after the girls had been led away that first night and locked into the cell where they were to sleep that he learned of the grief that had come to Adrienne about a week before the Terror came to an end—the execution on a single day of her mother, her grandmother, and her beloved sister Louise.

In time he learned all the details of her own story: the months she had been under parole at Chavaniac, where through the kind offices of Gouverneur Morris she received at last the letter from her husband telling her that he was well. Her one desire had been to join him, but there was the old aunt to be provided for, and there were also pressing debts to settle; a difficult matter after Lafayette's property was confiscated and sold. Mr. Morris lent her the necessary money, assuring her that if she could not repay it Americans would willingly assume it as part of the far larger debt their country owed her husband.

She asked to be released from her parole in order to go into Germany to share his prison. Instead she had been cast into prison on her own account. The children's tutor, M. de Frestel, who had been their father's tutor before them, conspired with the servants and sold their bits of valuables that she might make the journey to prison in greater comfort. He contrived, too, that the mother might see her children before she was taken off to Paris, and she made them promise, in the event of her death, to make every effort to rejoin their father. In Paris she lived through many months of prison horror, confined part of the time in the old Collège Du Plessis where Lafayette had spent his boyhood, seeing every morning victims carried forth to their death and expecting every day to be ordered to mount into the tumbrels with them. Had she known it, she was inquired for every morning at the prison door by a faithful maidservant, who in this way kept her children informed of her fate. George was in England with his tutor. At Chavaniac the little girls were being fed by the peasants, as was the old aunt, for the manor-house had been sold and the old lady had been allowed to buy back literally nothing except her own bed.

At last Robespierre himself died under the guillotine and toward the end of September, 1794, a less bloodthirsty committee visited the prisons to decide the fate of their inmates. Adrienne Lafayette was the last to be examined at Du Plessis. Her husband was so hated that no one dared speak her name. She pronounced it clearly and proudly as she had spoken and written it ever since misfortune came upon her. It was decided that the wife of so great a criminal must be judged by higher authority; meanwhile she was to be kept under lock and key. James Monroe, who was now American minister to Paris, interceded for her, but she was only transferred to another prison. Here a worthy priest, disguised as a carpenter, came to her to tell her how on a day in July the three women dearest to her had been beheaded, and how he, running beside the tumbrel through the storm that drenched them on their way to execution, had been able, at no small risk to himself, to offer them secretly the consolations of religion.

Finally in January, 1795, largely through the efforts of Mr. Monroe, she was released. Her first care was to make a visit of thanks to Mr. Monroe and to ask him to continue his kindness by obtaining a passport for herself and her girls so that they might seek out her husband. George was to be sent to America, for she felt sure that his father, if still alive, would desire him to be there for a time under the care of Washington, and, if he had perished in prison, would have wished his son to grow up an American citizen.

Getting the passport proved a long and difficult undertaking. When issued it was to permit Madame Motier of Hartford, Connecticut, and her two daughters to return to America. It was necessary to begin the journey in accordance with this, and they embarked at Dunkirk on a small American vessel bound for Hamburg. There they left the ship and went to Vienna on another passport, but still as the American family named Motier. In Vienna the American family hid itself very effectively through the help of old friends, and Adrienne contrived to be received by the emperor himself, quite unknown to his ministers. His manner to her and her girls was so gracious that she came away "in an ecstasy of joy," though he told her he could not release the prisoner. She was so sure her husband was well treated and so jubilant over the emperor's permission to write directly to him if she had reason to complain, that she was not at all cast down by the warnings and evident unfriendliness of the prime minister and the minister of war with whom she next sought interviews.

Leaving Vienna by carriage, she and her daughters traveled all one day and part of the next northward into the rugged Carpathian country before an interested postboy pointed out the steeples and towers of Olmütz. Once in the town, they drove straight to the house of the commandant, who took good care not to expose his heart to pity by seeing these women, but sent the officer in charge of the prison to open its doors and admit them to its cold welcome.

The room in which they found Lafayette did well enough in point of size and of furnishings. It was a vaulted stone chamber facing south, twenty-four feet long, fifteen wide, and twelve high. Light entered by means of a fairly large window shut at the top with a padlock, but which could be opened at the bottom, where it was protected by a double iron grating. The furnishings consisted of a bed, a table, chairs, a chest of drawers, and a stove; and this room opened into another of equal size which served as an antechamber. The vileness consisted in the sights and smells outside the window and the dirt within.

The routine that began when the door of this room opened so unexpectedly to admit Lafayette's wife and daughters continued for almost two years. Madame Lafayette described it in a letter to her aunt, Madame de Tessé, an exile in Holstein, with whom she and her girls spent a few days after leaving the ship at Hamburg. "At last, my dear aunt, I can write you secretly. Friends risk their liberty, their life, to transmit our letters and will charge themselves with this one for you.... Thanks to your good advice, dear aunt, I took the sole means of reaching here. If I had been announced I would never have succeeded in entering the domains of the emperor.... Do you wish details of our present life? They bring our breakfast at eight o'clock in the morning, after which I am locked with the girls until noon. We are reunited for dinner, and though our jailers enter twice to remove the dishes and bring in our supper, we remain together until they come at eight o'clock to take my daughters back to their cage. The keys are carried each time to the commandant and shut up with absurd precautions. They pay, with my money, the expenses of all three, and we have enough to eat, but it is inexpressibly dirty.

"The physician, who does not understand a word of French, is brought to us by an officer when we have need of him. We like him. M. de Lafayette, in the presence of the officer, who understands Latin, speaks with him in that language and translates for us. When this officer, a huge corporal of a jailer, who does not dare to speak to us himself without witnesses, comes with his great trousseau of keys in his hand to unpadlock our doors, while the whole guard is drawn up outside in the corridor and the entrance to our rooms is half opened by two sentinels, you would laugh to see our two girls, one blushing to her ears, the other with a manner now proud, now comic, passing under their crossed sabers; after which the doors of our cells at once close. What is not pleasant is that the little court on the same level with the corridor is the scene of frequent punishment of the soldiers, who are there beaten with whips, and we hear the horrible music. It is a great cause of thankfulness to us that our children up to the present time have borne up well under this unhealthy regime. As for myself, I admit that my health is not good."

It was so far from good that she asked leave to go to Vienna for a week for expert medical advice, but was told, after waiting long for an answer of any kind, that she had voluntarily put herself under the conditions to which her husband was subject, and that if she left Olmütz she could not return. "You know already that the idea of leaving M. de Lafayette could not be entertained by any one of us. The good we do him is not confined to the mere pleasure of seeing us. His health has been really better since we arrived. You know the influence of moral affections upon him, and however strong his character, I cannot conceive that it could resist so many tortures. His excessive thinness and his wasting away have remained at the same point since our arrival, but his guardians and he assure me that it is nothing compared to the horrible state he was in a year ago. One cannot spend four years in such captivity without serious consequences. I have not been able to see Messrs. Maubourg and Pusy, or even to hear their voices. Judging from the number of years with which their so-called guardians credit them, they must have aged frightfully. Their sufferings here are all the harder for us to bear because these two loyal and generous friends of M. de Lafayette have never for an instant permitted their case to be considered separately from his own. You will not be surprised that he has enjoined them never to speak for him, no matter what may be the occasion or the interest, except in a manner in harmony with his character and principles; and that he pushes to excess what you call 'the weakness of a grand passion.'"

So, in mingled content and hardship, the days passed. The young girls brought a certain amount of gaiety into the gray cell, even of material well-being. After their arrival their father was supplied with his first new clothing since becoming a prisoner, garments of rough cloth, cut out "by guesswork," that his jailer rudely declared were good enough for him. Out of the discarded coat Anastasie contrived shoes to replace the pair that was fairly dropping off his feet; and one of the girls took revenge upon the jailer by drawing a caricature of him on a precious scrap of paper which was hidden and saved and had a proud place in their home many years later. Madame Lafayette, though more gravely ill than she allowed her family to know, devoted herself alternately to her husband and to the education of the girls; and in hours which she felt she had a right to call her own wrote with toothpick and lampblack upon the margins of a volume of Buffon that biography of her mother, the unfortunate Madame d'Ayen, which is such a marvel of tender devotion. In the evenings, before his daughters were hurried away to their enforced early bedtime, Lafayette read aloud from some old book. New volumes were not allowed; "everything published since 1788 was proscribed," says a prison letter of La tour de Maubourg's, "even though it were an Imitation of Jesus Christ."

Long after she was grown Virginia, the younger daughter, remembered with pleasure those half-hours with old books. From her account of their prison life we learn that it was the rector of the university who enabled her mother to send and receive letters unknown to their jailers. "We owe him the deepest gratitude. By his means some public news reached our ears.... In the interior of the prison we had established a correspondence with our companions in captivity. Even before our arrival our father's secretary could speak to him through the window by means of a Pan's pipe for which he had arranged a cipher known to M. de Maubourg's servant. But this mode of correspondence, the only one in use for a long time, did not allow great intercourse. We obtained an easier one with the help of the soldiers whom we bribed by the pleasure of a good meal. Of a night, through our double bars, we used to lower at the end of a string a parcel with part of our supper to the sentry on duty under our windows, who would pass the packet in the same manner to Messrs. Maubourg and Pusy, who occupied separate parts of the prison."

Though they could see no change from day to day, the prisoners were conscious, on looking back over several weeks or months, that they were being treated with greater consideration. After every vigorous expression in favor of Lafayette by Englishmen and Americans, especially after every military success gained by France, their jailers became a fraction more polite. When talk of peace between Austria and France began, Tourgot, the emperor's prime minister, preferred to have his master give up the prisoners of his own free will rather than under compulsion. In July, 1797, the Marquis de Chasteler, "a perfect gentleman, highly educated, and accomplished," came to Olmütz to inquire with much solicitude, on the emperor's behalf, how the prisoners had been treated, and to offer them freedom under certain conditions. One condition was that they should never set foot again on Austrian territory without special permission. Another stipulated that Lafayette should not even stay in Europe, but must sail forthwith for America. To this he replied that he did not wish to stay in Austria, even at the emperor's most earnest invitation, and that he had often declared his intention of emigrating to America; but that he did not propose to render account of his actions to Frederick William II or to make any promise which seemed to imply that that sovereign had any rights in the matter. Madame Lafayette and his two friends, Maubourg and Pusy, whom he saw for the first time in three years when they were brought to consult with him over this proposal, agreed fully with Lafayette's stand; and the result was that all of them stayed in prison.

XXVI
EXILES

Thus it was partly because of repeated demands for his release coming from England and France and America, and largely because Napoleon willed it, that Lafayette was finally set free. Also there is little doubt that Austria was heartily tired of being his jailer. Tourgot said that Lafayette would have been released much earlier if anybody had known what on earth to do with him, but that neither Italy nor France would tolerate him within its borders. Tourgot supposed the emperor would raise no objection to the arrangement he had concluded to turn over "all that caravan" to America as a means of getting rid of him; "of which I shall be very glad," he added. The American consul at Hamburg was to receive the prisoners, and he promised that they should be gone in ten days. This time Lafayette was not given a chance to say Yes or No.

On September 18, 1797, five years and a month after he had been arrested, and two years lacking one month from the time Madame Lafayette and the girls joined him, the gates of Olmütz opened and he and his "caravan" went forth: Latour Maubourg, Bureaux de Pusy, the faithful Felix, and other humble members of their retinue who had shared imprisonment with them. Louis Romeuf, the aide-de-camp, who had taken down Lafayette's farewell words to France and who had been zealous in working for his relief, rode joyously to meet them, but so long as Austria had authority the military kept him at arm's-length. The party had one single glimpse of him, but it was not until they had reached Dresden that he was permitted to join them.

Gradually sun and wind lost their feeling of strangeness on prison-blanched cheeks. Gradually the crowds that gathered to watch them pass dared show more interest. Lafayette's face was not unknown to all who saw him. An Austrian pressed forward to thank him for saving his life in Paris on a day when Lafayette had set his wits against the fury of the mob. When the party reached Hamburg Gouverneur Morris and his host, who was an imperial minister, left a dinner-party to go through the form of receiving the prisoners from their Austrian guard, thus "completing their liberty." The short time spent in Hamburg was devoted to writing letters of thanks to Huger, to Fitzpatrick, and the others who had worked for their release.

The one anxiety during this happy journey had been caused by the condition of Madame Lafayette, who showed, now that the strain was removed, how very much the prison months had cost her. She did her best to respond to the demands made upon her strength by the friendliness of the crowds; but it was evident that in her state of exhaustion a voyage to America was not to be thought of. From Hamburg, therefore, the Lafayettes went to the villa of Madame Tessé on the shores of Lake Ploën in Holstein. Here they remained several weeks in happy reunion with relatives and close friends; and it was here a few months later that Anastasie, Lafayette's elder daughter, was married to a younger brother of Latour de Maubourg, to the joy of every one, though to the mock consternation of the lively, white-haired Countess of Tessé, who declared that these young people, ruined by the Revolution, were setting up housekeeping in a state of poverty and innocence unequaled since the days of Adam and Eve.

The Lafayettes and the Maubourgs took together a large castle at Lhemkulen, not far from Madame de Tessé, where Lafayette settled himself to wait until he should be allowed to return to France. It was here that George rejoined his family. He had been a child when his father saw him last; he returned a man, older than Lafayette had been when he set out for America. Washington had been very kind to him, but his years in America had not been happy. Probably he felt instinctively the constraint in regard to him.

Washington had been much distressed by Lafayette's misfortune and had taken every official step possible to secure his release. It was through the good offices of the American minister at London that Lafayette had learned that his wife and children still lived. Washington had sent Madame Lafayette not only sympathetic words, but a check for one thousand dollars, in the hope that it might relieve some of her pressing necessities. He even wrote the Austrian emperor a personal letter in Lafayette's behalf. When he heard that George was to be sent him he "desired to serve the father of this young man, and to become his best friend," but he did not find the godfatherly duty entirely easy. It threatened to conflict with his greater duty as father of his country, strange as it seems that kindness to one innocent, unhappy boy could have that effect. Washington was President of the United States at the time and it behooved the young nation to be very circumspect. Diplomacy is a strange game of many rules and pitfalls; and it might prove embarrassing and compromising to have as member of his family the son of a man who was looked upon by most of the governments of Europe as an arch criminal.

Washington wrote to George in care of the Boston friend to whose house the youth would go on landing, advising him not to travel farther, but to enter Harvard and pursue his studies there. But M. Frestel also came to America, by another ship and under an assumed name, and George continued his education with him instead of entering college. He possessed little of his father's faculty for making friends, though the few who knew him esteemed him highly. The most impressionable years of his life had been passed amid tragic scenes, and his natural reserve and tendency to silence had been increased by anxiety about his father's fate. After a time he went to Mount Vernon and became part of the household there. One of Washington's visitors wrote: "I was particularly struck with the marks of affection which the general showed his pupil, his adopted son, son of the Marquis de Lafayette. Seated opposite to him, he looked at him with pleasure and listened to him with manifest interest." A note in Washington's business ledger shows that the great man was both generous and sympathetic in fulfilling his fatherly duties. It reads: "By Geo. W. Fayette, gave for the purpose of his getting himself such small articles of clothing as he might not choose to ask for, $100." It was at Mount Vernon that the news of his real father's release came to George. He rushed out into the fields away from everybody, to shout and cry and give vent to his emotion unseen by human eyes.

His father was pleased by the development he noted in him; pleased by the letter Washington sent by the hand of "your son, who is highly deserving of such parents as you and your estimable lady." Pleased, too, that George had the manners to stop in Paris on the way home long enough to pay his respects to Napoleon, and that, in the absence of the general, he had been kindly received by Madame Bonaparte. Natural courtesy as well as policy demanded that the Lafayettes fully acknowledge their debt to Napoleon. One of Lafayette's first acts on being set free had been to write him the following joint letter of thanks with Maubourg and Pusy:

Lafayette could no more leave politics alone than he could keep from breathing; and even in its stilted phrases of thanks this letter managed to show how much more he valued the Republic than any individual. Perhaps even at that early date he mistrusted Napoleon's personal ambition.

With the leisure of exile on his hands, and pens and paper once more within easy reach, he plunged into correspondence and into the project of writing a book with Maubourg and Pusy to set forth their views of government. Pens and paper seem to have been the greatest luxuries of his exile, for the family fortunes were at a low ebb. Two of Madame Lafayette's younger sisters joined her and the three pooled their ingenuity and their limited means to get the necessaries of life at the lowest possible cost. "The only resource of the mistress of the establishment was to make 'snow eggs' when she was called upon to provide an extra dish for fifteen or sixteen persons all dying of hunger." This state of things continued after they had gone to live at Vianen near Utrecht in Holland, in order to be a little closer to France. Lafayette had asked permission of the Directory to return with the officers who had left France with him, but received no answer.

Since Madame Lafayette's name was not on the list of suspected persons, she could come and go as she would, and she made several journeys, when health permitted, to attend to business connected with the inheritance coming to her from her mother's estate. She was in Paris in November, 1799, when the Directory was overthrown and Napoleon became practically king of France for the term of ten years with the title of First Consul. She sent her husband a passport under an assumed name and bade him come at once without asking permission of any one and without any guaranty of personal safety beyond the general one that the new government promised justice to all. This was advice after his own heart and he suddenly appeared in Paris. Once there he wrote to Napoleon, announcing his arrival. Napoleon's ministers were scandalized and declared he must go back. Nobody had the courage to mention the subject to the First Consul, whose anger was already a matter of wholesome dread; but Madame Lafayette took the situation into her own hands. She went to see Napoleon as simply as if she were calling upon her lawyer, and just as if he were her lawyer she laid her husband's case before him. The calm and gentle effrontery filled him with delight. "Madame, I am charmed to make your acquaintance!" he cried; "you are a woman of spirit—but you do not understand affairs."

However, it was agreed that Lafayette might remain in France, provided he retired to the country and kept very quiet while necessary formalities were complied with. In March, 1800, his name and those of the companions of his flight were removed from the lists of émigrés. After this visit of Madame Lafayette to the First Consul the family took up its residence about forty miles from Paris at La Grange near Rozoy, a château dating from the twelfth century, which had belonged to Madame d'Ayen. But it was not as the holder of feudal dwellings and traditions that Lafayette installed himself in the place that was to be his home for the rest of his life. He had willingly given up his title when the Assembly abolished such things in 1790. Mirabeau mockingly called him "Grandison Lafayette" for voting for such a measure. It was as an up-to-date farmer that he began life all over again at the age of forty-two. He made Felix Pontonnier his manager, and they worked literally from the ground up, for the estate had been neglected and there was little money to devote to it. Gradually he accumulated plants and animals and machines from all parts of the world; writing voluminous letters about flocks and fruit-trees, and exchanging much advice and many seeds; pursuing agriculture, he said, himself, "with all the ardor he had given in youth to other callings." A decade later he announced with pride that "with a little theory and ten years of experience he had succeeded fairly well."

As soon as Napoleon's anger cooled he received Lafayette and Latour Maubourg, conversing affably, even jocularly about their imprisonment. "I don't know what the devil you did to the Austrians," he said, "but it cost them a mighty effort to let you go." For a time Lafayette saw the First Consul frequently and was on excellent terms with other members of his family. Lucien Bonaparte is said to have cherished the belief that Lafayette would not have objected to him as a son-in-law. But in character and principle Lafayette and the First Consul were too far apart to be really friends. It was to the interest of each to secure the good will of the other, and both appear honestly to have tried. The two have been said to typify the beginning and the end of the French Revolution: Lafayette, the generous, impractical theories of its first months: Napoleon, the strong will and strong hand needed to pull the country out of the anarchy into which these theories had degenerated. Lafayette was too much of an optimist and idealist not to speak his mind freely to the First Consul, even when asking favors for old friends. Napoleon was too practical not to resent lectures from a man whose theories had signally failed of success; and far too much of an autocrat to enjoy having his personal favors refused. The grand cross of the Legion of Honor, a seat in the French Senate at a time when it depended on the will of Napoleon and not on an election of the people, and the post of minister to the United States were refused in turn. Lafayette said he was more interested in agriculture than in embassies, and made it plain that an office to which he was elected was the only kind he cared to hold. If Napoleon hoped to gain his support by appealing to his ambition, he failed utterly.

Gradually their relations became strained and the break occurred in 1802 when Napoleon was declared Consul for life. Lafayette was now an elector for the Department of Seine and Marne, an office within the gift of the people, and as such had to vote on the proposal to make Bonaparte Consul for life.

He cast his vote against it, inscribing on the register of his Commune: "I cannot vote for such a magistracy until public liberty is sufficiently guaranteed. Then I shall give my vote to Napoleon Bonaparte"; and he wrote him a letter carefully explaining that there was nothing personal in it. "That is quite true," says a French biographer. "A popular government, with Bonaparte at its head, would have suited Lafayette exactly."

Napoleon as emperor and autocrat suited him not at all. He continued to live in retirement, busy with his farm, his correspondence, and his family, or when his duties as Deputy took him to Paris, attending strictly to those and avoiding intercourse with Napoleon's ministers. He made visits to Chavaniac to gladden the heart of the old aunt who was once more mistress of the manor-house, and he rejoiced in George's marriage to a very charming girl. In February, 1803, while in Paris, a fall upon the ice resulted in an injury that made him lame for life. The surgeon experimented with a new method of treatment whose only result was extreme torture even for Lafayette, whose power of bearing pain almost equaled that of his blood brothers, the American Indians. It was during this season of agony that Virginia, his youngest child, was married in a neighboring room to Louis de Lasteyrie, by the same priest who had followed the brave De Noailles women to the foot of the scaffold. Instead of the profusion of plate and jewels which would have been hers before the Revolution, the family "assessed itself" to present to the bride and her husband a portfolio containing two thousand francs—about four hundred dollars.

In 1807 the greatest grief of Lafayette's life came to him in the death of his wife, who had never recovered from the rigors of Olmütz. "It is not for having come to Olmütz that I wish to praise her here," the heartbroken husband wrote to Latour Maubourg soon after the Christmas Eve on which her gentle spirit passed to another life, "but that she did not come until she had taken the time to make every possible provision within her power to safeguard the welfare of my aunt and the rights of my creditors, and for having had the courage to send George to America." The gallant, loving lady was buried in the cemetery of Picpus, the secret place where the bodies of the victims to the Terror had been thrown. A poor working-girl had discovered the spot, and largely through the efforts of Madame Lafayette and her sister a chapel had been built and the cemetery put in order—which perhaps accounts for the simplicity of Virginia's wedding-gift.

XXVII
A GRATEFUL REPUBLIC

But he had never lost touch with his adopted country. At the time he declined Napoleon's offer to make him minister to the United States he wrote a correspondent that he had by no means given up the hope of visiting it again as a private citizen; though, he added, humorously, he fancied that if he landed in America in anything except a military uniform he would feel as embarrassed and as much out of place as a savage in knee-breeches. After Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States, foreseeing he could not profitably keep it, Jefferson sounded Lafayette about coming to be governor of the newly acquired territory. That offer, too, he had seen fit to refuse; but his friends called him "the American enthusiast."

Time went by until almost fifty years had passed since the "Bostonians" took their stand against the British king. To celebrate the semi-centennial, America decided to raise a monument to the heroes of Bunker Hill. Lafayette was asked to lay the corner-stone at the ceremonies which were to take place on the fiftieth anniversary of the battle. It became the pleasant duty of President James Monroe, who had served as a subaltern in the battle where Lafayette received his American wound, to send him the official invitation of Congress and to place a government frigate at his disposal for the trip. A turn of French elections in 1824 had left him temporarily "a statesman out of a job," without even the duty of representing his district in the Chamber of Deputies. There was really no reason why he should not accept and every reason why he might at last gratify his desire to see America and American friends again.

He sailed on July 12, 1824, not, however, upon the United States frigate, but on the Cadmus, a regular packet-boat, preferring, he said, to come as a private individual. His son accompanied him, as did Col. A. Lavasseur, who acted as his secretary. These, with his faithful valet, Bastien, made up his entire retinue, though he might easily have had a regiment of followers, so many were the applications of enthusiastic young men who seemed to look upon this as some new sort of military expedition. On the Cadmus he asked fellow-travelers about American hotels and the cost of travel by stage and steamboat, and M. Lavasseur made careful note of the answers. He had no idea of the reception that awaited him. When the Cadmus sailed into New York harbor and he saw every boat gay with bunting and realized that every man, woman, and child to whom coming was possible had come out to meet him, he was completely overcome. "It will burst!" he cried, pressing his hands to his heart, while tears rolled down his cheeks.

Whether he wished or no, he found himself the nation's guest. The country not only stopped its work and its play to give him greeting; it stopped its politics—and beyond that Americans cannot go. It was a campaign summer, but men forgot for a time whether they were for Adams or Crawford, Clay or Jackson. Election Day was three months off, politics could wait; but nobody could wait to see this man who had come to them out of the past from the days of the Revolution, whose memory was their country's most glorious heritage. They gave him salutes and dinners and receptions. They elected him to all manner of societies. Mills and factories closed and the employees surged forth to shout themselves hoarse as they jostled mayors and judges in the welcome. Dignified professors found themselves battling in a crowd of their own students to get near his carriage. Our whole hard-headed, practical nation burst into what it fondly believed to be poetry in honor of his coming. Even the inmates of New York's Debtors' Prison sent forth such an effusion of many stanzas. If these were not real poems, the authors never suspected it. There was truth in them, at any rate. "Again the hero comes to tread the sacred soil for which he bled" was the theme upon which they endlessly embroidered. Occasionally the law sidestepped in his honor. A deputy sheriff in New England pinned upon his door this remarkable "Notice. Arrests in civil suits postponed to-day, sacred to Freedom and Freedom's Friend."

Lafayette arrived in August and remained until September of the following year, and during that time managed, to tread an astonishing amount of our sacred soil, considering that he came before the day of railroads. The country he had helped to create had tripled in population, and, instead of being merely a narrow strip along the Atlantic, now stretched westward a thousand miles. He visited all the states and all the principal towns. It was not only in towns that he was welcomed. At the loneliest crossroads a musket-shot or a bugle-call brought people magically together. The sick were carried out on mattresses and wrung his hand and thanked God. Babies were named for him. One bore through life the whole name Welcome Lafayette. Miles of babies already named were held up for him to see—and perhaps to kiss. Old soldiers stretched out hands almost as feeble as those of babies in efforts to detain him and fight their battles o'er. With these he was very tender. Small boys drew "Lafayette fish" out of the brooks on summer days, and when he came to their neighborhood ran untold distances to get sight of him. Often he helped them to points of vantage from which they could see something more than forests of grown-up backs and legs during the ceremonies which took place before court-houses and state-houses. Here little girls, very much washed and curled, presented him with useless bouquets and lisped those artless odes of welcome. Sometimes they tried to crown him with laurel, a calamity he averted with a deft hand. Back of the little girls usually stood a phalanx of larger maidens in white, carrying banners, who were supposed to represent the states of the Union; and back of the maidens was sometimes a wonderful triumphal arch built of scantling and covered with painted muslin, the first achievement of its kind in local history.

The country was really deeply moved by Lafayette's visit. It meant to honor him to the full, but it saw no reason to hide the fact that it had done something for him as well. "The Nation's Guest. France gave him birth; America gave him Immortality," was a statement that kept everybody, nations and individuals alike, in their proper places. In short, the welcome America gave Lafayette was hearty and sincere. Whether it appeared as brilliant to the guest of honor, accustomed from youth to pageants at Versailles, as it did to his hosts we may doubt. It was occasionally hard for M. Lavasseur to appear impressed and not frankly astonished at the things he saw. Lafayette enjoyed it all thoroughly. The difficult rôle fell to his son George, who had neither the interest of novelty nor of personal triumph to sustain him. He already knew American ways, and it was equally impossible for him to join in the ovation or to acknowledge greetings not meant for himself. He made himself useful by taking possession of the countless invitations showered upon his father and arranging an itinerary to embrace as many of them as possible.

To those who have been wont to think of this American triumphal progress of Lafayette's as steady and slow, stopping only for demonstrations of welcome and rarely if ever doubling on its tracks, it is a relief to learn that Lafayette did occasionally rest. He made Washington, the capital of the country, his headquarters, and set out from there on longer or shorter journeys. The town had not existed, indeed had scarcely been dreamed of, for a decade after his first visit. What he thought of the straggling place, with its muddy, stump-infested avenues, we shall never know. He had abundant imagination—which was one reason the town existed; for without imagination he would never have crossed the ocean to fight for American liberty. Among the people he saw about him in Washington during the official ceremonies were many old friends and many younger faces mysteriously like them. To that striking sentence in Henry Clay's address of welcome in the House of Representatives, "General, you find yourself here in the midst of posterity," he could answer, with truth and gallantry, "No, Mr. Speaker, posterity has not yet begun for me, for I find in these sons of my old friends the same political ideals and, I may add, the same warm sentiments toward myself that I have already had the happiness to enjoy in their fathers."

His great friend Washington had gone to his rest; but there were memories of Washington at every turn. He made a visit to Mount Vernon and spent a long hour at his friend's tomb. He entered Yorktown following Washington's old campaign tent, a relic which was carried ahead of the Lafayette processions in that part of the country, in a spirit almost as reverent as that the Hebrews felt toward the Ark of the Covenant. At Yorktown the ceremonies were held near the Rock Redoubt which Lafayette's command had so gallantly taken. Zachary Taylor, who was to gain fame as a general himself and to be President of the United States, presented a laurel wreath, which Lafayette turned from a compliment to himself to a tribute to his men. "You know, sir," he said, "that in this business of storming redoubts with unloaded arms and fixed bayonets, the merit of the deed lies in the soldiers who execute it," and he accepted the crown "in the name of the light infantry—those we have lost as well as those who survive."

Farther south, at Camden, he laid the corner-stone of a monument to his friend De Kalb; and at Savannah performed the same labor of love for one erected in honor of Nathanael Greene and of Pulaski. At Charleston, also, he met Achille Marat, come from his home in Florida to talk with Lafayette about his father, who met his death at the hands of Charlotte Corday during the French Revolution. There were many meetings in America to remind him of his life abroad. Francis Huger joined him for a large part of his journey; he saw Dubois Martin, now a jaunty old gentleman of eighty-three. It was he who had bought La Victoire for Lafayette's runaway journey. In New Jersey he dined with Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, who was living there quietly with his daughter and son-in-law.

Both on the Western frontier and at the nation's capital he met Indian chiefs with garments more brilliant and manners quite as dignified as kings ever possessed. In a time of freshet in the West he became the guest of an Indian named Big Warrior and spent the night in his savage home. On another night he came near accepting unwillingly the hospitality of the Ohio River, for the steamboat upon which he was traveling caught fire, after the manner of river boats of that era, and "burned a hole in the night" and disappeared. He lost many of his belongings in consequence, including his hat, but not his serenity or even a fraction of his health, though the accident occurred in the pouring rain.

Everywhere, particularly in the West, he came to towns and counties bearing his own name. In the East he revisited with his son spots made memorable in the Revolution. On the Hudson he rose early to point out to George the place where André had been taken and the house to which he and Washington had come so soon after Arnold's precipitate flight. At West Point he reviewed the cadets, slim and straight and young, while General Scott and General Brown, both tall, handsome men, looking very smart indeed in their plumes and dress uniforms, stood beside their visitor, who was almost as tall and military in his bearing and quite as noticeable for the neatness and plainness of his civilian dress.

Lafayette was broader of shoulder and distinctly heavier than he had been forty years before. Even in his youth he had not been handsome, though he possessed for Americans the magnetism his son so sadly lacked. His once fair complexion had turned brown and his once reddish hair had turned gray, but that was a secret concealed under a chestnut wig. He carried a cane and walked with a slight limp, which Americans attributed enthusiastically to his wound in their service, but which was really caused by that fall upon the ice in 1803. Despite his checkered fortunes his sixty-eight years had passed lightly over his head. Perhaps he did not altogether relish being addressed as Venerable Sir by mayors and town officials, any more than he liked to have laurel wreaths pulling his wig awry, but he knew that both were meant in exquisite politeness.

And, true Frenchman that he was, he never allowed himself to be outdone in politeness. Everywhere incidents occurred, trivial enough, but very charming in spirit, that have been treasured in memory and handed down to this day. In New London two rival congregations besought him to come to their churches and listen to their pastors. He pleased them both. He led blind old ladies gallantly through the minuet. He held tiny girls in his arms and, kissing them, said they reminded him of his own little Virginia. He chatted delightfully with young men who accompanied him as governors' aides in turn through the different states; and if he extracted local information from these talks to use it again slyly, with telling effect, in reply to the very next address of welcome, that was a joke between themselves which they enjoyed hugely. "He spoke the English language well, but slower than a native American," one of these young aides tells us. He was seldom at a loss for a graceful speech, though this was a gift that came to him late in life. And his memory for faces seldom played him false. When William Magaw, who had been surgeon of the old First Pennsylvania, visited him and challenged him for recognition, Lafayette replied that he did not remember his name, but that he knew very well what he had done for him—he had dressed his wound after the battle of the Brandywine!

The processions and celebrations in Lafayette's honor culminated in the ceremony for which he had crossed the Atlantic, the laying of the corner-stone at Bunker Hill. Pious people had said hopefully that the Lord could not let it rain on such a day; and their faith was justified, for the weather was perfect. We are told that on the 17th of June "everything that had wheels and everything that had legs" moved in the direction of the monument. Accounts tell of endless organizations and of "miles of spectators," until there seemed to be not room for another person to sit or stand. The same chaplain who had lifted up his young voice in prayer in the darkness on Cambridge Common before the men marched off to battle was there in the sunlight to raise his old hands in blessing. Daniel Webster, who had not been born when the battle was fought, was there to make the oration. He could move his hearers as no other American has been able to do, playing upon their emotions as upon an instrument, and never was his skill greater than upon that day. He set the key of feeling in the words, "Venerable men," addressed to the forty survivors of the battle, a gray-haired group, sitting together in the afternoon light. Lafayette had met this little company in a quiet room before the ceremonies began and had greeted each as if he were in truth a personal friend. After his part in the ceremony was over he elected to sit with them instead of in the place prepared for him. "I belong there," he said, and there he sat, his chestnut wig shining in the gray company.

While Webster's eloquence worked its spell, and pride and joy and pain even to the point of tears swept over the thousands of upturned faces as cloud shadows sweep across a meadow, Lafayette must have remembered another scene, a still greater assembly, even more tense with feeling, in which he had been a central figure: that fête of the Federation on the Champs de Mars. Surely no other man in history has been allowed to feel himself so intimately a part of two nations in their moments of patriotic exaltation.

XXVIII
LEAVE-TAKINGS

He had made himself one in thought and spirit with the most aggressively American of them all. A witty speech of his proves this. A bill had been introduced in Congress to present him with two hundred thousand dollars in money and "twenty-four thousand acres of fertile land in Florida" to right a wrong unintentionally done him years before. He had been entitled at the time of our Revolution to the pay of an officer of his rank and to a grant of public land to be located wherever he chose. He refused to accept either until after the Revolution in France had swept away his fortune. Then his agent in the United States chose for him a tract of land near New Orleans which Jefferson thought would be of great value. Congress was not informed and granted this same land to the city. Lafayette had a prior claim, but flatly refused to contest the matter, saying he could have no quarrel with the American people. Everybody wanted the bill concerning this reparation in the way of money and Florida land to pass, and it was certain to go through, but there were twenty-six members of the House and Senate who, for one reason and another, felt constrained to vote against it. Some voted consistently and persistently against unusual appropriations of any kind; some argued that it was an insult to translate Lafayette's services into terms of cold cash. The struggle between private friendship and public duty was so hard that some of them came to make a personal explanation. "My dear friends!" he cried, grasping their hands, "I assure you it would have been different had I been a member of Congress. There would not have been twenty-six objectors—there would have been twenty-seven! " During this American visit he renewed old ties with, or made the acquaintance of, nine men who had been or were to become Presidents of the United States: John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, William Henry Harrison, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, and Franklin Pierce. Perhaps there were others. He broke the rules of the Puritan Sabbath by driving out to dine on that day with the venerable John Adams at his home near Boston; but there was only one white horse to draw his carriage instead of the customary four, and not a hurrah broke the orderly quiet. Had it been a week-day the crowds would have shouted themselves hoarse. Jefferson, ill and feeble, welcomed him on the lawn at Monticello, the estate so dear to him which had been ravaged by the British about the time Lafayette began his part in driving Cornwallis to Yorktown.

As was quite fitting, Lafayette was the guest of President John Quincy Adams at the White House during the last days of his stay. One incident must be told, because it is so very American and so amusing from the foreign point of view. He expressed a desire to make a visit of farewell to his old friend James Monroe, who had been President the year before. He was now living on his estate of Oak Hill, thirty-seven miles away. President Adams offered to accompany him, and on an August day they set out by carriage after an early dinner. Mr. Adams, both Lafayettes, and a friend rode in the presidential carriage. Colonel Lavasseur and the son of the President followed in a "tilbury," a kind of uncovered gig fashionable then on both sides of the Atlantic. Servants and luggage brought up the rear.

Lafayette had been passed free over thousands of miles of toll-road since he landed in the United States, but when they reached the bridge across the Potomac the little procession halted and Mr. Adams paid toll like an ordinary mortal. Scarcely had his carriage started again when a plaintive, "Mr. President! Mr. President!" brought it to a standstill. The gatekeeper came running up with a coin in his hand. "Mr. President," he panted, "you've done made a mistake. I reckon yo' thought this was two bits, but it's only a levy. You owe me another twelve and a half cents." The President listened, gravely examined the coin, counted the noses of men and horses, and agreed that he was at fault. He was just reaching down into the presidential pocket when he was arrested by a new exclamation. The gatekeeper had recognized Lafayette and was thoroughly crestfallen. "I reckon the joke's on me," he said, apologetically. "All the toll-roads has orders to pass the general free, so I owe you something instid of you owin' me money. I reckon I ought to pass you-all as the general's bodyguard." But to this Adams demurred. He was not anybody's bodyguard. He was President of the United States, and, though it was true that toll-roads passed the guest of the nation free, General Lafayette was riding that day in his private capacity, as a friend of Mr. Adams. There was no reason at all why the company should be cheated out of any of its toll. The gatekeeper considered this and acknowledged the superiority of Yankee logic. "That sounds fair," he admitted. "I reckon you-all do owe me twelve and a half cents." In the tilbury young Adams grinned and Colonel Lavasseur chuckled his appreciation. "The one time General Lafayette does not pass free over your roads," he said, "is when he rides with the ruler of the country. In any other land he could not pay, for that very reason."

When the day of farewell came Washington streets were filled with men and women come out to see the last of the nation's guest. Stores and public buildings were closed and surrounding regions poured their crowds into the city. Everybody was sad. The cavalry escort which for a year had gathered at unholy hours to speed Lafayette on his way or to meet him on his return, whenever he could be persuaded to take it into his confidence, met for the last time on such pleasant duty, taking its station near the White House, where as many citizens as possible had congregated. The hour set for departure was early afternoon. Officials had begun to gather before eleven o'clock. At noon the President appeared and took his place with them in a circle of chairs in the large vestibule, whose outside doors had been opened wide to permit all who could see to witness the public leave-taking.

After a brief interval of silence an inner door opened and Lafayette came forward with the President's son and the marshal of the District. Mr. Adams rose and made a short address. Lafayette attempted to reply, but was overcome with feeling, and it was several moments before he regained control of his voice. At the end of his little speech he cried, "God bless you!" and opened his arms wide with a gesture that included everybody. Then the crowd pressed forward and surrounded him until he retired to Mrs. Adams's sitting-room for the real farewell with the President's household. After that Mr. Adams and he appeared upon the portico. Lafayette stepped into a waiting carriage. Flags dipped, cannon boomed, and the procession took up its march to the wharf where a little steamer waited to carry the travelers down the Potomac to the new government frigate Brandywine, on which they were to sail. At the river's edge he reviewed the militia of the District of Columbia, standing with some relatives of Washington's during this final ceremony. It is said that a cheer that was like a cry of bereavement rose from the crowd and mingled with the last boom of the military salute as the boat swung out into the stream.

The sun had dropped below the horizon when they neared Mount Vernon. The company was at dinner, everybody, even George Lafayette, working hard to overcome the sadness that threatened to engulf the company. The marshal came and bent over Lafayette, who pushed back his plate and bowed his head upon his breast. Then he rose and hurried to the deck for a parting look, at the home of his friend most of the company following him. The eyes of both father and son sought out the stately house set on a hill, which held so many associations for both of them. The younger man had found the beautiful place less well cared for than during the lifetime of its owner. Lafayette had returned to it only to visit a tomb.

The trees near the mansion were already beginning to blur in the short September twilight. Silently, with his head a little bent and a little turned to the right, as was his habit, he watched it as the boat slipped by. The afterglow behind the house had deepened to molten gold when a bend in the river blotted it from his sight. He turned like a man coming out of a dream and hurried to his cabin without a word.

"Only then," says Lavasseur, "did he fully realize the sacrifice made to France in leaving America."

XXIX
PRESIDENT—OR KING-MAKER?

The ocean was no kinder than usual to Lafayette on his homeward voyage and the reception he met in Havre lacked enthusiasm. Louis XVIII, who was king when he went away, had died during his absence and another brother of the ill-fated Louis XVI had mounted the throne, with the title of Charles X. He was no other than the Comte d'Artois who had presided over Lafayette's section in the Assembly of Notables and had been blind to his presence when the two reached the same inn at the same moment in Austria. His ministers were no more friendly to liberals of Lafayette's way of thinking than those of his brothers had been; but the liberals of France showed a distinct desire to notice the home-coming of Lafayette. Police could and did disperse young men on horseback who gathered under his windows at the inn in Rouen for a serenade; but there were other ways of paying respect. One took the form of a contest of poets "to celebrate a voyage which history will place among the great events of the century." There were eighty-three contestants, and Béranger, who had already paid his tribute, acted as a judge. In due time the victor was ceremoniously given a prize. Lafayette must have been reminded of the burst of rhyme in America quite as much by contrast as by similarity.

His children came to meet him, which more than compensated for official neglect; and the welcome of several hundred neighbors when he reached La Grange convinced him that his local popularity was not impaired. On the whole he had reason to be well content. He brought home ruddy health, knowledge of the love in which he was held by twelve million warm-hearted Americans, and, a lesser consideration, doubtless, but one for which to be properly grateful, the prospect of speedily rebuilding the family fortunes. The grant of land voted by Congress was for thirty-six sections of six hundred and forty acres each, "east of and adjoining the city of Tallahassee in Leon County, Florida." So far as the writer has been able to learn, it never greatly benefited him or his heirs; but that fact was mercifully hidden in the future. In addition to the land there was a goodly sum of money to his credit in a Philadelphia bank.

He had stood the fatigues of the trip wonderfully. His cousin who went to see him soon after his return marveled to find him "big, fat, fresh, and joyous," showing not the least ill effects from having "gone several months practically without sleep, in addition to talking, writing, traveling, and drinking for all he was worth (pour tout de bon) ten hours out of the twenty-four." And he brought home from across the sea another gift: an ease in public speaking which astonished the friends who remembered the impatient scorn his silences roused in Marie Antoinette and how seldom he made speeches in the Assembly of Notables. During his command of the National Guard of Paris his utterances had of necessity been more frequent and more emphatic, but they betrayed none of the pleasure in addressing audiences that he now evidently felt. It was as though the friendliness of the American people had opened for him a new and delightful channel through which he could express his good will toward all the world. His voice lent itself well to public speaking; it could be soft or sonorous by turns, and he had the art of using plain and simple words. His physician, Doctor Cloquet, tells how some workmen were seen puzzling over a newspaper and criticizing it rather severely until they came to a speech by Lafayette. "Good!" said the reader, his face clearing. "At least we can understand what this man says. He speaks French."

Delighting workmen was not a gift to ingratiate him with a Bourbon king whose government was growing less popular every day. Lafayette retired to La Grange among its vineyards and orchards in the flat region of La Brie and took up life there again; cultivating his estate; carrying on an immense correspondence in that small, well-formed script of his which is yet so difficult to read; rejoicing in his family and receiving many visitors. It was a cosmopolitan procession that made its way up the Rozoy road to the château whose Norman towers had been old before the discovery of the New World. Some in that procession were old friends, members of the French nobility, who came in spite of Lafayette's politics; others were complete strangers drawn to him from distant parts of the earth by these same opinions. French, English, Americans, Austrians, Algerian sheiks, black men from the West Indies—all were welcome.

In his study, an upper room in one of his five towers, he was literally in the center of his world. From a window overlooking the farm-yard he could direct the laborers by megaphone if he did not choose to go down among them. His "speaking-trumpet," as Charles Sumner called it, still lay on his desk when this American made his pious pilgrimage years after Lafayette's death. On the walls of the library and living-room hung relics that brought vividly to mind the history of two continents during momentous years. The American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of Rights hung side by side. A copy in bronze of Houdon's bust of Washington had the place of honor. A portrait of Bailly, a victim of the Revolution, hung over the fireplace in Lafayette's study. There were swords presented by French admirers and gifts from American cities and Indian chiefs. There was one room which was entered only by Lafayette and his children, and that but once a year, on the anniversary of his wife's death. It had been hers and was closed and kept just as she left it.

Her death marked a distinct period in his life. There were those who said that when she died Lafayette lost more than a loved companion; that he lost his conscience. In proof of this they pointed out how in the later years of his life, after her steadying influence was removed, he veered about in the troubled sea of French politics, like a ship without a rudder. It is true only in a superficial sense; but it is true that he was never quite the same after she died.

For seven years immediately after this loss he took no active part in public affairs; partly because of his private sorrow, partly because of his opposition to the emperor. He had been disappointed in Napoleon and the latter distrusted him. "All the world is reformed," Napoleon grumbled, "with one exception. That is Lafayette. He has not receded from his position by so much as a hair's breadth. He is quiet now, but I tell you he is ready to begin all over again." George and Lafayette's son-in-law suffered from this displeasure in their army careers. "These Lafayettes cross my path everywhere!" Napoleon is said to have exclaimed when he found the names of the young men on an army list submitted for promotion, and promptly scratched them off.

Then fortune began to go against the emperor and invading armies came marching into France. Lafayette offered his sword and his experience to his country, but the advice he gave appeared too dangerous and revolutionary. What he desired was to force the abdication of Napoleon at that time. He was in Paris on March 31, 1814, when foreign soldiers entered the city. Powerless to do anything except grieve, he shut himself up in his room. Napoleon retired to Elba and the brother of Louis XVI was summoned to take the title of Louis XVIII. This was the prince Lafayette had intentionally offended when he was scarcely more than a boy.

After he was made king, however, Lafayette wrote him a note of congratulation and appeared in uniform at his first royal audience wearing the white cockade. That certainly seemed like a change of front, but Lafayette thought it a necessity. "It had to be Napoleon or the Bourbons," he wrote Jefferson. "These are the only possible alternatives in a country where the idea of republican executive power is regarded as a synonym for excesses committed in its name." He accepted the government of Louis XVIII as more liberal than that of the emperor. Time and again after this he aided in the overthrow of one man or party, only to turn against the new power he had helped create. He even tried to work with Napoleon again after Louis XVIII fled to Ghent and Bonaparte returned from Elba to found his "new democratic empire," known as the Hundred Days. Waterloo came at the end of it; then Lafayette voiced the demand for the emperor's abdication and pressed it hard.

"What!" he cried in answer to Lucien Bonaparte's appeal to the Chamber of Deputies not to desert his brother, because that would be a violation of national honor, "you accuse us of failing in duty toward honor, toward Napoleon! Do you forget all we have done for him? The bones of our brothers and of our children cry aloud from the sands of Africa, from the banks of the Guadalquivir and the Tagus, from the shores of the Vistula and the glacial deserts of Russia. During more than ten years three million Frenchmen have perished for this man who wants to-day to fight all Europe. We have done enough for him. Our duty now is to save our country!"

Lafayette was one of the deputation sent by the Chamber to thank the ex-emperor after his abdication, and admired Napoleon's self-possession during that trying scene. He thought Napoleon "played grandly the role necessity forced upon him." Lafayette was also one of the commission sent to negotiate with the victorious allies. It was there that he gave his spirited answer to the demand that Napoleon be given up. "I am astonished you should choose a prisoner of Olmütz as the person to whom to make that shameful proposal."

Louis XVIII returned to power and soon Lafayette was opposing him. So it went on for years. He said of himself that he was a man of institutions, not of dynasties; and that he valued first principles so much that he was very willing to compromise on matters of secondary importance. He cared nothing for apparent consistency and did whatever his erratic republican conscience dictated, without a thought of how it might look to others. He was a born optimist, but a poor judge of men; and in spite of repeated disappointments believed the promises of each new ruler who came along. Liberal representative government was of supreme importance in his eyes. If France was not yet ready for a president, she could have it under a king. Each administration that promised a step in this direction received his support, each lapse from it his censure. That appears to be the key to the many shifting changes of his later life.