His popularity among the people waxed and waned. Usually it kept him his seat in the Chamber of Deputies. From 1818 to 1824 he represented the Sarthe; from 1825 to the close of his life the district of Meaux. It was in the interval between that he made his visit to America. He returned to find Charles X king. As that monarch lost popularity his own influence gained. Charles's ministers thought their sovereign showed ill-placed confidence and esteem when he freely acknowledged that this liberal leader had rendered services to his family that no true man could forget. "I know him well," Charles said. "We were born in the same year. We learned to mount a horse together at the riding academy at Versailles. He was a member of my division in the Assembly of Notables. The fact is neither of us has changed—he no more than I." That was just the point. Neither had changed. Charles X was a Bourbon to the bone, and Lafayette had come back from America with renewed health, replenished means, and all the revolutionary impetuosity of youth. He had not one atom of that willingness to put up with "things as they are" which grows upon many reformers as their hair turns gray. John Quincy Adams divined this and advised Lafayette to have nothing more to do with revolutions. "He is sixty-eight years old, but there is fire beneath the cinders," the President of the United States confided to his diary in August, 1825.

The cinders glowed each time Charles X emphasized his Bourbonism; and caught fire again when the king made the Prince de Polignac prime minister in defiance of all liberal Frenchmen. That happened in 1829. Lafayette took occasion to visit Auvergne, the province of his birth, in company with his son, and was received with an enthusiasm rivaling his most popular days in America. The journey was prolonged farther than strict necessity required and did much to unite opposition to the king, for leaders of the liberal party profited by banquets and receptions in Lafayette's honor to spread their doctrines. More than one official who permitted such gatherings lost his job in consequence. Lafayette returned to La Grange; but in the following July, when the storm broke, he called for his horses and hurried to Paris. The Chamber of Deputies was not in session; he thought it ought to be; and he started as soon as he had read a copy of the Royal Ordinances which limited the freedom of the press and otherwise threatened the rights of the people.

Before he reached Paris blood had been shed and barricades had been thrown across the streets. Alighting from his carriage, he told the guards his name, dragged his stiff leg over the obstructions, and joined the little group of legislators who were striving to give this revolt the sanction of law. Having had more experience in revolutions than they—this was his fourth—he became their leader, and on July 29, 1830, found himself in the exact position he had occupied forty years before, commander of the National Guard and practically dictator of France. An unwillingly admiring biographer says that he had learned no wisdom in the interval; that he "pursued the same course with the same want of success." This time he held the balance of power for only two days, but it was actual concentrated power while it lasted. It was he who sent back to Charles the stern answer that his offers of compromise came too late, that the royal family had ceased to reign. And it was he who had to choose the next form of government for France.

It was a dramatic choice. He was frankly ambitious; and quite within his reach lay the honor he would have preferred above all others. The choice lay between becoming himself President of France or, making a new king. It was put to him fairly and squarely: "If we have a republic you will be president. If a monarchy, the Duc d'Orléans will be king. Will you take the responsibility of a republic?" A man with "a canine appetite for fame" and nothing more could have found but one answer, and that not the answer Lafayette gave. In his few hours of power he had talked with men from all parts of France. These confirmed his belief that the country was not yet ready for the change to a republic. It would be better to have a king for a while longer, provided he was a liberal king, pledged to support a constitution. The Duc d'Orléans gave promise of being just such a king. He was son of the duke Lafayette had banished from Paris after the mob attacked Versailles in 1789; but he had fought on the liberal side. The people knew him as Philippe Égalité—"Equality Philip"—and during recent years he had given evidence of being far more democratic than any other member of his family. To choose him would please liberals and conservatives alike, because he was next in line of succession after the sons of the deposed king.

Being by no means devoid of ambition, the duke was already in Paris, awaiting what might happen. The Deputies sent him an invitation to become lieutenant-general of the kingdom. Accounts vary as to the manner in which it was accepted. One has him walking with ostentatious humility through the streets to the Hôtel de Ville, preceded by a drummer to call attention to the fact that he was walking and that he wore a tricolored scarf. Another has him on horseback without the scarf. It matters little; they agree that he was not very well received and that shouts of "No more Bourbons!" betrayed the suspicion that the duke's liberality, like the scarf, if he wore one, could be put on for the occasion. Accounts agree, too, that it was Lafayette who swung popular feeling to his side. He met him at the foot of the stairs and ascended with him to the Chamber of Deputies; and in answer to the coolness with which he was greeted and the evident hostility of the crowd outside, thrust a banner into the duke's hand and drew him to a balcony, where he publicly embraced him. Paris was easily moved by such spectacles. Carried away by the sight of the two enveloped in the folds of the same flag, and that the Tricolor, which had been forbidden for fifteen years, they burst into enthusiastic shouts of "Vive Lafayette!" "Long live the Duc d'Orléans!" Chateaubriand says that "Lafayette's republican kiss made a king," and adds, "Singular result of the whole life of the hero of two worlds!"

That belief at least he could keep to the end. Two weeks after Louis Philippe became king Lafayette was appointed general in command of the National Guards of the kingdom, a position he held from August until Christmas. Then a new law abolished the office in effect but not in appearance. Lafayette sent the king his resignation and refused to reconsider it or even to talk the matter over, as the king asked him to do. "No, my dear cousin, I understand my position," Lafayette wrote Philip de Ségur. "I know that I weigh like a nightmare on the Palais Royal; not on the king and his family, who are the best people in the world, and I love them tenderly, but on the people who surround them.... Without doubt I have been useful in his advancement. But if I sacrificed for him some of my personal convictions, it was only on the faith of the program of the Hôtel de Ville. I announced a king basing his reign on republican institutions. To that declaration, which the people seem to forget, I attach great importance; and it is that which the court does not forgive.... From all this the conclusion follows that I have become bothersome. I take my stand. I will retain the same friendliness for the royal family, but I have only one word of honor, and I cannot change my convictions."

So once again, near the close of his life, he found himself in opposition to a government he had helped to create.

XXX
SEVENTY-SIX YEARS YOUNG

When the Chamber of Deputies was in session he lived in Paris. Vacations were spent at La Grange, where he pursued the varied interests of his many-sided life, particularly enjoying, in his character of farmer, the triumph of his beasts and fruits in neighborhood fairs. In the winter of 1834 he was as usual in Paris, and on the 26th of January made the speech in behalf of Polish refugees then in France which proved to be his last public address. A few days later he attended the funeral of one of the Deputies, following the coffin on foot all the long distance from the house to the cemetery, as was the French custom, and standing on the damp ground through the delivery of the funeral discourses. The exposure and fatigue were too much for even his hardy old body.

He was confined to his room for many weeks, but carried on a life as normal as possible, having his children around him, receiving visits of intimate friends, reading journals and new books, and dictating letters. One of these was to Andrew Jackson about his fight with the United States Senate. The inactivity of the sick-chamber was very irksome to him, and by the 9th of May he was so far improved that his physicians allowed him to go for a drive. Unfortunately a storm came up, the weather turned suddenly cold, and he suffered a chill, after which his condition became alarming. When it was known that he was a very sick man, friends and political enemies—he had no personal enemies—hastened to make inquiries and to offer condolences. Occasionally George Lafayette was able to answer that his father seemed better; but the improvement was not real. On the 20th of May he appeared to wake and to search for something on his breast. His son put into his hands the miniature of Adrienne that he always wore. He had strength to raise it to his lips, then sank into unconsciousness from which he passed into the sleep of death.

He was laid to rest in the cemetery of Picpus beside the wife who had awaited him there for more than a quarter of a century; but his grave was made in earth from an American battle-field that he had brought home with him after his last visit. Fifteen natives of Poland bore the coffin to the hearse. There were honorary pall-bearers representing the Chamber of Deputies, the National Guard, the Army, the United States, Poland, and his own electoral district of Meaux. It was purely a military funeral. His party friends hotly declared that it was not a funeral at all, only a monster military parade. The government feared that his burial might be made the occasion for political demonstrations and ordered out such an immense number of troops that "the funeral car passed almost unseen in the midst of a battalion whose bayonets ... kept the people from rendering homage to their liberator." "He was there lifeless, but not without honor," wrote an indignant friend. "The French army surrounded him in his coffin as relentlessly as the Austrian army had held him a prisoner at Olmütz." Even the cemetery was guarded as if to withstand a siege. "Only the dead and his family might enter.... One would say that the government looked upon the mortal remains of this friend of liberty as a bit of prey which must not be allowed to escape." The liberals resented this fancied attitude of the government so bitterly that a cartoonist drew Louis Philippe rubbing his hands together with satisfaction as the procession passed and saying, gleefully, "Lafayette, you're caught, old man!" Only one incident occurred to justify so many precautions. In the Place Vendome a few score young men carrying a banner tried to break through the line of soldiers, but were repulsed. Elsewhere people looked on in silence.

Lafayette's political friends complained that not one of the king's ministers was to be seen in the procession. The ministers answered that politics were out of place at the funeral of such a distinguished man; and that the government rendered its homage regardless of party. While friends and foes wrangled thus over the coffin, Nature did her beautiful consoling best. Chateaubriand, standing in the silent crowd, saw the hearse stop a moment as it reached the top of a hill, and as it stopped a fugitive ray of sunlight came to rest upon it, then disappeared, gilding the guns and military trappings as it passed.

In spite of all this recrimination Lafayette's death passed comparatively unnoticed in France, for it occurred during a season of political turmoil and he had retired several years before from active affairs. Three thousand miles away the news produced far greater effect. He was mourned in America with universal sorrow. All over the country flags floated at half-mast. The House and Senate of the United States passed resolutions which were sent to George Lafayette, while the members wore crape upon their arms for thirty days and the Senate Chamber and Hall of Representatives remained draped in black until the end of the session. Our army and navy wore a tribute of crape upon their sleeves also, and on a given day every city in the Union heard the mourning salute of twenty-four guns, and after that at half-hour intervals until sunset the booming of a single cannon. "Touching honors," says a French writer, "rendered by a great people to the memory of a stranger who had served them sixty years before."

Lafayette lived to hold his great-grandchild in his arms, yet the period of his life seems very short if measured by the changes that came about while he walked the earth. It was a time when old men dreamed dreams and young men saw visions, and during Lafayette's seventy-six years some of the visions became realities, some of his dreams he saw well on the way to fulfilment.

The French regard Lafayette's American career as only an episode in his life; while Americans are apt to forget that he had a career in France. He lived in three distinct periods of history, so different that they might have been centuries apart. He saw medieval Europe; the stormy period of change, and something very like the modern world we know to-day. Peasants knelt in the dust before the nobles, after he was a grown man; yet, in his old age, railroads and republicanism were established facts. "To have made for oneself a rôle in one or another of these periods suffices for a career," says his French biographer Donoil; "very few have had a career in all."

Lafayette played an important part in all three. Not only that; it was his strange good fortune to hold familiar converse with two of the greatest figures in history—the two very greatest of his own age—Washington and Napoleon. That he seems even measurably great in such company shows his true stature. Washington was his friend, who loved him like a son. Napoleon appears to have been one of the very few men Lafayette could never quite bring himself to trust, though Napoleon rendered him an immense service and did everything in his great power to win his support.

If, as certain French historians say, Lafayette and Napoleon were dictators in turn, Lafayette's task was in a way the harder of the two; for Napoleon's turn came after the fury had spent itself and men were beginning to recover, sobered by their own excesses. It was in the mounting delirium of their fever that Lafayette's middle course brought upon him first distrust, then enmity from both sides.

If an Austrian prison had not kept him from destruction he must have perished during the Revolution, for he was never swerved by fear of personal danger. One of his eulogists asserts that he was "too noble to be shrewd." Another says that he judged men by his own feelings and was "misled by illusions honorable to himself." After his experience in America he undoubtedly expected to play a great part in the uprising in France, and, not realizing the strength of selfishness and passion, helped to let loose forces too powerful to control. One of his critics has asserted that he never made a wise or a correct decision; but critics and eulogists alike agree that he was upright and brave. They are justified in saying he was vain. His vanity took the form of believing himself right.

He was not self-seeking, and the lack of that quality caused him to be regarded with puzzled surprise by men who could not understand his willingness to step aside in favor of some one else, when he thought the cause demanded it. "It seemed so foolish," said Madame de Staël in her sympathetic portrait, "to prefer one's country to oneself... to look upon the human race, not as cards to be played for one's own profit, but as an object of sacred devotion." Chateaubriand said that forty years had to pass after Lafayette's death before people were really convinced that he had been an idealist and not a fool. The fact was brought home to them, little by little, as records scattered to the four winds during the Revolution gradually saw the light of print; here a public document, there a private letter, there again a bit of personal reminiscence. Fitting together like a puzzle, they showed at last how one single idea had inspired all Lafayette's acts, even when they seemed most erratic. "Fortunately for him," says one of his French biographers, "it was the idea of the century—political liberty."

In his lifetime he arranged his papers for publication and dictated occasional bits of comment; but these were only fragmentary, as many of his papers were lost. Besides, it was a task for which he had no great zest. He said it seemed ungracious to accuse men of persecuting him who afterward died for the very principles he upheld. He was sure history would accord to each his just deserts. Madame de Staël said that his belief in the final triumph of liberty was as strong as the belief of a pious man in a future life. He said himself that liberty was to him a love, a religion, a "geometric certainty."

To his last day he pursued this ideal of his wherever it led him. His failure to learn worldly wisdom irritated many. It was incongruous, like the contrast between his polished old-time manners and the rash utterances that fell from his lips. It must be confessed that in his latter years he was not always clear-sighted as to the means he employed. Once he descended to methods better suited to Italy in the Middle Ages than to political reformers in 1822. There were times, too, when he seemed bent on self-destruction. Those near him were convinced that he would like to lose his life provided he could thereby add to the luster of his reputation. "I have lived long," was his answer to intimate friends who gave him counsels of prudence. "It seems to me that it would be quite fitting to end my career upon the scaffold, a sacrifice to liberty."

Napoleon's estimate of him was short and severe. "Lafayette was another of the fools; he was not cut out for the great rôle he wanted to play." When some one ventured to remind the ex-emperor of Lafayette's spirited refusal to give him up on the demand of the allied powers, Napoleon answered dryly that he was not attacking Lafayette's sentiments or his good intentions, but was merely complaining of the mess he made of things. Lafayette's estimate of the former emperor was even more severe. He thought Napoleon's really glorious title had been "Soldier of the Revolution" and that the crown was for him "a degradation." American history would have been the loser if either of these men had not lived. Lafayette helped win us our country. By selling us Louisiana, Napoleon almost doubled its extent. Napoleon's heart rarely led him into trouble; personal ambition seldom led Lafayette far astray. The two can be contrasted, but not compared. There is food for thought in the fact that a statue of Lafayette, modeled by an American sculptor and given by five million American schoolchildren to France, should have been erected in the Louvre on the spot once set apart for a statue of the French emperor.

Madame de Staël thought Lafayette more like the English and Americans than like the French, even in his personal appearance. Another French estimate, that he had "a cold manner, masking concentrated enthusiasm," is quite in keeping with American character, as was his incorrigible dash of optimism. It was to America, a country of wide spaces and few inhabitants, that he followed his vision of liberty in early manhood, and there where the play and interplay of selfish interests was far less complicated than in France he saw it become a practical reality. Later he championed many noble causes in many parts of the world. Next to political freedom and as a necessary part of it, he had at heart the emancipation of the negroes. This he tried himself to put into practice. He was shocked when he returned to our country in 1824 to find how much race prejudice had increased. He remembered that black soldiers and white messed together during the American Revolution.

Religious liberty for Protestants, civil rights for Jews and Protestants; suppression of the infamous lettres de cachet; trial by jury; a revision of French criminal law to allow the accused the privilege of counsel, of confronting witnesses, and of free communication with his family—benefits, by the way, which were all enjoyed by the accused in the state trials which took place while Lafayette was in power; abolition of the death penalty and freedom of the press were some of the measures most ardently championed by this believer in liberty and law.

He remained a man of visions to the end. After his death one of the men who wrote in praise of him said that if he had lived during the Middle Ages he would have been the founder of a great religious order, one which had a profound moral truth as its guiding principle. Another compared him to a Knight of the Round Table fighting for the lady of his adoration, whose name was Liberty. Possibly no knight-errant, ancient or modern, can seem altogether sane, much less prudent, to the average unimaginative dweller in this workaday world. Yet what would the workaday world be without its knights-errant of the past; the good their knight-errantry has already accomplished; the courage it inspires for to-day; the promise it gives us for the future?

If we dwell on the few times that Lafayette did not choose wisely, the times when the warm impulses of his heart would have carried farther had his head taken a more masterful part in directing his acts, we are tempted to echo the criticism made upon the unfortunate Louis XVI, "What a pity his talents did not equal his virtues!" But when we think of the generous, optimistic spirit of Lafayette, and how that spirit remained unchanged through good fortune and ill from boyhood to old age; of his fearless devotion to right as he saw the right; of his charm, and of the great debt our country owes him, his mistakes fade away altogether and we see only a very gallant, inspiring figure uniting the Old World with the New.

There can be no better eulogy for this brave gentleman, beloved of Washington, than the few words he wrote in all simplicity after he had been called upon to make his great decision between Louis Philippe and himself:

"I did as my conscience dictated. If I was mistaken, the mistake was made in good faith."