Chapter XV: America’s Message to France--“lafayette, (5)

In February, 1791, a crowd from Paris attacked the fortress of Vincennes, which had once been a state prison, but had been unused for some time. Lafayette, with his staff and a considerable number of National Guards, marched out to the place, quelled the disturbance, and arrested sixty of the ringleaders. When he brought his prisoners back to the city he found the gates of the Faubourg St. Antoine closed against him, and he had to threaten to blow the gates open with cannon before the people would allow him to enter. All the way to the Conciergerie, where he took his prisoners, the General and his soldiers were targets for the abuse of the crowds.

On the same day some of the nobles who lived in the neighborhood of the royal palace of the Tuileries, hearing of the attack at Vincennes, thought that the King might also be in danger, and went to the palace, armed with pistols and daggers. This angered the National Guards who were posted about the Tuileries and who thought that the noblemen were poaching on their territory. The King had to appear in person to settle the dispute, and even then some of the nobles were maltreated by the soldiers. Immediately revolutionary orators made use of the incident to inflame the people’s mind, representing that the King’s friends had planned to murder officers of the Guards.

It was clear that the National Guards were growing less and less trustworthy, and equally evident that the people of Paris were becoming more and more hostile to their King. Louis disliked staying at the Tuileries, where he was constantly under the eyes of enemies, and at Easter decided to go to the palace of St. Cloud, which was near Paris, and celebrate the day there. Word of this got abroad, and the people grumbled; more than that they said that Louis should not go to St. Cloud.

On the morning of April eighteenth the King and his family entered their traveling-carriage, only to have an angry crowd seize the horses’ heads and forbid the King to move. Louis appealed to the National Guards who were in attendance, but the soldiers took the side of the people and helped to block the way. The mob swarmed close to the carriage, insulting the King and his servants. Louis had courage. He put his head out at the window and cried, “It would be an astonishing thing, if, after having given liberty to the nation, I myself should not be free!”

At this point Lafayette and the mayor, Bailly, arrived, and urged the mob and the Guards to keep the peace and disperse. The crowd was obstinate; most of the Guards were openly rebellious. Then Lafayette went to the royal carriage, and offered to use force to secure the King’s departure if Louis would give the word. The King answered promptly, “It is for you, sir, to see to what is necessary for the due fulfilment of your constitution.” Again Lafayette turned to the mob and addressed it, but it showed no intention of obeying his orders, and at last he had to tell Louis that it would be dangerous for him to drive forth. So the King and his family returned to the Tuileries, fully aware now that they were prisoners of the people and could not count on the protection of the troops.

Everywhere it was now said that the King must obey “the supreme will of the people.” Louis protested; he went to the National Assembly and told the deputies that he expected them to protect his liberty; but Mirabeau, the leader who had used his influence on behalf of the sovereign in earlier meetings, was dead, and the party of Robespierre held the upper hand. The Assembly had no intention of opposing the people, and paid little heed to the King’s demands.

Lafayette saw that a general whose troops would not obey him was a useless officer, and sent in his resignation as commander of the Guards. But the better element in Paris wanted him to stay, and the more loyal of the troops begged him to resume his command. No one could fill his place, and so he agreed to take the office again. He went to the Commune of Paris and addressed its members. “We are citizens, gentlemen, we are free,” said he; “but without obedience to the law, there is only confusion, anarchy, despotism; and if this capital, the cradle of the Revolution, instead of surrounding with intelligence and respect the depositaries of national power, should besiege them with tumult, or fatigue them with violence, it would cease to be the example of Frenchmen, it would risk becoming their terror.”

The Commune applauded his words, and he went forth again as Commander-in-chief, the Guards taking a new oath to obey the laws. But at the same time the Jacobins, or revolutionaries, placarded the walls of Paris with praises of the soldiers who had rebelled and feasted them as models of patriotism.

Meantime King Louis and his closest friends determined that the royal family must escape from the Tuileries. Careful plans were laid and a number of the nobles were told of them. Rumors of the intended escape got abroad, but such rumors had been current for the past year. Lafayette heard them and spoke of them to the King, who assured him that he had no such design. Lafayette went to the mayor, Bailly, and the two men discussed the rumor, concluding that there was nothing more to it than to the earlier stories.

The night of June twentieth was the time chosen by the King and his intimate friends. Marie Antoinette placed her children in the care of Madame de Tourzel, her companion, saying, “The King and I, madame, place in your hands, with the utmost confidence, all that we hold dear in the world. Everything is ready; go.” Madame de Tourzel and the children went out to a carriage, driven by the Count de Fersen, and rode along the quays to a place that had been decided on as the rendezvous.

Lafayette and Bailly had spent the evening with the King. As soon as they had gone, to disarm suspicion Louis undressed and got into bed. Then he got up again, put on a disguise, and walked down the main staircase and out at the door. He reached his carriage, and waited a short time for the Queen, who presently joined him; and then the royal couple drove out of Paris.

The flight was not discovered until about six o’clock in the morning. Then Lafayette hurried to the Tuileries with Bailly. He found that a mob had already gathered there, vowing vengeance on all who had had charge of the King. With difficulty he rescued the officer who had been on guard the night before. He sent messengers in every direction with orders to stop the royal fugitives. He went to the Assembly, and addressed it. At the Jacobin Club, Danton, the fiery orator, declared, “The commander-general promised on his head that the King would not depart; therefore we must have the person of the King or the head of Monsieur the commander-general!” But Lafayette’s reputation was still too great for him to be reached by his enemies.

The unfortunate royal family were finally arrested at Varennes and brought back to Paris. Louis was received in an ominous silence by his people. Lafayette met him at the gates and escorted him back to the palace. There Lafayette said, “Sire, your Majesty is acquainted with my personal attachment; but I have not allowed you to be unaware that if you separated your cause from that of the people I should remain on the side of the people.”

“That is true,” answered King Louis. “You have acted according to your principles; it is an affair of party. At present, here I am. I will tell you frankly, that up to these last days, I believed myself to be in a vortex of people of your opinion with whom you surrounded me, but that it was not the opinion of France. I have thoroughly recognized in this journey that I was mistaken, and that this opinion is the general one.”

When Lafayette asked the King for his orders, the latter laughed and said, “It seems to me that I am more at your orders than you are at mine.”

The commander did all that he could to soften the hard position of the royal captives, but he took care to see that the Tuileries was better guarded after that.

Some Jacobins now petitioned the Assembly to dethrone the King, and a great meeting was held in the Champs de Mars on the seventeenth of July. As usual the meeting got out of hand and the mob turned to murder and pillage. Lafayette and Bailly rode to the field with some of their soldiers; Bailly proclaimed martial law and ordered the crowd to disperse. Jeers and threats followed, and at last Lafayette had to give his men the command to fire. A dozen of the mob were killed, and the rest took to flight.

This seemed to bring peace again, but it was only the quiet that precedes the thunder-storm. The Assembly finished its work on the new constitution for France and the King signed it. Then Lafayette, tired with his constant labors, resigned his commission and stated his intention of retiring to private life. Paris voted him a medal and a marble statue of Washington, and the National Guards presented him with a sword forged from the bolts of the Bastille. At last he rode back to his country home at Chavaniac, looking forward to rest there as Washington looked for rest at his beloved Mount Vernon.

To friends at his home in Auvergne the General said, “You see me restored to the place of my birth; I shall leave it only to defend or consolidate our common liberty, if attacked, and I hope to remain here for long.” He believed that the new constitution would bring liberty and peace to his country. But the French Revolution had only begun its course, and he was destined soon to be called back to its turmoil.

He had several months of rest in his home in the mountains, happy months for his wife, who for two years had hardly ever seen her husband leave their house in Paris without fearing that he might not return. She had been a wonderful helpmate for the General during the turbulent course of events since his return from America and had loyally entertained the guests of every varying shade of political opinion who had flocked to his house in the capital. But she liked to have her husband away from the alarms of Paris and safe in the quiet of his country home at Chavaniac. There he had more time to spend with her and their three children, Anastasie, George Washington, and Virginia, who had been named after the State where her father had won his military laurels.

The Legislative Assembly of France, which was trying to govern the country under the new constitution, was finding the making of laws which should satisfy every one a very difficult task. There were countless cliques and parties, and each had its own pet scheme for making the land a Utopia. The court party hoped that the more reckless element would lose all hold on the people through its very extravagance, and so actually encouraged many wildly absurd projects. The royalists were always expecting that a counter-revolution would bring them back into power, and the nobles who had left the country filled the border-towns and plotted and conspired and used their influence to induce foreign sovereigns to interfere and restore the old order in France. Naturally enough news of these plots and conspiracies did not tend to make King Louis or his nobles any more popular with the lawgivers in Paris.

In August, 1791, the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria met the Count d’Artois and the Marquis de Bouillé at the town of Pilnitz and formed an alliance against France, making the cause of Louis XVI. their own. The royalists who had emigrated were delighted, and filled Europe with statements of what they meant to do to the revolutionary leaders when they won back their power. The revolutionists grew more and more angry, and as they saw foreign troops gathering on the French frontiers they decided that it was high time to oppose force with force. Narbonne, the Minister of War, announced that the King and government meant to form three armies of fifty thousand men each, and that the country had chosen as commanding generals Rochambeau, Luckner, and Lafayette.

Lafayette at once returned to Paris from Chavaniac, paid his respects to the King, and going to the Assembly thanked the members for his new appointment and declared his unalterable devotion to the maintenance and defense of the constitution. The president of the Assembly answered that “the French people, which has sworn to conquer or to die in the cause of liberty, will always confidently present to nations and to tyrants the constitution and Lafayette.”

In view of what happened afterward it is important to remember that Lafayette accepted his appointment under the constitution of France and that he felt himself bound to support and obey it under all circumstances.

Then he departed from Paris for the frontier, the cheers of the people and the National Guards ringing in his ears. He was popular with all parties except those of the two extremes, the friends of the King considering him a rebel and the Jacobins calling him a courtier.

At Metz Lafayette met Rochambeau, Luckner, and Narbonne, and it was arranged that the three generals should make their headquarters at Liège, Trèves, and Coblentz. News of these military measures somewhat cooled the ardor of the alliance against France and enemy troops stopped collecting along the border. Lafayette took advantage of this to prepare his raw recruits for a possible struggle. They needed this preparation, for the army of France, which had once been the proudest in Europe, had been allowed to scatter during the past few years.

He accomplished much in the way of discipline, was called to Paris to consult on a plan of campaign, found the leaders there as much at odds as ever, and returned to his post at Metz. Again the emigrant nobles and their allies were uttering threats against the French government, and finally, on April 20, 1792, the government declared war on its enemies.

Lafayette’s orders were to proceed against the Netherlands, marching from Metz to Givet, and thence to Namur. Meantime Rochambeau’s army was to attack the Austrians. But there was so much discord among Rochambeau’s divisions that the attack turned into a retreat, and Lafayette, learning this when he arrived at Givet, was obliged to wait there instead of marching farther. The conduct of his soldiers so discouraged Rochambeau that he resigned his commission and the territory to be defended was divided between Lafayette and Luckner. The former concentrated his troops at Maubeuge, and spent the month of May drilling and occasionally making sorties.

In Paris the cause of law and order was having a hard time. The Jacobins wanted to upset the constitution, dethrone the King, and establish a republic, and they were steadily growing stronger. The spirit of revolution was spreading through the country, and everywhere the people gave the greatest applause to the most revolutionary orators. The Assembly was treating Louis XVI. with insolence and the King was retaliating by regarding the deputies with unconcealed contempt. The monarchy and the constitution were fast falling to pieces, and the news of the defeat of the army on the frontier helped to hasten the climax. Gouverneur Morris wrote to Thomas Jefferson in June, 1792, “The best picture I can give of the French people is that of cattle before a thunder-storm.” And a week later he wrote, “We stand on a vast volcano; we feel it tremble and we hear it roar; but how and where and when it will burst, and who may be destroyed by its irruption, are beyond the ken of mortal foresight to discover.”

Lafayette, in camp at Maubeuge, alarmed at the reports from Paris, felt that the cause of liberty and order would be lost unless some effective blow could be dealt at the power of the Jacobins. If some one would take the lead in opposing that group, or club, he believed that the Assembly and the rest of the people would follow. So he wrote a letter to the Assembly, and in this he said, “Can you hide from yourselves that a faction, and, to avoid vague terms, the Jacobite faction, has caused all these disorders? It is this club that I openly accuse.” Then he went on to denounce the Jacobins as the enemies of all order.

When the letter was read in the Assembly the Jacobins attacked it furiously, charging that the General wanted to make himself a dictator. His friends supported him, but the Jacobins were the more powerful. Through their clubs, their newspapers, and their street orators they soon led the fickle people to believe that Lafayette, their idol of a few years before, was now a traitor to them and their greatest enemy.

Another quarrel arose between King Louis and the Assembly, and the former dismissed his ministers. The Jacobins seized on this to inaugurate a reign of terror. The streets were filled with mobs, passionate orators harangued the crowds, men and women pushed their way into the meetings of the Assembly and told the deputies what they wanted done. June twentieth was the anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath, and on that day a great rabble invaded the Assembly, denounced the King, and then marched to the Tuileries, where it found that the gates had been left open. The mob surged through the palace, singing the revolutionary song “_Ça ira_,” and shouting “Down with the Austrian woman! Down with Marie Antoinette!” The Queen and her children fled to an inner room, protected by a few grenadiers. The King watched the crowd surge by him, his only concession to their demands being to put a liberty cap on his head. After three hours of uproar the leaders felt that Louis had been taught a sufficient lesson and led their noisy followers back to the streets.

A story is told that a young and penniless lieutenant by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte was dining with a friend in the Palais Royal when the mob attacked the Tuileries. Taking a position on the bank of the Seine he watched the scene with indignation. When he saw the King at the window with the red liberty cap on his head, he exclaimed, “Why have they let in all that rabble? They should sweep off four or five hundred of them with cannon; the rest would then set off fast enough.” But the time had not yet come for this lieutenant to show how to deal with the people.

Lafayette heard of the mob’s invasion of the Tuileries and decided to go to Paris to see what he could do to check the spirit of revolution. General Luckner had no objection to his leaving his headquarters at Maubeuge, but warned him that if the Jacobins once got him in their power they would cut off his head. Undaunted by this idea Lafayette went to the capital, and arrived at the house of his friend La Rochefoucauld, entirely unexpected, on the twenty-eighth of June.

His visit caused great excitement. He went to the Assembly and made a stirring speech in which he said that the violence committed at the Tuileries had roused the indignation of all good citizens. His words were cheered by the more sober deputies, but the Jacobins protested loudly. One of the latter asked how it happened that General Lafayette was allowed to leave his army to come and lecture the Assembly on its duties. The General’s speech had some influence in restoring order, but the power of the Jacobins was steadily increasing.

Lafayette then went to the Tuileries, where he saw the royal family. Louis was ready to receive any assurance of help that the General could give him, for the King saw now that his only reliance lay in the constitution he had signed, and felt that might prove a slight support. Marie Antoinette, however, refused to forgive Lafayette for the part he had taken in the early days of revolution, and would have no aid at his hands.

When he left the Tuileries some of his former National Guards followed his carriage with shouts of “Vive Lafayette! Down with the Jacobins!” and planted a liberty pole before his house. This gave Lafayette the idea of appealing to the whole force of the National Guard and urging them to stand by the constitution. He asked permission to speak to them at a review the next day, but the mayor, fearing Lafayette’s influence, countermanded the review. Then the General held meetings at his house and did all he could to persuade Guards and citizens to oppose the Jacobins, who, if they had their way, would, in his opinion, ruin the country.

At the end of June he returned to the army. Daily he heard reports of the growing power of his enemies, the Jacobins. Then he resolved to make one more attempt to save the King and the constitution. He received orders to march his troops by a town called La Capelle, which was about twenty miles from Compiègne, one of the King’s country residences. His plan was that Louis XVI. should go to the Assembly and declare his intention of passing a few days at Compiègne; there Lafayette’s army would meet him, and the King would proclaim that he was ready to send his troops against the enemies of France who had gathered on the frontiers and should reaffirm his loyalty to the constitution. The General thought that if the King would do this it would restore the confidence of the people in their sovereign.

But neither the King nor the nobles who were with him at the Tuileries were attracted by this plan, which meant that Louis would openly declare his hostility toward those emigrant nobles who had gathered on the borders. And when the Jacobins learned that Lafayette had been communicating secretly with the King they used this news as fresh fuel for their fire. So the result of the scheme was only to add to the currents of suspicion and intrigue that were involving Paris in the gathering storm.

The power of the Assembly grew weaker; its authority was more and more openly thwarted; the deputies wanted to stand by the constitution, but it appeared that the country did not care to live under its laws. The government of Paris was now entirely under the control of the Jacobins. They filled the ranks of the National Guards with ruffians in their pay. On July fourteenth the King reviewed soldiers who were secretly ready to tear the crown from his head and was forced to listen to bitter taunts and jibes.

Then, at the end of July, the allied armies of Austria and Prussia, accompanied by a great many French noblemen, crossed the frontier and began their heralded invasion. The general in command, the Duke of Brunswick, issued a proclamation calling on the people of Paris to submit to their king, and threatening all sorts of dire things if they persisted in their rebellion. The proclamation acted like tinder to powder. The invasion united all parties for the moment. If the Duke of Brunswick succeeded, no man who had taken part in the Revolution could think his life or property secure, and France would return to the old feudal despotism, made worse by its dependence on foreign armies.

The people of Paris and of France demanded immediate and vigorous action; the Assembly could not lead them, and the Jacobins seized their chance. Danton and his fellows addressed the crowds in the streets and told them that France would not be safe until the monarchy and the aristocracy had been exterminated. The people heard and believed, and by August first were ready to strike down any men their leaders pointed out to them.

Danton and the Jacobins made their plans rapidly. They filled the floor and the galleries of the Assembly with men whose violent threats kept the deputies constantly in fear of physical force. They taught the people to hate all those who defended the constitution, and chief among the latter Lafayette, whom the Jacobins feared more than any other man in France. So great was their fury against him that Gouverneur Morris wrote to Jefferson at the beginning of August, “I verily believe that if M. de Lafayette were to appear just now in Paris unattended by his army, he would be torn in pieces.”

On August tenth the mob, armed with pikes, surrounded the Tuileries. The King looked out on a crowd made up of the most vicious elements of the city. He tried to urge the National Guards to protect him, but they were demoralized by the shouts of the throngs. Finally he decided to take refuge with the National Assembly, and with the Queen and their children succeeded in reaching the Assembly chamber.

The Swiss guards at the Tuileries attempted to make some resistance, but the mob drove them from their posts and killed many of them. The reign of terror spread. Nobles or citizens who had opposed the Jacobins were hunted out and murdered. When the Assembly adjourned the deputies found armed bands at the doors, waiting to kill all those who were known to have supported the constitution.

Meantime the royal family had found the Assembly a poor refuge. A deputy had moved that the King be dethroned and a convention summoned to determine the future government of the country. The measure was instantly carried. Louis XVI. and his family were handed over to officers who took them to the Temple, which then became their prison.

The Jacobins had won the day by force and violence. They formed a government called the “Commune of August 10th,” filled it with their own men, drove all respectable soldiers out of the National Guard and placed Jacobin pikemen in their places. All nobles and friends of the King who were found in Paris were thrown into the prisons, which were soon crammed. The Reign of Terror had begun in fact. Only a short time later the prisoners were being tried and sent to the guillotine.

Lafayette heard of the events of August tenth and begged his troops to remain true to the King and the constitution. Then the Commune of Paris sent commissioners to the armies to announce the change of government and to demand allegiance to the Commune. Lafayette met the commissioners at Sedan, heard their statements, and declaring them the agents of a faction that had unlawfully seized on power, ordered them imprisoned.

News of Lafayette’s arrest of the commissioners added to the turmoil in Paris. Some Jacobins wanted to have him declared a traitor at once; others, however, feared that his influence with the army might be too great for them to take such a step safely. But troops in the other parts of France had come over to the Commune, and so, on the nineteenth of August the Jacobin leaders felt their power strong enough to compel the Assembly to declare Lafayette a traitor.

Lafayette now had to face a decision. France had declared for the Commune of Paris and overthrown King and constitution. He had three choices. He might accept the rule of the Jacobins and become one of their generals; he might continue to oppose them and probably be arrested by his own soldiers and sent to the guillotine; he might leave the country, seek refuge in some neutral land, and hope that some day he could again be of service to liberty in France. To accept the first course was impossible for him, because he had no confidence in Jacobin rule. To take the second would be useless. Therefore the third course was the one he decided on.

He turned his troops over to other officers, and with a few friends, who, like himself, had been declared traitors because they had supported the constitution, rode away from Sedan and crossed the border into Belgium at the little town of Bouillon. He was now an exile from his own country. The cause of liberty that he had fought so hard for had now become the cause of lawlessness. His dream of France, safe and prosperous under a constitution like that of the young republic across the sea, had come to an end, at least for the time being. He could do nothing but wash his hands of the Reign of Terror that followed on the footsteps of the Revolution he had helped to start.

XI

LAFAYETTE IN PRISON AND EXILE

Lafayette knew that he could expect to find no place of refuge on either side of the French frontier; on the one hand were the Jacobin soldiers of the Reign of Terror who held him to be a traitor, and on the other the emigrant noblemen and their allies who regarded him as in large part responsible for all the troubles that had befallen Louis XVI. and his court. He had got himself into a position where both sides considered him an enemy; and his best course seemed to be to make his way to England and there take ship for America, where he was always sure to meet a friendly welcome.

Austrian and Prussian troops held the northern border of France and garrisoned the outpost towns of Belgium. Lafayette and his companions crossed the frontier on their road to Brussels, but were stopped at the town of Rochefort because they had no passports. One of the party, Bureaux de Pusy, rode to Namur, the nearest large town, to try to get the necessary papers, but when he told the officer in charge there that the passports were wanted for General Lafayette and several friends there was great commotion. “Passports for Lafayette, the enemy of the King and of order!” the Austrian officer exclaimed. Lafayette was too important a man to let escape in any such fashion. And at once the command was given to arrest the Frenchman and his companions.

They were found at Liège and arrested. Lafayette protested that he and his friends were now non-combatants, and moreover were on neutral territory in Belgium. In spite of that they were held as prisoners, although a secret message was sent to Lafayette that he could have his freedom if he would forswear his republican principles and give certain information about conditions in France. Indignantly he refused to buy his liberty in any such way, and then was sent to the Prussian fortress of Wesel on the Rhine. On the journey there he was questioned several times about the French army he had commanded, but the haughty contempt with which he refused to make any answers quickly showed his captors the sort of man they had to deal with. At one town an officer of the Duke of Saxe Teschen came to him and demanded that Lafayette turn over to the Duke the treasure chest of his army that his enemies supposed he had taken with him. At first Lafayette thought the request a joke; but when the demand was repeated he turned on the officer. “I am to infer, then, that if the Duke of Saxe Teschen had been in my place, he would have stolen the military chest of the army?” said he. The officer backed out of the room in confusion, and afterward no one dared to doubt the Frenchman’s honesty.

The prison at Wesel was mean and unhealthy, and the cells so small and cold and damp that the prisoners suffered greatly. Yet to every protest of Lafayette the only answer vouchsafed was that he should have better treatment if he would tell his captors the military plans of the army of France. His reply was always the same, an indignant refusal. The Jacobins had declared him a traitor to the government of the Commune, but he never repaid them by any treachery.

The Prussians and Austrians, arch-enemies of liberty, felt that in Lafayette they had caught the chief apostle of freedom in all Europe, and for greater security they presently moved him from the prison at Wesel to the stronger fortress at Magdeburg on the Elbe. There Lafayette had a cell about eight feet by four in size, under the outer rampart, never lighted by a ray of sun. Its walls were damp with mould, and two guards constantly watched the prisoner. Even the nobles in Paris, victims of the Terror, were treated better than the Prussians treated Lafayette. For five months he stayed there, with no chance for exercise or change, proof against every threat and bribe. Then the King of Prussia, seeing that he would soon have to make peace with France, and unwilling that this leader of liberty should be set free, decided to hand Lafayette and his comrades over to the Emperor of Austria, the bitterest foe of freedom and of France.

So Lafayette and several of the others were secretly transferred across the frontier to the fortress of Olmutz, a town of Moravia in central Austria. Here they were given numbers instead of names, and only a few officials knew who the prisoners were or where they were kept. Lafayette practically disappeared, as many other famous prisoners had disappeared in Austrian dungeons. Neither his wife and friends in France nor Washington in America had any inkling of what had become of him.

When he had first left France on his way to Brussels he had written to his wife at Chavaniac. “Whatever may be the vicissitudes of fortune, my dear heart,” he said, “you know that my soul is not of the kind to give way; but you know it too well not to have pity on the suffering that I experienced on leaving my country.... There is none among you who would wish to owe fortune to conduct contrary to my conscience. Join me in England; let us establish ourselves in America. We shall find there the liberty which exists no longer in France, and my tenderness will seek to recompense you for all the enjoyments you have lost.” Later, in his first days in prison, he wrote to a friend in England, using a tooth-pick with some lemon juice and lampblack for pen and ink. “A prison,” he said, “is the only proper place for me, and I prefer to suffer in the name of the despotism I have fought, than in the name of the people whose cause is dear to my heart, and which is profaned to-day by brigands.”

For as brigands he thought of Robespierre and his crew who were making of France a country of horror and fear. From time to time he had news of the execution in Paris of friends who had been very near and dear to him. When Louis XVI. was beheaded he wrote of it as “the assassination of the King, in which all the laws of humanity, of justice, and of national faith were trampled under foot.” When his old friend La Rochefoucauld had fallen at the hands of the Terror he said, “The name of my unhappy friend La Rochefoucauld ever presents itself to me. Ah, that crime has most profoundly wounded my heart! The cause of the people is not less sacred to me; for that I would give my blood, drop by drop; I should reproach myself every instant of my life which was not devoted to that cause; _but the charm is lost_.”

The lover of liberty saw anarchy in the land he had worked to set free; king, nobles and many citizens swept away by the fury of a mob that mistook violence for freedom. Few things are more bitter than for a man who has labored for a great cause to see that cause turn and destroy his ideals.

Meantime Madame Lafayette was suffering also. She was arrested at the old castle of Chavaniac and for a time imprisoned, persecuted, and even threatened with death. The state had denounced Lafayette as an _émigré_, or runaway, and had confiscated all his property. Yet through all these trials his wife remained calm and determined, her one purpose being to learn where her husband was and secure his release if possible. She wrote to Washington, who was then the President of the United States, begging him to intercede for her husband, and when she finally managed to find out where Lafayette was imprisoned she urged the Austrians to allow her to share his captivity.

The Emperor of Austria turned a deaf ear to all requests made on behalf of Lafayette. The United States, however, was able to do something for the man who had befriended it, and deposited two thousand florins in Prussia, subject to his order, and obtained permission of the King of Prussia that Lafayette should be informed that his wife and children were alive.

The prisoner might well have thought that his own family had shared the fate of so many of their relatives and friends. The name of Lafayette was no protection to them, rather an added menace in a land where the Jacobins held sway. On September 2, 1792, when the Reign of Terror was in full flood in Paris, Minister Roland ordered that Madame Lafayette should be arrested at Chavaniac. She was taken, with her aunt and her elder daughter, who refused to leave her, as far as the town of Puy, but there she wrote such vigorous letters of protest to Roland and other officials that she was allowed to return to her home on parole. In October of the next year she was again arrested, this time under the new law that called for the arrest of all persons who might be suspected of hostility to the government, and now she was actually put into a country prison. In June, 1794, Robespierre’s agents brought her to Paris, and she was imprisoned in the College du Plessis, where her husband had gone to school as a boy. From there her next journey, according to the custom of that time, would have been to the guillotine.

At this point, however, Gouverneur Morris, the Minister of the United States, stepped upon the scene. He had already advanced Madame Lafayette large sums of money, when her property had been confiscated; now when he heard that she was to be condemned to the guillotine by the butchers of the Revolution he immediately bearded those butchers in their den. He wrote to the authorities, the Committee of Safety, as the officials grotesquely called it, and told them that the execution of Madame Lafayette would make a very bad impression in America.

The Committee of Safety were not disposed to listen to reason from any quarter. Yet, when they heard Gouverneur Morris say, “If you kill the wife of Lafayette all the enemies of the Republic and of popular liberty will rejoice; you will make America hostile, and justify England in her slanders against you,” they hesitated and postponed ordering her execution. But, because of his protests against such violent acts of the Reign of Terror, Gouverneur Morris was sent back to America, on the ground that he had too much sympathy with the victims of “liberty!”

Madame Lafayette was brought into court, and the Committee of Safety did its best to insult her. Said the Chief Commissioner, “I have old scores against you. I detest you, your husband, and your name!”

Madame Lafayette answered him fearlessly, “I shall always defend my husband; and as for a name--there is no wrong in that.”

“You are insolent!” shouted the Commissioner, and was about to order her execution when he remembered Morris’s words and sent her back to her prison instead.

With her husband in prison in Austria, her young children left unprotected and far away from her, the plight of Madame Lafayette was hard indeed. But she was very brave, though she knew that any day might take her to the scaffold. Almost all the old nobility were brave. While Robespierre and his rabble made liberty and justice a mockery the prisoners maintained their old contempt for their jailers and held their heads as high as in the old days when they had taken their pleasure at Versailles.

On July 22, 1794, Madame Lafayette’s grandmother, the Maréchale de Noailles, her mother, the Duchess d’Ayen, and her sister, the Vicomtesse de Noailles, were beheaded by the guillotine, victims of the popular rage against all aristocrats. A few days later the Reign of Terror came to a sudden end, the prey of the very excesses it had committed.

The people were sick of blood; even the judges and executioners were weary. On July twenty-eighth Robespierre and his supporters were declared traitors and were carted off to the guillotine in their turn. The new revolution opened the prison doors to most of the captives, but it was not until February, 1795, that Madame Lafayette obtained her freedom, and then it was largely owing to the efforts of the new Minister of the United States, James Monroe. At once she flew to her children, and sent her son George to America to be under the protection of Washington. A friend had bought Chavaniac and gave it back to her, but another Reign of Terror seemed imminent and Madame Lafayette wanted to leave France. A passport was obtained for her, and with her daughters she went by sea to Hamburg. There the American consul gave her another passport, made out in the name of “Madame Motier, of Hartford, in Connecticut.” Then she went to Austria and at Vienna presented herself to the grand chamberlain, the Prince of Rosemberg, who was an old acquaintance of her family. He took her to the Emperor, and from the latter she finally won permission to share her husband’s captivity at Olmutz.

Meantime Lafayette’s health had suffered under his long imprisonment. In the dark damp fortress, deprived of exercise, of company, of books, he had passed many weary days. But the Fourth of July he remembered as the birthday of American freedom and spent the hours recollecting the happy time he had known in the young republic across the Atlantic.

At last his wife and daughters joined him in his prison and told him of what had happened in France. Imprisonment was easier to bear now that his family was with him, but the confinement was hard on all of them, and presently the prison authorities, seeing Lafayette in need of exercise, gave him more liberty, allowing him to walk or ride each day, but always strongly guarded.

His friends in America were not idle. Washington had earlier sent a letter to Prussia asking the liberation of Lafayette as a favor. But the prisoner had already been transferred to Austria. In May, 1796, Washington wrote to the Emperor of Austria, and the American Minister, John Jay, presented the letter. “Permit me only to submit to your Majesty’s consideration,” wrote Washington, “whether his long imprisonment and the confiscation of his estate and the indigence and dispersion of his family, and the painful anxieties incident to all these circumstances, do not form an assemblage of sufferings which recommend him to the mediation of humanity. Allow me, sir, on this occasion, to be its organ; and to entreat that he may be permitted to come to this country, on such conditions and under such instructions as your Majesty may think it expedient to prescribe.”

Austria, however, did not intend to release the prisoner. She had too much fear of him as a leader of liberty. When at an earlier time a friend of Lafayette had asked for his release an official of Frederick the Great had refused the request on the same ground that Austria’s emperor now took. “Monsieur de Lafayette,” said this official, “is too fanatic on the subject of liberty; he does not hide it; all his letters show it; he could not keep quiet, if out of prison. I saw him when he was here, and still remember a statement of his, which surprised me very much at that time: ‘Do you believe,’ said he to me, ‘that I went to America to make a military reputation for myself? I went for the sake of liberty. When a man loves it, he can rest only when he has established it in his own country.’”

Before Madame Lafayette had joined her husband in the prison at Olmutz a friend had tried to help the captive to escape. At the time the Austrian officials were allowing Lafayette a little more freedom, although he was practically never out of the watchful sight of guards. The friend was a young man who had come to Vienna to try to find out where the famous Frenchman was imprisoned, the young American, Francis Kinloch Huger, who, as a small boy, had stood in the doorway of his father’s house in South Carolina at midnight and helped to welcome Lafayette and his companions when they first reached American soil. Francis Huger’s father had been attached to Lafayette’s command during the campaign in Virginia, and the son had retained so deep an admiration for his hero that he had come to Europe to help him if he could.

After he had been in Vienna some time Francis Huger met a German physician, Doctor Bollman, who was as great an admirer of Lafayette as the young American. Bollman said to Francis Huger, “Lafayette is in Olmutz,” and then explained how he had found out the place where their hero was hidden. He had become acquainted with the physician who was visiting the Frenchman in prison, and had used this doctor, who knew nothing of his plans, as a go-between. By means of chemically-prepared paper and sympathetic ink he had actually communicated with Lafayette and had arranged a method of escape to be attempted some day when the prisoner was outdoors.

Francis Huger entered eagerly into the plot, and the two conspirators made ready their horses and signals and other preparations for escape. Lafayette had learned part of their plans. As he rode out one day in November, 1794, accompanied by an officer and two soldiers, his two friends were ready for him. Lafayette and the officer got out of the carriage to walk along the road. The carriage, with the two soldiers, drove on. When it was far ahead, Huger and Bollman, who had been watching from their saddles, charged on the officer, while Lafayette turned on the latter, snatched at his unsheathed sword, and tried to disarm him.

The Austrian officer fought gamely, and while Huger held the horses Bollman ran to the aid of the Frenchman, whose strength had been sapped by his long imprisonment. The two soldiers, alarmed at the sudden assault, made no effort to help their officer, but drove away for aid. Meantime the officer was thrown to the ground and held there by Doctor Bollman.

Francis Huger, holding the restive horses with one hand, helped to gag the Austrian officer with his handkerchief. Then one of the horses broke from his grasp and dashed away. Bollman thrust a purse full of money into Lafayette’s hand, and, still holding the struggling Austrian, called to Lafayette in English, so that the officer should not understand, “Get to Hoff! Get to Hoff!”

Lafayette, who was very much excited, was too intent on escaping to pay special attention to Bollman’s directions. He thought the latter was merely shouting, “Get off; get off!” and so, with the help of Francis Huger, he sprang to the saddle of the remaining horse and galloped away as fast as he could go. He did not take the road to Hoff, where his rescuers had arranged to have fresh horses waiting, but took another road which led to Jagerndorf on the German frontier. Before he reached Jagerndorf his horse gave out, and while he was trying to get a fresh mount he was recognized, arrested, and taken back to his prison at Olmutz.

So the attempted escape failed. Huger and Bollman were arrested while they were hunting for the lost Lafayette. They were thrown into prison, put in chains, and nearly starved to death. And for some time after that the officials made Lafayette’s life in prison even more uncomfortable than it had been before.

Fortunately neither Huger nor Bollman died in their Austrian prison. After eight months in their cells they were set free and sent out of the country. Both went to America, where in time Doctor Bollman became a political adventurer and aided Aaron Burr in those schemes which ultimately brought Burr to trial for treason. Then Bollman might have been punished had not Lafayette remembered what he had done at Olmutz and begged President Jefferson to set him free. Francis Huger was among the Americans who welcomed Lafayette to the United States in 1824.

The Frenchman, however, had to continue in prison in Austria. After his wife and daughters joined him the imprisonment grew less hard. But after a time his daughters fell ill of prison-fever, and soon their mother was sick also. She appealed to the Emperor for permission to go to Vienna to see a doctor. The Emperor answered that she could go to Vienna “only on condition that you do not go back to Olmutz.”

She would not desert her husband. “I will never expose myself to the horrors of another separation from my husband,” she declared; and so she and her daughters stayed with Lafayette, enduring all manner of privations and sufferings for his sake.

The world, however, had not forgotten Lafayette. America worked constantly to free him, Washington and Jefferson and Jay, Morris and Marshall and Monroe used all their influence with Austria, but America was not loved in the tyrannical court of Vienna and the appeals of her statesmen passed unheeded. England was generous also toward the man who had once fought against her. The general who had commanded the forces against him at the Brandywine moved Parliament again and again to interfere on behalf of the French hero, and Charles James Fox, the great English orator, pleaded in favor, as he said, “of a noble character, which will flourish in the annals of the world, and live in the veneration of posterity, when kings, and the crowns they wear, will be no more regarded than the dust to which they must return.”

Help finally came from his own land, though in a very strange guise. While Lafayette lay in his cell at Olmutz a new star was rising in the skies, a planet succeeding to the confusion of the Reign of Terror in France. A Corsican officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, was winning wonderful laurels as a general. From victory he strode to victory, and by the spring of 1797 he had broken the power of Austria, had crossed the Italian Alps, and in sight of the Emperor’s capital was ready to dictate the terms of the treaty of Campo Formio. Then he remembered that a Frenchman, Lafayette, was still in an Austrian dungeon. Neither Bonaparte nor the Directory that now governed France wanted Lafayette to return to that country, but both were determined that Austria must give him up. Napoleon wrote that demand into the treaty. The Austrian Emperor objected, but Napoleon insisted and finally threatened, and he held the upper hand. The Emperor sent an officer to demand a written acknowledgment of his past good treatment from Lafayette and a promise never to enter Austria again. Lafayette refused to say anything about his past treatment but agreed to the second condition. Dissatisfied with this the Austrians represented to General Bonaparte that the prisoner had been set free and urged him to sign the treaty. Bonaparte saw through the ruse. He sent an officer to see that Lafayette was liberated, and only when he was satisfied of this would he make peace with the crafty Emperor.

On September 17, 1797, Lafayette, after five years in prison, walked out of Olmutz with his wife and daughters a free man. Even then, however, the Emperor did not hand him over to the French; instead he had him delivered to the American consul, with the statement that “Monsieur the Marquis de Lafayette was released from imprisonment simply because of the Emperor’s desire to favor and gratify America.”

The French Revolution had swept away Lafayette’s estates and fortune, but his friends came to his assistance and helped to provide for him. Especially Americans were eager to show their appreciation of what he had done for their country. Washington, who had been caring for Lafayette’s son at Mount Vernon, now sent him back to Europe, with a letter showing that the great American was as devoted as ever to the great Frenchman.

Lafayette knew that his liberation was due to the brilliant young general, Bonaparte, and he wrote a letter to the latter expressing his gratitude. But there was considerable jealousy in the French government at that time; the letter was distasteful to some of the Directory, and they took their revenge by confiscating the little property that still belonged to Lafayette. Two Englishwomen, however, had left money to the Frenchman as a tribute to his “virtuous and noble character,” and this enabled him to tide over the period until he could get back some of his native estates.