Chapter I: Warriors and Wild Beasts (7)

The king had been named for that one day Supreme Commander of all the National Guards of France. He had delegated his powers, whatever they may have been, to Lafayette; and it was Lafayette on a white horse such as Washington rode who was here, there, and everywhere, the central figure of the pageant as he moved about fulfilling the duties of his office. General Thiébault wrote in his _Memoirs_ that the young buoyant figure on the shining horse, riding through that great mass of men, seemed to be commanding all France. "Look at him!" cried an enthusiast. "He is galloping through the centuries!" And it was upon Lafayette, [Pg 212]at the crowning moment of the ceremony, that all eyes rested. After the two hundred priests had solemnly marched to the altar and placed ahead of all other banners their sacred oriflamme of St.-Denis, Lafayette dismounted and approached the king to receive his orders. Then, slowly ascending the many steps to the altar, he laid his sword before it and, turning, faced the soldiers. Every arm was raised and every voice cried, "I swear!" as he led them in their oath of loyalty; and as if in answer to the mighty shout, the sun burst at that instant through the stormclouds. Music and artillery crashed in jubilant sound; other cannon at a distance took up the tale; and in this way news of the oath was borne to the utmost limits of France. The day ended with fireworks, dancing, and a great feast. Lafayette was the center of the cheers and adulation, admirers pressing upon him from all sides. He was even in danger of bodily harm from the embraces, "perfidious or sincere," of a group of unknown men who had to be forcibly driven away by his aides-de-camp. That night somebody hung his portrait upon the railing surrounding the statue of France's hero-king, Henri IV; an act of unwise enthusiasm or else of very clever malignity of which his critics made the most.

After this, his enemies increased rapidly. The good will and harmony celebrated at the Feast of the Federation had been more apparent than real; a "delicious intoxication," as one of the participants called it, and the ill-temper that follows intoxication soon manifested itself. The Jacobins grew daily more radical. The club did not expel Lafayette; [Pg 213]he left it of his own accord in December, 1790; but that was almost as good for the purposes of his critics.

The task he had set himself of steering a middle course between extremes became constantly more difficult. Mirabeau was president of the Jacobin Club after Lafayette left it, and their mutual distrust increased. Gouverneur Morris thought Lafayette able to hold his own and that "he was as shrewd as any one." He said that "Mirabeau has the greater talent, but his adversary the better reputation." In spite of being president of the Jacobins, Mirabeau was more of a royalist than Lafayette and did what he could to ruin Lafayette with the court party. The quarrel ended only with Mirabeau's sudden death in April, 1791. At the other extreme Marat attacked Lafayette for his devotion to the king, saying he had sold himself to that side. Newspapers circulated evil stories about his private life. Slanders and attacks, wax figures and cartoons, each a little worse than the last, flooded Paris at this time. Some coupled the queen's name with his, which increased her dislike of him, and in the end may have played its small part in her downfall.

The king and queen were watched with lynxlike intensity by all parties, and about three months after Mirabeau's death they made matters much worse by betraying their fear, and what many thought their perfidy, in an attempt to escape in disguise, meaning to get help from outside countries and return to fight for their power. There had been rumors [Pg 214]that they contemplated something of this sort, and Lafayette had gone frankly to the king, urging him not to commit such folly. The king reassured him, and Lafayette had announced that he was willing to answer "with his head" that Louis would not leave Paris. One night, however, rumors were so persistent that Lafayette went himself to the Tuileries. He talked with a member of the royal family, and the queen saw him when she was actually on her way to join the king for their flight. Luck and his usual cleverness both failed Lafayette that night. He suspected nothing, yet next morning it was discovered that the royal beds had not been slept in and that the fugitives were already hours on their way. Lafayette issued orders for their arrest, but clamor was loud against him and Danton was for making him pay literally with his head for his mistake.

Almost at the frontier the king and queen were recognized through the likeness of Louis to his portrait on the paper money that flooded the kingdom, and they were brought back to Paris, real prisoners this time. They passed on their way through silent crowds who eyed them with terrifying hostility. The queen, who was hysterical and bitter, insisted on treating Lafayette as her personal jailer. Louis, whatever his faults, had a sense of humor and smiled when Lafayette appeared "to receive the orders of the king," saying it was evident that orders were to come from the other side. It is strange that he was not dethroned at once, for he had left behind him a paper agreeing to repeal every law [Pg 215]that had been passed by the National Assembly. Dread of civil war was still strong, however, even among the radicals, and he was only kept a prisoner in the Tuileries until September, when the new Constitution was finished and ready for him to sign. After he swore to uphold it he was again accorded royal honors.

But meantime there had been serious disturbances. Lafayette had felt it his duty to order the National Guard to fire upon the mob; and for that he was never forgiven. On that confused day an attempt was made upon his life. The culprit's gun missed fire, and when he was brought before Lafayette the latter promptly set him at liberty; but before midnight a mob surrounded Lafayette's house, crying that they had come to murder his wife and carry her head to the general. The garden wall had been scaled, and they were about to force an entrance when help arrived.

After the Constitution became the law of the land, Lafayette followed Washington's example, resigned his military commission, and retired to live at Chavaniac. Several times before when criticism was very bitter he had offered to give up his sword to the Commune, but there had been no one either willing or able to take his place and he had been persuaded to remain. Now he felt that he could withdraw with dignity and a clear conscience. In accepting his resignation the Commune voted him a medal of gold. The National Guard presented him with a sword whose blade was made from locks of the old Bastille, and on his 360-mile journey to Chavaniac he received civic crowns enough to [Pg 216]fill his carriage. His reception at home was in keeping with all this. "Since you are superstitious," he wrote Washington, "I will tell you that I arrived here on the anniversary of the surrender of Cornwallis." But even in far-away Chavaniac there were ugly rumors and threats against his life. The local guard volunteered to keep a special watch; an offer he declined with thanks.

Bailly retired as mayor of Paris soon after this, whereupon Lafayette's friends put up his name as a candidate. The election went against him two to one in favor of Pétion, a Jacobin, and from that time the clubs held undisputed sway. According to law the new Assembly had to be elected from men who had not served in the old one; this was unfortunate, since it deprived the new body of experienced legislators. The pronounced royalists in the Assembly had now dwindled to a scanty hundred.

Neighboring powers showed signs of coming to the aid of Louis, and the country did not choose to wait until foreign soldiers crossed its frontiers. Nobody knew better than Lafayette how unprepared France was for war against a well-equipped enemy, but the marvels America had accomplished with scarcely any equipment were fresh in his memory, and he looked upon foreign war as a means of uniting quarreling factions at home--a dangerous sort of political back-fire, by no means new, but sometimes successful. Before December, 1791, three armies had been formed for protection. Lafayette was put in command of one of them, his friend Rochambeau of another, and the third was given to General [Pg 217]Luckner, a Bavarian who had served France faithfully since the Seven Years' War.

Lafayette's new commission bore the signature of the king. He hurried to Paris, thanked his sovereign, paid his respects to the Assembly, and departed for Metz on Christmas Day in a semblance of his old popularity, escorted to the city barriers by a throng of people and a detachment of the National Guard. He entered on his military duties with enthusiasm, besieging the Assembly with reports of all the army lacked, consulting with his co-commanders, and putting his men through stiff drill.

By May war had been declared against Sardinia, Bohemia, and Hungary, but the back-fire against anarchy did not work. Troubles at home increased. The Paris mob became more lawless, and on the 20th of June, 1792, the Tuileries was invaded and the king was forced to don the red cap of Liberty; a serio-comic incident that might easily have become tragedy if Louis had possessed more spirit. Lafayette spoke the truth about this king when he said that he "desired only comfort and tranquillity--beginning with his own."

Feeling that his monarch had been insulted, Lafayette hurried off to Paris to use his influence against the Jacobins. He went without specific leave, though without being forbidden by General Luckner, his superior officer, who knew his plan. To his intense chagrin he found that he no longer had an atom of influence in Paris. The court received him coldly, the Assembly was completely in the hands of the Jacobins, [Pg 218]timid people were too frightened to show their real feelings, and the National Guard, upon whose support Lafayette had confidently relied, was now in favor of doing away with kingship altogether.

Lafayette could not succor people who refused to be helped, and he returned to the army, followed by loud accusations that he had been absent without leave and that he was "the greatest of criminals." "Strike Lafayette and the nation is saved!" Robespierre had shouted, even before he appeared on his fruitless mission. "Truly," wrote Gouverneur Morris, "I believe if Lafayette should come to Paris at this moment without his army he would be knifed. What, I pray you, is popularity?"

In July Prussia joined the nations at war, threatening dire vengeance if Paris harmed even a hair of the king or queen. The mob clamorously paraded the streets, led by five hundred men from Marseilles, singing a new and strangely exciting song whose music and whose words, "To arms! To arms! Strike down the tyrant!" were alike incendiary. In spite of his recent rebuff, Lafayette made one more attempt to rescue the king, not for love of Louis or of monarchy, but because he believed that Louis now stood for sane government, having signed the Constitution. It is doubtful whether the plan could have succeeded; it was one of Lafayette's generous dreams, based on very slight foundation. He wanted to have himself and General Luckner called to Paris for the coming celebration of July 14th. At that time, making no secret of it, the king should go with his generals before the Assembly and [Pg 219]announce his intention of spending a few days at Compiègne, as he had a perfect right to do. Once away from Paris and surrounded by the loyal troops the two generals would have taken care to bring with them, Louis could issue a proclamation forbidding his brothers and other _émigrés_ to continue their plans and could say that he was himself at the head of an army to resist foreign invasion; and, having taken the wind out of the sails of the Jacobins by this unexpected move, could return to Paris to be acclaimed by all moderate, peace-loving men.

There were personal friends of the king who urged him to try this as the one remaining possibility of safety. Others thought it might save Louis, but could not save the monarchy. The queen quoted words of Mirabeau's about Lafayette's ambition to keep the king a prisoner in his tent. "Besides," she added, "it would be too humiliating to owe our lives a second time to that man." So Lafayette was thanked for his interest and his help was refused. On the 10th of August there was another invasion of the Tuileries, followed this time by the massacre of the Swiss Guard. The royal family, rescued from the palace, was kept for safety for three days in a little room behind the one in which the Assembly held its sessions; then it was lodged, under the cruel protection of the Commune, in the small medieval prison called the Temple, in the heart of Paris.

With the Commune in full control, it was not long before an accusation was officially made against Lafayette. "Evidence" to bear it out was speedily found; and on August 19th, less than ten days after [Pg 220]the imprisonment of the king, the Assembly, at the bidding of the Commune, declared Lafayette a traitor. He knew he had nothing to hope from his own troops, for only a few days before this his proposal that they renew their oath of fidelity to the Nation, the Law, and the King had met with murmurs of disapproval, until one young captain, making himself spokesman, had declared that Liberty, Equality, and the National Assembly were the only names to which the soldiers could pledge allegiance.

Lafayette still had faith in the future, but the present offered only two alternatives--flight, or staying quietly where he was to be arrested and carried to Paris, where he would be put to death as surely as the sun rose in the east. This was what his Jacobin friends seemed to expect him to do, and they assailed him bitterly for taking the other course. He could not see that his death at this time and in this way would help the cause of civil liberty. He said that if he must die he preferred to perish at the hands of foreign tyrants rather than by those of his misguided fellow-countrymen. He placed his soldiers in the best position to offset any advantage the enemy might gain through his flight, and, with about a score of officers and friends, crossed the frontier into Liège on the night of August 20th, meaning to make his way to Holland and later to England. From England, in case he could not return and aid France, he meant to go to America.

Instead of that, the party rode straight into the camp of an Austrian advance-guard.

[Pg 221]XXIV

SOUTH CAROLINA TO THE RESCUE!

It was eight o'clock at night, a few leagues from the French border. Their horses were weary and spent. The road approached the village of Rochefort in such a way that they could see nothing of the town until almost upon it, and the gleam of this camp-fire was their first intimation of the presence of the Austrians. It would have availed nothing to turn back. If they went toward the left they would almost certainly fall in with French patrols, or those of the _émigrés_ who were at Liège. To the right a whole chain of Austrian posts stretched toward Namur. "On all sides there was an equality of inconvenience," as Lafayette said. One of the party rode boldly forward to interview the commandant and ask permission to spend the night in the village and continue the journey next day. This was granted after it had been explained that they were neither _émigrés_ nor soldiers on their way to join either side, but officers forced to leave the French army, whose only desire was to reach a neutral country.

[Pg 222]A guide was sent to conduct them to the village inn. Before they had been there many minutes Lafayette was recognized, and it was necessary to confess the whole truth. The local commander required a pass from the officer at Namur, and when that person learned the name of his chief prisoner he would hear nothing more about passports, but communicated in joyful haste with his superior officer, the Duc de Bourbon. At Namur Lafayette received a visit from Prince Charles of Lorraine, who sent word in advance that he wished "to talk about the condition in which Lafayette had left France." Lafayette replied that he did not suppose he was to be asked questions it might be inconvenient to answer, and when the high-born caller entered with his most affable manner he was received with distant coolness by all the prisoners.

From Namur they were taken to Nivelles, where they were presented with a government order to give up all French treasure in their possession. Lafayette could not resist answering that he was quite sure their Royal Highnesses would have brought the treasure with them had they been in his place; and the amusement of the Frenchmen increased as the messenger learned, to his evident discomfiture, that the twenty-three of them combined did not have enough to keep them in comfort for two months. That same day the prisoners were divided into three groups. Those who had not served in the French National Guard were given their liberty and told to leave the country. Others were sent to the citadel at Antwerp and kept there for two months. Lafayette and [Pg 223]three companions who had served with him in the Assembly, Latour Maubourg, a lifelong friend, Alexander Lameth, and Bureaux de Pusy, were taken to Luxembourg. There was only time for a hurried leave-taking. Lafayette spent it with an aide who was to go to Antwerp. Feeling sure he was marked for death, he dictated to this officer a message to be published to the French people when he should be no more.

Before leaving Rochefort he had found means of sending a letter to his wife, who was at Chavaniac overseeing repairs upon the old manor-house. It was from this letter that she learned what had befallen him, and she carried it in her bosom until she was arrested in her turn. The message to Adrienne began characteristically on a note of optimism. "Whatever the vicissitudes of fortune, dear heart, you know my soul is not of a temper to be cast down." He told of his misfortune in a gallant way, saying the Austrian officer thought it his duty to arrest him. He hurriedly reviewed the reasons that led up to his flight, said that he did not know how long his journey "might be retarded," and bade her join him in England with all the family. His closing words were: "I offer no excuses to my children or to you for having ruined my family. There is not one of you who would owe fortune to conduct contrary to my conscience. Come to me in England. Let us establish ourselves in America, where we shall find a liberty which no longer exists in France, and there my tenderness will endeavor to make up to you the joys you have lost."

[Pg 224]His journey was "retarded" for five years, and for a large part of that time seemed likely to end only at the grave, possibly by way of the executioner's block. It is to be hoped that his sense of humor allowed him to enjoy one phase of his situation. He had been driven from France on the charge that he favored the king, yet he was no sooner across the border than he was arrested on exactly the opposite charge; that of being a dangerous revolutionist, an enemy to all monarchs. When he demanded a passport he received the sinister answer that he was to be kept safely until the French king regained his power and was in a position to sentence him himself. He was sent from prison to prison. First to Wezel, where he remained three months in a rat-infested dungeon, unable to communicate with any one, and watched over by an officer of the guard who was made to take a daily oath to give him no news. "One would think," said Lafayette, "that they had imprisoned the devil himself." He was so thoroughly isolated that Latour Maubourg, a few cells away, learned only through the indiscretion of a jailer that he was seriously ill. Maubourg asked permission, in case the illness proved fatal, to be with him at the last, but was told that no such privilege could be granted. But Lafayette did not die and even in the worst of his physical ills had the spirit to reply, "The King of Prussia is impertinent!" when a royal message came offering to soften the rigors of his captivity in return for information about France. The message was from that "honest prince" who in Lafayette's opinion "would never have the genius of his uncle."

[Pg 225]Another answer, equally inconsiderate of royal feelings, resulted in the transfer of the prisoners to Magdebourg, where they were kept a year. On these journeys from place to place they served as a show to hundreds who pressed to see them. There were even attempts to injure them, but Lafayette believed he saw more pitying faces than hostile ones in the crowds. Once fate brought them to an inn at the same moment with the Comte d'Artois and his retinue, all of whom, with a single exception, proved blind to the presence of their former friends. We have details of the way in which Lafayette was lodged and treated at Magdebourg, from a letter he managed to send to his stanch friend, the Princesse d'Hénin in London.

"Imagine an opening under the rampart of the citadel, surrounded by a high, strong palisade. It is through that, after opening successively four doors each guarded with chains and padlocks and bars of iron, that one reaches, not without some trouble and some noise, my dungeon, which is three paces wide and five and a half long. The side wall is covered with mold; that in front lets in light, but not the sun, through a small barred window. Add to this two sentinels who can look down into our subterranean chamber, but are outside the palisade so that we cannot speak to them.... The noisy opening of our four doors occurs every morning to allow my servant to enter; at dinner-time, that I may dine in presence of the commandant of the citadel and of the guard; and at night when my servant is taken away to his cell." The one ornament [Pg 226]on his prison wall was a French inscription, in which the dismal words _souffrir_ and _mourir_ were made to rhyme. The one break in the prison routine had been an execution, upon which, had he chosen, Lafayette could have looked from his window as from a box at the opera.

After a year of this he was moved again and turned over to the Emperor of Prussia, his prison journeys ending finally at the gloomy fortress of Olmütz in the Carpathian Mountains. Something may be said in defense of the severity with which his captors guarded him. He steadfastly refused to give his parole, preferring, he said, to take his liberty instead of having it granted him. This undoubtedly added a zest to life in prison which would otherwise have been lacking, and very likely contributed not a little to his serenity and even to his physical well-being. It transformed the uncomfortable prison routine into a contest of wits, with the odds greatly against him, but which left him honorably free to seize any advantage that came his way. He foiled the refusal to allow him writing materials by writing letters as he wrote that one to Madame d'Hénin, with vinegar and lampblack in a book on a blank leaf which had escaped the vigilant eye of his guard. Knowing very little German, he dug out of his memory forgotten bits of school-day Latin to use upon his jailers. He took every bit of exercise allowed him in order to keep up his physical strength. He believed he might have need of it. He even lived his life with a certain gay zest, and took particular delight in celebrating the Fourth of July, 1793, in [Pg 227]his lonely cell by writing a letter to the American minister at London. He gave his vivid imagination free rein in concocting plans of escape.

Friends on the outside were busy with plans, too; and though he got no definite news of them, his optimism was too great to permit him to doubt that they were doing everything possible for his release. At the very outset of his captivity he applied to be set free on the ground that he was an American citizen, though there was small chance of the request being granted. He was sure Washington would not forget him; he knew that Gouverneur Morris had deposited a sum of money with his captors upon which he might draw at need. Madame de Staël, the daughter of Necker, and the Princesse d'Hénin were in London, busy exercising feminine influence in his behalf. General Cornwallis and General Tarleton had interceded for him, and later he learned that Fitzpatrick, the young Englishman he had liked on their first meeting in London, the same who afterward carried letters for him from America, had spoken for him in Parliament. Fox and Sheridan and Wilberforce added their eloquence; but the cautious House of Commons decided it was none of its business and voted against the proposal to ask for Lafayette's release, in the same proportion that the citizens of Paris had rejected him for mayor.

French voices also were raised in his behalf. One of the earliest and most courageous was that of Lally Tollendal, who as member of the French Assembly had quarreled with Lafayette for being so much [Pg 228]of a monarchist. But later he changed his mind and acted as go-between in the negotiations for Lafayette's final plan to remove the royal family to Compiègne. From his exile in London Lally Tollendal now addressed a memorial to Frederick William II, telling him the plain truth, that it was unjust to keep Lafayette in jail as an enemy of the French king, because it was an effort to save Louis which had proved his ruin. "Those who regard M. de Lafayette as the cause, or even one of the causes, of the French Revolution are entirely wrong," this friend asserted. "He has played a great role, but he was not the author of the piece.... He has not taken part in a single one of its evils which would not have happened without him, while the good he did was done by him alone."

Then Lally Tollendal went on to tell how on the Sunday after Louis was arrested and brought back from Varennes Lafayette by one single emphatic statement had put an end, in a committee of the Assembly, to an ugly discussion about executing the king and proclaiming a republic. "I warn you," he had said, "that the day after you kill the king the National Guard and I will proclaim the prince royal." Lally Tollendal expatiated upon how evenly Lafayette had tried to deal out justice to royalists and revolutionists alike; how in the last days of his liberty he had said in so many words that the Jacobins must be destroyed; and that he had with difficulty been restrained from raising a flag bearing the words, "No Jacobins, no Coblenz," as a banner around which friends of the king and conservative republicans might rally. But the strict [Pg 229]impartiality this disclosed had little charm for a king of Prussia and the appeal bore no fruit.

There were more thrilling efforts to aid him close at hand. "It is a whole romance, the attempt at rescuing Lafayette," says a French biographer. The opening scene of this romance harks back to the night when Lafayette made his first landing on American soil, piloted through the dark by Major Huger's slaves. The least noticed actor in that night's drama had been Major Huger's son, a very small boy, who hung upon the words of the unexpected guests and followed them with round, child eyes. Much had happened to change two hemispheres since, and even greater changes had occurred in the person of that small boy. He had grown up, he had resolved to be a surgeon, had finished his studies in London, and betaken himself to Vienna to pursue them further. There in the autumn of 1794 in a café he encountered a Doctor Bollman of Hanover. They fell into conversation, and before long Bollman confided to Huger that he had a secret mission. He had been charged by Lally Tollendal and American friends of Lafayette then in London to find out where the prisoner was and to plan for his escape. In his search he had traveled up and down Germany as a wealthy physician who took an interest in the unfortunate, particularly in prisoners, and treated them free of charge. For a long time he had found no clue, but at Olmütz, whose fortifications proved too strong in days past even for Frederick the Great, he had been invited to dinner by the prison doctor [Pg 230]and in turn had entertained him, plying him well with wine. They talked about prisoners of note. The prison doctor admitted that he had one now on his hands; and before the dinner was over Bollman had sent an innocent-sounding message to Lafayette. Later he was allowed to send him a book, with a few written lines purporting to be nothing more than the names of some friends then in London.

When the book was returned Bollman lost no time in searching it for hidden writing. In this way he learned that Lafayette had lately been allowed to drive out on certain days a league or two from the prison for the benefit of his health, and that his guard on such occasions consisted of a stupid lieutenant and the corporal who drove the carriage. The latter was something of a coward. Lafayette would undertake to look after both of them himself if a rescuer and one trusty helper should appear. No weapons need be provided; he would take the officer's own sword away from him. All he wanted was an extra horse or two, with the assurance that his deliverers were ready. It was a bold plan, but only a bold plan could succeed. There were too many bolts and bars inside the prison to make any other kind feasible. Lameth had been set at liberty; his two other friends, Latour Maubourg and Bureaux de Pusy, were in full sympathy with the plan, and to make it easier had refrained from asking the privilege of driving out themselves. Bollman added that he could not manage the rescue alone and had come away to hunt for a trusty confederate. Huger had already [Pg 231]told of his unforgotten meeting with Lafayette, and there was no mistaking the eagerness with which he awaited Bollman's next word or the joy with which he accepted the invitation to take part in the rescue. He was moved by something deeper than mere love of adventure. "I simply considered myself the representative of the young men of America and acted accordingly," he said long after.

The two men returned to Olmütz and put up at the inn where Bollman had stayed before. They managed to send a note to Lafayette. His answer told them he would leave the prison on November 8th for his next drive, how he would be dressed, and the signal by which they might know he was ready. It was a market day, with many persons on the road. They paid their score, sent their servants ahead with the traveling-carriage and luggage to await their arrival at a town called Hoff, while they came more slowly on horseback. Then they rode out of the gray old town. Neither its Gothic churches, its hoary university, nor the ingenious astronomical clock that had rung the hours from its tower for three hundred and seventy years; not even the fortifications or the prison itself, built on a plain so bare that all who left it were in full view of the sentinels at the city gates, interested these travelers as did the passers-by. Presently a small phæton containing an officer and a civilian was driven toward them, and as it went by the pale gentleman in a blue greatcoat raised his hand to pass a white handkerchief over his forehead. The riders bowed slightly and tried to look indifferent, but that was hard work. Turning as soon as they dared, they saw that [Pg 232]the carriage had stopped by the side of the road. Its two passengers alighted; the gentleman in blue handed a piece of money to the driver, who drove off as though going on an errand. Then leaning heavily upon the officer, seeming to find difficulty in walking, he drew him toward a footpath. But at the sound of approaching horsemen, he suddenly seized the officer's sword and attempted to wrench it from its scabbard. The officer grappled with him. Bollman and Huger flew to his assistance. In the act of dismounting Bollman drew his sword and his horse, startled by the flashing steel, plunged and bolted. Huger managed to keep hold of his own bridle, while he helped Bollman tear away the officer's hands that were closing about Lafayette's throat. The Austrian wrenched himself free and ran toward the town, shouting with all his might.

Here were three men in desperate need of flight, the alarm already raised, and only two horses to carry them to safety--one of these running wild. Huger acted with Southern gallantry and American speed. He got Lafayette upon his own steed, shouted to him to "Go to Hoff!" and caught the other horse. Misunderstanding the injunction, Lafayette, who thought he had merely been told to "Go off," rode a few steps, then turned back to help his rescuers. They motioned him away and he disappeared, in the wrong direction. The remaining horse reared and plunged, refusing to carry double. Huger persuaded Bollman to mount him, since he could be of far greater use to Lafayette, and saw him [Pg 233]gallop away. By that time a detachment of soldiers was bearing down upon him, and between their guns he entered the prison Lafayette had so lately quitted.

At the end of twenty miles Lafayette had to change horses. He appealed to an honest-looking peasant, who helped him to find another one, but also ran to warn the authorities. These became suspicious when they saw Lafayette's wounded hand, which had been bitten by the officer almost to the bone. They arrested him on general principles and he was carried back to a captivity more onerous than before. He was deprived of all rides, of course, of all news, even of the watch and shoe-buckles which up to this time he had been allowed to retain. Bollman reached Hoff and waited for Lafayette until nightfall, then made his way into Silesia. But he was captured and returned to Austria and finally to Olmütz.

The treatment accorded Lafayette's would-be rescuers was barbarous in the extreme. Huger was chained hand and foot in an underground cell, where he listened to realistic descriptions of beheadings, and, worse still, of how prisoners were walled up and forgotten. Daily questions and threats of torture were tried to make him confess that the attempt was part of a wide-spread conspiracy. As his statements and his courage did not waver, the prison authorities came at last to believe him, and he was taken to a cell aboveground where it was possible to move three steps, though he was still chained. He found that Bollman was confined in the cell just above him. The latter let down a walnut [Pg 234]shell containing a bit of ink and also a scrap of paper. With these Huger wrote a few lines to the American minister at London, telling of their plight and ending with the three eloquent words, "Don't forget us!"--doubly eloquent to one who knew those stories of walled-up prisoners underground. They bribed the guard to smuggle this out of the prison, and in time it reached its destination. The American minister did not forget them. Through his good offices they were released and told to leave the country. They waited for no second invitation, which was very wise, because the emperor repented his clemency. He sent an order for their rearrest, but it arrived, fortunately, just too late to prevent their escape across the border.

[Pg 235]XXV

VOLUNTEERS IN MISFORTUNE

Lafayette, in his uncomfortable cell, was left in complete ignorance of the fate of Bollman and Huger, though given to understand that they had been executed or soon would be, perhaps under his own window. The long, dreary days wore on until more than a year had passed, with little to make one day different from another, though occasionally he was able to communicate with Pusy or Maubourg through the ingenuity of his "secretary," young Felix Pontonnier, a lad of sixteen, who had managed to cling to him with the devotion of a dog through all his misfortunes. Prison air was hard upon this boy and prison officials were harder still, but his spirits were invincible. He whistled like a bird, he made grotesque motions, he talked gibberish, and these antics were not without point. They were a language of his own devising, by means of which he conveyed to the prisoners such scraps of information as came to him from the outside world.

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 [Pg 236]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 [Pg 237]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 [Pg 238]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, [Pg 239]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 [Pg 240]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 [Pg 241]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 [Pg 242]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 [Pg 243]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 [Pg 244]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_."