did. He was too honest not to leave his keys always in the locks, even

in politics.”

La Fayette’s conversation was graceful, easy, full of good humor, and peculiarly charming, without descending to frivolity. He was quick at repartee, and apt in uttering _bon mots_, as the following incidents will illustrate:—

“When he was arrested by the Austrians in 1792, an aide-de-camp of Prince de ——, the enemy’s general, came to him, on behalf of his superior, to demand the money of the army which he had been obliged to leave. La Fayette, astonished at the demand, laughed heartily; and when the aide-de-camp advised him to take the matter more seriously, ‘How can I help laughing?’ said he; ‘for all that I can understand of your demand is, that had your prince been in my place he would have run away with the military chest.’ The aide-de-camp had nothing to say in reply, took leave of the prisoner, and departed as he came.”

When he joined the nobles of Brittany, in 1788, in their movement against the government, the queen impatiently asked him why he, who was from Auvergne, meddled with the affairs of the Bretons. “I am a Breton, Madam,” replied La Fayette, “just as your Majesty is of the house of Hapsburg.”

As La Fayette’s mother was from Brittany, so the queen was descended from the house of Hapsburg by the female line.

None of the speeches pronounced by La Fayette in the Chamber of Deputies were prepared. His extempore addresses were eloquent, dignified, and clear. His language was persuasive and pleasing, and his speeches were intelligible to all classes, on account of their simplicity and the directness of their appeal.

A friend of La Fayette one day overheard the conversation of several French artisans, who were discussing in the street the merits of the articles in a newspaper they were reading, and after criticising with warmth many of the writers, the leader exclaimed, “Come, this man La Fayette at least speaks French: we can understand what he wishes to say.”

The English language was as familiar to La Fayette as the French, and he wrote both with great facility. His style was simple, concise, and clear-cut, forceful and elevated; his ideas were well defined, his principles and opinions decided and frankly avowed. Regarding the English correspondence of La Fayette with his friend Masclet, an Englishman thus comments:—

“La Fayette has happily avoided the two principal dangers to which the majority of those who attempt to write in a foreign language are exposed. His style is as free from servile imitation as from grammatical errors or faults of idiom: in a word, it is peculiar to himself; it displays the man, though under another costume. It is simple without meanness, concise without obscurity, dignified without affectation; and often contains those happy turns of expression which infuse such a charm into letters written in French. Scarcely ever does it contain one of those little particles which betray the foreign origin of the writer. His letters, it is true, present some inversions not authorized perhaps by modern custom, but by no means at variance with the genius of the language. On the contrary, they establish a sort of link between the writer and the old English authors. Such inversions are admirable for their delicacy and _naïveté_; without shocking the ear, or proving injurious to clearness of expression, they arrest the attention of the reader, deck themselves, as it were, in the smile resulting from his agreeable surprise, and prevent monotony of style. La Fayette writes English with much facility. His letters present no trace of painful effort or labored composition. He seems never to hesitate in his choice of a suitable word or turn of expression, though he sometimes forgets that the English language can with difficulty bend to that nervous and even elliptic concision of which a skilful French writer often avails himself with so much advantage. This forgetfulness occasionally gives an appearance of roughness and even abruptness to La Fayette’s style.

“His letters are irreproachable, as presenting a faithful picture of his mind; in reading them we feel irresistibly inclined to love the writer; and perhaps in this respect they are inferior to nothing ever composed by him in his own language. Amongst the English, and others who speak that language, such expressions as are employed to depict different degrees of friendship are certainly less numerous and less graceful than amongst the French; but, on the other hand, such expressions have been less frequently subject to the encroachments of gallantry or exaggerated politeness, and are consequently more candid and sincere. In the mouth of such a man as La Fayette, it will be readily imagined that all these qualities acquire new force.”

La Fayette’s handwriting was more legible in English than in French. His characters were small and well formed. Though he never made rough copies, his letters rarely presented erasures. A writer says of the value of his letters:—

“It is almost superfluous to say how La Fayette’s letters were received by those to whom they were addressed. It was enough to present them to meet with unlimited support, protection, and devotedness. The name of the writer was a species of talisman which opened every door; and it might have been said that to such as received his letters, a spark was communicated from his soul, and a desire to imitate his virtues. Some years ago one of my friends, who was abroad, showed a letter from La Fayette to a distinguished personage entrusted with the confidence of an absolute sovereign. At sight of the letter, the powerful functionary seemed electrified, rose from his seat in token of respect, and entreated my friend as a special favor to give him a fragment of the precious correspondence.”

La Fayette always gave precedence to his duty rather than his personal interests. To the Bailli de Ploën he wrote: “So many stupid remarks have been uttered by party spirit, that it may not be out of place here to assert that no private affection has ever diverted me from my public duty. In the course of three years of power I encouraged none to speak well of me; I prevented none from speaking ill; and to explain my conduct with regard to the notorious characters of the Revolution, it will be sufficient to verify their writings, speeches, and actions at the same period.”

Regarding his own ideas of liberty and equality, he wrote to the same friend: “For my part, as I feel persuaded that the human race was created to enjoy freedom, and as I have been born to promote the cause of liberty, I neither can nor will shrink from the participation which it has been my fate to take in this great event; wherever I have been able, and especially in my own country, I concurred on principle in all the enterprises undertaken against an illegitimate power which it was necessary to destroy, and I now declare to you that in 1787 and 1788 the resistance of the privileged classes—of the leaders of the aristocracy—had as much of the true character of faction as any other insurrection that I have since witnessed.”

La Fayette could never be persuaded to use violent measures in upholding even a good cause when such an expedient was not absolutely necessary. At one time during the Revolution, Mirabeau having recommended some very violent plans to La Fayette, urging that they were excusable for the execution of certain projects, La Fayette indignantly exclaimed, “M. de Mirabeau, it is impossible for an honest man to employ such means.”

“An honest man!” replied Mirabeau. “Ah! M. de La Fayette, it seems you wish to be a _Grandison Cromwell_: you will see to what that amalgamation will lead you.”

Wherever the voice of duty called La Fayette, no danger could make him flinch, no fear of insult could deter. During the days of October, 1789, when the palace of Versailles was filled with the raging, bloodthirsty mob, La Fayette hastened to an apartment where the crowd was the thickest, and calmly entered, and crossed the _Salon_ without attendants. “There goes Cromwell!” cried one. Turning to the speaker, La Fayette replied with dignity, “Cromwell would not have entered here ALONE!” Notwithstanding the difference of opinion between La Fayette and Napoleon, whenever it appeared to La Fayette that his services could be of use to the best interests of his country, he was ever ready to sacrifice all personal feeling. Before the battle of Marengo, La Fayette addressed a letter to a friend, instructing him to deliver the communication to Napoleon, in case the battle of Marengo should be lost. In this letter La Fayette offered his services to Bonaparte, in defence of the independence of France. As the battle was won, the epistle was not delivered; but Napoleon was informed of the step which La Fayette contemplated taking in case of defeat. One day, while surrounded by his staff of officers, Bonaparte expressed his admiration of the patriotism of the man with whom he differed in opinion, and added, “Which of you, gentlemen, could have done better?”

La Fayette always recollected with pride and with pleasure the services rendered to France by the National Guard, and he thus wrote of them:—

“The Revolution had armed France; it was urgent to bestow on her an organization, and to that end the observations which I had made in America and in several parts of Europe were directed. The National Guard was instituted; this was the sole armed force which could maintain internal order without favoring military despotism, and by means of which foreign aggression could be repelled, whilst the ancient governments were reduced to the inability of defending themselves against us, unless they imitated us; or against their subjects, if they ventured to follow our example.”

La Fayette was a warm advocate in favor of educating the masses; he often said, “that a good education, physical, moral, and intellectual, was in his opinion the best inheritance that parents could transmit to their children; and he considered it to be their duty to make every sacrifice to insure to their offspring this imperishable advantage, which could not but in time prove conducive to their happiness and that of others.” He expressed to his physician his astonishment that in colleges young people were forced to study the course of different rivers in India or Mexico, whilst no pains were taken to impart to them a knowledge of themselves, by giving them some notions of their own organizations and the exercise of their functions. He was desirous that great pains should be taken with the moral and political education of the people, thus insuring their being well-informed and good citizens. He contended that education was calculated to purify the manners of a nation, and contribute to its happiness. And in proof of his own opinions, La Fayette himself might well have been cited as a type of a perfectly civilized being, whom civilization has improved instead of deteriorating; for he had avoided all its vices, and followed only with undeviating step the path traced by virtue and true liberty. He declared that every member of a well-constituted society should receive an education that might point out to him the path which he ought to pursue between his duties and his rights; and that such an education would prove much more effectual for the prevention than the law was for the repression of disorder.

La Fayette considered that labor was the first duty of man living in a social state, as it was only by labor that one’s debt to society could be repaid. He countenanced amusements when they were pure and healthful, and considered them a necessary relaxation from bodily or mental occupations.

La Fayette recognized liberty of conscience and was tolerant of all religious beliefs. “If it be a crime,” he declared, “to have preferred civil and religious liberty extended equally to all men and all countries, none is more guilty than myself.”

When La Fayette had been proscribed in 1792, the National Convention confiscated all his property, and ordered his negroes at Cayenne to be sold, in spite of the remonstrances of La Fayette, who declared that the negroes had been purchased only to receive their liberty after they had been prepared to exercise it by proper education, and not to be again sold as slaves. At a later period all the negroes of the French colonies were declared free by a decree of the National Convention. It is interesting to note in connection with this effort of La Fayette to bring about the abolition of slavery, that during his last visit to America he visited a free school of young Africans in New York, which had been founded and instituted by the society for the emancipation of the negroes. This incident is related of his visit to this school. A young negro approached La Fayette and said to him, with much emotion: “You see, General, these hundreds of poor African children who appear before you; here they share the benefits of education with the children of the whites: like them, they learn to cherish the recollection of the services which you have rendered to America, and they also revere in you an ardent friend to the emancipation of their race.”

La Fayette was very desirous of instituting prison reforms in France, but he was no advocate for the complete seclusion of prisoners. “Solitary confinement,” said he, “is a punishment which to be judged of must have been endured.” Surely he spoke from a bitter experience, for he had suffered its terrible tortures for one year. Capital punishment was held in horror by La Fayette, and he constantly raised his voice against such penalty, especially in matters of political misdemeanors. And no wonder that he shrank in loathing abhorrence from the bloody guillotine, after his experience of the awful Reign of Terror.

M. Cloquet says in his recollections of La Fayette, regarding his opinions on different subjects:—

“He was familiar with all questions of morals, jurisprudence, policy, and public economy, and he could have treated them all _ex professo_. I have frequently heard him speak of the resources of France and other states; of the relations which people and governments should have to each other; of constitutions, legitimacy, property; of commerce, industry, agriculture; of the art of war, the progress of civilization, the happiness of nations and individuals; and other questions which he treated in the most lucid manner, and which he solved with his natural good sense and simplicity.”

The Encyclopædia Britannica thus sums up the characteristics of La Fayette:—

“His life was beset with inconceivable responsibility and perils, for he was ever the minister of humanity and order among a frenzied people who had come to regard order and humanity as phases of treason. He rescued the queen from the murderous hands of the populace, not to speak of multitudes of humbler victims who had been devoted to death. He risked his life in many unsuccessful attempts to rescue others. He was obliged to witness the butchery of Foulon, and the reeking heart of Berthier torn from his lifeless body and held up in triumph before him. Disgusted with enormities which he was powerless to prevent and could not countenance, he resigned his commission; but so impossible was it to replace him that he was induced to resume it.

“In the Constituent Assembly, of which he was a member, his influence was always felt in favor of republican principles, for the abolition of arbitrary imprisonment, for religious tolerance, for popular representation, for the establishment of trial by jury, for the gradual emancipation of slaves, for the freedom of the press, for the abolition of titles of nobility, and the suppression of privileged orders.

“Few men have owed more of their success and usefulness in the world to their family rank than La Fayette, and still fewer have abused it less. He never achieved distinction in the field, and his political career proved him to be incapable of ruling a great national movement; but he had strong convictions which always impelled him to study the interests of humanity, and a pertinacity in maintaining them, which, in all the marvellous vicissitudes of his singularly eventful life, secured him a very unusual measure of public respect.

“No citizen of a foreign country has ever had so many and such warm admirers in America, nor does any statesman in France appear to have ever possessed uninterruptedly for so many years so large a measure of popular influence and respect. He had what Jefferson called a ‘canine appetite’ for popularity and fame, but in him the appetite only seemed to make him more anxious to merit the fame which he enjoyed. He was brave even to rashness; his life was one of constant personal peril, and yet he never shrank from any danger or responsibility if he saw the way open to spare life or suffering, to protect the defenceless, to sustain the law and preserve order.”

Hon. Chauncey Depew thus concisely comments upon La Fayette’s influence in France:—

“While the principles of the American Devolution were fermenting in France, La Fayette, the hero and favorite of the hour, was an honored guest at royal tables and royal camps. The proud Spaniard and the Great Frederick of Germany alike welcomed him, and everywhere he announced his faith in government founded on the American idea. The financial crisis in the affairs of King Louis on the one hand, and the rising tide of the popular passion on the other, compelled the summons of the Assembly of Notables at Versailles. All the great officers of state, the aristocracy, the titled clergy, the royal princes, were there, but no representative of the people. La Fayette spoke for them, and, fearless of the efforts of the brother of the king to put him down, he demanded religious toleration, equal taxes, just and equal administration of the laws, and the reduction of royal expenditures to fixed and reasonable limits. This overturned the whole feudal fabric which had been in course of construction for a thousand years. To make effectual and permanent this tremendous stride toward the American experiment, he paralyzed the court and cabinet by the call for a national assembly—an assembly of the people. Through that assembly he carried a declaration of rights, founded upon the natural liberties of man, a concession of popular privilege never before secured in the modern history of Europe; and, going as far as he believed the times would admit toward his idea of an American republic, he builded upon the ruins of absolutism a constitutional monarchy.

“But French democracy had not been trained and educated in the schools of the Puritan or the colonist. Ages of tyranny, of suppression, repression, and torture had developed the tiger and dwarfed the man. Democracy had not learned the first rudiments of liberty,—self-restraint and self-government. It beheaded king and queen; it drenched the land with the blood of the noblest and best; in its indiscriminate frenzy and madness it spared neither age nor sex, virtue nor merit, and drove its benefactor, because he denounced its excesses and tried to stem them, into exile and the dungeon of Olmütz. Thus ended in the horrors of the French Revolution La Fayette’s first fight for liberty at home. After five years of untold sufferings, spurning release at the price of his allegiance to monarchy, holding with sublime faith, amidst the most disheartening and discouraging surroundings, to the principles of freedom for all, he was released by the sword of Napoleon Bonaparte, to find that the untamed ferocity of the Revolution had been trained to the service of the most brilliant, captivating, and resistless of military despotisms by the mighty genius of the great Dictator. He only was neither dazzled nor dismayed, and when he had rejected every offer of recognition and honor, Napoleon said: ‘La Fayette alone in France holds fast to his original ideas of liberty. Though tranquil now, he will reappear if occasion offers.’ Against the first consulate of Bonaparte he voted, ‘No, unless with guaranties of freedom.’ When Europe lay helpless at the feet of the conqueror, and, in the frenzy of military glory, France neither saw nor felt the chains he was forging upon her, La Fayette, from his retirement of La Grange, plead with the Emperor for republican principles, holding up to him the retributions always meted out to tyrants, and the pure, undying fame of the immortal few who patriotically decide, when upon them alone rests the awful verdict, whether they shall be the enslavers or the saviors of their country.

“The sun of Austerlitz set in blood at Waterloo. The swords of allied kings placed the Bourbon once more on the throne of France. In the popular tempest of July, the nation rose against the intolerable tyranny of the king, and, calling upon this unfaltering friend of liberty, said with one voice: ‘You alone can save France from despotism on the one hand, and the orgies of the Jacobin mob on the other; take absolute power; be marshal, general, dictator if you will.’ But in assuming command of the National Guard, the old soldier and patriot answered, amidst the hail of shot and shell, ‘Liberty shall triumph, or we all perish together.’ He dethroned and drove out Charles X., and France, contented with any destiny he might accord to her, with unquestioning faith left her future in his hands. He knew that the French people were not yet ready to take and faithfully keep American liberty. He believed that in the school of constitutional government they would rapidly learn, and, in the fulness of time adopt its principles, and he gave them a king who was the popular choice, and surrounded him with the restraints of charter and an assembly of the people.”

M. Francis Hervé, editor of Madame Tussaud’s “Memoirs of the French Revolution,” gives the following account of an interview with La Fayette:—

“During an interesting conversation which took place at the apartments of the editor at Paris, a few months prior to the death of La Fayette, respecting the different forms of government, he observed that the approaches of liberty ought always to be very gradual, and not conferred at once upon those who had lived in a state of slavery under an arbitrary power, and without the benefit of education; which opinion was founded upon the long experience of a life which had been ever devoted to that subject. Although bent with age, the same philanthropy and energetic love of freedom glowed within him as that which characterized his youth, but tempered with maturer judgment; hence, when the Revolution of the three days took place, and he was called upon as the arbiter of France respecting her government, he decided for monarchy, with liberal institutions; but observed that, although a pledge was given for the promotion of the latter, yet it had never been redeemed; and he sighed as he made that declaration.”

La Fayette passed his winters in Paris, and at all seasons of the year, when he was a member of the Chamber of Deputies, he resided in the city during the sessions. He there occupied a suite of apartments in a large hotel No. 6 Rue d’Anjou, St. Honoré.

La Fayette’s occupations in Paris were extremely numerous. Besides his duties as a deputy, which he performed with scrupulous exactness, he was obliged to attend public meetings, committees, relief societies, boards of instruction, and constant social engagements. Notwithstanding his multifarious avocations he found time to devote to his domestic affairs and to his personal study. He was fond of society, and was a delightful and brilliant conversationalist.

A political duel which terminated in the death of M. Dulong, one of La Fayette’s fellow-deputies, was a severe blow to the marquis. Notwithstanding his age, La Fayette followed the body of his friend to the grave on foot, and when he returned home he was soon taken violently