Part 71

"Long live the general! Long live the queen! Long live the body-guard!"

It was immediately announced that the king would go with the people to Paris; which had the effect of completely allaying their passions. During the long march of ten miles, La Fayette rode close to the door of the king's carriage, and thus conducted him, in the midst of the tramping crowd, in safety to the Tuilleries. When the royal family was once more secure within its walls, one of the ladies, the daughter of the late king, threw herself in the arms of La Fayette, exclaiming:

"General, you have saved us."

From this moment dates the decline of La Fayette's popularity; and his actions, moderate and wise, continually lessened it. He demanded, as a member of the National Assembly, that persons accused of treason should be fairly tried by a jury, and he exerted all his power, while giving a constitution to his country, to preserve the monarchy.

To appease the suspicions of the people that the king meditated a flight from Paris, he declared that he would answer with his head for the king's remaining. When, therefore, in June, 1791, the king and queen made their blundering attempt to escape, La Fayette was immediately suspected of having secretly aided it. Danton cried out at the Jacobin club:

"We must have the person of the king, or the head of the commanding general!"

It was in vain that, after the king's return, he ceased to pay him royal honors; nothing could remove the suspicions of the people. Indeed, he still openly advised the preservation of the monarchy, and, when a mob demanded the suppression of the royal power, and threatened violence to the National Guard, the general, after warning them to disperse, ordered the troops to fire--an action which totally destroyed his popularity and influence. Soon after, he resigned his commission and his seat in the Assembly, and withdrew to one of his country seats.

He was not long allowed to remain in seclusion. The allied dynasties of Europe, justly alarmed at the course of events in Paris, threatened the new republic with war. La Fayette was appointed to command one of the three armies gathered to defend the frontiers. While he was disciplining his troops, and preparing to defend the country, he kept an anxious eye upon Paris, and saw with ever-increasing alarm the prevalence of the savage element in the national politics. In 1792 he had the boldness to write a letter to the National Assembly, demanding the suppression of the clubs, and the restoration of the king to the place and power assigned him by the constitution.

Learning, soon after, the new outrages put upon the king, he suddenly left his army and appeared before the bar of the Assembly, accompanied by a single aide-de-camp; there he renewed his demands, amid the applause of the moderate members; but a member of the opposite party adroitly asked:

"Is the enemy conquered? Is the country delivered, since General La Fayette is in Paris?"

"No," replied he, "the country is not delivered; the situation is unchanged; and, nevertheless, the general of one of our armies is in Paris."

After a stormy debate, the Assembly declared that he had violated the constitution in making himself the organ of an army legally incapable of deliberating, and had rendered himself amenable to the minister of war for leaving his post without permission. Repulsed thus by the Assembly, coldly received at court, and rejected by the National Guard, he returned to his army despairing of the country. There he made one more attempt to save the king by inducing him to come to his camp and fight for his throne. This project being rejected, and the author of it denounced by Robespierre, his bust publicly burned in Paris, and the medal formerly voted him broken by the hand of the executioner, he deemed it necessary to seek an asylum in a neutral country. Having provided for the safety of his army, he crossed the frontiers in August, 1792, accompanied by twenty-one persons, all of whom, on passing an Austrian post, were taken prisoners, and La Fayette was thrown into a dungeon. The friend of liberty and order was looked upon as a common enemy. His noble wife, who had been for fifteen months a prisoner in Paris, hastened, after her release, to share her husband's captivity.

For five years, in spite of the remonstrances of England, America, and the friends of liberty everywhere, La Fayette remained a prisoner. To every demand for his liberation the Austrian Government replied, with its usual stupidity, that the liberty of La Fayette was incompatible with the safety of the governments of Europe. He owed his liberation, at length, to General Bonaparte, and it required all his great authority to procure it. When La Fayette was presented to Napoleon to thank him for his interference, the first consul said to him:

"I don't know what the devil you have done to the Austrians; but it cost them a mighty struggle to let you go."

La Fayette voted publicly against making Napoleon consul for life, against the establishment of the empire. Notwithstanding this, Napoleon and he remained very good friends. The emperor said of him one day:

"Everybody in France is corrected of his extreme ideas of liberty except one man, and that man is La Fayette. You see him now tranquil: very well; if he had an opportunity to serve his chimeras, he would reappear on the scene more ardent than ever."

Upon his return to France, he was granted the pension belonging to the military rank he had held under the republic, and he recovered a competent estate from the property of his wife. Napoleon also gave a military commission to his son, George Washington; and, when the Bourbons were restored, La Fayette received an indemnity of four hundred and fifty thousand francs.

Napoleon's remark proved correct. La Fayette, though he spent most of the evening of his life in directing the cultivation of his estate, was always present at every crisis in the affairs of France to plead the cause of constitutional liberty. He made a fine remark once in its defense, when taunted with the horrors of the French Revolution: "The tyranny of 1793," he said, "was no more a republic than the massacre of St. Bartholomew was a religion."

His visit to America in 1824 is well remembered. He was the guest of the nation; and Congress, in recompense of his expenditures during the Revolutionary War, made him a grant of two hundred thousand dollars and an extensive tract of land. It was La Fayette who, in 1830, was chiefly instrumental in placing a constitutional monarch on the throne of France. The last words, he ever spoke in public were uttered in behalf of the French refugees who had fled from France for offenses merely political; and the last words he ever wrote recommended the abolition of slavery. He died May 19, 1834, aged seventy-seven. His son, George Washington, always the friend of liberty, like his father, died in 1849, leaving two sons--inheritors of a name so full of inspiration to the world.

* * * * *

LIII.

LYDIA SIGOURNEY

(BORN 1791--DIED 1865.)

THE LESSON OF A USEFUL AND BEAUTIFUL LIFE.

"A beautiful life I have had. Not more trial than was for my good. Countless blessings beyond expectation or desert.... Behind me stretch the green pastures and still waters by which I have been led all my days. Around is the lingering of hardy flowers and fruits that bide the Winter. Before stretches the shining shore."

These are the words of Mrs. Sigourney, written near the close of a life of seventy-four years. All who have much observed human life will agree that the rarest achievement of man or woman on this earth is a solid and continuous happiness. There are very few persons past seventy who can look back upon their lives, and sincerely say that they would willingly live their lives over again. Mrs. Sigourney, however, was one of the happy few.

Lydia Huntley, for that was her maiden name, was born at Norwich, Connecticut, on the first of September, 1791. Her father was Ezekiel Huntley, an exceedingly gentle, affectionate man, of Scotch parentage, who had as little of a Yankee in him as any man in Connecticut. Unlike a Yankee, he never attempted to set up in business for himself, but spent the whole of the active part of his life in the service of the man to whom he was apprenticed in his youth. His employer was a druggist of great note in his day, who made a large fortune in his business, and built one of the most elegant houses in the State. On his retirement from business his old clerk continued to reside under his roof, and to assist in the management of his estate; and, even when he died, Mr. Huntley did not change his abode, but remained to conduct the affairs of the widow. In the service of this family he saved a competence for his old age, and he lived to eighty-seven, a most happy, serene old man, delighting chiefly in his garden and his only child. He survived as late as 1839.

Owing to the peculiar relations sustained by her father to a wealthy family--living, too, in a wing of their stately mansion, and having the free range of its extensive gardens--Lydia Huntley enjoyed in her youth all the substantial advantages of wealth, without encountering its perils. She was surrounded by objects pleasing or beautiful, but no menial pampered her pride or robbed her of her rightful share of household labor. As soon as she was old enough to toddle about the grounds, her father delighted to have her hold the trees which he was planting, and drop the seed into the little furrows prepared for it, and never was she better pleased than when giving him the aid of her tiny fingers. Her parents never kept a servant, and she was brought up to do her part in the house. Living on plain, substantial fare, inured to labor, and dressed so as to allow free play to every limb and muscle, she laid in a stock of health, strength, and good temper that lasted her down to the last year of her life. She never knew what dyspepsia was. She never possessed a costly toy, nor a doll that was not made at home, but she passed a childhood that was scarcely anything but joy. She was an only child, and she was the pet of two families, yet she was not spoiled.