The Boys Life of Lafayette 35

The Boys Life of Lafayette 35

Being by no means devoid of ambition, the duke was already in Paris,

awaiting what might happen. The Deputies sent him an invitation to

become lieutenant-general of the kingdom. Accounts vary as to the

manner in which it was accepted. One has him walking with ostentatious

humility through the streets to the Hôtel de Ville, preceded by a

drummer to call attention to the fact that he was walking and that

he wore a tricolored scarf. Another has him on horseback without the

scarf. It matters little; they agree that he was not very well received

and that shouts of "No more Bourbons!" betrayed the suspicion that the

duke's liberality, like the scarf, if he wore one, could be put on for

the occasion. Accounts agree, too, that it was Lafayette who swung

popular feeling to his side. He met him at the foot of the stairs and

ascended with him to the Chamber of Deputies; and in answer to the

coolness with which he was greeted and the evident hostility of the

crowd outside, thrust a banner into the duke's hand and drew him to a

balcony, where he publicly embraced him. Paris was easily moved by such

spectacles. Carried away by the sight of the two enveloped in the folds

of the same flag, and that the Tricolor, which had been forbidden for

[Pg 287]fifteen years, they burst into enthusiastic shouts of "Vive

Lafayette!" "Long live the Duc d'Orléans!" Chateaubriand says that

"Lafayette's republican kiss made a king," and adds, "Singular result

of the whole life of the hero of two worlds!"

 

[Illustration: MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE AND LOUIS PHILIPPE

 

After the Revolution of 1830, it was Lafayette who swung popular

feeling to the side of Louis Philippe]

 

Louis Philippe, the new king, promised to approve certain very liberal

measures known as the program of the Hôtel de Ville; Lafayette saw

to that. The king even agreed in conversation with Lafayette that

the United States had the best form of government on earth. He

had spent some years in America and probably knew. He was called,

enthusiastically or mockingly, as the case might be, the Bourgeois

King; but the suspicion that his sympathies with the people were only

assumed proved well founded. As time wore on it became manifest that he

was as eager for arbitrary power as ever Louis XIV had been, without

possessing Louis XIV's great ability. At first, however, everything was

rose-colored. A few days after the new king had ascended the throne

Lafayette wrote: "The choice of the king is good. I thought so, and I

think so still more since I know him and his family. Things will not go

in the best possible way, but liberty has made great progress and will

make still more. Besides, I have done what my conscience dictated; and

if I have made a mistake, it was made in good faith."

 

That belief at least he could keep to the end. Two weeks after Louis

Philippe became king Lafayette was appointed general in command of the

National Guards of the kingdom, a position he held from August until

Christmas. Then a new law abolished the office in effect but not in

[Pg 288]appearance. Lafayette sent the king his resignation and refused

to reconsider it or even to talk the matter over, as the king asked

him to do. "No, my dear cousin, I understand my position," Lafayette

wrote Philip de Ségur. "I know that I weigh like a nightmare on the

Palais Royal; not on the king and his family, who are the best people

in the world, and I love them tenderly, but on the people who surround

them.... Without doubt I have been useful in his advancement. But if I

sacrificed for him some of my personal convictions, it was only on the

faith of the program of the Hôtel de Ville. I announced a king basing

his reign on republican institutions. To that declaration, which the

people seem to forget, I attach great importance; and it is that which

the court does not forgive.... From all this the conclusion follows

that I have become bothersome. I take my stand. I will retain the same

friendliness for the royal family, but I have only one word of honor,

and I cannot change my convictions."

 

So once again, near the close of his life, he found himself in

opposition to a government he had helped to create.

 

 

[Pg 289]XXX

 

SEVENTY-SIX YEARS YOUNG

 

 

Although he had resigned the office to which the king had appointed

him, Lafayette continued to hold his place in the Chamber of Deputies;

the office to which the people had elected him. Here he worked in

behalf of the oppressed of his own and other nations; the Irish, for

example, and the Poles, in whose struggles for liberty he was deeply

interested.

 

When the Chamber of Deputies was in session he lived in Paris.

Vacations were spent at La Grange, where he pursued the varied

interests of his many-sided life, particularly enjoying, in his

character of farmer, the triumph of his beasts and fruits in

neighborhood fairs. In the winter of 1834 he was as usual in Paris, and

on the 26th of January made the speech in behalf of Polish refugees

then in France which proved to be his last public address. A few days

later he attended the funeral of one of the Deputies, following the

coffin on foot all the long distance from the house to the cemetery,

as was the French custom, and standing on the damp ground through the

[Pg 290]delivery of the funeral discourses. The exposure and fatigue

were too much for even his hardy old body.

 

He was confined to his room for many weeks, but carried on a life as

normal as possible, having his children around him, receiving visits

of intimate friends, reading journals and new books, and dictating

letters. One of these was to Andrew Jackson about his fight with the

United States Senate. The inactivity of the sick-chamber was very

irksome to him, and by the 9th of May he was so far improved that

his physicians allowed him to go for a drive. Unfortunately a storm

came up, the weather turned suddenly cold, and he suffered a chill,

after which his condition became alarming. When it was known that

he was a very sick man, friends and political enemies--he had no

personal enemies--hastened to make inquiries and to offer condolences.

Occasionally George Lafayette was able to answer that his father

seemed better; but the improvement was not real. On the 20th of May he

appeared to wake and to search for something on his breast. His son put

into his hands the miniature of Adrienne that he always wore. He had

strength to raise it to his lips, then sank into unconsciousness from

which he passed into the sleep of death.

 

He was laid to rest in the cemetery of Picpus beside the wife who had

awaited him there for more than a quarter of a century; but his grave

was made in earth from an American battle-field that he had brought

home with him after his last visit. Fifteen natives of Poland bore the

coffin to the hearse. There were honorary pall-bearers representing the

[Pg 291]Chamber of Deputies, the National Guard, the Army, the United

States, Poland, and his own electoral district of Meaux. It was purely

a military funeral. His party friends hotly declared that it was not a

funeral at all, only a monster military parade. The government feared

that his burial might be made the occasion for political demonstrations

and ordered out such an immense number of troops that "the funeral car

passed almost unseen in the midst of a battalion whose bayonets ...

kept the people from rendering homage to their liberator." "He was

there lifeless, but not without honor," wrote an indignant friend.

"The French army surrounded him in his coffin as relentlessly as the

Austrian army had held him a prisoner at Olmütz." Even the cemetery

was guarded as if to withstand a siege. "Only the dead and his family

might enter.... One would say that the government looked upon the

mortal remains of this friend of liberty as a bit of prey which must

not be allowed to escape." The liberals resented this fancied attitude

of the government so bitterly that a cartoonist drew Louis Philippe

rubbing his hands together with satisfaction as the procession passed

and saying, gleefully, "Lafayette, you're caught, old man!" Only one

incident occurred to justify so many precautions. In the Place Vendome

a few score young men carrying a banner tried to break through the line

of soldiers, but were repulsed. Elsewhere people looked on in silence.

 

Lafayette's political friends complained that not one of the king's

[Pg 292]ministers was to be seen in the procession. The ministers

answered that politics were out of place at the funeral of such

a distinguished man; and that the government rendered its homage

regardless of party. While friends and foes wrangled thus over the

coffin, Nature did her beautiful consoling best. Chateaubriand,

standing in the silent crowd, saw the hearse stop a moment as it

reached the top of a hill, and as it stopped a fugitive ray of sunlight

came to rest upon it, then disappeared, gilding the guns and military

trappings as it passed.

 

In spite of all this recrimination Lafayette's death passed

comparatively unnoticed in France, for it occurred during a season of

political turmoil and he had retired several years before from active

affairs. Three thousand miles away the news produced far greater

effect. He was mourned in America with universal sorrow. All over the

country flags floated at half-mast. The House and Senate of the United

States passed resolutions which were sent to George Lafayette, while

the members wore crape upon their arms for thirty days and the Senate

Chamber and Hall of Representatives remained draped in black until the

end of the session. Our army and navy wore a tribute of crape upon

their sleeves also, and on a given day every city in the Union heard

the mourning salute of twenty-four guns, and after that at half-hour

intervals until sunset the booming of a single cannon. "Touching

honors," says a French writer, "rendered by a great people to the

memory of a stranger who had served them sixty years before."

 

* * * * *

 

[Pg 293]Lafayette lived to hold his great-grandchild in his arms, yet

the period of his life seems very short if measured by the changes

that came about while he walked the earth. It was a time when old

men dreamed dreams and young men saw visions, and during Lafayette's

seventy-six years some of the visions became realities, some of his

dreams he saw well on the way to fulfilment.

 

The French regard Lafayette's American career as only an episode in

his life; while Americans are apt to forget that he had a career in

France. He lived in three distinct periods of history, so different

that they might have been centuries apart. He saw medieval Europe; the

stormy period of change, and something very like the modern world we

know to-day. Peasants knelt in the dust before the nobles, after he

was a grown man; yet, in his old age, railroads and republicanism were

established facts. "To have made for oneself a rôle in one or another

of these periods suffices for a career," says his French biographer

Donoil; "very few have had a career in all."

 

Lafayette played an important part in all three. Not only that; it