Lafayette Part 10

Huger gave his horse to Lafayette and told him hurriedly to go to Hoff, the rendezvous agreed upon. Lafayette mounted the horse and started out. But he could not bear to leave his two rescuers in such a plight, so he came back to ask if he could not do something for them.

"No, no!" they cried. "Go to Hoff! Go to Hoff!" they repeated. "We will follow."

Now if they had said this in French, if they had said "Allez a Hoff,"

Lafayette would have understood the direction. But not knowing the name of this near-by village, he misunderstood. He thought the English words meant only "Go off!" A fatal misunderstanding!

Huger and Bollman soon released their officer and both mounted the remaining horse. He was not used to "carrying double." The insulted creature set his feet in a ditch and threw them both. Bollman was stunned. Huger lifted him up and then started off to recover the horse. On the way he was thinking what course he should take in this critical and dangerous juncture.

When he came back he had decided. He said that Bollman should take the horse and follow Lafayette, for Bollman knew German and could give more help than he could. Alarm guns were beginning to be fired from the battlements, and trains of soldiers were seen issuing from the gates; but these portentous signs did not influence him. Bollman was persuaded; he mounted, put spurs to his horse, and was soon out of sight. Young America stood alone on this wide, dangerous plain; the shadow of that ominous fortress fell gloomily on its border. The guards came down. Between two rows of fixed bayonets Huger pa.s.sed into the fortress.

The bold plan was doomed to complete failure! Lafayette rode twenty miles; but the blood on his greatcoat awakened suspicion; he was arrested and carried back to Olmutz where a heavier and gloomier imprisonment awaited him.

The same fate awaited Bollman; but Lafayette's despair was the deeper because he feared that his brave rescuers had been executed for their gallant attempt in his behalf.

The imprisonment accorded to the intrepid young American was as vile and cruel as any devised in the Dark Ages. He was put in a cell almost underground, with but one small slit near the top to let in a little light. A low bench and some straw formed the furnishings, while two chains linked him at ankle and wrist to the ceiling. To make things a trifle more cheerful for him, they showed him a prisoner in a cell which was only a walled hole in the ground! The prisoner had been there for many years and his name and residence were now utterly forgotten. The jailers also exhibited their expert method of swift decapitation and acted out the method with a large two-bladed sword.

Daily questionings of a cruel kind were used in order to force him to confess the truth--or rather what they wished to believe was the truth--that he had been the agent of a widespread plot. He stated that it was no man's plot but his own. They threatened torture, but he did not flinch or change his statement.

At last the officers were convinced that there had been no concerted plot. They then softened the rigors of Huger's imprisonment, gave him a cell with a window where a star could sometimes be seen, and lengthened his chains so that he could take as many as three whole steps. After a time he managed to get into communication with Bollman who was in the room above. With a knotted handkerchief Bollman lowered a little ink in a walnut sh.e.l.l from his window, together with a sc.r.a.p of dingy paper. Huger then wrote a letter of a few lines only to General Thomas Pinckney, then American Minister at London. His entreaty was to let his mother know that he was still alive; also to let Lafayette's friends know that he would certainly have escaped but that he had been recognized as an Olmutz prisoner in a small town where he changed his horse; and that he had already mounted a fresh one when stopped. Huger's letter ended with the words, "Don't forget us. F.K.H. Olmutz, Jan. 5th, 1795." By bribery and cajolery they started this letter off.

Suffice it to say at present that, through the intervention of General Pinckney, the two young men were finally released and made their way swiftly out of the country. It was well that they hurried, for the emperor decided they had been released too soon and sent an edict for their rearrest. They had, however, by that time crossed the line and were out of his domain.

After a short stay in London, Huger started for America. The pa.s.sengers on his ship discussed the story of Lafayette's attempted rescue through the entire six weeks of the voyage, and they never dreamed that their quiet young fellow-pa.s.senger was one of the rescuers until he received an ovation on landing. This is related by the only member of the Huger family living to-day (1916) who heard the story of the attempted rescue from the lips of "Colonel Frank" himself, as the family affectionately call him. She says that Colonel Frank was the most silent of men. He was the kind that _do_ more than they _talk_.

When Huger reached Philadelphia, he called at once on President Washington and told him of the effort he had made. The President said that he had followed the whole course of events with the greatest solicitude and had wished that it might have met with the success it deserved.

In time Colonel Huger married the second daughter of General Thomas Pinckney who had effected his release from Olmutz and under whom he fought in the war of 1812; he had eleven children and made his home on a large estate in the highlands of South Carolina. When Congress presented Lafayette with an extensive section of land, he asked Huger to share it with him. Colonel Huger thanked him for the generous offer, but st.u.r.dily announced that he himself was able to provide for his daughters and that his sons should look out for themselves. His faith in his sons was justified, for they made good their father's opinion of their ability. Among his children and grandchildren were many who not only ama.s.sed goodly fortunes but held honored positions in public and military affairs.

When Lafayette made his memorable visit to America in 1824, he said that the one man in the country whom he most wished to see was the one who when a youth had attempted to rescue him from Olmutz. Colonel Huger had a corresponding desire to see Lafayette. On the General's arrival he started north at once, reached New York, and sought out the lodgings of Lafayette early in the morning, in order that their first meeting might be entirely without interruption. No account of that meeting has ever been made public, but the rescuer and his champion were together most of the time during that patriotic journey. Josiah Quincy once had the privilege of driving Colonel Huger in his coach through the suburbs of Boston and of calling with him upon many distinguished personages. Huger charmed and delighted every one.

Josiah Quincy said that he had that "charm of a high-bred southerner which wrought with such peculiar fascination upon those inheriting Puritan blood." Besides his attractive personality, there was the romantic a.s.sociation with the attempted rescue. Scott's novels were then in the full blossom of popularity; but there was no hero in all those brave tales whose adventures appeared more chivalrous and thrilling.

To be sure, the effort at rescue had resulted in failure. Lafayette remained in prison. But it was known where he was, and, what was better, word had been conveyed to him that he was not forgotten. Yet the conditions of his imprisonment were now more severe than before, and his mind must have suffered intensely from being thrown back upon itself after that one hour's prospect of liberty.

On the way from Wesel to Magdeburg Lafayette had had a moment's conversation with a stranger who told him something of what was happening in Paris, and of the lawlessness and carnage of the Reign of Terror. Lafayette saw to what lengths an unregulated mob might go, even when originally inspired by a n.o.ble pa.s.sion for liberty. He heard of the death of Louis XVI, and called it an a.s.sa.s.sination. He realized that these things were being done in France by the people in whom he had so blindly, so persistently, believed. He was deeply disappointed.

Yet he did not quite lose faith. The cause of the people was still sacred to him; they might destroy for him whatever charm there had been in what he called the "delicious sensation of the smile of the mult.i.tude"; but his belief in the ultimate outcome for democratic government, as the best form of government for the whole world, remained unchanged.

And in the prison at Olmutz he celebrated our great holiday, the Fourth of July, as usual.

CHAPTER XVII

A WELCOME RELEASE

More than a year had pa.s.sed after the attempt at rescue when one day Lafayette heard the big keys turning in the several locks, one after another, that barred his cell, and in a moment his wife and two daughters stood before his amazed eyes! Could this be true, or was it a vision?

It will be remembered that shortly after Lafayette's arrest he had heard that Madame de Lafayette was imprisoned and was in danger of perishing on the scaffold. A year later the news was smuggled to him that she was still alive. But what had been happening to her and to his three children during all these dismal years?

Through the instrumentality of James Monroe, the amba.s.sador to France from the United States,--the only foreign power that in the days of the French Revolution would send its representative,--Madame de Lafayette was liberated from an imprisonment that tried her soul, even as Olmutz had proved and tested the spirit of her husband. Through all those tragic months Adrienne showed herself a woman of high and unswerving courage.

Now, indeed, was the American citizenship of her husband--and it had included his family also--of value to her. Madame de Lafayette's first letter to Mr. Monroe shows this. This dignified letter is preserved in the ma.n.u.script department of the New York Public Library and is here printed for the first time:

"Having learned that a minister of the United States has recently arrived in France, who has been sent by his government and invested with powers representing a people in whose interests I have some rights that are dear to my heart, I have felt that such misfortunes as I have not already suffered were no longer to be feared for me, that the most unjust of captivities was about to be at an end, and that my sufferings accompanied by irreproachable conduct towards the principles and towards the laws of my country, cause me to have confidence in the name of this protecting nation at a moment when the voice of justice is once more heard, and when the National Convention is undertaking to deliver such patriots as have been unjustly imprisoned. I have begun to hope that the wishes of my heart shall be fulfilled--that I may be returned to my children. For ten months I have been taken away from them. From the very moment of their birth they have heard that they have a second country, and they have the right to hope that they will be protected by it."

Through the official authority of Mr. Monroe, Madame de Lafayette was given money and pa.s.sports. When Washington first heard of her plight, he sent her a reverent letter inclosing a thousand dollars, and he was unceasing in his correspondence with representatives in France and England for herself as well as for Lafayette. She sent her son, George Washington de Lafayette, to his ill.u.s.trious namesake in America, and as "Madame Motier, of Hartford, Connecticut," she, with her two young daughters, made her way to Hamburg where, instead of taking ship for America, she took carriage across the wide s.p.a.ces of Germany and Austria. Here she gained an audience with the emperor, and bowing at his feet asked permission to go to the fortress of Olmutz and stay with her husband until he was set free.

"Your request is granted," he said; "but as for Lafayette--I cannot free him; my hands are tied." Exactly what it was that had "tied the hands" of the great potentate has never been revealed.

Her pet.i.tion being granted, Madame de Lafayette continued her journey.

Two days more and she and her daughters were with her husband.

The day of their meeting was spent in trying to bear the joy of the reunion. Not until the daughters were sent to their cell did she tell Lafayette of the sad things that had happened. Her mother, her grandmother, and her sister had, with many friends and relatives, been led to the scaffold. These and many other facts of tragic interest to the man so long deprived of any word from outside his prison were shared with Lafayette.

It may go without saying that Lafayette's prison days were now far easier to bear, except that to see Madame de Lafayette grow more and more broken in health as days went on, in their close, unlighted, and malodorous cells, must have caused an added sorrow. After a time she was obliged to ask the emperor to allow her to go to Vienna for medical attendance. He granted the request, but with the proviso that she should never return. Then she decided to remain with her husband, even at the risk of her life.

Shall the miseries of their prison life be dwelt upon? Their jailers were the coa.r.s.est of human beings. They surpa.s.sed in brutality the slave drivers of Constantinople. The food, which the family bought for themselves, was coa.r.s.e and miserably cooked. Tobacco floated in the coffee. Lafayette's clothes were in tatters. When his shoes had been soled fifteen times and resented the indignity any further, his daughter Anastasie took it upon herself to make shoes for him out of an old coat.

Lafayette's dingy cell was, however, now brightened by companionship and by inspiring conversation. Even work was going on, for Madame de Lafayette prepared a life of her mother while she was at Olmutz. It was written with a toothpick and a little lampblack on the margins of a copy of Buffon which she succeeded in obtaining. One of the daughters amused the family by making pencil sketches; one of the burly old turnkey, with his sword, candle, and keys, and his hair in a comical queue behind, amused the family very much and was carried with them when they left their dismal abode.

Before the desolate prison of Olmutz fades from our view, let one laurel wreath be placed upon the head of young Felix Pontonnier, sixteen years old when he became the servant of Lafayette, whom he faithfully followed into prison. He was with Lafayette when he was arrested and was bidden to look after his master's belongings; so he was separated from him for several days. This gave him an excellent opportunity to escape, but he refused to take advantage of it. Of his own accord he joined Lafayette once more, and during the whole long season of his captivity he gave ample proof of his devotion. He possessed a rare inventive genius and was constantly on the alert to devise means for making the prisoners comfortable and to find out ways for carrying on secret correspondence. He invented a special language known only to himself and to the prisoners, and also a unique gesture-language. He whistled notes like a captive bird; with varied modulations he conveyed to the prisoners whatever news he could ferret out. Prison life proved to be bad for him, and his health was several times endangered. For a fancied offense he was once confined in total darkness for three months. But none of his sufferings dashed his gay spirits. He was constantly sustained by a buoyant cheer, and his wonderful devotion should win him a place among heroes. After the five years of captivity were over, Lafayette made Felix the manager of his farm at La Grange. He filled this position with success and probity.

It was through the fiat of Napoleon Bonaparte that the removal of Lafayette from Olmutz was made possible. Bonaparte was influenced by a long-sighted policy; he desired to win to himself the man of so unique a personality. He was also spurred on by various writers and diplomats, by representatives of the French Directory, and by Brigadier General Henri Jacques Guillaume Clarke, who was for a time governor of Vienna and who won the t.i.tle of "the incorruptible" from Napoleon. President Washington's dignified and effective letter to the Emperor of Austria is believed to have left its mark; and in a thousand ways public opinion had awakened to the ignominy of leaving such a man as Lafayette in prison. Lafayette disliked to be indebted to anybody but himself for an escape from his dungeon; but he willingly admitted that he owed much to his devoted wife whose many letters imploring help for her husband were among the causes that unlocked the double-barred doors of Olmutz.

When finally released, Lafayette was taken in a carriage from Olmutz to Dresden, thence by way of Dresden, Leipzig, and Halle to Hamburg, where the American consul received him. So wearied was Madame de Lafayette that she made the journey with the greatest difficulty, and a voyage to America at that time was out of the question. The family, therefore, took refuge in an obscure town in Holland, since there was no other European country where the monarchy would be safe if it conferred the right of residence upon any man who bore the name of Lafayette.

CHAPTER XVIII

A TRIUMPHAL TOUR

For some years events did not shape themselves so that Lafayette could return to Paris. That he, in 1799, was considering the possibility of a voyage to America is shown by a letter written in that year to his "deliverer," Francis Kinloch Huger, which his descendant of the same name has kindly allowed to be printed here. It was sent from Vianen in Holland, and introduces his fellow-prisoner, M. Bureaux-de-Pusy, who was seeking a home in the United States.

VIANEN, 17th April, 1799.

MY DEAR HUGER:

Here is one of my companions in captivity, Bureaux Pusy, an Olmutz prisoner, and at these sounds my heart vibrates with the sentiments of love, grat.i.tude, admiration, which forever bind and devote me to you! How I envy the happiness he is going to enjoy! How I long, my dear and n.o.ble friend, to fold you in my arms! Pusy will relate to you the circ.u.mstances which hitherto have kept me on this side of the Atlantic--even now the illness of my wife, and the necessity of her having been a few weeks in France before I set out, prevent me from embarking with Pusy and his amiable family. But in the course of the summer I shall look over to you and with inexpressible delight I shall be welcomed by my beloved deliverer. No answer from you has yet come to me. We are expecting every day my friend McHenry's nephew--perhaps I may be blessed with a letter from you!

I need not recommend to you Bureaux Pusy. The conspicuous and honorable part he has acted in the French Revolution, his sufferings during our imprisonment--you but too well know what it is--are sufficient introductions to your great and good heart. He is one of the most accomplished men that can do honour to the country where he is born, and to the country where he wishes to become a citizen. He is my excellent friend. Every service, every mark of affection he can receive from you and your friends, I am happily authorized to depend upon.

My son is gone to Paris. My wife and my two daughters, who love you as a brother, present you with the sincere, grateful expressions of their friendship. The last word George told me at his setting out was not to forget him in my letter to you. He will accompany me to America.

Adieu, my dear Huger, I shall to the last moment of my life be wholly

Yours, LAFAYETTE.