Lafayette Part 12

Many wonderful visitors came to La Grange, and in later years to the Paris home of the Lafayettes. There were Irish guests to tell tales of romance; there were Poles to plead the cause of their country; misguided American Indians were sometimes stranded there; Arabs from Algeria; negro officers in uniform from the French West Indies--all people who had the pa.s.sion for freedom in their hearts naturally and inevitably gravitated to Lafayette. His house was a modern Babel, for all languages of the world were spoken there.

And Americans! So many Americans came along the Rosay Road that little boys learned the trick of meeting any foreign-looking persons who spoke bad French, and announced themselves as guides of all the "Messieurs Americains"; they would capture the portmanteau, swing it up to a strong shoulder, and then set out for the chateau at the regular jog trot of a well-trained porter.

One of these American guests was the grandson of General Nathanael Greene with whom Lafayette had had cordial relations during the Virginia campaign. In the year 1828 this grandson visited La Grange and wrote an account full of delightful, intimate touches, which was printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1861. Of Lafayette himself he said:

"In person he was tall and strongly built, with broad shoulders, large limbs, and a general air of strength.... He had more dignity of bearing than any man I ever saw. And it was not merely the dignity of self-possession, which early familiarity with society and early habits of command may give even to an ordinary man, but that elevation of manner which springs from an habitual elevation of thought, bearing witness to the purity of its source, as a clear eye and ruddy cheek bear witness to the purity of the air you daily breathe. In some respects he was the mercurial Frenchman to the last day of his life; yet his general bearing, that comes oftenest to my memory, was of calm earnestness, tempered and mellowed by quick sympathies."

The death of Lafayette, on the 20th of May, 1834, set the bells a-tolling in many lands, but in none was the mourning more sincere than in our own. Members of Congress were commanded to wear the badge of sorrow for thirty days, and thousands of the people joined them in this outward expression of the sincere grief of their hearts.

His services to his own country and to ours were many and valuable.

But his personal example of character, integrity, and constancy was even more to us and to the world than his distinct services. What he _was_ endeared him to us, even more than the things he did. He gave his whole soul in youth to his world-wide dream of freedom--freedom under a const.i.tution guaranteeing it, through public order, to every human being. He found himself in a world where monarchical government seemed the destiny and habit of mankind. He thought it a bad habit--one that ought to be broken. Sincerely and pa.s.sionately believing this, he was willing to die in the service of any people who were ready to make the struggle against the existing national traditions. He made mistakes; he made the mistake of trusting Louis Philippe. In doing this he had with him the whole French people. But let it be said on the other hand that he did not make the mistake of trusting Bonaparte, whose blandishments he resisted during the whole pa.s.sage of that meteor. And he was making no mistake when, to the very end of his life, he remained true to his love for the land he had aided in his youth. His visions did not all come true in exactly the shape he devised, but to the last he retained a glorious confidence that they would ultimately be realized in full.

Lafayette was absolutely fearless. He had physical bravery; he was equally indomitable in moral and intellectual realms. He had the power of courage. He could decide quickly and then stand by the decision to the bitter end. The essence of his bold, adventurous youth is expressed in the motto he then chose, "Cur non." But the confirmed and tried spirit of his full manhood is more truly set forth in another motto: "Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra." "Do what you ought, let come what may."

For a man so possessed by a great, world-wide idea, so fearless, so constant, it is quite fitting that monuments should be erected and that his birthday should be celebrated. Probably there is no man in all history who has had so many cities, counties, townships, boulevards, arcades, mountains, villages, and hamlets named for him, in a country to which he was not native-born, as has the Frenchman Lafayette in the United States of America. Also, many notable statues of Lafayette stand in city squares and halls of art, both in our country and in his own. Among them there is one special statue in which the young people of America have a peculiar interest. On the 19th of October, 1898, five millions of American school children contributed to a Lafayette Monument Fund. With this sum a bronze statue was made and presented to the French Republic. Mr. Paul Wayland Bartlett was the sculptor intrusted with this work. The statue was completed in 1908 and placed in a court of the Louvre in Paris. It was originally intended that the statue of Bonaparte should occupy the center of that beautiful court, but it is the statue of Lafayette that stands there--the "Boy" Cornwallis could not catch, the man Napoleon could not intimidate. No one can tell us just how Lafayette's statue happened to be a.s.signed the place intended for Napoleon's; but however it was, the fact is a luminous example of how a man who loved people only to master and subjugate them did not reach the heart of the world so directly as the man who loved human beings for their own sakes and to do them good.