Lafayette, in his uncomfortable cell, was left in complete ignorance of
the fate of Bollman and Huger, though given to understand that they had
been executed or soon would be, perhaps under his own window. The long,
dreary days wore on until more than a year had passed, with little to
make one day different from another, though occasionally he was able
to communicate with Pusy or Maubourg through the ingenuity of his
"secretary," young Felix Pontonnier, a lad of sixteen, who had managed
to cling to him with the devotion of a dog through all his misfortunes.
Prison air was hard upon this boy and prison officials were harder
still, but his spirits were invincible. He whistled like a bird, he
made grotesque motions, he talked gibberish, and these antics were not
without point. They were a language of his own devising, by means of
which he conveyed to the prisoners such scraps of information as came
to him from the outside world.
His master had need of all Felix's cheer to help him bear up against
the anxiety that grew with each bit of news from France, and grew
greater still because of the absence of news from those he loved [Pg
236]best. For the first seven months he heard not a word from wife and
children, though soon after his capture he learned about the early days
of September in Paris, when the barriers had been closed and houses
were searched and prisons "purged" of those suspected of sympathy with
the aristocracy. Since then he had heard from his wife; but he had
also learned of the trial and death of the king; and rumors had come
to him of the Terror. Adrienne's steadfastness had been demonstrated
to him through all the years of their married life. Where principle
was involved he knew she would not falter; and he had little hope that
she could have escaped imprisonment or a worse fate. He had heard
absolutely nothing from her now for eighteen months. His captivity has
been called "a night five years long," and this was its darkest hour.
Then one day, without the least previous warning, the bolts and bars
of his cell creaked at an unusual hour; they were pushed back--and he
looked into the faces of his wife and daughters. The authorities broke
in upon the first instant of incredulous recognition to search their
new charges; possessed themselves of their purses and the three silver
forks in their modest luggage, and disappeared. The complaining bolts
slid into place once more and a new prison routine began, difficult to
bear in spite of the companionship, when he saw unnecessary hardships
press cruelly upon these devoted women. Bit by bit he learned what had
happened in the outside world: events of national importance of which
[Pg 237]he had not heard in his dungeon, and also little incidents that
touched only his personal history; for instance, the ceremonies with
which the Commune publicly broke the mold for the Lafayette medal, and
how the mob had howled around his Paris house, clamoring to tear it
down and raise a "column of infamy" in its place. He forbore to ask
questions at first, knowing how tragic the tale must be, and it was
only after the girls had been led away that first night and locked into
the cell where they were to sleep that he learned of the grief that had
come to Adrienne about a week before the Terror came to an end--the
execution on a single day of her mother, her grandmother, and her
beloved sister Louise.
In time he learned all the details of her own story: the months she
had been under parole at Chavaniac, where through the kind offices of
Gouverneur Morris she received at last the letter from her husband
telling her that he was well. Her one desire had been to join him, but
there was the old aunt to be provided for, and there were also pressing
debts to settle; a difficult matter after Lafayette's property was
confiscated and sold. Mr. Morris lent her the necessary money, assuring
her that if she could not repay it Americans would willingly assume it
as part of the far larger debt their country owed her husband.
She asked to be released from her parole in order to go into Germany
to share his prison. Instead she had been cast into prison on her
own account. The children's tutor, M. de Frestel, who had been their
father's tutor before them, conspired with the servants and sold their
[Pg 238]bits of valuables that she might make the journey to prison
in greater comfort. He contrived, too, that the mother might see her
children before she was taken off to Paris, and she made them promise,
in the event of her death, to make every effort to rejoin their father.
In Paris she lived through many months of prison horror, confined part
of the time in the old Collège Du Plessis where Lafayette had spent his
boyhood, seeing every morning victims carried forth to their death and
expecting every day to be ordered to mount into the tumbrels with them.
Had she known it, she was inquired for every morning at the prison door
by a faithful maidservant, who in this way kept her children informed
of her fate. George was in England with his tutor. At Chavaniac the
little girls were being fed by the peasants, as was the old aunt, for
the manor-house had been sold and the old lady had been allowed to buy
back literally nothing except her own bed.
At last Robespierre himself died under the guillotine and toward the
end of September, 1794, a less bloodthirsty committee visited the
prisons to decide the fate of their inmates. Adrienne Lafayette was the
last to be examined at Du Plessis. Her husband was so hated that no
one dared speak her name. She pronounced it clearly and proudly as she
had spoken and written it ever since misfortune came upon her. It was
decided that the wife of so great a criminal must be judged by higher
authority; meanwhile she was to be kept under lock and key. James
Monroe, who was now American minister to Paris, interceded for her,
but she was only transferred to another prison. Here a worthy priest,
[Pg 239]disguised as a carpenter, came to her to tell her how on a day
in July the three women dearest to her had been beheaded, and how he,
running beside the tumbrel through the storm that drenched them on
their way to execution, had been able, at no small risk to himself, to
offer them secretly the consolations of religion.
Finally in January, 1795, largely through the efforts of Mr. Monroe,
she was released. Her first care was to make a visit of thanks to Mr.
Monroe and to ask him to continue his kindness by obtaining a passport
for herself and her girls so that they might seek out her husband.
George was to be sent to America, for she felt sure that his father, if
still alive, would desire him to be there for a time under the care of
Washington, and, if he had perished in prison, would have wished his
son to grow up an American citizen.
Getting the passport proved a long and difficult undertaking. When
issued it was to permit Madame Motier of Hartford, Connecticut, and
her two daughters to return to America. It was necessary to begin the
journey in accordance with this, and they embarked at Dunkirk on a
small American vessel bound for Hamburg. There they left the ship and
went to Vienna on another passport, but still as the American family
named Motier. In Vienna the American family hid itself very effectively
through the help of old friends, and Adrienne contrived to be received
by the emperor himself, quite unknown to his ministers. His manner to
her and her girls was so gracious that she came away "in an ecstasy of
joy," though he told her he could not release the prisoner. She [Pg
240]was so sure her husband was well treated and so jubilant over the
emperor's permission to write directly to him if she had reason to
complain, that she was not at all cast down by the warnings and evident
unfriendliness of the prime minister and the minister of war with whom
she next sought interviews.
Leaving Vienna by carriage, she and her daughters traveled all one
day and part of the next northward into the rugged Carpathian country
before an interested postboy pointed out the steeples and towers of
Olmütz. Once in the town, they drove straight to the house of the
commandant, who took good care not to expose his heart to pity by
seeing these women, but sent the officer in charge of the prison to
open its doors and admit them to its cold welcome.
The room in which they found Lafayette did well enough in point of
size and of furnishings. It was a vaulted stone chamber facing south,
twenty-four feet long, fifteen wide, and twelve high. Light entered
by means of a fairly large window shut at the top with a padlock, but
which could be opened at the bottom, where it was protected by a double
iron grating. The furnishings consisted of a bed, a table, chairs, a
chest of drawers, and a stove; and this room opened into another of
equal size which served as an antechamber. The vileness consisted in
the sights and smells outside the window and the dirt within.
The routine that began when the door of this room opened so
unexpectedly to admit Lafayette's wife and daughters continued for
almost two years. Madame Lafayette described it in a letter to her [Pg
241]aunt, Madame de Tessé, an exile in Holstein, with whom she and her
girls spent a few days after leaving the ship at Hamburg. "At last,
my dear aunt, I can write you secretly. Friends risk their liberty,
their life, to transmit our letters and will charge themselves with
this one for you.... Thanks to your good advice, dear aunt, I took the
sole means of reaching here. If I had been announced I would never
have succeeded in entering the domains of the emperor.... Do you wish
details of our present life? They bring our breakfast at eight o'clock
in the morning, after which I am locked with the girls until noon. We
are reunited for dinner, and though our jailers enter twice to remove
the dishes and bring in our supper, we remain together until they
come at eight o'clock to take my daughters back to their cage. The
keys are carried each time to the commandant and shut up with absurd
precautions. They pay, with my money, the expenses of all three, and we
have enough to eat, but it is inexpressibly dirty.
"The physician, who does not understand a word of French, is brought
to us by an officer when we have need of him. We like him. M. de
Lafayette, in the presence of the officer, who understands Latin,
speaks with him in that language and translates for us. When this
officer, a huge corporal of a jailer, who does not dare to speak to
us himself without witnesses, comes with his great trousseau of keys
in his hand to unpadlock our doors, while the whole guard is drawn up
outside in the corridor and the entrance to our rooms is half opened
[Pg 242]by two sentinels, you would laugh to see our two girls, one
blushing to her ears, the other with a manner now proud, now comic,
passing under their crossed sabers; after which the doors of our cells
at once close. What is not pleasant is that the little court on the
same level with the corridor is the scene of frequent punishment of the
soldiers, who are there beaten with whips, and we hear the horrible
music. It is a great cause of thankfulness to us that our children up
to the present time have borne up well under this unhealthy regime. As
for myself, I admit that my health is not good."
It was so far from good that she asked leave to go to Vienna for a
week for expert medical advice, but was told, after waiting long for
an answer of any kind, that she had voluntarily put herself under the
conditions to which her husband was subject, and that if she left
Olmütz she could not return. "You know already that the idea of leaving
M. de Lafayette could not be entertained by any one of us. The good we
do him is not confined to the mere pleasure of seeing us. His health
has been really better since we arrived. You know the influence of
moral affections upon him, and however strong his character, I cannot
conceive that it could resist so many tortures. His excessive thinness
and his wasting away have remained at the same point since our arrival,
but his guardians and he assure me that it is nothing compared to the
horrible state he was in a year ago. One cannot spend four years in
such captivity without serious consequences. I have not been able to
see Messrs. Maubourg and Pusy, or even to hear their voices. Judging
[Pg 243]from the number of years with which their so-called guardians
credit them, they must have aged frightfully. Their sufferings here
are all the harder for us to bear because these two loyal and generous
friends of M. de Lafayette have never for an instant permitted their
case to be considered separately from his own. You will not be
surprised that he has enjoined them never to speak for him, no matter
what may be the occasion or the interest, except in a manner in harmony
with his character and principles; and that he pushes to excess what
you call 'the weakness of a grand passion.'"
So, in mingled content and hardship, the days passed. The young girls
brought a certain amount of gaiety into the gray cell, even of material
well-being. After their arrival their father was supplied with his
first new clothing since becoming a prisoner, garments of rough cloth,
cut out "by guesswork," that his jailer rudely declared were good
enough for him. Out of the discarded coat Anastasie contrived shoes
to replace the pair that was fairly dropping off his feet; and one
of the girls took revenge upon the jailer by drawing a caricature
of him on a precious scrap of paper which was hidden and saved and
had a proud place in their home many years later. Madame Lafayette,
though more gravely ill than she allowed her family to know, devoted
herself alternately to her husband and to the education of the girls;
and in hours which she felt she had a right to call her own wrote
with toothpick and lampblack upon the margins of a volume of Buffon
[Pg 244]that biography of her mother, the unfortunate Madame d'Ayen,
which is such a marvel of tender devotion. In the evenings, before
his daughters were hurried away to their enforced early bedtime,
Lafayette read aloud from some old book. New volumes were not allowed;
"everything published since 1788 was proscribed," says a prison letter
of La tour de Maubourg's, "even though it were an _Imitation of Jesus
Christ_."
Long after she was grown Virginia, the younger daughter, remembered
with pleasure those half-hours with old books. From her account of
their prison life we learn that it was the rector of the university
who enabled her mother to send and receive letters unknown to their
jailers. "We owe him the deepest gratitude. By his means some public
news reached our ears.... In the interior of the prison we had
established a correspondence with our companions in captivity. Even
before our arrival our father's secretary could speak to him through
the window by means of a Pan's pipe for which he had arranged a cipher
known to M. de Maubourg's servant. But this mode of correspondence, the
only one in use for a long time, did not allow great intercourse. We
obtained an easier one with the help of the soldiers whom we bribed by
the pleasure of a good meal. Of a night, through our double bars, we
used to lower at the end of a string a parcel with part of our supper
to the sentry on duty under our windows, who would pass the packet in
the same manner to Messrs. Maubourg and Pusy, who occupied separate
parts of the prison."
[Pg 245]Though they could see no change from day to day, the prisoners
were conscious, on looking back over several weeks or months, that
they were being treated with greater consideration. After every
vigorous expression in favor of Lafayette by Englishmen and Americans,
especially after every military success gained by France, their jailers
became a fraction more polite. When talk of peace between Austria
and France began, Tourgot, the emperor's prime minister, preferred
to have his master give up the prisoners of his own free will rather
than under compulsion. In July, 1797, the Marquis de Chasteler, "a
perfect gentleman, highly educated, and accomplished," came to Olmütz
to inquire with much solicitude, on the emperor's behalf, how the
prisoners had been treated, and to offer them freedom under certain
conditions. One condition was that they should never set foot again on
Austrian territory without special permission. Another stipulated that
Lafayette should not even stay in Europe, but must sail forthwith for
America. To this he replied that he did not wish to stay in Austria,
even at the emperor's most earnest invitation, and that he had often
declared his intention of emigrating to America; but that he did not
propose to render account of his actions to Frederick William II or
to make any promise which seemed to imply that that sovereign had any
rights in the matter. Madame Lafayette and his two friends, Maubourg
and Pusy, whom he saw for the first time in three years when they were
brought to consult with him over this proposal, agreed fully with
Lafayette's stand; and the result was that all of them stayed in prison.
[Pg 246]XXVI