soon as I got over my sea-sickness, and picked up the rest in camp.  I was compelled to write and talk, and so I learned to write and talk.  The officers were very kind and never laughed at me.  After the peace, Colonel Tarleton came over to Paris, and was presented to the King one day when I happened to be at Court.  The King asked him how I spoke English.  ‘I cannot say how he speaks it, Sire,’ said the Colonel, ’but I occasionally had the good-luck to pick up some of his letters that were going the wrong way, and I can assure your Majesty that they were very well written.’”

His valet was an old soldier, who had served through the Peninsular War, and who moved about with the orderly gait and quiet air of a man who had passed his heyday under the forming influences of camp discipline.  He was a most respectable-looking man, as well as a most respectful servant; and it was impossible to see him busying himself about the General at his morning toilet, and watch his delicate handling of the lather-brush and razor, without feeling, that, however true the old proverb may have been in other cases, Bastien’s master was a hero to him.

The General’s dress was always simple, though studiously neat.  His republicanism was of the school of Washington, and would have shrunk from a public display of a bare neck and shirt-sleeves.  Blue was his usual winter color; a frock-coat in the morning, and a dress-coat for dinner, and both near enough to the prevailing fashion to escape remark.  He had begun serious life too early to have ever been anything of a dandy, even if Nature had seen fit to contradict herself so far as to have intended him for one.

Jewelry I never saw him wear; but there was one little compartment in his library filled with what in a certain sense might be called jewelry, and of a kind that he had good reason to be proud of.  In one of the drawers was a sword made out of a key of the Bastile, and presented to him by the city of Paris.  The other key he sent to Washington.  When he was a young man the Bastile was a reality, and those keys still plied their dismal work at the bidding of a power as insensible to the suffering it caused as the steel of which they were made.  Of the hundreds who with sinking hearts had heard them turn in their massive wards, how few had ever come back to tell the tale of their misery!  Lafayette himself, but for the quick wit of a servant-maid, might have passed there some of the youthful days that he passed at the side of Washington, and gazed dimly, as at a dream, in the Bastile, at what he could look back upon as a proud reality in Olmuetz.  Another of his relics was a civic crown, oak-leaf wrought in gold, the gift of the city of Lyons; but this belonged to a later period, his last visit to Auvergne, the summer before the Revolution of July, and which called forth as enthusiastic a display of popular affection as that which had greeted his last visit to America.  But the one which he seemed to prize most was a very plain pair of eye-glasses, in a simple horn case, if my memory does not deceive me, but which, in his estimation, neither gold nor jewels could have replaced, for they had once belonged to Washington.  “He gave them to me,” said the General, “on my last visit to Mount Vernon.”