To hasten to the chamber where I was again to look upon the exquisite resemblance of features which, till then, I had thought without a similar in the world, was a matter of instinct; and, winding my way through the intricacies of galleries and corridors, loaded with the baggage of the emigrant army, and strewed with many a gallant noble who had exchanged the down bed of his ancestral mansion for the bare floor, or the open bivouac, I at length reached the apartment to which the captive general had been consigned.  To my utter astonishment, instead of the silence which I expected under the circumstances, I heard the jingling of glasses and roars of laughter.  Was this the abode of solitude and misfortune?  I entered, and found M. Lafayette, indeed, conducting himself with the composure of a personage of his rank; but the other performers exhibiting a totally different temperament.  A group of Polish officers, who had formerly borne commissions in the royal service, and now followed the Emigrant troops, had recognized Lafayette, and insisted on paying due honours to the “noble comrade” with whom they had served beyond the Atlantic.  Hamlet’s menace to his friend, that he would “teach him to drink deep ere he depart,” had been adopted in the amplest sense by those jovial sons of the north, and “healths bottle-deep” were sent round the board with rapid circulation.

My entrance but slightly deranged the symposium, and I was soon furnished with all the freemasonry of the feast, by being called on to do honour to the toast of “His Majesty the King of Great Britain.”  My duty was now done, my initiation was complete, and while my eyes were fixed on the portrait which, still in its unharmed beauty, looked beaming on the wild revel below, I heard, in the broken queries, and interjectional panegyrics of these hyperborean heroes, more of the history of Lafayette than I had ever expected to reach my ears.

His life had been the strangest contrast to the calm countenance which I saw so tranquilly listen to its own tale.  It was Quixotic, and two hundred years ago could scarcely have escaped the pen of some French Cervantes.  He had begun life as an officer in the French household troops in absolute boyhood.  At sixteen he had married! at eighteen he had formed his political principles, and begun his military career by crossing the Atlantic, and offering his sword to the Republic.  To meet the thousand wonderings at his conduct, he exchanged the ancient motto of the Lafayettes for a new one of his own.  The words, “Why not?” were his answer to all, and they were sufficient.  On reaching America, he asked but two favours, to be suffered to serve, and to serve without pay.