To appease the suspicions of the people that the king meditated a flight from Paris, he declared that he would answer with his head for the king’s remaining.  When, therefore, in June, 1791, the king and queen made their blundering attempt to escape, La Fayette was immediately suspected of having secretly aided it.  Danton cried out at the Jacobin club: 

“We must have the person of the king, or the head of the commanding general!”

It was in vain that, after the king’s return, he ceased to pay him royal honors; nothing could remove the suspicions of the people.  Indeed, he still openly advised the preservation of the monarchy, and, when a mob demanded the suppression of the royal power, and threatened violence to the National Guard, the general, after warning them to disperse, ordered the troops to fire—­an action which totally destroyed his popularity and influence.  Soon after, he resigned his commission and his seat in the Assembly, and withdrew to one of his country seats.

He was not long allowed to remain in seclusion.  The allied dynasties of Europe, justly alarmed at the course of events in Paris, threatened the new republic with war.  La Fayette was appointed to command one of the three armies gathered to defend the frontiers.  While he was disciplining his troops, and preparing to defend the country, he kept an anxious eye upon Paris, and saw with ever-increasing alarm the prevalence of the savage element in the national politics.  In 1792 he had the boldness to write a letter to the National Assembly, demanding the suppression of the clubs, and the restoration of the king to the place and power assigned him by the constitution.

Learning, soon after, the new outrages put upon the king, he suddenly left his army and appeared before the bar of the Assembly, accompanied by a single aide-de-camp; there he renewed his demands, amid the applause of the moderate members; but a member of the opposite party adroitly asked: 

“Is the enemy conquered?  Is the country delivered, since General La Fayette is in Paris?”

“No,” replied he, “the country is not delivered; the situation is unchanged; and, nevertheless, the general of one of our armies is in Paris.”

After a stormy debate, the Assembly declared that he had violated the constitution in making himself the organ of an army legally incapable of deliberating, and had rendered himself amenable to the minister of war for leaving his post without permission.  Repulsed thus by the Assembly, coldly received at court, and rejected by the National Guard, he returned to his army despairing of the country.  There he made one more attempt to save the king by inducing him to come to his camp and fight for his throne.  This project being rejected, and the author of it denounced by Robespierre, his bust publicly burned in Paris, and the medal formerly voted him broken by the hand of the executioner, he deemed it necessary to seek an asylum in a neutral country.  Having