provided for the safety of his army, he crossed the frontiers in August, 1792, accompanied by twenty-one persons, all of whom, on passing an Austrian post, were taken prisoners, and La Fayette was thrown into a dungeon.  The friend of liberty and order was looked upon as a common enemy.  His noble wife, who had been for fifteen months a prisoner in Paris, hastened, after her release, to share her husband’s captivity.

For five years, in spite of the remonstrances of England, America, and the friends of liberty everywhere, La Fayette remained a prisoner.  To every demand for his liberation the Austrian Government replied, with its usual stupidity, that the liberty of La Fayette was incompatible with the safety of the governments of Europe.  He owed his liberation, at length, to General Bonaparte, and it required all his great authority to procure it.  When La Fayette was presented to Napoleon to thank him for his interference, the first consul said to him: 

“I don’t know what the devil you have done to the Austrians; but it cost them a mighty struggle to let you go.”

La Fayette voted publicly against making Napoleon consul for life, against the establishment of the empire.  Notwithstanding this, Napoleon and he remained very good friends.  The emperor said of him one day: 

“Everybody in France is corrected of his extreme ideas of liberty except one man, and that man is La Fayette.  You see him now tranquil:  very well; if he had an opportunity to serve his chimeras, he would reappear on the scene more ardent than ever.”

Upon his return to France, he was granted the pension belonging to the military rank he had held under the republic, and he recovered a competent estate from the property of his wife.  Napoleon also gave a military commission to his son, George Washington; and, when the Bourbons were restored, La Fayette received an indemnity of four hundred and fifty thousand francs.

Napoleon’s remark proved correct.  La Fayette, though he spent most of the evening of his life in directing the cultivation of his estate, was always present at every crisis in the affairs of France to plead the cause of constitutional liberty.  He made a fine remark once in its defense, when taunted with the horrors of the French Revolution:  “The tyranny of 1793,” he said, “was no more a republic than the massacre of St. Bartholomew was a religion.”

His visit to America in 1824 is well remembered.  He was the guest of the nation; and Congress, in recompense of his expenditures during the Revolutionary War, made him a grant of two hundred thousand dollars and an extensive tract of land.  It was La Fayette who, in 1830, was chiefly instrumental in placing a constitutional monarch on the throne of France.  The last words, he ever spoke in public were uttered in behalf of the French refugees who had fled from France for offenses merely political; and the last words he ever wrote recommended the abolition of slavery.  He died May 19, 1834, aged seventy-seven.  His son, George Washington, always the friend of liberty, like his father, died in 1849, leaving two sons—­inheritors of a name so full of inspiration to the world.