veugle soumission pour la loi_," said Lafayette to the
Federation of National Guards. The atrocities, both at the storming of
the Bastile and afterward, he would not countenance, and on more than
one occasion, at the head of his armed troops, he enforced law and
order. Finally, Austria and Prussia declared war upon France, and
Lafayette was sent from Paris and at the head of a French army of
twenty-eight thousand men was stationed at Sedan.

It was inevitable that he and the Jacobins, the leaders in the mad orgy
of debauched democracy that succeeded the initial stages of the
revolution, should soon split. For a long time the Jacobins had seemed
to shrink from a contest with him, probably because they hoped to win
him over to their excesses. Finding him inflexible, when at last they
controlled the government, they vowed his destruction, and he was
deprived of his command. They proposed that a price should be set upon
his head and that "_chaque citoyen put courir sus_"--that is to say,
that any one who pleased might murder him.

Deprived of his command, and with destruction awaiting him in the rear,
his only resource was flight. Even then he hesitated, but reason
prevailed and on a dark and rainy night, with a few companions on
horseback, he started for Holland. To get there he had to pass through
territory occupied by the Austrian and Prussian troops. Facing the
almost certain chance of falling in with a superior force, he determined
to make a bold front, and went directly to the Austrian commander at
Namur, declaring that he was a French officer attached to constitutional
measures and seeking an asylum in Holland. Instead of being given a
passport, he was, when recognized, detained, given over to a Prussian
commander, sent in a cart to Wesel on the Rhine and there put in a cell
in irons. It was then intimated to him that the burden of the situation
would be lightened if he would draw up certain plans to be used against
France. The Prussians, finding that he would not do this, instead of
treating him as a prisoner of war threw him into a dungeon at
Magdebourg. His estate at home was confiscated and his wife imprisoned.
After a year's imprisonment at Magdebourg in a dirty and humid vault he
was transferred by the Prussians from one dungeon to another, and at
last confined in the Austrian citadel of Olmutz.

The walls of his dungeon at Olmutz were six feet thick and the air was
admitted through openings two feet square s