as made to believe that he was only saved for a public
execution, while at the same time he was not permitted to know whether
his family were still alive or had perished under the axe during the
Reign of Terror.

A Prussian statesman to whom in 1793 a memorial had been addressed
soliciting Lafayette's release is said to have replied: "Lafayette has
too much fanaticism for liberty. He does not conceal it. All his letters
prove it. If he were out of prison he could not remain quiet. I saw him
when he was here and I shall always recollect one of his expressions,
which surprised me very much at the time: 'Do you believe,' said he,
'that I went to America to obtain military reputation?--it was for
liberty I went there. He who loves liberty can only remain quiet after
having established it in his own country.'"

O liberty, hard is thy path! License wearing thy mask at home, and thy
champion betrayed to the dungeon of thy eternal foe!

VII

Out of the chaos rose the dictator. Napoleon's comet was beginning to
ascend.

Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797 was commander in Italy of the victorious army
of the French Republic, and as such he demanded of Austria that the
French prisoners in the fortress of Olmutz be set at liberty. Consent
was given as to the others, but only after much talk and grudgingly as
to Lafayette. His unconquerable hostility to the reigning autocracies
was too well known, and Austria even attempted to impose the terms that,
if freed, Lafayette should be deported to America under promise never
again to put his foot either in Austria or Prussia. But Lafayette
himself would not consent to be freed on these terms, and Napoleon
insisted; so, finally, at the dictation of Napoleon Bonaparte, on
September 19, 1797, after more than five years' imprisonment,
Lafayette's fetters were knocked off and he was released. Napoleon
afterward often alluded to the intense hatred of the monarchs and royal
cabinets of Europe for the democrat Lafayette. "I am sufficiently
hated," said he one day to Lafayette, "by the princes and their
courtiers; but it is nothing to their hatred for you. I have been so
situated as to see it, and I could not have believed that human hate
could go so far."

Perhaps at no time was the spirit of Lafayette put to a greater test
than in the years that followed--the years of the rise of imperial
Napoleon, Emperor of the French.

Revenge against his prison keepers, the certainty of high success,