hdraw from relations with French officialdom, and to concern himself
only with the private matters of the Polish legions, not with their
public affairs. Lebrun reproached him for showing his face no more among
the high officers of state. "You are now all so grand," replied the son
of the simple, far-distant Lithuanian home, "that I in my modest garb am
not worthy to go among you." In 1801 came the Treaty of Luneville with
Napoleon's bitter deception of Poland's hopes. Rage and despair filled
the Polish legions. Numbers of their soldiers tendered their
resignations. Others remained in the French army, and were sent by
Napoleon, to rid himself of them, said his enemies, on the disastrous
expedition to San Domingo. Done to death by yellow fever, by the arms of
the natives and the horrible onslaughts of the negroes' savage dogs,
four hundred alone survived to return.

Henceforth Kosciuszko would have nothing further to say to Bonaparte.
Before a large audience at a gathering in the house of Lebrun the latter
called out to Kosciuszko: "Do you know, General, that the First Consul
has been speaking about you?" "I never speak about him," Kosciuszko
answered curtly, and he visited Lebrun no more. The anguish of this
fresh wrong to his nation went far to break him. He again suffered
intensely from the wound in his head, and old age seemed suddenly to
come upon him. Many of the Polish soldiers who had left the legions were
homeless and penniless. These Kosciuszko took pains to recommend to his
old friend Jefferson, now President of the United States. "God bless
you"--so Jefferson ends his reply--"and preserve you still for a season
of usefulness to your country."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Memoirs, Correspondence and Miscellanies of Thomas
Jefferson_, ed. Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Charlottesville, 1829.]

Kosciuszko's intercourse with his American friends did not slacken. At
the request of one of them he wrote a treatise in French on artillery
that, translated in the United States into English, became a textbook at
West Point.

About this time Kosciuszko came across a Swiss family whose name will
ever sound gratefully to the Polish ear as the friends under whose roof
he found the domestic hearth that gladdened his declining years. The
Republican sympathies of the Zeltner brothers, one of whom was the
diplomatic representative of Switzerland in France, first attracted
Kosciuszko to them. Their relations soon grew intimate; and Kosciuszk