But as some are born poets and others are born mathematicians, the Marquis de Lafayette was born with instinctive fidelity to the great principles of Liberty and Equality, by the side of which all hereditary distinctions disappear. Liberty, he had the habit of saying, was with him a religion, a love, and a geometrical certainty; and this passion, thus sacred, ardent, and confident, was inborn, perpetual, and irresistible. While still a child in the seclusion of Auvergne, he sighed for dangerous adventure, and when at the age of eleven he was transferred to college at Paris, the soul of the young noble responded instinctively to all instances of republican virtue. In the child may be seen the man, and he delighted afterwards to remember that during those early years, when the heart showed itself as it was, in a school exercise describing “the perfect horse,” he lost the prize by picturing the noble animal as throwing his rider at sight of the whip. Nor did his ardent nature express itself in superficial sallies. At every period of life, and particularly in youth, he was grave and silent even to coldness,--thus in external manner differing from the giddy and ostentatious nobles of his day, as he contrasted with them in character. An early marriage, at the age of sixteen, with the remarkable daughter of the ducal house of Noailles, enlarged his aristocratic connections, and completed all that heart could desire for happiness or worldly advancement. But the life of a courtier, even with the companionship of royal princes, did not satisfy his earnest nature, and he turned away from the grandeurs and follies of Versailles to follow in the steps of his father as captain in the French army. Stationed at Metz, a border fortification on the Rhenish frontier of France, an incident occurred which gave impulse and direction to his life. The Duke of Gloucester, brother of King George the Third, smarting under slights at court on account of a marriage disagreeable to the King, turned his back upon England, and in his travels stopped at Metz, where he was welcomed at dinner by the commander of the garrison. At that table sat the youthful Lafayette, only nineteen years old, who there for the first time heard the story of the American “insurgents,” as they were called,--of their armed resistance to British troops, and of the Declaration of Independence. His whole nature was thrilled, and the passionate declamation against arbitrary power to which the English Duke gave vent, though stirred only by wounded pride and spite, fell like a spark upon his sincere and sensitive soul, already kindling with generous emotions, so that, before the dinner was ended, his resolution was fixed to cross the ocean and offer his sword to distant, unknown fellow-men struggling for liberty. This was in the autumn of 1776.[54] Hastening back to Paris, he lost no time in engaging with the American Commissioners there, who with grateful astonishment welcomed their romantic ally.