All had now failed, and the dungeon seemed to have closed upon Lafayette forever. The hearts of his friends were wrung with anguish, and especially here in America. Washington, at the fireside of Mount Vernon, shed tears for his friend,--while to that noble wife, who in all things was not less faithful than her heroic husband, he addressed an earnest letter, regretting that he had not words to convey his feelings, and placing a considerable sum of money to her credit, which he mentioned as the least he was indebted for services, of which he had never yet received an account.[107] But an intervention was at hand which would not be denied. It was the early sword of Napoleon Bonaparte, which, flashing across the Alps from his Italian victories, broke open the dungeon of Olmütz. Lafayette had been a captive five years,--his wife and daughters shut up with him twenty-two months. In the negotiations ending in the Treaty of Campo Formio, it was required, under special instructions from the French Directory, that he should be released; and the conqueror was heard to say afterwards, that, among all the sacrifices exacted of tottering Austria, not one was so difficult to obtain. The captive of many years, at last in the enjoyment of liberty, hastened to Hamburg, where he found welcome with the American consul. This was in the autumn of 1797, and he was forty years of age. But life with him, though brief in years, had been extended by events full of lessons never to be forgotten; above all was that great lesson of perpetual fealty to Human Rights. And now this same lesson was illustrated again. As in dungeon, so in exile, Lafayette could not forget the cause to which his life was devoted, especially the liberty of the African. From the obscure retreat in Holstein, where he lingered, he addresses Clarkson, the English Abolitionist, in eloquent words, against the Slave-Trade, which was still the scandal of nations, and announces that the mission of France, while healing the wounds of the past, should be to assure _Liberty for all, whether white or black_, under the equal protection of Law.[108] Better far such mission than battle and conquest, which this ambitious nation craved. In a letter to Washington at the same time he gives utterance to his aspiration, that, for the good of the world, the North and the South should gradually adopt the principles on which the Independence and the Liberty of the United States have been happily founded.[109] How in thinking of himself Lafayette thought instinctively of the slave appears in an incident of exile at this time. In the straitened circumstances to which he was reduced, stripped of the wealth to which he was born, poor and homeless, his thoughts turned to the broad continent across the Atlantic, and he conceived the plan of buying a farm,--although without what he denominates “the first dollar” necessary,--either in Virginia, not far from what he calls the “Federal