America has never forgotten Lafayette. As John Quincy Adams said to him, he was ours “by that unshaken sentiment of gratitude for ... services which is a precious portion of our inheritance; ours by that tie of love, stronger than death, which has linked” Lafayette’s “name for the endless ages of time with the name of Washington.” In 1916 the old Château of Chavaniac, Lafayette’s birthplace, one hundred and fifty miles to the south of Paris, was put up for sale by the owner, a grandson of George Washington Lafayette. Patriotic Americans bought it, desiring to make a French Mount Vernon of the historic castle and grounds. At first it was intended to convert the château into a museum, to be filled with relics of Lafayette and Washington and the American Revolution, but the great needs that were facing France led to a change of plan. The castle should become more than a museum; it should be a home and school for as many children of France as could be provided for. This would have been Lafayette’s own wish, and in doing this the American society known as the French Heroes Lafayette Memorial has paid the noblest tribute to the great patriot. And the people of France, the most appreciative people in the world, have welcomed the gift and the spirit that underlay it. Anatole France, the great French writer, has summed up the sentiment of his nation in glowing words. “American thought,” he says, “has had a beautiful inspiration in choosing the cradle of Lafayette, in which to preserve memoirs of American independence and to establish an institution for the public good. In preserving in the Château de Chavaniac d’Auvergne the testimonies and relics of the war which united under the banner of liberty, Washington and Rochambeau, and in founding the Lafayette museum, ties which have bound the two great democracies to an eternal friendship have been commemorated. But this was not enough for the inexhaustible liberality of the Americans. It went further, and it was decided that upon this illustrious corner of France, the children of those who died in defense of liberty, should find a refuge and home, and that, deprived of their natural protection, some of these children should be adopted by the great American people, while others of delicate constitution should recover health and strength on this robust land. It is a large heart that these men reveal in preserving a grateful remembrance of past services, and in coming to the assistance of the orphaned of a past generation who fought for their cause a hundred and forty years ago. May I venture, as an aged Frenchman and a lover of liberty, to proffer to America the tribute of my heartfelt homage?”