The voyage across the Atlantic in those days was a long and tedious affair. It took seven weeks, and after Lafayette had recovered from his seasickness he had plenty of time to think of the hazards of his new venture and of the family he had left at home. He was devoted to his family, and as the _Victory_ kept on her westward course he wrote long letters to his wife, planning to send them back to France by different ships, so that if one was captured another might carry his message to Adrienne safely to her. In one letter he wrote, “Oh, if you knew what I have suffered, what weary days I have passed thus flying from everything that I love best in the world!” And then, in order to make his wife less fearful of possible dangers that might beset him, he said, “The post of major-general has always been a warrant of long life. It is so different from the service I should have had in France, as colonel, for instance. With my present rank I shall only have to attend councils of war.... As soon as I land I shall be in perfect safety.” But this boy, nineteen years old, though he called himself a major-general, was not to be content with attending councils of war and keeping out of danger, as later events were to show. He was far too eager and impetuous for that, too truly a son of the wild Auvergne Mountains. And he showed that he knew that himself, for later in the same letter to Adrienne he compared his present journey with what his father-in-law would have tried to make him do had Lafayette met the Duke d’Ayen at Marseilles. “Consider the difference between my occupation and my present life,” he wrote, “and what they would have been if I had gone upon that useless journey. As the defender of that liberty which I adore; free, myself, more than any one; coming, as a friend, to offer my services to this most interesting republic, I bring with me nothing but my own free heart and my own good-will,--no ambition to fulfil and no selfish interest to serve. If I am striving for my own glory, I am at the same time laboring for the welfare of the American republic. I trust that, for my sake, you will become a good American. It is a sentiment made for virtuous hearts. The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind; she is destined to become the safe and worthy asylum of virtue, integrity, tolerance, equality, and peaceful liberty.” This, from a boy not yet twenty years old, showed the prophetic instinct that burned like a clear flame in the soul of Lafayette. He knew very little of the English tongue, but that was the language of the people he was going to help, and so on shipboard he set himself to study it. “I am making progress with that language,” he wrote to his wife. “It will soon become most necessary to me.”