Here Lafayette was welcomed with delight. The young fellow who had run away to sea in the _Victory_ was returning like a hero in a war-ship of the new American republic. In triumph he landed at Brest, and as he hurried to Paris to see his family he was greeted by joyful crowds all along his route. He stopped at the royal palace of Versailles, and his old friend Marie Antoinette came out into the gardens to hear him tell his adventures. King Louis sent for him, and ordered him under arrest as a deserter, but with a twinkling eye declared that his prison should be his father-in-law’s great house in Paris, and his jailer his wife Adrienne. Then the King forgave him for running away to America, congratulated him, and, with his ministers, consulted the Marquis about affairs in the United States. Lafayette said, “I had the honor of being consulted by all the ministers and, what was a great deal better, of being kissed by all the women.” The welcome he cared for the most was that from his wife, who had followed him in her thoughts all the time he had been in America, and had always sympathized with him and wished success for his plans. The Duke d’Ayen was delighted to see him and welcomed him to his house with open arms. Whenever the Marquis appeared on the street he was cheered by admiring throngs. The actors in the theatres put special words in their parts to honor Lafayette; poems were written about him; and the young man of twenty-one became the lion of Paris. In a sense he represented the connecting link in the alliance that now united the two countries, and that alliance was in great favor with the people. He also stood for that ideal of “liberty” which was rapidly becoming the ruling thought of France. It would have been easy for him to rest on his laurels now, and feel that he had accomplished all that was needed of him. But instead he used all this hero-worship to further his one aim--more help for the young republic across the sea. “In the midst of the whirl of excitement by which I was carried along,” he said, “I never lost sight of the revolution, the success of which still seemed to me to be extremely uncertain; accustomed as I was to seeing great purposes accomplished with slender means, I used to say to myself that the cost of a single fête would have equipped the army of the United States, and in order to provide clothes for them I would gladly have stripped the palace at Versailles.”