Lafayette, We Come!: The Story of How a Young Frenchman Fought for Liberty in America and How America Now Fights for Liberty in FranceHolland, Rupert Sargent
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Lafayette, We Come!: The Story of How a Young Frenchman Fought for Liberty in America and How America Now Fights for Liberty in France
Holland, Rupert Sargent
Lafayette, Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert Du Motier, marquis de, 1757-1834
This seemed to bring peace again, but it was only the quiet that
precedes the thunder-storm. The Assembly finished its work on the
new constitution for France and the King signed it. Then Lafayette,
tired with his constant labors, resigned his commission and stated his
intention of retiring to private life. Paris voted him a medal and a
marble statue of Washington, and the National Guards presented him with
a sword forged from the bolts of the Bastille. At last he rode back
to his country home at Chavaniac, looking forward to rest there as
Washington looked for rest at his beloved Mount Vernon.
To friends at his home in Auvergne the General said, “You see me
restored to the place of my birth; I shall leave it only to defend or
consolidate our common liberty, if attacked, and I hope to remain here
for long.” He believed that the new constitution would bring liberty
and peace to his country. But the French Revolution had only begun its
course, and he was destined soon to be called back to its turmoil.
He had several months of rest in his home in the mountains, happy months
for his wife, who for two years had hardly ever seen her husband leave
their house in Paris without fearing that he might not return. She had
been a wonderful helpmate for the General during the turbulent course
of events since his return from America and had loyally entertained
the guests of every varying shade of political opinion who had flocked
to his house in the capital. But she liked to have her husband away
from the alarms of Paris and safe in the quiet of his country home at
Chavaniac. There he had more time to spend with her and their three
children, Anastasie, George Washington, and Virginia, who had been named
after the State where her father had won his military laurels.
The Legislative Assembly of France, which was trying to govern the
country under the new constitution, was finding the making of laws which
should satisfy every one a very difficult task. There were countless
cliques and parties, and each had its own pet scheme for making the
land a Utopia. The court party hoped that the more reckless element
would lose all hold on the people through its very extravagance, and so
actually encouraged many wildly absurd projects. The royalists were
always expecting that a counter-revolution would bring them back into
power, and the nobles who had left the country filled the border-towns
and plotted and conspired and used their influence to induce foreign
sovereigns to interfere and restore the old order in France. Naturally
enough news of these plots and conspiracies did not tend to make King
Louis or his nobles any more popular with the lawgivers in Paris.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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