The prisoner might well have thought that his own family had shared the fate of so many of their relatives and friends. The name of Lafayette was no protection to them, rather an added menace in a land where the Jacobins held sway. On September 2, 1792, when the Reign of Terror was in full flood in Paris, Minister Roland ordered that Madame Lafayette should be arrested at Chavaniac. She was taken, with her aunt and her elder daughter, who refused to leave her, as far as the town of Puy, but there she wrote such vigorous letters of protest to Roland and other officials that she was allowed to return to her home on parole. In October of the next year she was again arrested, this time under the new law that called for the arrest of all persons who might be suspected of hostility to the government, and now she was actually put into a country prison. In June, 1794, Robespierre’s agents brought her to Paris, and she was imprisoned in the College du Plessis, where her husband had gone to school as a boy. From there her next journey, according to the custom of that time, would have been to the guillotine. At this point, however, Gouverneur Morris, the Minister of the United States, stepped upon the scene. He had already advanced Madame Lafayette large sums of money, when her property had been confiscated; now when he heard that she was to be condemned to the guillotine by the butchers of the Revolution he immediately bearded those butchers in their den. He wrote to the authorities, the Committee of Safety, as the officials grotesquely called it, and told them that the execution of Madame Lafayette would make a very bad impression in America. The Committee of Safety were not disposed to listen to reason from any quarter. Yet, when they heard Gouverneur Morris say, “If you kill the wife of Lafayette all the enemies of the Republic and of popular liberty will rejoice; you will make America hostile, and justify England in her slanders against you,” they hesitated and postponed ordering her execution. But, because of his protests against such violent acts of the Reign of Terror, Gouverneur Morris was sent back to America, on the ground that he had too much sympathy with the victims of “liberty!” Madame Lafayette was brought into court, and the Committee of Safety did its best to insult her. Said the Chief Commissioner, “I have old scores against you. I detest you, your husband, and your name!” Madame Lafayette answered him fearlessly, “I shall always defend my husband; and as for a name--there is no wrong in that.” “You are insolent!” shouted the Commissioner, and was about to order her execution when he remembered Morris’s words and sent her back to her prison instead.