With her husband in prison in Austria, her young children left unprotected and far away from her, the plight of Madame Lafayette was hard indeed. But she was very brave, though she knew that any day might take her to the scaffold. Almost all the old nobility were brave. While Robespierre and his rabble made liberty and justice a mockery the prisoners maintained their old contempt for their jailers and held their heads as high as in the old days when they had taken their pleasure at Versailles. On July 22, 1794, Madame Lafayette’s grandmother, the Maréchale de Noailles, her mother, the Duchess d’Ayen, and her sister, the Vicomtesse de Noailles, were beheaded by the guillotine, victims of the popular rage against all aristocrats. A few days later the Reign of Terror came to a sudden end, the prey of the very excesses it had committed. The people were sick of blood; even the judges and executioners were weary. On July twenty-eighth Robespierre and his supporters were declared traitors and were carted off to the guillotine in their turn. The new revolution opened the prison doors to most of the captives, but it was not until February, 1795, that Madame Lafayette obtained her freedom, and then it was largely owing to the efforts of the new Minister of the United States, James Monroe. At once she flew to her children, and sent her son George to America to be under the protection of Washington. A friend had bought Chavaniac and gave it back to her, but another Reign of Terror seemed imminent and Madame Lafayette wanted to leave France. A passport was obtained for her, and with her daughters she went by sea to Hamburg. There the American consul gave her another passport, made out in the name of “Madame Motier, of Hartford, in Connecticut.” Then she went to Austria and at Vienna presented herself to the grand chamberlain, the Prince of Rosemberg, who was an old acquaintance of her family. He took her to the Emperor, and from the latter she finally won permission to share her husband’s captivity at Olmutz. Meantime Lafayette’s health had suffered under his long imprisonment. In the dark damp fortress, deprived of exercise, of company, of books, he had passed many weary days. But the Fourth of July he remembered as the birthday of American freedom and spent the hours recollecting the happy time he had known in the young republic across the Atlantic. At last his wife and daughters joined him in his prison and told him of what had happened in France. Imprisonment was easier to bear now that his family was with him, but the confinement was hard on all of them, and presently the prison authorities, seeing Lafayette in need of exercise, gave him more liberty, allowing him to walk or ride each day, but always strongly guarded.