His friends in America were not idle. Washington had earlier sent a letter to Prussia asking the liberation of Lafayette as a favor. But the prisoner had already been transferred to Austria. In May, 1796, Washington wrote to the Emperor of Austria, and the American Minister, John Jay, presented the letter. “Permit me only to submit to your Majesty’s consideration,” wrote Washington, “whether his long imprisonment and the confiscation of his estate and the indigence and dispersion of his family, and the painful anxieties incident to all these circumstances, do not form an assemblage of sufferings which recommend him to the mediation of humanity. Allow me, sir, on this occasion, to be its organ; and to entreat that he may be permitted to come to this country, on such conditions and under such instructions as your Majesty may think it expedient to prescribe.” Austria, however, did not intend to release the prisoner. She had too much fear of him as a leader of liberty. When at an earlier time a friend of Lafayette had asked for his release an official of Frederick the Great had refused the request on the same ground that Austria’s emperor now took. “Monsieur de Lafayette,” said this official, “is too fanatic on the subject of liberty; he does not hide it; all his letters show it; he could not keep quiet, if out of prison. I saw him when he was here, and still remember a statement of his, which surprised me very much at that time: ‘Do you believe,’ said he to me, ‘that I went to America to make a military reputation for myself? I went for the sake of liberty. When a man loves it, he can rest only when he has established it in his own country.’” Before Madame Lafayette had joined her husband in the prison at Olmutz a friend had tried to help the captive to escape. At the time the Austrian officials were allowing Lafayette a little more freedom, although he was practically never out of the watchful sight of guards. The friend was a young man who had come to Vienna to try to find out where the famous Frenchman was imprisoned, the young American, Francis Kinloch Huger, who, as a small boy, had stood in the doorway of his father’s house in South Carolina at midnight and helped to welcome Lafayette and his companions when they first reached American soil. Francis Huger’s father had been attached to Lafayette’s command during the campaign in Virginia, and the son had retained so deep an admiration for his hero that he had come to Europe to help him if he could.