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
Fortunately neither Huger nor Bollman died in their Austrian prison.
After eight months in their cells they were set free and sent out of
the country. Both went to America, where in time Doctor Bollman became
a political adventurer and aided Aaron Burr in those schemes which
ultimately brought Burr to trial for treason. Then Bollman might have
been punished had not Lafayette remembered what he had done at Olmutz
and begged President Jefferson to set him free. Francis Huger was among
the Americans who welcomed Lafayette to the United States in 1824.
The Frenchman, however, had to continue in prison in Austria. After his
wife and daughters joined him the imprisonment grew less hard. But after
a time his daughters fell ill of prison-fever, and soon their mother was
sick also. She appealed to the Emperor for permission to go to Vienna to
see a doctor. The Emperor answered that she could go to Vienna “only on
condition that you do not go back to Olmutz.”
She would not desert her husband. “I will never expose myself to the
horrors of another separation from my husband,” she declared; and so
she and her daughters stayed with Lafayette, enduring all manner of
privations and sufferings for his sake.
The world, however, had not forgotten Lafayette. America worked
constantly to free him, Washington and Jefferson and Jay, Morris and
Marshall and Monroe used all their influence with Austria, but America
was not loved in the tyrannical court of Vienna and the appeals of her
statesmen passed unheeded. England was generous also toward the man
who had once fought against her. The general who had commanded the
forces against him at the Brandywine moved Parliament again and again
to interfere on behalf of the French hero, and Charles James Fox,
the great English orator, pleaded in favor, as he said, “of a noble
character, which will flourish in the annals of the world, and live in
the veneration of posterity, when kings, and the crowns they wear, will
be no more regarded than the dust to which they must return.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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