She asked to be released from her parole in order to go into Germany to share his prison. Instead she had been cast into prison on her own account. The children's tutor, M. de Frestel, who had been their father's tutor before them, conspired with the servants and sold their [Pg 238]bits of valuables that she might make the journey to prison in greater comfort. He contrived, too, that the mother might see her children before she was taken off to Paris, and she made them promise, in the event of her death, to make every effort to rejoin their father. In Paris she lived through many months of prison horror, confined part of the time in the old Collège Du Plessis where Lafayette had spent his boyhood, seeing every morning victims carried forth to their death and expecting every day to be ordered to mount into the tumbrels with them. Had she known it, she was inquired for every morning at the prison door by a faithful maidservant, who in this way kept her children informed of her fate. George was in England with his tutor. At Chavaniac the little girls were being fed by the peasants, as was the old aunt, for the manor-house had been sold and the old lady had been allowed to buy back literally nothing except her own bed. At last Robespierre himself died under the guillotine and toward the end of September, 1794, a less bloodthirsty committee visited the prisons to decide the fate of their inmates. Adrienne Lafayette was the last to be examined at Du Plessis. Her husband was so hated that no one dared speak her name. She pronounced it clearly and proudly as she had spoken and written it ever since misfortune came upon her. It was decided that the wife of so great a criminal must be judged by higher authority; meanwhile she was to be kept under lock and key. James Monroe, who was now American minister to Paris, interceded for her, but she was only transferred to another prison. Here a worthy priest, [Pg 239]disguised as a carpenter, came to her to tell her how on a day in July the three women dearest to her had been beheaded, and how he, running beside the tumbrel through the storm that drenched them on their way to execution, had been able, at no small risk to himself, to offer them secretly the consolations of religion. Finally in January, 1795, largely through the efforts of Mr. Monroe, she was released. Her first care was to make a visit of thanks to Mr. Monroe and to ask him to continue his kindness by obtaining a passport for herself and her girls so that they might seek out her husband. George was to be sent to America, for she felt sure that his father, if still alive, would desire him to be there for a time under the care of Washington, and, if he had perished in prison, would have wished his son to grow up an American citizen.