Getting the passport proved a long and difficult undertaking. When issued it was to permit Madame Motier of Hartford, Connecticut, and her two daughters to return to America. It was necessary to begin the journey in accordance with this, and they embarked at Dunkirk on a small American vessel bound for Hamburg. There they left the ship and went to Vienna on another passport, but still as the American family named Motier. In Vienna the American family hid itself very effectively through the help of old friends, and Adrienne contrived to be received by the emperor himself, quite unknown to his ministers. His manner to her and her girls was so gracious that she came away "in an ecstasy of joy," though he told her he could not release the prisoner. She [Pg 240]was so sure her husband was well treated and so jubilant over the emperor's permission to write directly to him if she had reason to complain, that she was not at all cast down by the warnings and evident unfriendliness of the prime minister and the minister of war with whom she next sought interviews. Leaving Vienna by carriage, she and her daughters traveled all one day and part of the next northward into the rugged Carpathian country before an interested postboy pointed out the steeples and towers of Olmütz. Once in the town, they drove straight to the house of the commandant, who took good care not to expose his heart to pity by seeing these women, but sent the officer in charge of the prison to open its doors and admit them to its cold welcome. The room in which they found Lafayette did well enough in point of size and of furnishings. It was a vaulted stone chamber facing south, twenty-four feet long, fifteen wide, and twelve high. Light entered by means of a fairly large window shut at the top with a padlock, but which could be opened at the bottom, where it was protected by a double iron grating. The furnishings consisted of a bed, a table, chairs, a chest of drawers, and a stove; and this room opened into another of equal size which served as an antechamber. The vileness consisted in the sights and smells outside the window and the dirt within.