Washington wrote to George in care of the Boston friend to whose house the youth would go on landing, advising him not to travel farther, but to enter Harvard and pursue his studies there. But M. Frestel also came to America, by another ship and under an assumed name, and George continued his education with him instead of entering college. He possessed little of his father's faculty for making friends, though the few who knew him esteemed him highly. The most impressionable years of his life had been passed amid tragic scenes, and his natural reserve and tendency to silence had been increased by anxiety about his father's fate. After a time he went to Mount Vernon and became part of the household there. One of Washington's visitors wrote: "I was particularly struck with the marks of affection which the general showed his pupil, his adopted son, son of the Marquis de Lafayette. Seated opposite to him, he looked at him with pleasure and listened to him with manifest interest." A note in Washington's business ledger shows that the great man was both generous and sympathetic in fulfilling his fatherly duties. It reads: "By Geo. W. Fayette, gave for the purpose of his getting himself such small articles of clothing as he might not choose to ask for, $100." It was at Mount Vernon that the news of his real father's release came to George. He rushed out into the fields away from everybody, to shout and cry and give vent to his emotion unseen by human eyes. [Pg 251]His father was pleased by the development he noted in him; pleased by the letter Washington sent by the hand of "your son, who is highly deserving of such parents as you and your estimable lady." Pleased, too, that George had the manners to stop in Paris on the way home long enough to pay his respects to Napoleon, and that, in the absence of the general, he had been kindly received by Madame Bonaparte. Natural courtesy as well as policy demanded that the Lafayettes fully acknowledge their debt to Napoleon. One of Lafayette's first acts on being set free had been to write him the following joint letter of thanks with Maubourg and Pusy: "CITIZEN GENERAL: The prisoners of Olmütz, happy in owing their deliverance to the good will of their country and to your irresistible arms, rejoiced during their captivity in the thought that their liberty and their lives depended upon the triumphs of the Republic and of your personal glory. It is with the utmost satisfaction that we now do homage to our liberator. We should have liked, Citizen General, to express these sentiments in person, to look with our own eyes upon the scenes of so many victories, the army which won them, and the general who has added our resurrection to the number of his miracles. But you are aware that the journey to Hamburg was not left to our choice. From the place where we parted with our jailers we address our thanks to their victor.