In spite of all this recrimination Lafayette's death passed comparatively unnoticed in France, for it occurred during a season of political turmoil and he had retired several years before from active affairs. Three thousand miles away the news produced far greater effect. He was mourned in America with universal sorrow. All over the country flags floated at half-mast. The House and Senate of the United States passed resolutions which were sent to George Lafayette, while the members wore crape upon their arms for thirty days and the Senate Chamber and Hall of Representatives remained draped in black until the end of the session. Our army and navy wore a tribute of crape upon their sleeves also, and on a given day every city in the Union heard the mourning salute of twenty-four guns, and after that at half-hour intervals until sunset the booming of a single cannon. "Touching honors," says a French writer, "rendered by a great people to the memory of a stranger who had served them sixty years before." * * * * * [Pg 293]Lafayette lived to hold his great-grandchild in his arms, yet the period of his life seems very short if measured by the changes that came about while he walked the earth. It was a time when old men dreamed dreams and young men saw visions, and during Lafayette's seventy-six years some of the visions became realities, some of his dreams he saw well on the way to fulfilment. The French regard Lafayette's American career as only an episode in his life; while Americans are apt to forget that he had a career in France. He lived in three distinct periods of history, so different that they might have been centuries apart. He saw medieval Europe; the stormy period of change, and something very like the modern world we know to-day. Peasants knelt in the dust before the nobles, after he was a grown man; yet, in his old age, railroads and republicanism were established facts. "To have made for oneself a rôle in one or another of these periods suffices for a career," says his French biographer Donoil; "very few have had a career in all." Lafayette played an important part in all three. Not only that; it was his strange good fortune to hold familiar converse with two of the greatest figures in history--the two very greatest of his own age--Washington and Napoleon. That he seems even measurably great in such company shows his true stature. Washington was his friend, who loved him like a son. Napoleon appears to have been one of the very few men Lafayette could never quite bring himself to trust, though Napoleon [Pg 294]rendered him an immense service and did everything in his great power to win his support.