capital. The next much graver evidence of this change was in the flight of the royal family upon the night of the twentieth of June immediately succeeding; and in this the two elements fatal to Lafayette’s future in the Revolution appeared with equal clarity. On the one hand he had proved unable, with all his militia, to prevent the escape of the king; on the other hand, he thought it his duty--his duty to the Constitution--to recapture the fugitives. The king’s flight, despite Lafayette’s presence at the head of the National Guard, despite his personal activity in ordering the force at the palace doors and seeing upon that very night to the position of the sentinels, made him a suspect in the eyes of revolutionary Paris; his activity in recapturing the king and queen made him odious to all that growing opinion in Europe and in France which had ceased to see in the Revolution a political experiment and had begun to see in it only a drama--a tragedy, the pitiful victims of which were Louis and the royal family. It is further characteristic of Lafayette’s fate that all this activity of his counted for nothing. It was not he that effected the recapture of the flying king; that was done, as much had hitherto been done, by the energy of what was popular, plebeian, and, to him, incomprehensible, in France. But as much blame as a man could gather from the issue Lafayette most unfortunately reaped; and when the captives were brought back again after those torturing three days of heat, it was Lafayette who, as the general of the armed force in the capital, must ask Marie Antoinette to give him the keys of the palace. She threw them at him; he caught them as a man catches a ball in a game. Of the many things he did in those days, one is sufficiently characteristic, and marks his attitude in all that rising anger. There was in Auvergne a family of squires called Romeuf; they were neighbours of the powerful and wealthy Lafayettes, whose chief estate lay at Chavagniac, close by, and Lafayette had taken one of the young Romeufs to be his aide-de-camp when he was put at the head of the National Guard. As one might imagine of poor squires, the Romeufs were intensely and personally loyal to the king; yet, whether through negligence or because his devotion to his constitutional ideal made him forget what personal affections might mean, or from a love of power, or from whatever cause, it was this young Romeuf whom Lafayette sent off post-haste along the eastern road to recapture the king and queen.