The mass of his army was still intact, and would still have followed him had he then broken camp and marched on Paris. But in that decisive moment also comes the final and most characteristic act of all: Lafayette did not march upon Paris. He “put himself at the disposition of the civil authority of the Department of the Ardennes”; he asked the neighbouring departments in which troops of his command were stationed for their orders; he refused to use military force save at the orders of authorized civilian government; he preferred his political idea and creed to every practical necessity of the situation; or, as he would have put it, to every temptation the situation might offer him. He did more: he allowed letters, pamphlets, and even emissaries from Paris to circulate freely among his men; he allowed one of the battalions in revolt against him, and even the commander of the guns in revolt against him, to write freely to the new government in Paris, swearing their adhesion to it. He sent to department after department submitting the military to the civil power and awaiting their decision, when any other man would have marched straight upon the capital. Paris and the new order learned how its commissioners had been treated; new commissioners were at once sent out; upon Sunday, the nineteenth of August, the parliament impeached the general. Meanwhile he had decided upon his own fate. Lafayette upon that morning judged, _first_, that he would not join in an enterprise against its fellow-citizens; _next_, that his own conscience would not allow him to serve the new régime. Taking with him a handful of friends (a few who joined him against his will raised the total of the commissioned officers with him to twenty-three), he proceeded through the forest of Ardennes to the little town of Bouillon, then in French territory, now in Belgian. He first left minute orders for the disposition of his army, notably for the safety of the outposts to prepare them against the shock of the immediate invasion; he also left behind him all his official papers, sealed and in good order for use of his successor, whoever that might be. Before sunset he crossed the bridge in front of the famous little forest town, with its enormous castle and crusading legend, and rode out northward with his companions, twelve miles and more through the gathering darkness, toward Rochefort, all the way in foreign land. To that road he was compelled. Did he deviate to the left he would fall among the French outposts in the valley of the Meuse beyond the woods; upon his right was the line of the Austrian advance.