The other tradition is that of a man in the flower of his age concerned with a vast transformation of European Society--a transformation springing directly from the energy of his own people, and one who so undervalued or misjudged it that, after appearing continually in places of capital importance and as continually failing to do more than preserve his principles, he ended by neither saving the institutions to which he was attached nor so much as delaying their destruction. At last, equally condemned by each section of contemporary opinion and power, he abandoned his high command upon the frontier in the first crisis of the great war between the Revolution and the kings, and subsequently appeared neither in the one camp nor in the other, neglected by both in common, a prisoner in the hands of foreigners. One picture is that of a hero; the other that of a pale figure almost guilty of a double treason and certainly a prig. These two traditions are easily reconcilable if we draw for ourselves from the many sources available to us a true picture of the man. We shall then perceive why Marie Antoinette, with her ardent, but unsympathetic, temperament, was violently repelled by him, especially in his maturity; we shall understand how Carlyle,--allowing for his grossly insufficient reading--was capable of drawing only the pale caricature which is among the worst failures of his great study; and above all, we shall understand how, in what is for European history the crisis of his life, Lafayette neither led nor attacked the civilian forces of his own people, but deliberately effaced himself; and as a consequence of his action, though not of his own volition, suffered those years of effacement and prison. It is fortunately possible to us, though it is not easy, to reconstruct the character which lay at the root of these varied actions and especially of these singular inactions.