“‘SIR: Your Majesty’s well-known integrity admits of M. de La Fayette’s wife addressing herself to you without forgetting what she owes to her husband’s character. I have always hoped, sir, that Your Majesty would respect virtue wherever it was to be found, and thereby give to Europe a glorious example. It is now five long, dreadful months since I last heard anything of M. de La Fayette, so I cannot plead his cause. But it seems to me that both his enemies and myself speak eloquently in his favor: they by their crimes, I by the violence of my despair. They prove his virtue, and how much he is feared by the wicked; I show how worthy he is of being loved. They make it a necessity for Your Majesty’s glory not to have an object of persecution in common with them. Shall I myself be fortunate enough to give you the occasion of restoring me to life by delivering him? “‘Allow me, sir, to indulge in that hope as in the one of soon owing to you this deep debt of gratitude. “‘NOAILLES LA FAYETTE.’ “In December M. Roland obtained from the committee the repeal of the order for my mother’s arrest. She was still under the surveillance to which the _ci-devant_ nobles were subjected, and could not leave the department without express permission. But she was disengaged from her promise, and she was not discouraged. Pecuniary interests also detained my mother in France, not on her own account nor on that of her children, but because she looked upon it as a sacred duty before leaving the country to see the rights of my father’s creditors acknowledged. “The events of the 31st of May, which assured the triumph of the terrorist party, brought no alteration at first in our situation, but took from us all hopes for the future. “Towards the middle of June my mother received, through the minister of the United States, two letters from my father, written from the dungeon of Magdebourg. The anxiety they occasioned with respect to my father’s health marred the joy we felt in receiving them.... “At that period of the Revolution, many _émigrés’_ wives thought it necessary, for the preservation of their children’s fortune and for their personal safety, to obtain a divorce. My mother esteemed and even respected the virtue of several persons who thought themselves obliged to take this step. But as for herself, the scruples of her conscience would not have allowed her to save her life by feigning an act contrary to Christian law, even when no one could be deceived. However, another motive influenced her, though this one would have sufficed. Her love for my father made her find pleasure in all that was a remembrance of him. Whilst many pious and tender wives sought for safety in a pretended divorce, never did she address a request to any administration whatever, or present a petition, without feeling satisfaction in beginning everything she wrote by these words: ‘_La Femme La Fayette_.’