"Welcome, friend of our fathers, to our shores!... Enjoy a triumph such as never conqueror or monarch enjoyed.... The friend of your youth, the more than friend of his country, rests in the bosom of the soil he redeemed. On the banks of his Potomac he lies in glory and peace. You will revisit the hospitable shades of Mount Vernon, but him whom you venerated as we did, you will not meet at its door.... But the grateful children of America will bid you welcome, in his name. Welcome, thrice welcome to our shores; and whithersoever throughout the limits of the continent your course shall take you, the ear that hears you shall bless you, the eye that sees you shall bear witness to you, and every tongue exclaim, with heartfelt joy: "'Welcome, welcome, La Fayette[304]!'" In the New World, M. de La Fayette contributed to the formation of a new society; in the Old World, to the destruction of an old society: liberty invokes him in Washington, anarchy in Paris. M. de La Fayette had only one idea, and, unfortunately for him, it was that of his century; the fixity of that idea constituted his empire: it served him as a blinker, prevented him from looking to right or left of him; he walked with a firm step along a single line; he marched on without falling into precipices, not because he saw them, but because he did not see them; blindness stood him in the stead of genius: all that is fixed is fatal, and that which is fatal is powerful. [Sidenote: La Fayette's funeral.] I still see M. de La Fayette, at the head of the National Guard, passing along the boulevards, in 1790, on his way to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; on the 22nd of May 1834, I saw him lying in his coffin, following the same boulevards. In the funeral procession one remarked a troop of Americans, each with a yellow flower in his button-hole. M. de La Fayette had sent to the United States for a quantity of earth sufficient to cover him in his grave; but his intentions were not carried out[305]: when the fatal moment came, forgetting both his political dreams and the romance of his life, he expressed the wish to lie at Picpus beside his virtuous wife[306]: death restores order to all things. At Picpus are buried the victims of the Revolution[307] commenced by M. de La Fayette; there stands a chapel where perpetual prayers are said in honour of those victims. I accompanied M. le Duc Matthieu de Montmorency to Picpus[308]; he had been M. de La Fayette's colleague in the Constituent Assembly: on touching the bottom of the grave, the rope turned that Christian's coffin on one side, as though he had raised himself on his hip to say a last prayer. I stood in the crowd, at the entrance to the Rue Grange-Batelière, when M. de La Fayette's funeral passed by: at the top of the ascent to the boulevard, the hearse stopped; I saw it, all gilded by a fleeting ray of the sun, gleam above the helmets and arms: then the shadow returned, and it disappeared from sight.