The Boys' Life of Lafayette

MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE From an engraving by Jones
by Helen Nicolay
Illustrated
Harper & Brothers Publishers New York and London

This is no work of fiction. It is sober history; yet if the bare facts it tells were set forth without the connecting links, its preface might be made to look like the plot of a dime novel.
It is the story of a poor boy who inherited great wealth; who ran away from home to fight for liberty and glory; who became a major-general before he was twenty years old; who knew every nook and corner of the palace at Versailles, yet was the blood-brother of American Indians; who tried vainly to save the lives of his king and queen; who was in favor of law, yet remained a rebel to the end of his days; who suffered an unjust imprisonment which has well been called a night five years long ; who was twice practically Dictator of France; and who, in his old age, was called upon to make a great decision.
But it is no work of fiction. It is only the biography of a French gentleman named Lafayette.

The Lafayettes die young, but die fighting, was a saying in that part of France where they had been people of consequence for seven hundred years before the most famous of them came into the world. The family name was Motier, but, after the custom of the time, they were better known by the name of their estate, La Fayette, in Auvergne, a region which had been called the French Siberia. Although situated in central southern France, fully three hundred and fifty miles from Paris, it is a high wind-swept country of plains and cone-shaped hills, among whose rugged summits storms break to send destruction rushing down into the valleys. Unexpected, fertile, sheltered spots are to be found among these same hills, but on the whole it is not a gentle nor a smiling land.
The history of France during the Middle Ages bears not a little resemblance to this region of Auvergne, so full of sharp contrasts, often of disaster. Through all the turbulent centuries the men of the house of Lafayette bore their part, fighting gallantly for prince and king. Family tradition abounded in stories telling how they had taken part in every war since old Pons Motier de Lafayette, the Crusader, fought at Acre, in Palestine, in 1250. Jean fell at Poictiers in 1356. There was a Claude—exception to the rule that they died young—who took part in sixty-five sieges and no end of pitched battles. Though most of them fought on land, there was an occasional sailor to relieve the monotony; notably a vice-admiral of the reign of Francis First, who held joint command with Andrea Doria when that soldier of fortune went to the relief of Marseilles, and who sank or burned four Spanish galleons in the naval battle at the mouth of the Var.