Lafayette

E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Jen Haines, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

From an authentic portrait.
Portait of Lafayette.
This shows Lafayette as a youthful general.
And what gave he to us? He gave his starry youth, His quick, audacious sword, His name, his crested plume. And what gave we? We gave—a nation's heart!

AMONG the rugged Auvergne Mountains, in the southern part of France, stands a castle that is severe and almost grim in its aspect. Two bare round towers flank the building on the right and on the left. Rows of lofty French windows are built across the upper part of the front, and the small, ungenerous doorway below has a line of portholes on either side that suggest a thought of warlike days gone by.
This castle, built in the fourteenth century, is called the Château de Chaviniac de Lafayette. Though it was burned to the ground in 1701, it was rebuilt as nearly like the earlier structure as possible; hence it represents, as it stands, the chivalrous days of the crusading period and so forms a fitting birthplace for a hero. In this half-military château was born one of the most valiant champions of liberty that any country has ever produced—the Marquis de Lafayette.
The climate of the Haute-Loire—the highlands of Auvergne—is harsh; it has been called the French Siberia. There are upland moors like deserts across which sweep fierce winds, where the golden broom and the purple heather—flowers of the barren heights—are all that will flourish. There are, indeed, secluded valleys filled with muskmallows and bracken, but these are often visited by wild tempests, and sudden floods may make the whole region dreary and dangerous.
In Lafayette's time the violence of the elements was not the only thing to be dreaded. When the children wandered too near the edge of the forest, they might catch sight of a wild boar nozzling about for mushrooms under the dead oak leaves; and if it had been a severe winter, it was quite within possibility that wolves or hyenas might come from their hiding places in the rocky recesses of the mountains and lurk hungrily near the villages.