The treatment accorded Lafayette's would-be rescuers was barbarous in the extreme. Huger was chained hand and foot in an underground cell, where he listened to realistic descriptions of beheadings, and, worse still, of how prisoners were walled up and forgotten. Daily questions and threats of torture were tried to make him confess that the attempt was part of a wide-spread conspiracy. As his statements and his courage did not waver, the prison authorities came at last to believe him, and he was taken to a cell aboveground where it was possible to move three steps, though he was still chained. He found that Bollman was confined in the cell just above him. The latter let down a walnut shell containing a bit of ink and also a scrap of paper. With these Huger wrote a few lines to the American minister at London, telling of their plight and ending with the three eloquent words, "Don't forget us!"—doubly eloquent to one who knew those stories of walled-up prisoners underground. They bribed the guard to smuggle this out of the prison, and in time it reached its destination. The American minister did not forget them. Through his good offices they were released and told to leave the country. They waited for no second invitation, which was very wise, because the emperor repented his clemency. He sent an order for their rearrest, but it arrived, fortunately, just too late to prevent their escape across the border.
XXV
VOLUNTEERS IN MISFORTUNE
Lafayette, in his uncomfortable cell, was left in complete ignorance of the fate of Bollman and Huger, though given to understand that they had been executed or soon would be, perhaps under his own window. The long, dreary days wore on until more than a year had passed, with little to make one day different from another, though occasionally he was able to communicate with Pusy or Maubourg through the ingenuity of his "secretary," young Felix Pontonnier, a lad of sixteen, who had managed to cling to him with the devotion of a dog through all his misfortunes. Prison air was hard upon this boy and prison officials were harder still, but his spirits were invincible. He whistled like a bird, he made grotesque motions, he talked gibberish, and these antics were not without point. They were a language of his own devising, by means of which he conveyed to the prisoners such scraps of information as came to him from the outside world.
His master had need of all Felix's cheer to help him bear up against the anxiety that grew with each bit of news from France, and grew greater still because of the absence of news from those he loved best. For the first seven months he heard not a word from wife and children, though soon after his capture he learned about the early days of September in Paris, when the barriers had been closed and houses were searched and prisons "purged" of those suspected of sympathy with the aristocracy. Since then he had heard from his wife; but he had also learned of the trial and death of the king; and rumors had come to him of the Terror. Adrienne's steadfastness had been demonstrated to him through all the years of their married life. Where principle was involved he knew she would not falter; and he had little hope that she could have escaped imprisonment or a worse fate. He had heard absolutely nothing from her now for eighteen months. His captivity has been called "a night five years long," and this was its darkest hour.
Then one day, without the least previous warning, the bolts and bars of his cell creaked at an unusual hour; they were pushed back—and he looked into the faces of his wife and daughters. The authorities broke in upon the first instant of incredulous recognition to search their new charges; possessed themselves of their purses and the three silver forks in their modest luggage, and disappeared. The complaining bolts slid into place once more and a new prison routine began, difficult to bear in spite of the companionship, when he saw unnecessary hardships press cruelly upon these devoted women. Bit by bit he learned what had happened in the outside world: events of national importance of which he had not heard in his dungeon, and also little incidents that touched only his personal history; for instance, the ceremonies with which the Commune publicly broke the mold for the Lafayette medal, and how the mob had howled around his Paris house, clamoring to tear it down and raise a "column of infamy" in its place. He forbore to ask questions at first, knowing how tragic the tale must be, and it was only after the girls had been led away that first night and locked into the cell where they were to sleep that he learned of the grief that had come to Adrienne about a week before the Terror came to an end—the execution on a single day of her mother, her grandmother, and her beloved sister Louise.
In time he learned all the details of her own story: the months she had been under parole at Chavaniac, where through the kind offices of Gouverneur Morris she received at last the letter from her husband telling her that he was well. Her one desire had been to join him, but there was the old aunt to be provided for, and there were also pressing debts to settle; a difficult matter after Lafayette's property was confiscated and sold. Mr. Morris lent her the necessary money, assuring her that if she could not repay it Americans would willingly assume it as part of the far larger debt their country owed her husband.
She asked to be released from her parole in order to go into Germany to share his prison. Instead she had been cast into prison on her own account. The children's tutor, M. de Frestel, who had been their father's tutor before them, conspired with the servants and sold their bits of valuables that she might make the journey to prison in greater comfort. He contrived, too, that the mother might see her children before she was taken off to Paris, and she made them promise, in the event of her death, to make every effort to rejoin their father. In Paris she lived through many months of prison horror, confined part of the time in the old Collège Du Plessis where Lafayette had spent his boyhood, seeing every morning victims carried forth to their death and expecting every day to be ordered to mount into the tumbrels with them. Had she known it, she was inquired for every morning at the prison door by a faithful maidservant, who in this way kept her children informed of her fate. George was in England with his tutor. At Chavaniac the little girls were being fed by the peasants, as was the old aunt, for the manor-house had been sold and the old lady had been allowed to buy back literally nothing except her own bed.