XXX
SEVENTY-SIX YEARS YOUNG
Although he had resigned the office to which the king had appointed him, Lafayette continued to hold his place in the Chamber of Deputies; the office to which the people had elected him. Here he worked in behalf of the oppressed of his own and other nations; the Irish, for example, and the Poles, in whose struggles for liberty he was deeply interested.
When the Chamber of Deputies was in session he lived in Paris. Vacations were spent at La Grange, where he pursued the varied interests of his many-sided life, particularly enjoying, in his character of farmer, the triumph of his beasts and fruits in neighborhood fairs. In the winter of 1834 he was as usual in Paris, and on the 26th of January made the speech in behalf of Polish refugees then in France which proved to be his last public address. A few days later he attended the funeral of one of the Deputies, following the coffin on foot all the long distance from the house to the cemetery, as was the French custom, and standing on the damp ground through the delivery of the funeral discourses. The exposure and fatigue were too much for even his hardy old body.
He was confined to his room for many weeks, but carried on a life as normal as possible, having his children around him, receiving visits of intimate friends, reading journals and new books, and dictating letters. One of these was to Andrew Jackson about his fight with the United States Senate. The inactivity of the sick-chamber was very irksome to him, and by the 9th of May he was so far improved that his physicians allowed him to go for a drive. Unfortunately a storm came up, the weather turned suddenly cold, and he suffered a chill, after which his condition became alarming. When it was known that he was a very sick man, friends and political enemies—he had no personal enemies—hastened to make inquiries and to offer condolences. Occasionally George Lafayette was able to answer that his father seemed better; but the improvement was not real. On the 20th of May he appeared to wake and to search for something on his breast. His son put into his hands the miniature of Adrienne that he always wore. He had strength to raise it to his lips, then sank into unconsciousness from which he passed into the sleep of death.
He was laid to rest in the cemetery of Picpus beside the wife who had awaited him there for more than a quarter of a century; but his grave was made in earth from an American battle-field that he had brought home with him after his last visit. Fifteen natives of Poland bore the coffin to the hearse. There were honorary pall-bearers representing the Chamber of Deputies, the National Guard, the Army, the United States, Poland, and his own electoral district of Meaux. It was purely a military funeral. His party friends hotly declared that it was not a funeral at all, only a monster military parade. The government feared that his burial might be made the occasion for political demonstrations and ordered out such an immense number of troops that "the funeral car passed almost unseen in the midst of a battalion whose bayonets ... kept the people from rendering homage to their liberator." "He was there lifeless, but not without honor," wrote an indignant friend. "The French army surrounded him in his coffin as relentlessly as the Austrian army had held him a prisoner at Olmütz." Even the cemetery was guarded as if to withstand a siege. "Only the dead and his family might enter.... One would say that the government looked upon the mortal remains of this friend of liberty as a bit of prey which must not be allowed to escape." The liberals resented this fancied attitude of the government so bitterly that a cartoonist drew Louis Philippe rubbing his hands together with satisfaction as the procession passed and saying, gleefully, "Lafayette, you're caught, old man!" Only one incident occurred to justify so many precautions. In the Place Vendome a few score young men carrying a banner tried to break through the line of soldiers, but were repulsed. Elsewhere people looked on in silence.
Lafayette's political friends complained that not one of the king's ministers was to be seen in the procession. The ministers answered that politics were out of place at the funeral of such a distinguished man; and that the government rendered its homage regardless of party. While friends and foes wrangled thus over the coffin, Nature did her beautiful consoling best. Chateaubriand, standing in the silent crowd, saw the hearse stop a moment as it reached the top of a hill, and as it stopped a fugitive ray of sunlight came to rest upon it, then disappeared, gilding the guns and military trappings as it passed.
In spite of all this recrimination Lafayette's death passed comparatively unnoticed in France, for it occurred during a season of political turmoil and he had retired several years before from active affairs. Three thousand miles away the news produced far greater effect. He was mourned in America with universal sorrow. All over the country flags floated at half-mast. The House and Senate of the United States passed resolutions which were sent to George Lafayette, while the members wore crape upon their arms for thirty days and the Senate Chamber and Hall of Representatives remained draped in black until the end of the session. Our army and navy wore a tribute of crape upon their sleeves also, and on a given day every city in the Union heard the mourning salute of twenty-four guns, and after that at half-hour intervals until sunset the booming of a single cannon. "Touching honors," says a French writer, "rendered by a great people to the memory of a stranger who had served them sixty years before."