“‘Blessed be God that liveth forever, and blessed be His kingdom, for He doth scourge and hath mercy; He leadeth down to hell, and bringeth up again; neither is there any that can avoid His hand. Confess Him before the Gentiles, ye children of Israel: for He hath scattered us among them. There declare his greatness, and extol Him before all the living; for He is our Lord, and He is the God our Father forever. And He will scourge us for our iniquities, and will have mercy again, and will gather us out of all nations, among whom He has scattered us. Therefore see what He will do with you, and confess Him with your whole mouth, and praise the Lord of might, and extol the everlasting King. Let my soul bless God the great King.’
“We drove to the house of the commander of the town. He sent the officer in charge of the prison to conduct us. After having been admitted through the first door, which was locked on the guard itself, we arrived, by passing through several long passages, to the two padlocked doors of my father’s room. My father had not been informed of our arrival. Three years of captivity, the last of which had been passed in complete solitude,—for, since the attempt at escape, he had not even seen his servant,—continual anxiety with respect to all the objects of his affection, sufferings of every kind, had deeply impaired his health; he was fearfully altered. My mother was struck with the change, but nothing could diminish the rapture of her joy, save the bitterness of her irreparable losses. My father, after the first moment of happiness caused by this unexpected meeting, dared not make any inquiries. He knew there had been a reign of terror in France, but he had not learned the names of the victims. The day passed without his venturing to ask any question; my mother had not courage enough to break the subject herself. It was only in the evening, after we had been locked in an adjoining but separate room, which had been assigned to my sister and myself, that she told my father that her grandmother, her mother, and her sister had perished on the scaffold.”
Madame La Fayette wrote thus to her aunt, when reunited to her husband:—
“Thanks to your good advice, dear aunt, I have attained my wishes. If I had been known, I could never have entered the Austrian dominions; and if I had not kept very quiet at Vienna until M. de Rosemberg had arranged my audience, I should never have succeeded. The emperor very politely granted us permission to be imprisoned with M. de La Fayette, and said at the same time that the affair was very complicated, and did not depend on him alone; but he assured us he should be well treated, and that our presence serait un agrément de plus.... Fancy the feelings of M. de La Fayette, who for eighteen months had not been permitted to learn even if we existed, and who had seen no one but his jailers, when, without any preparation, we entered his room....
“Would you like to know the sort of life we lead here? At eight o’clock the jailers call us to breakfast, after which I am locked up with my little girls till midday. We all dine together, and the turnkey comes in twice, to take away the dishes, and to bring in supper. We are all together until eight o’clock, when they carry off my little girls to their cage. The keys of their room are always delivered to the commandant, and they are locked in with all sorts of absurd precautions. We three pay for our food out of my money. We have more than we can eat, but inexpressibly dirty.... It is a great blessing to us both that the children keep well in this unwholesome place. My own health is not very good ... but nothing to make me uneasy. Of course you feel that nothing could induce us to leave M. de La Fayette. His health is really improved since our arrival. His terrible emaciation and pallor are the same, though both his keepers and himself assure me that they are nothing like what they were a year ago. But no one can go through four years of such captivity with impunity. I have not been able to see his fellow-captives, Messieurs de Maubourg and de Pusy, nor even to hear their voices; from the age one of their late keepers supposed them to be they must have grown terribly older.”
“You know the details of our captivity at Olmütz,” writes Virginie; “my mother shared in all its hardships. We had not the slightest intercourse with the outside. The doors were only opened for the officer’s visit at meal time. We were refused a woman for household work. On entering the prison we were asked for our purses, and three silver forks found in our luggage were seized. The use of a knife and fork was refused us, and we were obliged, during the whole time, to eat with our fingers. My mother applied to the authorities on all these subjects, but all her requests were refused.
“My mother deeply felt the grief of being unable to alleviate the sufferings of her companions in captivity. But as for herself, no words could express her happiness. You can only imagine it by remembering what was the ruling passion of her life from the age of fourteen, and how much she had gone through from frequent separations and incessant labors which had so constantly called my father from his home, as from the great dangers to which he had been exposed. She had passed three horrible years almost without a hope of ever seeing him again. At last she possessed that happiness which, during all her life, she had been longing for; each day she beheld the influence of her presence on my father’s health, and the solace she afforded him; she was surprised at feeling so happy, and reproached herself for being satisfied with her situation while my father was still a prisoner. She was allowed now and then to write, under the eyes of the officer on duty, short unsealed letters to the banker, who remitted the money necessary for our food. Permission to write to her son was refused, in order that no intelligence from the prison of Olmütz should reach the United States. It was with a toothpick and a small piece of India ink that she wrote my grandmother’s life on the margins of the engravings of a volume of Buffon.
“As might have been expected, my mother’s health had suffered much. Never did she show more meritorious submission to my father’s wishes than when she determined to write to the emperor for permission to go and consult the doctors at Vienna. At the end of seven weeks the commander of Olmütz came to intimate a verbal refusal to leave the prison unless she gave up all hopes of returning. He asked at the same time for a written answer. It was as follows:—
“‘The commander of Olmütz having declared to me that, on my request to go for a week to Vienna in order to consult the doctors, his Imperial Majesty does not permit me under any pretence whatever to go to Vienna, and only allows me to leave this prison on condition never to enter it again, I have the honor here to renew my answer. It was my duty towards my family and friends to try and obtain the advice necessary for my health, but they well know that I cannot accept the conditions offered to me. I cannot forget that while we were both on the eve of perishing, I through the tyranny of Robespierre, M. de La Fayette through the physical and moral sufferings of his captivity, I was neither allowed to receive any accounts of him, nor to let him know that his children and I were still alive. I shall not expose myself to the horrors of another separation.
“‘Therefore, whatever may be the state of my health, or the hardships of this abode for my daughters, we shall all three take advantage of his Imperial Majesty’s goodness in allowing us to share this captivity in all its details.