On January 11, 1779, the Alliance sailed for France, having had so much difficulty in making up its crew that a number of English prisoners and deserters had been pressed into service as sailors. This makeshift crew came very near to proving disastrous for the Marquis. An English law offered to pay the full value of any American ship to the crew that would bring it into an English port, and there were considerably more English prisoners and deserters in the crew of the Alliance than there were American and French sailors. The Alliance was approaching the French coast, having just weathered a storm, when a sailor ran into the cabin where the officers were sitting. He said that the prisoners and deserters who had been pressed into service had planned a mutiny, and that, taking him for an Irishman, they had offered him the command in case of success. A lookout was to give the signal “Sail ho!” and as the officers came on deck in a group they were to be shot down by cannon loaded with grape-shot and the ship sailed into an English port, where the mutineers would divide the profits. The loyal American sailor said that the signal would be given in about an hour.
Immediately the officers seized their swords, and, rushing on deck, called the Americans and Frenchmen together. The thirty-three mutineers, taken by surprise, were captured and clapped into irons, and the rest of the crew sailed the Alliance into the French harbor of Brest a week later.
Here Lafayette was welcomed with delight. The young fellow who had run away to sea in the Victory was returning like a hero in a war-ship of the new American republic. In triumph he landed at Brest, and as he hurried to Paris to see his family he was greeted by joyful crowds all along his route. He stopped at the royal palace of Versailles, and his old friend Marie Antoinette came out into the gardens to hear him tell his adventures. King Louis sent for him, and ordered him under arrest as a deserter, but with a twinkling eye declared that his prison should be his father-in-law’s great house in Paris, and his jailer his wife Adrienne. Then the King forgave him for running away to America, congratulated him, and, with his ministers, consulted the Marquis about affairs in the United States. Lafayette said, “I had the honor of being consulted by all the ministers and, what was a great deal better, of being kissed by all the women.”
The welcome he cared for the most was that from his wife, who had followed him in her thoughts all the time he had been in America, and had always sympathized with him and wished success for his plans. The Duke d’Ayen was delighted to see him and welcomed him to his house with open arms. Whenever the Marquis appeared on the street he was cheered by admiring throngs. The actors in the theatres put special words in their parts to honor Lafayette; poems were written about him; and the young man of twenty-one became the lion of Paris.
In a sense he represented the connecting link in the alliance that now united the two countries, and that alliance was in great favor with the people. He also stood for that ideal of “liberty” which was rapidly becoming the ruling thought of France. It would have been easy for him to rest on his laurels now, and feel that he had accomplished all that was needed of him.
But instead he used all this hero-worship to further his one aim—more help for the young republic across the sea. “In the midst of the whirl of excitement by which I was carried along,” he said, “I never lost sight of the revolution, the success of which still seemed to me to be extremely uncertain; accustomed as I was to seeing great purposes accomplished with slender means, I used to say to myself that the cost of a single fête would have equipped the army of the United States, and in order to provide clothes for them I would gladly have stripped the palace at Versailles.”
With this desire to help the United States ever in his thoughts he went to see Benjamin Franklin, and with Franklin and the American sea-captain John Paul Jones he planned an expedition against England in which he should lead the land forces and Paul Jones command the fleet. While they were arranging this the French government suggested a greater plan. Spain was to unite with France in defense of America. Details were being worked out when John Paul Jones embarked in his ship, the Bon Homme Richard, and had his famous sea-fight with the Serapis. But the Spanish government delayed and at last the French gave up the idea of a joint attack on England.
Meantime Lafayette joined the French army again and was commissioned a colonel of the King’s Dragoons. While he was waiting at Havre he was presented by Franklin’s grandson with the sword that the Congress of the United States had ordered should be given to him. It was a beautiful sword; the handle was of gold, exquisitely wrought, and decorated, as well as the blade, with figures emblematical of Lafayette’s career in America, with his coat of arms and his motto, “Cur non?”
And while he waited he was always impatient to be of help to his friends across the Atlantic. To Washington he wrote, “However happy I find myself in France, however well treated by my country and my king, I am so accustomed to being near to you, I am bound to you, to America, to my companions in arms by such an affection, that the moment when I sail for your country will be among the happiest and most wished for of my life.”
His great work during that year he spent in France was the winning of a French army, under the Count de Rochambeau, to fight by the side of the Americans. There was opposition to this at first, for neither Louis XVI. nor Marie Antoinette nor the royal princes who surrounded them cared to encourage the spirit of liberty too far. But the people, backed by their hero, Lafayette, demanded it, and at last their persistency won the day. The government of France decided to send an army, commanded by Rochambeau, lieutenant-general of the royal forces, with a fleet of warships and transports and six thousand soldiers, to the aid of America.