Lafayette knew that he could expect to find no place of refuge on either side of the French frontier; on the one hand were the Jacobin soldiers of the Reign of Terror who held him to be a traitor, and on the other the emigrant noblemen and their allies who regarded him as in large part responsible for all the troubles that had befallen Louis XVI. and his court. He had got himself into a position where both sides considered him an enemy; and his best course seemed to be to make his way to England and there take ship for America, where he was always sure to meet a friendly welcome.
Austrian and Prussian troops held the northern border of France and garrisoned the outpost towns of Belgium. Lafayette and his companions crossed the frontier on their road to Brussels, but were stopped at the town of Rochefort because they had no passports. One of the party, Bureaux de Pusy, rode to Namur, the nearest large town, to try to get the necessary papers, but when he told the officer in charge there that the passports were wanted for General Lafayette and several friends there was great commotion. “Passports for Lafayette, the enemy of the King and of order!” the Austrian officer exclaimed. Lafayette was too important a man to let escape in any such fashion. And at once the command was given to arrest the Frenchman and his companions.
They were found at Liège and arrested. Lafayette protested that he and his friends were now non-combatants, and moreover were on neutral territory in Belgium. In spite of that they were held as prisoners, although a secret message was sent to Lafayette that he could have his freedom if he would forswear his republican principles and give certain information about conditions in France. Indignantly he refused to buy his liberty in any such way, and then was sent to the Prussian fortress of Wesel on the Rhine. On the journey there he was questioned several times about the French army he had commanded, but the haughty contempt with which he refused to make any answers quickly showed his captors the sort of man they had to deal with. At one town an officer of the Duke of Saxe Teschen came to him and demanded that Lafayette turn over to the Duke the treasure chest of his army that his enemies supposed he had taken with him. At first Lafayette thought the request a joke; but when the demand was repeated he turned on the officer. “I am to infer, then, that if the Duke of Saxe Teschen had been in my place, he would have stolen the military chest of the army?” said he. The officer backed out of the room in confusion, and afterward no one dared to doubt the Frenchman’s honesty.
Lafayette, a Prussian Prisoner
The prison at Wesel was mean and unhealthy, and the cells so small and cold and damp that the prisoners suffered greatly. Yet to every protest of Lafayette the only answer vouchsafed was that he should have better treatment if he would tell his captors the military plans of the army of France. His reply was always the same, an indignant refusal. The Jacobins had declared him a traitor to the government of the Commune, but he never repaid them by any treachery.
The Prussians and Austrians, arch-enemies of liberty, felt that in Lafayette they had caught the chief apostle of freedom in all Europe, and for greater security they presently moved him from the prison at Wesel to the stronger fortress at Magdeburg on the Elbe. There Lafayette had a cell about eight feet by four in size, under the outer rampart, never lighted by a ray of sun. Its walls were damp with mould, and two guards constantly watched the prisoner. Even the nobles in Paris, victims of the Terror, were treated better than the Prussians treated Lafayette. For five months he stayed there, with no chance for exercise or change, proof against every threat and bribe. Then the King of Prussia, seeing that he would soon have to make peace with France, and unwilling that this leader of liberty should be set free, decided to hand Lafayette and his comrades over to the Emperor of Austria, the bitterest foe of freedom and of France.
So Lafayette and several of the others were secretly transferred across the frontier to the fortress of Olmutz, a town of Moravia in central Austria. Here they were given numbers instead of names, and only a few officials knew who the prisoners were or where they were kept. Lafayette practically disappeared, as many other famous prisoners had disappeared in Austrian dungeons. Neither his wife and friends in France nor Washington in America had any inkling of what had become of him.
When he had first left France on his way to Brussels he had written to his wife at Chavaniac. “Whatever may be the vicissitudes of fortune, my dear heart,” he said, “you know that my soul is not of the kind to give way; but you know it too well not to have pity on the suffering that I experienced on leaving my country.... There is none among you who would wish to owe fortune to conduct contrary to my conscience. Join me in England; let us establish ourselves in America. We shall find there the liberty which exists no longer in France, and my tenderness will seek to recompense you for all the enjoyments you have lost.” Later, in his first days in prison, he wrote to a friend in England, using a tooth-pick with some lemon juice and lampblack for pen and ink. “A prison,” he said, “is the only proper place for me, and I prefer to suffer in the name of the despotism I have fought, than in the name of the people whose cause is dear to my heart, and which is profaned to-day by brigands.”
For as brigands he thought of Robespierre and his crew who were making of France a country of horror and fear. From time to time he had news of the execution in Paris of friends who had been very near and dear to him. When Louis XVI. was beheaded he wrote of it as “the assassination of the King, in which all the laws of humanity, of justice, and of national faith were trampled under foot.” When his old friend La Rochefoucauld had fallen at the hands of the Terror he said, “The name of my unhappy friend La Rochefoucauld ever presents itself to me. Ah, that crime has most profoundly wounded my heart! The cause of the people is not less sacred to me; for that I would give my blood, drop by drop; I should reproach myself every instant of my life which was not devoted to that cause; but the charm is lost.”