On July 22, 1794, Madame Lafayette’s grandmother, the Maréchale de Noailles, her mother, the Duchess d’Ayen, and her sister, the Vicomtesse de Noailles, were beheaded by the guillotine, victims of the popular rage against all aristocrats. A few days later the Reign of Terror came to a sudden end, the prey of the very excesses it had committed.
The people were sick of blood; even the judges and executioners were weary. On July twenty-eighth Robespierre and his supporters were declared traitors and were carted off to the guillotine in their turn. The new revolution opened the prison doors to most of the captives, but it was not until February, 1795, that Madame Lafayette obtained her freedom, and then it was largely owing to the efforts of the new Minister of the United States, James Monroe. At once she flew to her children, and sent her son George to America to be under the protection of Washington. A friend had bought Chavaniac and gave it back to her, but another Reign of Terror seemed imminent and Madame Lafayette wanted to leave France. A passport was obtained for her, and with her daughters she went by sea to Hamburg. There the American consul gave her another passport, made out in the name of “Madame Motier, of Hartford, in Connecticut.” Then she went to Austria and at Vienna presented herself to the grand chamberlain, the Prince of Rosemberg, who was an old acquaintance of her family. He took her to the Emperor, and from the latter she finally won permission to share her husband’s captivity at Olmutz.
Meantime Lafayette’s health had suffered under his long imprisonment. In the dark damp fortress, deprived of exercise, of company, of books, he had passed many weary days. But the Fourth of July he remembered as the birthday of American freedom and spent the hours recollecting the happy time he had known in the young republic across the Atlantic.
At last his wife and daughters joined him in his prison and told him of what had happened in France. Imprisonment was easier to bear now that his family was with him, but the confinement was hard on all of them, and presently the prison authorities, seeing Lafayette in need of exercise, gave him more liberty, allowing him to walk or ride each day, but always strongly guarded.
His friends in America were not idle. Washington had earlier sent a letter to Prussia asking the liberation of Lafayette as a favor. But the prisoner had already been transferred to Austria. In May, 1796, Washington wrote to the Emperor of Austria, and the American Minister, John Jay, presented the letter. “Permit me only to submit to your Majesty’s consideration,” wrote Washington, “whether his long imprisonment and the confiscation of his estate and the indigence and dispersion of his family, and the painful anxieties incident to all these circumstances, do not form an assemblage of sufferings which recommend him to the mediation of humanity. Allow me, sir, on this occasion, to be its organ; and to entreat that he may be permitted to come to this country, on such conditions and under such instructions as your Majesty may think it expedient to prescribe.”
Austria, however, did not intend to release the prisoner. She had too much fear of him as a leader of liberty. When at an earlier time a friend of Lafayette had asked for his release an official of Frederick the Great had refused the request on the same ground that Austria’s emperor now took. “Monsieur de Lafayette,” said this official, “is too fanatic on the subject of liberty; he does not hide it; all his letters show it; he could not keep quiet, if out of prison. I saw him when he was here, and still remember a statement of his, which surprised me very much at that time: ‘Do you believe,’ said he to me, ‘that I went to America to make a military reputation for myself? I went for the sake of liberty. When a man loves it, he can rest only when he has established it in his own country.’”
Before Madame Lafayette had joined her husband in the prison at Olmutz a friend had tried to help the captive to escape. At the time the Austrian officials were allowing Lafayette a little more freedom, although he was practically never out of the watchful sight of guards. The friend was a young man who had come to Vienna to try to find out where the famous Frenchman was imprisoned, the young American, Francis Kinloch Huger, who, as a small boy, had stood in the doorway of his father’s house in South Carolina at midnight and helped to welcome Lafayette and his companions when they first reached American soil. Francis Huger’s father had been attached to Lafayette’s command during the campaign in Virginia, and the son had retained so deep an admiration for his hero that he had come to Europe to help him if he could.
After he had been in Vienna some time Francis Huger met a German physician, Doctor Bollman, who was as great an admirer of Lafayette as the young American. Bollman said to Francis Huger, “Lafayette is in Olmutz,” and then explained how he had found out the place where their hero was hidden. He had become acquainted with the physician who was visiting the Frenchman in prison, and had used this doctor, who knew nothing of his plans, as a go-between. By means of chemically-prepared paper and sympathetic ink he had actually communicated with Lafayette and had arranged a method of escape to be attempted some day when the prisoner was outdoors.
Francis Huger entered eagerly into the plot, and the two conspirators made ready their horses and signals and other preparations for escape. Lafayette had learned part of their plans. As he rode out one day in November, 1794, accompanied by an officer and two soldiers, his two friends were ready for him. Lafayette and the officer got out of the carriage to walk along the road. The carriage, with the two soldiers, drove on. When it was far ahead, Huger and Bollman, who had been watching from their saddles, charged on the officer, while Lafayette turned on the latter, snatched at his unsheathed sword, and tried to disarm him.