The Austrian officer fought gamely, and while Huger held the horses Bollman ran to the aid of the Frenchman, whose strength had been sapped by his long imprisonment. The two soldiers, alarmed at the sudden assault, made no effort to help their officer, but drove away for aid. Meantime the officer was thrown to the ground and held there by Doctor Bollman.
Francis Huger, holding the restive horses with one hand, helped to gag the Austrian officer with his handkerchief. Then one of the horses broke from his grasp and dashed away. Bollman thrust a purse full of money into Lafayette’s hand, and, still holding the struggling Austrian, called to Lafayette in English, so that the officer should not understand, “Get to Hoff! Get to Hoff!”
Lafayette, who was very much excited, was too intent on escaping to pay special attention to Bollman’s directions. He thought the latter was merely shouting, “Get off; get off!” and so, with the help of Francis Huger, he sprang to the saddle of the remaining horse and galloped away as fast as he could go. He did not take the road to Hoff, where his rescuers had arranged to have fresh horses waiting, but took another road which led to Jagerndorf on the German frontier. Before he reached Jagerndorf his horse gave out, and while he was trying to get a fresh mount he was recognized, arrested, and taken back to his prison at Olmutz.
So the attempted escape failed. Huger and Bollman were arrested while they were hunting for the lost Lafayette. They were thrown into prison, put in chains, and nearly starved to death. And for some time after that the officials made Lafayette’s life in prison even more uncomfortable than it had been before.
Fortunately neither Huger nor Bollman died in their Austrian prison. After eight months in their cells they were set free and sent out of the country. Both went to America, where in time Doctor Bollman became a political adventurer and aided Aaron Burr in those schemes which ultimately brought Burr to trial for treason. Then Bollman might have been punished had not Lafayette remembered what he had done at Olmutz and begged President Jefferson to set him free. Francis Huger was among the Americans who welcomed Lafayette to the United States in 1824.
The Frenchman, however, had to continue in prison in Austria. After his wife and daughters joined him the imprisonment grew less hard. But after a time his daughters fell ill of prison-fever, and soon their mother was sick also. She appealed to the Emperor for permission to go to Vienna to see a doctor. The Emperor answered that she could go to Vienna “only on condition that you do not go back to Olmutz.”
She would not desert her husband. “I will never expose myself to the horrors of another separation from my husband,” she declared; and so she and her daughters stayed with Lafayette, enduring all manner of privations and sufferings for his sake.
The world, however, had not forgotten Lafayette. America worked constantly to free him, Washington and Jefferson and Jay, Morris and Marshall and Monroe used all their influence with Austria, but America was not loved in the tyrannical court of Vienna and the appeals of her statesmen passed unheeded. England was generous also toward the man who had once fought against her. The general who had commanded the forces against him at the Brandywine moved Parliament again and again to interfere on behalf of the French hero, and Charles James Fox, the great English orator, pleaded in favor, as he said, “of a noble character, which will flourish in the annals of the world, and live in the veneration of posterity, when kings, and the crowns they wear, will be no more regarded than the dust to which they must return.”
Help finally came from his own land, though in a very strange guise. While Lafayette lay in his cell at Olmutz a new star was rising in the skies, a planet succeeding to the confusion of the Reign of Terror in France. A Corsican officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, was winning wonderful laurels as a general. From victory he strode to victory, and by the spring of 1797 he had broken the power of Austria, had crossed the Italian Alps, and in sight of the Emperor’s capital was ready to dictate the terms of the treaty of Campo Formio. Then he remembered that a Frenchman, Lafayette, was still in an Austrian dungeon. Neither Bonaparte nor the Directory that now governed France wanted Lafayette to return to that country, but both were determined that Austria must give him up. Napoleon wrote that demand into the treaty. The Austrian Emperor objected, but Napoleon insisted and finally threatened, and he held the upper hand. The Emperor sent an officer to demand a written acknowledgment of his past good treatment from Lafayette and a promise never to enter Austria again. Lafayette refused to say anything about his past treatment but agreed to the second condition. Dissatisfied with this the Austrians represented to General Bonaparte that the prisoner had been set free and urged him to sign the treaty. Bonaparte saw through the ruse. He sent an officer to see that Lafayette was liberated, and only when he was satisfied of this would he make peace with the crafty Emperor.
On September 17, 1797, Lafayette, after five years in prison, walked out of Olmutz with his wife and daughters a free man. Even then, however, the Emperor did not hand him over to the French; instead he had him delivered to the American consul, with the statement that “Monsieur the Marquis de Lafayette was released from imprisonment simply because of the Emperor’s desire to favor and gratify America.”