Napoleon’s star led the Corsican on, farther and farther away from the path that Lafayette hoped he would follow. In May, 1804, the man who was “Consul for life” became the Emperor of France, and seated himself on the most powerful throne in Europe. Lafayette was tremendously disappointed at this step. Again Napoleon’s friends made overtures to the General, and the latter’s own cousin, the Count de Segur, who had wanted to go with him to America to fight for freedom, and who was now the Grand Master of Ceremonies at the new Emperor’s court, wrote to him asking him to become one of the high officers of the Legion of Honor. Lafayette refused the invitation, and from that time the friendship between him and Napoleon ceased. The Emperor had now no use for the lover of liberty, and carried his dislike for the latter so far that Lafayette’s son George, though a brave and brilliant officer in the army, was forced to resign his commission.
Napoleon went on and on, his victories over all the armies of Europe dazzling the eyes of his people. Those who had been aristocrats under Louis XVI. and those who had been Jacobins during the Reign of Terror were glad to accept the smallest favors from the all-powerful Emperor. But Lafayette stayed away from Paris and gave all his attention to his farm, which began to prove productive. In his house portraits of his great friends, Washington, Franklin, La Rochefoucauld, Fox, kept fresh the memory of more stirring times.
But France, and even the Emperor, had not forgotten him. Once in an angry speech to his chief councilors about the men who had brought about the French Revolution, Napoleon exclaimed, “Gentlemen, this talk is not aimed at you; I know your devotion to the throne. Everybody in France is corrected. I was thinking of the only man who is not,—Lafayette. He has never retreated an inch.”
And at another time, when a conspiracy against the life of the Emperor was discovered, Napoleon was inclined to charge Lafayette with having been concerned in it. “Don’t be afraid,” said Napoleon’s brother Joseph. “Wherever there are aristocrats and kings you are certain not to find Lafayette.”
Meantime at Lagrange Madame Lafayette fell ill and died in December, 1807. No husband and wife were ever more devoted to each other, and Lafayette expressed his feelings in regard to her in a letter to his friend Maubourg. “During the thirty-four years of a union, in which the love and the elevation, the delicacy and the generosity of her soul charmed, adorned, and honored my days,” he wrote, “I was so much accustomed to all that she was to me, that I did not distinguish her from my own existence. Her heart wedded all that interested me. I thought that I loved her and needed her; but it is only in losing her that I can at last clearly see the wreck of me that remains for the rest of my life; for there only remain for me memories of the woman to whom I owed the happiness of every moment, undimmed by any cloud.”
Madame Lafayette deserved the tribute. Never for one moment in the course of all the storms of her husband’s career had she wavered in her loyal devotion to his ideals and interests. The little girl who had met him first in her father’s garden in Paris had stood by him when all her family and friends opposed him, had been his counselor in the days of the French Revolution, and had gone to share his prison in Austria. History rarely says enough about the devoted wives of the great men who have helped the world. No hero ever found greater aid and sympathy when he needed it most than Lafayette had from his wife Adrienne.
From his home at Lagrange the true patriot of France watched the wonderful course of the Emperor of France. It was a course amazing in its victories. The men who had been an undrilled rabble in the days of the Revolution were now the veterans of the proudest army in Europe. The people did not have much more liberty than they had enjoyed under Louis XVI.; they had exchanged one despotic government for another, but Napoleon fed them on victories, dazzled their vision, swept them off their feet by his long succession of triumphs.
The treaty of Tilsit, made in July, 1807, followed the great victories of Eylau and Friedland, which crushed the power of Prussia and changed Russia into an ally of France. Napoleon’s might reached its zenith then. No European nation dared to contest his claim of supremacy. He was the ruler of France, of Northern Italy, of Eastern Germany; he had made Spain a dependency, and placed his brothers on the thrones of Holland, Naples, and Westphalia. For five years his power remained at this height. In 1812 he set out to invade Russia with an army of five hundred thousand men, gathered from half the countries of Europe. He stopped at Dresden, and kings of the oldest lineage, who only held their crowns at his pleasure, came to do homage to the little Corsican soldier who had made himself the most powerful man in the world. Only one country still dared to resist him, England, who held control of the seas, but who was feeling the effect of the commercial war he was waging against her.
But the very size of Napoleon’s dominion was a source of weakness. The gigantic power he had built up depended on the life and abilities of one man. No empire can rest for long on such a foundation. When Napoleon left the greater part of the grand army in the wilderness of Russia and hurried back to Paris the first ominous signs of cracks in the foundation of his empire began to appear. France was almost exhausted by his campaigns, but the Emperor needed more triumphs and demanded more men. He won more victories, but his enemies increased. The French people were tired of war; there came a time when they were ready to barter Napoleon for peace. The allied armies that were ranged against him occupied the hills about Paris in March, 1814, and on April fourth of that year the Emperor Napoleon abdicated his throne at Fontainebleau.
The illness of relatives brought Lafayette to Paris at the same time, and seeing the storms that again threatened his country he did what he could to bring order out of confusion. His son and his son-in-law Lasteyrie enlisted in the National Guard, and his other son-in-law, Maubourg, joined the regular army. When the allies entered Paris Lafayette witnessed the downfall of the Empire with mixed emotions. He had never approved of Napoleon, but he knew that he had at least given the country a stable government. And when the allies placed the brother of Lafayette’s old friend Louis XVI. on the throne, with the title of Louis XVIII., he hoped that the new king might rule according to a liberal constitution, and hastened to offer his services to that sovereign.