In this year 1834, M. de La Fayette has just died[299]. I think I must have been unjust in speaking of him in former days; I think I must have represented him as a sort of double-faced, double-famed ninny: a hero on the other side of the Atlantic, a Giles on this side[300]. It has needed more than forty years to recognise in M. de La Fayette qualities that had been persistently denied him. He expressed himself in the Tribune with ease and in the tone of a well-bred man. His life was unblemished; he was affable, obliging and generous. Under the Empire, he behaved nobly and lived a life apart; under the Restoration, he was less dignified: he stooped so far as to allow himself to be called the "grand old man" of the auction-rooms of Carbonarism and the ring-leader of petty conspiracies, glad as he was to escape from justice at Belfort[301], like a vulgar adventurer. In the early stages of the Revolution, he did not mix with the cut-throats; he fought them by force of arms and tried to save Louis XVI.; but, though abhorring the massacres, obliged though he were to fly from them, he found words of praise for scenes in which some heads were carried at the ends of pikes.
La Fayette.
M. de La Fayette became exalted because he lived: there is a reputation which bursts forth spontaneously from talent and of which death increases the splendour by arresting the talent in youth; there is another sort of reputation which is the offspring of age, the backward daughter of time: without being great of itself, it is great through the revolutions in whose midst chance has placed it. The bearer of that reputation, by the mere fact of his existence, is mixed up with everything; his name becomes the sign or the banner of everything: M. de La Fayette[302] will be the "National Guard" to the end of time. By an extraordinary effect, the result of his actions was often in contradiction with his thoughts: as a Royalist, he overthrew, in 1789, a Royalty eight centuries old; as a Republican, he created, in 1830, the Royalty of the Barricades: he went away giving Philip the crown which he had taken from Louis XVI. Moulded as he was with events, when the alluvium of our misfortunes shall have become consolidated, his image will be found encrusted in the revolutionary dough.
The ovation which he received in the United States enhanced his fame to a singular degree: a nation, rising to greet him, covered him with the effulgence of its gratitude. Everett[303] apostrophized him as follows in the peroration to the speech which he delivered in 1824:
"Welcome, friend of our fathers, to our shores!... Enjoy a triumph such as never conqueror or monarch enjoyed.... The friend of your youth, the more than friend of his country, rests in the bosom of the soil he redeemed. On the banks of his Potomac he lies in glory and peace. You will revisit the hospitable shades of Mount Vernon, but him whom you venerated as we did, you will not meet at its door.... But the grateful children of America will bid you welcome, in his name. Welcome, thrice welcome to our shores; and whithersoever throughout the limits of the continent your course shall take you, the ear that hears you shall bless you, the eye that sees you shall bear witness to you, and every tongue exclaim, with heartfelt joy:
"'Welcome, welcome, La Fayette[304]!'"
In the New World, M. de La Fayette contributed to the formation of a new society; in the Old World, to the destruction of an old society: liberty invokes him in Washington, anarchy in Paris.
M. de La Fayette had only one idea, and, unfortunately for him, it was that of his century; the fixity of that idea constituted his empire: it served him as a blinker, prevented him from looking to right or left of him; he walked with a firm step along a single line; he marched on without falling into precipices, not because he saw them, but because he did not see them; blindness stood him in the stead of genius: all that is fixed is fatal, and that which is fatal is powerful.
La Fayette's funeral.