Although he had resigned the office to which the king had appointed him, Lafayette continued to hold his place in the Chamber of Deputies; the office to which the people had elected him. Here he worked in behalf of the oppressed of his own and other nations; the Irish, for example, and the Poles, in whose struggles for liberty he was deeply interested.

When the Chamber of Deputies was in session he lived in Paris. Vacations were spent at La Grange, where he pursued the varied interests of his many-sided life, particularly enjoying, in his character of farmer, the triumph of his beasts and fruits in neighborhood fairs. In the winter of 1834 he was as usual in Paris, and on the 26th of January made the speech in behalf of Polish refugees then in France which proved to be his last public address. A few days later he attended the funeral of one of the Deputies, following the coffin on foot all the long distance from the house to the cemetery, as was the French custom, and standing on the damp ground through the delivery of the funeral discourses. The exposure and fatigue were too much for even his hardy old body.

He was confined to his room for many weeks, but carried on a life as normal as possible, having his children around him, receiving visits of intimate friends, reading journals and new books, and dictating letters. One of these was to Andrew Jackson about his fight with the United States Senate. The inactivity of the sick-chamber was very irksome to him, and by the 9th of May he was so far improved that his physicians allowed him to go for a drive. Unfortunately a storm came up, the weather turned suddenly cold, and he suffered a chill, after which his condition became alarming. When it was known that he was a very sick man, friends and political enemies—he had no personal enemies—hastened to make inquiries and to offer condolences. Occasionally George Lafayette was able to answer that his father seemed better; but the improvement was not real. On the 20th of May he appeared to wake and to search for something on his breast. His son put into his hands the miniature of Adrienne that he always wore. He had strength to raise it to his lips, then sank into unconsciousness from which he passed into the sleep of death.

He was laid to rest in the cemetery of Picpus beside the wife who had awaited him there for more than a quarter of a century; but his grave was made in earth from an American battle-field that he had brought home with him after his last visit. Fifteen natives of Poland bore the coffin to the hearse. There were honorary pall-bearers representing the Chamber of Deputies, the National Guard, the Army, the United States, Poland, and his own electoral district of Meaux. It was purely a military funeral. His party friends hotly declared that it was not a funeral at all, only a monster military parade. The government feared that his burial might be made the occasion for political demonstrations and ordered out such an immense number of troops that "the funeral car passed almost unseen in the midst of a battalion whose bayonets ... kept the people from rendering homage to their liberator." "He was there lifeless, but not without honor," wrote an indignant friend. "The French army surrounded him in his coffin as relentlessly as the Austrian army had held him a prisoner at OlmÜtz." Even the cemetery was guarded as if to withstand a siege. "Only the dead and his family might enter.... One would say that the government looked upon the mortal remains of this friend of liberty as a bit of prey which must not be allowed to escape." The liberals resented this fancied attitude of the government so bitterly that a cartoonist drew Louis Philippe rubbing his hands together with satisfaction as the procession passed and saying, gleefully, "Lafayette, you're caught, old man!" Only one incident occurred to justify so many precautions. In the Place Vendome a few score young men carrying a banner tried to break through the line of soldiers, but were repulsed. Elsewhere people looked on in silence.

Lafayette's political friends complained that not one of the king's ministers was to be seen in the procession. The ministers answered that politics were out of place at the funeral of such a distinguished man; and that the government rendered its homage regardless of party. While friends and foes wrangled thus over the coffin, Nature did her beautiful consoling best. Chateaubriand, standing in the silent crowd, saw the hearse stop a moment as it reached the top of a hill, and as it stopped a fugitive ray of sunlight came to rest upon it, then disappeared, gilding the guns and military trappings as it passed.

In spite of all this recrimination Lafayette's death passed comparatively unnoticed in France, for it occurred during a season of political turmoil and he had retired several years before from active affairs. Three thousand miles away the news produced far greater effect. He was mourned in America with universal sorrow. All over the country flags floated at half-mast. The House and Senate of the United States passed resolutions which were sent to George Lafayette, while the members wore crape upon their arms for thirty days and the Senate Chamber and Hall of Representatives remained draped in black until the end of the session. Our army and navy wore a tribute of crape upon their sleeves also, and on a given day every city in the Union heard the mourning salute of twenty-four guns, and after that at half-hour intervals until sunset the booming of a single cannon. "Touching honors," says a French writer, "rendered by a great people to the memory of a stranger who had served them sixty years before."

Lafayette lived to hold his great-grandchild in his arms, yet the period of his life seems very short if measured by the changes that came about while he walked the earth. It was a time when old men dreamed dreams and young men saw visions, and during Lafayette's seventy-six years some of the visions became realities, some of his dreams he saw well on the way to fulfilment.

The French regard Lafayette's American career as only an episode in his life; while Americans are apt to forget that he had a career in France. He lived in three distinct periods of history, so different that they might have been centuries apart. He saw medieval Europe; the stormy period of change, and something very like the modern world we know to-day. Peasants knelt in the dust before the nobles, after he was a grown man; yet, in his old age, railroads and republicanism were established facts. "To have made for oneself a rÔle in one or another of these periods suffices for a career," says his French biographer Donoil; "very few have had a career in all."

Lafayette played an important part in all three. Not only that; it was his strange good fortune to hold familiar converse with two of the greatest figures in history—the two very greatest of his own age—Washington and Napoleon. That he seems even measurably great in such company shows his true stature. Washington was his friend, who loved him like a son. Napoleon appears to have been one of the very few men Lafayette could never quite bring himself to trust, though Napoleon rendered him an immense service and did everything in his great power to win his support.

If, as certain French historians say, Lafayette and Napoleon were dictators in turn, Lafayette's task was in a way the harder of the two; for Napoleon's turn came after the fury had spent itself and men were beginning to recover, sobered by their own excesses. It was in the mounting delirium of their fever that Lafayette's middle course brought upon him first distrust, then enmity from both sides.

If an Austrian prison had not kept him from destruction he must have perished during the Revolution, for he was never swerved by fear of personal danger. One of his eulogists asserts that he was "too noble to be shrewd." Another says that he judged men by his own feelings and was "misled by illusions honorable to himself." After his experience in America he undoubtedly expected to play a great part in the uprising in France, and, not realizing the strength of selfishness and passion, helped to let loose forces too powerful to control. One of his critics has asserted that he never made a wise or a correct decision; but critics and eulogists alike agree that he was upright and brave. They are justified in saying he was vain. His vanity took the form of believing himself right.

He was not self-seeking, and the lack of that quality caused him to be regarded with puzzled surprise by men who could not understand his willingness to step aside in favor of some one else, when he thought the cause demanded it. "It seemed so foolish," said Madame de StaËl in her sympathetic portrait, "to prefer one's country to oneself... to look upon the human race, not as cards to be played for one's own profit, but as an object of sacred devotion." Chateaubriand said that forty years had to pass after Lafayette's death before people were really convinced that he had been an idealist and not a fool. The fact was brought home to them, little by little, as records scattered to the four winds during the Revolution gradually saw the light of print; here a public document, there a private letter, there again a bit of personal reminiscence. Fitting together like a puzzle, they showed at last how one single idea had inspired all Lafayette's acts, even when they seemed most erratic. "Fortunately for him," says one of his French biographers, "it was the idea of the century—political liberty."

In his lifetime he arranged his papers for publication and dictated occasional bits of comment; but these were only fragmentary, as many of his papers were lost. Besides, it was a task for which he had no great zest. He said it seemed ungracious to accuse men of persecuting him who afterward died for the very principles he upheld. He was sure history would accord to each his just deserts. Madame de StaËl said that his belief in the final triumph of liberty was as strong as the belief of a pious man in a future life. He said himself that liberty was to him a love, a religion, a "geometric certainty."

To his last day he pursued this ideal of his wherever it led him. His failure to learn worldly wisdom irritated many. It was incongruous, like the contrast between his polished old-time manners and the rash utterances that fell from his lips. It must be confessed that in his latter years he was not always clear-sighted as to the means he employed. Once he descended to methods better suited to Italy in the Middle Ages than to political reformers in 1822. There were times, too, when he seemed bent on self-destruction. Those near him were convinced that he would like to lose his life provided he could thereby add to the luster of his reputation. "I have lived long," was his answer to intimate friends who gave him counsels of prudence. "It seems to me that it would be quite fitting to end my career upon the scaffold, a sacrifice to liberty."

Napoleon's estimate of him was short and severe. "Lafayette was another of the fools; he was not cut out for the great rÔle he wanted to play." When some one ventured to remind the ex-emperor of Lafayette's spirited refusal to give him up on the demand of the allied powers, Napoleon answered dryly that he was not attacking Lafayette's sentiments or his good intentions, but was merely complaining of the mess he made of things. Lafayette's estimate of the former emperor was even more severe. He thought Napoleon's really glorious title had been "Soldier of the Revolution" and that the crown was for him "a degradation." American history would have been the loser if either of these men had not lived. Lafayette helped win us our country. By selling us Louisiana, Napoleon almost doubled its extent. Napoleon's heart rarely led him into trouble; personal ambition seldom led Lafayette far astray. The two can be contrasted, but not compared. There is food for thought in the fact that a statue of Lafayette, modeled by an American sculptor and given by five million American schoolchildren to France, should have been erected in the Louvre on the spot once set apart for a statue of the French emperor.

Madame de StaËl thought Lafayette more like the English and Americans than like the French, even in his personal appearance. Another French estimate, that he had "a cold manner, masking concentrated enthusiasm," is quite in keeping with American character, as was his incorrigible dash of optimism. It was to America, a country of wide spaces and few inhabitants, that he followed his vision of liberty in early manhood, and there where the play and interplay of selfish interests was far less complicated than in France he saw it become a practical reality. Later he championed many noble causes in many parts of the world. Next to political freedom and as a necessary part of it, he had at heart the emancipation of the negroes. This he tried himself to put into practice. He was shocked when he returned to our country in 1824 to find how much race prejudice had increased. He remembered that black soldiers and white messed together during the American Revolution.

Religious liberty for Protestants, civil rights for Jews and Protestants; suppression of the infamous lettres de cachet; trial by jury; a revision of French criminal law to allow the accused the privilege of counsel, of confronting witnesses, and of free communication with his family—benefits, by the way, which were all enjoyed by the accused in the state trials which took place while Lafayette was in power; abolition of the death penalty and freedom of the press were some of the measures most ardently championed by this believer in liberty and law.

He remained a man of visions to the end. After his death one of the men who wrote in praise of him said that if he had lived during the Middle Ages he would have been the founder of a great religious order, one which had a profound moral truth as its guiding principle. Another compared him to a Knight of the Round Table fighting for the lady of his adoration, whose name was Liberty. Possibly no knight-errant, ancient or modern, can seem altogether sane, much less prudent, to the average unimaginative dweller in this workaday world. Yet what would the workaday world be without its knights-errant of the past; the good their knight-errantry has already accomplished; the courage it inspires for to-day; the promise it gives us for the future?

If we dwell on the few times that Lafayette did not choose wisely, the times when the warm impulses of his heart would have carried farther had his head taken a more masterful part in directing his acts, we are tempted to echo the criticism made upon the unfortunate Louis XVI, "What a pity his talents did not equal his virtues!" But when we think of the generous, optimistic spirit of Lafayette, and how that spirit remained unchanged through good fortune and ill from boyhood to old age; of his fearless devotion to right as he saw the right; of his charm, and of the great debt our country owes him, his mistakes fade away altogether and we see only a very gallant, inspiring figure uniting the Old World with the New.

There can be no better eulogy for this brave gentleman, beloved of Washington, than the few words he wrote in all simplicity after he had been called upon to make his great decision between Louis Philippe and himself:

"I did as my conscience dictated. If I was mistaken, the mistake was made in good faith."