Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 50, December, 1861

His method of life was very regular,—the regularity of thirty years of comparative retirement, following close upon fifteen years of active public life, begun at twenty in the army of Washington, and ending in a Prussian and Austrian dungeon at thirty-five.

His private apartments consisted of two rooms on the second floor. The first was his bed-room, a cheerful, though not a large room, nearly square, with a comfortable fireplace, and a window looking out upon the lawn and woods behind the castle. Just outside of the bed-room, and the first object that struck your eye on approaching it from the gallery, was a picture by one of his daughters, representing the burly turnkey of Olmütz in the act of unlocking his dungeon-door. "It is a good likeness," said the General to me, the first time that he took me to his rooms,—"a very good likeness. I remember the features well." From the bed-room a door opened into a large turret-room, well lighted and airy, and which, taking its shape from the tower in which it stood, was almost a perfect circle. This was the General's library. The books were arranged in open cases, filling the walls from floor to ceiling, and with a neatness and order which revealed an artistic appreciation of their effect. It was lighted by two windows, one opening on the lawn, the other on the farm-yards, and both, from the thickness of the walls, looking like deep recesses. In the window that looked upon the farm-yards was the General's writing-table and seat. A spy-glass lay within reach, enabling him to overlook the yard-work without rising from his chair; and on the table were his farm-books, with the record of crops and improvements entered in regular order with his own hand. Charles Sumner, who visited La Grange last summer, tells me that they lie there still.

The library was miscellaneous, many of the books being presentation-copies, and most of them neatly bound. Its predominant character, as nearly as I can recollect, was historical; the history in which he had borne so important a part naturally coming in for a full share. Though not a scholar from choice, General Lafayette loved books, and was well read. His Latin had stood him in stead at Olmütz for his brief communication with his surgeon; and I have a distinct impression, though I cannot vouch for the correctness of it, that he never dropped it altogether. His associations were too much among men of thought as well as men of action, and the responsibilities that weighed upon him were too grave, to permit so conscientious a man to neglect the aid of books. Of the historians of our Revolution, he preferred Ramsay, who had, as he said, put everything into his two volumes, and abridged as well as Eutropius. It was, perhaps, the presence of something of the same quality that led him to give the preference, among the numerous histories of the French Revolution, to Mignet, though, in putting him into my hands, he cautioned me against that dangerous spirit of fatalism, which, making man the unconscious instrument of an irresistible necessity, leaves him no real responsibility for evil or for good.

It was in this room that he passed the greater part of the time that was not given to his farm or his guests. I never entered it without finding him at his desk, with his pen or a book in hand. His correspondence was so extensive that he was always obliged to keep a secretary, though a large portion of his letters were written with his own hand. He wrote rapidly in fact, though not rapidly to the eye; and you were surprised, in seeing his hand move over the paper, to find how soon it reached the bottom of the sheet, and how closely it filled it up. His handwriting was clear and distinct, neither decidedly French nor decidedly English,—like all his habits and opinions, formed early and never changed. I have letters of his to my grandfather, written during the Revolution, and letters of his to myself, written fifty years after it, in which it is almost impossible to trace the difference between the old man and the young one. English he seemed to write as readily as French, although a strong Gallicism would every now and then slip from his pen, as it slipped from his tongue. "I had to learn in a hurry," said he, giving me one day the history of his English studies. "I began on my passage out, as soon as I got over my sea-sickness, and picked up the rest in camp. I was compelled to write and talk, and so I learned to write and talk. The officers were very kind and never laughed at me. After the peace, Colonel Tarleton came over to Paris, and was presented to the King one day when I happened to be at Court. The King asked him how I spoke English. 'I cannot say how he speaks it, Sire,' said the Colonel, 'but I occasionally had the good-luck to pick up some of his letters that were going the wrong way, and I can assure your Majesty that they were very well written.'"

His valet was an old soldier, who had served through the Peninsular War, and who moved about with the orderly gait and quiet air of a man who had passed his heyday under the forming influences of camp discipline. He was a most respectable-looking man, as well as a most respectful servant; and it was impossible to see him busying himself about the General at his morning toilet, and watch his delicate handling of the lather-brush and razor, without feeling, that, however true the old proverb may have been in other cases, Bastien's master was a hero to him.

The General's dress was always simple, though studiously neat. His republicanism was of the school of Washington, and would have shrunk from a public display of a bare neck and shirt-sleeves. Blue was his usual winter color; a frock-coat in the morning, and a dress-coat for dinner, and both near enough to the prevailing fashion to escape remark. He had begun serious life too early to have ever been anything of a dandy, even if Nature had seen fit to contradict herself so far as to have intended him for one.

Jewelry I never saw him wear; but there was one little compartment in his library filled with what in a certain sense might be called jewelry, and of a kind that he had good reason to be proud of. In one of the drawers was a sword made out of a key of the Bastile, and presented to him by the city of Paris. The other key he sent to Washington. When he was a young man the Bastile was a reality, and those keys still plied their dismal work at the bidding of a power as insensible to the suffering it caused as the steel of which they were made. Of the hundreds who with sinking hearts had heard them turn in their massive wards, how few had ever come back to tell the tale of their misery! Lafayette himself, but for the quick wit of a servant-maid, might have passed there some of the youthful days that he passed at the side of Washington, and gazed dimly, as at a dream, in the Bastile, at what he could look back upon as a proud reality in Olmütz. Another of his relics was a civic crown, oak-leaf wrought in gold, the gift of the city of Lyons; but this belonged to a later period, his last visit to Auvergne, the summer before the Revolution of July, and which called forth as enthusiastic a display of popular affection as that which had greeted his last visit to America. But the one which he seemed to prize most was a very plain pair of eye-glasses, in a simple horn case, if my memory does not deceive me, but which, in his estimation, neither gold nor jewels could have replaced, for they had once belonged to Washington. "He gave them to me," said the General, "on my last visit to Mount Vernon."

He was an early riser, and his work began the moment he left his pillow. First came his letters, always a heavy drain upon his time; for he had been so long a public man that everybody felt free to consult him, and everybody that consulted him was sure of a polite answer. Then his personal friends had their claims, some of them running back to youth, some the gradual accession of later years, and all of them cherished with that genial and confiding expansiveness which was the great charm of his private life, and the chief source, when he did err, of his errors as a public man. Like all the men of Washington's school, he was systematically industrious; and by dint of system and industry his immense correspondence was seldom allowed to get the start of him. Important letters were answered as they came, and minutes or copies of the answers kept for reference. He seemed to love his pen, and to write without effort,—never aiming, it is true, at the higher graces of style, somewhat diffuse, too, both in French and in English, but easy, natural, idiomatic, and lucid, with the distinctness of clear conceptions rather than the precision of vigorous conceptions, and a warmth which in his public letters sometimes rose to eloquence, and in his private letters often made you feel as if you were listening instead of reading.