the
excitement of a great popular cause, military glory, gratitude to his
deliverer, all cooerdinated to make him follow the path of conquest, and
lead with Napoleon. He could have been one of the great military heroes
of those times. But apparently these temptations rebounded from him as
an arrow from a steel plate. When only a boy of seventeen, his noble
relatives had been unable to conceive his refusing an honorable place in
royalty's household. It had been inconceivable to the Prussian that this
Frenchman had not gone to America on a quest solely for military glory.
The Jacobin clubs, first by fair promises and then by the demand for his
life blood, had sought to force him from liberty to license, from real
freedom to debauched freedom. But like Sir Galahad, the Knight of the
Holy Grail, he had stood true to his quest, true to his ideal, true to
the inward light that unerringly marked the real from the false, true to
genuine democracy in its fight against autocracy. And now, greater than
all these lures and tests, stood before him Napoleon Bonaparte, his
deliverer, the greatest military captain of the world beckoning him to
paths of fame. The sceptre of all that the professional soldier held
dear was thrust into his hands. He could not be false unto himself, and
the sceptre was turned aside.

When he found that Napoleon was plotting against the democracy of
France, that a new imperial power was rising in Napoleon's person, he
deliberately broke off his relations with the general. During the days
of the French conquests under Napoleon he lived the life of a quiet
country gentleman, interested solely in domestic life, agriculture, and
the pursuit of reading and science. The man who had staked his all in a
desperate chance in the war of democracy against despotic autocracy
would not raise his finger in a war of conquest for the aggrandizement
of an emperor, though driven by the demon of revenge, drawn by the ties
of gratitude, and enticed by the lure of glory.

VIII

On March 1, 1815, Napoleon returned from Elba and began the final act in
the great drama of his life. In a last effort to win Lafayette to his
side, he sent his brother Joseph Bonaparte on a special mission to
Lafayette with word that the latter's name was placed first upon
Napoleon's list of peers. Joseph returned with a refusal. "Should I ever
again appear upon the sea of public life," Lafayette had replied, "it
will only be as a representativ