cely fortune, he had been married, at sixteen
years of age, to a daughter of the house of Noailles, the most
distinguished family of the kingdom, scarcely deemed in public
consideration inferior to that which wore the crown. He came into
active life, at the change from boy to man, a husband and a father,
in the full enjoyment of everything that avarice could covet, with a
certain prospect before him of all that ambition could crave. Happy
in his domestic affections, incapable, from the benignity of his
nature, of envy, hatred, or revenge, a life of "ignoble ease and
indolent repose" seemed to be that which nature and fortune had
combined to prepare before him. To men of ordinary mold this
condition would have led to a life of luxurious apathy and sensual
indulgence. Such was the life into which, from the operation of the
same causes, Louis XV. had sunk, with his household and court, while
Lafayette was rising to manhood surrounded by the contamination of
their example. Had his natural endowments been even of the higher
and nobler order of such as adhere to virtue, even in the lap of
prosperity, and in the bosom of temptation, he might have lived and
died a pattern of the nobility of France, to be classed, in
aftertimes, with the Turennes and the Montausiers of the age of
Louis XIV., or with the Villars or the Lamoignons of the age
immediately preceding his own.

But as, in the firmament of heaven that rolls over our heads, there
is, among the stars of the first magnitude, one so pre-eminent in
splendor as, in the opinion of astronomers, to constitute a class by
itself, so in the fourteen hundred years of the French monarchy,
among the multitudes of great and mighty men which it has evolved,
the name of Lafayette stands unrivaled in the solitude of glory.

In entering upon the threshold of life, a career was to open before
him. He had the option of the court and the camp. An office was
tendered to him in the household of the King's brother, the Count de
Provence, since successively a royal exile and a reinstated king.
The servitude and inaction of a court had no charms for him;
he preferred a commission in the army, and, at the time of the
Declaration of Independence, was a captain of dragoons in garrison
at Metz.

There, at an entertainment given by his relative, the Marechal de
Broglie, the commandant of the place, to the Duke of Gloucester,
brother to the British king, and then a transient traveler through