The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 50, December, 1861. Various
all sat down and rose at the same time; and as every one that worked at all had evidently done part of his day's work before he came to table, all came with good appetites. Then came the family walk, all starting out in a group, but always sure to break up into smaller groups as they went on: the natural law of affinities never failing to make itself felt, and they who found most pleasure in each other's society generally ending their walk together. Sometimes the General would come a little way with us, but soon turned off to the farm, or dropped behind and went back to his books and letters. An hour in the grounds passed quickly,—too quickly, I often used to think; and then, unless, as occasionally happened, there was an excursion on foot which all were to take part in, the members of the family withdrew to their own apartments, and the guests were left free to fill up the time till dinner as they chose. With books, papers, and visits from room to room, or strolls about the grounds, the hours never lagged; and much as one day seemed like another, there was always something of its own to remember it by. Of course, this regularity was not the result of chance. Behind the visible curtain was the invisible spirit guiding and directing all. It was no easy task to provide abundantly, and yet judiciously, for a family always large, but which might at any moment be almost doubled without an hour's notice. The farm, as I have already said, furnished a full proportion of the daily supplies, and the General was the farmer. But the daily task of distribution and arrangement fell to the young ladies, each of whom took her week of housekeeping in turn. The very first morning I was admitted behind the scenes. "If you want anything before breakfast," said one of the young ladies, as the evening circle was breaking up, "come down into the butler's room and get it." And to the butler's room I went; and there, in a calico fitted as neatly as the rich silk of the evening before, with no papers in her hair, with nothing but a richer glow to distinguish the morning from the evening face, with laughing eyes and busy hands, issuing orders and inspecting dishes, stood the very girl with whom I was to begin at nine my initiation into the mysteries of French. There must have been something peculiar in the grass which the cows fed on at La Grange; for I used to go regularly every morning for my cup of milk, and it never disagreed with me.
MY FRENCH
Oh, that lesson of French! Two seats at the snug little writing-table, and only one witness of my blunders; for nobody ever thought of coming into the drawing-room before the breakfast-bell. Unfortunately for me, Ollendorff had not yet published his thefts from Manesca; and instead of that brisk little war of question and answer, which loosens the tongue so readily to strange sounds and forms the memory so promptly to the combinations of a new idiom, I had to struggle on through the scanty rules and multitudinous exceptions of grammar, and pick my way with the help of a dictionary through the harmonious sentences of "Télémaque." And never had sentences seemed so harmonious to my ears before; and never, I fear, before had my young friend's patience been so sorely tried, or her love of fun put under so unnatural a restraint. "Calypso ne pouvait se consoler," over and over and over again, her rosy lips moving slowly in order to give distinctness to every articulation, and her blue eyes fairly dancing with repressed laughter at my awkward imitation. If my teacher's patience could have given me a good pronunciation, mine would have been perfect. Day after day she came back to her task, and ever as the clock told nine would meet me at the door with the same genial smile.
Nearly twenty years afterwards I found myself once more in Paris, and at a large party at the house of the American Minister, the late Mr. King. As I was wandering through the rooms, looking at group after group of unknown faces, my eye fell upon one that I should have recognized at once as that of my first teacher of French, if it had not seemed to me impossible that twenty years could have passed over it so lightly.
"Who is that lady?" I asked of a gentleman near me, whom it was impossible not to set down at once for an American.
"Why, that is Madame de –, a grand-daughter of General Lafayette."
I can hardly account, at this quiet moment, for the sudden impulse that seized me; but resist it I could not; and walking directly up to her, I made my lowest bow, and, without giving her time to look me well in the face, repeated, with all the gravity I could command, "Calypso ne pouvait se consoler du départ d'Ulysse."
"O! Monsieur Greene," said she, holding out both her hands, "it must be you!"
THE GENERAL
General Lafayette had just entered his seventy-first year. In his childhood he had been troubled by a weakness of the chest which gave his friends some anxiety. But his constitution was naturally good, and air, exercise, and exposure gradually wore away every trace of his original debility. In person he was tall and strongly built, with broad shoulders, large limbs, and a general air of strength, which was rather increased than diminished by an evident tending towards corpulency. While still a young man, his right leg—the same, I believe, that had been wounded in rallying our broken troops at the Brandywine—was fractured by a fall on the ice, leaving him lame for the rest of his days. This did not prevent him, however, from walking about his farm, though it cut him off from the use of the saddle, and gave a halt to his gait, which but for his dignity of carriage would have approached to awkwardness. Indeed, he had more dignity of bearing than any man I ever saw. And it was not merely the dignity of self-possession, which early familiarity with society and early habits of command may give even to an ordinary man, but that elevation of manner which springs from an habitual elevation of thought, bearing witness to the purity of its source, as a clear eye and ruddy cheek bear witness to the purity of the air you daily breathe. In some respects he was the mercurial Frenchman to the last day of his life; yet his general bearing, that in which he comes oftenest to my memory, was of calm earnestness, tempered and mellowed by quick sympathies.
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,