The Living Age Volume 8 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1846 edition. Excerpt: ... tried on the 5th and 6th of October, 1789, when, as commander of the National Guards, he protected them from the opulace who had assailed them in their palace of ersailles. Subsequently, when the king was deposed and imprisoned (August, 1792, ) Lafayette, then with the army on the frontiers, endeavored to incite the soldiers to march upon Paris, in order to restore the throne, and put down Petion, Danton, and their associates. But the revolutionary tide, impelled asit was by the fears of the people for the foreign armies pressing on the country, was too strong to be thus resisted; and a few days thereafter, Lafayette was obliged to seek his own safety by flying from the kingdom. He and the officers of kindred sentiments by whom he was accompanied, had scarcely passed the frontier, when their farther progress was arrested by a body of the Limburg volunteers; and the national cockade, which, unthinkingly, they had retained, betraying them to the leader, they were, by his command, arrested and conveyed to the rison of Luxemburg, from thence removed to esel, then to Magdeburg, and lastly to Olmiitz. On the plea of Lafayette having been seized on neutral ground, and that, having ceased to be a soldier, he could not properly be considered aprisoner of war, strenuous efforts from all quarters were made to obtain his release; but the emperor of Germany, who regarded him as a principal instigator of the Revolution, as well as one of the chiefinstruments of the insulting degradation and subsequent death of the royal family of France, was not to be moved. The vengeance of Robespierre for the loss of his victim was, meanwhile, wreaked with savage inveteracy against the unfortunate wife of Lafayette; for no sooner was the escape of her husband known, .