Page:A French Volunteer of the War of Independence.djvu/148

124 continue the campaign, and there followed a kind of tacitly arranged truce extending over the eighteen months which preceded the declaration of peace. The combined armies of Washington and Comte de Rochambeau were compelled to remain inactive, for the surrender at York Town had settled the question of American Independence, though the French and English continued to fight at sea for a few months longer. Being unacquainted with that kind of diplomacy which leads to nothing more than an exchange of cannon shot between hostile fleets, and finding that not another musket was to be fired in war on the American continent, M. de la Fayette left for France, and I did the same, for we had nothing in common with the little French army which remained in the United States until further orders.

Comte de Rochambeau's officers had nothing better to do, I suppose, than travel about the country. When we think of the false ideas of government and philanthropy which these youths acquired in America, and propagated in France with so much