Page:Kościuszko A Biography by Monika M Gardner.djvu/192

 of this fresh wrong to his nation went far to break him. He again suffered intensely from the wound in his head, and old age seemed suddenly to come upon him. Many of the Polish soldiers who had left the legions were homeless and penniless. These Kościuszko took pains to recommend to his old friend Jefferson, now President of the United States. "God bless you"—so Jefferson ends his reply—"and preserve you still for a season of usefulness to your country."

Kościuszko's intercourse with his American friends did not slacken. At the request of one of them he wrote a treatise in French on artillery that, translated in the United States into English, became a textbook at West Point.

About this time Kościuszko came across a Swiss family whose name will ever sound gratefully to the Polish ear as the friends under whose roof he found the domestic hearth that gladdened his declining years. The Republican sympathies of the Zeltner brothers, one of whom was the diplomatic representative of Switzerland in France, first attracted Kościuszko to them. Their relations soon grew intimate; and Kościuszko's first visit in their house, his sojourn with them in the country at Berville, near Fontainebleau, that reminded him of the Poland he had lost for ever, were the beginning of a common household that only death severed.

Napoleon became emperor. He crushed Prussia at Jena, from Berlin summoned the Poles in "Prussian" Poland to rise, and sent his minister, Fouché, to Kościuszko, as the leader whose name every Pole