Page:Statement of the attempted rescue of General Lafayette from Olmutz.djvu/45

 would probably have cost me my life, if the blessed news of your liberation had not reached me, in spite of the orders to conceal it from me. It would be in vain even to undertake to describe to you my feelings.

How hardly they have treated you, my admirable friend! I fear that your sufferings during your captivity may have injured your health. I adjure you to advise me in detail of your welfare, in which I am so much concerned. I wish I could discuss with you the exact circumstances of your adventure and to acknowledge the generous and self-sacrificing part you have had in it. To leave you at the time and before I saw you mounted on horseback was impossible, and I returned when your failure to come caused me to fear that some thing had happened to you. Then again I supposed that while I was in search of you, you had taken another road, and tho’ I saw clearly that it would be better for me to leave the Austrian territory, yet it would have been impossible for me to have continued on my way if your fate had been known to me, and as I was forced to do so, I could not regret that I was recaptured. You knew that twelve months later my wife and daughters shared my captivity. Through them I had the consolation of hearing from you:—they thought they would be permitted to write you from Olmutz, and I hoped through them to be able to express to you and to Bollman my gratitude. I need not tell you how great our disappointment, since you must have heard that the few lines the mother ventured to write to her son, and which she sent to the American Consul, were stopped in Vienna and returned.

My two friends Latour Maubourg and Pucy beg me to lay at your feet the expression of their esteem and love, which they will be proud to feel for you at their dying moment. It was on the 19th September, five months after hostilities had ended, that we were liberated.

This had been demanded upon the part of France on the first day of the conferences at Leobon, and promises were made but not fulfilled; repeated applications were repeatedly evaded. At last my former adjutant, Louis Rouen, was sent by Bonaparte and Clarke to Vienna to put an end to these