The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 50, December, 1861 by Various
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page 28 of 283 (09%)
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servant; and it was impossible to see him busying himself about the
General at his morning toilet, and watch his delicate handling of the lather-brush and razor, without feeling, that, however true the old proverb may have been in other cases, Bastien's master was a hero to him. The General's dress was always simple, though studiously neat. His republicanism was of the school of Washington, and would have shrunk from a public display of a bare neck and shirt-sleeves. Blue was his usual winter color; a frock-coat in the morning, and a dress-coat for dinner, and both near enough to the prevailing fashion to escape remark. He had begun serious life too early to have ever been anything of a dandy, even if Nature had seen fit to contradict herself so far as to have intended him for one. Jewelry I never saw him wear; but there was one little compartment in his library filled with what in a certain sense might be called jewelry, and of a kind that he had good reason to be proud of. In one of the drawers was a sword made out of a key of the Bastile, and presented to him by the city of Paris. The other key he sent to Washington. When he was a young man the Bastile was a reality, and those keys still plied their dismal work at the bidding of a power as insensible to the suffering it caused as the steel of which they were made. Of the hundreds who with sinking hearts had heard them turn in their massive wards, how few had ever come back to tell the tale of their misery! Lafayette himself, but for the quick wit of a servant-maid, might have passed there some of the youthful days that he passed at the side of Washington, and gazed dimly, as at a dream, in the Bastile, at what he could look back upon as a proud reality in Olmütz. Another of his relics was a civic crown, oak-leaf wrought in gold, the gift of the city of |
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