As soon as I returned to France, my friends requested me to write
memoirs: I found excuses for not doing so in my reluctance to judge
with severity the first jacobin chiefs who have shared since in my
proscription,--the _Girondins_, who have died for those very
principles they had opposed and persecuted in me,--the king and queen,
whose lamentable fate only allows me to pride myself upon some
services I have rendered them,--and the vanquished royalists, who are
at present deprived of fortune, and exposed to every, arbitrary
measure. I ought to add, likewise that, happy in my retreat, in the
bosom of my family and occupied with agricultural pursuits, I know not
how to purloin one moment from the enjoyments of my domestic life.

But my friends have renewed their request, and to comply in some
degree with it, I have consented to place in order the few papers that
I still possess and assemble together some relations which have been
already published, and unite, by notes, the whole collection, in which
my children and friends may one day find materials for a less
insignificant work. As to myself, I acknowledge that my indolence in
this respect is owing to the intimate conviction which I feel, that
liberty will ultimately be established in the old as well as in the
new world, and that then the history of our revolutions will put all
things and all persons in their proper places.


Footnote

1. Although this notice, written a short time after the 18th
_Brumaire_, be anterior to a great number of events, in the midst of
which General Lafayette continued his public life, we have placed it
in this part of the work, as a sort of general introduction to the