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badly needed military leaders. 14 The new government also released most political prisoners, including seventy-three surviving Girondins and all but a relative handful of aristocrats and others deemed enemies of the state. While former suspects danced in the streets to celebrate the end of the Terror, Adrienne, to her dismay, remained imprisoned for reasons she still did not and could not understand.
    Fortunately, a new American ambassador had arrived in Paris: James Monroe, the former Continental army captain who had kept watch over the wounded Lafayette after the Battle of Brandywine. Although Monroe won the release of Tom Paine and a few American citizens, Adrienne could not claim United States citizenship under the reorganized American government, which had stripped the states of control over citizenship. In France, moreover, she remained the wife of a French deserter. Monroe did not want to make a diplomatic misstep that could prolong her detention. Instead of making a formal demand that French authorities could reject, he adopted a subtle approach to embarrass the government into releasing her: he sent his wife to visit Adrienne in prison.
    “As soon as she [Mrs. Monroe] entered the street,” Monroe wrote, “the public attention was drawn to [her carriage], and at the prison gate the crowd gathered round it. Inquiry was made, whose carriage was it? The answer given was, that of the American minister. Who is in it? His wife. What brought her here? To see Madame LaFayette. . . . On hearing that the wife of the American Minister had called with the most friendly motives to see her, she became frantic, and in that state they met. The scene was most affecting. The sensibility of all the beholders was deeply excited. The report of the interview spread through Paris and had the happiest effect.” A few days later, Monroe joined his wife and the two made frequent visits to Adrienne together, always with armfuls of provisions that drew the attention of public and press—and embarrassed the Committee of Public Safety, which had no explanation for her continuing incarceration. “Informal communications took place in consequence between Mr. Monroe and the members of the Committee, and the liberation of Madame LaFayette soon followed.” 15
    The end of the Terror also encouraged Lafayette’s friends and supporters in Europe, England, and America to demand his release from the inhuman conditions of Olmütz. In London, a group of exiled Fayettistes organized a plan for his escape. Justus-Erich Bollmann, a young German doctor, agreed to go to the Inn of the Three Swans at Olmütz. He learned that the prison doctor had ordered guards to take Lafayette on a carriage ride into the countryside for his health every other day. By an incredible coincidence, a twenty-one-year-old American student from South Carolina was also at the inn— Francis Huger, son of Major Benjamin Huger, Lafayette’s host when he first landed in South Carolina, more than seventeen years earlier. Young Huger eagerly joined the Bollmann plot, and, on November 8, a sunny Saturday morning, the two trotted up to Lafayette’s carriage, leaped from their saddles, subdued the guard, and shouted breathlessly to Lafayette to mount one of the horses and “Go-t’Hoff, Go-t’Hoff; we will follow.” The carriage driver bounded forward to seek help and was well down the road, leaving Lafayette’s two rescuers with but one horse to make their escape. Knowing he had less to fear than the German doctor if captured by the Austrians, Huger sent Bollmann off to Hoff, a small post on the German border, where a carriage was waiting to take them to safety in Germany. When Bollmann arrived, however, Lafayette was nowhere to be found. Lafayette had misunderstood the Huger-Bollmann chorus—“Go t’Hoff”—to mean “Go off; go off.” So he raced “off,” following the main road and missing the small lane that turned “to Hoff.” Soldiers caught and arrested all three