Its honorary degree having been conferred in absentia, the College took the occasion of a visit by Lafayette thirty-four years later to award him his diploma. He stopped at Princeton, on the way from New York to Washington, in September 1824, at the beginning of the triumphal American tour he made on the invitation of Congress. Soon after arrival (according to John Maclean, Jr., the Professor of Mathematics), the Marquis, his son George Washington Lafayette, and members of his escort were entertained at a ``very bountiful'' breakfast in the gaily decorated college refectory, ``then the largest room in town.'' Later, the Marquis was escorted to a circular canopy, which had been erected near the central gate of the front campus. Here, before a throng of students and people from the town and neighboring countryside, President Carnahan presented to Lafayette the doctor of laws diploma, which President Witherspoon had signed in 1790, in ceremonies at which the College's Peale portrait of Washington was conspiculously displayed.