QUEEN HORTENSE AND HER FRIENDS Vol. II L io/-\r-^ ruu I LIBRARY tl « QUEEN HORTENSE AND HER FRIENDS 1783 — 1837 By I. A. TAYLOR Author of "A Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald/' " Queen Henrietta Maria/' etc., etc. WITH TWENTY-FOUR FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRA- TIONS AND TWO PHOTOGRAVURE PLATES IN TWO VOLUMES Vol. II London: HUTCHINSON & CO. Paternoster Row «ftf *T 1907 CONTENTS CHAPTER XV *8l0 PAGE Josephine at Malmaison — Her children with her — Madame de Remusat — Louis Bonaparte demands a separation — Negotia- tions for the Emperor's re-marriage — Josephine and Hortense — Hortense's position — Eugene and his wife — Josephine at Navarre — Hortense at Court — Her return to Holland . . I CHAPTER XVI 1810 — i8n Hortense in Holland for the last time — At Plombieres — Louis' abdication — Charles de Flahault — Visit to Aix — Birth of the King of Rome — And of the future Due de Morny 20 CHAPTER XVII 1812—1813 Approaching disaster — A court ball- — Louis and his son — Hortense at Aix — The training of her children — The Grand Due de Berg's illness— His mother's alarm — Hortense and Marie Louise — The Malet riot — Russian disasters — Louis' proposals — Hortense at Paris and at Aix — Death of Duroc — Of Madame de Broc — Louis and Eugene de Beauharnais . . 37 CHAPTER XVIII 1814 Imperial reverses — Paris in danger — Hortense's attitude — Her flight — At Trianon, Rambouillet, and Navarre — Her schemes for the future .......... 62 CHAPTER XIX 1814 Mademoiselle Cochelet in Paris — The Emperor Alexander — Hor- tense's letters — She arrives at Malmaison — Eugene at the Tuileries — Royalists and Bonapartists — Napoleon at Fon- tainebleau — The Czar and the Beauharnais — Hortense the fashion — Josephine's death — Hortense becomes Duchesse de Saint-Leu .......... 77 vi Contents CHAPTER xx 1814 — 1815 PAGE Hortense in adversity — Pozzo di Borgo at Saint-Leu — Madame de Stael and Madame Recamier — Meeting at Baden with Eugene, and Madame de Kriidener — Life at Saint-Leu — Accused of intrigue — Louis claims his son — Hortense's position in Paris — Visit to the Tuileries — Interview with Wellington — Unrest in the capital 95 CHAPTER XXI 1815 The return from Elba — The news received in Paris — Hortense in hiding — Napoleon's arrival — His displeasure — The Hundred Days — Changed conditions of Paris — Public ceremonials — The Emperor's departure — His parting with Louis Napoleon — Tidings of defeat — Waterloo — Abdication — In Paris and at Malmaison 114 CHAPTER XXII 1815—1816 Hortense's plans in question — The army offered as her escort — Labedoyere in Paris — Alexander's changed attitude — Hor- tense's journey to Geneva — Difficulties in finding a shelter — Aix — Parting with Prince Napoleon — The winter at Con- stance — Visit of Prince Eugene — The Queen returns it — The Landmann's proposal of marriage — Louis Bonaparte's letter 142 CHAPTER XXIII 1816—1821 Hortense's position — Louis Napoleon — The Queen's unpublished memoirs — Desired to leave Constance — Buys Arenenberg — The ex-King and his sons — M. Lebas appointed tutor to Prince Louis . . .166 CHAPTER XXIV 1821 — 1823 Death of the Emperor — Prince Napoleon and his tutor — Madame Campan at Baden — Life at Arenenberg — M. Coulmann — The Grand Duchess Stephanie — King Louis at Marienbad — Letter to the Queen 1 85 Contents vii CHAPTER XXV 1823—1830 PAGE Rome — Madame Recamier — Madame Salvage — Prince Eugene's illness and death — Prince Napoleon and his tutor — The Grand Duchess again at Arenenberg — Death of the King of Bavaria — Winters at Rome — The Revolution of 1830 . . 204. CHAPTER XXVI 1830—1831 The July Revolution in Paris — Hopes and disappointments — The two Princes — Condition of Italy — The Queen at Florence and Rome — Her sons join the insurgents — Her fears and anxieties — Prince Napoleon's death ..... 227 CHAPTER XXVII 1831 Prince Napoleon's death — Louis ill — The Austrians at Ancona — Journey through Italy — The frontier passed — In France — Hortense in Paris — Louis Philippe — Ordered to leave — Re- ception in London — Rumours and reports — Passage through France — Boulogne, Chantilly, Malmaison, and Reuil . . 249 CHAPTER XXVIII 1831—1836 Back at Arenenberg — Hortense and her son — His changed position — Visitors at the chateau — Chateaubriand — Alexandre Dumas — The Queen's Memoires — Visit to Geneva — Question of Prince Louis' marriage — His love affairs — J6r6me at Arenen- berg— Louis' maturing schemes — Parts with the Queen . . 268 CHAPTER XXIX 1836—1837 The Strasbourg affair — Louis Philippe's clemency — The Queen in France — Louis Napoleon's letters— The Queen intends to follow him — Her failing health — Fatal illness — The Prince returns to Furope— Last weeks at Arenenberg — The Queen's will — Louis Napoleon's return — Her death .... 293 ILLUSTRATIONS Vol. II queen HORTENSE (Girodet) .... Photogravure Frontispiece FACING PAGE MARRIAGE OF NAPOLEON AND MARIE LOUISE (Rouget) l8 the king OF ROME [F. GJrard) 40 THE EMPRESS MARIE LOUISE {Frudhon) 68 ALEXANDER I., EMPEROR OF RUSSIA (Wolkoff) 90 MADAME DE STAliL [Godefroy) IOO MADAME RECAMIER [David) 120 KUGKNE 1)E BEAUHARNAIS [Richter) 160 PKINCK NAPOLEON LOUIS IgO MARIE LCETITIA RAMOLINO BONAPARTE (F. Gdrard) 206 ' HATEAUBKIANI! (G irudct-Frioson) 272 ALEXANDRE DUMAS 278 PRINCE LOUIS NAPOLEON [Stewart) 288 viii Queen Hortense and her Friends CHAPTER XV 1810 Josephine at Malmaison — Her children with her — Madame de Rgmusat — Louis Bonaparte demands a separation— Negotiations for the Emperor's re-marriage — Josephine and Hortense — Hortense's position — Eugene and his wife— Josephine at Navarre — Hortense at Court— Her return to Holland. ~^HE conclusion of the saddest chapter of her 1 mother's life must have brought relief to Hor- tense. She had no longer to stand by helplessly, watching the accomplishment of the sacrifice ; it was possible to escape from the gaze of those who re- joiced in Josephine's fall, and to avoid all but friendly faces. Yet Malmaison, full of memories of what had perhaps been the happiest years of both mother and daughter, must have served to accentuate the sharpness of regret. The Empress, moreover, having made an effort to go through the last scenes at the Tuileries with dignity and self-restraint, had now given way to the full expression of her grief. The excitement of the crisis, the consciousness that the eyes of the world were upon her, had borne her up vol. 11. 1 2 Queen Hortense and her Friends until the need for self-control was at an end ; but a reaction had set in, and, in spite of all that could be done to soothe and cheer her, she was perpetually in tears. In the presence of her children she found her chief consolation, and the tie, always strong, was riveted by misfortune. Both Hortense and her brother had accompanied her to Malmaison, and were, as Madame de Remusat reported to her husband, full of courage. " The Viceroy is gay," she added, " and does what he can to give her strength. They are a real help to her." 1 To Eugene the present condition of his mother appeared to contain advantages, and he indulged the belief, as he told his wife, that she would be more happy and tranquil than before. It is not impossible that he was right. It was long since Josephine had been untortured by the dread of the future, and certainty, even of disaster, is less wearing than doubt. The worst had befallen ; there was no longer anything to fear. Whether or not Hortense shared her brother's hopes, she was not blind to the difficulties attending her mother's position, and when Madame de Remusat gave proof of her fidelity by electing to share the fortunes of her fallen mistress, the Queen placed the situation before her plainly. She wished, she told the dame du pa/aisy that she should not arrive at a final determination without full consideration. M. de Remusat held a post in the Emperor's household, and such being the case, would his wife's position not be a false or embarrassing 1 Lettres de Madame de Remusat, t. ii. j>. 284. Josephine at Malmaison 3 one ? Was it well that she should relinquish the advantages attached to the service of a new Empress? " Think, it all over," concluded her mistress's daughter. " I give you the advice of a friend, and you should reflect upon it." Madame de Remusat thanked the Queen, adhering, however, to the resolution she had formed. The only danger she foresaw, she added, was that if gossip concerning the Empress and her household were to be repeated to the Emperor, it was possible that she might be suspected by Josephine of being the channel of communication. Should this occur, she would be compelled to resign her post. Hortense responded by the expression of a hope that her mother would be prudent, kissed the lady-in-waiting, and, on behalf of the Empress, accepted the sacrifice implied by her decision. 1 For the present there was no fear that Josephine would suffer from lack of attention. It was true that at first some persons had hesitated to pay their respects to her, lest sympathy displayed towards his repudiated wife should have compromised them in the eyes of the Emperor. But when it became known that attention shown to her would have the contrary effect, the road to Malmaison became thronged by crowds of visitors, who, undeterred by wind and rain, were eager to offer their homage — and possibly to satisfy their curiosity. All Paris had been touched by the account of the closing 1 Lettres de Madame de Remusat, t. ii. pp. 284-6. 4 Queen Hortense and her Friends scenes at the Tuileries, and especially by the fact that Napoleon had shed tears. " That pleases us women," observed Madame de Remusat. " Men's tears, and above all those of kings, never fail in their effect. " ! It was, indeed, of a superfluity of sympathy rather than of its absence that those watching Josephine with the anxious eyes of affection were inclined to complain. Her wound was too fresh not to be reopened by a touch, however well meant, and Napoleon's letters in particular had an effect upon her the reverse of soothing. Her lady-in-waiting was of opinion that he should be asked to moderate his expressions of grief, for when he displayed sadness the Empress — so much more worthy of compassion than he — fell into a con- dition of despair causing it almost to appear that her brain was affected. Madame de Remusat was not a specially soft-hearted woman, nor was her affection for her mistress the blind adoration Josephine had inspired in other members of the Imperial household 2 ; never- theless, it is evident that the tragedy of the situation nad moved her strongly. " The Empress," she said, " was gentle, affectionate, all that was necessary to rend the heart. She uttered not a word too much, gave vent to no bitterness, but displayed the sweet- ness of an angel." At the same time she was in danger of falling into a condition of apathy from 1 1 ettres de Madame de Remusat, t. ii. p. 283. - " Ce iiit un concert de lamentations a ne pouvoir exprimer, lorsque cette iemnie ailoree traversa le court espace qui la separait de sa voiture." — Constant, t. iv. 224. At Trianon 5 which, in her attendant's opinion, measures should be taken to rouse her. " It seems to me at times," she would say, " that I am dead, and there remains in me nothing but a vague power of feeling that I no longer exist." It was a state of which the pathos must have been acutely felt by the daughter who loved her. Standing close at her side, no suffering inflicted upon Josephine left her untouched ; and, her mother's constant com- panion, she shared with her the sorrow of these first days of abandonment. With the Empress, too, Hortense was bidden by Napoleon to dine at Trianon, and saw her seated as an invited guest where she had presided as mistress. The position might have been expected to accentuate to an unbearable degree the change in her fortunes ; but it was not Josephine's habit to refuse compensations, and so full of gladness was she at the meeting that, according to a wondering looker-on, it might have been thought that no parting had taken place. 1 Meantime, Hortense had not been without more personal subjects of preoccupation than even those furnished by her mother's affairs. Her attitude towards her husband had been unusually conciliatory, since, in spite of the slight implied by Louis' avoidance of his own house, she had paid him a formal visit at that of his mother. With Madame Mere at hand to fan the flame of his antipathy, he was, however, not only in no mood to suspend hostilities, but lost no time 1 Memoires de Mademoiselle d'Avrillon, t. ii. p. 160. 6 Queen Hortense and her Friends in taking steps to enable him to follow his brother's example. As early as December i 7 he had addressed a formal petition to the Emperor in order to obtain the necessary permission, entreating that Napoleon would bestow his approval upon a separation, cause his elder son to be placed in his hands, the custody of the younger remaining with the Queen ; and finally re- quested that, in accordance with the statute dealing with the Imperial family, the prescribed family council should be called together, so that his wishes might be carried into effect. It is noticeable that in this document no grievances were alleged, no motives for the line of conduct it indicated were supplied. The King desired a separation, and that was all. Hortense must have concurred in that desire ; but her counsellors at this time induced her to move warily, and she seems to have played a passive part, refraining from associating herself in her husband's demand for freedom. It is possible that in thus acting she was governed by a knowledge that any pressure to be brought upon the Emperor would be useless, and that opposition to his will would be merely to irritate him uselessly, and would bring her no nearer to the liberty she coveted. The moment, as she was probably aware, was not one when Napoleon would be inclined to subordinate other and more important considerations to his brother's private gratification. It is unnecessary to enter into the political questions at issue between France and Holland during this winter and spring, Napoleon and Louis Bonaparte 7 but it should be borne in mind that they had reached a point placing the brothers in an attitude of antagonism bordering upon open strife, Louis being not even permitted to return to the dominions he nominally ruled. Napoleon had formed the project of annexing Holland, and of rendering it a province of France, and under these circumstances the King's attempt to make his sovereignty independent was foredoomed to failure. The conqueror in so many fights was not likely to allow his younger brother to win the victory. The question of Louis' divorce was quickly decided. The family council, when summoned, acted, as might have been anticipated, as the Emperor's mouthpiece. Its deliberations resulted in a declaration that it was impossible to pronounce upon a demand when no grounds for it had been set forth ; that a formal deed of separation was inexpedient, and also super- fluous, since it would bestow upon husband and wife no greater an amount of liberty than could be secured by other means. In any case causes for the King's request must be produced before any step could be taken in the matter. So far there was a certain show of justice and of impartiality in the course pursued. But on the very same day that the family council met, Napoleon accorded Hortense permission to remain in Paris, re- taining possession of Saint-Leu and the hotel in the rue Cerutti ; whilst a sufficient income was assured to her, and she was left the guardianship of both her 8 Queen Hortense and her Friends children. Notwithstanding the recent defeat suffered by the Beauharnais, or perhaps by reason of it, they were high in favour with the Emperor, and his step-daughter had, for the moment, won all along the line. Meanwhile, negotiations were on foot for the Em- peror's re-marriage, and Paris was in a state of expecta- tion, with little attention to spare for subjects of less importance than the absorbing question of the hour. No time was to be lost ; and many were rejoicing that the preliminary step had at length been taken, and that hopes of a direct heir to the popular idol could be entertained. Others, however, remembered with regret Josephine and her soft and winning ways. The army, in especial, remained faithful to her. There were veterans who could recall the early days of her marriage at the time that she had come to join Napoleon in Italy, and when disaster overtook him they shook their heads. " He should not have left la vieille" they would say ; " she brought him, and also us, good luck." 1 Nevertheless, the question of the Emperor's fresh choice was the pressing one of the moment, and in its solution the Beauharnais strangely intermeddled. Writing to her husband on January 3, Madame de Metternich, wife of the Austrian Ambassador, gave a description of a singular visit she had paid to Malmaison. 1 Parquin, Souvenirs. Josephine and the Austrian Match 9 " When 1 arrived," she said, " only the Viceroy was in the salon, who is the best of human beings — he is the Queen of Holland as a man. He spoke much of you, and in the middle of our conversation the Queen came in, rejoicing that we had so soon renewed our acquaintance. Then, taking me apart, she said, ' You know we are all Austrian at heart ; but you would never guess that my mother has had the courage to advise the Emperor to ask for your Arch- duchess.' I had not recovered from my astonishment when the Empress entered, and after talking to me of all that has happened, and of all she had suffered, said to me, ' I have a project that occupies me exclusively, and of which the success alone makes me hope that the sacrifice I have just made will not be entire loss. It is that the Emperor should marry your Archduchess. I spoke of it to him yesterday, and he said his choice is not yet made. But,' she added, ' I think, were he certain of being accepted by you, it would be.' . . . She said that the Emperor was to lunch with her to- day, and that she would then tell me something more positive." ' The picture of Josephine finding consolation in the thought of a fresh marriage for the husband who had forsaken her is a strange one, but there is no reason to suspect her of any want of good faith. That Hortense should have consented to share in furthering her stepfather's matrimonial projects is perhaps still more difficult to account for, and can only be explained 1 Mcmoircs dc Mcttcrnich, t. ii. pp. 314-S. io Queen Hortense and her Friends by the fact that in the eyes of those surrounding him he was the supreme controller of every law, whether human or divine. In spite, however, of the Emperor's decree that the Carnival was to be a brilliant one, in spite of balls and fetes, a shadow seemed to hang over the town. Caro- line Murat, presiding at the Tuileries, was not liked, her manners comparing unfavourably with those, gracious and gentle, of the woman she re- placed ; and though Hortense did her best to carry out the Emperor's wishes, she must have done so with a heavy heart. She will have commanded the sympathy of those around her, for she shared in her mother's popularity. " She was loved and loved truly," says the Duchesse d'Abrantes, writing of this period, when no interested motives would have been an incentive to a display of affection towards Jose- phine's daughter ; " you saw it when people met at her house. They were at their ease there ; she made every one so. There was music, conversa- tion, billiards, drawing — in short, one was amused, which was never the case at the house of the Queen of Naples, except on the days when she gave balls." l Attached to the household of Madame Mere the Duchess should be a witness unprejudiced in favour of her mistress's unloved daughter-in-law. Hortense possessed a rare and valuable gift — the " genie de maitresse de maison." 1 M empires de la Duchesse d'Abrantes, t. vii. p. 585, Louis Bonaparte and his Son 1 1 The presence of her husband in Paris must have been a source of some disquiet to the Queen during this spring, more especially in relation to her children. The claim he had put forward to the custody of the elder boy had given an indication of possible trouble in the future, and he continued, in spite of his defeat, to vindicate his rights as a father. Prince Napoleon Louis was constantly taken to visit him, the King exerting himself to provide amusements for the child, and likewise taking thought for the more serious matter of his education. Though he had not yet completed his sixth year, he would in fifteen months reach the age when Princes of the Imperial family were consigned to the guardianship of the Em- peror, and Louis was anxious to place him pro- visionally in hands he could trust. It was upon M. de Bonald, known to him by his writings, that the King's choice fell, in virtue of the theocratic principles there maintained. Bonald, however, wisely declined a difficult post, and the little Prince was left for the present in the charge of his gouvernante, Madame Boubers. Meantime, Hortense was to be deprived of the comfort and support always derived from her brother's presence. Having done all that was possible to set his mother's future arrangements upon a satisfactory foot- ing, Eugene was free to return to Italy until such time as his presence would be required, with that of his wife, to assist at the festivities in honour of the Emperor's approaching marriage. 12 Queen Hortense and her Friends To escape temporarily from Paris must have been a relief to the Viceroy ; to find himself once more at home was a consolation for much. Every letter that had reached him from Milan had shown with what vehemence the Princesse Augusta's sympathies were engaged upon the side of her husband's family, and with how cheerful a courage she faced the results of the Beauharnais disaster. " Blotted out of the list of the great," she wrote on December 13, when the news was still fresh, "we shall be inscribed upon that of the happy. Is not that better ? " * And again, when her husband's return was shortly expected, " I am young," she wrote, " but events have taught me to value greatness at its proper worth ; so do not torment yourself on my account, and think only of the joy I am soon to feel in kissing you and in telling you by word of mouth that I love nothing in this world like my Eugene." 2 In February the Viceroy was able to inform her that his mother had arrived at the Elysee ; that the Emperor had visited her the same evening ; that her business affairs were concluded, his own shortly to be so; and as, to judge by appearances, those of his sister would not be settled according to her wishes, there would be nothing to prevent his starting for Italy — " that is to say, doing what is most agreeable to my heart." 3 On February 9, " in spite of the tears of my 1 Memoircs du Prince Eugene, t. vi. p. 289. 2 Ibid. t. vi. p. 315. ' Ibid. t. vi. p. 314, Napoleon's Displeasure 13 sister and the Empress," he was able to announce that he was to leave Paris in two days. Of the wishes of Hortense, which, according to her brother, had so little chance of realisation, it is possible to do no more than to form a conjecture. Her future lay uncertain before her, whilst the disagreements between her husband and his brother were growing daily more threatening to Louis' position as King of Holland. It is said that when the Emperor had declared to the legislative body in December that changes would shortly be necessary in that kingdom, his stepdaughter demanded an explanation of language which appeared to contain a menace. " Ma foi" the Emperor had answered, " understand it in a way to cause you alarm. Your husband is ungrateful. Holland should act with France. If he forces me to take extreme measures, I shall go so far as to have him declared incapable of managing his own affairs." " It would be better to dethrone him," Hortense said, " than thus to degrade him." " Very well, then let him submit to my will. Give him that advice," said Napoleon. " He would not listen to me," she replied. " So much the worse for you. It will be your fault. You would not have his love ; he does not give you his trust. If you had wished it, your husband would have been your slave, and you would have guided him in your children's interest." ' 1 La Reine Hortense (Turquan,), p. 168. t4 Queen Hortense and her Friends Napoleon's counsels came too late. Louis was not disposed, at this stage, to accept advice from his wife ; and as the winter went by there were no signs of an amelioration of the relations between the brothers. With the pring the Emperor's intentions as to im- mediate action with regard to the subjects of disagree- ment underwent a certain change. Developments were taking place in the situation. The interest attending the divorce, with its emotions and regrets, was yielding to the more cheerful excitement due to the expected arrival of the new Empress. Napoleon's views concerning his future relations with Josephine, formed when no compensation seemed too great for the sorrow he was causing her, were showing signs of modifi- cation ; and he was renouncing his first strange con- ception of an existence in which his former wife should continue to occupy a prominent place and intercourse with her should be frequent and close. Human nature is stronger than the most powerful of autocrats ; and the Emperor had begun to realise that her proximity might produce complications unfavourable to the success of his new domestic arrangements, and also that the constant presence of her daughter, in her character of Imperial Princess, at Court, might not be advisable. It may be that the fact that Eugene's wife had, on her arrival, preferred the hospitality of her mother-in-law's house at Malmaison ' to a lodging at the Elysee, had served as an object-lesson on the possibility of rival and clashing claims ; and it has 1 Memoires du Prince Eugene. Hortensc at Compi£gne 15 been suggested that a desire to remove Hortense to a distance may have been one of the motives dictating the course he pursued with regard to Holland. Jose- phine could be sent into honourable banishment in the duchy of Navarre, the gift of that property repre- senting a mark of the Emperor's favour ; but were Louis to be deprived of his kingdom, it would have been a less easy matter to discover an excuse for his wife's exile from Paris. By yielding to his brother's instances, and refraining for the present from pursuing the policy of annexation, the Emperor would be provided with a pretext for insisting upon her return to a country of which she was Queen. 1 It is certain that the formal relinquishment of Napoleon's avowed intention of reducing Holland to the condition he had contemplated of a French province was coinci- dent with a demand that Louis should consent once more to receive his wife under his roof. The King's assertion that such was Hortense's own desire, by reason of the false position she occupied in Paris, is uncorroborated by any proof, and all probability is against it. At Compiegne the Queen learnt her fate. Thither husband and wife had accompanied the Court, to take their part in the great pageant of the Emperor's marriage. It was there that the meeting of Napoleon and his bride was to take place ; and there it was deter- mined that Hortensc should return to Holland, and resume her place in her husband's dominions. Whether 1 Napoleon el safamille, t. v. pp. 207, seq. 1 6 Queen Hortense and her Friends any apprehension of the Emperor's coming fiat had been entertained by her or not, the final decision appears to have found her unprepared. It is stated that on a certain night, after a conversation with his brother, Louis, at eleven o'clock, sent for his wife ; that, obeying the summons, she returned to her apartments an hour later in floods of tears, informing her attendants that no choice was to be given her, and that she was to be forced to leave Paris, and to follow her husband to Holland. The blow in store for her daughter had been evi- dently totally unsuspected by Josephine, and a letter she addressed to her after her arrival at Navarre indicates her ignorance that the step was so much as in contemplation. That Hortense, like herself, was to be sent into virtual banishment will have been no small addition to her causes of melancholy, already sufficient to weigh down spirits always easily depressed. Writing in a tone of subdued dejection of the warmth of the reception accorded her in her new home, she spoke of it as saddening — its very cordiality too like condolence. " They doubtless pitied me for being no longer anything. The Emperor is happy. He ought to be so more and more. This thought is a great comfort to me, and the only one that keeps up my courage. . . . The time seems a little long ; it will seem less so when you are here. 1 await you with impatience. I have had your lodging prepared. It is not a handsome one, you will be only camped there ; but you know with what tenderness you will be Josephine at Navarre 17 received. If the Emperor asks you for news of me, tell him the truth — that my only occupation is to think of him." l It would be difficult to conceive a picture more forlorn than that unconsciously sketched in Josephine's letter. About the fallen Empress there is something of the wistfulness of a forsaken child, looking mournfully on from a distance at joys it is forbidden to share. The lack of seriousness or backbone, the absence of dignity or reserve marking her character, only serve to enhance the pathos of the situation. No wonder that the time seemed " a little long " in the stillness of the country retreat, remote from that world and its pleasures Josephine had loved so well. How should it have been otherwise ? Yet from that Eden of earthly delight she was shut out for ever. It was a hard fate. When she wrote again she had learnt that the consolation of her daughter's presence was to be denied her, and she was grieving for Hortense as well as for herself. She had hoped, she said, that a return to Holland was no longer thought of, and that Louis' wife was to enjoy a little quiet. So long as her mother had any possessions, however, Hortense should be mistress of her own fate. Grief and happiness alike they would share. Let her take courage. It was needed by both. 2 \\ hilst Josephine was making her involuntary re- treat, Marie Louise had arrived at Compiegne, and the 1 Lettres de Napoleon a Josephine, t. ii. pp. 300-1. '' Ibid. t. ii. pp. 202-3. VOL. II. 2 1 8 Queen Hortense and her Friends Emperor, to the exclusion of every other consideration and to the exasperation of spectators, was wholly- engrossed in his bride. " Louis, occupied in versifying, makes no complaint ; Pauline is enraged ; Hortense weeps ; Catherine (Jerome's wife) is indignant, and Jerome exasperated to the point of desiring to leave." * Caroline, high in her brother's favour, was content. By virtue, no doubt, of this same favour, she succeeded in obtaining an exemption from a distaste- ful duty exacted from the other Imperial Princesses, when, the civil marriage having taken place at Saint- Cloud, the religious ceremony was performed in Paris on April 2. On that occasion, Hortense, in conjunc- tion with the Queens of Spain and Westphalia and the Princesses Elisa and Pauline, consented to bear the train of the woman by whom her mother had been supplanted. The ceremony must have put a last touch to a period of humiliation and sorrow. At a later date she recalled that day and her own com- pliance, with the bitterness of shame and self-reproach, and forestalled posterity in pronouncing a just sentence upon her conduct. It was with grief and with remorse that, as she told Lucien Bonaparte's wife, she looked back upon it. " I ought never," she said, " to have submitted to what was exacted from me. It will be a blot upon my memory." 2 She was right. The strange ascendency exercised by her stepfather over those with whom he was brought 1 Napoleon et sa famille (F. Masson), t. v. p. 28. ' lung, Memoires de Lucien Bonaparte, Return to Holland 19 into contact had led her to acquiesce in a demand which should never have been made, and which he would have found it difficult to enforce. By April 1 1 — Louis had started some days earlier — she had again bowed to his will, and had set out, a melancholy and reluctant traveller, on her way to Holland, taking with her her elder child, the little Louis remaining behind in France. CHAPTER XVI 1810 — 1811 Hortense in Holland for the last time — At Plombieres — Louis' abdica- tion — Charles de Flahault — Visit to Aix — Birth of the King of Rome — And of the future Due de Morny. HAD anything been wanting to increase the Queen's dread of returning to a country where, in addi- tion to the usual domestic discomfort, she had been overtaken by the first overwhelming sorrow of her life, it would have been supplied by the knowledge that her husband's reluctance to resume so much as the semblance of existence in common had been no less great than her own. Both had submitted to the decree of the Emperor, and each was aware that such was the case. It was true that she was received on her arrival with due formalities and with the respect owed to the Sovereign's wife, addresses of welcome and congratulation being, with the King's permission, addressed to her. But in the interior of the palace husband and wife lived apart, lonely, hostile, and unhappy, Louis having gone so far as to cause the doors of communication between their apartments to be walled up. Under compulsion, he had consented to receive his wife under his roof ; In Holland 21 he took care to make the limits of his compliance clear to all. The ordeal implied by this condition of affairs was not to be prolonged, nor was Hortense's residence in the country of which she was the nominal Queen destined to be lengthy. Early in July Louis' abdica- tion put an end to the existence of any duty, real or imaginary, requiring her to make it her home ; and even before that event she had temporarily left the country to seek the waters of Plombieres. The period spent at the Hague was one of the pro- foundest discouragement, and her dejection is reflected in the answers sent by Josephine to her letters. At first it is clear that her mother was making a last attempt to assume a sanguine tone ; and early in May, when Hortense was already in bad health, she is found expressing a hope that reads like irony that the King will, by his care and attachment, contribute to his wife's recovery. Each day, adds the mother, Hortense will show more and more how deserving she is of them. 1 There appears to have been a conspiracy in the Imperial family to convince the unhappy couple of their good fortune ; and the Emperor's congratulations had been offered at an earlier date. " I am assured," he wrote to his stepdaughter, " that you are pleased with the King and with Holland. This is a great pleasure to me." Hortense was far from being pleased with either the one or the other, and any gratification Napoleon might derive from a conviction that it was 1 Lcttrcs de Napoleon a Josephine, t. ii. p. 305. 22 Queen Hortense and her Friends otherwise must have been short-lived. By the middle of May Josephine, at any rate, was aware of the true condition of affairs. Hortense had evidently made no attempt at concealment, and, grieved at the spirit of self- abandonment she displayed, the Empress wrote to remind her of the ties binding her to life, and to address to her gentle reproaches for her readiness to con- template with so much calm the idea of leaving her mother alone in her unhappiness. Let her speak frankly to the King as to seeking the waters — Hortense had been suffering from fever, and the in- evitable remedy of waters had been suggested — and he would not refuse her what was necessary to her health. 1 Times were changed since last the King and Queen had together inhabited the Hague, and Louis had now probably as little desire to keep his wife in Holland as she had to remain there. In June Hortense, though she was unaware of it, had quitted the country for ever, and was able, from her old resort, Plombieres, to report an improvement in her condition. Josephine, returned to Malmaison, had also news to communicate as the result of an interview with Napoleon, which must have gone far to cheer her. It was the Emperor's iron hand alone that had forced and kept the ill-matched couple together ; now, displeased with Louis, and fore- seeing that the present state of affairs in Holland could not endure, he was at last showing a disposition to permit them to part. 1 Lettres de Napoleon a Josephine ', t. ii. p. 309. Louis' Abdication 23 " I spoke to him of your position," wrote Josephine on June 14 ; "he listened with interest. He is of opinion that you should not go back to Holland, the King not having conducted himself as he ought. Your health and what you have done was a sacrifice proving to the Emperor and to your husband's family how great was your desire to please them. The Emperor's view is that you should take the waters for the necessary time, that you should afterwards write to your husband that the advice of the doctor is that you should live for some time in a warm climate, and that you are consequently going to your brother in Italy. As to your son [the younger child], the Emperor will give orders that he is not to leave France." l The disputes between Louis and his brother be- coming more and more embittered, the King recognised the fact that one course alone offered a solution of the difficulty. That course was abdication. By the first days of July he had determined to take it ; vacating the throne, in a formula which has been considered to contain a direct insult to his wife, " in favour of our beloved son Napoleon Louis, and in his default, in favour of his brother, Charles Louis Napoleon." On the night of July 2 he left the palace, never to return, accompanied by three companions and a dog. Hortense was at Plombieres when the step was taken. The amendment in her health had not lasted, and on July 3 Josephine was writing that had she known how ill she had been she would have gone 1 Lettres dc Napoleon d Josephine, t. ii. pp. 316-7. 24 Queen Hortense and her Friends to act as her nurse, adding the suggestion that she should now join her at Aix or arrange a meeting in Switzerland. " Let me see you," entreated the mother. " Alone, forsaken, far from all who belong to me, and amongst strangers, judge how great is my sadness, and how much I need your presence." 1 Before the meeting of mother and daughter, the change in Hortense's future prospects was to become public. Louis had not informed his wife of a decision affecting her fortunes scarcely less than his own ; but the tidings reached her through the gouvernante of her son, almost at the same moment that a courier arrived with letters from the Emperor, conveying the intelligence. Louis' abdication in favour of the little Napoleon Louis was naturally treated by his brother as waste paper — an empty protest against the sequel he must have anticipated. On July 8 — not a week after the King's flight — the Emperor had affixed his signature to the deed formally uniting Holland to France, and there was no further question of the succession of the little Grand Duke. Of the view likely to be taken by Hortense there could be no question. The annexation, Napoleon wrote to her mother, would have the advantage of emancipating the Queen. "That unfortunate girl," he added, "will come to Paris with her son, the Grand Due de Berg, and that will render her perfectly happy." 2 A letter addressed by Hortense to Napoleon, dated 1 Lettres de Napoleon a Josephine, t. ii. p. 321. 1 Ibid. t. ii. p. 165. Hortense's Reception of the News 25 July 10, proves that he had rightly interpreted her sentiments. " Sire," she wrote, " I have had no courier from Holland, only a letter from Madame de Boubest [Madame Boubers, the Prince's gouvernante] announcing the King's departure. I add this letter to my own. I was about to send it to your Majesty when your courier arrived, and to ask you what I ought to do, for I will never do anything but what pleases you. 1 am sending M. de Marmold to find the Prince and to bring him to me, since your Majesty permits it. I should not have been well enough to go as far as Lacken. Still, it vour Majesty makes a point of it, 1 am better, and will do what will be agreeable to you. The thought ot living quietly near you is what will make me happiest, and 1 beg you to believe such will always be the desire of your daughter, Hortense." * Acting upon Napoleon's instructions, she torwarded the formal communications he dictated to the Dutch authorities ; whilst the Grand Duke, Napoleon Louis, bv a change of plan the reason for which does not appear, was forthwith removed to Paris, where his reception by his uncle at Saint-Cloud was attended with a certain amount of ceremony. " Come, my son," the Emperor said, taking the child into his arms, " I will be your father. You lose nothing. Your father's conduct grieves mc to the heart. Illness alone explains it. When you are 1 Archives, quoted in I.es secrets des Bonaparte (Nauroy), pp. 156-7. 26 Queen Hortense and her Friends grown to be a man, you will pay his debt and your own." * The boy, with his brother, was settled for the present near the Palace of Saint-Cloud ; the hotel in the rue Cerutti and the chateau of Saint-Leu being taken possession of, by the orders of the Emperor, in their mother's name. Before the end of the month an ample income had been assigned to Hortense, on her own behalf and that of her children ; her separation from Louis had been authorised, and the guardianship of her sons assured to her. Of the ex-King strangely little notice had been taken. He was ignored rather than blamed, the responsibility for the line of conduct he had pursued being laid upon the condition of his health. But he was, nevertheless, so far as any right to dispose either of his property or his children was concerned, placed as it were outside the law. Meantime, Hortense was eagerly awaited at Aix. The Emperor, it is true, had written to Josephine in the expectation that her daughter was to be looked for in Paris. But health, a desire to see her mother, or, it might be, other reasons, had decided her upon deferring her return thither ; and the Empress was writing that her lodging — " the largest house available, where all are small " — was prepared. A visitor, Charles de Flahault, who had come from Plombieres, had brought news of an unsatisfactory nature of the Queen. "She has been more ill than we thought," wrote Madame de 1 Moniteur, quoted in Napoleon et sa famille (Masson), t. v. p. 282 ; Mcmoircs dc Me'neval, t. ii. Charles de Flahault 27 Remusat to her husband. " The Empress is not uneasy — she believes her to be better. It is a chord I dare not touch." l The messenger, here mentioned for the first time, is believed to have played an important part in the life of the dispossessed Queen, now, at twenty-seven, separated from her husband. The son of a Comte de Flahault who died by the guillotine, he was a young colonel attached to the Etat-Major of the Prince de Neuchatel. Tall, slight, and good- looking, he was popular in Paris ; but Napoleon had never liked him. The qualities he possessed were not those commending a man to the Emperor. Intelligent ? he would say contemptuously — every one had as much intelligence. He sang well ? A fine gift in a soldier, who was almost always hoarse. Joli garfon ? that was what women cared about. For his part, he saw nothing out of the common in him. 2 Yet, discerning no special merit in the young man, the Emperor had not refused him advancement. When he had been relegated to a German garrison, he had received permission to return to France ; he had filled successive military posts, and had been promoted, before he was twenty-five, on the field of battle, to be Colonel. He was Eugene's close friend, and there can be little doubt that he was to become more than a friend to Eugene's sister. It is from this summer that M. Masson, who has included in his valuable and 1 Lettres de Madame de Remusat, t. ii. p. 334. 2 Memoires de la Duchesse d'Abrantes, t. iv. p. 306. 28 Queen Hortense and her Friends exhaustive study of the Bonaparte family an account of Louis' wife, dates the beginning of the connection between Flahault and Hortense. The historian is careful to distinguish the tie he believes existed from the intrigues constantly carried on by Napoleon's sisters. In the Queen's case, " c'est un engagement serieux ou Ton trouve des sentiments profonds et de la part de Hortense quelque chose du definitif d'une union raisonnee, contracted apres reflexion et devant durer la vie. In the opinion of the same writer, the liaison, short- lived as it eventually proved, was probably tacitly accepted as a species of morganatic marriage ; and, as evidence of the Emperor's connivance at a fact of which he could not be ignorant, he cites the promotion from this time forward bestowed upon Flahault. In December, 1812, he became General of Brigade, Napoleon's aide-de-camp in the following January, General of Division and Count of the Empire in October, and Commander of the Legion in March, 1 814. This was the man, and this his record, past and future, generally believed to have been the father of the future Due de Morny, the adventurer quoted as saying, " Je nomme mon pere Comte ; j'appelle ma fille Princesse ; je dis a mon frere Sire ; j'ai le titre de Due, et tout cela est naturel." 2 The arrival of the visitor was welcomed at Aix. " Our society is pleasant," wrote Madame de Remusat. 1 Napoleon et sa famille, t. vi. p. 287. 1 Les Bonaparte a Montpcllier (Grasset Morel), p. 241. Josephine at Aix 29 " Charles de Flahault puts life into it. He has more resources and talks better than I should have believed. He is gay, sings well, and we are content." 1 The Empress's household was in need of any cheering element that could be secured. No fault could be found with her behaviour. Displaying the utmost good taste and tact, she had accepted her new position after a fashion calling for nothing but praise, spoke of the Emperor in the proper terms, and in negativing the wish of the civic authorities to show her any special attention, had done so without apparent effort or constraint. " Rest," she would say, with a manifest endeavour to make the best of the situation — " rest sometimes takes the place of happiness." Nevertheless, it was impossible that she should not be melancholy, and the news from Holland had supplied an additional cause of anxiety in the un- certainty overhanging the future of her daughter and grandchildren. It was, therefore, no cheerful atmosphere by which Hortense was surrounded when, during the last days of July, she came to join her mother. Nor was she calculated to add to the gaiety of the forlorn little Court. It might have been expected that, freed from the bondage of an uncongenial domestic life, the possession of her children secured to her, and a return to France in view, she would have looked on, if not with rejoicing, at least without apprehension. But, whether owing to a low state 1 Lettres de Madame de Remusat, t. li. p. 335. 30 Queen Hortense and her Friends of health, or to other causes, her spirits showed no sign of recovery. It may be that, in closing the chapter of her life associated with Louis, she was oppressed by a sense, if not of remorse, of failure. Pale, thin, and depressed, she was always on the verge of tears, without being able to assign any reason for them ; and Madame de Remusat, with the boldness of an old friend, took upon her to remonstrate. The Queen's misfortune, she ventured to remind her, in reference to the loss of her throne, was in reality no misfortune at all. Her heart did not suffer by it. Her children were in France, well cared for by the Emperor. She would join them there shortly, and was at present with her mother. She must eat and sleep, and leave the rest to God and the Emperor. Hortense did not resent the lady-in-waiting's plain speech. " She smiled at my little harangue," wrote her monitor, reporting the matter to her husband, " and I think she believes me to be right. Eh ! mon Dieu, let us have no ills that we have not. ' God protect us from our friends,' says the Portuguese proverb. I will add, God protect us from our- selves." 1 Madame de Rimusat's protest perhaps did good. Though still languissante^ in August the Queen had improved, and at her house, in a charming situation outside the town, she gave a fete, with a dejeuner al fresco, and a little dramatic performance. By October 1 Lettres de Madame de Retnusat, t. ii. p. 369. Josephine's Plans 31 she had returned to her children in France ; whilst her mother carried out her project of a Swiss tour. A plan had been formed for a longer absence ; but Josephine had conceived the apprehension that her permanent exile from France was in contemplation, and feared to facilitate it. Hortense had been employed by her to ascertain the Emperor's wishes, and the letter in which he expressed them, if not definitely condemning her to the fate she dreaded, makes it clear that it was not expedient that his former wife should, at the present moment, be found in the neighbourhood of Paris. It was considered unadvisable that she should be near at hand now that the birth of an heir was expected ; lest, in case of misfortune, popular suspicion should unreasonably attach to her ; J nor had Hortense, as her mother's representative, been at first successful in obtaining so much as an authorisation for the Empress to pass the winter in her country home at Navarre. " Hortense, whom I have seen, will have told you what I think," wrote Napoleon on October 1. "Go and visit your son this winter. Return next year to the waters of Aix, or else remain at Navarre for the spring." The wish of the Emperor to keep her at a distance was plain ; but it was found in the end impossible to refuse her permission to pass the winter upon the property he had bestowed upon her, and eventually she obtained leave to return to France. The Empress's household had fully shared her dread 1 Memoires tie Mademoiselle Avrilhm, t. ii. p. 251. J Lettres tie Napoleon a Josephine, t. ii. 32 Queen Hortense and her Friends of an indefinite term of banishment, even though the Court of the Viceroy had been indicated as their place of honourable exile, and so great was their relief when it appeared that such was not to be their fate, that the courier bringing the Emperor's letter was received with delirious joy. 1 Hortense, meanwhile, re-domiciled in Paris, was resuming her old habits, and recovering her spirits. Life, indeed, compared with her nine years of marriage, must have begun to smile upon her. Freedom — the negative freedom afforded by separation from her husband — was hers ; her children were in her hands ; her home was in the place where she would have chosen to make it. The large income allotted to her secured her immunity from financial cares ; and though Louis, learning in his place of retreat in the Austrian dominions the arrangements made by the Emperor, forbade his wife to accept the provision thus conferred upon her and his sons, and to rest content with what was derived from their private property, " la reine Hortense," writes Napoleon's secretary, " se vit dans la necessite de desobeir." Thus, varied by visits to her mother at Navarre, the winter passed cheerfully away. The birth of the long-desired heir was expected in the spring, and Court and city kept holiday. On March 20 the event so eagerly anticipated took place, and the King of Rome was born. 1 Memoires de Mademoiselle Avrillon, t. ii. p. 255. 2 Memoires de Meneval, t. ii. p 371. Birth of the King of Rome 33 The populace, waiting "que le ciel eut (lit oui," imagined that they had received an answer ; all Paris rejoiced ; the future of the Empire was, it seemed, secured ; Napoleon was no longer childless. " So great and so little," the newborn infant held the future in his hands. With regard to the sentiments with which Hortense viewed the event, it would perhaps be overmuch to expect of a mother that she should look on at the exclusion of her sons from the chance of an unrivalled inheritance with unmixed satisfaction. But the Queen, if any one, was capable of accepting the change in their prospects with equanimity ; and a magnificent gift of Gobelins tapestries, valued at eighty thousand francs, made her by the Emperor at this time, testified to his unaltered affection. A correspondence of some months later, however, indicates that her reckless expenditure, as well as her mother's, contrasting strangely with the frugal habits of his high-born wite, was a source of some vexation and irritation to her stepfather, and that he took measures to put a limit to their extravagance. " Take occasion to see the Empress Josephine," he wrote to the Comte de Mollien at the Treasury, " and make her understand that I hope her household will be more economically managed. . . . The Empress Marie Louise has only 100,000 crowns, and pays her bills weekly, depriving herself of dresses and imposing privations upon herself that she may have no debts. . . . Pay nothing further to Oueen Hortense . . . vol. 11. 3 34 Queen Hortense and her Friends without asking me. Speak to her intendant, that he may put order into her house." 1 Whatever may have been Napoleon's minor causes of annoyance as to his stepdaughter's domestic arrange- ments, the fact that before his letter to Mollien was written she had been chosen to represent the Queen of Naples as sponsor to the King of Rome at his christening in Notre Dame constituted another mark of the Emperor's favour. Of her movements during these months there is scanty record, of her condition of mind still less. On July 4 she parted from her children, sending them to Saint-Cloud, whence they were later to go to Malmaison to be consigned to their grandmother's care, the following weeks being spent by the Queen at Aix in Savoy, and at a house lately acquired by Josephine in the neighbourhood of Geneva. In September a letter to Madame Boucheporn, in charge of the Princes, stated that she was meditating a short journey to see her brother ; that she would be in Paris from October 10 to October 1 5 ; whilst after the 20th letters were not to be sent to her, as she would be moving about. Should the boys be sick, Lavallette would dispatch a courier to let her know. 2 To the same month of September belongs a letter from her mother, showing that it was at this date that the children were to be transferred to her care. Toys, Josephine wrote, had been already laid in — she would give them all they 1 Lettres inedites de Napoleon, t. ii. p. 175. 2 Napoleon et sa famille (Masson), t. viii. The Future Due de Morny 35 could want. " For sweetmeats, be at rest — they shall have none." l But as to Hortense's plans, the Empress's letter affords no indication. The Journal de Paris, however, noted her arrival in Paris on October 10 ; and it is further known that on the 22nd the birth of a boy was registered there, under the name of Charles Auguste Louis Joseph, son of Louise Auguste Coralie Fleury, wife of Auguste Jean Hyacinthe Demorny. It is said that it was this child who, placed by Charles de Flahault in the charge of his mother, Madame de Souza — married for the second time to the Portuguese Ambassador — became the future Due de Morny, reputed brother of Napoleon III. It is further stated that the Demorny named as the father was an old friend of Hortense, a Chevalier of St. Louis, dead in 1814, who, for a consideration, consented to lend his name. 2 The evidence is circumstantial ; it is not conclusive ; nor can actual proof of the generally accepted story be adduced. If the conclusions of the reader should be adverse to Hortense, it must be repeated that, in judging her, contemporary morality should be taken into account. To those in whose eyes marriage is sacred and indissoluble, every connection contracted in spite of it is alike a breach of morality. But it should be remembered that only the absence of what she may have regarded as a mere legal formality rendered her, in the eyes of the world, less justified in 1 Lettres de Napoleon a Josephine, t. ii. p. 346. a Les secrets des Bonaparte (Ch. Nauroy), p. 136. 3 6 Queen Hortense and her Friends contracting fresh ties than Napoleon, the birth of whose heir had just been celebrated with so much pomp, or than his brother Jerome, forced to discard his first wife, and to whom a Princess had been accorded in her stead. Lucien alone, the mauvais sujet of the family, having married the woman he loved, had steadily refused to repudiate her at the Emperor's repeated command, and had forfeited all the advantages to be won by compliance. 1 1 I find no record of any meetings in later years between the Queen and the child, who afterwards adopted as his armorial bearings the Hortensia flower and the motto Memento sed tace. CHAPTER XVII 1812 — 1813 Approaching disaster — A court ball -Louis and his son — Hortense at Aix — The training of her children — The Grand Due de Berg's illness— His mother's alarm — Hortense and Marie Louise — The Malet riot — Russian disasters — Louis' proposals— Hortense at Paris and at Aix — Death ol Duroc — Of Madame de Broc — Louis and Eugene de Beauharnais. WITH his marriage to a daughter of a great reigning house, still more with the birth of the son for whom he had waited and longed, Napoleon's fortunes had reached their height. Hence- forth they were to decline. The year 18 12 was to witness his first great failure in the Russian campaign, terminated by the disastrous retreat from Moscow. Europe was to look, on, with eagerness open or disguised, at the reverses of the man by whom most of it had been subjugated. His enemies were to take courage, his friends — many of them — to grow cold, whilst the women who loved him waited trembling for what was to rollow. Yet the year opened under favourable auspices. Treaties of peace with Austria and Prussia had been signed ; and though relations with Russia were becoming increasingly strained, there was 37 3 8 Queen Hortense and her Friends no immediate cause for anxiety. By December Hortense had resumed her attendance at Court, and was treated with marked favour both by the Emperor and his wife. A prominent figure at the palace, she was included in the weekly family dinner, and filled her accustomed place on more public occasions, a quadrille — le quadrille des Incas — led by her during the Carnival being attended with so much success that it was repeated by the Emperor's orders the following year. In the arrangement of this particular dance there had, never- theless, been trouble. Drawn from amongst the members, past or present, of her household, some of those taking part in the performance desired modifica- tions in their costumes ; others entreated to be permitted to execute pas seuls ; and the Queen was urged to in- troduce a compliment to the "conqueror of the world." Moved neither by supplications nor argument, she firmly refused to allow any change in the dresses, designed, as they had been, by the best artists ; skirt-dancing was to be left to the Opera, where it was in place ; and as for the suggested flattery of the Emperor, it would be in the worst possible taste. " I warn you," she added, " that I will not be made ridiculous. For the rest, no one is obliged to join in my quadrille." l Amidst the gaieties of the winter and spring it may be that the evidence of a persistent intention upon her husband's part to maintain his hold upon her elder son and to vindicate his paternal rights was again suggestive of disturbing possibilities in the future. 1 Memoires de Mademoiselle Cochelet, t. i. p. 46. Louis Bonaparte at Gratz 39 From his retreat at Gratz Louis was assiduous in keeping up a connection with those to whose care the child was entrusted, and inquired into every detail of his daily life. Sore at heart, and viewing with resentment the injuries, real or imaginary, sus- tained at the hands of friends and kinsfolk, the existence of the ex-King continued to be that of a morbid invalid. Isolation, combined with physical suffering, had produced a temper of mind far from encouraging to those who might otherwise have shared and alleviated his voluntary exile, and when a general, actuated by devotion to his person, followed him to Gratz, he was met by distrust and insult. Louis was not, he told him, his dupe, and divined the interested motives underlying his fine sentiments. 1 Literature continued to be a resource to the recluse ; and the composition of an autobiographical work of fiction entitled olfarie, ou les peines de r amour, into which portraits of both his wife and her cousin Emilie were introduced, was affording an outlet for his egotistic grudges at life. But, engaged as he was in these pursuits and, as ever, engrossed in matters of health, his love for the child to whom he can have been little more than a name was real and genuine, and the letters addressed to him are full of anxious affection. " I know not," he wrote, " when I shall see you ; but even if I do not see you, it does not prevent me from loving you tenderly — it is a reason to love you the more ; " 2 1 Memoir es dc Thiebault, t. v. p. 340. 2 Quoted in Napoleon et sa famille (F. Masson), t. vii. pp. 127-8. 4° Queen Hortense and her Friends and again and again the brooding solicitude of a father powerless to enforce his wishes is shown. For the present Hortense could count upon the Emperor to secure her from any danger of practical interference with the management of her children ; and Napoleon's joy in the possession of a son may have rendered him still more sympathetic towards a mother's rights. More than Court entertainments, home life was now affording relaxation for his leisure hours. At the moment that a rupture with the Czar was imminent and cares of State were pressing upon him with unusual force, it was his favourite amusement to watch — Marie Louise looking placidly on — the attempts made by the King of Rome to walk alone, greeting the child's frequent collapses with bursts of laughter. " The trio," says his secretarv, " . . .offered the spectacle of a bourgeois menage, united by ties of the sweetest familiarity." l In May Emperor and Empress left Saint-Cloud, to pay a visit to Dresden, where a meeting had been arranged with Marie Louise's family. By the middle of July she had returned alone to France, Napoleon going to take his place at the head of his army. Part of the summer was spent by Josephine and Hortense together at Aix-la-Chapelle. But the weather was unpropitious, and Hortense melancholy, and in- clined to compare the streets of the little town unfavourably with her shady home at Saint-Leu. It was at this time that — in the absence perhaps of other 1 Memoires de Meneval, \. iij. p. 4. THE KING OF ROME. picture l.y 1". f.C-r.ird. I'lioto l>y Neiirdin 1' Hortense and her Children 41 occupation — Madame de Remusat describes her as taking part in her children's studies and endeavouring thus to repair the deficiencies of her education. Whilst their mother was a sharer in their lessons, Albert de Remusat was the companion of the Princes in their games, and Hortense seems to have been wise enough to establish a certain equality between the playmates, refusing to allow the guest to be chidden for having so far forgotten the reverence due to an infant Monseigneur as to have given her younger boy a blow. The culprit, the Queen's indulgence notwithstanding, was not without his private misgivings. " He looked at me when he had done it," said his mother, reporting the incident, " to see what I should say. On my return I gave him a little lesson, which he understood" — to the effect, no doubt, that whether or not Imperial Princes were in the wrong, they must not be forcibly convinced of it. 1 Hortense's method of dealing with Albert de Remusat's offence was no isolated instance of her system of training. In her relations with her children she was at her best. Notwithstanding her passionate affection, it was not her habit to over-indulge them. Recalling the days of his childhood,' 2 Napoleon III. afterwards contrasted the caresses of his grandmother, and her repetitions of his bons mots, with his mother's correction of his faults. At Malmaison he and his brother ruled as masters. Hortense's educational theory 1 Lettres de Madame dc Remusat, t. ii. pp. 419-20. ' Xaputeon III. (Blanchard Jerrold), vol. i. p. 70. 42 Queen Hortense and her Friends was a different one. " Their high position will spoil them only too much," she would say, " if care is not taken that it does not. 1 wish to make distinguished men of them, and I will not have them given the defects of greatness. I desire, on the contrary, that the idea ot their rank may force them to become better men ; and it is by constant self-forgetful ness in the service of others that one becomes their superior." 1 " If you possessed nothing in the world, and were alone in it, what would you do, Napoleon," she once asked the elder boy, " pour te tirer d'affaire ? " " I would become a soldier," was the answer of the child, " and would fight so well that 1 should be made an officer." " And you, Louis," his mother asked the younger prince, not yet five years old, " what would you do for a livelihood ? " " I would sell violets, like the little boy at the door ot the Tuileries, from whom we buy them every day," was the answer of the future Emperor. " Do not laugh," Hortense bade her lectrice^ who reports the scene. " 1 am giving them a lesson. The misfortune of princes is to believe that all is their due, . . . and that human privation can never touch them. Then, when misfortune comes, they are taken by surprise, are terrified, and are always incapable ot rising to their destiny." 2 Hortense was still the same as when, in her girlhood, 1 Memoires de Mademoiselle Cochelet, t. i. p. 212. 2 Ibid. t. i. pp. 287-8. Hortense and her Children 43 she had anticipated the possibility of being called upon to earn her bread by means of her artistic gifts ; and if the training of her children betrayed a touch of the pedanticism common in her day, it was at all events free from the vulgar pretension of the parvenu. When, two years later, the boys were addressed by the con- querors of France as " Monseigneur " and " Your Imperial Highness," they listened with astonishment, the titles having been eschewed in their mother's house. " It was her object to convince them that they were nothing, except what they were worth in themselves." Madame de Remusat sketched a portrait of the Queen, as she was at this date, for her husband's benefit, interesting as evidence of the attraction Hortense possessed for those with whom she was brought into personal relations. " I cannot say how much charm I find in her in- timacy," wrote her friend. " Her character is truly angelic, and she is quite different from what she is believed to be. She is so sincere [si vraie~\, so pure, so perfectly ignorant of evil, there is in the depth of her soul so gentle a melancholy, she appears so much resigned to the future, that it is impossible not to carry away a very special impression of her." : In spite of the gaiety which had been, and continued to be at times, one of her characteristics, there was something intangible about the Queen leading those who loved her to teel uneasily that she was marked 1 Lettres de Madame de Remusat, t. ii. p. 441. 44 Queen Hortense and her Friends out for misfortune. When her elder boy was taken ill even the level-headed lady-in-waiting, though wrongly convinced that the malady was nothing but a childish disorder, was troubled by a presentiment of evil. " Some people," she observed, " are made almost exclusively for suffering, and she seems called upon earth to endure these sort of trials." * Her children were her vulnerable point. When, on one occasion, they had been sent from Paris to visit their grandmother, and were later in returning from Malmaison than had been expected, their mother, as she sat at dinner with her household, could scarcely disguise her anxiety, nor was it until the sound of little feet overhead was audible that she breathed freely. " It is true," she admitted gently, when those present ventured to point out how unnecessary had been her alarm. " I do not deceive myself. I have only this one joy upon earth, and I am always afraid lest it should be taken away." 2 Though her affections centred strongly upon those bound to her by ties of family and kindred, her sympathies were not confined to that narrow circle, and she was ready to participate, to what might be regarded as an exaggerated degree, in the sorrows of her friends. " I share the regrets you bestow upon poor Caulin- court," wrote Josephine in the course of this year. 1 Lcltrcs de Madame de Remusat, t. ii. p. 441. : ' Mcmqires de Mademoiselle Cochelet, t. i. pp. 76-7. Hortense's Reserve 45 " They are very just, and you will find it difficult to console his unhappy mother. But, my dear Hortense, do not give way to your sadness. Everything grieves you too deeply. You have already suffered sufficiently from spiritual ills [maux de Fame]. Dismiss them, and I am persuaded you will recover your health. Sensi- bility does the most harm." * Josephine was probably right, and one recognises in her advice an echo of the constant injunctions — " sois gaie, sois raisonnable " — which had been the burden of Napoleon's letters in days gone by. Yet sym- pathetic as Hortense was, by disposition and habit, she laboured under the disability — not altogether un- common — of a difficulty in making what she felt known. Strongly affected by the misfortunes befalling those around her, she was at a loss to express it in words, and only when deeds were necessary did the sufferers discover the extent to which she participated in their grief. " Always gentle, gracious, and indulgent to the last degree," admits Mademoiselle Cochelet, " she was thought to be indifferent, because she showed nothing." - Hortense was acutely conscious of the defect ; and when, later on, she lost a friend under melancholy circumstances, she reproached herself bitterly for her habitual reserve. " I have an ugly character [un vilain caractere]" she said. " I am sure Adele never knew how dear she was to me. I do not know how to say what 1 feel." 3 ' Lettres de Napoleon a Josephine \ t. ii. pp. 310-11. J Mi-moires de Mademoiselle Cochelet, t. i. p. 32. 3 Ibid. t. i. p. 92. 46 Queen Hortense and her Friends It was during her stay at Aix that Prince Napoleon developed scarlet fever, giving rise in his mother to an agony of alarm ; and though the period for which he was considered to be in danger was short, the contingency of his death was freely canvassed in the Bonaparte family, as well as the question whether or not it would be advisable to allow his brother the reversion of the Grand Duchy of Berg. " I am per- suaded," wrote the Queen of Westphalia to Jerome, " that you will agree with me as to the impossibility of depriving the last of the Princes of it without dishonour to his parents." The Emperor wrote kindly and promptly, expressing his regret at the child's illness, and his satisfaction in learning, two days later, that danger was passed. " I had counted on a rapid cure," he added, " knowing how quickly a mother takes alarm." Marie Louise, in a letter to the patient himself, sent affectionate messages to Hortense " from a sister who loves her tenderly." Hortense's private and special apprehensions had been removed by her son's speedy recovery. But this autumn, if tidings of actual defeat had not yet reached Paris, the hearts of many must have been weighted with misgivings. Eugene, ever his sister's idol, was with the army, and most families had given hostages to fate. A common anxiety was drawing together those whose interests centred on the same point, and was more and more cementing the affectionate intimacy between Marie Louise and her predecessor's daughter. The Malet Riot 4-7 " You give me fresh life in saying that you have read the Emperor's letters to the Empress," wrote Josephine. " It is very good of her to have shown them to you. I am infinitely grateful to her for the affection she displays towards you. I own I was always very uneasy." * In October Paris was startled by an abortive attempt at insurrection. A vague sense that Napoleon's fortunes were on the wane may have encouraged the hopes of those hostile to his government, and a report of his death had likewise been circulated. With General Malet, who had before been concerned in more than one such enterprise, at their head, the rioters had been momen- tarily masters of the situation. The Treasury and hotel de Ville had been seized, and Savary, the Minister, with the Prefect of Police, imprisoned. The success of the insurgents was short-lived, and on October 23 Hortense was able to inform her brother that all was quiet, adding, on the following day, that Paris was beginning to ridicule its own fears — " they laugh very much, which is not gay for the persons laughed at." What she did not dwell upon was " the profound impression made on France and on Europe by the audacity with which an obscure individual, without money, without credit, alone and without accomplices, had Hung himself out of prison to attempt a stroke which had been on the point of succeeding ; his facility in persuading the troops that the Emperor was dead, that the Empire was in consequence at an end ; the 1 Lettres de Napoleon a Josephine, t. ii. p. 367. 4 8 Queen Hortense and her Friends passive submission of the municipal authorities to his injunctions ; and lastly, the forgetfulness shown of the King of Rome and his mother." 1 The disorganisation consequent upon a mere rumour of the Emperor's death was indeed well calculated to give rise, in observers who reflected upon it, to a certain amount of uneasiness. But in her relief at the collapse of the attempt Hortense would not seem to have been amongst these. A letter of the 25th, in good spirits, addressed again to the Viceroy, and containing a more detailed account of the affair, is not uncharacteristic of the writer. " I went yesterday to Saint-Cloud," she told her brother. " I wanted to kiss that poor little King of Rome, whom I found very well. The Empress was wonderfully well, and believed it to have been nothing but an affair of brigands. Happily, she had not feared for her son. She told me she would come and pass the day at Saint-Leu to-morrow, and I am hastening to arrange everything. ... I was at Malmaison this morning, and found our mother very well, and en- chanted with your family, of whom we talked much. She was trembling at this equipec in Paris, and — as each one makes his own plans — she would have gone, she told me, to be near the King of Rome, had he run any risk. It was, above all, the rumour of the Emperor's death which spread consternation in Paris. Even those who sometimes complain were conscious of the calamity that would overtake them. 1 Memoires de Meneval, t. iii. p. 99. The Malet Riot 49 " Happily people are now much reassured, and begin to laugh at three men in prison having succeeded in taking possession of all the police. The poor Minister of Police is much pitied. Women, however, say that, were he not so much occupied in learning every woman's intrigue for the amusement of the Emperor, he would have known all this, and it is far more necessary. But all the world pities him, and are very uneasy till it is known how the Emperor will take it. There is no doubt that they nearly gained possession of the King of Rome, and that makes one tremble. My private little plan was to send my children to the first fortified town, like Peronne. Ce nam de Pucelle suited me. I should have tried to take the King there, and the Empress ; and, buying much corn, to shut myself up in the city and wait till they came to deliver us. Each builds his own castle. Do you approve of mine ? For the rest, on occasions of this kind, a head is necessary, and I see nobody who has one near the Empress." ! The excitement of the incident, when danger, had there been any, was at an end, may possibly have afforded a relief from the wearing anxiety as to the result of the Russian campaign. Difficult as it is to realise in the present day, Paris had been far from entertaining any suspicion of the actual state of affairs in the east, nor was it until thirty-six hours before the return of the Emperor to his capital that the long silence as to the movements of the army was ' lung, Memoires de Lucien Bonaparte, t. iii. pp. 168-70. VOL. II. a 50 Queen Hortense and her Friends broken. Tidings were then brought of the great retreat forming one of the most painful chapters of military- history and the prelude to the fall of the Empire. Demain, 6 conquerant, c'est Moscou qui s'allume, La nuit, comme un flambeau. C'est votre vieille garde au loin jonclant la plaine — ■ Domain, c'est Waterl- o ! demain, c'est Sainte-Helene 1 Demain, c'est le tombeau ! Thus Victor Hugo marked the stages of ruin inaugurated by the campaign of this year. On December 18, unexpectedly and late at night, the Emperor entered the Tuileries. For the first time he had come back defeated. Nor was the war over. " We will do all you wish — when peace is concluded," Napoleon told Hortense in reply to her suggestion that her present abode did not correspond to the rank and dignity of her son, and that another should be built for him. " When peace was concluded." But when peace came it was no longer a question of fresh honours to be paid to the Bonaparte race. Nevertheless, possibly thus seeking distraction, Hortense continued to find amusement in tracing the plans of the hotel she hoped one day to see erected ; and the children, gathering up from the floor the drawings she had made, would explain with respect, " C'est le plan de maman." * Louis, at a distance, was engaged in schemes of a different nature, destined no more than those of his wife to meet with realisation. It had occurred to 1 Memoires de Mademoiselle Cochelet, t. i. p. 43. Merry-making in Paris 51 the ex-King that the present moment might find his brother disposed to restore to him the position he had relinquished, and he wrote to propose that he should resume the crown of a country in danger of falling into the hands of the enemy. Though negativing his request, Napoleon's answer was couched in no un- kindly terms. Let Louis come to Paris, he said, and he would meet, not an offended brother, but the father who had brought him up. 1 Hortense must have rejoiced that her husband showed no inclination to respond to the invitation. In the meantime, the Emperor's flat had gone forth : Paris was to be gay ; 1813 was to retrieve the losses of 1 8 1 2 ; and no diminution of the customary merry-making was to betray fears or misgivings or regrets. " Soie gaie," he had been accustomed to order Josephine. " Soyez gais," he commanded his Parisians ; and his Parisians did their best to obey. Hortense did her duty with the rest. Eugene was with the army ; Murat had wearied of his share in the campaign and returned to Italy, leaving the chief responsibility to the Prince ; but though care and watching for tidings had told upon his sister's health, it would not have occurred to her to seek in illness or anxiety an excuse for failing to respond to the Emperor's demands. Her house was opened as usual to the guests he wished her to entertain, as well as to some he might not have objected to see excluded. Was it well, asked her chamberlain dubiously, when issuing invitations to a 1 Memoires de Mineval, t. iii. p. 110. 52 Queen Hortense and her Friends ball, to bid to it those maimed or disabled in the late war ? Would not their presence, rather than answering the Emperor's purpose in causing Paris to forget its misfortunes, serve as a reminder of them ? Hortense admitted the justice of the argument; she refused, however, not unnaturally, to erase from her list the names of the victims. She was right ; yet it was no wonder that, with its living object-lessons in war, the ball should have proved a melancholy affair ; and the Queen, moving amongst her guests and remembering her brother surrounded by perils, cannot have done the honours with a light heart. 1 From Moscow Eugene had written, strangely enough, to ask her to send him songs ; and conceiving that the recommendations to prudence she was con- stantly addressing to him would be more effective in verse, she caused her friends to supply words to which music might be added, in order that, complying with his request, her admonitions might gain additional force. 2 Hortense's life at this time was a full one. With her duties in Paris, her home at Saint-Leu, her mother to be visited and cheered at Malmaison, and the many subordinate interests crowding her days, she had few leisure moments. Her toilette in particular, even when dinners at the Tuileries were in question, was conducted with breathless speed. " It will do very well ; quick, quick, make haste," she would bid her despairing 1 Memoir es de Mademoiselle Cochelet, t. i. p. 33. 2 Ibid. p. 26. Opening of the Campaign 53 coiffeur ; whilst his labours were rendered more difficult by the presence of her little sons, who would chase each other under her long hair, passing between her chair and the unfortunate M. Charbonier, standing behind it at the distance necessitated by the unusual length of his material. The hurried performance completed, the Queen would hurry to her carriage, always conducted by the children, carrying her gloves, her cloak and, when she was in court dress, her train ; whilst the coiffeur, left behind, would make no secret or his discontent. He was losing his reputation, and — the question every one great and small was asking at the time— what would the Emperor think of him? He would say he did not know his trade ! 1 Before Napoleon's departure for the army Hortense spent some days at Trianon. On March 30 she was summoned to the Tuileries to be present when Marie Louise was appointed to fill the post of Regent during her husband's absence. A fortnight later he was gone, and Paris had relinquished the attempt to make merry upon which he had insisted. The Empress at Saint- Cloud, Josephine at Malmaison, Hortense at Saint- Leu, awaited with breathless anxiety tidings from the army ; and when news of the battle of Lutzen was brought, a wave of rejoicing for a moment blotted out the memory of past defeats, and it seemed that all would be well. At the Te Deum in honour of the victory Hor- tense's place was vacant. Her health had been failing 1 Mr moires de Mademoiselle Cochclet, t. i. p, 20. 54 Queen Hortense and her Friends throughout the winter and spring, and she was too ill to be present. Fouche, however — now Due de Rovigo — took upon himself to remonstrate. The Empress, he said, was in an isolated position, and the Queen must be aware that the Emperor always desired that she should be at his wife's side. Hortense demurred. Ill and suffering, what use could she be to the Empress ? Nevertheless, in deference to the opinion of the Minister of Police, she invited Marie Louise to Saint-Leu, bringing down from Paris the company of the Varietes Theatre to minister to her amusement. The day was a success. Neverthe- less, when the Empress and her train had taken leave, the satisfaction of the woman who was before everything a mother was alloyed. Little Napoleon, contrary to his wont, had been most reluctant to go to bed. Taken unwisely into the confidence of the household, he was aware that a surprise had been prepared for the Queen, and that the actor Brunet was to furnish her with a special and private entertainment he much desired to witness. Being an honourable child, however, he gave no reason for his pertinacity, and submitted at length to be dismissed. The farce was played with brilliant success. Every one, save the Queen, was enchanted with the per- formance. Hortense, enlightened as to the motive of the child's persistence, could not share in the general satisfaction. " I am angry with myself," she said. " I have been thinking all the time of the effort it cost Louis Napoleon 55 my boy to go. At his age every impression is so strong." l No improvement taking place in the Queen's health, it was decided, as the year advanced, that she should again seek the benefit to be derived from the waters of Aix, and she proceeded thither, leaving her sons in the charge of their grandmother, who kept her informed as to their well-being. " Be at ease about your children," Josephine wrote ; " they are perfectly well, with pink and white complexions." Little Oui- oui, as the youngest was, at this time and much later, nicknamed, had distinguished himself, at five years old, by his tact and courtesy. " I wish," he had observed to the Abbe Bertrand, once his mother's teacher at Saint-Germain, and now tutor to her boys — " I wish I could change myself into a little bird. I would fly away at the hour of your lesson, and come back when M. Hase [the German master] arrives." " But, Prince," objected the Abbe, " what you say is not civil to me." "Oh!" answered the child, retrieving his blunder with ready grace, " what I say is for the lesson, not for the man." 2 Hortense would be touched, her mother told her, did she know how much her boys thought about her. " I see with pleasure," she wrote a few weeks later, " that you have not forgotten the years of your 1 Memoires de Mademoiselle Cochelet, t. i. pp. 75-6. 7 Lettres dc Napoleon a Josephine, t. ii. p. 376. 56 Queen Hortense and her Friends childhood, and you show goodness to your mother in recalling them. I was right to make such good children happy — they have well rewarded me for it since. Your children will do the same by you — their heart is like your own ; they will never cease to love you." x An event had taken place after the battle of Wilrtschen which must have recalled to Hortense's memory another debt — not of gratitude — owed to her mother. This was the death of Duroc, her first love, now Due de Frioul. The blow struck Napoleon hard. Seeking the house where the wounded man had been carried, the master he had served so well sat tor a quarter of an hour leaning his head upon the right hand of the dying Duke. The last farewells had been taken, the last words spoken. At length, true to the end to his character, the silence was broken by Duroc, begging the Emperor not to sadden himself by remaining longer a witness of the scene ; and with a final word of parting, Napoleon withdrew, to mourn in solitude the man whose loss he is said to have most regretted. 2 Hortense regretted him, too, but for the sake of the Emperor, and of the wife, become her friend, he left behind him, rather than for her own. "None can replace Duroc with the Emperor," she said. " Ah ! when will there be peace? Will all our friends end by perishing thus ? " :! 1 I. c l ires de Napoleon d Josephine \ t. ii. p. 389. s Memoires de Meneval, t. iii. p. 135. 3 Memoires de Mademoiselle Cochelel, t. i. p. 79. Death of Madame de Broc 57 At Aix death was to come nearer to Hortense, and to remove the one of her household for whom her affection seems to have been the deepest. This was her dame du palais, Madame de Broc, a niece of Madame Campan's who, as Adele Auguie, had been her schoolmate at Saint-Germain. A widow of twenty- four or twenty-five, her love for the Queen, some six years older, was great, and her sudden and tragic death ended a long friendship. An expedition had been made with the object of viewing the cascade of Gresy, for which purpose it was necessary to cross a narrow strip of rushing water. A plank had been placed across the torrent, and Hortense had safely reached the opposite side, when Madame de Broc, following her, made a false step, and fell into the eddying waters below. Every effort to save her was fruitless, and it was clear that death must have been rapid. The Queen, seated on the trunk of a tree, her head in her hands, refused to leave the spot until the body of her friend should have been recovered. Thus she waited for twenty minutes ; at length the stream was turned aside, and the unfortunate woman was withdrawn, dead, from the waters. 1 Hortense's grief was sincere and profound. She had loved Adele de Broc, and was not quickly consoled ; and the shock of the accident must have gone far to neutralise any good effect from the waters of Aix. Throwing herself, in her sorrow, into charitable works, ^he became attached to the Sisters of Charity who had 1 Memoires de Mademoiselle Cuchelet, t. i. p. 85 seq. 58 Queen Hortense and her Friends kept vigil beside the dead, and made them a permanent foundation in Aix. The rest of the summer, uneventful in France, was crowded with events upon the battlefield of Europe. One by one the nations who had remained friendly fell away from Napoleon. Prussia, England, Sweden, Russia, were banded together against him ; and Austria was passing over to the enemy. The Princes of the Confederation of the Rhine were amongst the deserters, and upon the battlefield of Leipsic the Saxons and the Wilrtembergers changed sides. By November 9 the Emperor had returned to Paris, defeated but not disheartened. Of peace, on the terms proposed by the allied Powers, he would have none ; on conditions he would have accepted it was not within his reach ; and he was making ready once more for the fight. It was a time well calculated to sift true from false friends. If misfortune was alienating many attached by self-interest alone to the Empire, it had an opposite effect upon others. Louis Bonaparte had repaired to Paris and was once again at his mother's house ; desiring, according to some lookers-on, to take his place, in a season of disaster, at his great brother's side. Other accounts attribute his return to the necessity of quitting his retreat at Gratz caused by the action of the allies. Hortense preferred the former explanation. With emancipation from his control, she had arrived at a more generous estimate of Louis' character than had been possible to her in earlier days. " My husband is a good Frenchman," she said. " He Louis Bonaparte in Paris 59 proves it by coming back to France at the moment when all Europe is declaring itself against her. . . . He is an honest man. ... It is worthy of him to join with every Frenchman in doing what he can in the defence of his country. Thus should gratitude be shown for all that the people has done for our family." 1 The Emperor possibly took a different view of his brother's conduct. He was in no mood to appreciate Louis' tardy devotion, and received him coldly. He perhaps remembered that, for the second time, in the previous August, at a moment when there can have been scanty leisure to attend to his demands, he had repeated his attempt to be reinstated on the throne of Holland. 2 If Hortense approved of her husband's behaviour, she was afforded juster grounds for pride by her brother. Eugene had been sent back to Italy in the summer, the Emperor conceiving that his presence there was more necessary than with the army. In November negotiations were set on foot by the allies with the young Viceroy ; the King of Bavaria, excusably anxious to secure the future of his daughter and to detach her husband from a failing cause, serving as intermediary. It was intimated to the Prince that, should he consent to abandon the Emperor, he might look for a crown as his reward. To a man of Eugene's stainless honour and perfect loyalty, the offered bribe could hold small temptation. Nevertheless, contrasted 1 Memoires de Mademoiselle Cochelet, t. i. p. 137. 2 Memoires de Meneval, t. iii. p. 176 60 Queen Hor tense and her Friends with Murat's treason, the unfaltering devotion of the Viceroy to the man to whom both alike owed every- thing stands out ; whilst the enthusiastic approval of his wife is still more noteworthy. Nothing, Princess Augusta wrote to her husband's mother, great or noble or good in Eugene could surprise her ; she was nevertheless more proud and happy than before in being his wife, since he had refused a crown rather than play the ingrate and the coward, and betray the Emperor, as the King of Naples had done. 1 Hortense, it is needless to say, was of the same mind. "What does it matter what happens?" she said. " To do his duty worthily, as my brother has done, makes a man happier than to possess a crown." 2 To ordinary critics Eugene's fidelity, given his high character, might seem a matter of course. To crowned heads, inclined to estimate their position at a different value from that accorded to it by mere spectators of the game of royalty, it may appear to merit the extravagant laudations it called forth — laudations referred to by Napoleon with contemptuous irony. " It is fdcheux for our century," he wrote to his stepson, " that your reply to the King of Bavaria should have gained you the esteem of all Europe. As for me, 1 paid you no compliments upon the subject, because you only did your duty, and that is a simple thing." 3 1 Mcmoires de Mademoiselle Cochelct, t. i. p. 150. 2 Ibid. t. i. p. 151. 1 Memoircs du Prince I-Aigenc, t. x. p. 137, Eugene's Loyalty 61 The Emperor's view of the refusal of a bribe did the Viceroy more honour than the adulation of his admirers. But Napoleon was to learn by bitter experience that to perform the duty of remaining faithful to a fallen master was not, as he esteemed it, " a simple thing," in the eyes of many upon whom he would have counted with no less assurance than upon Eugene. CHAPTER XVIII 1814 Imperial reverses — Paris in danger — Hortense's attitude — Her flight — At Trianon, Kambouillet, and Navarre — Her schemes for the future. WITH the treachery of his brother-in law, Murat, and of his sister added to the tale of the Emperor's misfortunes, the year 18 13 had closed. By the end of January he had taken a last farewell of his wife and of the son for whom he had so passionately longed. The allies had crossed the French frontier. It was no longer a question of carrying the war into the enemy's country, but of national defence. On January 23, the eve of his departure to join the army, he presented Marie Louise and her child to the assembled officers of the National Guard and confided them to their care. " I go to fight the enemy," he told them ; " I entrust to you what is dearest to me — the Empress, my wife, and the King of Rome, my son." That night Hortense dined at the Tuileries. It was a melancholy evening, and she stayed late at the palace, endeavouring to cheer the Empress. 62 Anxiety in Paris 63 " She weeps as my mother wept when he was leaving her," she said afterwards. " And I think," she added, " that her show of affliction is sincere." If the words indicated a suspicion of a doubt, it was shortly to be justified. Meantime, the Emperor gone, there was nothing to be done but to await develop- ments. In the anxious city rumours were rife. It was reported that the Grand Duke Constantine had promised his troops that they should warm them- selves at the ashes of Paris. It was probably known that Madame de Kriidener, Hortense's Baden acquaintance, whose fame as a prophetess was be- coming widespread, was busily foretelling the destruc- tion of the ange noir, Napoleon, at the hands of the Czar Alexander, the ange blanc. Women were con- cealing their jewels. Some were leaving the capital. Hidden in their chambers, Royalist ladies, with secret rejoicing, were preparing white cockades; whilst Marie Louise, Hortense, and their households were engaged in the manufacture of char pie for the use of the wounded, by whom the hospitals were being rapidly filled. 1 In the hotel in the rue Cerutti, as in many houses in Paris, all other interests and occupations will have given way to the one absorbing thought of the struggle for life or death that was being fought out. The children were encouraged to participate in the anxiety of the hour. It was no part of Hortense's system of education to seek to shield her sons from premature 1 Memoires de Meneval, t. iii. p. 221. 64 Queen Hortense and her Friends comprehension of the sorrows and ills of life ; and she had been at pains to bring home to their minds the calamities overtaking their native land, and the suffering and want and privation consequent upon the war. Were they older, she told the boys, they should have gone with the Emperor to take part in the defence of the country. As it was, would they not share what they had with the victims ? The children responded with enthusiasm to the appeal, bringing toys, money, all they possessed, to be used for the purpose sug- gested. It was agreed that so long as the enemy was upon French soil they should forgo their dessert, and Prince Napoleon counted the sacrifice as a distinction, making his little brother understand that association in the public disaster was a thing to be proud of. 1 The campaign had opened with some successes on the part of the Imperial troops, and hopes in Paris had risen high. Negotiations between Napoleon and the allies had ensued, and it had at one time appeared possible that a satisfactory arrangement might be arrived at. But it was soon apparent that these hopes were doomed to disappointment, and in a letter to his secretary the Emperor told him that he would regard the first petition urging him to make peace as an act of rebellion. 2 Advice to that effect from his brother Louis he treated with angry contempt. " King Louis' 1 Memoires de Mademoiselle Cochelet, from which many of the details in this and the subsequent chapters dealing with this period are drawn. '' Memoires de Meneval, t. iii. p. 223. The Enemy Approaching 65 letter," he wrote to Joseph, " is nothing but a rhapsody. That man has always a false judgment and avoids the question at issue. . . . [To talk of peace] ... is to give advice very ill a propos." His letters were marked by the bitter impatience of a man whose every nerve is strained. " Cause these prayers and Misereres to cease," he ordered Joseph. " If so many singeries are carried on, we shall all be afraid of death." Louis, who was a saint, he added mockingly, might promise a lighted taper to the Madonna of armies. 1 In Paris it was considered of the last importance to maintain an appearance of security, and when a reduction was made in the expenses of Hortense's stables, Fouche went so far as to remonstrate. Re- form in matters of the kind, he said, indicated fear. The Emperor would disapprove. The Queen was not inclined to indulge apprehension. So late as March 28, when it could no longer be denied that the capital was menaced, and news was circu- lated that the enemy was no farther than five leagues distant, she refused to draw disquieting con- clusions from this fact. Her faith in the ruler of the destinies of France was unshaken. If the hostile forces had been permitted to approach the city, it was the result of manoeuvres on the Emperor's part unknown to those in Paris. He was not the man to permit himself to be surprised. At the moment when he was least expected he would appear to deliver 1 Les Rois Freres des Napoleon, p. 66. VOL. II. 5 66 Queen Hortense and her Friends his capital. What was all-important was not to give way to alarm. That evening a Council of State was held, to which Joseph Bonaparte communicated the secret instructions sent him twelve days earlier by his brother. Should resistance become impossible, the Emperor's wife, the King of Rome, and the great Crown officers and ministers were to quit the city. " Do not leave my son," Napoleon ordered, "and remember that I would rather know him to be in the Seine than in the hands of the enemies of France." 1 A debate followed, and, in spite of opposition, it was decided that the Empress and the little King should seek safety in flight. At the Tuileries that morning Hortense had implored her sister-in-law to refuse her consent to any such policy ; and, repairing to the palace at night to learn the decision of the council, she entreated that she would remain at her post, striving to convince her that the suggested step was a fatal one. Marie Louise listened and agreed, but expressed her determination to abide by the advice of the council ; and Hortense returned to her house in angry despair. " Would you believe it, they are leaving," she told those anxiously awaiting her return. " Thus they ruin, a plaisir, France and the Emperor." Only women, she said, had courage. She herself would suffer least from a loss of greatness ; but she was indignant 1 Memoircs dc Meneval, t. iii. p. 227. The Enemy Approaching 67 at the lack of energy displayed when the need for it was so great. Questioned by her cousin's husband, Lavallette, Hortense informed him of her personal intentions. " As they leave us to decide for ourselves," she said, " I will not be taken prisoner upon the highway. I stay in Paris. I will share their fortunes, good or bad, with the Parisians." For her mother, lonely and sad and helpless at Malmaison, it was another matter, and she sent a messenger to urge her to start at once for Navarre. For her own part — " I wish I were the mother of the King of Rome," she said. " I should know how, by my energy, to inspire others with the like." It was no vain boast. The stress of necessity had brought out in a nature not without its element of Creole indolence a vigour and a courage with which she would not have been credited. " Napoleon fallen," said some one, speaking of this time, " there was only one man left in the Bonaparte family, and that man was Hortense." l Exhausted with the agitation of the day, she retired to rest. She was not to be left undisturbed ; and her reluctant attendant was quickly forced to waken her to read a letter from her husband. It announced what she knew too well, that the decision of the council had been taken, and that the Empress was leaving Paris. The Queen replied that she was aware of it, and the messenger departed. An hour later she was again aroused. The King had sent to inquire into her 1 La Rcine Hortense (J. Turquan), p. 225. 68 Queen Hortense and her Friends intended movements, adding that it would be impossible that she should remain in Paris with her children ; that he disapproved of the course determined upon, but that it was necessary to submit. The nature of the Queen's answer to this second message does not appear. It may be inferred from the fact that for the third time the household was disturbed. Louis now wrote to convey his explicit orders. His wife must follow the Empress. When morning broke Paris was in a turmoil, Marie Louise was to leave the Palace at eight o'clock. By seven she was ready ; but, surrounded by advisers tendering opposite counsels, some hastening her depar- ture, others urging that she should remain in Paris, she was torn by doubt and hesitation, and, leaning her head on her hands, burst into tears. When she had at length resolved to abide by the decision taken on the previous night, her son, " seeming to divine what the future held for him," obstinately refused to quit his apartment, struggling in the arms of the equerry who was carrying him to the carriage, and clinging to the doors and to the balustrade of the staircase. " I will not leave my house," he cried again and again. " I will not go. Since papa is absent, it is I who am master." The little heir, like others, was to yield to necessity. Meantime his cousins, Napoleon and Louis, had been sent to their father, upon his demand, coupled with the promise that they should promptly THE EMPRESS MARIE LOUISE i I'^-tun; by I'rudkun. I'h,,f>by Ncurdm Departure of the Empress 69 return to the rue Cerutti ; and Hortense was still in ignorance of what would follow, when her plans were settled by an interview with the Comte Regnault de Saint-Jean d'Angely, Colonel of the National Guards. As he told of the discouragement produced by the departure of the Empress and her son, she made up her mind. " Unhappily," she answered, " I cannot replace them. But I have no doubt that the Emperor is executing manoeuvres which will shortly bring him here. Paris must hold out, and if the National Guard will defend the capital, tell them that I pledge myself to remain in it with my children." The boys had been sent home by their father, certain that, in accordance with his directions, his wife was preparing to follow the Empress. Nothing was farther from her mind. With inveterate con- fidence she persisted in her belief that the Emperor would come and would save the situation. " I expected to see Paris surrounded," she said, when informed that the enemy were in sight. " What is essential is to prevent them from entering it." It was becoming patent to those least willing to relinquish hope that this was precisely what could not be done. Towards nightfall she received a second visit from Regnault. " I give you back your pledge, madame," he said mournfully. " However well disposed the Guard may be, it is impossible to save Paris." According to his forecast, the capital would be in 70 Queen Hortense and her Friends the enemy's hands by the following day, and he urged the Queen to lose no time in leaving it. Yet when the Count had quitted her, she still hesitated, almost refusing even now to believe that Paris could be lost. It was a message from her husband that at length determined her upon flight. At the very moment he was setting forth on his own journey he had learnt that his wife had not left the doomed city, and sent to demand possession of his sons lest they should be seized by the enemy as hostages. Hortense had no choice but to yield. "Put in my horses," she said, "and tell the King that I am leaving at once with my children." The arrangements were hurriedly made, and by nine o'clock the Queen and the Princes were on the road to Glatigny, near Versailles, where the night was to be passed. Their destination reached, Hortense saw the children put to bed. Whilst they slept, the sound of cannon announced that Paris was attacked, and a move was considered expedient to Trianon, where General Preval, commanding the troops at Versailles, could be trusted to watch over the safety of the Emperor's nephews. To a distance from the scene of action Hortense could not make up her mind to remove till she had learnt the fate of the city she loved. " I cannot go far," she repeated, " when 1 hear the cannon, perhaps at this moment killing some of my countrymen and my friends. Alas ! " she added, tears in her eyes, " until now 1 had never listened to firing Hortense's Flight 71 except at a fete^ or in honour of the success of our armies." In the garden of the little Trianon she awaited the event. It was a fine night ; and each shot was dis- tinctly audible as the fight proceeded. Presently all was silent. The cessation of the sound of battle brought a sense of relief. It was, the Queen said, possible to breathe again, since there was no longer the fear that Parisians were being slain. On March 31 Marmont destroyed all remaining hope by his submission ; the capitulation of Paris had taken place, and the allies had entered it. It is said that the General responsible tor the surrender sorely re- pented, too late, of his course of action ; Napoleon was severe in his condemnation. "Jamais chose avec telle naivete que cette capitulation," he said afterwards with contempt. 1 The news, reaching him when on his way to the relief of the capital, was a crush- ing blow. The ange blanc was accomplishing his mission. Late on the evening preceding the capitulation Hortense had reached Rambouillet. Marie Louise had already left it, to proceed on her journey ; it was crowded with officers of State, the Minister of War himself having followed the Empress from Paris. Joseph and Jerome Bonaparte were still there, though intending to start that night on their way to rejoin their sister-in-law. They were at dinner when Hortense and her tired children arrived, and received 1 Napoleon at Fontainebleau (Sir Neil Campbell), p. 223. 72 Queen Hortense and her Friends her with tidings of all that had taken place in Paris. The sight of Versailles alone would have been sufficient to enlighten her as to what had been going forward in the city she had left so reluctantly. " As we watched motionless at our window," says the Duchesse de Reggio, " it was the Empire that we saw passing by — the Empire, with its pomp and its splendour, which was departing — ministers, all in their coaches-and-six, carry- ing with them portfolios, wives, children, jewels, livery — the entire Council of State, the archives, the Crown jewels. . . ." Whatever tragedy may be proceeding, it is necessary to eat ; but, as Mademoiselle Cochelet acidly remarks, it had not occurred to those in possession at Rambouillet to offer any supper to the newcomers. No provisions had been brought by the travellers, and though the Queen — who, she observes, with some irritation, lived almost without food — was uncon- scious of the lack of them, her indifference was not shared by her attendants. For Hortense, indeed, there were other and more important subjects of preoccupa- tion. Joseph and Jerome 1 were at one in advising their sister-in-law to proceed on her journey, as the Cossacks might appear at any moment. They did not accompany the recommendation with the proffer of facilities for acting upon it. Hortense's horses required rest, no others were available, and the two Kings 1 M. Turquan states that Louis Bonaparte formed one of the party at Rambouillet, and that there husband and wife met after a lapse of four years. I can discover no indication of his presence or of any such meeting. She starts for Navarre 73 showed no disposition to place seats in their carriages at the service of their brother's wife and sons. The children were asleep, and the Queen had no alternative but to spend the night in her present quarters. Her further movements were determined by an express from her husband, directing her to follow the rest of the fugitives to Blois. In the letter, couched in terms of command and enforced by the authority of the Em- press, Hortense was quick to detect the menace of a renewal of marital interference, and she was at once roused to rebellion. " I was going to Blois," she exclaimed, " but I will now join my mother at Navarre " ; and she wrote to announce her intention, not only to Marie Louise and to her husband, but to the Emperor. The journey, resumed on the following day, was an anxious one. The road was thick with those seeking safety in flight ; here and there a Cossack, emerging from the surrounding woods, was an earnest of possible peril. On the other hand, a courier of Napoleon's encountered on the way announced that his master was marching on Paris. The news re- awakened all Hortense's regrets. " I was then right," she cried, " to wish that it should be defended. I was certain that the Emperor would come to the help of his capital. And now what is to become of him and of our army ? " The travellers themselves were occasionally regarded with apprehension, and at one village on their route the cure came forth to meet them, bearing the Blessed 74 Queen Hortense and her Friends Sacrament, in the belief that the party, by this time reinforced by a cavalry escort, was the dreaded enemy. So the hours passed by. Arrived at their first resting- place, the Queen's spirits for a moment gave way. In comparative safety, a reaction from the excitement of the past days set in, and she was overwhelmed with a passion of sorrow and pity. " I weep," she said, " for all the misfortunes I fore- see. We are in tranquillity here, but what is going on in Paris ? No doubt there is fighting there. The Emperor, at the head of his army, will desire to regain his capital, and the enemy is master of it. How is one not to foresee a horrible struggle of extermination ? All the calm surrounding us hurts me more than the agitation I have left behind." The next day Navarre was reached, and Hortense and her children were safe under the shelter of her mother's roof. The travellers were eagerly welcomed by Josephine, but it was observed that, in the Empress's salon itself, feelings with regard to the Imperial reverses were mixed, and that those were not wanting who were looking forward with satisfac- tion to the reconstitution of the old society and a recurrence to the ancient order of things. As in Paris, Talleyrand, u high priest of the temple of treason," with Fouche, Bourrienne, and their friends, were industriously making their peace with the destroyers of the Empire, so at Navarre the servants of the Empress and the Queen were separating into opposite camps. Plans for the Future 75 Uncertainty as to the actual condition of affairs had prevailed when Hortense reached her destination ; but one night, after the household had retired to rest, the arrival of a messenger, with news from Fontainebleau, put an end to all doubt. Hortense, worn out by what she had gone through, ill and suffering, was in bed, and Josephine brought the bearer of ill tidings to her room. " I shall never forget." says Mademoiselle Cochelet, present on the occasion, " the exclamation made by the Empress when M. de Maussion said that the Emperor would go to Elba. " ' Ah ! Hortense,' she cried, leaning towards her daughter, ' he is unhappy. What ! he is to be con- fined to the island of Elba ? Ah ! were it not for his wife, I would go and shut myself up with him there.' " Hortense had her own future and that of her children to consider ; and, forming a project with characteristic rapidity, she communicated it to her attendant as soon as her mother had left her. She occupied, she said, an isolated position, and with the return of the Bourbons those who bore the Bonaparte name must quit France. Under these circumstances, she would sell her diamonds, go to Martinique, and live there upon their proceeds. It was settled that Mademoiselle Cochelet should return to Paris for the purpose of making the necessary arrangements, and should then accompany her to her retreat. Though the plan was not destined to be carried into effect, the swiftness with which it was made, the 7 6 Queen Hortense and her Friends completeness of the breach contemplated not only with the associations of former years but with Europe itself, all tell the story of the woman to whom, in spite of other strong affections and keen interests, her children were alone an essential part of life. Twenty years later she was no less ready to follow her son to America. CHAPTER XIX 1814 Mademoiselle Cochelet in Paris — The Emperor Alexander — Hortense's letters — She arrives at Malmaison — Eugene at the Tuileries — Royalists and Bonapartists — Napoleon at Fontainebleau — The Czar and the Beauharnais — Hortense the fashion— Josephine's death — Hortense becomes Duchesse de Saint-Leu. TO adherents of the Empire the capital presented a melancholy spectacle when Hortense's repre- sentative reached it. The return of the Bourbons had been agreed upon. Paris — the Paris of the people — submitted in silence ; the Royalists, from whom Alexander had received an ovation as he entered the city, rejoiced, but not without uneasiness. Their day was not yet come, nor their triumph altogether assured. On her arrival Mademoiselle Cochelet had been troubled with many misgivings as to her mistress's position. The Queen had no debts ; but neither, under present circumstances, did she possess any certain income save what the sale of her jewels might bring. Money had ever been the least of her cares and anxieties, and though she believed that her diamonds would realise a sufficient sum to supply her wants and those of her children, Mademoiselle 77 78 Queen Hortense and her Friends Cochelet was less convinced of it. It was soon, however, to appear that the Beauharnais had a powerful advocate, and that the sympathies of the young Czar, Alexander, were enlisted, with singular fervour, upon their side. Although it was not till the following year that his first interview took place with Madame de Krildener, by whose influence he was to be for a time so strangely dominated, the prophetess had already achieved a position and re- putation fascinating to an imaginative nature, and the knowledge of her admiration for Hortense may have supplemented the interest inspired in the con- queror by the misfortunes of the fallen Queen. To whatever cause his partisanship was due, Made- moiselle Cochelet had scarcely reached Paris before it was made known to her that her mistress's fortunes would be zealously cared for by the man most capable of dictating terms to the Bourbons. Visiting her on his behalf, his representative, Nesselrode, deprecated the idea of the Queen's leaving France, and directed the lectrice to urge her immediate return to Paris ; adding that the arrangement of her future would lie in her own hands, and that all her wishes would be carried out. Mademoiselle Cochelet rejoiced greatly. Every- thing appeared to promise a settlement beyond what could have been hoped ; and her disappointment was proportionately bitter when, in answer to her assur- ances of the goodwill of the Czar and of his intention of supporting the Queen's claims, her mistress replied by an absolute refusal to separate her cause from that of the Hortense's Attitude 79 Bonapartes. If Hortense modified her conception of her duty at a later date, there is no reason to question that her present attitude was sincere ; and one of her letters, written at this juncture, is worth quoting as giving a key to it. " All the world, like you," she wrote to her lectrice, "writes to ask me, What do you wish ? what do you ask for ? To all I reply, Nothing at all. What can I desire ? Is not my fate fixed ? . . . I beg of you, take no action that I might disapprove. I know that you love me, and that might mislead you ; but truly, I am not personally too much to be pitied. I have suffered so much in the midst of greatness ; I may perhaps be about to know tranquillity, and to find it preferable to all the restless brilliance that surrounded me. . . . My brother will be happy ; my mother will retain the enjoyment of her country and her possessions. As for me, I shall go to a distance with my children ; and life and fortune being assured to those I love, I can always bear misfortune affecting only my manner of living and not my heart. I am still troubled as to the fate awaiting the Emperor Napoleon and his family. . . . Had I not come to be near my mother, I am sure that I could not have left them in these unhappy times. Ah ! I hope that my children will not again be demanded from me — it is then that my courage would fail. . . . They are well — that is happiness for me. Thank M. de Nesselrode for all his interest. I assure you that there are positions called with reason unfortunate which are not without 80 Queen Hortense and her Friends their charm. They are those that put it in our power to judge of the sincerity of the sentiments we inspire." If there was a suspicion of theatrical effect both in the attitude assumed and in its expression, it does not follow that, in taking it up, Hortense was not acting upon a genuine impulse forbidding her to separate her destiny from that of the race whose name she bore and to which her children belonged, or to accept private compensations in the midst of the universal cataclysm. She was no doubt aware that she enjoyed a special and personal popularity. Talleyrand — from whom praise came near to assuming the character of an insult — declared in council that he pleaded for Queen Hortense alone, since she was the single member of the Bonaparte family he respected ; and the Due Dalberg, a member of the Provisional Government, told her connection, Madame Tascher, that the Queen was regarded as dis- tinct from the family to which she belonged by marriage, and was both esteemed and loved. Eulogies of this nature, taken by themselves, might be felt to be a slur upon a woman bound by every tie of affection and gratitude to the fallen Emperor ; and it is the more necessary to remember that not only did she show no disposition to make capital out of his enemies' approval, but that she was resolute in proclaiming and advertising the identity of her interests with those of a family she had little reason to love and in showing her readiness to share in their calamities. It was well known that Alexander had small love for the Bourbons, and had Hortense and the Czar 81 the arrangement of French affairs rested with him alone, a Regency might not have been out of the question. The Queen, however, testified no inclination to respond to his advances ; and to Nesselrode's exertions upon her behalf and the reiteration of his master's proffers of assistance, her sole rejoinder was the request that a letter she sent might be forwarded to her stepfather. It was scarcely surprising that her emissary should have been disappointed at this result of her indefatigable labours. " It is strange," she wrote to the Queen, " that all my requests to be permitted to serve you should have merely ended in commissioning M. de Nesselrode to send a letter to the Emperor Napoleon at Fontainebleau. He believed at first that it was the one to his Emperor that he had asked for." Notwithstanding the scanty encouragement received by her friendly enemies, their efforts to serve the Queen were not abandoned. In the treaty concluded between Napoleon and the allies, their present titles had been preserved to his family, with permission to live in France ; but though Hortense and her sons had been included in the arrangement, it was considered expedient by her Russian advocates, who had manifestly little confidence in Bourbon pledges, that her future should be secured by a separate and independent guarantee. For this purpose her presence appears to have been considered essential, and she was again urged to come to Malmaison. Letter after letter from Mademoiselle Cochelet placed her duty to her children, vol. n. 6 82 Queen Hortense and her Friends the wishes of her friends and of her Russian advocates before her. When Hortense replied it was still to decline to act upon the advice given her. " My mother will go to Malmaison," she said, " but I remain. My reasons are only too good. I ought not to separate my cause from that of my children. It is they, it is their family, who are sacrificed in all that is done. I will not enter into relations with those who destroy their destiny. The better I know how to bear calmly the blows of fortune which are changing my existence — to give to it, it may be, greater tranquillity — the less I should display this personal feeling. I ought to be much grieved by this our great adversity, and I desire to appear to be so, without entering into relations with those who would see in me a suppliant, when I have nothing to ask of them. I do not doubt that the Emperor of Russia is well disposed towards me. I have heard much good of him, even from the Emperor Napoleon. But, if I was curious in other days to know him, I do not wish to see him at this moment. Is he not our conqueror ? . . . My children are well ; my mother opposes all my projects — she says she has need of me. But nevertheless I shall go to join her who must be still more unhappy." Acting upon the resolution thus announced Hortense started for Rambouillet, whither Marie Louise and her little son had returned. Her friends were in despair. In a letter sent to meet her at a half- way stage Mademoiselle Cochelet implored her to reconsider her decision. To carry it out would be, she The Queen's Arrival at Malmaison 83 said, echoing the opinion of others, to ruin her future and that of her children. " Instead of returning with the Empress Josephine, you are going to join a family who have never loved you, with whom you have had nothing but unhappiness, believing you are accomplishing a duty for which no one will be grateful to you. You will regret your action, and it will be too late. I implore you, do not go to Rambouillet." M. de Marmold, attached to the Queen's household, was the bearer of Mademoiselle Cochelet's entreaties, supplemented by a note from Prince Leopold ; and was charged with the duty of using what influence he possessed to turn his mistress from her purpose. His efforts were vain. " You may be right," Hortense admitted gently — she was still the douce entetee that her brother had been wont to call her — " all may be true. I shall never- theless go to see the Empress Marie Louise. . . . Nothing will alter my determination." What her friends failed to do, circumstances effected. Josephine, less obstinate than her daughter, had con- sented to return to Malmaison ; and thither Alexander lost no time in hastening, that he might pay his respects to the Emperor's discarded wife. Before his visit was concluded, general astonishment was caused by the wholly unexpected appearance of Hortense and her children. Mademoiselle Cochelet's prediction had been promptly verified, and embarrassment, rather than gratitude, had been plainly visible in the recep- tion accorded her by Marie Louise. The Emperor 84 Queen Hortense and her Friends of Austria was expected to visit his daughter at Rambouillet, where the presence of the Queen, identified as she was with the Bonaparte family, would be incon- venient and inopportune. Quick to perceive her sister- in-law's dilemma, Hortense had relieved her without delay of an unwelcome guest. " Since I was an embarrassment, rather than a con- solation, to the Empress Marie Louise, I left her," she explained, rightly feeling that, in this case, her place was with her mother. The rebuff had not rendered her the more disposed to turn to her profit the goodwill of the Czar ; and at this first meeting with the woman so well known to him by repute he was disappointed in her, the response she made to his tenders of support being so cold that it was felt that she was rendering it difficult for him to continue to perform the office of a friend. Josephine, according to Nesselrode, had charmed his master by her gentleness and kindness ; the impression produced by her daughter had been of a different nature. The Queen, however, was im- penitent. " I received him as I ought to receive the conquerors of my country," she persisted, when apprised of the complaint. She knew, she added, that he had been a generous enemy to Napoleon, and she would show that such was her opinion. But at the first moment his position towards the country had been alone in her thoughts. As time went on the relationship improved. Alexander was constantly at Malmaison, and the contrast of the Eugene in Paris 85 attention he was sedulous in paying to the dispossessed Empress and her daughter, and his unveiled con- tempt for the restored Bourbons, cannot have failed to commend him to the Beauharnais. When Eugene joined his mother and sister he was at once included in the friendly cordiality shown by the Czar. It is probable that the ex-Viceroy was more appreciative of it than his sister. Notwithstanding his affection for his stepfather, neither he nor his children bore the Bonaparte name, and he may have fairly con- sidered himself less bound up with those who did so than Hortense. But if he is to be excused for not having compromised his future by maintaining, once in Paris, a hostile attitude towards those who replaced the Emperor at the Tuileries, he would have done better to remain for the present at a distance ; and it is a shock to find that the Prince had lost no time in paying his respects to the new ruler. " I had scarcely kissed my mother," he wrote to his wife, " before I received the authorisation to present myself at the Tuileries. I have therefore offered my homage to Louis XVIII., who received me perfectly, and asked after you with much interest." l He did not include in his letter a description of the scene that had taken place at the Palace. Hearing his guest announced as the Marquis de Beauharnais, the King rose, and, advancing to meet him, held out his hand, bidding the official to use the title His High- ness the Prince Eugene Napoleon, " and to add — if 1 Memoires du Prince Eugene, t. x. p. 288. 86 Queen Hortense and her Friends such should be the Prince's good pleasure — Grand Constable of France." 1 The incident was painful, no less in the reparation offered by the King to the adopted son of the Em- peror, than in the studied insult of the subordinate ; and it is strange to find that, though Eugene declined the proffered post, a naive satisfaction in the attentions shown him is noticeable in the letter to his wife, written four days later, when he had paid his visits of ceremony to the Emperors, Kings, and Princes then occupying as conquerors the French capital. " I cannot say enough of their graciousness in receiving me," wrote Napoleon's stepson. " They promise, when my future is in question, to take an interest in it." 2 The tone assumed by a man of Eugene's stainless reputation and honour is as deplorable as it is difficult to understand. A candour and simplicity curiously often included in the eulogies of his contemporaries was, how- ever, combined with his courage and loyalty. These qualities may be responsible, if not for the desire to assure his fortunes and those of his wife and children by the conciliation of the men in whose hands it would lie to make or mar them, at least for the openness with which he avowed what a cleverer or more complex character would have seen the wisdom of concealing. Had the Emperor been in a position to prolong the struggle, there is no reason to believe that Eugene would have 1 Mcmoires du Prince Eugene, t. x. 2 Ibid. t. x. p. 289. Royalists and the Empire 87 been otherwise than faithful. But the game being lost, he considered himself at liberty to make terms with the enemy. That he did so must be matter of regret. Talking afterwards to Madame du Cayla, he frankly expressed his astonishment that Frenchwomen could so far have forgotten themselves as to welcome and fete a foreign army, covered with French blood. He would have done well to have set the example of dignity and restraint to those guilty of the outrage he con- demned, by holding altogether aloof from a party prevented by policy alone from testifying their con- temptuous dislike for all who owed their rank and position to the Empire. " Is not that the Prince who married one of Bona- parte's princesses ? " asked the Duchesse d'Angouleme, indicating Stephanie's husband, the Grand Duke of Baden. " What weakness to have allied himself with them ! " The Duchess had ill chosen the person to whom the observation was addressed. It was the Prince of Bavaria, brother-in-law to Eugene ; and the Emperor of Austria was not far off. In blundering fashion, she had merely given expression to what others were feeling. It was the habit and policy of the restored Royalists to ignore the Empire and all that had belonged to it. The King, affixing his signature to his first Acts, dated them the nineteenth year of his reign ; and when Alexander finally succeeded in forcing from the French authorities Hortense's recognition as Duchesse de Saint- Leu, with possession of a portion of her property there, 88 Queen Hortense and her Friends the patent bestowing the title upon her stated that it was bestowed upon Mademoiselle de Beauharnais — a favour having been by this means ingeniously con- verted into an insult. The Czar was too powerful to be resisted ; but the preference he openly showed for the Beauharnais and their mother had served to em- bitter royalist sentiment against them. Hortense, of higher spirit than her brother, indig- nantly resented the terms in which the deed was couched. She had, she said, received her former title without having desired it ; it had not rendered her happy, and she lost it without regret. But she would make no concession to the party of the conquerors, nor allow it to be forgotten that she had been a Queen. Proceeding to say for Eugene what he had not said for himself, she observed that her brother had, wrongly, considered it beneath him to give the lie to the statement made in the newspapers to the effect that he had caused himself to be announced at Court as the Marquis de Beauharnais. The men who had invented the false- hood wished to persuade the nations that their former rulers recognised that the rights conferred upon them were not valid, and laid them at the feet of the Bourbons. Their dignity was too much bound up with that of France to be compromised thus. Whilst Paris was pervaded by this atmosphere and torn by conflicting parties whose reconciliation was merely superficial, it was not unnatural that Napoleon at Fontainebleau, lonely, sore at heart, defeated, and confronted by the dreary prospect of Elba, Napoleon at Fontainebleau 89 should have viewed with disfavour the well-meant attentions of the victor to his family. " What does he expect to get from that ? " he asked, informed of the Czar's visit to Malmaison. When it further transpired that Alexander had paid his respects to Marie Louise, he regarded what was doubtless intended as an act of courtesy in quite another light. It was, he said, an insult to women in sorrow to appear before them in the guise of a conqueror. " C'est du Grec," he added. 1 The King of Rome endorsed his father's opinion, and the Czar and the King of Prussia asking in turn to see him, " the interesting child was somewhat ennuye at their visits, perceiving, in spite of his tender age, that they were not due to any feeling of interest, and that he was nothing but the object of indiscreet curiosity." 2 If Alexander's advances were inevitably viewed with distaste by his fallen rival, his considerate kindness, supplemented by the open expression of his dislike for the present sovereign, could not fail to win recognition from the Beauharnais. " I do not know whether I shall not one day repent having put the Bourbons upon the throne," he observed to Eugene before leaving France. " Believe to to me, my dear Eugene, they are no good. We have had them in Russia, and I know what to think of them." a 1 Napoleon at Fontainebleau (Sir Neil Campbell), p. 172. 2 Me?noires de Meneval, t. iii. p. 302. 3 Memoires de Lavallette, t. ii. p. 102. 9° Queen Hortense and her friends With regard to the Prince's fortunes, he desired that the care of them should be left in his hands — he took everything upon himself, and " had the amour-propre to believe that Eugene would be content with him." 1 His position at Malmaison was becoming rather that of an old friend than of a foreign sovereign. " Are the Kings not our uncles ? " asked little Louis once, after a visit from the Czar and the King of Prussia. In his limited experience the terms were synonymous. Hearing that the guests were, on the contrary, conquerors, the elder boy protested. " Why, then, do they kiss us ? " he questioned, " since they are the enemies of my uncle, the Emperor ? " Again an explanation was supplied. The Czar, the child was told, if an enemy, was a generous one, to whom it was due that their position, their mother's, and their uncles', was not much worse. Louis, listening in silence, meditated on the matter, and when he next saw Alexander he slipped a ring, given him by Eugene, into his hand, " puisqu'il est bon pour maman." In befriending Hortense the Czar still found diffi- culties. In spite of gratitude, in spite of her appre- ciation of his affection for her family and his zeal on their behalf, in spite of a genuine liking on her part, there lingered in her mind some trace of the old hostility inspired by a man who wore the guise of a victor ; and when, as a special grace, he had asked and obtained from Josephine the autograph copy of her daughter's songs, the Queen expressed her regret 1 Mcmoires du P?ince Eugene, t. x p, 292. Hortense and the Czar 91 that it should have passed into his possession. Nor* would she consent to second his efforts to surmount the obstacles placed by Louis XVIII. and his advisers in the way of obtaining for her from the government a fitting and adequate financial provision. It was not without reason that Alexander suspected that unless the allies were definitely pledged to some such arrangement, Hortense and her children might be left unprovided for, and her indifference in the matter was viewed by him with surprise and curiosity. " I am persuaded," he told Mademoiselle Cochelet, " that she thinks one can live without money, and upon air. ... I never saw so interesting a woman. Were she my sister, I could not be more anxious to serve her. But she is very obstinate, your Queen ! " The consciousness of a partial responsibility for the change in her condition was painful to him, and visiting Saint-Leu, where she had formerly been exercising her skill in landscape gardening in a portion of the estate now made over to the Prince de Conde, his depression was manifest. Paris, meanwhile, had taken its cue from Alexander, and in the same way that, following his example and that of the King of Prussia, the world had found its way to Malmaison, so it now echoed his praises of the Queen. They were repeated to her, and she smiled. " They say it because it is at the moment the mode" she replied. " What do they know about it ? I say so little to them ! " 92 Queen Hortense and her Friends If she appraised at its true worth the eulogies pro- nounced upon her, she was quickly proved to be right in considering them of small value. Deeds are more eloquent than words ; and the light in which she, with others of Bonaparte blood, were in truth regarded by those in power was forcibly expressed when the body of her dead child was expelled from Notre Dame. " So much the better," the Queen said coldly, as she read the announcement of what was intended. " My son's body shall be laid in the chapel at Saint- Leu. He will no longer be amongst those who declare themselves our enemies." This last insult — for which it is fair to say that the King disowned responsibility — was taken deeply to heart by Josephine. The events of the last two months, and the uncertainty still hanging over the future, had had its effect upon her, and prepared the way for the catastrophe so quickly to follow. " Why did you let my poor Josephine die ? " were the first words addressed to Corvisart, the Court physician, by Napoleon on his return from Elba. But it was, in fact, sorrow and care, rather than any disease curable by doctors, that was sapping her strength. On May 25, Eugene, himself ill, wrote to his wife that he was uneasy about his mother, though the doctors pro- nounced her complaint to be nothing more serious than feverish catarrh. By the 28th he told Augusta he had almost given up hope, and trembled lest she should not outlive the day. By noon on the 29th all was Josephine's Death 93 over. The close tie which had for so many years knit together mother and children was broken. Hortense, with Eugene, had been constantly at her side. The last night the Queen had been per- suaded to take rest ; but had again and again sought her mother's room to ascertain from the watcher that all was well. Earlv in the morning, brother and sister were once more at their post, and knew, looking upon the face of the Empress, that hope was past. It was Whit Sunday, and they went below to hear the Pentecostal Mass ; whilst in the room above the Abbe Bertrand, Hortense's faithful old friend, administered the last Sacraments to the dying woman. When her children returned, she was still conscious. As, at- tempting in vain to utter the words she would have spoken, she held out her arms to them, Hortense, exhausted by grief and anxiety, fell senseless to the ground. A few minutes later Josephine had breathed her last in Eugene's arms. Peace had been signed, and the foreign troops were on the eve of evacuating Paris. The Czar, though not till the last moment, had succeeded in wresting from the French authorities the letters patent securing the Duchy of Saint-Leu to Hortense, the difficulty in the wording of the deed being removed by the sub- stitution of her baptismal names for the original offen- sive formula. So reluctantly was the favour conceded, that the Emperor instructed his aide-de-camp to remain at the Tuileries, and, if necessary, to pass the night there, not leaving until the documents should be placed 94 Queen Hortense and her Friends in his hands. 1 On quitting Paris, he brought the letters patent to Malmaison, feeling with sadness that they came, in a sense, too late. " In this terrible moment they have no interest for the Queen," he said, reading her rightly, as he con- signed the papers to Mademoiselle Cochelet's care, " and I do not venture to present them to her in person. Give them to her when she is better. ... I have been compelled to seize, in some sort, on this act of justice and reparation. The Queen owes no grati- tude to any one for it, and I entreat her to render no thanks." That same night Alexander started for England. On his return to Paris, it was in a different character. His departure closed the short chapter of the friendship between him and the woman he had been so zealous in befriending. 1 Memoir es de Lavallette, t. ii. p. 103. CHAPTER XX 1814 — 1815 Hortense in adversity — Pozzo di Borgo at Saint-Leu — Madame de Stael and Madame Recamier— Meeting at Baden with Eugene, and Madame de Krudener — Life at Saint-Leu — Accused of intrigue — Louis claims his son — Hortense's position in Paris — Visit to the Tuileries — Interview with Wellington — Unrest in the capital. THE great crises of life come and pass. Such a crisis had been to Hortense the fall of Napoleon, carrying with it all connected with him, and followed by the crushing blow of her mother's death. It is at these times that character is shown. To adapt oneself to a totally new set of circumstances is not easy, nor is it a simple thing to take the lower place with grace and composure. The advantages attached to rank and power are apt to assume disproportionate value when they have been forfeited, and to accept their loss with dignity is to prove that, possessed, they had not been rated above their true worth. Hortense was to supply this testimony to the genuineness of the indifference she had professed in these matters. Yet it must have been upon a new world, a reconstituted present and future, that she gazed as she gradually emerged from her sorrow and entered again upon common life. Familiar landmarks were swept 95 96 Queen Hortense and her Friends away, and her habits, her outlook, her aspirations for her children, had to be readjusted on a fresh basis. That she proved equal to the occasion goes far to corroborate the judgment formed of her by many of her contemporaries. Perhaps a little self-consciously, and not without some recognition of the fact that she was performing her part well and worthily, she acted in a fashion to command respect, and to awaken, in those who loved her, enthusiasm. If the know- ledge that she was conforming herself to the ideal standard ever commanding her allegiance caused her satisfaction, there is no need to grudge it to her. It should, moreover, be borne in mind that, should a tendency be detected, if not in her conduct, in her language, to play to an audience, she laboured under the disadvantage, for the three years 1813, 18 14, and 181 5, of feeling that a reporter was always at hand to take down her utterances. Few women — perhaps few men — would be altogether uninfluenced by the knowledge that their words were in a sense stereotyped as they were spoken, or would rise superior to the temptation to adapt them to the public ear. Mademoiselle Cochelet's memoirs depict one side of her mistress's character, nor is there any reason to suspect that it was not a true one ; but it is undoubtedly the side Hortense would have wished to present to the world. The fresh grief of a parting with Eugene followed quickly upon her mother's death. In sorrow, as in prosperity, she clung to him, and the more as her position became one of greater loneliness. Imperialist Indiscretion 97 " I am frightened at his departure," she said. " My isolation frightens me." Eugene in some sort shared both her apprehensions and the doubts she indulged as to whether she had done wisely in listening to those who would have had her remain in France. The distrust shown by the Bourbons had been — in spite of superficial courtesy — sufficiently marked to lead him to hasten his own journey. It was his wish that, so soon as he possessed a settled home, his sister should share it ; and in taking leave of her, he held out hopes that he and his wife would shortly join her at Aix, whither she was going by the advice of her physicians. In the meantime, the indiscretions of her friends were not likely to allay the mistrust of the government or to enlist or retain on her side the support of the allied powers. The violent hostility of Pozzo di Borgo, Russian Ambassador at Paris, to everything connected with the Empire was so well recognised that his master had arranged that the affairs of the Queen should be conducted by a subordinate, M. Boutiakim, through whose hands Alexander's correspondence with her was to go. The Ambassador had, however, paid a formal visit to Saint-Leu, and had received in conse- quence an invitation to dinner. On this occasion an incident occurred tending to confirm any suspicions he might have entertained as to the society accustomed to frequent Hortense's salon. Certain young Napoleonist officers, Colonel Lawoes- tine at their head, had been busily engaged in vol. 11. 7 98 Queen Hortense and her Friends turning the Royalists into ridicule. Assuming the costumes of the last century, and decorated with immense white cockades, they had caricatured the emigres, indignantly declining to partake of chicken a la Marengo offered to them at a restaurant, on the grounds that the name recalled the regime of an usurper. The culprits had carried the joke so far as to pursue it under the very windows of the Tuileries, the affair resulting in a fortnight's confinement to barracks of the four offenders. On the afternoon of the day when Pozzo di Borgo was expected at Saint-Leu, the ringleader in the farce, Colonel Lawoestine, had also unfortunately repaired thither, making his excuses for not having sooner paid his respects to the Queen by a description of his escapade, and receiving in return a rebuke not un- mingled with amusement. The performance, Hortense told him, might have been a fitting one for pages, but not for Colonels. Misfortune should have made him and his comrades older. Labedoyere, the young soldier who, a year later, was to die upon the scaffold, was present, and laughed. The Queen, he said gaily, was scolding again. He was glad he was not the only person to incur her blame ; and Hortense, her reprimand delivered, had retired to dress for dinner, leaving her visitors in possession of the salon, when, unfortunately early, the Russian Ambassador, with his subordinate Bouti- akim, appeared upon the scene. The sight of a man of notoriously anti-Imperial Guests at Saint^Leu 99 sympathies was too much for the hot-headed Lawoes- tine. Rendered perhaps still less inclined to be conciliatory by recent events and his fortnight's en- forced retreat, he proceeded, deliberately ignoring the Ambassador, to keep up a conversation ill calculated to raise the political character of the Queen's salon in the opinion of her guest, animadverting in especial upon the Allies and those Frenchmen who had not been ashamed to return to France under their wing. The Russian, taking the more dignified part of appearing unconscious of language not ostensibly addressed to himself, nevertheless formed his con- clusions and drew his inferences from what he heard. If this was the company to be met at the house of the Duchesse de Saint-Leu, he observed to Boutiakim, he had no place there. A dangerous enemy was strengthened in his prejudices. Amongst other guests at Saint-Leu during this summer were Madame de Stael and Madame Recamier. Grateful for kindness shown them by the Queen in her more prosperous days, they now sought permission to visit her, and were made welcome. Some trepidation had been caused by the reputation they enjoyed ; but all would have gone well had it not been for the ignorance unfortunately betrayed by Hortense of the chef cTceuvre of her formidable guest. Had Madame de Stael, she asked absently, ever been in Italy ? " Et Corinne ? et Corinne ? " cried some of the bystanders. " Your Majesty has not read Corinne ? " The Queen was visibly embarrassed. ioo Queen Hortense and her Friends "Yes — no," she replied; " I shall read it again." She did not add that the book had been read aloud to her when, after the death of her little son, she had been in no condition to appreciate its literary excellence, or even to remember the subject of it. " She would not have understood," she said in- differently, asked afterwards why she had offered no explanation soothing to her visitor's vanity. " I am lost in her estimation, . . . but it was not the moment to talk of myself." She may have guessed there were subjects of greater interest to the guest. Madame de Stael was eager to discuss the Emperor, the prejudice he had always entertained against her, her own admiration, and her desire to follow him to Elba. Would she be received, she questioned anxiously, did she take the step ? Hortense replied with perfunctory civility that Napoleon would doubtless receive a like disciple " a merveille " ; and so the conversation proceeded, until the literary lady directed her attention to the children, in the apparent hope of extracting further details concerning their uncle. Though replying politely, Prince Napoleon appears to have viewed the visitor with disfavour. " Cette dame est bien questionneuse," he observed, her catechism concluded. " Is that what is called being clever ? " It is not necessary to linger over the remainder of the summer, spent partly at Plombieres, partly at Baden, where a brilliant company had assembled. Madame de Kriidener 101 The Grand Duchess Stephanie was there, eager to welcome her cousin, with the Empress of Russia and the King of Bavaria. But it was the presence of Eugene which had attracted his sister to the place. " I feel alive again in seeing my brother," she said as, with tears in her eyes, she prepared to greet him. Amongst other visitors to Baden was Madame de Kriidener, met by Hortense for the first time for four years. In her character of seer and prophetess, she thoroughly alarmed her friend, Mademoiselle Cochelet, by the solemnity of her predictions of misfortune to France and to Hortense. " I am come to see your Queen," she said, ap- pearing before the lectrice, a spare, lean, little figure, with fair, disordered hair, gleaming eyes, and a mien and gesture of authority. " I must save her from the danger by which she is menaced. . . . She must undergo her destiny. She is beloved of God. . . . Let her resign herself; she is not at the end of all her afflictions." So pure, so sublime a soul, she admitted, should indeed be happy. She was to expect nothing from men. Above all — descending to more practical matters — she was, instead of returning to France, to repair to Russia, where Alexander would afford her shelter. The year 1 8 1 5 was to be one of terror. Napoleon was to quit his island, and to rise to greater heights than before. But those who became his allies would be hunted, persecuted, and punished. 102 Queen Hortense and her Friends Mademoiselle Cochelet, hearing this and more, was terror-stricken. Her mistress, when the scene was duly reported to her, was less impressed. Her senti- ments towards the seer had undergone a change since their former meeting at Baden. Madame de Krildener, she observed, was an excellent person, whom she much liked. To believe her to be a prophetess was a different matter. She consented, nevertheless, to grant her an interview, and appears to have retained a genuine esteem for a woman at whose predictions she smiled, and whom she characterised as exalte e and probably ill. As to her admonitions and advice, if indeed the Emperor should return to France, Hortense was his daughter, and whatever misfortunes might ensue, her place was at his side. A visit paid by the visionary to Eugene and his wife had a more exhilarating effect. The Prince took her for a lunatic, and the Princess Augusta was so manifestly thunderstruck and bewildered by the harangue she delivered that Hortense, witness of the scene, fled from the room overcome by laughter. By the end of August the Queen had left Baden, to return to Saint-Leu. The journey was marked by the inconvenient determination manifested by some officers encountered on the way to do honour to a Queen identified with the cause of the fallen Emperor ; nor was it without some difficulty that she succeeded in convincing them that she preferred to dispense with their escort, as well as with their loud and compromis- ing demonstrations of loyalty. Hortense at Saint'Leu 103 From Saint-Leu the Queen proceeded to Havre, and it was not until September that she was once more settled at home. She was a person suspect, her movements were carefully watched, and a report of the Surete Generale of September 8 recorded that on the 3rd Madame Louis Bonaparte had arrived in Paris, with a numerous suite of people and carriages. Her cortege, it was added, " made the neighbours talk." 1 Once at Saint-Leu, she seems to have done little to invite attention. Her usual habits were resumed, only interrupted by visits from guests who cared sufficiently to see her to make the expedition from Paris. Amongst these Labedoyere was conspicuous, whilst the artist Garnerey gave a weekly lesson in drawing, and Madame Campan came to lament the closing of the educational establishment over which she had been placed by the Emperor at Ecouen, the chateau having been reclaimed by the Prince de Conde and the scholars dispersed. If Hortense, as her enemies assert, was occupied in political intrigues, no proof of the fact is forthcoming ; and the evidence afforded by the presence in her salon of those who had been attached to the Empire and openly regretted the restoration is inconclusive. Where, if not amongst these men, should the Emperor's stepdaughter have sought her friends and associates ? To others she was a relic of a state of things of which they resented the very recollection. To Labedoyere and his comrades she was a sacred legacy from a past they cherished amongst 1 Les secrets des Bonaparte (Ch. Nauroy), p. 157. 104 Queen Hortense and her Friends their dearest memories, a woman and a queen to whom their allegiance was vowed. They made no secret of their devotion. At a salon she had visited on her return to Paris, the Duchesse de Gontaut was bewildered by the conversation she overheard. " They were delighted to learn that the Queen was well. A certain young and handsome M. de Lawoes- tine had just come from her, and they all crowded round him. ... I racked my brain to think of what sovereign this Queen could be the wife, and I asked the question in a low voice of Madame de Valence, who replied aloud, ' Why, it is Queen Hortense.' " * Had the efforts of the Emperor's stepdaughter been ceaselessly directed, as was currently reported, towards a counter- revolution, it is difficult to see that she would have been greatly to blame ; but except on the assumption that, even with her intimate associates, she was con- sistently playing a double part, this was far from being the case. She had accepted the change in her fortunes, and found it not devoid of compensations. Her mode of life, she told her confidants, suited her. "I reproach myself with being happier than when fortune heaped favours upon France and upon my family. 1 only ask of God to remain in my present condition." If she counted upon the continuance of her tran- quillity, she had forgotten to reckon with her hus- band. An intimation had reached her that, now that his brother was no longer in a position to afford her protection, Louis Bonaparte would not be content to 1 Mcmoircs dc la Duchesse dc Gontaut, t. i. Louis Bonaparte claims his Son 105 leave her in undisputed possession of her children. Writing to reiterate his desire to sever all ties between himself and his wife, he had suggested that she should relinquish to him the elder of the boys. What answer Hortense returned to his letter does not appear. That she would comply without a struggle can scarcely have been anticipated ; and nothing further having, for the moment, ensued, she may have deluded herself with the hope that the matter would be allowed to rest. She was to be undeceived. On a certain autumn morning, after her return to Saint-Leu, an emissary from her husband appeared, charged with the duty of enforcing his paternal rights. At this time it would seem that both of the children were included in his demand. It was subsequently limited to the elder of the two ; nor, setting senti- ment on one side, will it be denied that in claiming one, at least, of his sons, Louis was not unjustified. Neither one nor both, however, would their mother yield, unless compelled thereto by forcible means ; and though Eugene and the Emperor Alexander were agreed in counselling submission, she adhered to her determination to leave Louis to resort to legal measures. A report of the Surete Generale, dated November 29, gave the official version of the affair. "It is asserted," it ran, " that Louis Bonaparte is about to present a legal demand to obtain his two sons, over seven years ot age. 1 It is at this age that male children come 1 Born in March, 1808, the younger child was only six, which may account for his father's consent to leave him with his mother. io6 Queen Hortense and her Friends under the power of their father. By reason of this action Bonaparte's wife has addressed the Chancellor and has asked for an interview. The Chancellor, in consequence, gave an audience to Madame Hortense, who seemed shocked \_formalisee\ that he had not called upon her, and had paid no attention to the title she formerly bore. Nevertheless, the ci-devant Queen went to the Chancellor, to whom she communicated the subject of her anxiety. The Chancellor replied that he could take no part in the suit, and that the affair belonged to the courts of law." 1 The language of this report gives a key to the light in which Louis Bonaparte's wife was regarded in official quarters. Aware both of the prejudice felt against her and of the fact that she was surrounded by police agents whose business it was to keep the authorities informed as to her movements and habits, she decided upon a step to be regretted by all who occupy in any sort the position of her apologists. This was her visit to the Tuilcries. Viewed as a measure she may have considered necessary to enlist the sympathy of those in power on behalf of her children, her action may be pardoned, but it cannot be commended. As a sign of gratitude for benefits received — the character in which she preferred to represent it — or as a protest against the rumours in circulation with regard to her propensities to political intrigue, it admits of no pallia- tion. Her endeavours to justify the intention of seeking an audience with Louis XVIII. were, to judge by the 1 Lcs secrets des Bonaparte (Ch. Nauroy), p. 158. Hortense at the Tuileries 107 specimen supplied by Mademoiselle Cochelet, a little grandiloquent. Her attendance at the Tuileries was a duty, she explained ; and when this was the case, she performed the required action without considering the consequences. She proceeded to carry out her present resolve without delay. So far as the King was concerned, the visit was an entire success. His guest was received by Louis in his private cabinet, and no witnesses assisted at the inter- view. On her reappearance she was surrounded by the courtiers who had waited outside, anxious to learn the result of the meeting. " Well, madame," asked the Due de Grammont, " are you pleased with our King?" " Extremely so," was the Queen's reply — she could indeed have said no less — and she took her departure. Describing the audience to her companion, she said that Louis had been most courteous, even galant. He had, on her entrance, betrayed some embarrassment, and she had been the first to speak — a matter of little difficulty, she observed, when it was merely a question of returning thanks for his conduct towards her. He gave her the impression of being a good man. She had been more at her ease with him than with the Emperor Napoleon. "It is not surprising," she observed. "Per- sonal greatness imposes upon all — even upon me, who was his daughter. I never ventured to speak to him unless he addressed me." If Hortense had been guilty of worse than a breach of good taste in paying her respects to Napoleon's supplanter, 108 Queen Hortense and her Friends she showed no desire to follow it up by further inter- course with the royal family, ignoring the King's hint that she would do well to present herself to the Duchesse d'Angouleme, and replying to his expression of a hope of future meetings that her place was no longer in the world and that she preferred a life of retirement. Louis, for his part, was full of praises of her manners, her tact, and her intelligence, and to Pozzo di Borgo in particular — no friend to the Imperial family — expressed his opinion that she was charming. " I have never known," he said to another of his courtiers, " a woman combining so much grace with such distinguished manners." There was a silence, broken by the Due de Duras. All the world, he said, were agreed that the Duchesse de Saint-Leu was charming. It was unfortunate, and perhaps a cause of anxiety, that she was surrounded by the relentless enemies of the King. To which Louis made no reply. It is clear, from the reports made by the Surete Generale, that if Hortense had desired to allay suspicion by her presence at the palace, she had not been success- ful. A strict watch continued to be kept upon her household, and in December, when she had returned to Paris for the winter, a detailed account was supplied of her manner of life. It was stated that she rose late, usually spent the morning in painting or in receiving the visits of artists, amongst whom were Garnerey, Richard, Thton, and others ; conferring with men of business concerning the impending lawsuit. Hortense's Parisian Salon 109 She also frequently took walks with her children, gave parties twice a week, on other days saw but few guests. The names of those who frequented her salon were carefully noted ; and it was mentioned that her household was marked by much orderliness, but no display, and that she was greatly loved by those around her. 1 Flahault received his due share of attention in official reports, being described as still young, living with his mother and her husband, and though associating chiefly with Generals devoted to Bonaparte, not absenting himself altogether from Court. 2 Hortense's return to Paris had not resulted in the increase of her general popularity. Her salon — at first only open to the select few who had cared to frequent her house at Saint-Leu — soon became an habitual place of resort for the young Bonapartists hitherto rinding their evening amusements with royalist ladies, who, not without interest and entertainment, had been engaged in attempting the political conversion of such men as Labedoyere and Flahault. Hortense, it was true, conscious that her house was assuming the character of a political centre, was prudent enough to desire to render it less exclusively Bonapartist. With this view, a certain number of those professing opposite opinions, notably English, were admitted to it, whilst she preached caution and wisdom to the men who lacked them. But try as she might, in 1 Les secrets ties Bonaparte (Ch. Nauroy), pp. 158-9. 2 Ibid. p. 160. 1 1 o Queen Hortense and her Friends her interest and her children's, to banish politics from her salon, it was no easy matter to restrain the hot-headed partisans of the Empire ; and when Flahault and Labedoyere, amongst the most zealous of Imperialists, proceeding from words to acts, dis- carded the Cross of the Legion of Honour, on the score of the base uses to which it was now put, her remonstrances took little effect. Labedoyere would be happy to obey any other orders given by the Queen, but could not bring himself to wear the cross ; and when Hortense appealed to his companion as the more level-headed of the two, Flahault protested that he was no calmer than Labedoyere and entirely shared his opinion. If they were to conspire, it would certainly, they said, not be in the rue Cerutti ; but the most that their hostess could obtain was that their badges should be worn in her house, if not else- where. " Nous faisons notre toilette chez son portier," said Labedoyere to Mademoiselle Cochelet gaily. He admired the Queen, he said, and, as a woman, she played her right part in attempting to produce peace ; for himself, " Je veux etre conspirateur," he an- nounced frankly. Taking into consideration the doubtful character borne, in spite of her efforts, by Hortense's house, it was natural that a visit paid her this winter by Wellington — introduced by Madame Recamier — should have been viewed with uneasiness by the authorities. It was re- marked that the Englishman remained with the mistress Wellington visits Hortense 1 1 1 of the house in her cabinet more than an hour, and that, all the time he was at her house, contrary to his usual bearing, " which is of extreme hauteur and very grave," he showed the Duchess the greatest and most respectful deference, and paid marked attentions to her guests. It was added in the report that politics were talked littie at the Duchess's house, as she did not permit it ; and that, two days before, she had observed to General Flahault's mother that these tetes exaltees should become more moderate and quiet. 1 According to Mademoiselle Cochelet, the conversation with Wellington had been concerned with misgivings the Queen entertained that the pledges of the Bourbons with regard to Napoleon's financial affairs would not be carried out, and that the Emperor would be placed in a difficulty. A step recently taken by the Government had been calculated to give rise to these fears. This had been the order issued by the authorities to place all Bonaparte property under seal. Warned of the intended measure, Hortense had taken precautions ; and when the official emissary appeared at her house, her diamonds had already been put into trustworthy hands. The order with regard to her possessions was subsequently rescinded, on the protest of her man of business. The proceeding afforded a disquieting indication of the direction in which the tide was setting. It had been at Christmas that the incident had occurred, and thus ended the disastrous year of I 8 14. 1 Les secrets des Bonaparte (Ch. Nauroy), p. 162. ii2 Queen Hortense and her Friends The first two months of 1815 — to be followed by an episode of unparalleled excitement — passed for Hortense uneventfully. Her lawsuit was pursu- ing its course and must have been a constant source of anxiety. By an official report it appears that she was expected to be the winner, and when the judge's decision was given against her, on March 8, the blow would have been crushing, had not affairs then taken a turn rendering it for the moment of little importance. Paris was in a condition of unrest. Each party viewed the other with suspicion, and the most extrava- gant rumours were in circulation. On the one hand, it was said that Chouans had been brought to the capital, to be a danger to peaceful citizens of Bonapartist opinions ; whilst when the body of a General of Imperialist views was found in the Seine, it was rumoured that, distrusted by his comrades and ac- quainted with too many of their secrets, he had been assassinated by order of the Duchesse de Saint-Leu. Trifles, such as the bunches of violets daily sent to Hortense from Saint-Leu, gave rise to suspicion. Nor was the policy pursued by Louis, exemplified by such acts as the gift of the title of Marechale to the widow of the conspirator, General Moreau — killed fighting in the Russian army, his face to his countrymen — adapted to conciliate adherents of the Empire. In spite, however, of underground disquiet and dis- satisfaction, and of the contempt, save amongst their Napoleon's Escape from Elba 113 special friends and adherents, felt for the restored Bourbons, no definite apprehensions of a coming crisis had been entertained ; and the event destined to trans- form in a moment every aspect of European politics was as sudden, as unexpected, as if Napoleon had not been in existence. The news that he had left Elba fell like a bomb amongst his enemies. VOL. 11. CHAPTER XXI 1815 The return from Elba — The news received in Paris — Hortense in hiding — Napoleon's arrival — His displeasure — The hundred days — Changed conditions of Paris — Public ceremonials — The Emperor's departure — His parting with Louis Napoleon — Tidings of defeat — Waterloo — Abdication — In Paris and at Malmaison. ON the wider European consequences of the return of Napoleon this is not the place to dwell. Meneval, in attendance upon Marie Louise at Vienna, has left a picture of the consternation produced amongst the sovereigns assembled in the Austrian capital, when, like the announcement of a death in the middle of a feast, the momentous fact became known ; of the silent activity by which the previous merry-making was replaced ; of the Empress's vacil- lations and hesitations and fears, followed by her disavowal of complicity in her husband's designs, and her invocation of the protection of the allied powers. The tidings reached Paris on March 7. The authorities had lost no time in taking their measures, the Comte d'Artois having left the capital during the night to oppose the Emperor's advance. It was one man against Europe ; but that man was Napoleon. 114 Napoleon's Escape from Elba 1 1 5 On the following morning passers-by, not venturing to utter the great news aloud, were whispering it to each other in the streets. " I heard some one walking near me," says Lavallette, " and I was about to turn round, when these words were pronounced in a low voice, ' Make no gesture ; show no surprise ; do not stand still. The Emperor disembarked at Cannes on March 1 ; the Comte d'Artois left last night to go to fight him.' ' And Lavallette — representative of Bonapartist faith and Bonapartist loyalty — moved on, breathless with emotion, and like a drunken man, asking himself, " Is it possible ? Is it a dream, or the most cruel of jests ? " l It was no dream, and Paris was soon sure of it. The tidings reached Hortense through an Englishman. As she was driving home from the Bois de Boulogne, Lord Kinnaird rode up to her carriage. " You know the news ? " he inquired, anxious, perhaps, to see how the woman credited by Royalists with a large share of responsibility for the event by which Europe was convulsed, would play her part. " The Emperor has landed from Elba." Pale as death, the Queen stopped her carriage. Incredulous at first, she, like Lavallette, questioned, was it possible ? Who, she asked, was Kinnaird's authority ? He was not long in convincing her that he was repeating no idle report. He came straight, he told her, from the Due d'Orleans, who was to join the Comte d'Artois. Troops were being at once dispatched. 1 Mcmoires, t. ii. p. 118. u6 Queen Hortense and her Friends For the rest, Napoleon had but few with him. The affair would be settled without delay. Such was the Englishman's opinion. Hortense at first concurred in it, her imagination painfully con- juring up the inevitable catastrophe. " To die thus ! " she cried passionately — " shot by Frenchmen ! — Him ! the Emperor ! " Then, her thoughts reverting to her children, would they be in danger ? she asked anxiously. Kinnaird was not reassuring ; he professed himself unable to reply. To seize the nephews of the Emperor as hostages would, in his opinion, be a not unnatural step. It was clear that their safety must be their mother's first care ; and, hurrying home, she lost no time in arranging that the boys should be placed at nightfall in the house of a tried friend, where they might remain in concealment until it was seen what turn affairs would take. Meanwhile, as to the great fact of the Emperor's disembarkment on French soil, there was no longer room for doubt ; and it is possible that the Queen's terror began to give place to confidence inspired by her faith in Napoleon, since, when Lavallette hastened to the rue Cerutti, he describes her as shedding tears of joy and emotion. Her position was a critical one, and not without a possibility of danger. Whatever might be the ultimate results of the step taken by the Emperor, its immediate consequence was a marked development of hostility towards those of his blood. " Great irritation was displayed by the Royalists and Excitement in Paris 117 the bodyguard against my mother and her children," wrote Napoleon III. in after-days, " the rumour gaining currency that we were to be assassinated." * Reports of this kind, probably quite unfounded, will have increased Hortense's anxiety upon her sons' account, and under cover of the darkness the two little Princes were conducted to the place of retreat she had selected for them — a small apartment situated upon the boule- vard. It was not without some demur upon the part of the elder of the boys. " Where are you taking us ? " he asked uneasily, as he and his brother were led through the gardens by their governess. " Why are we to be hidden ? Is it because there is risk, and is maman to run it? " Reassured, truly or falsely, on this point, there was nothing but pleasure for the children in the night expedition, enhanced by the necessity of silence and the sense of mystery ; and her boys in safety, Hortense will have breathed more freely. Remaining behind in her salon — it was her night for receiving guests — she did the honours of her house as if in ignorance of the occurrence filling her with fear and hope and excitement. Throughout the succeeding days one rumour followed fast upon the heels of another, confusing and be- wildering. Sometimes it was asserted that the Em- peror had been captured ; then that he had escaped to the mountains. He would, it was said, in Royalist language, be tracked like a wild beast ; Marshal Ney 1 Life of Napoleon III. (Blanchard Jerrold), vol. i. p. 73. 1 1 8 Queen Hortense and her Friends was falsely quoted as promising to bring him to Paris in a cage. Now it was affirmed that the troops could be relied upon to support the Bourbons and their government ; then it was stated that Artois had returned, no longer able to count upon their loyalty. Ney's wife — Madame Campan's niece — on the other hand, visited the rue Cerutti, and there gave ex- pression to her opinion of the Emperor's madness. Her husband, she said, was marching against him. No one would be found to recruit the Imperial forces. Hortense listened to her former schoolmate with some coldness. She admitted that she, too, deplored the action taken by the Emperor ; but to say that he would find none to embrace his cause was to forget what manner of man he was, as well as to misjudge the nation he had served. Ney's defection from the Royalist cause was soon to prove the Queen right, and to give the lie to his wife's asseverations. In the meantime, Labedoyere — happy, ill-starred Labedoyere — was to lead the way by carrying over the forces under his command to his master. It was time for Hortense to take thought for her own safety. If her position had not been free from peril even whilst the Emperor's enterprise seemed hopeless to all whose faith in him was not blind, the possibility of his success rendered it doubly dangerous. Her house could scarcely fail to prove a rallying-place and centre for his partisans ; and when the time-server Fouche, apprehensive of per- Hortense in Hiding 119 sonal peril, obtained leave to escape through her garden, adjoining his own, he found himself, on scaling a wall, " as in a wonderful Arabian tale, suddenly in the midst of the Bonapartist elite, at the headquarters of the party." l The description may have been highly coloured ; at any rate, by the time to which it refers, the mistress of the house had been persuaded to take refuge, like her children, in a secret hiding-place, where she should be safe from either responsible or irresponsible vengeance. The house of a faithful Creole servant, who had accompanied her mother from Martinique, having been selected for the purpose, the Queen was conducted to it in the darkness by a brother of her lectrice, her escort being not unnaturally ex- asperated and alarmed by the laughter to which she gave way as she walked, a grey cloak imperfectly concealing the laces she had forgotten to remove, towards her destination. Any moment might have brought detection, and her laughter, probably with little merriment in it, seemed to the young man as ill-timed as the hesitation she had shown in deciding so to transgress Court etiquette as to cross the streets on foot under his care. Her refuge reached, she was induced to remain there until the eventful March 20 arrived, and, Louis XVIII. having fled in the night, Napoleon's arrival was momentarily expected. Before she left her place of shelter it was constantly 1 Memoir cs de Fouche. 120 Queen Hortense and her Friends becoming clearer that it would soon not be Bona- partists who would be forced to remain concealed, and Hortense was beginning to exchange her fears for a sense of compassion towards her opponents. Pity was a prominent feature of her character, and when it appeared that rumours were afloat that the Bourbons might be in danger, she sent a message to the Orleans to beg that, should they feel any uneasiness as to their children, they would consign them to her care. She, who had nothing to fear from the people, would answer for their security. The proffer of service, perhaps ill-advised, was not made, the intermediary employed by the Queen learning that to Hortense's account was charged, in the Orleans household itself, the very condition of Paris that was causing dis- quiet. A further step taken by her at this juncture was yet more strangely wanting in tact, and can only be explained by the overstrained state of her brain and nerves. In her compassion for the fugitive King, she insisted upon addressing to him a letter of sympathy, replying to protests that, if she had erred in incurring obligations towards the Bourbons, it would be to act unworthily were she now to refuse to acknowledge them. Should the Emperor be displeased, he knew that she had ever been on the side of the defeated. If it cannot be denied that there was a certain amount of bad taste in her desire to offer her condolences to the chief sufferer, it is fair to remember that, three days later, in all the joyful excitement of Imperialist success, Napoleon expected in Paris 121 she was not oblivious of a Royalist less highly placed, who might expect to suffer from the shifting of official scenery. " I hope," she wrote to Madame Recamier, " that you are at ease, that you are not quitting Paris, where you have friends, and that you will leave me to care for your interests. I am persuaded that I shall not so much as have the opportunity of proving to you how glad I should be to be of use." 1 All cause for concealment was plainly at an end, and the Queen left her retreat in time to witness the replacing of Napoleon's statue in the Place Vendome. Events were succeeding one another with startling rapidity. Scarcely had Hortense returned to her house when an officer of the National Guard appeared to summon her to the Tuileries, where the Emperor's arrival was shortly expected. Lavallette, who also hastened to the Palace, has left an account of the interval of suspense that followed — of the great empty courtyard, where some five or six half-pay officers had met and were exchanging congratulations upon the turn affairs had taken ; of the two Queens, Hortense and the wife of Joseph Bonaparte, the only members of the family then in Paris, presently joined by the ladies of their households and those who had been attached to that of the Empress, and occupied in removing the lilies affixed to the carpet, so that the bees below became visible, " till in less than half an 1 Souvenirs et correspond af ice dc Madame Recamier^ t. ii. p. 279. 122 Queen Hortense and her Friends hour the carpet had, amidst laughter from all those assembled, became again Imperial." * And still the Emperor had not arrived, and the hours of waiting must have seemed long. Paris was strangely quiet. One sovereign had fled from it, another was approaching, yet none could have guessed it. A singular apathy pervaded the capital, contrasting sharply with the wild enthusiasm shown by the peasantry who had lined the route to Paris in such numbers as to make the Emperor's advance a matter of difficulty. As Hortense and her friends awaited the moment of his coming, surely, in spite of their nervous laughter, it must have been chiefly in tense silence that they strained their ears for the sound of approaching feet. At length, at nine o'clock in the evening, the pro- longed suspense was ended. A carriage — a " mauvais cabriolet " — stopped at the gate of the Palace. Its master had reached it, accompanied by an immense throng which pressed into the vestibule and made the staircases impassable, and a great shout of " Vive l'Empereur " proclaimed his arrival to the Parisians who had re- mained indoors. None had eyes or attention for any object except the small figure in the grey redingote ; and the two Queens, coming forth with greeting and welcome, unable so much as to reach the Emperor, were in danger of suffocation in the crowd. " For God's sake," cried the Due de Vicenza, who had accompanied Napoleon, to Lavallette — " for God's sake, place yourself in front of him, that he may be 1 Memoires de Lavallette, t. ii. p. 132. Napoleon's Arrival 123 able to move on " ; and Lavallette obeyed, his eyes full of tears, and repeating again and again, as he moved backwards, clearing a path for his master, " It is you . . . it is you — you, at last ! Napoleon, " for his part, was mounting the stairs slowly ; his eyes shut, his hands stretched out before him, like a blind man," but his lips smiling. 1 And so the Emperor came home. His apartments gained, and the doors with difficulty shut upon the crowd, he made his greetings to the Queens, but without cordiality. Where were her children, he inquired of Hortense ; expressing with cold displeasure his opinion of her line of conduct when she had explained that they were in conceal- ment. " You have placed my nephews in a false position, in the midst of my enemies," he told her sternly. " I count upon Eugene. I think he will come back. I wrote to him from Lyons." That expectation, like others, was not destined to be realised. Marie Louise, his little son, and the boy he had brought up, whose fortunes he had secured, were none of them to gladden his eyes. For Hortense the meeting, after the long, exhausting day, must have been a bitter disappointment. When, at midnight, she reached her own house, she was worn out. One duty, however, could not be postponed, and before she slept she had given her brother an account of what was going forward in Paris. The letter was subsequently of 1 Mcmoircs de Lavallette, t. ii. p. 133. i24 Queen Hortense and her Friends importance, as, seized by the enemy and placed before the Congress at Vienna, it produced an unfortunate effect upon its members. Alexander, according to Meneval, " sous l'empire d'une violente exal- tation," conceived he had a right to feel personally wounded by certain expressions the Queen used ; and Eugene was compromised in the eyes of the Allies, the Czar, in particular, declining further com- munication with a man he had hitherto liked and trusted. Yet, if Hortense's memory is to be relied upon, corroborated by that of her lectrice, in whose memoirs the document finds a place, she had said little beyond what must have been expected from the step- daughter of the Emperor. " My dear Eugene," thus it ran, — " An enthusiasm of which you have no conception brings the Emperor back to France. I have just seen him. He received me very coldly. I think he disapproves of my having remained here. He told me that he counted upon you, and had written to you from Lyons. Mon Dieu, if only we do not have war ! It will not come, I hope, from the Emperor of Russia — he deplored it so much ! Ah, speak to him for peace ! Use your influence with him — it is a necessity for humanity. I hope I shall soon see you. I was obliged to hide during twelve days, because a thousand stories had been told about me. Adieu ! I am dead with fatigue." So ended the eventful 20th of March. Notwithstanding her weariness, Hortense was an early visitor next morning at the Tuileries, bringing with her Hortense's Interview with Napoleon 125 the boys, hastily withdrawn on the preceding evening from their hiding-place and dressed in hussar uniforms. Napoleon was not proof against the affection he had always borne the children connected with him by blood, and he received his nephews with visible emotion. It may be that, in seeing them, his thoughts reverted to his little son, and that the one meeting may have been an earnest and a pledge of another. But his anger was still hot against Hortense. An account of the interview was long afterwards given by the Queen to Madame Recamier, and it is supplemented by details related by the Duchesse d'Abrantes. It was not without apprehension that Hortense had repaired to the Palace. " The Em- peror," she told her friend, "always inspired me with fear ; nor had his tone in assigning me this rendezvous been reassuring." If she had expected that he would give further expression to his displeasure, her anticipa- tions were fulfilled, for he took her to task at once and with bitterness. "Did you so little understand your position," he asked, " as to have been capable of renouncing your name, the rank you held from me, and of accepting a title given by the Bourbons ? Was that your duty ? " Hortense did her best to rally her courage. " My duty, Sire," she answered, " was to think of my children's future, since your Majesty's abdication left me no other to perform." " Your children ! " exclaimed Napoleon. " Were they not my nephews before they were your sons ? 126 Queen Hortense and her Friends Did you forget that ? Did you imagine you had the right to allow them to be degraded from the rank belonging to them ? " Nor was it against the living alone that his anger was directed. According to the Duchesse d'Abrantes — Hortense was silent on this point to her friend — Jose- phine did not escape her share of censure, the Emperor dwelling in particular upon the fact that she had requested permission of his enemies to retain the title he had conferred upon her. She should, he said, have waited until it was certain that he was incapable of serving her ; whereas he had not been a month in banishment before she had been engaged in making terms with his persecutors. From a spirited defence of the dead Empress, Hortense, bursting into tears, descended to appeal. " Sire, I conjure you to be good to my mother," she entreated ; " the last word she uttered was your name." If Napoleon was softened, he gave no sign of it. " The more reason to make it respected," he retorted. Excited by the argument, he had been walking rapidly up and down the room in which the interview had taken place. The window stood open, and the spring sun was shining outside. Following him, Hor- tense once more attempted to justify her conduct. She had, she pleaded, taken counsel with her heart alone. The Emperor stopped suddenly short. " Then it ought to have told you, madame," he said, " that when one has shared the prosperity of a family, one must know how to endure its adversities." Hortense's Interview with Napoleon 127 The judgment was harsh, but there was a grain of truth in the implied reproach, calculated to appeal to Hortense, sensitive, generous, and impulsive ; and abandoning her defence, she was giving free way to her tears when an unexpected interruption occurred. Napoleon had unconsciously approached the open window looking upon the crowded terrace below ; and as the throng caught sight of their idol a wild storm of acclamation greeted him. Regaining at once his accustomed calm, the Emperor acknowledged the salutations of the people, and dis- cerning an opportunity of producing an impression upon the multitude, he seized and made instant use of it. Advancing to the balcony, he drew Hortense with him, her face wet with tears, and obliged her to take her part in the scene. The description of the incident in the next day's Moniteur gives the key to the light in which he wished it to be regarded. " His Majesty the Emperor " — so ran the paragraph in the official paper — " with Queen Hortense and the Princes, his nephews, was in his cabinet. The ac- clamations of the people . . . having summoned him to the balcony, Queen Hortense was so much moved by this proof of the attachment of the people of Paris that she melted into tears, offering to the crowd the touching spectacle of her countenance bathed in tears caused by the love of the people for its great father." 1 1 Memoires de la Rcstauration ; La Duchcssc d'Abra?itcs, t. ii. pp. 1 13-7. Souvenirs et Cotrespondance de Madame Rccamier, t. ii. pp. 76-80. 128 Queen Hortense and her Friends That day Hortense wrote a second letter, destined, like the first, to serve as evidence against her with those who were to be once more arbiters of her fate. The present one was sent at the Emperor's desire, and, addressed to his wife, conveyed the assurance of the happiness he would feel in seeing her again. Napoleon's motive in making his stepdaughter his channel of communication remains undetermined ; but the fact was remembered and resented in the future, as well as the suggestion contained, according to Meneval, in her letter, that she should herself meet the Empress at Strasbourg. If it were to be counted to her as a crime that she had welcomed the Emperor on his return to his capital, there was no doubt that she was guilty of it. That she had not conspired to bring him back, that she had had no hand in the initiation of his hazardous enterprise, she constantly affirmed ; nor is there any reason to distrust her statement. But to encourage a desperate venture and to rejoice in its apparent success are wholly different matters ; and it would have been strange indeed if Hortense had failed to do the last. Affection, generosity, what ambition she had, the consideration of her children's future — all enlisted her sympathies on the side of the man who was now standing on his defence against the whole of Europe, nor was she ever an apostate from the Imperialist faith. Meanwhile, in the absence of Marie Louise, it devolved upon the Queen to fill her place, so far as it The Hundred Days 129 could be filled, and to do the honours of the Palace. Though continuing to live at her own house, she repaired to the Tuileries every evening, and there, as well as at the rue Cerutti, court was paid to the reconstituted Queen by many who had been lately less assiduous in their attentions. " You were in the country this winter, madame," said one lady, " when I called several times to see your Majesty." " Yes, madame," was the Queen's reply ; but she smiled. " As for me," said another in an audible aside, " I always called her Queen, never Duchesse de Saint- Leu." A vindictive spirit was not amongst Hortense's failings, and she proved it by her successful endeavour to obtain permission for the Dowager Duchesse d'Orleans and the Duchesse de Bourbon to remain in Paris. A pension was, further, allotted to each by the intercession of the woman who was persistently charged by Royalists with being responsible for the Emperor's return. The messenger to whom her ill-judged letter to Louis XVIII. had been entrusted had wisely refrained from forwarding it to its destination, on discovering- the animus against her in the very man — one of the La Rochefoucaulds — to whom he had been on the point of consigning it. " Can you conceive such dissimulation ! " the latter had exclaimed in reference to the Queen. " Is it possible to deceive with so sweet an air ? " It would vol. 11. 9 130 Queen Hortense and her Friends have been useless to attempt to combat a prejudice thus widespread, though Hortense's attempts to remove the disabilities of Royalists were not discontinued in consequence of their distrust. c{ It always seemed that she had won a victory when she had obtained a favour for some unfortunate person." As March passed into April and April into May, Napoleon learnt that the Paris of 1 8 1 5 was not the Paris he had quitted a year earlier. It had tasted of liberty, and desired more ; it was no longer disposed to bow to the autocracy of a monarch, however great. The declara- tion made by the Council of the sovereignty of the people was charged with significance. Even trifles indicated the turn in the tide ; and the absolute deference that had, in older days, marked the bearing of subordinates had undergone a subtle change. " What, am I left like that?" the Emperor asked Lavallette, smiling yet surprised, when the latter, his business finished and feeling that he was required elsewhere, was about to quit the royal presence without waiting for dismissal ; and Lavallette, loyal as he was, secretly acknowledged that he would not have acted after this fashion a year before. Again, the desire for glory, for conquest, had given place to a dominating longing for peace — the peace declared by the Allies to be impossible so long as Napoleon was at the head of the State. The convic- tion that his sovereignty meant war, soaking gradually into the mind of the country, gave it ample food for reflection and was of a nature to cool public enthusiasm. It seems singular that when, with all Europe The Hundred Days 131 banded together against him, Napoleon can have had little leisure for domestic affairs, his brother Louis should have written to renew his demand for permission to divorce his wife. Once more it was refused, in terms, according to the Memorial de Saint-HeFene, indicating a curious oblivion of their bearing on the Emperor's own past. Divorce, he told Louis, was formally forbidden by the Family Statute ; policy, morals, and opinion were no less opposed to it. Pressed with business of all kinds as he was, the thoughts of Napoleon reverted to the past, and — in the voluntary absence of the wife by whom he had replaced Josephine — he expressed a desire to visit Malmaison, intimately connected with his happiest years of domestic life. Hortense, acquainted with his wish, shrank from the ordeal. Never after her mother's death had she returned to Josephine's favourite home. Reaching it the night before her stepfather was expected there, she faced alone the memory of past days, a profound discouragement overshadowing her spirits. " Would her mother," she questioned, " have been happy had she now been living ? Was it not those who remained who should rather be compassionated, since for them there was neither joy nor peace ? " With the Emperor, too, the past was vividly present, and who can tell how far the bitterness of remorse mingled with regret for the dead ? When house and woods had been inspected, and the homage of the civic authorities of the district had been paid, he asked to see Josephine's death-chamber. " No," he said, with unusually gentle consideration, *3 2 Queen Hortense and her Friends as the Queen rose to conduct him thither — " no, Hortense. Remain here, my daughter ; I will go alone. It would agitate you too much." Silently Hortense obeyed — her eyes were full of tears ; and Napoleon, unaccompanied, entered the room where his forsaken wife had fought her last battle far from him and alone. Returning to the salon, his eyes, too, were wet. There was, however, little leisure for the indulgence of private and sentimental regrets. If the Emperor's position was to be maintained, no means of strengthen- ing it could be neglected. The less secure his seat upon the throne, the more need to surround it with a brilliance dazzling to the public eye. A stable and settled Government may be able to disregard effect ; to authority established upon a precarious basis, every appeal to the imagination has its use, and Napoleon was not backward in testifying to his sense of the importance of ceremonial and spectacular display. On April 24 he held a review of the Guards. The scene is described by an English eye-witness. Chancing to be in Paris at the moment, Hobhouse had been accorded an entrance to the Tuileries, and from a window of the room allotted to Hortense he looked down upon the crowd assembled below, and noted the anxiety shown by the women gathered together at the Palace as the Emperor's arrival was delayed. When Napoleon at length drew near, the cry of Vive /' ' Empereur, heralding his approach, announced that all was well ; yet it was no wonder if those whose fate and future hung upon his The Hundred Days 133 single life should have trembled for his safety. For two long hours, as their great captain watched the troops march past, any assassin, observes the spectator, " unless disarmed by his face of fascination," could have shot him. Even in the eyes of a foreigner, unbiassed by nationality or race in favour of the chief actor, it was a memorable and noteworthy day ; and in Hobhouse's account of it the electric thrill of the emotion and enthusiasm charging the atmosphere is discernible. " The vast palace of Kings, the moving array before me, the deep mass of flashing arms in the distance, the crowd around, the apparatus of war and empire, all disappeared, and in the first gaze of admiration I saw nothing but Napoleon — the single individual to destroy whom the earth was rising in arms from the Tanais to the Thames." 1 One other scene stands out upon the shifting, many- coloured background of those days of restless excitement. On June 1, at the assemblage of the Champ de Mai, Napoleon distributed the eagles, badges of the Empire, to the troops. It was a fine sight, says Lavallette, regarding it with the impartial wisdom possibly taught by subsequent events, c< but it was not the whole of France, nor was sentiment, save in the crowd, sincerely in favour of the Emperor." He may have been right — the sequel goes far to prove him so ; yet it must have been difficult to look below the surface and divine the cold indifference or fermenting discontent 1 Hobhouse's Letters from Paris, vol. i. pp. 32-6. 134 Queen Hortense and her Friends underlying it ; and ears filled with the enthusiastic plaudits of the multitude may easily have been deaf to the murmurs of dissenters from the popular faith. Again Hobhouse, cool and observant, but as before not uninfected by the contagious passion of the throng, was present at the demonstration, and watched the crowded area of the theatre, the innumerable standard-bearers, the glittering eagles, the coloured banners, the purple and gold of the throne. He saw Hortense's two little sons take the seats prepared for them in the tribune, noted the Emperor's three brothers — even Lucien was there, and Louis alone absent — ranged on either side of him, arrayed in " white fancy-dresses, and looking, excepting the House of Austria," observes the Englishman, " as ill as the Princes of any legitimate house in Christendom." 1 A French spectator, General Thiebault, has also left a description of the magnificent coup d'ceil. " Though it was calculated to absorb the attention and the eye, I still seem to see Hortense sketching the imposing picture. At her side were her two sons, not less remarkable for their beauty than for their graceful hussar uniforms." 2 One more great State function, and the last. On June 6, the Chambers met and took the oath of allegi- ance — so quickly to be broken — to the Emperor, surrounded by his brothers, again in their white "fancy-dresses," his mother and Hortense near, and Labedoyere — the doomed Labedoyere — conspicuous 1 Hobhouse's Letters, vol. i. p. 408. 2 Me 'moires \ t. v. p. 338. The Hundred Days 135 by his beauty, standing behind the throne. " Si beau et si perfide," a Royalist present was overheard to observe, as her eyes rested upon the young man. The drama of those hundred days was drawing towards its close. Looking back upon them, read- ing the records left by men who shared in their excitement and who participated in the vivid life by which they were crowded, it is possible — even after a century, or close upon it — to realise the tense anxiety, the terror, and the hope marking each one of them. In the motley crowd collected in Paris, mixing as acquaintances, sometimes as friends, jostling each other in the very Palace, soldiers who had fought side by side on the same battlefields, every shade and variety of opinion was represented. There were men loyally attached to the ancient royal house, however decadent, to whom Napoleon, returned from his place of exile, was the " fantome ennemi " of Hugo's ode ; others who feared him because he was strong, and to whom the weakness of the Bourbons was their recommendation ; generals and politicians who hated, because they had betrayed, their great chief, and who could neither forgive him their disgrace nor trust him to pardon it ; thinkers who saw in him the epitome of the past greatness of France and her only hope for the future ; and lastly, some who loved him as a soldier loves his captain, as a loyalist loves his King, as man loves man and friend friend. The fate of Paris, of France, of Napoleon, and with him of Hortense and her children, was quickly to be 136 Queen Hortense and her Friends decided. Very early on the morning of Monday, June 1 2, the Emperor was to leave his capital, to return to it, in hardly more than a week, a defeated and broken-hearted man. On the night preceding his departure all the Imperial family were bidden to a dinner at the Palace, the two little Princes being like- wise brought to the Tuileries to take leave of their uncle. Regnault de Saint-Jean d'Angely has described the parting between Napoleon and the younger of them — the child destined to bear his name and wear the Imperial crown. Grave and preoccupied as he had good reason to be, the Emperor had entered his cabinet with Soult, when Louis, now seven years old, crept into the room and, drawing near, knelt down at his side, laid his head on his knees and burst into tears. Annoyed at the interruption, his uncle spoke sharply. " What is the matter, Louis ? " he asked. " Why have you come here ? What are you crying for ? " At first the child, frightened, only answered by sobs ; then, becoming quieter, " Sire," he replied, " my gouvernante has just told me that you are leaving for the war. Do not go ! — do not go ! " Why not ? the Emperor inquired, not untouched. It was not the first time, he said, that he had gone forth to fight. He would come back. The boy only wept the more. " Ces mechants allies veulent vous tuer," he sobbed. " Laissez-moi aller avec vous." Napoleon lifted the child to his knee and kissed him. Napoleon and Louis Napoleon 137 " Tenez ! Hortense," he said, calling his stepdaughter, " take my nephew away, and give a severe reprimand to his gouvernante, who has worked upon the child's feelings by her careless words," Soult had watched the scene with some emotion. Perceiving it, before consigning the boy to his mother, the Emperor turned to the Marshal. " Kiss him," he said. " He will have a good heart and a fine soul ; ... he may be the hope of my race." l A few hours more and he was gone, leaving those who remained behind to wait, in fear and trembling, for the result of this ultimate venture. The first news from the army was good. On June 1 7 and 1 8 tidings were brought of French successes ; Hortense was overwhelmed with congratulations ; and, reassured as to any immediate cause for anxiety, pur- sued her customary way of life. On the 20th a few of her acquaintances had collected at the rue Cerutti to hear Benjamin Constant read aloud a new work, and the audience were paying the tribute of tears to his literary powers, when the Queen was called from the room to receive the Due de Rovigo, come to inquire if she had fresh tidings from the army, and to mention that, though apparently without foundation, sinister rumours were abroad. In the evening the usual gathering took place in her salon, and conversation was going on gaily when the Queen was once more summoned to a private interview. It was not till some time later that she returned, unchanged in mien and 1 Quoted in La Jeunesse de Napoleon III. (Pol.), pp. 7-8. i3 8 Queen Hortense and her Friends bearing, though anxious eyes noted that she was paler than before. The news that had been brought was of the battle of Waterloo. That evening Hortense played her part well and bravely, aided, it may be, by the knowledge that there were those present to whom the intelligence of the Imperial calamity would have occasioned nothing but joy. Her guests, earlier than usual, were dismissed in ignorance of what had befallen. Yet the Queen indulged in no illusions as to the situation. " For the Emperor all is at an end," she said. " It is France for whom thought must be taken. They received him with acclamation, they had need of his powerful genius, they expected triumphs, good fortune, from it. He has been unfortunate ; all the world will forsake him." Napoleon arrived a few hours after intelligence of the lost battle had reached the capital. Already the whisper of a second abdication had been heard. Labedoyere, at Hortense's house, vehemently deprecated the possibility. " Would you rather," the Queen answered mournfully, " that the Chambers should depose him ? " By the next day the step condemned so strongly by a large portion of the army had been taken ; and the King of Rome had been proclaimed Emperor in his father's place. There was no longer any reason that Napoleon should remain in Paris, and he expressed his wish to remove to Malmaison, now the property of Eugene. Hortense made ready to go thither to receive him, her intention meeting with strong protests from Labedoy&re 139 her friends. The step, they reasoned, would serve to give colour to the suspicions entertained concerning her, and would be compromising in the eyes of the authorities. That it can have been conceivable that his stepdaughter should have deserted the fallen Emperor in his hour of need is a measure of the prevailing condition of panic, and to praise her for her deter- mination to share his fate would be to do her the dishonour of implying that any other line of conduct was possible. She cut short the arguments directed against it. If there was danger, the more cause that she should be associated in it, she said. It was a duty ; and the greater the risks run by the Emperor, the happier she was in proving her devotion to him. Before she left Paris, Labedoyere visited the rue Cerutti, fresh from the Assembly, where, as a member of the Upper Chamber, he had indignantly reminded those ranged openly or secretly against their master of the oath of fidelity so recently taken. " Are we never to hear in this place," he had cried passionately, " anything but perjuries? " If the Queen, according to her custom, blamed his violence, it can have been but faintly ; and he remained to dine with her. As the guests took their places, it was observed that they numbered thirteen. " Have no fear," answered Labedoyere, overhearing what was said. " From the turn matters are taking, it is very likely that it will be I who will be the thirteenth missing from the roll-call by the time that a year has passed by." i4° Queen Hortense and her Friends The choice of Fouche as President of the Provisional Government was an ominous one. Napoleon had expressed his opinion of the Minister when he observed to Meneval, on the eve of leaving France, that he ought to have had him hanged. " I leave that care," he added grimly, "to the Bourbons." * Fouche was not the only traitor. The Chambers, and not a few of the Generals and Marshals of the army, were anxious to be dissociated from their fallen chief, and to make terms with " nos amis, les ennemis." Worse than all, the Emperor's spirit was, for the moment, broken. On the 24th he quitted his capital, carrying out his intention of repairing to Malmaison ; where Hortense, having again placed her sons in concealment, was waiting to play for the last time the part of daughter to the man who had been to her as a father. Whatever might be the risk to herself or even to her children, she did not shrink from running it, and the boys were brought from their hiding-place to take a last leave or their uncle. Other farewells were to take place at Malmaison. Napoleon was to bid a final adieu to the memories clustering around its walls and gardens, and serving as a setting to the figure of the woman he had once adored. " I seem," he said, " to see her come from the garden walk, and gather one of the flowers she loved so well. She was more full of graces than any woman I ever saw." 1 Memoir es de Meneval^ t. iii. p. 554. Hortense parts from Napoleon 14 l Time was short, whether for memory or for regret. It had been arranged that the Emperor should start for Rochefort, and, with or without his consent, the Provisional Government were determined that his departure should not be delayed. So eager, indeed, were they to be relieved at the earliest possible date of the responsibility implied by his neighbourhood, that when Flahault, as his aide-de-camp, applied to Davoust, Minister of War, for a respite of twenty-four hours, it was refused in terms of contemptuous insult. "Tell your Bonaparte," answered the Marshal, " that if he does not set out at once, I will go in person to compel him to do so." Flahault might break his sword, resign his com- mission, and quit the Minister's presence declaring that he would consider it for the future a dishonour to serve under him — the Emperor had no alternative but to obey. At Malmaison, the home of the mother who had been the link uniting them, Hortense's parting with Napoleon fitly took place. She had acted with courage and generosity ; and her last act was to induce him, not without difficulty, to accept her diamond necklace, sewn up in a black band, to be carried concealed about his person, in order that, in case of necessity, funds might be at hand. Thus terminated a relation- ship which had lasted for close upon twenty years. CHAPTER XXII 1815—1816 Hortense's plans in question — The army offered as her escort — Labedoyere in Paris — Alexander's changed attitude — Hortense's journey to Geneva — Difficulties in finding a shelter — Aix — Parting with Prince Napoleon — The winter at Constance — Visit of Prince Eugene — The Queen returns it — The Landmann's proposal of marriage — Louis Bonaparte's letter. THE question for Hortense, as for France, was, Napoleon gone, what was to follow? On the future of the country opinions varied. Some cherished the hope that the nation would be permitted by the allied Powers to select its ruler, and that the dis- credited Bourbons would not again be forced upon it. Others, mere clearsighted, foresaw that the projected surrender of the capital by the Provisional Government, without a blow struck in its defence, would seal the fate of the country, and that it would be disposed of at the will of the conquerors. Some few had clung, for a brief space, with vehement persistency, to the possibility of resistance. It was patent to all that the Emperor's departure had deprived any such scheme of its forlorn hope of success, and those faithful to Napoleon turned their thoughts to Hortense and her children, exposed to 143 Hortense's Plans H3 danger in Paris. On July i a certain number of officers visited the rue Cerutti, and, representing to the Queen that, by the arrangements agreed upon, the French troops were to evacuate the capital and to leave it in the possession of the Bourbonists and their foreign allies, proposed that she, with her sons, should withdraw with the army, proud to serve as her escort until a place of security should be reached. To accept the offer would have been to lend colour to every report in circulation as to Hortense's propensity to political intrigue, and to strengthen the conviction that she was a standing menace to peace. Though not un- grateful, she at once negatived the suggestion. She must, she said, confront the fate in store for her. She no longer occupied any position justifying her in making use of the services of the army, or in intermingling her private destiny with the destiny of France. Had she been the sovereign, it would have been a different matter. Under the present circum- stances, it was her intention to leave the country for ever, so soon as passports could be obtained. Lovers of France could have little desire to witness her humiliation. On July 3 a formal convention was concluded between the Allies and the Provisional Government ; on the 6th the foreign Powers took, posses- sion of the capital ; and two days later Louis XVIII. made his state entry into the city from which he had fled three months earlier, surrounded by the nobles who were the only portion of the nation hailing his return with genuine satisfaction. His train was 144 Queen Hortense and her Friends swelled by not a few of the Marshals whose laurels had been won under the great captain now gone for ever. As Hortense sat that evening in the little garden of the secret retreat whither, in view of the open hostility displayed towards her, she had been persuaded to retire with her children, Mademoiselle Cochelet re- counted the events of the day, roused to something like impatience by the calm, resembling indifference, dis- played by her hearer. " You listen as if it was the history of the last century that I was telling you," she exclaimed.