Madame de Stael soon began to long ardently to return to France, which
she loved all the more for having been compelled to leave it. She
therefore used all the influence she possessed in Paris, to obtain from
Napoleon permission to return to her home, but the emperor remained

music and drums, his
despair and anger had become so great that she had been forced to resort
to severe means, and make him stand in the corner behind a chair. I
begged for the young king's pardon; I showed him the cup, and explained

daughter of the "exile." Among the flowers the lovely Hortense continued
to live on, and Gavarni, the great poet of the floral realm, has reared
to her, as Hortensia, the Flower Queen, an enchanting monument, in his
"_Fleurs Animees_." Upon a mound of Hortensias rests the image of ...

emperor's command; on the 1st of April, 1810, the day
of the union of Marie Louise with the emperor, she, together with his
sisters, bore the train of the new empress. She alone did this without
making any resistance, while it was only after the most violent

On the 24th of January, Napoleon left Paris, in order to repair to the
army. The empress, whom he had made regent, giving her a council,
consisting of his brothers and the ministers, as a support--the empress
had taken leave of him in a flood of tears, and Queen Hortense, who had

an appeal that Louis Bonaparte now returned from Graetz to Paris; he
had heard the ominous tones of the voice that threatened the emperor,
and wished to be at his side in the hour of danger.
It was not as the wife, but in the spirit of a Frenchwoman and a queen,

the star of her hero was ascending, brighter and
brighter in its effulgence, above the horizon; the name of Bonaparte was
echoing in louder and louder volume through the world, and filling all
Europe with a sort of awe-inspired fear and trembling, as the sea

was restless in his efforts to provide for his
country, and to merit the love and confidence which his subjects
bestowed on him.
His wife also exerted herself to do justice to her new and glittering

dawned. In the first carriage sat the duchess, with a
lady companion, and in front, on the box, her son, as a servant, at the
side of the postilion; in the second carriage her maid, behind her the
young Marquis Zappi.

latter go earnestly desired that I might have a child to inherit my
name. But it is still spoken of, is it not?"
"Yes, general, it is still spoken of; and I confess that I did not
believe this calumny would be so long continued."

In the generosity and kindliness of her heart, she forgave them all;
and, instead of nursing a feeling of bitterness, she pitied them! She
had done with the outer world! Arenenberg was now her world--Arenenberg,
in which her last and only happiness, her son, the heir of the imperial

be laid to rest in the
vault of St. Denis. Now, after so many years, she descended into it
living and had hardly a right to visit it.
But there was another grave, another monument to her memories, beside

before the three consuls transferred their quarters to the
Tuileries, the royal palace had to be transformed to a residence worthy
of the representatives of the republic. So, the first move made was to
set up a handsome bust of the elder Brutus--a war-trophy of Bonaparte's,

to the Emperor Napoleon. He at first
thought I was bringing him the letter he had solicited for his emperor;
but he well knows how to appreciate all that is noble and great, and as
he possesses the most admirable tact, he thinks the letter cannot well

decree of exile fulminated by the Bourbons against the Bonapartes.
Louis Philippe had accepted this condition; and the Bonapartes, whose
only crime was that they were the brothers and relatives of the deceased
emperor, before whom not only France, but all the princes of Europe, had