DEATH OF THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE.
Since Napoleon's star had grown pale, and himself compelled to leave France as an exile, life seemed to Josephine also to be enveloped in a gloomy mourning-veil; she felt that her sun had set, and night come upon her. But she kept this feeling a profound secret, and never allowed a complaint or sigh to betray her grief to her tenderly-beloved daughter. Her complaints were for the emperor, her sighs for the fate of her children and grandchildren. She seemed to have forgotten herself; her wishes were all for others. With the pleasing address and grace of which age could not deprive her, she did the honors of her house to the foreign sovereigns in Malmaison, and assumed a forced composure, in which her soul had no share. She would have preferred to withdraw with her grief to the retirement of her chambers, but she thought it her duty to make this sacrifice for the welfare of her daughter and grandchildren; and she, the loving mother, could do what Hortense's pride would not permit--she could entreat the Emperor Alexander to take pity on her daughter's fate.
When, therefore, the czar had finally succeeded in establishing her future, and had received the letters-patent which secured to the queen the duchy of St. Leu Alexander hastened to Malmaison, to communicate this good news to the Empress Josephine.
She did not reward him with words, but with gushing tears, as she extended to the emperor both hands. She then begged him, with touching earnestness, to accept from her a remembrance of this hour.
The emperor pointed to a cup, on which a portrait of Josephine was painted, and begged her to give him that.
"No, sire," said she; "such a cup can be bought anywhere. But I wish to give you something that cannot be had anywhere else in the world, and that will sometimes remind you of me. It is a present that I received from Pope Pius VII., on the day of my coronation. I present you with this token in commemoration of the day on which you bring my daughter the ducal crown, in order that it may remind you of mother and daughter alike--of the dethroned empress and of the dethroned queen."
This present, which she now extended to the emperor with a charming smile, was an antique cameo, of immense size, and so wondrously-well executed that the empress could well say its equal was nowhere to be found in the world. On this cameo the heads of Alexander the Great and of his father, Philip of Macedonia, were portrayed, side by side; and the beauty of the workmanship, as well as the size of the stone, made this cameo a gem of inestimable value. And for this reason the emperor at first refused to accept this truly imperial present, and he yielded only when he perceived that his refusal would offend the empress, who seemed to be more pale and irritable than usual.
Josephine was, in reality, sadder than usual, for the royal family of the Bourbons had on this day caused her heart to bleed anew. Josephine had read an article in the journals, in which, in the most contemptuous and cruel terms, attention was called to the fact that the eldest son of the Queen of Holland had been interred in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, and that the Minister Blacas had now issued an order to have the coffin removed from its resting-place, and buried in an ordinary grave-yard.
Hortense, who had read this article, had hastened to Paris, in order that she might herself superintend the removal of the body of her beloved child from Notre-Dame, and its reinterment in the Church of St. Leu.
While she informed the emperor of this new insult, Josephine's whole figure trembled, and a deathly pallor overspread her countenance. Josephine lacked the strength to conceal her sufferings to-day, for the first time; Hortense was not present, and she might therefore, for once, allow herself the sad consolation of showing, bereft of its smile and its paint, the pale countenance, which death had already lightly touched.
"Your majesty is ill!" exclaimed the emperor, in dismay.
With a smile, which brought tears to Alexander's eyes, Josephine pointed to her breast, and whispered: "Sire, I have received the death-wound here!"
Yes, she was right; she had received a fatal wound, and her heart was bleeding to death.
Terrified by Josephine's condition, the emperor hurried to Paris, and sent his own physician to inquire after her condition. When the latter returned, he informed the emperor that Josephine was dangerously ill, and that he did not believe her recovery possible.
He was right, and Alexander saw the empress no more! Hortense and Eugene, her two children, held a sad watch at their mother's bedside throughout the night. The best physicians were called in, but these only confirmed what the Russian physician had said--the condition of the empress was hopeless. Her heart was broken! With strong hands, she had held it together as long as her children's welfare seemed to require. Now that Hortense's future was also assured--now that she knew that her grandchildren would, at least, not be compelled to wander about the world as exiled beggars--now Josephine withdrew her hands from her heart, and suffered it to bleed to death.
On the 29th of May, 1814, the Empress Josephine died, of an illness which had apparently lasted but two days. Hortense had not heard her mother's death-sigh; when she re-entered the room with Eugene, after her mother had received the sacrament from Abbé Bertrand--when she saw her mother, with outstretched arms, vainly endeavoring to speak to them--Hortense fainted away at her mother's bedside, and the empress breathed her last sigh in Eugene's arms.
The intelligence of the death of the empress affected Paris profoundly. It seemed as though all the city had forgotten for a day that Napoleon was no longer the ruler of France, and that the Bourbons had reascended the throne of their fathers. All Paris mourned; for the hearts of the French people had not forgotten this woman, who had so long been their benefactress, and of whom each could relate the most touching traits of goodness, of generosity, and of gentleness.
Josephine, now that she was dead, was once more enthroned as empress in the hearts of the French people and thousands poured into Malmaison, to pay their last homage to their deceased empress. Even the Faubourg St. Germain mourned with the Parisians; these haughty and insolent royalists, who had returned with the Bourbons, may, perhaps, for a moment, have recalled the benefits which the empress had shown them, when, as the mighty Empress of France, she employed the half of her allowance for the relief of the emigrants. They had returned without thinking of the thanks they owed their forgotten benefactress; now that she was dead, they no longer withheld the tribute of their admiration.
"Alas!" exclaimed Madame Ducayla, the king's friend; "alas! how interesting a lady was this Josephine! What tact, what goodness! How well she knew how to do everything! And she shows her tact and good taste to the last, in dying just at this moment!"
Immediately after the death of the empress, Eugene had conducted the queen from the death-chamber, almost violently, and had taken her and her children to St. Leu. The body of the empress was interred in Malmaison, and followed to the grave by her two grandchildren only. Grief had made both of her children severely ill, and the little princes were followed, not by her relatives, but by the Russian General Von Sacken, who represented the emperor, and by the equipages of all those kings and princes who had helped to hurl the Bonapartes from their thrones and restore the Bourbons.
The emperor passed his last night in France, before leaving for England, at St. Leu; and, on taking leave of Eugene and Hortense, who, at the earnest solicitation of her brother, had left her room for the first time since her mother's death, for the purpose of seeing the emperor, he assured them of his unchangeable friendship and attachment. As he knew that, among those whom he strongly suspected, Pozzo di Borgo[29], the ambassador he left behind him in Paris, was an irreconcilable enemy of Napoleon and his family, he had assigned to duty at the embassy as attaché, a gentleman selected for this purpose by Louise de Cochelet--M. de Boutiakin--and it was through him that the emperor directed that the letters and wishes of the queen and of her faithful young lady friend should be received and answered.
[29] Upon receiving the intelligence of the death of the emperor at St. Helena, Pozzo di Borgo said: "I did not kill him, but I threw the last handful of earth on his coffin, in order that he might never rise again."
A few days later Eugene also left St. Leu and his sister Hortense, to return, with the King of Bavaria, to his new home in Germany. It was not until his departure that Hortense felt to its full extent the gloomy loneliness and dreary solitude by which she was surrounded. She had not wept over the downfall of all the grandeur and magnificence by which she had formerly been surrounded; she had not complained when the whirlwind of fate hurled to the ground the crowns of all her relations, but had bowed her head to the storm with resignation, and smiled at the loss of her royal titles; but now, as she stood in her parlor at St. Leu and saw none about her but her two little boys and the few ladies who still remained faithful--now, Hortense wept.
"Alas!" she cried, bursting into tears, as she extended her hand to Louise de Cochelet, "alas! my courage is at an end! My mother is dead, my brother has left me, the Emperor Alexander will soon forget his promised protection, and I alone must contend, with my two children, against all the annoyances and enmities to which the name I bear will subject me! I fear I shall live to regret that I allowed myself to be persuaded to abandon my former plan. Will the love I bear my country recompense me for the torments which are in store for me?"
The queen's dark forebodings were to be only too fully realized. In the great and solemn hour of misfortune, Fate lifts to mortal vision the veil that conceals the future, and, like the Trojan prophetess, we see the impending evil, powerless to avert it.