A painting of this child was sent to the emperor at Moscow, and another followed Napoleon to Saint-Helena.
The father of this little martyr-innocent had scarcely time to realise his existence, except as a heavenly vision appearing for a brief space in this world. He saw him after the Russian campaign, after the Dresden campaign, and never again save in the dreams and hallucinations of his solitude and his despair.
His mother,—as disastrous an influence on the fortunes of France as all other daughters of the Cæsars: Anne of Austria, Marie Antoinette, and now Marie Louise—stood behind him, but her face left an indistinct and insipid impression on my mind, and her features are lost in the mists of time; I can only remember her fair hair fastened up on the top of her head by a diamond comb.
They swore fealty to this poor child, and, if the flourish of trumpets and the shouting had ceased for a moment, if the murmur of Paris with her million peoples had been stilled, the booming of the enemy's guns could have been heard thundering only two leagues away from the place where they were making all that futile cheering, and swearing those hollow vows!
In his name it was promised that he should never quit Paris; that he, Marie Louise his mother, and King Joseph his uncle, should die among the French people. And the carriages that were to bear them away next day were standing ready with the horses harnessed, in the courtyards of the Tuileries!
So it fell out that the King of Rome left the château of Catherine of Médicis the following morning—that castle which survived days like the 20th June, the 10th August, the 29th July, and the 24th February. On the morrow he left to his successors, the Duke of Bordeaux and the Count of Paris, the royal cradle presented by the Hôtel-de-Ville; they too—both great-nephews of Louis XVI.—were destined not to rest in it any longer than he had done.
This, then, was the flash of light and poetry still present to my memory.
The second recollection was of the number of girls of the town who, at that period, called out from the windows of their apartments to passers-by their licentious invitations with gestures obscene.
Every few moments I would turn round and say to Crétet and Mademoiselle Adélaïde, "They are calling to us." Both laughed, and I wondered why they laughed.