"Sire, my governess has told me that you are going away to the war. Oh! do not go! do not go!"
The Emperor, much moved, passed his fingers through the clustering ringlets of the child, and said, tenderly,
"My child, this is not the first time that I have been to the war. Why are you so afflicted? Do not fear for me. I shall soon come back again."
"Oh! my dear uncle," exclaimed the child, weeping convulsively; "those wicked Allies wish to kill you. Let me go with you, dear uncle, let me go with you!"
The Emperor made no reply, but, taking Louis Napoleon upon his knee, pressed him to his heart with much apparent emotion. Then calling Hortense, the mother of the child, he said to her:
"Take away my nephew, Hortense, and reprimand his governess, who, by her inconsiderate words, has so deeply excited his sympathies."
Then, after a few affectionate words addressed to the young prince, he was about to hand him to his mother, when he perceived that Marshal Soult was much moved by the scene.
"Embrace the child, Marshal," said the Emperor; "he has a warm heart and a noble soul. Perhaps he is to be the hope of my race!"
Hortense meets Napoleon.
Napoleon returned from the disaster at Waterloo with all his hopes blighted. Hortense hastened to meet him, and to unite her fate with his. "It is my duty," she said. "The Emperor has always treated me as his child, and I will try, in return, to be his devoted and grateful daughter." In conversation with Hortense, Napoleon remarked: "Give myself up to Austria! Never. She has seized upon my wife and my son. Give myself up to Russia! That would be to a single man. But to give myself up to England, that would be to throw myself upon a people." His friends assured him that, though he might rely upon the honor of the British people, he could not trust to the British Government. Hortense repaired to Malmaison with her two sons, where the Emperor soon rejoined her. "She restrained her own tears," writes Baron Fleury, "reminding us, with the wisdom of a philosopher and the sweetness of an angel, that we ought to surmount our sorrows and regrets, and submit with docility to the decrees of Providence."