The celebrated Duchess of Abrantes, wife of Marshal Junot, sent her Memoirs to King Joseph by the hands of M. Presle. The following extracts from the letter of the duchess to M. Presle shows the enthusiastic attachment which Joseph won from his friends. The letter is dated Paris, 1833.
Letter from the Duchess of Abrantes.
"Will you be so good, sir, as to have the kindness to take charge of the book which I send with this, and also of the letter which I address to his Majesty, King Joseph? I earnestly desire that both should be transmitted to him as promptly as possible. I very much wish, sir, I could have the pleasure of seeing you. My attachment for King Joseph is so profound and so true, of such long-standing, so established upon bases which can never crumble, that I would give days of my life to talk a moment with persons loving him as I do, and speaking to me as I speak of him and think of him. As for me, to see him for one moment would be now the fulfillment of the most ardent of my wishes.
"With these feelings, you will perceive, sir, how happy I shall be to have him soon receive this letter, which I entrust to you. It contains my wishes for the new year. And I can truly say that there is not another heart in France more sincerely devoted to his happiness—his true happiness and his glory. Ah! sir, I assure him that in France there is one being who is warmly attached, sincerely devoted to him, as are all hers. My children have been cradled in the name of Napoleon, and that without concealment. The misfortune of their father has been an additional tie to attach them to the memory of the Emperor, and to all those who bear his revered name. The bust of the Emperor is in my alcove, by the side of the font in which I place my lustral water. There I every morning and evening repeat my prayers. Why should I not say this? I do it because my love for my country constrains me to fall upon my knees before that name which constituted its glory and its happiness for fifteen years."
Restoration of Napoleon's Statue to the Column of Austerlitz.
On the 28th of July, 1833, the Louis Philippe Government, in reluctant concession to the almost universal voice of the French people, restored the statue of Napoleon to the Column of Austerlitz, in the Place Vendôme. It is scarcely too much to say that as that statue rose to its proud eminence, the whole French nation raised a shout of joy. A Parisian journal, The Tribune, intending perhaps to reflect upon the Government, expressed surprise in not seeing a single member of the Bonaparte family shaking the dust of exile from his feet, and coming, in the broad light of July, claiming a "just reparation." Joseph wrote to the editor from London a letter containing the following sentiments:
"I have read in your journal of July 29th the article in which you give an account of the solemnity which took place on the 28th at the foot of the Column of Austerlitz, upon the inauguration of the statue of the Emperor Napoleon. You attribute the absence of his brothers to very strange sentiments. Are you ignorant, then, that an iniquitous law, dictated by the enemies of France to the elder branch of the Bourbons, excluded these brothers, out of hatred to the name of Napoleon? Would you wish that, in defiance of a law which the National Majesty has not yet repealed, we should bear the brands of discord into our country at the moment when it re-erects the statue of our brother? Every thing for the nation, was the motto of our brother. It shall be ours also.
"Instead of speaking, as a hostile journal would have done, in casting the blame upon patriots proscribed, who wander over the world the victims of the enemies of their country, would it not have exhibited more of courage and of justice on your part, sir, to recall to the electors of France that Napoleon has a mother who languishes upon a foreign soil, without it being possible for her children to speak to her a last adieu? She shares with three generations of her kindred, including sixty French, the rigors of an exile of twenty years. They are guilty of no other crime than that of being the relatives of a man whose statue is re-erected by national decree.
"The name of Napoleon will never be the banner of civil discord. Twice he withdrew from France, that he might not be the pretext for the infliction of calamities upon his country. Such are the doctrines which Napoleon has bequeathed to his family. It is because the French people know well that his pretended despotism was but a dictatorship, rendered necessary by the wars which his enemies waged against him, that his memory remains popular. Is it just, is it honorable that his family should still be condemned to endure the anguish of exile, and to hear even his ancient enemies reproach the French with the injustice of their proscription?"