Queen Hortense: A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era

by L. Mühlbach

"My children," says Hortense, in her memoirs, "my children, who had been cruelly persecuted by all the courts, even by those who owed every thing to the emperor, their uncle, loved their country with whole-souled devotion. Their eyes ever turned toward France, busied with the consideration of institutions that might make France happy; they knew that the people alone were their friends; the hatred of the great had taught them this. To conform to the will of the people with resignation was to them a duty, but to devote themselves to the service of France was their hearts' dearest wish. It was for this reason that my son had written to Louis Philippe hoping to be permitted to make himself useful to his country in some way."

Hortense advised against this venturous step; and when she saw how much this grieved her son, and observed his eyes filling with tears, she begged that he would at least wait and reflect, and postpone his decision until their arrival in Paris.

Louis Napoleon yielded to his mother's entreaties, and in silence and sadness these two pilgrims continued their wandering through the country and cities, that to Hortense seemed transformed into luminous monuments of departed glory.

In Fontainebleau Hortense showed her son the palace that had been the witness of the greatest triumphs and also of the most bitter grief of his great uncle. Leaning on his arm, her countenance concealed by a heavy black veil, to prevent any one from recognizing her, Hortense walked through the chambers, in which she had once been installed as a mighty and honored queen, and in which she was now covertly an exile menaced with death. The servants who conducted her were the same who had been there during the days of the emperor! Hortense recognized them at once; she did not dare to make herself known, but she nevertheless felt that she, too, was remembered there. She saw this in the expression with which the servants opened the rooms she had once occupied; she heard it in the tone in which they mentioned her name! Every thing in this palace had remained as it then was! There was the same furniture in the rooms which the imperial family had occupied after the peace of Tilsit, and in which they had given such brilliant fêtes, and received the homage of so many of the kings and princes of Europe, all of whom had come to implore the assistance and favor of their vanquisher! There were also the apartments which the pope had occupied, once voluntarily; subsequently, under compulsion. Alas! and there was also the little cabinet, in which the emperor, the once so mighty and illustrious ruler of Europe, had abdicated the crown which his victories, his good deeds, and the love of the French people, had placed on his head! And, finally, there were also the chapel and the altar before which the Emperor Napoleon had stood god-father to his nephew Louis Napoleon! All was still as it had been, except that the garden, that Hortense and her mother had laid out and planted, had grown more luxuriant, and now sang to the poor banished pilgrim with its rustling tree-tops a melancholy song of her long separation from her home!

The sorrowing couple wandered on, and at last arrived before the gates of Paris. At this moment, Hortense was a Frenchwoman, a Parisian only, and, forgetting every thing else, all her grief and sufferings, she sought only to do the honors of Paris for her son. She ordered the coachman to drive them through the boulevards to the Rue de la Paix, and then to stop at the first good hotel. This was the same way over which she had passed sixteen years before, escorted by an Austrian officer. Then she had quitted Paris by night, driven out in a measure by the allies, who so much feared her, the poor, weak woman with her little boys, that troops had been placed under arms at regular intervals on her way, in order, as it was given out, to secure her safe passage. Now, after sixteen years, Hortense returned to Paris by the same route, still exiled and homeless, at her side the son who was not only menaced by the French decree of banishment, but also by the Austrian edict of proscription.

But yet she was once more in Paris, once more at home, and she wept with joy at beholding once more the streets and places about which the memories of her youth clustered.

By a strange chance, it was at the "Hôtel de Hollande" that the former Queen of Holland descended from her carriage, and took up her residence, holding thus, in a measure, her entrance into Paris, under the fluttering banner of the past. In the little Hôtel de Hollande, the Queen of Holland took possession of the apartments of the first floor, which commanded a view of the boulevard and the column of the Place Vendôme. "Say to the column on the Place Vendôme that I am dying, because I cannot embrace it," the Duke de Reichstadt once wrote in the album of a French nobleman, who had succeeded, in spite of the watchful spies, who surrounded the emperor's son, in speaking to him of his father and of the empire. This happiness, vainly longed for by the emperor's son, was at least to be enjoyed by his nephew.

Louis Napoleon could venture to show himself. In Paris he was entirely unknown, and could therefore be betrayed by no one. He could go down into the square and hasten to the foot of the Vendôme column, and in thought at least kneel down before the monument that immortalized the renown and grandeur of the emperor. Hortense remained behind, in order to perform a sacred duty, imposed on her, as she believed, by her own honor and dignity.

She was not willing to sojourn secretly, like a fugitive criminal, in the city that in the exercise of its free will had chosen itself a king, but not a Bonaparte. She was not willing to partake of French hospitality and enjoy French protection by stealth; she was not willing to go about in disguise, deceiving the government with a false pass and a borrowed name. She had the courage of truth and sincerity, and she resolved to say to the King of France that she had come, not to defy his decree of banishment by her presence, not for the purpose of intriguing against his new crown, by arousing the Bonapartists from their sleep of forgetfulness by her appearance, but solely because there was no other means of saving her son; because she must pass through France with him in order to reach England.

Revolution, which so strangely intermingles the destinies of men, had surrounded the new king almost entirely with the friends and servants of the emperor and of the Duchess of St. Leu. But, in order not to excite suspicion against these, Hortense now addressed herself to him with whom she had the slightest acquaintance and whose devotion to the Orleans family was too well known to be called in doubt by her undertaking. Hortense therefore addressed herself to M. de Houdetot, the adjutant of the king, or rather, she caused her friend Mlle. de Massuyer to write to him. She was instructed to inform the count that she had come to Paris with an English family, and was the bearer of a commission from the Duchess of St. Leu to M. de Houdetot.