"Will she consent?"
"She will have to consent, Bourrienne."
Duroc came in at a late hour that evening, and Bourrienne told him, word for word, the ultimatum of the first consul.
Duroc listened to him attentively; but, as Bourrienne went on with his communication, his countenance grew darker and darker.
"If such be the case," he exclaimed at last, when Bourrienne had got through, "if Bonaparte will do nothing more than that for his son-in-law, I must forego a marriage with Hortense, however painful it may be to do so: and then, instead of going to Toulon, I can remain in Paris." And, as he ceased to speak, Duroc took up his hat, without a trace of excitement or concern, and departed.
That same evening, Josephine received from her husband his full consent to the marriage of her daughter to Louis Bonaparte.
On that very evening, too, Josephine informed her daughter that Duroc had not withstood the test, and that he had now relinquished her, through ambition, as, through ambition, he had previously feigned to love her.
Hortense gazed at her mother with tearless eyes. She had not a word of complaint or reproach to utter; she was conscious merely that a thunder-bolt had just fallen, and had forever dashed to atoms her love, her hopes, her future, and her happiness.
But she no longer had the strength and the will to escape the evil that had flung its meshes around her; she submitted meekly to it. She had been betrayed by love itself; and what cared she now for her future, her embittered, bloomless, scentless life, when he had deceived her --he, the only one whom she had loved?
The next morning Hortense stepped, self-possessed and smiling, into Josephine's private cabinet, and declared that she was ready to fulfil her mother's wishes and marry Louis Bonaparte.