After these came the great officers of the imperial crown, and many personages of princely rank not related by kindred.
So mournful a ceremony was not regarded in the light of a spectacle, and even the elements accorded with the nature of the scene. There was no sun to flash from the polished helmets of the Lancers, or linger on the gold of the splendidly mounted Horse-Artillery.
“It was an unusual and impressive sight to see that strangely and variously composed line of soldiers on horseback, and priests and mourners on foot, moving slowly along the serpentine road across the great, uneven plain of the common, with thousands of spectators stationary on either hand.”
To those who thought of the widowed, childless empress in her lonely house, and knew that the chief mourners were princes, and that the queen was watching the procession from her black tribune, unless she had left it to console the sorrowing mother, the sight was much more than impressive.
“The tragic elements which prevailed at the death of the prince, the inexpressible desolation of the imperial mother, the lessons of mutability in human affairs which the case enforced upon the mind, the remembrance of the virtues of the departed young man, and the tale of broken hopes, baffled aspirations, and defeated purposes, which the circumstances so clearly exhibited, preoccupied the thoughts and feelings of the mourners, and shut off for the time being all interest in the mere external traits of the scene. The realities to which it pointed stood out so clearly from the outward semblances in which they were pictured, that the latter were forgotten, and the overpowering force of the former were exclusively recognized.
“Seldom in recent times has any public ceremonial so closely touched the hearts of those who took part in it.”
And now in the little Roman Catholic church at Chiselhurst, by the side of the emperor his father, lies all that was mortal of Napoleon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph, Prince Imperial.
Requiescat in pace.
Under the elms at Chiselhurst, at the close of a mild spring afternoon, we may see a lady walking. Her figure, once so straight and graceful, is slightly bowed with age, and her fast-whitening hair is covered by a widow’s cap. And as she turns toward us her sad face, still retaining the traces of its former loveliness, we recognize her whom we have seen seated, amid the pomp and pageantry of a court, upon the throne at the Tuileries Palace, and flying with her scanty escort through the galleries of the Louvre,—Eugénie de Montijo, Comtesse de Téba, the once brilliant empress of the French.