King Charles IV. reached Bayonne on the 1st of May, accompanied by his wife, their youngest son, the daughter of the Prince of the Peace, and the Queen of Etruria and her son. Shortly afterward Don Antonio arrived also; he had been obliged to leave the Junta and to join his relatives.
CONCLUSION
HE Memoirs of my grandmother came to an end here, and general regret will, no doubt, be felt that she was prevented by death from continuing them, at any rate so far as the divorce from the Emperor, which, from the very beginning, hangs threateningly over the head of the fascinating, lovable, and yet somewhat uninteresting Josephine. No one can supply what is wanting here; even the correspondence of the author affords little political information respecting the succeeding period, and during the latter part of her life she seldom spoke of what she had witnessed or endured. My father entertained at times the idea of continuing her narrative, by putting together what he had heard from his parents, anecdotes of expressions of their opinions in the last days of the Empire, and what he himself knew concerning their lives. He did not carry out his plan in its entirety, nor did he leave anything on the subject complete. His notes, however, seem to me to be valuable, and give the ending of the great drama which has been described in the foregoing pages. It will be interesting to read them as a continuation of the Memoirs, which they complete, although he has recorded his opinions concerning the latter days of the Empire, and the period when he himself entered political life, in a more extensive work. His political views and clear definition of the conduct of officials and of citizens in times of difficulty deserves to be made known. I have added this chapter to the Memoirs, and published the notes of which I speak in their original unstudied form, confining myself to the slight modifications necessary to make the narrative succinct and clear.
The Spanish sovereigns arrived at Bayonne in May, 1808. The Emperor dispatched them to Fontainebleau, and sent Ferdinand VII. to Valençay, an estate belonging to M. de Talleyrand. Then he himself returned, after having traveled through the southern and western departments, and made a political journey into La Vendée, where his presence produced a great effect. He reached Paris about the middle of August. Count de Rémusat writes:
“My father, who was then First Chamberlain, was appointed to receive the Spanish Bourbons at Fontainebleau. He accomplished his task with the attention and courtesy habitual to him. Although on his return he gave us an account which conveyed no exalted idea of the King, the Queen, or the Prince of the Peace, who accompanied them, he had treated these dethroned Princes with the respect due to rank and misfortune. It would seem that some of the other Court officials had behaved in a different fashion, rather from ignorance than from ill feeling. Charles IV. noticed this, and said, ‘Rémusat, at any rate, knows that I am a Bourbon.’
“M. de Talleyrand happened to be actually staying at Valençay when the Emperor sent him orders to proceed thither, with an evident intention of committing him to the Spanish affair, to receive the three Infantes. He was not altogether pleased with the task, nor on his return did he refrain from sarcastic remarks concerning these strange descendants of Louis XIV. He used to tell us that they bought children’s toys at all the booths at the neighboring fairs, and when a poor person begged an alms of them they would give him a doll. He afterward accused them of dilapidations at Valençay, and cleverly mentioned the fact to Louis XVIII., who, being desirous to dismiss him from Court, while he had not the courage to order him to go, took occasion to praise the beauty and splendor of his seat at Valençay. ‘Yes, it is pretty fair,’ he said, ‘but the Spanish Princes entirely spoiled it with the fireworks on St. Napoleon’s Day.’
“Although M. de Talleyrand was aware that his position with the Emperor was altered, yet he found Bonaparte when he joined him well disposed and inclined to trust him. There was no perceptible cloud between them. The Emperor had need of him for the conference at Erfurt, to which they went together at the end of September. My father was in attendance on the Emperor. The letters which he doubtless wrote thence to my mother have not been found; but their correspondence was so strictly watched, and must therefore have been so reserved, that its loss is, I fancy, of little importance. My father’s general letters referred to the good understanding between the two Emperors, their mutual finessing, and the fine manners of the Emperor Alexander.
“M. de Talleyrand composed a narrative of this Erfurt conference, which he was in the habit of reading aloud. He used to boast, on his return, that as the two Emperors entered their respective carriages, each about to journey in a different direction, he had said to Alexander, while attending him, ‘If you could only get into the wrong carriage!’ He had discerned some fine qualities in the Czar, and had endeavored to win favor, by which he profited in 1814; but, at the time of which I am writing, he looked on a Russian alliance as a merely accidental necessity during a war with England, and he persistently held that friendship with Austria, which would eventually become a basis for an alliance with England, was the true system for France in Europe. His conduct of political affairs, whether at the time of Napoleon’s marriage, or in 1814, in 1815, or, again, in the reign of Louis Philippe, was always consistent with this theory. He often spoke of it to my mother.