"And who is that?" the commandant asked.
"My father," replied the boy, proudly, and walked away from the lecturer.
He was ten years old when his great father died in his exile at St. Helena (on the 5th of May, 1821). The boy wept bitterly when he was told the news, and shut himself up for several days. He put on mourning, but the Austrians compelled him to put it off, and permitted him to show no grief for his dead father.
After this he grew still more quiet and secretive; he took to his books, became quite a student, and wrote an able treatise upon Cæsar's Commentaries. When he was fifteen he was permitted to read books about his father and the history of France, and at sixteen he was instructed in the forms of Austrian government, and the false theory known as "the divine right of Kings."
When he was twenty he "came out" into society, and was made Lieutenant-Colonel of infantry in the Austrian army, but he never "smelled powder" nor saw war. Brooding and solitude weakened his constitution; ill health resulted; his lungs were touched with disease: and on the 22d of July, in the year 1832, having reached the age of twenty-one, the son of Napoleon died in the palace of Schönbrunn, of consumption.
It seems hard, but death was the only solution of what might have been a problem. Without the will, the energy, the genius, or the selfishness of his remarkable father, the son of Napoleon had yet ambition, persistence, and a reverence for his father's memory that amounted almost to a passion. Without any special love for France, he cherished that dream of empire that his father had made come true. Had he lived and joined ability to strength, his name might have raised up armies, and again drenched Europe in blood—the tool of factions or the prey of his own ambitions. He died a lonely invalid, and Europe was spared the horror of a possible "might have been."
On the plain bronze tomb that marks this boy's place of burial in the Carthusian Monastery at Vienna—near to that of another unwise and unfortunate Prince, the Austrian usurper Maximilian of Mexico—the visitor may read this inscription, placed there by the Emperor, his grandfather: To the eternal memory of Joseph Charles Francis, Duke of Reichstadt, son of Napoleon, Emperor of the French, and Marie Louise, Archduchess of Austria. Born at Paris, March 20, 1811, when in his cradle he was hailed by the title of King of Rome; he was endowed with every faculty, both of body and mind; his stature was tall; his countenance adorned with the charms of youth, and his conversation full of affability; he displayed an astonishing capacity for study, and the exercise of the military art: attacked by a pulmonary disease, he died at Schönbrunn, near Vienna, July 22, 1832.
The epitaph tells but one side of this boy's story; the other side is sad enough. A young life begun in glory went out in gloom; the Prince of the Tuileries became the prisoner of Vienna: the dream of empire was speedily dispelled, and death itself mercifully removed one who might have been a menace and a curse to Europe.
What he might have been had his father remained conqueror and Emperor none may say. But the star of Napoleon, that had blazed like a meteor in Europe's startled sky, flickered, fell, and went out in disgrace. Thenceforward the shadow of the father's downfall clung to the boy, and the son of Napoleon had neither the opportunity, the energy, nor the will to display any trace of that genius for conquest that made the name of Napoleon great in his day, and greater since his downfall and his death.