Louis Napoleon bowed his head and sighed.  He must conform to the will of the people; cautiously, under a borrowed name, he must steal into the land of his longing and of his dreams; he must deny his nationality, and be indebted, for his name and passport, to the country that had bound his uncle, like a second Prometheus, to the rock, and left him there to die!  But he did it with a sorrowful, with a bleeding heart; he wandered with his mother, who walked heavily veiled at his side, from place to place, listening to her reminiscences of the great past.  At her relation of these reminiscences, his love and enthusiasm for the fatherland, from which he had so long been banished, burned brighter and brighter.  The sight, the air of this fatherland, had electrified him; he entertained but one wish:  to remain in France, and to serve France, although in the humble capacity of a private soldier.

One day Louis Napoleon entered his mother’s room with a letter in his hand, and begged her to read it.  It was a letter addressed to Louis Philippe, in which Louis Napoleon begged the French king to annul his exile, and to permit him to enter the French army as a private soldier.

Hortense read the letter, and shook her head sadly.  It wounded her just pride that her son, the nephew of the great emperor, should ask a favor of him who had not hesitated to make the most of the revolution for himself, but had nevertheless lacked the courage to help the banished Bonapartes to recover their rights, and enable them to return to their country.  In his ardent desire to serve France, Louis Napoleon had forgotten this insult of the King of France.

“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.