In Fontainebleau Hortense showed her son the palace that had been the witness of the greatest triumphs and also of the most bitter grief of his great uncle.  Leaning on his arm, her countenance concealed by a heavy black veil, to prevent any one from recognizing her, Hortense walked through the chambers, in which she had once been installed as a mighty and honored queen, and in which she was now covertly an exile menaced with death.  The servants who conducted her were the same who had been there during the days of the emperor!  Hortense recognized them at once; she did not dare to make herself known, but she nevertheless felt that she, too, was remembered there.  She saw this in the expression with which the servants opened the rooms she had once occupied; she heard it in the tone in which they mentioned her name!  Every thing in this palace had remained as it then was!  There was the same furniture in the rooms which the imperial family had occupied after the peace of Tilsit, and in which they had given such brilliant fetes, and received the homage of so many of the kings and princes of Europe, all of whom had come to implore the assistance and favor of their vanquisher!  There were also the apartments which the pope had occupied, once voluntarily; subsequently, under compulsion.  Alas! and there was also the little cabinet, in which the emperor, the once so mighty and illustrious ruler of Europe, had abdicated the crown which his victories, his good deeds, and the love of the French people, had placed on his head!  And, finally, there were also the chapel and the altar before which the Emperor Napoleon had stood god-father to his nephew Louis Napoleon!  All was still as it had been, except that the garden, that Hortense and her mother had laid out and planted, had grown more luxuriant, and now sang to the poor banished pilgrim with its rustling tree-tops a melancholy song of her long separation from her home!

The sorrowing couple wandered on, and at last arrived before the gates of Paris.  At this moment, Hortense was a Frenchwoman, a Parisian only, and, forgetting every thing else, all her grief and sufferings, she sought only to do the honors of Paris for her son.  She ordered the coachman to drive them through the boulevards to the Rue de la Paix, and then to stop at the first good hotel.  This was the same way over which she had passed sixteen years before, escorted by an Austrian officer.  Then she had quitted Paris by night, driven out in a measure by the allies, who so much feared her, the poor, weak woman with her little boys, that troops had been placed under arms at regular intervals on her way, in order, as it was given out, to secure her safe passage.  Now, after sixteen years, Hortense returned to Paris by the same route, still exiled and homeless, at her side the son who was not only menaced by the French decree of banishment, but also by the Austrian edict of proscription.

But yet she was once more in Paris, once more at home, and she wept with joy at beholding once more the streets and places about which the memories of her youth clustered.