“As for the people, it will, if it remembers its glory, its grandeur, and the incessant care of which it was the object, ever hold our memory dear.  This is my firm conviction, and this thought is the sweetest consolation of an exile, the sweetest consolation he can take with him to the grave[74]!”

Hortense still lived a few years of peaceful tranquillity; far from all she loved—­far also from the son who was her last hope, never dreaming that destiny had so brilliant a future in store for him, and that Louis Napoleon, whom the Bourbons had banished from France as a child, and the Orleans as a youth—­that Louis Napoleon would one day be enthroned in Paris as emperor, while the Bourbons and Orleans languish in foreign lands as exiles!

In the year 1837, Hortense, the flower of the Bonapartes, died!

Weary, at last, of misfortune, and of the exile in which she languished, she bowed her head, and went home to her great dead—­home to Napoleon and Josephine!

[Footnote 74:  Voyage en Italie, etc., p. 324.]

THE END.