To-day, that song rings out with power again through France, and mounts in jubilee to the summit of the column on the Place Vendome.  The bronze visage of the emperor seems to melt into a smile as these tremulous billows of melody go sweeping around his brow, and the Hortensias on the queen’s grave raise dreamingly their heads of bloom, in which the dews of heaven, or the tears of the departed one, glisten like rarest gems, and seem to look forth lovingly and listen to this ditty, which now for France has won so holy a significance—­holy because it is the master-chant of a religion which all men and all nations should revere—­the “religion of our memories.”  Thus, this “Va t’en, Guerrier,” which France now sings, resounds over the grave of the queen, like a salute of honor over the last resting-place of some brave soldier.

She had much to contend with—­this hapless and amiable queen—­but she ever proved firm, and ever retained one kind of courage that belongs to woman—­the courage to smile through her tears.  Her father perished on the scaffold; her mother, the doubly-dethroned empress, died of a broken heart; her step-father, the Emperor Napoleon, pined away, liked a caged lion, on a lone rock in the sea!  Her whole family—­all the dethroned kings and queens—­went wandering about as fugitives and pariahs, banished from their country, and scarcely wringing from the clemency of those to whom they had been clement, a little spot of earth, where, far from the bustle and intercourse of the world, they might live in quiet obscurity, with their great recollections and their mighty sorrows.  Their past lay behind them, like a glittering fairy tale, which no one now believed; and only the present seemed, to men and nations, a welcome reality, which they, with envenomed stings, were eager to brand upon the foreheads of the dethroned Napoleon race.

Yet, despite all these sorrows and discouragements, Hortensia had the mental strength not to hate her fellow-beings, but, on the contrary, to teach her children to love them and do good to them.  The heart of the dethroned queen bled from a thousand wounds, but she did not allow these wounds to stiffen into callousness, nor her heart to harden under the broad scars of sorrow that had ceased to bleed.  She cherished her bereavements and her wounds, and kept them open with her tears; but, even while she suffered measureless woes, it solaced her heart to relieve the woes and dry the tears of others.  Thus was her life a constant charity; and when she died she could, like the Empress Josephine, say of herself, “I have wept much, but never have I made others weep.”