The day before the Emperor Napoleon left Paris for the campaign of Waterloo, Hortense carried her boys to the Tuileries to take leave of him.  Little Louis Napoleon contrived to run alone to his uncle’s cabinet, where he was closeted with Marshal Soult.  As soon as the boy saw the emotion in the emperor’s face, he ran up to him, and burying his head in his lap, sobbed out:  “Our governess says you are going to the wars,—­don’t go; don’t go, Uncle.”  “And why not, Louis?  I shall soon come back.”  “Oh, Uncle, those wicked allies will kill you!  Let me go with you.”  The emperor took the boy upon his knee and kissed him.  Then, turning to Soult, who was moved by the little scene, he said, “Here, Marshal, kiss him; he will have a tender heart and a lofty spirit; he is perhaps the hope of my race.”

After Waterloo, the emperor, who passed one night in Paris, kissed the children at the last moment, with his foot upon the step of the carriage that was to carry him the first stage of his journey to St. Helena.

After this, Hortense and her boys were not allowed to live in France.  Protected by an aide-de-camp of Prince Schwartzenberg, they reached Lake Constance, on the farthest limits of Switzerland.  There, after a while, Queen Hortense converted a gloomy old country seat into a refined and beautiful home.  A great trial, however, awaited her.  King Louis demanded the custody of their eldest son, and little Napoleon was taken from his mother, leaving her only Louis.  Louis had always been a “mother’s boy,” frail in health, thoughtful, grave, loving, and full of sentiment.

Hortense’s life at Arenenberg was varied in the winter by visits to Rome.  Her husband lived in Florence, and they corresponded about their boys.  But though they met once again in after years, they were husband and wife no more.  Indeed, charming as Hortense was to all the circle that surrounded her, tender as a mother, and devoted as a friend, her conduct as a wife was not free from reproach.  She was a coquette by nature, and it is undeniable that more than one man claimed to have been her lover.

After a while her son Louis went for four years to college at Heidelberg.  Mother and son never forget the possibilities that might lie before them.  When the Italian revolution broke out, in 1832, Hortense went to Rome, both her sons being at that time in Florence with their father.  Although the elder was newly married to his cousin, the daughter of King Joseph, both he and Louis were full of restlessness, and caught the revolutionary fervor.  They contrived to escape from their father’s house and to join the insurgents, to the great displeasure of both father and mother; but they were fired by enthusiasm for Italian liberty, and took the oaths as Carbonari.