“Reasons of State,” she says, “have their limits, and posterity, which forgets nothing, admires above everything the generosity of conquerors.”

The allied sovereigns were afraid to answer the letter.  Better for their reputations if they had obviated the necessity of writing it.  The testimony of Pius VII. is that she was “a God-fearing woman who deserved to be honoured by every prince in Christendom.”

A great joy came to Madame Mere in 1830, when they told her that the Government had decided to replace the statue of Napoleon on the Vendome Column.  She went into ecstasies over this, but bewailed her lameness (she had broken her thigh that year) and total blindness, which would forever prevent her beholding the statue.  She turned away from these painful reflections and comforted herself with a few words of sad humour, remarking that if she could have been in Paris as in former days, God would have given her strength to climb to the top of the column to assure herself that it was there.  She refused to separate her lot from that of her children, and would not accept the proposal that the sentence of banishment should be repealed unless it included all her family.  This remarkable woman died February 2, 1836, aged eighty-five, and Napoleon III. had the remains of his grandmother and Cardinal Fesch removed to Ajaccio in 1851.  Six years later the remains were again removed and deposited in a vault constructed to receive them in a church which was built subsequent to the first interment at Ajaccio.

Pity and strange it is that the Emperor’s faithless second wife should be noticed at all in history.  Happily, very few even of those historians who are anti-Napoleon have anything very complimentary to say of her.  She survived her son the King of Rome fifteen years, and the earth claimed her in December, 1847, her age being fifty-six.  Had this amiable adulteress, who wished success to the allied armies against her husband, lived a little longer, she would have witnessed the humiliating spectacle of her father’s successor being forced to abdicate his throne in favour of the nephew of her Imperial husband, whose memory all noble hearts revere, and whose sufferings, domestic and public, will ever lie at the door of this woman who allowed herself to be the base accomplice of a great assassination.  The most fitting reference to her death appeared in the Times newspaper, which said that “nothing in her life became her like the leaving it.”  On April 15, 1821, in the third paragraph of his will, Napoleon, with consistent magnanimity, if not wilful indifference to this passive, icy female’s abandonment of him, says:  “I have always had reason to be pleased with my dearest Marie Louise.  I retain for her, to my last moment, the most tender sentiments.  I beseech her to watch, in order to preserve my son from the snares which yet environ his infancy.”  What irony!