a title from the Bourbons, but she did the honours of the Elysee for him, and it is creditable to both of them that, braving the vile slanders about their intercourse, she was with him to the end; and that one of the last persons to embrace him at Malmaison before he started for the coast was his adopted daughter, the child of his discarded wife.  Hortense’s presence in Paris was thought to be too dangerous by the Prussian Governor; and she was peremptorily ordered to leave.  An appeal to the Emperor Francis received a favourable answer, but Francis always gave way where any act against his son-in-law was in question, and she had to start at the shortest notice on a wandering life to Aix, Baden, and Constance, till the generosity of the small but brave canton of Thurgau enabled her to get a resting-place at the Chateau of Arenenberg.

In 1831 she lost her second son, the eldest then surviving, who died from fever in a revolutionary attempt ill which he and his younger brother, the future Napoleon.  III., were engaged.  She was able to visit France incognita, and even to see Louis Philippe and his Queen; but her presence in the country was soon thought dangerous, and she was urged to leave.  In 1836 Hortense’s last child, Louis Napoleon, made his attempt at an ‘emeule’ at Strasburg, and was shipped off to America by the Government.  She went to France to plead for him, and then, worn out by grief and anxiety, returned to Arenenberg, which her son, the future Emperor, only succeeded in reaching in time to see her die in October 1837.  She was laid with Josephine at Rueil.

Hortense’s brother, Prince Eugene, the Viceroy of Italy, was at Vienna when Napoleon returned, and fell under the suspicion of the Allies of having informed the Emperor of the intention of removing him from Elba.  He was detained in Bavaria by his father-in-law the King, to whose Court he retired, and who in 1817 created him Duke of Leuchtenberg and Prince of Eichstadt.  With the protection of Bavaria he actually succeeded in wringing from the Bourbons some 700,000 francs of the property of his mother.  A first attack of apoplexy struck him in 1823, and he died from a second in February 1824 at Munich.  His descendants have intermarried into the Royal Families of Portugal, Sweden, Brazil, Russia, ’and Wartemberg; his grandson now (1884) holds the title of Leuchtenberg.

Except Louis, an invalid, all the brothers of the Emperor were around him in the Cent Jours, the supreme effort of their family.  Joseph had left Spain after Vittoria, and had remained in an uncomfortable and unrecognised state near Paris until in 1814 he was again employed, and when, rightly or not, he urged the retreat of the Regency from Paris to Blois.  He then took refuge at his chateau of Prangins in the canton Vaud in Switzerland, closely watched by the Bourbonists, who dreaded danger from every side except the real point, and who preferred trying to hunt the Bonapartists from place to place, instead of making their life bearable by carrying out the engagements with them.