The disaster of 1814 had rather dispersed than crushed the Bonaparte family, and they rallied immediately on the return from Elba.  The final fall of the Empire was total ruin to them.  The provisions of the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which had been meant to ensure a maintenance to them, had not been carried out while Napoleon was still a latent power, and after 1815 the Bourbons were only too happy to find a reason for not paying a debt they had determined never to liquidate it was well for any of the Bourbons in their days of distress to receive the bounty of the usurper, but there was a peculiar pleasure in refusing to pay the price promised for his immediate abdication.

The flight of the Bonapartes in 1815 was rapid.  Metternich writes to Maria Louisa in July 1815:  “Madame Mere and Cardinal Fesch left yesterday for Tuscany.  We do not know exactly where.  Joseph is.  Lucien is in England under a false name, Jerome in Switzerland, Louis at Rome.  Queen Hortense has set out for Switzerland, whither General de Flahault and his mother will follow her.  Murat seems to be still at Toulon; this, however, is not certain.”  Was ever such an account of a dynasty given?  These had all been among the great ones of Europe:  in a moment they were fugitives, several of them having for the rest of their lives a bitter struggle with poverty.  Fortunately for them the Pope, the King of Holland, and the Grand-Duke of Tuscany, were not under heavy obligations to Napoleon, and could thus afford to give to his family the protection denied them by those monarchs who believed themselves bound to redeem their former servility.

When Napoleon landed Maria Louisa was in Austria, and she was eager to assist in taking every precaution to prevent her son, the young King of Rome, being spirited off to join his father, whose fortunes she had sworn to share:  She herself was fast falling under the influence of the one-eyed Austrian General, Neipperg, just then left a widower, who was soon to be admitted to share her bed.  By 1823 she seemed to have entirely forgotten the different members of the Bonaparte family, speaking of her life in France as “a bad dream.”  She obtained the Grand-Duchy of Parma, where she reigned till 1847, marrying a third time, it is said, the Count Bombellea, and dying, just too soon to be hunted from her Duchy by the Revolution of 1848.

There is something very touching in most that we know of the poor young King of Rome, from his childish but strangely prescient resistance to his removal from Paris to Blois on the approach of the Allies in 1814, to the message of remembrance sent in after years to the column of the Place Vendome, “his only friend in Paris.”