At four years of age Meneval describes him as gentle, but quick in answering, strong, and with excellent health.  “Light curly hair in ringlets set off a fresh face, while fine blue eyes lit up his regular features:  He was precociously intelligent, and knew more than most children older than himself.”  When Meneval—­the former secretary of his father, giving up his post in Austria with Maria Louisa, as he was about to rejoin Napoleon—­took farewell of the Prince in May 1815, the poor little motherless child drew me towards the window, and, giving me a touching look, said in a low tone, “Monsieur Meva, tell him (Napoleon) that I always love him dearly.”  We say “motherless,” because Maria Louisa seems to have yielded up her child at the dictates of policy to be closely guarded as easily as she gave up her husband.  “If,” wrote Madame de Montesquiou, his governess, “the child had a mother, I would leave him in her hands, and be happy, but she is nothing like a mother, she is more indifferent to his fate than the most utter stranger in her service.”  His grandfather, the Emperor Francis, to do him justice, seems to have been really kind to the lad, and while, in 1814, 1816, and in 1830, taking care to deprive him of all chance of, his glorious inheritance, still seems to have cared for him personally, and to have been always kind to him.  There is no truth in the story that the Austrians neglected his education and connived at the ruin of his faculties.  Both his tutor, the Count Maurice Dietrichstein, and Marshal Marmont, who conversed with him in 1831, agree in speaking highly of him as full of promise:  Marmont’s evidence being especially valuable as showing that the Austrians did not object to the Duke of Reichstadt (as he had been created by his grandfather in 1818), learning all he could of his father’s life from one of the Marshals.  In 1831 Marment describes him:  “I recognised his father’s look in him, and in that he most resembled Napoleon.  His eyes, not so large as those of Napoleon, and sunk deeper in their sockets, had the same expression, the same fire, the same energy.  His forehead was like that of his father, and so was the lower part of his face and his chin.  Then his complexion was that of Napoleon in his youth, with the same pallor and the same colour of the skin, but all the rest of his face recalled his mother and the House of Austria.  He was taller than Napoleon by about three inches.”

As long as the Duke lived his name was naturally the rallying-point of the Bonapartes, and was mentioned in some of the many conspiracies against the Bourbons.  In 1830 Joseph Bonaparte tried to get the sanction of the Austrians to his nephew being put forward as a claimant to the throne of France, vacant by the flight of Charles X., but they held their captive firmly.  A very interesting passage is given in the ’Memoirs of Charles Greville’, who says that Prince Esterhazy told him a great deal about the Duke of Reichstadt, who, if he had lived, would