I think of you always, and I always shall.  God has given me power to endure this final shock, and in Him alone I have put all my trust.  He will help me and give me courage, and I shall find support in doing my duty toward you, since it is all for you that I have sacrificed myself.

There is something piteous in this little note of a frightened girl going to encounter she knew not what, and clinging almost frantically to the one thought—­that whatever might befall her, she was doing as her father wished.

One need not recount the long and tedious journey of many days over wretched roads, in carriages that jolted and lurched and swayed.  She was surrounded by unfamiliar faces and was compelled to meet at every town the chief men of the place, all of whom paid her honor, but stared at her with irrepressible curiosity.  Day after day she went on and on.  Each morning a courier on a foaming horse presented her with a great cluster of fresh flowers and a few lines scrawled by the unknown husband who was to meet her at her journey’s end.

There lay the point upon which her wandering thoughts were focused—­the journey’s end!  The man whose strange, mysterious power had forced her from her school-room, had driven her through a nightmare of strange happenings, and who was waiting for her somewhere to take her to himself, to master her as he had mastered generals and armies!

What was marriage?  What did it mean?  What experience still lay before her!  These were the questions which she must have asked herself throughout that long, exhausting journey.  When she thought of the past she was homesick.  When she thought of the immediate future she was fearful with a shuddering fear.

At last she reached the frontier of France, and her carriage passed into a sort of triple structure, the first pavilion of which was Austrian, while the middle pavilion was neutral, and the farther one was French.  Here she was received by those who were afterward to surround her—­the representatives of the Napoleonic court.  They were not all plebeians and children of the Revolution, ex-stable boys, ex-laundresses.  By this time Napoleon had gathered around himself some of the noblest families of France, who had rallied to the empire.  The assemblage was a brilliant one.  There were Montmorencys and Beaumonts and Audenardes in abundance.  But to Marie Louise, as to her Austrian attendants, they were all alike.  They were French, they were strangers, and she shrank from them.

Yet here her Austrians must leave her.  All who had accompanied her thus far were now turned back.  Napoleon had been insistent on this point.  Even her governess, who had been with her since her childhood, was not allowed to cross the French frontier.  So fixed was Napoleon’s purpose to have nothing Austrian about her, that even her pet dog, to which she clung as a girl would cling, was taken from her.  Thereafter she was surrounded only by French faces, by French guards, and was greeted only by salvos of French artillery.