ce to embarrass him.

He made his eldest brother, Joseph, King of Spain, and Spain proved
almost as deadly to him as did Russia. He made his youngest brother,
Jerome, King of Westphalia, and Jerome turned the palace into a pigsty
and brought discredit on the very name of Bonaparte. His brother Louis,
for whom he had starved himself, he placed upon the throne of Holland,
and Louis promptly devoted himself to his own interests, conniving
at many things which were inimical to France. He was planning high
advancement for his brother Lucien, and Lucien suddenly married a
disreputable actress and fled with her to England, where he was received
with pleasure by the most persistent of all Napoleon's enemies.

So much for his brothers--incompetent, ungrateful, or openly his foes.
But his three sisters were no less remarkable in the relations which
they bore to him. They have been styled "the three crowned courtesans,"
and they have been condemned together as being utterly void of principle
and monsters of ingratitude.

Much of this censure was well deserved by all of them--by Caroline and
Elise and Pauline. But when we look at the facts impartially we shall
find something which makes Pauline stand out alone as infinitely
superior to her sisters. Of all the Bonapartes she was the only one who
showed fidelity and gratitude to the great emperor, her brother. Even
Mme. Mere, Napoleon's mother, who beyond all question transmitted to him
his great mental and physical power, did nothing for him. At the height
of his splendor she hoarded sous and francs and grumblingly remarked:

"All this is for a time. It isn't going to last!"

Pauline, however, was in one respect different from all her kindred.
Napoleon made Elise a princess in her own right and gave her the Grand
Duchy of Tuscany. He married Caroline to Marshal Murat, and they
became respectively King and Queen of Naples. For Pauline he did very
little--less, in fact, than for any other member of his family--and yet
she alone stood by him to the end.

This feather-headed, languishing, beautiful, distracting morsel of
frivolity, who had the manners of a kitten and the morals of a cat,
nevertheless was not wholly unworthy to be Napoleon's sister. One has to
tell many hard things of her; and yet one almost pardons her because
of her underlying devotion to the man who made the name of Bonaparte
illustrious for ever. Caroline, Queen of Naples, urged her husband to
turn against his