authors of the poetry
sent to the Tuileries; and finally, fashion, which makes use of the least
events, invented stuffs called roi-de-Rome, as in the old regime they had
been called dauphin. On the evening of the 20th of March at nine o'clock
the King of Rome was anointed in the chapel of the Tuileries. This was a
most magnificent ceremony. The Emperor Napoleon, surrounded by the
princes and princesses of his whole court, placed him in the center of
the chapel on a sofa surmounted by a canopy with a Prie-Dieu. Between
the altar and the balustrade had been placed on a carpet of white velvet
a pedestal of granite surmounted by a hand some silver gilt vase to be
used as a baptismal font. The Emperor was grave; but paternal tenderness
diffused over his face an expression of happiness, and it might have been
said that he felt himself half relieved of the burdens of the Empire on
seeing the august child who seemed destined to receive it one day from
the hands of his father. When he approached the baptismal font to
present the child to be anointed there was a moment of silence and
religious contemplation, which formed a touching contrast to the
vociferous gayety which at the same moment animated the crowd outside,
whom the spectacle of the brilliant fireworks had drawn from all parts of
Paris to the Tuileries.

Madame Blanchard, who as I have said had set out in her balloon an hour
after the birth of the King of Rome, to carry the news into all places
she passed, first descended at Saint-Tiebault near Lagny, and from there,
as the wind had subsided, returned to Paris. Her balloon rose after her
departure, and fell at a place six leagues farther on, and the
inhabitants, finding in this balloon only clothing and provisions, did
not doubt that the intrepid aeronaut had been killed; but fortunately
just as her death was announced at Paris, Madame Blanchard herself
arrived and dispelled all anxiety.

Many persons had doubted Marie Louise's pregnancy. Some believed it
assumed, and I never could comprehend the foolish reasons given by these
persons on this subject which malevolence tried to 'gular' fact which
carries its great number of these evil-thinking, suspicious persons, one
part accused the Emperor of being a libertine, supposing him the father
of many natural children, and the other thought him incapable of
obtaining children even by a young princess only nineteen years of age,
their hatred thus blinding their judgment. If N