attentive prince of the days that had been, and
spoke to him of the days in which they were now living--of these days of
humiliation and obscurity--of those days in which the French nation had
risen, and, shaking its lion's mane, hurled the Bourbons from their
ancestral throne, and out of the land they had hitherto proudly called
their own. On driving out the Bourbons, the people had freely chosen
another king--not the King of Rome, who, in Vienna, as Duke of
Reichstadt, had been made to forget the brilliant days of his
childhood--not the son of the Emperor Napoleon. The people of France had
chosen the Duke of Orleans as their king, and Louis Philippe's first act
had been to renew the decree of banishment which the Bourbons had
fulminated against the Bonapartes, and which declared it to be a
capital crime if they should ever dare to set foot on the soil
of France.

"The people acted freely and according to their own will," said
Hortense, with a sad smile, as she saw her son turn pale, and wrinkles
gather on his brow. "Honor the will of the people, my son! In order to
reward the emperor for his great services to the country, the people of
France had unanimously chosen him their emperor. The people who give
have also the right to take back again. The Bourbons, who consider
themselves the owners of France, may reclaim it as an estate of which
they have been robbed by the house of Orleans. But the Bonapartes must
remember that they derived all their power from the will of the people.
They must be content to await the future expression of its will, and
then submit, and conform themselves to it[62]."

[Footnote 62: The duchess's own words. See La Reine Hortense en Italie,
Suisse, France, etc., p. 79.]

Louis Napoleon bowed his head and sighed. He must conform to the will of
the people; cautiously, under a borrowed name, he must steal into the
land of his longing and of his dreams; he must deny his nationality, and
be indebted, for his name and passport, to the country that had bound
his uncle, like a second Prometheus, to the rock, and left him there to
die! But he did it with a sorrowful, with a bleeding heart; he wandered
with his mother, who walked heavily veiled at his side, from place to
place, listening to her reminiscences of the great past. At her
relation of these reminiscences, his love and enthusiasm for the
fatherland, from which he had so long been banished, burned brighter and
brighter. The sight, the air of