stalled as a
mighty and honored queen, and in which she was now covertly an exile
menaced with death. The servants who conducted her were the same who had
been there during the days of the emperor! Hortense recognized them at
once; she did not dare to make herself known, but she nevertheless felt
that she, too, was remembered there. She saw this in the expression
with which the servants opened the rooms she had once occupied; she
heard it in the tone in which they mentioned her name! Every thing in
this palace had remained as it then was! There was the same furniture in
the rooms which the imperial family had occupied after the peace of
Tilsit, and in which they had given such brilliant _fetes_, and received
the homage of so many of the kings and princes of Europe, all of whom
had come to implore the assistance and favor of their vanquisher! There
were also the apartments which the pope had occupied, once voluntarily;
subsequently, under compulsion. Alas! and there was also the little
cabinet, in which the emperor, the once so mighty and illustrious ruler
of Europe, had abdicated the crown which his victories, his good deeds,
and the love of the French people, had placed on his head! And, finally,
there were also the chapel and the altar before which the Emperor
Napoleon had stood god-father to his nephew Louis Napoleon! All was
still as it had been, except that the garden, that Hortense and her
mother had laid out and planted, had grown more luxuriant, and now sang
to the poor banished pilgrim with its rustling tree-tops a melancholy
song of her long separation from her home!

The sorrowing couple wandered on, and at last arrived before the gates
of Paris. At this moment, Hortense was a Frenchwoman, a Parisian only,
and, forgetting every thing else, all her grief and sufferings, she
sought only to do the honors of Paris for her son. She ordered the
coachman to drive them through the boulevards to the Rue de la Paix,
and then to stop at the first good hotel. This was the same way over
which she had passed sixteen years before, escorted by an Austrian
officer. Then she had quitted Paris by night, driven out in a measure by
the allies, who so much feared her, the poor, weak woman with her little
boys, that troops had been placed under arms at regular intervals on her
way, in order, as it was given out, to secure her safe passage. Now,
after sixteen years, Hortense returned to Paris by the same route, still
exiled and home