if such a journey would
endanger her son's life. The physician declared that, while he could
have desired a few days more of repose, the prince would nevertheless,
with proper care and attention, be able to leave on the following day.

"Inform the king that I shall depart to-morrow," said Hortense; and,
while M. de Houdetot was hastening to the king with this welcome
intelligence, the duchess was making preparations for the journey, which
she began with her son early on the following morning.

In four days they reached Calais, where they found the ship that was to
convey them to England in readiness to sail. Hortense was to leave her
country once more as a fugitive and exile! She was once more driven out,
and condemned to live in a foreign country! Because the French people
still refused to forget their emperor, the French kings hated and feared
the imperial family. Under the old Bourbons, they had been hated; Louis
Philippe, who had attained his crown through the people, felt that it
was necessary to flatter the people, and show some consideration for
their sympathies. He declared to the people that he entertained the most
profound admiration for their great emperor, and yet he issued a decree
of banishment against the Bonapartes; he ordered that the _Vendome_
column, with its bronze statue of the emperor, should be adorned, and at
the same time his decree banished the daughter and the nephew of the
emperor from France, and drove them back into a foreign country.

Hortense went, but she felt, in the pain it caused her, that she was
leaving her country--the country in which she had friends whom she had
not seen again; the country in which lay her mother's grave, which she
had not dared to visit; and, finally, the grave of her son! She once
more left behind her all the remembrances of her youth--all the places
she had loved; and her regret and her tears made known how dear these
things still were to her; that the banished and homeless one was still
powerless to banish the love of country from her heart, and that France
was still her home!

CHAPTER X.

PILGRIMAGE THROUGH FRANCE.

The sojourn of the Duchess of St. Leu in England where she arrived with
her son after a stormy passage, was for both a succession of triumphs
and ovations. The high aristocracy of London heaped upon her proofs of
esteem, of reverence, and of love; every one seemed anxious to atone for
the severity and cruelty with which England had tre