d to be slowly and surely undermined until death took him
from the restraining influences and crimeful policy of the Courts of
Europe. Great efforts have been made to convince a sceptical public
that his early death was the result of youthful indiscretions, but
this is stoutly denied by Prokesch, who declares that he was a
strictly moral youth, and Baron Obenaus, in his diary, justifies this
opinion, if there was nothing else to support it. Moreover the same
Anton, Count Prokesch was asked by Napoleon III. to tell him the truth
as to the alleged love affairs, and he averred that the rumours were
without foundation.

The King of Rome died at Schoenbrunn in the same room that his father
had occupied in 1809. In Paris a report was put about that he had been
poisoned by the Court of Vienna. This opinion has been handed down,
and there are many persons to-day who have a firm belief in its
possibility.

Another common rumour, current in 1842, was that Metternich sent a
poisoned lemon by Prokesch, which had done its work, and even this
highly improbable story is not without reason believed, because
Metternich was known to be the most heartless cunning Judas in
politics at that time. He had betrayed the father of the Prince while
he was declaring the most loyal friendship. He admits this, nay, even
boasts of it, in his memoirs, and his shameful conduct has its reward
by having won for him the stigma of wishing for, and hastening on, the
death of an unfortunate young man for whom ordinary manliness should
have claimed compassion. This moral assassin of father and son
declared that he had "used all the means in his power to second the
hand of God" by trapping Napoleon into the clutches of the combined
moralists of Europe. The Usurper was to be ruined, then peace
proclaimed for evermore. That was their pretence, though it could not
have been their conviction. If it was, they were soon disillusioned.

I made a long journey in company with a Danish statesman a few years
ago, and amongst other things that we conversed about was the reign
and fall of Napoleon. This gentleman held up his hands and said to me,
"Oh! what a blunder the criminal affair was. Had the Powers beheld the
mission of this man aright, what a blessing it would have been to the
world!"--and there is not much difficulty in supporting the view of
this Danish gentleman. The more one probes into the history of the
period, the more vivid the blunder appears.

Metter