have their limits, and _posterity_,
which _forgets nothing_, admires above everything the generosity of
conquerors."

The allied sovereigns were afraid to answer the letter. Better for
their reputations if they had obviated the necessity of writing it.
The testimony of Pius VII. is that she was "a God-fearing woman who
deserved to be honoured by every prince in Christendom."

A great joy came to Madame Mere in 1830, when they told her that the
Government had decided to replace the statue of Napoleon on the
Vendome Column. She went into ecstasies over this, but bewailed her
lameness (she had broken her thigh that year) and total blindness,
which would forever prevent her beholding the statue. She turned away
from these painful reflections and comforted herself with a few words
of sad humour, remarking that if she could have been in Paris as in
former days, God would have given her strength to climb to the top of
the column to assure herself that it was there. She refused to
separate her lot from that of her children, and would not accept the
proposal that the sentence of banishment should be repealed unless it
included all her family. This remarkable woman died February 2, 1836,
aged eighty-five, and Napoleon III. had the remains of his grandmother
and Cardinal Fesch removed to Ajaccio in 1851. Six years later the
remains were again removed and deposited in a vault constructed to
receive them in a church which was built subsequent to the first
interment at Ajaccio.

Pity and strange it is that the Emperor's faithless second wife should
be noticed at all in history. Happily, very few even of those
historians who are anti-Napoleon have anything very complimentary to
say of her. She survived her son the King of Rome fifteen years, and
the earth claimed her in December, 1847, her age being fifty-six. Had
this amiable adulteress, who wished success to the allied armies
against her husband, lived a little longer, she would have witnessed
the humiliating spectacle of her father's successor being forced to
abdicate his throne in favour of the nephew of her Imperial husband,
whose memory all noble hearts revere, and whose sufferings, domestic
and public, will ever lie at the door of this woman who allowed
herself to be the base accomplice of a great assassination. The most
fitting reference to her death appeared in the _Times_ newspaper,
which said that "nothing in her life became her like the leaving it."
On April 15, 1821,