se.--Napoleon to Hortense.--The need of
charity.

It will be remembered that Hortense had a cousin, Stephanie, the
daughter of her father's elder brother, Marquis de Beauharnais. Though
Viscount de Beauharnais had espoused the popular cause in the desperate
struggle of the French Revolution, the marquis was an undisguised
"aristocrat." Allying himself with the king and the court, he had fled
from France with the emigrant nobles. He had joined the allied army as
it was marching upon his native land in the endeavor to crush out
popular liberty and to reinstate the Bourbons on their throne of
despotism. For this crime he was by the laws of France a traitor, doomed
to the scaffold should he be captured.

The marquis, in his flight from France, had left Stephanie with her aunt
Josephine. She had sent her to the school of Madame Campan in company
with Hortense and Caroline Bonaparte. Louis Bonaparte was consequently
often in the company of Stephanie, and fell desperately in love with
her. The reader will recollect the letter which Josephine wrote to
Madame Campan relative to Stephanie, which indicated that she had some
serious defects of character. Still she was a brilliant girl, with great
powers of pleasing when she condescended to use those powers.

Louis Bonaparte was a very pensive, meditative young man, of poetic
temperament, and of unsullied purity of character. With such persons
love ever becomes an all-absorbing passion. It has been well said that
love is represented as a little Cupid shooting tiny arrows, whereas it
should be presented as a giant shaking the world. The secrets of the
heart are seldom revealed to others. Neither Napoleon nor Josephine were
probably at all aware how intense and engrossing was the affection of
Louis for Stephanie.

Regenerated France was then struggling, with all its concentrated
energies, against the combined aristocracies of Europe. Napoleon was the
leader of the popular party. The father of Stephanie was in the counsels
and the army of the Allies. Already advances had been made to Napoleon,
and immense bribes offered to induce him, in treachery to the people, to
restore to the exiled Bourbons the sceptre which the confiding people
had placed in his hands. Napoleon, like all men in power, had bitter
enemies, who were ever watching for an opportunity to assail him. Should
his brother Louis marry a daughter of one of the old nobility, an avowed
aristocrat, an emigrant, a pronounc