NAPOLEON III’S MOTHER.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4571, 13 November 1875, Page 1 (Supplement)

NAPOLEON III’S MOTHER.

Queen Hortense has left seven or eight compact volumes of memoirs, which, in their entirety, are never to be published. They were designed for the reading of her own family, and were intended to explain the complicated, unhappy, and not blameless life of the writer. They are full of exaggerations and indiscretions, of high-flown sentiments and hasty verdicts on men and women. Throughout there is evidence of a generous spirit, a warm heart, and a penetrating mind. Tho intimate descriptions of Napoleon are, in many passages, admirable, and would be valuable to history as showing the warmer side of his character. When the queen touches ou her wedded life, she represents her husband as a domestic tyrant, with whom it was impossible to live ; but then it is easy to see by the context that what she called tyranny was the endeavor of a serious and solitary man to curb the wild exuberance of a worldly, society-loving, even frivolous woman, who found most of her pleasure away from the fire-side, and who had been spoiled by the adoration of a brilliant court. It is to be remarked that, although she resented King Louis’s tyranny and gloom, she never ceased to respect him. She knew that she had not been a good wife to him, and in her will she acknowledged it. Her frailties were beyond question, nor does she deny them in the final record of her life. She explains, idealises, and moralises, seeking to bewitch, rather than to satisfy, the judgment of the reader; and to some extent she succeeds. For there was in the daughter of “la bonne Josephine” heroic virtue, scorn of danger, intensity of maternal love, and charity which, covering the calumny of the ingrate and the treachery of the friend, was active to the last in kind offices among the humblest of her neighbors. The good overbears and almost hides the bad. Yet it cannot be denied that the effect exercised by Queen Hortense on the character of her son Louis was enervating. She was a lover and seeker of pleasure to the last. All her friends were delightful and cultivated companions. She loved letters and the arts. The learned man was ever welcome to her board. But sho was no strict mistress of morals. There was much of what we understand as the Bohemian in her nature. Cattrau, the artist, was allowed about the chateau in a costume that would have charmed the grisettes of the Quartier Latin. She liked expeditions a la honne franquette, to use a Paris vulgarism. In Rome her parties were of the liveliest, and in those days strict morals made no part of the estimate when the value or desirability of a lady’s society was under consideration. Prince Louis could not but become kindly and charitable under the guidance and with the example of his mother ; but he could hardly fail also to feel the influence of the very thin moral atmosphere of her little court. The basis of the Areuenburg society was democratic, and, as we have observed, the Bernese aristocrat was not more welcome than the rough radical of Thurgau. In this bracing political company the gay queen’s son contracted that democratic tone which his mind kept unimpaired to the last hour of his life. But the pleasures, the convention, the southern brio, that threw a rosy tint about slips in morals, were enervating surroundings to the young man whose single hand was to hold sway and mastery over an empire. In after life Prince Louis showed deep traces of both the good and the evil of his mother’s teaching and the society in which she brought him up. The good blossomed in a thousand acts of kindness, and tho evil appeared in many weaknesses—all those of a tender heart —for which a bitter penalty was paid in the end.