Queen Hortense | Page 3

artless, too sportive and genial, to avoid all those things that might give to the watchful and hostile family of her husband an opportunity for ill-natured suspicions, which were whispered in the viscount's ear as cruel certainties. It may readily be conceived, then, that such a state of things soon led to violent scenes and bitter grief. Josephine was too beautiful and amiable not to attract attention and admiration wherever she went, and she was not yet blasée and hackneyed enough to take no pleasure in the court thus paid to her, and the admiration so universally shown her, nor even to omit doing her part to win them. But, while she was naive and innocent at heart, she required of her husband that these trifling outside coquetries should not disquiet him nor render him distrustful, and that he should repose the most unshaken confidence in her. Her pride revolted against his suspicions, as did his jealousy against her seeming frivolity; and both became quite willing, at last, to separate, notwithstanding the love they really bore each other at the bottom of their hearts, had not their children rendered such a separation impossible. These children were a son, Eugene, and a daughter, Hortense, four years younger than the boy. Both parents loved these children with passionate tenderness; and often when one of the stormy scenes at which we have hinted took place in the presence of the young people, an imploring word from Eugene or a caress from little Hortense would suffice to reconcile their father and mother, whose anger, after all, was but the result of excessive attachment.
But these domestic broils became more violent with time, and the moment arrived when Eugene was no longer there to stand by his little sister in her efforts to soothe the irritation of her parents. The viscount had sent Eugene, who was now seven years of age, to a boarding-school; and little Hortense, quite disheartened by the absence of her brother, had no longer the means or the courage to allay the quarrels that raged between her parents, but would escape in terror and dismay, when they broke out, to some lonely corner, and there weep bitterly over a misfortune, the extent of which her poor little childish heart could not yet estimate.
In the midst of this gloomy and stormy period, the young viscountess received a letter from Martinique. It was from her mother, Madame Tascher de la Pagerie, who vividly depicted to her daughter the terrors of her lonely situation in her huge, silent residence, where there was no one around her but servants and slaves, whose singularly altered and insubordinate manner had, of late, alarmed the old lady, and filled her with secret apprehensions for the future. She, therefore, besought her daughter to come to her, and live with her, so that she might cheer the last few years of her mother's existence with the bright presence of her dazzling youth.
Josephine accepted this appealing letter from her mother as a hint from destiny; and, weary of her domestic wrangles, and resolved to end them forever, she took her little daughter, Hortense, then scarcely four years old, and with her sailed away from France, to seek beyond the ocean and in her mother's arms the new happiness of undisturbed tranquillity.
But, at that juncture, tranquillity had fled the world. The mutterings and moanings of the impending tempest could be heard on all sides. A subterranean rumbling was audible throughout all lands; a dull thundering and outcry, as though the solid earth were about to change into one vast volcano--one measureless crater--that would dash to atoms, and entomb, with its blazing lava-streams and fiery cinder-showers, the happiness and peace of all humanity. And, finally, this terrific crater did, indeed, open and hurl destruction and death on all sides, over the whole world, uprooting, with demoniac fury, entire races and nations, and silencing the merry laugh and harmless jest with the overpowering echoes of its awful voice!
This volcano was the revolution. In France, the first and most fearful explosion of this terrific crater occurred, but the whole world shook and heaved with it, and, on all sides, the furious masses from beneath overflowed on the surface, seeking to reverse the order of things and place the lowest where the highest had been. Even away in Martinique this social earthquake was felt, which had already, in France, flung out the bloody guillotine from its relentless crater. This guillotine had become the altar of the so-called enfranchisement of nations, and upon this altar the intoxicated, unthinking masses offered up to their new idol those who, until then, had been their lords and masters, and by whose death they now believed that they could purchase freedom for evermore.
"Egalité! fraternité! liberté!" Such was the battle-cry of this howling,