The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise | Page 5

abandon my son, and remember that I had rather see him in the Seine than in the hands of the enemies of France. The lot of Astyanax, a prisoner among the Greeks, has always seemed to me the unhappiest in history." But, alas! in spite of the great Emperor's precautions, the King of Rome was condemned by fate to be the modern Astyanax, and Marie Louise was not as constant as Andromache.
The allied forces drew near, and there was no more time for flight. March 29, 1814, horses and carriages had been stationed in the Carrousel since the morning. At seven o'clock Marie Louise was dressed and ready to leave, but they could not abandon hope; they wished still to await some possible bit of good news which should prevent their leaving,--an envoy from Napoleon, a messenger from King Joseph. The officers of the National Guard were anxious to have the Empress stay. "Remain," they urged; "we swear to defend you." Marie Louise thanked them through her tears, but the Emperor's orders were positive; on no account were the Empress and the King of Rome to fall into the enemy's hands. The peril grew. Ever since four o'clock Marie Louise had kept putting off the moment of leaving, in expectation that something would turn up. Eleven struck, and the Minister of War came, declaring there was not a moment to lose. One would have thought that the little King of Rome, who was just three years old, knew that he was about to go, never to return. "Don't go to Rambouillet," he cried to his mother; "that's a gloomy castle; let us stay here." And he clung to the banisters, struggling with the equerry who was carrying him, weeping and shouting, "I don't want to leave my house; I don't want to go away; since papa is away, I am the master." Marie Louise was impressed by this childish opposition; a secret voice told her that her son was right; that by abandoning the capital, they surrendered it to the Royalists. But the lot was cast, and they had to leave. A mere handful of indifferent spectators, attracted by no other feeling than curiosity, watched the flight of the sovereign who, four years before, had made her formal entrance into this same palace of the Tuileries under a triumphal arch, amid noisy acclamations. There was not a tear in the eyes of the few spectators; they uttered no sound, they made no movement of sympathy or regret; there was only a sullen silence. But one person wept, and that was Marie Louise. When she had reached the Champs Elyseés, she cast a last sad glance at the palace she was never to see again. It was not a flight, but a funeral.
The Empress and the King of Rome took refuge at Blois, where there appeared a faint shadow of Imperial government. On Good Friday, April 8, Count Shouvaloff reached Blois with a detachment of Cossacks, and carried Marie Louise and her son to Rambouillet, where the Emperor of Austria was to join them. What Napoleon had feared was soon realized.
April 16, the Emperor of Austria was at Blois. Marie Louise, who two years before had left her father, starting on her triumphal journey to Prague, amid all form of splendor and devotion, was much moved at seeing him again, and placed the King of Rome in his arms, as if to reproach him for deserting the child's cause. The grandfather relented, but the monarch was stern: did he not soon say to Marie Louise: "As my daughter, everything that I have is yours, even my blood and my life; as a sovereign, I do not know you"? The Russian sentinels at the entrance of the castle of Rambouillet were relieved by Austrian grenadiers. The Empress of the French changed captors; she was the prisoner no longer of the Czar's soldiers, but of her own father. Her conjugal affection was not yet wholly extinct, and she reproached herself with not having joined Napoleon at Fontainebleau; but her scruples were soon allayed by the promise that she should soon see her husband again at Elba. She was told that the treaty which had just been signed gave her, and after her, her son, the duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla; that the King of Rome was henceforth the hereditary Duke of Parma; that if she had duties as a wife, she also had duties as a mother; that she ought to gain the good-will of the powers, and assure her child's future. They added that she ought to give her husband time to establish himself at Elba, and that meanwhile she would find in Vienna, near her loving parents, a few weeks of moral and physical rest, which must be very necessary