One real and serious cause of unhappiness for Josephine was removed in part this summer. It was her daughter Hortense’s trouble. The poor Queen of Holland had for a long time been hopelessly embroiled with the King, Louis Bonaparte, and her daily letters to her mother during the winter and spring were hysterical cries of bitterness and despair. Josephine shows nowhere in better light than in her replies. During all this period of her own sorrow she wrote constantly to Hortense letters full of cheer, of wise counsel, and of the tenderest affection. The doubt of the Emperor which seized her now and then she never allowed Hortense to entertain. She never advised anything but courage and forbearance in her relations to King Louis. She held before her her duty to her little sons, to the people of Holland, who had always loved her, and to her mother. In July, Louis put an end to the sad situation by abdicating his throne, which by the Constitution went to the Queen. Napoleon promptly annexed Holland to France. “This emancipates the queen,” the Emperor wrote to Josephine, “and your unhappy daughter can come to Paris, where, with her sons, she will be perfectly happy.” It was not going to Paris, however, that pleased Hortense; it was release from Louis, the care of her sons, and rejoining her mother. Indeed, Louis Bonaparte’s cowardly conduct in Holland brought great relief to both Hortense and Josephine, especially was the latter happy at being able to have the children, Napoleon Louis and Louis Napoleon, or little _Oui-oui_, as she called him, (afterwards Napoleon III.) with her. She really was an ideal grandmother, everybody conceded, the children first of all. Their opinion was happily expressed once by Louis, who, when a lady of the court was leaving to see her husband, said soberly, “She must love M. A—— very much if she will leave grandmama to go and see him.” When Josephine left Malmaison in June, she had intended traveling in Italy, after Switzerland, and spending the winter at Milan with her son. Her old terror of being forgotten by the Emperor and driven from France seized her in September, however, and for weeks she tormented herself with the notion that it was Napoleon’s plan not to allow her to return to France. She had no reason for the supposition beyond the gossip which came to her and the fears of her own sore heart; but this was enough to persuade her so thoroughly that she was to be exiled that her health began to fail. She succeeded, too, in communicating her fears to the ladies of her suite, and the little company made themselves wretched in the classical feminine way over a possibility for which there was no foundation whatever. [Illustration: LOUIS BONAPARTE. 1778–1846. King of Holland in 1806. Abdicated in 1810, taking the title of Comte de St. Leu.]