“I cannot overcome the frightful sadness which has taken possession of me,” she said. “I make every effort to conceal it from my children, but only suffer the more. I am beginning to lose my courage. The Emperor of Russia has certainly shown great regard and affection for us, but it is nothing but words. What will he decide to do with my son, my daughter and her children? Is he not in a position to do something for them? Do you know what will happen when he has gone away? Nothing he has promised will be carried out. I shall see my children unhappy, and I cannot endure the idea; it causes me the most dreadful suffering. I am suffering enough already on account of the fate of the Emperor Napoleon, stripped of all his greatness, sent into an island far from France, abandoned. Must I, besides this, see my children wanderers? Stripped of fortune? It seems to me this idea is going to kill me.... Is it Austria who opposes my son’s advancement? Is it the Bourbons? Certainly they are under obligations enough to me to be willing to pay them by helping my children. Have I not been good to all of their party in their misfortunes? To be sure, I never imagined they would come back to France; nevertheless, it pleased me to be their friend; they were Frenchmen, they were suffering, they were former acquaintances, and the position of those princes that I had seen in their youth touched my heart. Did I not ask Bonaparte twenty times to let the Duchess of Orleans and the Duchess of Bourbon come back? It was through me that he succored them in their distress, that he allowed them a pension which they received in a foreign country.” The attention paid her by the allies seemed to leave no ground for any of these anxieties. The King of Prussia and his sons, the grand-dukes of Russia, every great man in Paris, in fact, sought Josephine repeatedly. She distrusted it all, and one moment wept over the fate of herself and children; the next over Napoleon alone on his island—repeatedly she declared she would join him if she did not fear it would cause a misunderstanding between him and Marie Louise, and so prevent the latter from going to Elba, as Josephine thought she ought to do. In her nervous state she searched for signs of the neglect and discourtesy which she believed were in store for her. She planned to sell her jewels. Everyone in the household became thoroughly disturbed over her condition. “My mother is courageous and amiable, when she is receiving,” Hortense said one day; “but as soon as she is alone, she gives up to a grief which is my despair. I am afraid that the misfortunes which have fallen upon us have affected her too deeply and that her health will never reassert itself.”