"I have read in your journal of July 29th the article in which you give an account of the solemnity which took place on the 28th at the foot of the Column of Austerlitz, upon the inauguration of the statue of the Emperor Napoleon. You attribute the absence of his brothers to very strange sentiments. Are you ignorant, then, that an iniquitous law, dictated by the enemies of France to the elder branch of the Bourbons, excluded these brothers, out of hatred to the name of Napoleon? Would you wish that, in defiance of a law which the National Majesty has not yet repealed, we should bear the brands of discord into our country at the moment when it re-erects the statue of our brother? _Every thing for the nation_, was the motto of our brother. It shall be ours also. "Instead of speaking, as a hostile journal would have done, in casting the blame upon patriots proscribed, who wander over the world the victims of the enemies of their country, would it not have exhibited more of courage and of justice on your part, sir, to recall to the electors of France that Napoleon has a mother who languishes upon a foreign soil, without it being possible for her children to speak to her a last adieu? She shares with three generations of her kindred, including sixty French, the rigors of an exile of twenty years. They are guilty of no other crime than that of being the relatives of a man whose statue is re-erected by national decree. "The name of Napoleon will never be the banner of civil discord. Twice he withdrew from France, that he might not be the pretext for the infliction of calamities upon his country. Such are the doctrines which Napoleon has bequeathed to his family. It is because the French people know well that his pretended despotism was but a dictatorship, rendered necessary by the wars which his enemies waged against him, that his memory remains popular. Is it just, is it honorable that his family should still be condemned to endure the anguish of exile, and to hear even his ancient enemies reproach the French with the injustice of their proscription?" This law of proscription, dictated by the Allies on the 12th of January, 1816, and re-affirmed by the Government of Louis Philippe, was as follows: "The ascendants and descendants of Napoleon Bonaparte, his uncles and his aunts, his nephews and his nieces, his brothers, their wives and their descendants, his sisters and their husbands, are excluded from the realm forever." The penalty for violating this decree of banishment was _death_. Madame Letitia had been informed in Rome that the Louis Philippe Government contemplated abolishing the decree of exile, so far as _she alone_ was concerned. In response she wrote, April, 1834, to a distinguished gentleman in Paris, M. Sapey, as follows: