that is best in German national life, simplicity of living, patriotism and devotion to duty. M. Lanfrey, whose history of Napoleon has been already quoted, says of the bulletins attacking the Queen, “Such circumstances as these indicate the defect of Napoleon’s moral organisation, amounting, in fact, to an absence of ordinary intelligence. He outraged the most delicate scruples of the human conscience, because such sentiments had no existence in his own heart. He made a grave mistake in treating other men as if they were as utterly devoid as he was himself of all sentiment of honour and morality. He did not perceive that these base insinuations against a fugitive and disarmed woman, by a man who commanded 500,000 soldiers, would produce an effect exactly contrary to what he intended; that they were calculated not only to excite disgust in all noble minds, but were revolting even to the most vulgar.” How little did either the conqueror or the conquered foresee what lay hidden in the womb of time! Prince William, then a delicate child of eight years old, and a fugitive, with his mother, before the victorious army of Napoleon, was destined to become the most powerful sovereign in Europe, to bring to an end the Napoleonic dynasty, and in the chief of the Royal Palaces of France, to be crowned Emperor of a United Germany. In 1806, however, the fortunes of Queen Louisa and her children were at the lowest ebb. After having lost so much that was more precious than the state and luxury of royalty, the privations of the fugitive Court were not an insupportable trial; the kind peasants brought gifts of money and provisions to their King and Queen, and many acts of faithfulness and devotion cheered and consoled Frederick William and his wife. Even ill-health, which now began to be visible in the Queen, seemed a small misfortune compared with others she had endured. She wrote at this period, June 1807, that her greatest unhappiness was being unable to hope. “Those who have been torn up by the roots ... have lost the faculty of hoping.” Still she felt sustained by the confidence that Prussia, though humiliated, was not disgraced. The country had had fearful odds against it, and had been vanquished, but it had striven to do its duty. “Wrong and injustice on our side would have brought me down to the grave,” she wrote.