Marie Antoinette had in fact known less happiness than Marie Louise. From the moment she entered France she encountered a sullen enmity which Marie Louise never experienced. The Empress was never denounced for her Austrian birth as the Queen had been by the opposition. Marie Antoinette was surrounded by snares and pitfalls which were never prepared for Marie Louise. Who would have dared to treat Napoleon's wife as the Cardinal de Rohan treated the wife of Louis XVI.? What could there have been under the Empire to compare with the affair of the necklace? The Queen was attacked by pamphlets of all sorts. The Empress was not once insulted or slandered. The bitterest foes of her husband respected her. Moreover, Napoleon was far more attractive than Louis XVI., and Marie Louise was soon a mother, while Marie Antoinette long endured a barrenness for which she was not to blame. The happiness of Marie Louise lasted but little more than two years, but it was all without a cloud. The mistake that historians always make in discussing celebrities is that they try to make a single portrait instead of a series of portraits, according to the different ages and circumstances. What was true in 1812 was no longer true in 1813, still less so in 1814. Human life has its seasons like the year. Is anything less like a brilliant spring day than a gloomy winter's day? In his history of the Restoration, Lamartine has drawn a picture of the Empress Marie Louise which seems tolerably exact for the period after the calamities that befell the Empire, but inapplicable to the happy days of the mother of the King of Rome. "Marie Louise," he writes, "sought refuge in ceremony, in retreat and silence from the ill-will that pursued her at every step.... Napoleon loved her from a feeling of superiority and pride. She was a sign of his alliance with great races; the mother of his son; and thus she perpetuated his ambition. ... The public did wrong to demand of Marie Louise passionate returns and devotion when her nature could inspire her only with a feeling of duty and respect for a soldier who had regarded her only as a German hostage and a pledge of posterity. Her constraint lessened her natural charms, darkened her expression, dimmed her wit, and burdened her heart. She was looked upon as a foreign decoration attached to the columns of the throne. Even history, written in ignorance of the truth, and inspired by the resentment of Napoleon's courtiers, has slandered this sovereign. Those who knew her will restore, not the stoical, theatric glory which was demanded of her, but her real nature.... The alleged emptiness of her silence hid feminine thoughts and mysteries of feeling which transported her far from this court. Magnificent though cruel exile!... She could not pretend anything, either during the days of her grandeur, nor after her husband's overthrow; that was her crime. The theatrical world of the court wanted to see a pretence of conjugal