The Happy Days of the Empress Marie LouiseImbert de Saint-Amand
History
The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise
Imbert de Saint-Amand
Marie Louise, Empress, consort of Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1791-1847
April 16, the Emperor of Austria was at Blois. Marie Louise, who two
years before had left her father, starting on her triumphal journey to
Prague, amid all form of splendor and devotion, was much moved at seeing
him again, and placed the King of Rome in his arms, as if to reproach
him for deserting the child's cause. The grandfather relented, but the
monarch was stern: did he not soon say to Marie Louise: "As my daughter,
everything that I have is yours, even my blood and my life; as a
sovereign, I do not know you"? The Russian sentinels at the entrance
of the castle of Rambouillet were relieved by Austrian grenadiers. The
Empress of the French changed captors; she was the prisoner no longer of
the Czar's soldiers, but of her own father. Her conjugal affection was
not yet wholly extinct, and she reproached herself with not having
joined Napoleon at Fontainebleau; but her scruples were soon allayed by
the promise that she should soon see her husband again at Elba. She was
told that the treaty which had just been signed gave her, and after her,
her son, the duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla; that the King of
Rome was henceforth the hereditary Duke of Parma; that if she had duties
as a wife, she also had duties as a mother; that she ought to gain the
good-will of the powers, and assure her child's future. They added that
she ought to give her husband time to establish himself at Elba, and
that meanwhile she would find in Vienna, near her loving parents, a few
weeks of moral and physical rest, which must be very necessary after so
many emotions and sufferings. Marie Louise, who had been brought up to
give her father strict obedience, regarded the advice of the Emperor of
Austria as commands which were not to be questioned, and April 23 she
left Rambouillet with her son for Vienna.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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