One of the most remarkable features of this pathetic young life is the intense interest his mother's husband began to take in him, and he probably owed a great deal to the fact that Count Neipperg urged him to make himself familiar with the glory of the Empire and his father's deeds. Strange though it may appear, the son of the Great Napoleon and the morganatic husband of his mother were attached to each other in the most intimate way. If he perceived the immoral relations between Neipperg and Marie Louise, the Duke never seems to have divulged it; but taking into account the passionate love and devotion he had for his father's memory, it is barely likely that he knew either of the amorous connection or marriage having taken place between the Count and his mother, otherwise he would have had something to say about it, not only to Neipperg himself, but certainly to his friends Prokesch, Baron Obenaus, and Count Dietrichstein, and very naturally his grandfather. It may be that the circumstances of his life made him cautious, and even cunning, in keeping to himself an affair that was generally approved by the most interested parties, but it is hardly likely that the spirit of natural feeling had been so far crushed out of him as to forbid his openly resenting a further monstrous wrong being done to his Imperial father. The young Prince was the centre of great political interest, and the object of ungrudging sympathy and devotion of a large public in Europe, and especially in France, and had his life been preserved a few more years he would, in spite of obstacles and prejudices, have been put on the throne of the land of his birth. Metternich, the inveterate trickster, does not appear to have had any serious thought of encouraging the project of making the Duke Emperor of the French. His subtle game was to use him as a terror to Louis Philippe when that monarch became refractory or showed signs of covetousness.