"This historical study contains many hitherto unpublished details concerning the life of Napoleon's second wife, and is invested, by the charm of the author's style, with all the interest of a romance. The volume commences at the birth of the Empress and continues the story of her career down to the opening of the Russian campaign. The work gives a complete picture of the Courts of Austria and France during the brilliant but deceptive period of her husband's highest glory. In referring to this period in after years at St. Helena, Napoleon is reported to have said: 'MarieLouise's reign was not a long one, but she must have enjoyed it while it lasted, seeing that all the world was at her feet'"-Galignani's Messenger on the French Edition of these Memoirs. INTRODUCTION. IN 1814, while Napoleon was in exile in the Island of Elba, the Empress Marie Louise and her grandmother, the Queen of Naples, Marie Caroline, were together in Vienna. The one, deprived of the Crown of France, was demanding possession of her new State, the Duchy of Parma; the other, who had fled from Sicily to escape from the yoke of her pretended protectors, the English, had come to claim the restitution of her kingdom of Naples, where Murat continued to reign with the connivance of Austria. This Queen, Marie Caroline, daughter of the great Empress Marie Thérèse, and sister of the unfortunate Marie Antoinette, had spent her life in hatred of the French Revolution, and of Napoleon, one of whose most celebrated victims she was. Well, at the very moment when the Austrian Court was labouring to the utmost extent of its power B to make Marie Louise forget that she was the wife of Napoleon, and to separate her from him for ever, Marie Caroline was suffering keenly from the spectacle of her granddaughter's docile acceptance of such suggestions. She said to the Baron de Méneval, who had accompanied Marie Louise to Vienna, "I have in days gone by had to complain of your Emperor; he has persecuted me and wounded my self-esteem-I was fifteen years younger then-but to-day I remember one thing alone -that he is in misfortune." She added that if there should be any opposition to the reunion of the married couple, Marie Louise ought to make a rope of her bedclothes, and in disguise escape through the window. "That," she exclaimed, "is what I should do in her place; for marriage is for life!" If a woman like Queen Marie Caroline, a sister of Marie Antoinette, a Queen driven out of her kingdom by Napoleon, could entertain such sentiments, we may readily understand the severity with which the French, devoted to the Emperor, judged the conduct of his ungrateful and forgetful wife. In the same degree that Josephine, despite her frailties, remained popular even after her divorce, because she was tender, good, and devoted, Marie Louise was criticised because, after having loved, or professed to love, the all-powerful Emperor, she abandoned the captive. The contrast between her conduct and that of the wife of King Jerome, the noble and courageous Catherine of Würtemberg, |