This is part of a series about why Napoleon’s stepdaughter Hortense broke the law. When we last left off, Hortense found that her sons had gone off to what she viewed as a doomed revolution and her husband Louis was begging her to get them back. She said the authorities would automatically blame her for everything.
Hortense writes:
[They’d say I came up] with millions to help them. So, in the terrible moment that I foresee, who can be useful to them if I have compromised myself with them?”
I could not persuade him, and his sorrow was so great, that he went so far as to the Minister of Austria to ask for the impossible: that his children should be demanded at the outposts.
Forced to satisfy him somehow to calm him down, I decided to go to the border of Tuscany, to write there, as he wished, to my children to come and see me.
I expected nothing from this process; it was just to please him. As soon as I asked for my passports, Prince Corsini, brother of the Minister of Tuscany, came to find me. I explained and showed the anxiety that had caused this trip, and I frankly told him of my husband's wishes. The prince then entered into the same ideas, and, in the simplest air, advised me the only way to get them back.
It was to say that I was sick, to lure them to the border, so that a Tuscan troop there would take them by force.
This trap which was proposed to a mother, and which one could use in spite of her, made me prefer it to the constant torment of the worried agitation of my husband.
I stayed in Florence. Besides, one of the young sons of the Princess of Canino, wife of Lucien Bonaparte, who had fled from his father's castle to escape from his governor, had just been taken in. The fear that he would meet with the insurgents against the pope, to whom his family had obligations, had made the princess obtain a place for her son in one of the state prisons of Tuscany.
This example could be followed for my children. I sometimes feared that my poor head might be not enough for all that occupied it. At night I couldn't sleep; I was pacing in my room, agitated by a thousand sinister thoughts. “How will I save them," I said to myself; by which -
To be continued.
C’est une partie d’une série explique pourquoi la belle-fille de Napoléon, Hortense, a enfreint la loi. La dernière fois que nous nous sommes arrêtés, Hortense a constaté que ses fils étaient partis pour ce qu'elle considérait comme une révolution condamnée et son mari Louis la suppliait de les récupérer. Elle a déclaré que les autorités lui reprocheraient automatiquement tout.
Hortense écrit:
