But she no longer had the strength and the will to escape the evil that
had flung its meshes around her; she submitted meekly to it. She had
been betrayed by love itself; and what cared she now for her future, her
embittered, bloomless, scentless life, when _he_ had deceived her
--_he_, the only one whom she had loved?

The next morning Hortense stepped, self-possessed and smiling, into
Josephine's private cabinet, and declared that she was ready to fulfil
her mother's wishes and marry Louis Bonaparte.

Josephine clasped her in her arms, with exclamations of delight. She
little knew what a night of anguish, of wailing, of tears, and of
despair, Hortense had struggled through, or that her present smiling
unconcern was nothing more than the dull hopelessness of a worn-out
heart. She did not see that Hortense smiled now only in order that
Duroc should not observe that she suffered. Her love for him was dead,
but her maidenly pride had survived, and it dried her tears, and
conjured up a smile to her struggling lips; it, too, enabled her to
declare that she was ready to accept the husband whom her mother might
present to her.

Thus, Josephine had accomplished her purpose; she had made one of
Bonaparte's brothers her son. Now there remained the question whether
she should attain her other aim through that son, and whether she should
find in him a support against the intrigues of the other brothers of the
first consul.