then to Florence, where the Grand-Duke Ferdinand received any of the
family who came there with great kindness.

Louis was the least interesting of the family, and it is difficult to
excuse his absence from France in 1815. After all, the present of a
kingdom is not such an unpardonable offence as to separate brothers for
ever, and Napoleon seems to have felt deeply the way in which he was
treated by a brother to whom he had acted as a father; still ill-health
and the natural selfishness of invalids may account for much. While his
son Louis Napoleon was flying about making his attempts on France, Louis
remained in the Roman Palace of the French Academy, sunk in anxiety about
his religious state. He disclaimed his son's proceedings, but this may
have been due to the Pope, who sheltered him. Anyhow, it is strange to
mark the difference between the father and his two sons who came of age,
and who took to revolution so kindly.

In 1846 Louis was ill at Leghorn when his son escaped from Ham, where he
had been imprisoned after his Boulogne attempt. Passports were refused
to the son to go from Italy to his father, and Louis died alone on the
25th of July 1846. He was buried at Santa Croce, Florence, but the body
was afterwards removed to the village church of St. Leu Taverny, rebuilt
by his son Napoleon III.

Jerome, the youngest of the whole family, the "middy," as Napoleon liked
to call him, had been placed in the navy, in which profession he passed
as having distinguished himself, after leaving his admiral in rather a
peculiar manner, by attacking an English convoy, and eventually escaping
the English by running into the port of Concarneau, believed to be
inaccessible. At that time it was an event for a French man-of-war to
reach home.