her advocate at the Congress of Vienna, her prime minister in the Duchy
of Parma, and after Napoleon's death, her morganatic husband. He had
three children by her,--two daughters (one of whom died young; the other
married the son of the Count San Vitale, Grand Chamberlain of Parma) and
one son (who took the title of Count of Montenuovo and served in the
Austrian army). Until his death in 1829 the Count of Neipperg completely
controlled Marie Louise, as Napoleon had never done.

After Waterloo, every day dimmed Marie Louise's recollections of France.
The four years of her reign--two spent in the splendor of perpetual
adoration, two in the gloom of disasters culminating in final ruin--were
like a distant dream, half a golden vision, half a hideous nightmare.
It was all but a brief episode in her life. She thoroughly deserved
the name of "the Austrian," which had been given unjustly to Marie
Antoinette; for Marie Antoinette really became a Frenchwoman. The
Duchess of Parma--for that was the title of the woman who had worn the
two crowns of France and of Italy--lived more in her principality than
in Vienna, more interested in the Count of Neipperg than in the Duke of
Reichstadt. While her son never left the Emperor Francis, she reigned
in her little duchy. But the title was to expire at her death; for the
Coalition had feared to permit a son of Napoleon to have an hereditary
claim to rule over Parma. Yet Marie Louise cannot properly be called
a bad mother. She went to close the eyes of her son, who died in his
twenty-second year, of consumption and disappointment.

By this event was broken the last bond which attached Napoleon's widow
to the imperial traditions. In 1833 she was married, for the third time,
to a Frenchman, the son of an emigre in the Austrian service. He was a
M. de Bombelles, whose mother had been a Miss Mackan, an intimate friend
of Madame Elisabeth, and had married the Count of Bombelles, ambassador