has retained her popularity, because she was tender, kind, and devoted,
even after she was divorced; while Marie Louise has been criticised,
because after loving, or saying that she loved, the mighty Emperor, she
deserted him when he was a prisoner. The contrast between her conduct
and that of the wife of King Jerome, the noble and courageous Catherine
of Wurtemberg, who endured every danger, and all sorts of
persecutions, to share her husband's exile and poverty, has set in an
even clearer light the faults of Marie Louise. She has been blamed for
not having joined Napoleon at Elba, for not having even tried to temper
his sufferings at Saint Helena, for not consoling him in any way, for
not even writing to him. The former Empress of the French has been also
more severely condemned for her two morganatic marriages,--one with
Count Neipperg, an Austrian general and a bitter enemy of Napoleon, the
other with Count de Bombelles, a Frenchman who left France to enter the
Austrian service. Certainly Marie Louise was neither a model wife nor a
model widow, and there is nothing surprising in the severity with which
her contemporaries judged her, a severity which doubtless history will
not modify. But if this princess was guilty, more than one attenuating
circumstance may be urged in her defence, and we should, in justice,
remember that it was not without a struggle, without tears, distress,
and many conscientious scruples, that she decided to obey her
father's rigid orders and become again what she had been before her
marriage,--simply an Austrian princess.

It must not be forgotten that the Empress Marie Louise, who was in two
ways the grandniece of Queen Marie Antoinette, through her mother Maria
Theresa of Naples, daughter of Queen Marie Caroline, and through her
father the Emperor Francis, son of the Emperor Leopold II., the
brother of the martyred queen, had been brought up to abhor the French
Revolution and the Empire which succeeded it. She had been taught from