brought up in the habit of severe discipline and passive obedience, she
belonged to a family in which the Austrian princesses are regarded as
the docile instruments of the greatness of the Hapsburgs. Consequently,
she resigned herself to following her father's wishes without a murmur,
but not without sadness. What Marie Louise thought at the time of her
marriage she still thought in the last years of her life. General de
Trobriand, the Frenchman who won distinction on the northern side in the
American civil war, told me recently how painfully surprised he was when
once at Venice he had heard Napoleon's widow, then the wife of Count de
Bombelles, say, in speaking of her marriage to the great Emperor, "I was
sacrificed."

Austria was covered with ruins, its hospitals were crowded with wounded
French and Austrians, and in the ears of Viennese still echoed the
cannon of Wagram, when salvos of artillery announced not war, but this
marriage. The memories of an obstinate struggle, which both sides had
regarded as one for life or death, was still too recent, too terrible to
permit a complete reconciliation between the two nations. In fact, the
peace was only a truce. To facilitate the formal entry of Napoleon's
ambassador into Vienna, it had been necessary hastily to build a bridge
over the ruins of the walls which the French had blown up a few months
earlier, as a farewell to the inhabitants. Marie Louise, who started
with tears in her eyes, trembled as she drew near the French territory,
which Marie Antoinette had found so fatal.

Soon this first impression wore off, and the young Empress was
distinctly flattered by the amazing splendor of her throne, the most
powerful in the world. And yet amid this Babylonian pomp, and all the
splendor, the glory, the flattery, which could gratify a woman's heart,
she did not cease to think of her own country. One day when she was