The Milan exchange. (Milan, Gibson County, Tenn.) 1874-1978, 1879-11-27
NapOleOn's Marriages.

The marriages of the Bonapartes play
an important part in the story of their
1 fortunes, and more of them were so sig
nificant and important as those of the
Emperor. To one who, like him, looked
upon the world as made for him, and
upon laws merely as something which
were good for him to impose upon 9TH
ers, it must have appeared that his two
wives were admirably planned for his
use. Josephine de Beauharnais was an
ideal wife for young and rising man of
genius. She had every thing which
would appeal to a fancy like his, at once
selfish and passionate. She had beauty,
rank, the power of pleasing, and a GER
tain indolent grace that promised an
obedience reasonably free from jealousy.
Up to the time that he mounted the i'm
perial throne and seated her by his side,
she was all that his narrow heart and
boundless ambition could desire But,
after the marvellous victory If Wagram
had opened up TO his fevered imagina-
ton still wider perspectives of dominion,
he looked for another style of wife, and
found her in Maria Louisa of Austria
Her blonde beauty, formed of pink and
wife color and roundly curving lines and
the golden floss of child's hail, appealed
strongly to his faded taste He was not
old, but, as he said to the Directory,
lone ages fast upon the field of battle,''
and he wanted some such solace as this
soft, unintellectual beauty somebody
has called it the Attorney style of pref
tiness) in his home, if such word may
be used of the Tuileries. Besides, he
doubtless felt that an Emperor should
have an Emperor's daughter to wife,
and this was young girl who had
hundred monarchs for her ancestors,
and yet she would be gentle and
Obedient, and not argue with him or an
swer him, and would give him heirs.
He was genuinely attached to her, and
if he knew nothing about her, and had |
no premonition of Count Neipperg, it |
was all the better for him. She also |
was quite taken by storm with him, and
for while the novelty of being loved by |
an ogre-for such she had always con-
sidered him-was agreeable to her. |
But his tumultuous glory was quite too |
much for the daily food of such hui
man small being as the Empress, and
she was doubtless relieved when the in
dignant soul left his body at Longwood,
and she was free to follow her ignoble |
little heart and marry Neipperg.
Josephine would have had her revenge
if she could have foreseen the course of
history for even few years. 1t is she,
and not the pretty Austrian, who will
be known forever as the wife of Napo-
leon. 1t is her statue that rises in mar
BILE in the public places of Paris. 1t is
her name and those of her children that
mark the great avenues of the metropo-
lis-Avenue Josephine, La RENO HOr-
tense, Boulevard du Prince Eugene.
Though she was Ousted remorselessly
from a throne to make room for Maria
Louisa, it was her children-the chill
dren of the creole proscript-who should
become the tenants of palaces, and not
those of her rival. The Duke of Reich
stadt was to pass q youth of inglorlOus
pleasure, and was to die before his
prime, and leave no son TO inherit his
claims to empire; while the Beauhar- |
naiS line was to stretch out like the |
sYarms of kings seen by the Thane of |
Cawdor in his vision. Eugene, her he |
roic SON. after the fall of the Napoleons, |
returned to the court of his father-in- |
law, the King of Bavaria, and |
became Prince of Eichstadt, Duke |
of Leuchtenberg, and first nobleman
of the kingdom. His daughter, united
TO the son of Bernadotte, became Queen |
of Sweden; another became a princess
of Hohenzollern. and a third Empress of |
Brazil. His eldest son won the hand of |
the Queen of Portugal, and the younger |
married daughter of the Gar Nicholas
of Russia. And whatever doubt might |
be thrown on the purity of the Napo-
leOnic descent by which the Emperor
Napoleon Ill claimed the throne, he
was unquestionably the son of Hortense,
and was Beauharnais and Tascher-la-
Pagerie beyond challenge, The grand
son of Josephine, Louis Napoleon, ruled
France in peace and with a sort of
splendor for the space of twenty-five
years, while the period of the first Ma
poleon's reign, counting Consulate and
Empire together, was but fifteen
though so powerful was the personal
imprint made by the uncle, and so vague
was the individual character of the
that the shorter reign seems
like an age, and the longer like an cpl
Sode .-HdTper'S Magazine for December.