The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1879-12-04
NapOleOn's Marriages.

NapOleOn's Marriages.
The marriages of the Bonapartes play
an important part in the story of their
fortunes, and none 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 fancy like his, at once
selfish and passionate. She had beauty,
rank, the power of pleasing, and GER
tain indolent grace that promised an
obedience reasonably free from jealousy.
Up to the time that he mounted the inn
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 of Wagram
had opened up to his fevered magma
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 hair appealed
strongly to his jaded taste. He was not
old, but, as he said to the Directory,
"one 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 a
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 a 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 a 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-
Josephine, La RENO Hor-
tense, Boulevard du Prince Eugene.
Though she was Ousted remorselessly |
from 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
hose of her rival. The Duke of Reich
'tadt was to pass a youth of inglorlous
pleasure, and was to die before his
prime, and leave no son to inherit his
claims to empire; while the Beauhar-
lais line was to stretch out like the
'warms of kings seen by the Thane of
Jawdor in his vision. Eugene, her he
ole son, after the fall of the Napoleons,
to the court of his father-in-
aw, the King of Bavaria, and
became Prince of Eichstadt, Duke
# Leuchtenberg, and first nobleman
# the kingdom. His daughter, united
o the son of Bernadotte, became Queen
# Sweden; another became a princess
# Hohenzollern, and third Empress of
Brazil. His eldest son won the hand of
he Queen of Portugal, and the younger
married a daughter of the Car Nicholas
+ Russia. And whatever doubt might
e thrown on the purity of the Napo-
comic descent by which the Emperor
Napoleon III. claimed the throne, he
7as unquestionably the son of Hortense,
nd was Beauharnais and Tascher-la-
'agerie beyond challenge, The grand
on of Josephine, Louis Napoleon, ruled
rance in peace and with a sort of
plendOr for the space of TWENTY-FIVE
ears, while the period of the first Ma {
oleon's reign, counting Consulate and +.
mpire together, was but fifteen
1ough SO powerful was the personal {
IMPRINT made by the uncle, and SO vague }
as the individual character of the {
ephew, that the shorter reign seems q
Ike an age, and the longer like an cpl G
'de.-Harper's Magazine for December.
ne OF Frederick the Greats Bloody ,
ID